On the morning of Feb. 3, 1959, a coroner in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, sat down and itemized what a 22-year-old had been carrying when a chartered Beechcraft went down in a cornfield outside Clear Lake.
Cash, $193.00, less $11.65 in coroner’s fees, leaving $181.35. Two silver cuff links, half-inch balls set in a jeweled band. The top portion of a ballpoint pen.
Charles Hardin Holley had been a star for less than two years. Eleven weeks later, his single “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” went to No. 1 in Britain and stayed there for three weeks, the country’s first posthumous chart-topper. The music catalog outlived the body, and the body was unusually young.
Below are 20 similar cases, from a Mississippi plantation in 1938 to a house in Camden Square in 2011. Six died at 27. Four went down in aircraft. Six were shot.
1. Robert Johnson, Aug. 16, 1938
He died on the Star of the West plantation near Greenwood, Miss., at 27, a few weeks after arriving from Tunica to play a dance.
What killed him was never established, because nobody really tried.
One reading of the death certificate, found by researcher Gayle Dean Wardlow in 1968, shows no cause of death at all and the words “no doctor” where a physician’s name is typically written. The Mississippi Encyclopedia cites the same document with a record of syphilis. One certainty was that there was no autopsy.
Cornelia Jordan, the Leflore County registrar, wrote her own note on the back of it.
“I talked with the white man on whose place this negro died and I also talked with a negro woman on the place,” the note reads. “The plantation owner said the negro man, seemingly about 26 years old, came from Tunica two or three weeks before he died to play banjo at a negro dance given there on the plantation… The plantation owner said it was his opinion that the man died of syphilis.”
Poisoned whiskey is a common retelling, repeated for decades by the musician David “Honeyboy” Edwards.
The scholar Tom Graves has argued it couldn’t be strychnine, since the poison “has such a distinctive odor and taste that it cannot be disguised.” Dissolved mothballs and an inherited disorder of the connective tissue have both been proposed since.
Four months later, John Hammond was booking the From Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall and wanted Johnson on the bill. That is how he found out Johnson was dead.
2. Hank Williams, Jan. 1, 1953
His driver, Charles Carr, pulled into a gas station in Oak Hill, W.Va., and reached into the back seat of the powder-blue Cadillac to check on the passenger under the blanket.
“When I pulled it back up, I noticed that his hand was stiff and cold,” Carr said later, though his account shifted over years of retellings. He went inside and told the attendant, “I think you’ve got a problem.”
Williams was 29. There are two official causes of death in circulation, both of which are similar. The pathologist Ivan Malinin recorded “insufficiency of the right ventricle of the heart” after finding hemorrhages in the heart and neck. The coroner’s inquest listed “acute right ventricular dilation, acute cerebral edema, and acute alcoholism.”
A man calling himself Dr. C. W. Lemon had been supplying him with morphine, amphetamines, and other drugs. His real name was Horace Marshall, a convicted forger with no medical license.
Police found empty beer cans in the car and handwritten lyrics to a song he never recorded.
At the Montgomery Auditorium on Jan. 4, roughly 2,750 people got seats and somewhere between 15,000 and 25,000 filed past the silver coffin. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” was released that January and spent six weeks at No. 1 on the country charts.
3. Buddy Holly, Feb. 3, 1959
The Beechcraft Bonanza left Mason City Municipal Airport a little after 1 a.m. and scattered itself across 540 feet of frozen Iowa field about five miles away.
The Civil Aeronautics Board blamed the pilot in language that has not softened with time, citing “the pilot’s unwise decision to embark on a flight which would necessitate flying solely by instruments when he was not properly certificated or qualified to do so.”
Also aboard were Ritchie Valens, 17, and J. P. Richardson, the Big Bopper, 28.
“The body of Charles H. Holley was clothed in an outer jacket of yellow leather-like material in which 4 seams in the back were split almost full length,” Dr. Ralph E. Smiley wrote.
Holly’s widow, María Elena Santiago, learned he was dead from a television report and miscarried the following day. Authorities changed their practice afterward and stopped releasing victims’ names before families had been notified.
4. Patsy Cline, March 5, 1963
Her manager and pilot, Randy Hughes, was told at Dyersburg, Tenn., not to fly because of the weather.
“If I can’t handle it I’ll come back and fly west or go someplace else,” he said, and took off anyway.
The Piper Comanche hit wooded ground about five miles west of Camden, Tenn., at roughly 175 mph, clipping a tree 30 feet up and throwing wreckage across a field 166 feet by 130 feet. Cline was 30. Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins died with her.
Searchers found the site at 6:10 the next morning. Looters got there before the Country Music Hall of Fame did, stripping clothing, jewelry, and pieces of instruments. Her fee from the Kansas City benefit she had just played was never recovered.
“Sweet Dreams (Of You)” reached No. 5 country that year, and “Faded Love” hit No. 7 in October.
5. Sam Cooke, Dec. 11, 1964
He was shot once in the chest at the Hacienda Motel on South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, around 3 a.m., by the manager, Bertha Franklin. He was 33 and wearing a sport jacket and one shoe.
A coroner’s inquest ruled it justifiable homicide five days later. Franklin testified that Cooke had forced his way into the office looking for a young woman who had left with his car keys.
“He grabbed both my arms,” she said. “I was fightin’, scratchin’, bitin’… finally I got up and grabbed a pistol.”
Police logged $108 and loose change in Cooke’s Ferrari.
The Black press did not accept the verdict, and neither did Cassius Clay, who said what a lot of people were thinking. “If Cooke had been Frank Sinatra, The Beatles or Ricky Nelson the FBI would be investigating… and that woman would have been sent to prison.”
An estimated 200,000 people filed past the body in Chicago on Dec. 18, the line running more than four city blocks. Eleven days after he died, RCA released “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It got to No. 31 pop and No. 9 R&B.
6. Otis Redding, Dec. 10, 1967
The twin-engine Beechcraft came out of fog over Madison, Wis., about 3:25 p.m. and hit Lake Monona four miles short of the runway.
Bernard Reese was on the shore. “I heard a twin-engine plane overhead in the fog,” he told investigators. “I noticed that it was having engine trouble as there seemed to be a lack of power in the motors. The aircraft then came out of the overcast and approached the water… The plane hit the water and I heard a loud noise like an explosion.”
Seven of the eight aboard died, including four of the Bar-Kays. Redding was 26.
Trumpeter Ben Cauley lived because he was thrown clear and caught a seat cushion. He could not swim. “I didn’t try,” he said years afterward, meaning he held on and waited.
Divers brought up a small dark gray attaché case stamped “O.R.” Redding’s body came up the next day, still strapped to the co-pilot’s seat. The left engine and the left propeller were never recovered, which is why the official report concluded the cause could not be determined.
7. Jimi Hendrix, Sept. 18, 1970
He was pronounced dead at 12:45 p.m. at St Mary Abbot’s Hospital in London after collapsing in a basement flat on Lansdowne Crescent at the age of 27.
Nine Vesparax tablets, a German barbiturate sleeping pill, were involved. The recommended dose was half of one.
Coroner Gavin Thurston recorded an open verdict on Sept. 28 and explained precisely why he could not do otherwise. “The cause of death was clearly inhalation of vomit due to barbiturate intoxication, but there is no evidence as to intention to commit suicide,” he said. “If the question of intention cannot be answered, then it is proper to find the cause of death and leave it an open verdict.”
The ambulance crew that arrived at the flat described a scene that nobody involved ever cleaned up in the retelling. “Well, we had to get the police, we only had [Hendrix] and an empty flat,” said attendant Reg Jones. “It was horrific.”
The account given by his girlfriend, Monika Dannemann, repeatedly changed regarding what time she woke up, shifting from 9 a.m. to 10 to 10:20 to 11. A 1992 London Ambulance Service statement contradicted her outright, recording that “there was no one else, except the deceased, at the flat when they arrived.”
Scotland Yard reopened the case in 1993. The attorney general declined to take it further.
8. Janis Joplin, Oct. 4, 1970
Road manager John Byrne Cooke drove to the Landmark Motor Hotel on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood on a Sunday evening because she had not turned up at Sunset Sound to record a vocal.
She was in room 105. She was 27, with cigarettes in one hand and loose change in the other.
Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi ruled it an accidental heroin overdose, possibly compounded by alcohol, and ruled out both homicide and suicide.
Cooke’s own view was that the batch was unusually strong, and he pointed to other customers of the same dealer who overdosed that weekend. Noguchi wrote in 1983 that narcotics appeared to have been removed from the room and replaced before the autopsy.
She was cremated by Oct. 7, and her ashes were scattered from a plane over the Pacific.
The album she had been finishing came out on Jan. 11, 1971, under the title Pearl. It held No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for nine weeks. “Me and Bobby McGee” reached No. 1 in March.
9. Jim Morrison, July 3, 1971
Pamela Courson found him in the bathtub of their apartment at 17 rue Beautreillis in Paris and reported it around 6 a.m. He was 27.
The French death certificate says heart failure. No autopsy was performed, because French law did not require one once a doctor certified natural causes, and Courson couldn’t remember the name of the doctor who signed it.
Bill Siddons, the Doors’ manager, flew over and gave the press a statement that settled nothing. “I have returned from Paris where I have attended the funeral of Jim Morrison. I can say he died peacefully of natural causes…”
Marianne Faithfull has said for years that Morrison died of an accidental heroin overdose, and that the dealer was Jean de Breteuil. Sam Bernett, who managed a Paris club called the Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus, wrote in 2007 that he found Morrison unconscious in a club toilet around 2 a.m. and watched two men carry the body out. The filmmaker Agnès Varda said in 2019 that she had helped keep the death quiet.
He was buried at Père Lachaise on July 7 with no priest and, by Varda’s count, four people present.
10. Duane Allman, Oct. 29, 1971
He was riding through Macon, Ga., late on a Friday afternoon when a flatbed truck stopped or turned in front of him at Hillcrest Avenue and Bartlett Street.
The motorcycle came down on top of him and skidded about 90 feet with him pinned under it. He died roughly three hours later on the operating table, at 24. Sources name the hospital as Macon Medical Center and as Middle Georgia Medical Center.
“Duane Allman’s death is a very personal loss, not only for the no-nonsense, straight-ahead music he created, but for the warm and sincere friendship we shared,” said his manager, Phil Walden.
Johnny Sandlin, who ran A&R at Capricorn, put the claim higher. “More than anyone else, Duane Allman was responsible for the musical revolution in the South.”
The funeral was Nov. 1 at Snow’s Memorial Chapel and the band played it. “The Sky Is Crying.” “Key to the Highway.” “Stormy Monday.” “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” “Come On In My Kitchen.” They closed with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” which was either brave or unbearable depending on where you were sitting.
At Fillmore East, recorded the previous March, went gold that same month.
11. Nick Drake, Nov. 25, 1974
His mother went up to his room at Far Leys, the family house in Tanworth-in-Arden, Warwickshire, around noon.
“I never used to disturb him at all,” Molly Drake said. “But it was about 12 o’clock, and I went in, because really it seemed it was time he got up. And he was lying across the bed.”
He was 26. The coroner ruled the following month that he had taken an overdose of his prescribed antidepressant while suffering from a depressive illness, and returned a verdict of suicide.
His producer, Joe Boyd, has never accepted it and believes the overdose was an accident.
His sister, the actress Gabrielle Drake, takes the opposite position and has explained why in terms that admit no comfort. “I’d rather he died because he wanted to end it than it to be the result of a tragic mistake. That would seem to me to be terrible.”
There was no note. A letter to a friend named Sophia Ryde was lying near the bed.
About 50 people came to the funeral on Dec. 2. His headstone reads “Now we rise / And we are everywhere.”
12. John Lennon, Dec. 8, 1980
He was shot outside the Dakota on West 72nd Street in Manhattan at about 10:50 p.m. and pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital within half an hour. He was 40.
The medical examiner’s finding runs to one long, clinical sentence. “Hypovolemic shock, caused by the loss of more than 80% of blood volume due to multiple through-and-through gunshot wounds to the left shoulder and left chest resulting in damage to the left lung, the left subclavian artery, and both the aorta and aortic arch.”
Mark David Chapman was still on the sidewalk reading The Catcher in the Rye when officers Steven Spiro and Peter Cullen arrived.
Most of America found out from Howard Cosell, who broke it during Monday Night Football in a live broadcast that got several details wrong and the weight of the thing exactly right. “Remember, this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses,” he said. “An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous, perhaps, of all the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.”
Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and got 20 years to life. He has been denied parole 14 times.
Lennon was cremated the next day at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, N.Y., and his ashes were scattered in Central Park.
13. Bob Marley, May 11, 1981
In July 1977, a doctor examined the right big toe Marley had injured playing football and diagnosed acral lentiginous melanoma, a rare and aggressive skin cancer growing under the nail.
Amputation was recommended. He refused it on religious grounds and because a man who cannot move cannot perform. Surgeons took the nail and the nail bed instead and grafted skin from his thigh over the wound.
He collapsed while jogging in Central Park on Sept. 21, 1980. Tests found cancer in his brain, his lungs and his liver. He played his last concert two days later at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh.
Eight months of alternative treatment at Josef Issels’ clinic in Bavaria did not stop it. He was flown to Jamaica, and the plane put down in Miami, where he died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital at 36.
Kingston’s National Arena held 6,000 for the funeral on May 21 and about 100,000 more stood outside listening on loudspeakers, with some 5,000 keeping vigil through the night. The coffin was draped in Rastafarian red, green and gold beside the Jamaican flag. He was buried with his guitar and a Bible.
“We share the grief at the loss of Bob Marley, Third World superstar, the Jamaican reggae king, humanist and brother whom we have lost,” said Prime Minister Edward Seaga.
The famous last words, “money can’t buy life,” are quoted everywhere and denied by the person who was in the room. Asked about them directly, Ziggy Marley said, “That’s not true. No.” What his father actually said to him, by his account, was “on your way up, take me up. On your way down, don’t let me down.”
14. Marvin Gaye, April 1, 1984
He was shot in the chest inside his parents’ house on South Gramercy Place in Los Angeles at 12:38 p.m., the day before his 45th birthday, and pronounced dead at 1:01.
The man who shot him was his father, Marvin Gay Sr. The weapon was a Smith & Wesson .38 Special that Gaye had given him as a Christmas present 14 weeks earlier.
The autopsy recorded that the fatal round “perforated his right lung, heart, diaphragm, liver, stomach, and left kidney.” Cocaine and PCP were in his system.
Gay Sr. pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter on Sept. 20 and faced 13 years. A benign brain tumor had been found and removed in May, and it counted in his favor. Judge Gordon Ringer gave him a six-year suspended sentence and five years of probation on Nov. 2.
“I’ll carry it with me ’til the day I die,” he told the court. “I’m paying the price.” He also said, “it’s killing me, I loved my son.”
More than 10,000 mourners came to Forest Lawn in Glendale on April 5. Smokey Robinson and Dick Gregory gave eulogies, and Stevie Wonder performed. Half of Gaye’s ashes were scattered at sea.
15. Kurt Cobain, April 5, 1994
An electrician arrived at the house on Lake Washington Boulevard East in Seattle on April 8 to install security lighting and found him in the room above the garage. He had been dead three days.
The death was ruled a suicide. A note was recovered at the scene, pinned into a flowerpot with a pen through it.
About 5,000 people gathered at Seattle Center on April 10 for a public vigil, where a recording of Courtney Love reading from the letter was played over the crowd.
Nirvana had released three studio albums. The last of them, In Utero, had come out seven months earlier.
16. Selena, March 31, 1995
She walked into the lobby of the Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas, at 11:48 a.m., bleeding from a gunshot wound, and told the staff who had done it.
“Yolanda, Yolanda Saldívar shot me,” the motel employee Ruben DeLeon testified she said. “The one in room 158.”
The bullet had severed her right subclavian artery. She was pronounced dead at 1:05 p.m. at Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital at 23.
Saldívar ran the fan club and the boutiques and had been confronted about more than $60,000 missing from both. She sat in a pickup truck in the motel parking lot for over nine hours before surrendering.
Her trial moved to Houston. Jurors heard the FBI negotiation tapes, in which she said, “I bought this gun to kill myself, not her… when I pointed it to my head, she opened the door… when I did that gun went off.” They convicted her on Oct. 23, 1995, after two hours and 23 minutes. She is serving life and was denied parole in March 2025.
Gov. George W. Bush declared April 16 Selena Day in Texas. Dreaming of You, the crossover album she had been recording in English, came out that July and sold 331,000 copies in its first week on the way to No. 1, and nearly three million in the United States since.
17. Tupac Shakur, Sept. 13, 1996
Four rounds came through the passenger door of a black BMW stopped at East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane in Las Vegas at about 11:15 p.m. on Sept. 7. Suge Knight was driving. Shakur took two in the chest, one in the arm and one in the thigh.
He lived six days at University Medical Center where a collapsed lung was removed. He died at 4:03 p.m. on Sept. 13 at 25.
Retired officer Chris Carroll, first on the scene, has said he leaned into the car and asked who did it. “And that’s when I looked at him and said one more time, ‘Who shot you?'” By Carroll’s account, which is the only account, Shakur answered, “Fuck you.”
The case sat for 27 years while the man who had bragged about it in a memoir and on camera stayed free. Duane “Keffe D” Davis was arrested on Sept. 29, 2023. Prosecutors built the case largely out of his own retellings.
“This guy’s scrapbooking his murder, for God’s sake,” prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo told the jury. Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal closed by pointing at the years of confessions. “He is responsible of the murder of Tupac Shakur. Tell him you hear him. Find him guilty.”
Defense attorney Michael Sanft answered that none of it placed Davis at the intersection. “They have nothing in this case that says that man was here in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996.”
The jury took less than three hours and convicted Davis of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon on Aug. 31, 2026.
Sentencing is set for October. He faces life and says he will appeal.
The Don Killuminati, recorded in seven days that August, came out less than eight weeks after he died and entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1 with 664,000 copies.
18. The Notorious B.I.G., March 9, 1997
Six 9mm rounds were fired into a green Suburban at Wilshire Boulevard and South Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles at 12:45 a.m., a little under six months after Shakur died 270 miles away.
Christopher Wallace was in the front passenger seat, leaving a party at the Petersen Automotive Museum. He was pronounced dead half an hour later at Cedars-Sinai at 24.
Witnesses described the shooter as a Black man in a light blue suit and a bow tie, driving a dark Impala. Nobody has ever been charged.
Four bullets hit Wallace, and three of them did survivable damage to the forearm, the back, and the thigh. The fourth is described differently in different readings of the coroner’s report, as entering the right hip and traveling up through the colon, liver, heart and lung, or simply as a wound to the chest and abdomen.
That report was sealed for more than 15 years and released in December 2012. The LAPD apologized to the family over an earlier release of autopsy material. A $500 million wrongful death suit against the city was dismissed in 2010.
Life After Death came out 16 days after he was killed.
19. Aaliyah, Aug. 25, 2001
The Cessna 402B lifted off from Marsh Harbour in the Bahamas at 6:50 p.m. with nine people aboard and came down almost immediately.
Investigators found the aircraft had been more than 900 pounds over its maximum takeoff weight, was carrying one more passenger than it was certified for, and had its center of gravity beyond the rear limit. In plain terms, it was never going to fly.
The pilot, Luis Morales III, had cocaine and alcohol in his system. He had obtained his FAA license by logging hundreds of hours he had never flown, and he was not approved for that aircraft.
Aaliyah was 22 and going home from the video shoot for “Rock the Boat.”
Her self-titled third album, released seven weeks earlier, jumped from No. 19 to No. 1 the week after she died and went double platinum by February. Her family’s suit against the charter operator settled out of court.
20. Amy Winehouse, July 23, 2011
She was pronounced dead at 3:54 p.m. at her house in Camden Square in London at 27. Police took one small and two large bottles of vodka out of the bedroom.
Her blood alcohol was 416 milligrams per 100 milliliters, more than five times the British drink-drive limit.
The inquest that October returned a verdict of misadventure and found that the unintended consequence of the drinking had been her sudden and unexpected death.
Then the verdict itself fell apart. The deputy coroner who delivered it, Suzanne Greenaway, turned out to lack the required five years’ standing with the Law Society, and she had been appointed by her own husband, the senior coroner.
Both resigned, and every finding Greenaway had made was void.
Her family sat through the whole thing a second time. On Jan. 8, 2013, coroner Shirley Radcliffe heard the same evidence and reached the same conclusion. “She voluntarily consumed alcohol, a deliberate act that took an unexpected turn in that it caused her death.”
Back to Black climbed to No. 2 in America after she died, four years after its release.