BO BRADY ACTOR ROBERT KELKER-KELLY DIES AT 62 AFTER A CHEST PAIN CALL IN MISSOURI
Robert Kelker-Kelly died on Saturday at his home in St. Peters, Missouri, after a medical emergency. Officers were called at about 8.16 p.m. He had complained of chest pain and was unresponsive. Paramedics could not revive him. The medical examiner confirmed the death. No cause has been released. He played Bo Brady on Days of Our Lives from 1992 to 1995, opposite Lisa Rinna’s Billie Reed, and later flew charter jets.
obert Kelker-Kelly, the actor who took over Bo Brady on Days of Our Lives in the early 1990s, died on Saturday, 3 October 2026, at his home in St. Peters, Missouri. He was 62.
St. Peters police were called at about 8.16 p.m. local time. He had complained of chest pain and then become unresponsive. CPR was already under way when officers and paramedics arrived. They continued life-saving measures. They were not successful. The St. Charles County Ambulance District said first responders were sent to an adult male in cardiac arrest, used advanced life-saving protocol, and pronounced him dead at the scene. Police found nothing suspicious. The circumstances were consistent with a medical event. The medical examiner confirmed the death. An official cause has not been released.
Kelker-Kelly was born on 18 April 1964 in Wichita, Kansas. He came to daytime television in 1987 as Sam Fowler on Another World and stayed until 1990. He later said that, when he was cast, he was homeless, sleeping in his Jeep or on anyone’s floor, and working as a secretary for a headhunter’s office in Los Angeles. In 1996 he returned to Another World as the race-car driver Bobby Reno, later revealed as Dr Shane Roberts.
The role that fixed his name was Bo Brady. Peter Reckell had left. Kelker-Kelly played Bo from 1992 to 1995, opposite Kristian Alfonso’s Hope Brady and Lisa Rinna’s Billie Reed. Reckell came back in 1995. The on-screen romance with Billie was the storyline viewers kept. Off screen, Rinna has given a different account. In her memoir You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It, published in February this year, she wrote that they hated each other. “He made my life a living hell on the set of Days. He was horrible to me. I’d go so far as to say verbally abusive,” she wrote. “He was passive aggressive, manipulative, and played weird mind games.” Those are her claims. He had not answered them in public before his death.
He described the job as a grind. He said he worked about 90 hours a week, with one or two shows shot a day and about 120 pages of dialogue, through one three-year contract and into a second that fell apart. “It was exhausting. They worked us to death,” he said. Because the part kept his shirt off, he said he was up at 3 a.m., in the gym from 4 to 6, then at the studio from 6 until 8 or 9 at night.
From 2001 to 2003 he played Stavros Cassadine on General Hospital, and returned to the role in 2013 and 2014. By then he had mostly left the screen. He became a charter pilot, flying Lear 60 jets for a company out of Spirit of St. Louis airport, and instructed on the side. He still coached acting in private, monologues and scenes. He said he was living in the Midwest, and that he was a dad.
The police account stops at the doorway. Chest pain. Unresponsive. Cardiac arrest on the ambulance log. Nothing at the house that suggested a crime. No cause of death until the examiner files one. The work that remains is the three years as Bo, the years as Sam Fowler and Stavros, and a second career in a cockpit in Missouri.
