1959: Buffy Holly, Richie Valens and JP "The Big Bopper" Richardson die when their chartered plane crashed during a flight from Mason City, Iowa to Moorhead, Minnesota. Richardson convinced Crickets band member Waylon Jennings to give up his seat, Valens won a coin toss for the third passenger.
Don McLean memorialized the three in his 1972 hit American Pie, calling February 3, 1959 "the day the music died"
In one of the most famous crimes of post-Revolution America, Barnett Davenport commits a mass murder in rural Connecticut. Caleb Mallory, his wife, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren were killed in their home by their boarder, Davenport. It would contribute to a change in the way the young nation views crime and criminals.
Davenport, born in 1760, enlisted in the Continental army as a teenager and had served at Valley Forge and Fort Ticonderoga. In the waning days of the war with the British, he came to live in the Mallory household. Today, Davenport’s crime might be ascribed to some type of post-war stress syndrome, but at the time it was the source of a different sociological significance.
On February 3, apparently unprovoked, Davenport beat Caleb Mallory to death. He then beat Mallory’s seven-year-old grandchild with a rifle and killed his daughter-in-law. Davenport looted the home before setting it on fire, killing two others.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/day/february-3