Where is it?
Jerry Dwyer has been telling locals and many people who have inquired over the ensuing decades that he has the plane. He claimed he buried the wreckage at an undisclosed location and will dig it up as a life insurance policy in the future. Remember the lineman back in the early 1990s who had pointed to a hanger and claimed he had been told the plane wreckage was hidden inside?
If Dwyer really has it, why is he hiding it? If there is a bullet hole in the pilot’s seat—or in any other part of the instrumentation or fuselage— it might explain something other than what the CAB reported. However, we know with certainty there was no bullet in Peterson’s body, and a bullet lodged in the seat would not have caused the plane to become unstable. And, of course, the authorities have accounted for all the bullets in Buddy Holly’s gun: the farmer discharged one round and the rest were still in the gun.
Barb Dwyer told me Jerry was writing a book about the entire episode and that “the truth” will finally be told. But neither Barb nor Jerry was in the plane and no one witnessed the crash, so what could they possibly know that no one else does? Does the wreckage hold some undisclosed or undiscovered evidence? I doubt it, and so does retired NTSB aviation expert Dick Rodriquez, but on what other basis could Barb Dwyer make such a claim?
I was not going to address the plane crash in any meaningful way when I began writing this book. My intention when I phoned the Dwyers was simply to interview them like I did everyone else. Like it or not, their lives were impacted by Buddy Holly. Unfortunately, it was in a very negative way. I respect the Dwyers, their advancing age, and appreciate the heartache they must have suffered, but I cannot write Hey Buddy and ignore Barb Dwyer’s bold claim, repeated several times, that they know something about the crash that no one else does—“the truth.”
If the Dwyers are really holding the plane, perhaps it is because they believe the wreckage has evidence that clears Jerry’s conscience for letting the flight leave on that fateful early morning. If so, then maybe he has not released this evidence or let others see the plane because he is waiting to finish and release his book. But if the wreckage held some lost secret that cleared his conscience (and would stun the world, as it most surely would), why would the Dwyers wait more than five decades to release it?
If Jerry Dwyer really has the plane wreckage, the emotional value to Buddy, Ritchie, and Big Bopper enthusiasts worldwide would be off the charts. Given how well known its occupants were and the fatal event, the wreckage could be worth a fortune to the Dwyers. Why not unveil it or sell it? I am not suggesting they should benefit financially, but why continue to hide it if you have it—especially if it supports Barb’s statement that only they know “the truth” about what happened that night?
If they really have the plane, let us see it. If the pilot seat has a bullet hole, show us. If the plane somehow tells a different story of the events of that night than do the official documents, let the plane speak the truth that Barb insists only they know. If Dick Rodriguez (like the CAB before him) is wrong, let the plane tell the story or share with the world facts heretofore unrevealed. If the wreckage is available, experts using today’s higher level of technology should be allowed to examine it once again. I would help pull together a team of qualified and unbiased experts who can support or dispel this untold “truth.” Both the CAB and now NTSB have a well known and longstanding policy that no investigation is ever closed. The NTSB is always open to receiving new and pertinent evidence on any accident investigation.
Is it even possible that the Dwyers have the plane wreckage? Dick Rodriguez and I discussed this very issue in one of our conversations. In most cases when a plane is totaled, he explained, one of the conditions of the insurance carrier is that the carrier gets the wreckage in exchange for payment.
Was that the case here? If so, did Jerry Dwyer forgo payment for the plane in order to bury or hide it? That seems highly doubtful.
According to Buddy Holly expert Bill Griggs, he ran into the same roadblocks I did trying to get through to the Dwyers. Close friends of the Dwyers told Bill that Jerry purchased the plane for salvage and that they have seen the wreckage. Apparently Jerry has the instruments from the wrecked plane and has showed them to people. When I asked Bill whether he knew for certain that those instruments were from the downed plane or from another Bonanza, Bill admitted he had no idea other than what others had related. Perhaps the Dwyers did purchase the plane as salvage from the insurance carrier. Bill is confident that they did, and he is equally confident that the Dwyers still have the wreckage.
If so, why go to all that trouble and expense to buy the plane, just to hide it for decades?
This is easy to settle: Jerry, you should show the world the plane.
Put unfounded rumors to bed, once and for all. The NTSB is open to any new information you may have that would change their original findings. I know because I have asked them.
If you do not have the plane, please issue a statement and put an end to the speculation.
Regardless of where the wreckage is or isn’t, please tell us what you know. Tell us your truth.
Let me put it another way:
Jerry,
I will assemble a team of first class aviation experts to examine the wreckage you claim to have in your possession to help you substantiate the reasons for the crash. If the “truth” has never been told, let me help you tell it. If the CAB report is correct, let us help verify that fact so we can put all the conspiracies and doubts to rest. But if one of those conspiracies (or something else entirely) turns out to be true, let the truth be told! Jerry, you are the only man in the world who can either help make this happen or forever block the truth from being told. Will you join with me and allow the world to know what actually happened?
Gary
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The Dwyers are fine people. I talked to several locals off the record who know them and everyone attests to that fact. The accident on February 3, 1959, was exactly that—an accident. If he could do it all over again, I am sure Jerry Dwyer would never have let that plane take off.
* * *
It is human nature to seek a larger or more noble or interesting reason for a tragedy to measure up to the importance of the people who die before their time. Ritchie Valens, J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, and Buddy Holly died in the prime of their young and promising lives because of a decision by an air charter operator to let a V-Tail Bonanza aircraft take off in bad weather with a young and inexperienced pilot at the controls who was not instrument rated. The results were not expected, but they were foreseeable.
Our hearts cry out for more, where more does not exist. Sometimes in life, it simply is what it is.