Return to "The Day the Music Died"

03/07/2007 8:04 AM, E! Online
Joal Ryan

The Big Bopper is still dead.

Not only that, but an autopsy on the "Chantilly Lace" hit-maker has concluded that the 1950s rocker/deejay is still dead of a plane crash that also took the lives of Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens.

The body of the Bopper, born Jiles Perry Richardson Jr., was exhumed from its Beaumont, Texas, grave on Tuesday at the behest of the performer's son, Jay P. Richardson. The younger Richardson, a performer himself who answers to "The Big Bopper Jr.," wanted to address rumors nearly as old as the 1959 plane crash that his father died in-flight during a shooting or shortly after impact during an attempt to rescue others.

"We're not doing this for history," Dr. Bill Bass, the forensic anthropologist who performed the autopsy, told the Beaumont (Texas) Enterprise. "We're doing this for a family. We have the ability to solve some of their personal mysteries."

X-rays on the Bopper's body—said to be in tip-top shape, all things considered--revealed there were no bullet wounds, and that there very likely were no rescue efforts.

The Bopper died on impact, Bass found.

Per an accounting in the Enterprise, the entertainer sustained "a smashed skull, a broken neck and back, a shattered pelvis, a crushed rib cage, compound fractures of both legs and at least one broken foot and ankle."

On the brighter side of grisly death, the paper reported that the Bopper's hair looked great.

The Bopper was 28, and on tour with Holly and Valens, when their charter flight crashed shortly after takeoff in Iowa on Feb. 3, 1959. The performer scored a seat on the plane after convincing a 21-year-old Waylon Jennings, then Holly's bass player, to take the tour bus instead.

"[The Bopper] came to me and said, 'I have the flu, I'm very sick and tired and I haven't been able to sleep,'" Jennings once recounted for  CMT.com. " 'Would you mind if I took your place on the plane?' "

The crash was immortalized as "the day the music died" in Don McLean's 1971 anthem, "American Pie." It also provided the downbeat ending for a pair of biopics, The Buddy Holly Story and La Bamba, about Valens.

In all, the crash killed four, including the pilot, Roger Peterson.

According to the book The Day The Music Died: The Last Tour Of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens, a pistol found at the crash site, and eventually linked to Holly, fueled rumors that a fight, suicide attempt or even attack on the pilot had brought down the plane. A 1992 review of the autopsy on the pilot showed no evidence of gunshot wounds, author Larry Lehmer reported.

The younger Richardson, born about three months after his father's death, seemed at peace with Tuesday's findings.

"I've been talking to Dad all day," Jay P. Richardson said in the Enterprise. "And after 48 years, he can still amaze me."