First openly gay federal judge Deborah Batts, who was set to preside over Michael Avenatti's trial on charges of stealing money from Stormy Daniels, is dead at age 72

US District Judge Deborah Batts passed away on Sunday from unknown cause

Last fall, she set Michael Avenatti's embezzlement trial for April 21

Batts, a Harvard Law School graduate, was appointed to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1994 by President Bill Clinton

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7962385/amp/Judge-set-preside-Michael-Avenattis-trial-dead-72.html?

The Day the Music Died: Remembering Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens

But February made me shiver

With every paper I'd deliver

Bad news on the doorstep

I couldn't take one more step

Don McLean, American Pie

Sixty-one years later, it still sends shivers down our spines. On Feb. 3, 1959, rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and "The Big Bopper" J. P. Richardson were killed in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, along with pilot Roger Peterson. All three musicians were up-and-coming stars who died in their prime.

The loss was especially tough on Texans. Holly hailed from Lubbock, Richardson from Beaumont. And Latinos lost one of their few stars in Valens, whose real name was Richard Valenzuela.

The chartered plane was a Beechcraft Bonanza like the one pictured above. It crashed in bad weather six miles from the airport.

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/texas/article/The-Day-the-Music-Died-Remembering-Buddy-Holly-15026964.php?

DAY MUSIC DIED How did Buddy Holly REALLY die and why did his wife say he knew it was going to happen?

Buddy left behind his wife Maria Elena, to whom he had been married less than a year.

Maria was pregnant with his child when he learned of his death on TV and had a miscarriage.

Months before the plane crash she said she and Holly himself had disturbing dreams that predicted something bad was going to happen.

Maria is reported as having a nightmare about a fireball falling to earth before an explosion and a huge crater.

Waking up she told Holly about her bad dream.

He then said he had dreamed he, his wife and brother were all in a plane. In it he said he was persuaded to leave his wife on the roof of a building.

Maria had been set to travel with Holly on his Winter Wonderland tour.

But he told her to stay at home because she had morning sickness.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8335574/buddy-holly-how-die-wife-knew-theory/

Buddy Holly plane crash : officials consider reopening 1959 probe

Hence the frenzied speculation concerning the discovery of a gun supposedly owned by Holly in the same Iowa cornfield where the mangled wreck of the Beechcraft Bonanza was found. Hence the unproven rumours that the pilot’s seat had a bullet hole through it, and that two chambers of the recovered pistol were empty.

The request came from LJ Coon, a pilot who has made his own investigation into the crash and has approached the National Transportation Safety Board’s cold case unit urging them to take another look. Coon believes that the finding of the Civil Aeronautics Board in 1959 that the accident was primarily caused by pilot error amounts to an injustice for Roger Peterson, the 21-year-old pilot who was at the controls of the Beechcraft Bonanza and who died alongside the three musicians.

Coon told the Pilot Tribune this year that “Roger would have flown out and about this airport at night, under multiple different conditions. He had to be very familiar with all directions of this airport in and out.”

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/04/buddy-holly-plane-crash-investigation-re-opened

The Coroner’s Report

The Day the Music Died

February 3, 1959

Coroner’s investigation

Air crash, Feb. 3, 1959

SW1/4 Section 18, Lincoln Twp.

Cerro Gordo County, Iowa

This is the Coroner’s Report from the crash:

Jiles P. Richardson, Charles Holley, Richard Valenzuela and Roger A. Peterson, pilot of the plane were killed in the crash of a chartered airplane when it fell within minutes of takeoff from the Mason City Airport. The three passengers were members of a troupe of entertainers who appeared at the Surf Ballroom at Clear Lake, Iowa, the evening of February 2, 1959, bound for Fargo, N.D. and was headed northwest from the airport at the time of the crash in a stubble field, 51/2 miles north of Clear Lake, Iowa. The plane was discovered about 9:00 A.M., February 3, 1959, when Mr. H.J. Dwyer, owner of the crashed plane, made an aerial search because he had received no word from Peterson since his takeoff.

The wreckage had been approached only by Deputy Sheriff Bill McGill in his sheriff’s car before I arrived about 11:15 A.M. At this time two sheriff’s cars, two highway patrol cars and cars carrying members of the press, both reporters and photographers, and representatives of TV and radio stations and a few spectators were allowed to pass through the gate into the field where the crash occurred. Approach was made in a circuitous route to avoid disturbing wreckage and debris from the crash.

The wreckage lay about 1/2 mile west from the nearest north-south gravel road and the farmhomes of the Albert Juhl’s and the Delbert Juhl’s. The main part of the plane lay against the barbed wire fence at the north end of the stubble field in which it came to earth. It had skidded and/or rolled approximately 570 feet from point of impact directed northwesterly. The shape of the mass of wreckage approximated a ball with one wing sticking up diagonally from one side. The body of Roger Peterson was enclosed by wreckage with only the legs visible sticking upward. Richard Valenzuela’s body was south, lying prone, head directed south 17 feet from the wreckage; Charles Holley’s body, also in the prone position, was lying southwest, head directed southwest, 17 feet from the wreckage; and J.P. Richardson’s body, lying partly prone and partly on the right side, was northwest of the wreckage, head directed south 40 feet from the wreckage, across the fence in a picked cornfield. Fine snow which fell lightly after the crash had drifted slightly about the bodies and wreckage. Some parts of each body had been frozen by ten hours’ exposure in temperature reported to have been near 18 degrees during that time. The three bodies on the ground were removed before I left. Peterson’s body was removed after permission was granted by the inspector for the Civil Aeronautics Board and Federal Aviation Agency. This was done by Deputy Sheriffs Wm. McGill and Lowell Sandquist using metal cutting tools to open a space in the wreckage.

(cont)

I, Ralph E. Smiley, M.D., Acting Coroner of Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, on the 4th day of February, 1959 hereby certify that the above facts are made of record after diligent investigation and I believe them to be correct.

https://fiftiesweb.com/music/coroner-report/amp/

>>8014704

(cont)

At the scene of the crash Mr. Carroll Anderson was helpful in tentatively identifying the bodies from the clothing.

A large brown leather suitcase with one catch open lay near one leg of Charles Holley, and about 8ft. north of the same body lay a travel case with brown leather ends and sides of a light plaid color. This measured approximately 15 in. x 12 in. x 6 in.

A billfold containing the name of Tommy Douglas Allsup and a leather pocket case marked with the name, “Ritchie Valens” were brought to me at the scene by Deputy Sheriff inspecting the ground over which the wreckage had skidded and rolled.

Glen Kellogg of Clear Lake took some photos of the scene at the request of Sheriff Jerry Allen and me. News and TV photographers also took still pictures and movies of the scene.

The plane was a Beech-Craft Bonanza, No. N3794N, painted red, with white and black trim. Deputy Sheriff Lowell Sandquist, an experienced pilot, who has flown in and out of the Mason City airport, was present when the radio and navigational equipment from the plane were examined. He reports the radio to have been set for listening and talking to the Mason City Airport Station MCW, and the navigational equipment to have been correctly set for a course from Mason City to Fargo, N.D.

Arrangements for the flight were made by Mr. Carroll Anderson, Manager of the Surf Ballroom at Clear Lake, Iowa, with Mr. H.J. Dwyer, fixed base operator for the Mason City Airport. The reasons given to Mr. Anderson for the flight were that all three passengers wished to reach their next destination in their itinerary ahead of the chartered bus which carried the rest of the troupe in order to have some laundry done. Mr. Anderson drove the three passengers to the airport in his family automobile. Accompanying him were his wife and 8-year-old son. They saw the plane take off and make its circle to take up its course.

The Air Traffic Communication Center of the Federal Aviation Agency at the Mason City Municipal Airport. reported to me that at 0058 on February 3rd, the wind was south, gusty to 20 M.P.H., temperature 18 degrees F., dew point 11. In takeoff, the plane followed a normal procedure using the runway toward the south and turning in a counterclockwise direction. The amount of snow falling from midnight to 6:30 A.M. on February 3rd was listed as a trace.

Further information from them was that as the pilot taxied down the runway he communicated by radio with the tower and secured additional information about the weather en route. He told the officer in charge in the tower he would file a flight plan after getting in the air. When this information did not come in, the officer tried to reach the pilot without getting a reply.

An official investigation was carried on by a crew of field representatives headed by Mr. C.E. Stillwagon of the Civil Aeronautics Board, Bureau of Safety Investigation, 4825 Treost Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri, and Mr. A.J. Prokop, Federal Aviation Agency, Des Moines office. This group spent three days on the investigation arriving here the evening of February 3rd. They visited the scene of the crash for preliminary survey before dark that day.

>>8014711

(end)

I, Ralph E. Smiley, M.D., Acting Coroner of Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, on the 4th day of February, 1959 hereby certify that the above facts are made of record after diligent investigation and I believe them to be correct.

Flashback: How Waylon Jennings Survived the Day the Music Died

Country icon was meant to be on the doomed plane that crashed on this day in 1959, killing Buddy Holly and three others

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FEBRUARY 3, 2015 6:50PM ET

Flashback: How Waylon Jennings Survived the Day the Music Died

Country icon was meant to be on the doomed plane that crashed on this day in 1959, killing Buddy Holly and three others

By STEPHEN L. BETTS

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Waylon Jennings

Waylon Jennings gave up his seat on the plane that crashed on February 3rd, 1959, killing Buddy Holly and three others.

Michael Ochs Archives

The day the music died. That’s how songwriter Don McLean memorialized February 3rd, 1959, in his 1972 single “American Pie,” an epic, eight-minute music-history lesson that begins with a reference to the plane crash that killed musicians Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson (a.k.a. the Big Bopper) and Ritchie Valens, along with the pilot of the 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza that had been chartered to transport the performers from Iowa to their next show in Minnesota. Less than six miles northwest of the airport where it took off, the plane went down, killing all onboard.

One member of Holly’s band who did not make the trip went on to become a country music trailblazer, one of the genre’s original “outlaws.” Waylon Jennings was hired by Holly to play bass for him on the Winter Dance Party Tour, which began January 23rd, 1959, in Milwaukee. Jennings, 21 at the time, had been in New York City recording sessions produced by Holly, and after taking a train to Chicago, met up with the rest of Holly’s band. Problems first arose when the tour buses hired to transport the group began breaking down. After a show in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2nd, Holly decided to charter a plane for himself, guitarist Tommy Allsup and Jennings so they could fly to Fargo, North Dakota, instead of taking the long, frozen bus trip. Richardson, who was suffering from the flu, asked Jennings for his seat on the plane, and Valens asked the same of Allsup. When Jennings told Holly that he was going to take the bus, Holly jokingly told him he hoped the bus broke down, to which Jennings replied, “I hope your ol’ plane crashes.”

“God almighty, for years I thought I caused it,” the country legend said decades later in a CMT interview.

“The only reason Buddy went on that tour was because he was broke. Flat broke,” Jennings revealed to Rolling Stone in 1973. “He didn’t want to go, but he had to make some money. I ain’t sayin’ the person’s name that was the reason he was broke.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/flashback-how-waylon-jennings-survived-the-day-the-music-died-122992/

>>8014763

dang. I try to post clean copy. I hate when [they] embed stuff. Apologies, note taker.