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Mansfield Bars...

On June 28th, 1967, actress Jayne Mansfield, her driver, her lawyer and three of her kids were driving to New Orleans for an interview after an appearance in Mississippi. While cruising along the highway at two o'clock in the morning, the driver didn't see a semi-truck that had slowed because of a mosquito fogging truck ahead -- the fog masked the big rig's trailer, and Mansfield's driver couldn't react in time to slow the 1966 Buick Electra 225. The car slid under the semi-trailer and Mansfield and the other adults didn’t survive.

Reports that Mansfield was decapitated are untrue, although she suffered severe head trauma. This urban legend started with the appearance in police photographs of the crashed car with its top virtually sheared off and what resembled a blonde-haired head tangled in the car's smashed windshield. Mansfield's death certificate gives her immediate cause of death as "crushed skull with avulsion of cranium and brain".

Known technically as the Rear Underrun Protection System, the steel tubular bars immediately gained the name Mansfield bars: likely due to the gruesome severity of the crash, and Mansfield’s star status. Following her death, the U.S. government mandated trailers have a rear bumper to help prevent similar deaths.