This Here's the Big Bopper

Check this out: http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Music/03/07/bigbopper.autopsy.ap/index.html

First of all, I had no idea there had been rumors about the plane crash (and I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about this kind of stuff).

But second of all, how cool is it that forensic anthropologists can figure this stuff out?!?!

J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson suffered massive fractures and likely died immediately in the 1959 plane crash that also killed early rock 'n' rollers Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, a forensic anthropologist said Tuesday after exhuming the body.

The performer's son, Jay Richardson, hired Dr. Bill Bass, a well-known forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, to look at the remains in Beaumont, Texas.

There have been rumors a gun might have been fired on board the plane and that the Big Bopper might have survived the crash and died trying to get help.

Bass took X-rays of the body and found nothing Tuesday 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. He didn't crawl away. He didn't walk away from the plane."

The rock 'n' roll stars' plane crashed after taking off from Mason City, Iowa, on February 3, 1959 -- a tragedy memorialized as "the day the music died" in Don McLean's song "American Pie."
...
Bass, 78, is a pioneer in his field and has worked on such famous cases as confirming the identity of the Lindbergh baby that was kidnapped in 1932 and murdered.

I saw a profile of Dr. Bass on 60 Minutes (or something similar) a few years ago. He pioneered the concept of body farms (where they observe bodies decomposing under different conditions, which is how they have developed the ability to tell when you died and whether you were exposed to the elements after your death, in rainy or dry conditions, etc. etc.).

Am I a ghoul for finding stuff like that fascinating?