I just stumbled across this excerpt from a bio on Jim Reeves regarding the aftermath of his death in a plane crash. :
“A member of law enforcement had called the Reeves home with the tip that Jim’s diamond cluster ring had been recovered, and he suggested Mary (Reeves’ widow) call downtown to let them know she was aware of this, lest it disappear again. Joyce (Jackson) was dispatched with a state trooper to go down and retrieve the ring, but a man at the property room wouldn’t relinquish it. After calls were made, she was sent back with the trooper. This time, the cop said “all right, you can have the ring — and the finger it’s attached to!” Whereupon he tossed a small plastic bag at her containing the ring and severed appendage.”
I had never heard this story and it just doesn’t ring true to me as I can’t believe this would have been kept quiet all these years. Has anyone ever heard this before? I can’t find anything else about it on google.
Well, this was in the 1960’s and it could be that the body parts were all found and sent to coroner and maybe the finger had been cut during the accident. I have to assume this was all shortly after the crash (hours/day or two) and that pieces were simply bagged for later fingerprint or other identification? After 9/11, I believe they were also bagging whatever (small fragments) of remains they could find for later identification - although I doubt anyone was as crass as to give a severed finger with a wedding ring to a loved one.
Without authorities knowing the ownership of the ring in question, perhaps keeping the severed finger attached until a fingerprint could be made (if possible) was the purpose - to discover whose ring it was?
Also, in reading the Wikipedia version of the accident, Reeve’s wife was the one who started the story that he was flying upside down in that storm and thought he was gaining altitude and thus hit the earth instead of climbing up in the air. This was later proven to be false - so perhaps the wife had a tendency to fabricate/embellish the stories surrounding the crash?
There are so many stories involving the crash. And the horror that results when a plane hits the ground is too gruesome to contemplate.
Mary Reeves was able to speak pretty matter-of-factly about the crash when I met her in the mid-80s. By then, her life was focused on running the Jim Reeves’ museum and gift shop outside of Nashville, and a person could see she was centering herself on the positive aspects of her late husband’s life.
That book mentioned upthread uncovers an incredible amount of dirt, and fans will be heartbroken to find their idol had feet of clay. There has been controversy everywhere, and I’d rather just enjoy the music he left behind.
~VOW
Just a little FYI for Jim Reeves fans: there was a persistent rumor that is probably still making the rounds, that a provision in Jim’s will directed Mary to hold back his unreleased songs, and only publish one a year.
We specifically asked Mary about that rumor, and she flat out denied it. Fact is, Mary Reeves was a very canny businesswoman, and she had her own marketing strategy mapped out.
~VOW
After some more googling, I found this website purportedly with answers from Joyce Jackson herself in which she specifically mentions the ring, but says nothing about the severed finger.
All I can say is that if some policeman tossed a severed finger at me, I would have been telling the story about it to everyone I knew. The incident certainly would have come to light long before Larry Jordan related it in his book, fifty years later. This is hardly an “oh by the way, I forgot about this until just now” sort of story.
Not only would I tell everyone I knew, I would make sure my lawyer knew, the police chief knew, and the media knew. I know people were supposedly less litigious in the early 60s than they are now but I would have to think that idiot cop committed some serious breaches of protocol when he callously chucked her husband’s severed finger at her.
I used to live in Nashville about 3 miles from the crash site. I was told by someone who was there that the ring was still attached to the entire hand and found near the crash. They thought it might have been disturbed by one of the dogs that was scavenging through the area. I have also heard different stories as to if the hand was still attached to his remains. Eddy Arnold identified Dean as being Jim because Dean was wearing a wedding ring. That should give you some idea as to what condition the remains were in after being exposed to the elements. I don’t claim to know everything but I find it hard to believe that people supposedly found the crash on Friday night and didn’t tell anyone. Seems like someone would have stepped forward by now. As with most things there are different versions of what people saw, said and did. After more than 50 years I don’t think we will ever know exactly what transpired but I don’t subscribe to the theory of a cover up by the Nashville authorities. In my opinionit was a tragic accident.