The “Chappaquiddick incident” refers to the circumstances surrounding the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign worker for the assassinated U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York.
In July 1969, Kopechne’s dead body was discovered inside an overturned car belonging to Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts under water in a tidal channel on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts.
After the body was found, Kennedy gave a statement to police saying that on the previous night he had taken a wrong turn and accidentally driven his car off a bridge into the water. He pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury, and received a suspended sentence.
The incident became a national scandal, and may have affected the Senator’s decision not to run for President in 1972.
Chappaquiddick incident History (Events of the night of July 18, 1969): According to his own testimony at the inquest into Kopechne’s death, Kennedy left the party at “approximately 11:15 p.m.” When he announced that he was about to leave, Kopechne indicated “that she was desirous of leaving, if I would be kind enough to drop her back at her hotel”. Kennedy then requested the keys to his car from his chauffeur, Crimmins. Asked why he did not have his chauffeur drive them both, Kennedy explained that Crimmins along with some other partygoers “were concluding their meal, enjoying the fellowship and it didn’t appear to me necessary to require him to bring me back to Edgartown”. Kopechne told no one that she was leaving with Kennedy, and left her purse and hotel key at the party.
Christopher “Huck” Look was a deputy sheriff working as a special police officer at the Edgartown regatta dance that night. At 12:30 am he left the dance, crossed over to Chappaquiddick in the yacht club’s launch, got into his parked car and drove home. He testified that between 12:30 and 12:45 am he had seen a dark car containing a man driving and a woman in the front seat approaching the intersection with Dike Road. The car had gone first onto the private Cemetery Road and stopped there. Thinking that the occupants of the car might be lost, Look had gotten out of his car and walked towards it. When he was 25 to 30 feet away, the car started backing up towards him. When Look called out to offer his help, the car took off down Dike Road in a cloud of dust. Look recalled that the car’s license plate began with a “L” and contained the number “7″ twice, both details true of Kennedy’s 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88.
According to his inquest testimony, Kennedy made a wrong turn onto Dike Road, an unlit dirt road that led to Dike Bridge (also spelled Dyke Bridge). Dike Road was unpaved, but Kennedy, driving at “approximately twenty miles an hour”, took “no particular notice” of this fact, and did not realize that he was no longer headed towards the ferry landing. Dike Bridge was a wooden bridge angled obliquely to the road with no guardrail. A fraction of a second before he reached the bridge, Kennedy applied his brakes; he then drove over the side of the bridge. The car plunged into tide-swept Poucha Pond (at that location a channel) and came to rest upside down underwater.
Kennedy later recalled that he was able to swim free of the vehicle, but Kopechne was not. Kennedy claimed at the inquest that he called Kopechne’s name several times from the shore, then tried to swim down to reach her seven or eight times, then rested on the bank for around fifteen minutes before returning on foot to Lawrence Cottage, where the party attended by Kopechne and other “Boiler Room Girls” had occurred. Kennedy denied seeing any house with a light on during his journey back to Lawrence Cottage.
In addition to the working telephone at the Lawrence Cottage, according to one commentator, his route back to the cottage would have taken him past four houses from which he could have telephoned and summoned help; however, he did not do so. The first of those houses, referred to as “Dike House”, was only 150 yards away from the bridge, and was occupied by Sylvia Malm and her family at the time of the incident. Malm later stated that she had left a light on at the residence when she retired for that evening.
According to Kennedy’s testimony, Gargan and party co-host Paul Markham then returned to the pond with Kennedy to try to rescue Kopechne. Both of the other men also tried to dive into the water and rescue Kopechne multiple times. When their efforts to rescue Kopechne failed, Kennedy testified, Gargan and Markham drove with Kennedy to the ferry landing, both insisting multiple times that the accident had to be reported to the authorities. According to Markham’s testimony Kennedy was sobbing and on the verge of breaking down. Kennedy went on to testify that “I had full intention of reporting it. And I mentioned to Gargan and Markham something like, ‘You take care of the other girls; I will take care of the accident!’ — that is what I said and I dove into the water”.
Kennedy had already told Gargan and Markham not to tell the other women anything about the incident “because I felt strongly that if these girls were notified that an accident had taken place and Mary Jo had, in fact, drowned, that it would only be a matter of seconds before all of those girls, who were long and dear friends of Mary Jo’s, would go to the scene of the accident and enter the water with, I felt, a good chance that some serious mishap might have occurred to any one of them”. Gargan and Markam would testify that they assumed that Kennedy was going to inform the authorities once he got back to Edgartown, and thus did not do so themselves.
According to his own testimony, Kennedy swam across the 500-foot channel, back to Edgartown and returned to his hotel room, where he removed his clothes and collapsed on his bed. Hearing noises, he later put on dry clothes and asked someone what the time was: it was something like 2:30 a.m., the senator recalled. He testified that, as the night went on, “I almost tossed and turned and walked around that room … I had not given up hope all night long that, by some miracle, Mary Jo would have escaped from the car.”
Back at his hotel, Kennedy complained at 2:55 am to the hotel owner that he had been awoken by a noisy party. By 7:30 am the next morning he was talking “casually” to the winner of the previous day’s sailing race, with no indication that anything was amiss. At 8 a.m., Gargan and Markham joined Kennedy at his hotel where they had a “heated conversation.” According to Kennedy’s testimony, the two men asked why he hadn’t reported the accident. Kennedy responded by telling them “about my own thoughts and feelings as I swam across that channel … that somehow when they arrived in the morning that they were going to say that Mary Jo was still alive”. The three men subsequently crossed back to Chappaquiddick Island on the ferry, where Kennedy made a series of phone calls from a payphone by the crossing to his friends for advice; he again did not report the accident to authorities.
