Jane Mansfield is killed in accident with tractor-trailer, together with Sam Brody and Ronnie Harrison

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 appearance on June 28, 1967, Mansfield, her lover Sam Brody, their driver, Ronnie Harrison, with three of her children – Miklós, Zoltán and Mariska – set out in Stevens' 1966 Buick Electra 225. They were headed for New Orleans, where Mansfield was scheduled to appear for an early-morning television interview. On June 29 at approximately 2:25am, on U.S. Highway 90, east of the Rigolets Bridge, the car crashed into the rear of a tractor-trailer that had slowed behind another truck that 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. Reports 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 recommended requiring an underride guard (a strong bar made of steel tubing) on all tractor-trailers, although the trucking industry was slow to adopt this change. This bar is known as a "Mansfield bar", or an "ICC bar".