On September 14, 1982, Princess Grace of Monaco—the
American-born former film star Grace Kelly, whose movie
credits include The Country Girl and Rear Window—dies
at the age of 52 from injuries suffered after her car plunged
off a mountain road near Monte Carlo.
During the height of her Hollywood career in the 1950s,
Kelly became an international icon of beauty and glamour.
Shortly after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator
Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts drove an Oldsmobile
off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. Kennedy escaped
the submerged car, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo
Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the fatal car
accident for 10 hours.
Edward Moore Kennedy
(February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009)
Ray Edward Cochran
Eddie Cochran, the man behind “Summertime Blues” and “C’mon Everybody,” was killed on April 17, 1960 when the taxi carrying
him from a show in Bristol, England, crashed en route to the
airport in London, where he was to catch a flight back home to
the United States. He had been on a triumphant concert tour of
Britain. Cochran was only 21.
1959
(FOX NEWS) – Founding Dixie Chicks member Laura Lynch was
killed in a head-on collision in Texas. She was 65.
A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety told
Fox News Digital Laura Lynch was killed about 7 miles west of
Cornudas on Friday morning while driving her car, stating a car
hit her head-on while attempting to pass another vehicle on a
two-way highway.
The car wreck.
On November 13, 1974, 28-year-old Karen Silkwood was killed in
a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma City. Silkwood worked as a technician at a plutonium plant operated
by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and she had been critical of the
plant’s health and safety procedures. In September, she had
complained to the Atomic Energy Commission about unsafe
conditions at the plant (a week before her death, plant monitors
had found that she was contaminated with radioactivity herself),
and the night she died, she was on her way to a meeting with a
union representative and a reporter for The New York Times,
reportedly with a folder full of documents that proved that Kerr-
McGee was acting negligently when it came to worker safety at
the plant. However, no such folder was found in the wreckage
of her car, lending credence to the theory that someone had
forced her off the road to prevent her from telling what she
knew.
Her story was chronicled in Mike Nichols‘s 1983 Academy
Award nominated film Silkwood (below) in which she was
portrayed by Meryl Streep.
