What Dr. Bill Bass found in bones of the Big Bopper

Hanna Lustig

Shopper News

It’s been 60 years since the day the music died. On Feb. 3, 1959, three of rock and roll’s rising stars boarded a flight to the next stop on their Winter Dance Party Tour in the middle of a cold and stormy night.

They would never arrive. The plane crashed into an Iowa cornfield. The impact killed the pilot, a 21-year-old named Roger Petersen, and all three passengers: Buddy Holly, 22, Ritchie Valens, 17, and Jiles Perry “J.P.” Richardson Jr., also known as the Big Bopper, 29. They were found the next day scattered among the wreckage, half-buried in the snow.

J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson Jr. was 28 years old when he died in the Iowa plane crash near Clear Lake on Feb. 3, 1959 after a performance at the Surf Ballroom.

With the help of WNOX radio personality Frank Murphy, Dr. Bill Bass — a rock star himself in the field of forensic anthropology, and founder of the Body Farm at UT — marked the anniversary of this tragedy by taking to the Knoxville Convention Center stage to revisit his role in the exhumation of the Big Bopper’s remains in 2007.

“You better wait until this is over to clap,” Bass warned before starting his lecture. “Things are going to get a little gruesome.”

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Bass’s involvement with the case began 48 years after the accident, with an unexpected phone call from the Big Bopper’s son, Jay Richardson, who explained that his father’s remains were going to be moved to another area of the Texas cemetery where he was buried.

Having seen the renowned anthropologist on TV and judged him to be an “honest man,” Richardson asked Bass to re-examine his father’s body and, it was hoped, help him answer two, lingering questions about his final moments: First, did the Big Bopper survive the initial impact, and was he going for help? His body was found approximately 40 feet from the crumpled plane — much farther away than the rest. And second, had the Bopper been shot? A .22-caliber pistol belonging to Buddy Holly was found in the debris, and for years, theorists speculated that perhaps an accidental firing caused the crash.

“I’m going to show you what I saw,” Bass said. “But I’m not going to tell you the answers to those two questions."

This is an undated file photo of Buddy Holly who died in 1959. For thousands of '50s rock 'n' roll fans who travel each year to the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, the music lives on and remains reason for an annual celebration to honor Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. ``The Big Bopper'' Richardson who died Feb. 3, 1959, just after performing at the Surf. (AP Photo/File)

Poorly planned in almost every way, Buddy Holly famously called the Winter Dance Party Tour “the tour from hell.” And fittingly, the exhumation of the Big Bopper was plagued by unforeseen challenges, too. With his co-author Jon Jefferson in tow, Bass flew down to Beaumont, Texas, to perform an autopsy, only to learn that the procedure would have to be conducted in the funeral home’s garage. To make matters worse, the casket proved unusually difficult to open.

“So we’d gotten this far — all you’ve seen, all we’d gone through. And we get there, and damn, we can’t get in the casket,” Bass joked. “If you don’t laugh, you’d cry.”

But in this case — one of more than 700 he’s worked on throughout his career – Bass also got rather lucky. Despite the proximity of his grave to the Gulf of Mexico, the Big Bopper was in “remarkably good condition.” His crew cut was intact, and his features were visible. Born only two months after the crash, Richardson remarked at the time that he had never seen his father in three dimensions before. Before the autopsy, Richardson sat with his father for an hour and a half, communicating silently.

Finally, Bass took four X-rays of the musician’s body. Displaying each slide for the audience, Bass presented his findings. The Big Bopper’s frame was riddled with fractures, from his skull to his legs. Going for help after sustaining such injuries would not have been possible. And had the Bopper been shot, the ammunition would have left a lead smudge mark on his bones.

As promised, Bass didn’t tell the audience what to believe after reviewing the evidence. But the facts pointed irrefutably to one conclusion: that, unfortunately, everyone on board died instantly.

“We all wonder what would’ve happened,” Murphy said, of the public’s enduring fascination with the crash. “Here are guys who never had the chance to become unpopular. They died on the way up, as opposed to on the way down. And we all wish, if only they’d hung around.”