... was 24 years, 7 months and 20 days old when he set out in his brand new Porsche 550 Spyder, to drive to Salinas, California to take part in a road race meeting that was scheduled to take place on 1 and 2 October 1955. At approximately 17:45 on 30 September, as he drove westwards on US Route 466, a 1950 Ford Tudor, travelling eastwards and driven by 23–year–old Donald Turnupseed (a student at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo) made a left turn in front of him, onto Highway 41 (headed north–east towards Fresno).
Dean's car hit the Ford at speed, almost head–on. It flipped up into the air, and landed back on its wheels on the right hand side of the road. The passenger, Porsche mechanic Rolf Wütherich, was thrown from the wreckage, but Dean himself was trapped inside. Both had suffered serious injuries and were taken by ambulance to the War Memorial Hospital in Paso Robles, 28 miles away. Wütherich was taken on to Los Angeles for surgery, and survived; but Dean, whose injuries included a broken neck, was pronounced dead on arrival at Paso Robles.
A number of passers–by had witnessed the accident and stopped to help. Dean's biographer George Perry wrote that "death appeared to have been instantaneous", despite quoting "a woman with nursing experience" who claimed to have detected a pulse.
An inquest was held on 11 October; the jury decided that Dean, who was said to have been travelling at 90 miles per hour, was entirely at fault due to speeding. However, an article published in the Los Angeles Times in 2005 quoted former California Highway Patrol officer Ron Nelson, who'd been called to the scene, as saying that "the wreckage and the position of Dean's body indicated his speed at the time of the accident was more like 55 mph".
© Haydn Thompson 2022