Narrow Escapes
Although Holly was guaranteed a seat on the plane, there were two further seats which were essentially up for grabs. Richardson felt too ill to embark on yet another hellacious bus journey and asked Waylon Jennings for his seat. Jennings agreed, and when Holly discovered his new band mate wasn’t flying with him, he quipped: “Well, I hope your ‘ol bus freezes up.” Jennings played along with the joke with a response that haunted him until the end of his days. He replied: “Well, I hope your ‘ol plane crashes.”
Tommy Allsup and Ritchie Valens tossed a coin to decide who would get the last seat. Valens won and said it was the first time he had ever won anything in his life. However, Dion DiMucci claimed that Holly offered him the seat. He said that Valens had fallen ill and DiMucci flipped a coin for the seat. DiMucci even said that he had ‘won’ the toss only to pull out of the flight because he couldn’t justify paying $36, the equivalent of the monthly rent his parents paid on their apartment when he was growing up, on an indulgence.
The Crash That Shocked America
Anderson contacted the owner of Dwyer Flying Service, Hubert Jerry Dwyer, and asked for a plane to fly to Hector Airport in Fargo. 21-year old Roger Peterson was chosen as the pilot, and he flew a 1947 single-engine V-tailed Beechcraft Bonanza which allowed for three passengers and the pilot. Once the groups had finished playing their Clear Lake show, Anderson drove Holly, Valens, and Richardson to Mason City Municipal Airport.
The plane took off at 12:55 am in difficult and snowy conditions, and the event was witnessed by Dwyer. However, he was alarmed when Peterson did not make the expected radio contact five minutes later. The worried Dwyer asked the radio operator to try to communicate with the plane, but he was unsuccessful. In the morning, Dwyer decided to take off in another airplane to try and find out what had happened.
Within minutes, he saw the wreckage which was less than 10 kilometers from the airport. He alerted the local sheriff’s office who sent Deputy Bill McGill to the scene. He encountered a grisly sight as the bodies of Valens and Holly were found near the wreckage; they had been thrown from the torn fuselage. Richardson’s body had been tossed from the plane and was found in a nearby cornfield while Peterson was found within the wreckage.
Investigators of the crash believe the plane hit terrain at around 270 kilometers and its right wing tip was the first thing to hit the ground. The impact caused the plane to cartwheel some 160 meters across the field before it ended up at a wire fence on the edge of the property of Albert Juhl. Anderson had to identify the four bodies and Ralph Smiley, the County Coroner, said that all four men died immediately. While Peterson died from brain damage, the three passengers suffered gross trauma to the brain. Although it seemed as if the crash was simply down to pilot error, one aviation expert stepped forward and claimed there is more to the crash than meets the eye.