Grief won’t fade away
QUESTION Is it true that Buddy Holly’s widow didn’t attend his funeral and has never visited his grave in Lubbock, Texas? ROCK ’N’ ROLL legend Buddy Holly, famous for That’ll Be The Day, Not Fade Away and Peggy Sue, died in a plane crash on February 3, 1959, minutes after takeoff from Mason City Airport, Iowa, with fellow performers Ritchie Valens and JP ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson.
In New York, two days after losing her 22-year-old husband, Buddy’s widow Maria Elena, who was barely five weeks pregnant, lost their baby as a result of the shocking news. After a few hours’ observation, Maria caught a plane to Texas for Buddy’s funeral.
The service, at Lubbock Tabernacle Church, drew a congregation of 1,500 people but, sick with grief and still in pain from her miscarriage, Maria Elena didn’t feel able to attend the funeral nor later visit Buddy’s grave just a mile from the basic wooden house where he’d been born.
‘I’ve never been to the gravesite,’ she said, ‘I refused to believe he was buried. I remembered him just as he was when he left our apartment. To be honest, I’ve never been to a cemetery since my mother died when I was six. I try to remember people like the last time I saw them – alive. People go to Buddy’s grave to pay homage. I’ll never think of Buddy as being six feet under.’
Maria Elena eventually remarried and had three children. Now 84 and divorced, she lives in Dallas, Texas, and promotes her first husband’s legacy.
In a 2008 interview with the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, she said of Holly’s death: ‘In a way, I blame myself. I was not feeling well when he left. I was two weeks pregnant and I wanted Buddy to stay with me but he had scheduled that tour.
‘It was the only time I wasn’t with him. And I blame myself because I know that if only I had gone along, Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane.’
Today in Lubbock, Texas, a simple granite memorial commemorates Buddy under his real surname – Holley – it had been changed due to a typing error on his first recording contract.
It reads: ‘In loving memory of our own Buddy Holley September 7, 1936, February 3, 1959.’ Simon Myers, Offerton, Stockport. QUESTION What is the longest jail sentence? THE longest sentence handed down by a court is that imposed on Chamoy Thipyaso of Thailand, who set up the Mae Chamoy Fund (Mae being Thai for Mother) which was made to look like an oil share with high returns.
Effectively a pyramid scheme, it collapsed in the mid-Eighties, defrauding 16,231 people out of about $200million. It’s thought some of her victims were members of the Thai Royal Family. On July 27, 1989, she was sentenced to a record 141,078 years in prison. In the event, she served only about eight.
A similar technicality applied to terrorist Otman el-Gnaoui who was given a 42,924-year prison sentence by a Spanish court for his part in the 2004 Madrid train bombings that claimed 191 lives. His accomplice, Jamal Zougam, got 42,922 years. Spanish law limits the time that can be spent in jail to 40 years.
Another long stretch was handed down to Oklahoma child rapist Charles Scott Robinson. Judge Dan Owens ordered his multiple 5,000-year sentences to be served consecutively – landing Robinson with a 30,000-year jail term.
In Ireland, the most serious sentence handed down is a life sentence, which is not necessarily ‘life imprisonment’ as people handed life sentences may apply for temporary or early release.
A number of prisoners, however, continue to be detained behind bars in Ireland, decades after they were convicted.
Jimmy Ennis, now 85, was jailed for life in 1964 for beating a farmer to death during the course of a robbery. That killing came just weeks after he had completed a sentence for an attack on a woman in which he left her for dead.
More notorious is John Shaw. He and fellow sexual predator Geoffrey Evans abducted, assaulted and killed two women in the Seventies. Evans died in 2012 after spending three years in a vegetative state, but Shaw, now aged 72, is still in prison, 39 years after his conviction.