Conspiracy Theories Never Die
On February 3, 1959, musicians Buddy Holly (”That’ll Be the Day”), Ritchie Valens (”La Bamba”), and The Big Bopper (”Chantilly Lace”), died in the crash of a Beech Bonanza on a charter trip from Clear Lake, IA, to Fargo, ND. The conspiracy theories started almost immediately and continue to this day. Evidently they have a half-life somewhere up there with theories about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.
I was a high school senior at the time, and loved Holly’s music (still do). To me the crash really was, as Don McLean put it in his great and still popular song, “American Pie,” “the day the music died.”
In 1972 I first heard the “pistol” rumor from an aviation insurance man who stated it as absolute fact. The pilot, he said, had been shot through the back of his seat by a pistol. Some said that Holly was committing suicide by firing the shot. According to this insurance man, the insurance carrier’s settlement with the families included a hush-up of the gunfire and the fact that Holly owned a pistol.
As far as I know, there was no proof at all that the story was true, but it survives to this day. The theories all came to life again recently when the Big Bopper’s family decided to move his grave to another location. His son hired Dr. Bill Bass, a well-known forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, to take a new look at the remains.
Dr Bass took X-rays of the body and found nothing to support those theories. “There was no indication of foul play,” Bass said in a telephone interview from Beaumont. “There are fractures from head to toe. Massive fractures. … (He) died immediately.”
Well, now maybe we can forget the conspiracy theories. But probably not, I got e-mail this week “proving” a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination.
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Ryan–
I can’t disagree with a single thing you wrote, but do believe that most conspiracy theories have a life of their own independent of the facts. About once a year, it seems, we still get articles wondering what could have happened to Amelia Earhart. Some of these are based on the fact that nobody ever found the airplane. Shoot, they hunted for an airplane in a lake in Alabama for more than a year before it was finally found. That airplane was tracked on radar by ATC until it got so low it disappeared. How in the world could you expect to find one in an unknown place in the Pacific?
Thanks for writing,
Ralph Hood
Ralph, I’ve researched the recent stories on Richardson’s disinterment with much interest, but I’m in the funeral business, so I enjoy reading macabre things in my spare time. I agree that the stories about shots on Holly’s plane are probably interesting fiction. But just a few points of clarification. Holly did not just own a gun, it was found at the crash site as he had either carried it or packed it. And just because Richardson’s body carried no bullets, doesn’t mean that the pilot or someone else had not been shot. But again, I’m only pointing these facts out that don’t conclusively prove or disprove anything. One more comment on your remark about the Kennedy assasination, which I found a little mismatched to the Holly crash discussion. Several revelations in recent years still leave many questions about that, including the fact that Gov. John Connelly went to his grave believing that all the details surrounding the event had not been revealed. The mortician (my specialty, by the way) for Lee Harvey Oswald is clearly correct in an observation the Oswald’s body (disinterred in the 70’s) was not the same body that he buried. Sure, much of the conspiracy theory is way out in left field. But you’d be fooling yourself and others by believing and advocating that everything we know is true. Thanks for your article.