Bobby Vee "The Day the Music Died," three of the four headline acts in the lineup of the traveling Winter Dance Party—Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper—were killed in the crash of a V-tailed 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza airplane, along with the 21-year-old pilot, Roger Peterson. (Dion DiMucci, the fourth headliner, had opted not to travel on the plane.) It crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa, en route to the next show on the tour itinerary, in Moorhead, Minnesota. Velline, then 15 years old, and a hastily assembled band of Fargo schoolboys (including his older brother Bill) calling themselves the Shadows volunteered
University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility more recent case came to light in 2007 with Bass' agreement to exhume the body of the late J.P. Richardson, Jr, more famously known as "The Big Bopper". He was one of the three musicians that died in a plane crash in February 1959. His son, Jay Richardson, had never met his father and, knowing the strange controversies surrounding the plane crash, decided to contact Bass to see if he could gather any answers. Questions lingered as to whether or not Buddy Holly's gun found at the scene of the crash had been fired earlier or if Richardson had managed