Notable deaths last week

• Rose Clayton Cochran - who became a focal point in the re-election campaign of her husband, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, when a man was accused of taking bedridden photos of her to use against the Republican - has died. She was 73.

From Washington, where he was waiting Friday to vote on a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown, Cochran, 77, issued a brief statement saying that he and his family are grateful to those who cared for his wife during her extended illness. She had lived in a nursing home for 13 years.

• Photojournalist Michel du Cille, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who recently captured compelling images of Ebola patients and their caretakers, died in Liberia while on assignment for The Washington Post. He was 58.

The Post reported du Cille collapsed Thursday while returning on foot from a Liberian village where he'd been working on an assignment. He was taken over dirt roads to a hospital two hours away and was declared dead of an apparent heart attack.

Du Cille won two Pulitzer Prizes as a photographer with the Miami Herald in the 1980s and shared a third in 2008 as a reporter with the Post - an investigative public service series on the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who were returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

• Former Phoenix Mayor John Driggs, who is credited with helping establish a group of mountain parks in the desert city, has died at the age of 87.

John Driggs served as mayor from 1970 to 1974 and is credited with helping create the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. The 33,000-acre area contains some of the city's most popular desert hiking trails.

• Judy Baar Topinka built a pioneering political career on a salty sense of humor and penny-pinching personality, making a name for herself as a moderate Republican unafraid to break party lines as she endeared herself to Illinois voters for more than three decades.

Just weeks after being re-elected to watch over the state's checkbook as Illinois comptroller, Topinka died early Wednesday from complications of a stroke. She was 70.

Her victory in November became the last chapter in a political career like few others in state history. Topinka was the only woman to hold two different statewide offices, having also served as three-term state treasurer after several years in the Illinois Legislature. In 2006, she was Illinois' GOP chairman and nominee for governor, but lost her bid to become the state's first female chief executive to Democrat Rod Blagojevich.

Her moxie even helped her remain popular - and in office - during a period in the 2000s when she was the lone Republican statewide officeholder in a Democratic stronghold.

"There's never going to be another Judy Baar Topinka," former GOP Gov. Jim Edgar said. "State treasurer, comptroller - for the most part people don't know those offices (but) Judy had a personality that people knew her and remembered her."

President Barack Obama, who knew Topinka when he was a state senator, issued a statement calling her "blunt, pragmatic, unfailingly cheerful and energetic, and always willing to put politics aside to find commonsense solutions that made a difference for the people of Illinois."

• A woman who stood up to police trying to search her Ohio home in 1957 and ultimately won a landmark Supreme Court decision on searches and seizures has died.

Dollree Mapp died Oct. 31 in Conyers, Georgia. A relative and caretaker, Carolyn Mapp, confirmed her death Wednesday and said she died on the day after her birthday at the age of 91.

Mapp's Supreme Court case, Mapp v. Ohio, is a staple of law school textbooks and considered a milestone case on the Fourth Amendment, which requires law enforcement officers to get a warrant before conducting a search. The case curbed the power of police by saying evidence obtained by illegal searches and seizures could not be used in state court.

• Ralph Giordano, a German writer and Holocaust survivor who spoke out against anti-Semitism and the far right, and later became a prominent critic of Germany's failure to integrate Muslim immigrants, has died. He was 91.

Publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch said Giordano, known for his autobiographical 1982 novel "The Bertinis" and 22 other books, died Wednesday in Cologne.

• Mary Ann Mobley Collins, a former Miss America who went on to appear in movies with Elvis Presley and make documentary films around the world, has died at 77.

She became an actress with credits including such TV shows as "General Hospital" and "Perry Mason," and films such as "Girl Happy" with Presley and "Three on a Couch" with Jerry Lewis. It was on that film she met her husband, actor Gary Collins, who died in 2012.

• Ernest Brace, a civilian who was captured during the Vietnam War while flying supplies for the CIA and who later tapped code through a wall to fellow prisoner John McCain, has died. He was 83.

McCain, a Republican U.S. senator representing Arizona, said he was deeply saddened by the death of his friend and fellow POW.

"As the longest-held American civilian prisoner detained for nearly eight years in Vietnam, Ernie endured more cruelty and severe torture than any other captive during the Vietnam War," McCain said in a statement. "We developed a special bond that strengthened us both at a difficult time, helping us to survive together."

• Ken Weatherwax, who played the child character Pugsley on "The Addams Family" television series in the 1960s, has died. He was 59.

Weatherwax died of a heart attack at his Box Canyon, California, home.

Pugsley, the son of Gomez and Morticia, was a member of the family of macabre oddballs in the television series, which aired on ABC from 1964 to 1966 with its familiar, finger-snapping theme song.

• Ralph Baer, a video game pioneer who created both the precursor to "Pong" and the electronic memory game Simon and led the team that developed the first home video game console, has died. He was 92.

Baer started thinking about what later became the home video game console while working as a television set designer in the 1950s. In the next decade, he started working on television games as chief engineer for Sanders Associates, now BAE Systems.

That led to The Brown Box, which was licensed by Magnavox and came out with the Odyssey in the early 1970s. The console, which connected to a television, could play about two dozen games, including one called "Table Tennis" that was a precursor to "Pong."

Baer received the National Medal of Technology from President George W. Bush in 2006 and was inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010.

• Nikolai Vasenin, a Russian who fought in the French resistance during World War II, has died at age 95, the Tass news agency reported.

A documentary film about Vasenin is scheduled to premiere in May as part of celebrations for the 70th anniversary of Victory Day.

Vasenin was captured by Nazi German troops shortly after their 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and sent to a camp in France, but he managed to escape and joined the resistance fighters. By the end of the war, he had become the commander of his own unit.