Jayne Mansfield - Death

Death

In Biloxi, Mississippi, for an engagement at the Gus Stevens Supper Club, Mansfield stayed at the Cabana Courtyard Apartments near the club. After an evening engagement on June 28, 1967, Mansfield, her lover Sam Brody, their driver, Ronnie Harrison and three of her children – Miklós, Zoltán and Mariska – set out in Stevens' 1966 Buick Electra 225 for New Orleans, where Mansfield was scheduled to appear for an early-morning television interview. Before leaving Biloxi, the party made a stop at the home of Rupert and Edna O'Neal (a family who lived nearby). After a late dinner with the O'Neals (during which Mansfield's last photographs were taken), the party set out for New Orleans. On June 29 at approximately 02:25, on U.S. Highway 90, east of the Rigolets Bridge, the car crashed into the rear of a tractor-trailer which had slowed for a truck which was spraying mosquito fogger. The car struck the rear of the trailer and went under it. The three adults in the front seat were killed instantly; the children, in the rear, survived with minor injuries.

Allegations that Mansfield was decapitated are untrue, although she suffered severe head trauma. The urban legend was spawned by the appearance in police photographs of a crashed car with its top virtually sheared off, and what resembled a blonde-haired head tangled in the car's smashed windshield. However, this was probably either a wig Mansfield was wearing or her actual hair and scalp. The death certificate stated that the immediate cause of Mansfield's death was a "crushed skull with avulsion of cranium and brain". After her death, the NHTSA began requiring an underride guard (a strong bar made of steel tubing) on all tractor-trailers. This bar is known as a Mansfield bar, or an ICC bar.

Mansfield's funeral took place on July 3 in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania. Her last rites were conducted by Rev. Charles Montgomery, a pastor of the Zion Methodist Church, which was destroyed by fire in February 1970 and rebuilt as Grace United Methodist Church). Her last rites were performed in a private service at the chapel of the Pullis Funeral Home. Of her three husbands, only Mickey Hargitay was present at the funeral. She is interred in Fairview Cemetery, southeast of Pen Argyl, beside her father Herbert William Palmer. Her heart-shaped gravestone reads, "We Live to Love You More Each Day". A cenotaph was placed in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood by the Jayne Mansfield Fan Club incorrectly citing her year of birth as 1938 (Mansfield tended to provide incorrect information about her age). In 1968, two wrongful-death lawsuits were filed on behalf of Jayne Marie Mansfield and Matt Cimber. The former for $4.8 million ($39.7 million in 2012 dollars) and the latter for $2.7 million ($22.3 million in 2012 dollars).