Elizabeth Eden; Basis of ‘Dog Day Afternoon’

The transsexual whose need for a sex-change operation resulted in a curious bank robbery that was eventually commemorated as the film “Dog Day Afternoon” has died of AIDS-related pneumonia, her notorious former lover said.

Elizabeth Debbie Eden, formerly Ernest Aron, died Tuesday in Genesee Hospital in Rochester.

Ms. Eden, 41, “requested that we release no information about her illness,” said Jean Dalmath, a hospital spokeswoman.

But Aron’s homosexual lover, John Wojtowicz, one of two men who took hostages during the August, 1972, attempted bank robbery, told of the cause of her death.

The accomplice, Salvatore Natuarale, was killed by police, and Wojtowicz was arrested and eventually served seven years in prison. Their story was the basis for the 1975 movie that starred Al Pacino.

Married Someone Else

Aron received part of the $7,500 Wojtowicz was given for his rights to the film and used it for sex-change surgery. She subsequently married, then divorced, someone else.

The robbery attempt followed the 1971 public “marriage” between Wojtowicz and Aron, who wore women’s clothing. Wojtowicz, a Vietnam War veteran with no prior arrest record, already had a wife and children. Just days before the bank robbery, Aron, despondent over his lack of money for the sex-change operation, tried to kill himself with a drug overdose, Wojtowicz said.

“That’s why I robbed the bank, to save his life.”

Wojtowicz did two more stretches in prison for parole violations in 1984 and 1986-87. He was released in April, he said, and Ms. Eden visited him in New York about once a month.

He said that she did not tell him she had AIDS and that he found out from her friends on Sept. 15, when she entered the hospital. Ms. Eden had told him she had pneumonia and cancer, “but I found out later she just said that so nobody would know she had AIDS,” said Wojtowicz, now 41, of Brooklyn.