Chappaquiddick incident
The Chappaquiddick incident occurred on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, United States, sometime around midnight between July 18 and 19, 1969, when Mary Jo Kopechne died inside the car driven by United States Senator Ted Kennedy after he accidentally drove off a narrow bridge into Poucha Pond.
Kennedy left a party on Chappaquiddick Island, off the eastern end of Martha's Vineyard, at 11:15p.m. on July 18. He stated that his intent was to immediately take Kopechne to a ferry landing and return to a hotel in Edgartown, but that he made a wrong turn onto a dirt road leading to a one-lane bridge. After his car skidded off the bridge into the pond, Kennedy swam free and maintained that he tried to rescue Kopechne from the submerged car, but could not. Kopechne's death could have happened any time between about 11:30p.m. Friday and 1a.m. Saturday. An off-duty deputy sheriff stated he saw a car matching Kennedy's license plate at 12:40a.m. Kennedy departed from the crash site and failed to report the incident to the police until after 10 a.m. on Saturday. In the meantime, a diver retrieved Kopechne's body from Kennedy's car shortly before 9 a.m. that same day.
At a court hearing on July 25, Kennedy pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended jail sentence. In a televised statement that same evening, Kennedy said that his conduct immediately after the crash had "made no sense to me at all" and that he regarded his failure to report the crash immediately as "indefensible." A January 5, 1970, judicial inquest concluded that Kennedy and Kopechne had not intended to take the ferry and that Kennedy had intentionally turned toward the bridge, operating his vehicle negligently, if not recklessly, and at too high a speed for the hazard which the bridge posed in the dark. The judge stopped short of recommending charges, and a grand jury convened on April 6, returning no indictments. On May 27, a Registry of Motor Vehicles hearing resulted in Kennedy's driver's license being suspended for sixteen months.
The Chappaquiddick incident became a national news item and influenced Kennedy's decision not to run for president in 1972 and 1976. Later, it was said to have undermined his chances of ever becoming president. Kennedy ultimately decided to enter the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries but earned only 37.6% of the vote, losing the nomination to incumbent President Jimmy Carter.
Background
, aged 37, and his cousin, Joseph Gargan, aged 39, planned to race Kennedy's sailboat, Victura, in the 1969 Edgartown Yacht Club Regatta on Friday and Saturday, July 18 and 19, 1969, after having forgone the previous year's Regatta because of the assassination of Kennedy's brother, Robert, that June. Gargan rented the secluded Lawrence Cottage for the weekend on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, a tiny island accessible by ferry from Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard. Kennedy and Gargan hosted a cookout party at the cottage at 8:30p.m that evening as a reunion for the "Boiler Room Girls," women who had served on Robert's 1968 presidential campaign. Six of these attended the party: Mary Jo Kopechne, Rosemary Keough, Esther Newberg, sisters Nance Lyons and Mary Ellen Lyons, and Susan Tannenbaum. All were in their twenties and single.The men at the party included the crew of Kennedy's sailboat: Gargan; Paul Markham, a school friend of Gargan who had previously served as the United States Attorney for Massachusetts; and John B. Crimmins, aged 63, a long-time political associate of Kennedy who served as his chauffeur for the weekend. Others in attendance were attorney Charles Tretter, a Kennedy advisor, and Raymond LaRosa, who had worked on Kennedy's Senate campaigns. All the men were married, except Crimmins; wives were not invited to the Chappaquiddick weekend. Other friends and campaign workers, male and female, had been invited, but they did not attend for various reasons. Markham and Crimmins intended to spend the night at the cottage, while the others were booked at hotels on Martha's Vineyard—the men at the Shiretown Inn, one block from the Edgartown ferry slip, and the women at the Katama Shores motor inn, about south of the ferry slip.
Sequence of events
The crash
According to Kennedy, Kopechne asked him to give her a ride back to her hotel in Katama. Kennedy requested the keys to his car from his chauffeur, Crimmins. Crimmins said that Kennedy told him that Kopechne was not feeling well because "she was bothered by the sun on the beach that day," but Kennedy did not remember saying this to Crimmins. Kennedy put this time at "approximately 11:15p.m.," although he was not wearing a watch and the time came from Crimmins' watch. Returning to Edgartown and Katama required making the last ferry, which left the island at midnight, or else calling to arrange a later ferry. Kopechne told no one else that she was leaving for the night with Kennedy and left her purse and hotel key at the party. Although she was sharing a motel room with Esther Newberg, she did not ask Newberg for her room key either, according to Judge Boyle's report.The exact time the crash occurred is unknown, due to a conflict between the testimony of Kennedy and a deputy sheriff who said that he had seen Kennedy's car on the roads at a later time. Kennedy said that as soon as he left the party he immediately drove north on Chappaquiddick Road headed for the ferry landing. He said he then mistakenly made a wrong turn, right, onto the unpaved Dike Road, instead of bearing left, to stay on the paved Chappaquiddick Road for another. There was also a northbound unpaved Cemetery Road at this intersection.
Part-time Deputy Sheriff Christopher "Huck" Look left work by 12:30a.m. on Saturday, as a gate guard in uniform for the regatta dance, returned to Chappaquiddick Island in the yacht club's private boat, and drove east and south on Chappaquiddick Road toward his home. He stated that around 12:40a.m., after he passed the intersection with Dike Road, he saw a dark four-door sedan driven by a man, with a woman in the front seat, approaching and passing slowly in front of him. The car drove off the pavement, onto Cemetery Road, and stopped. Thinking the occupants might be lost, Look stopped and walked towards the vehicle. When he was away, the car reversed and started backing up towards him. According to Look, when he called out to offer help, the car moved forward and quickly veered eastward onto Dike Road, speeding away and leaving a cloud of dust. Look recalled that the car's license plate began with an L and contained two 7s, consistent with Kennedy's license plate on his Oldsmobile Delmont 88. Look then returned to his car and continued on his way south. Look's version, if true, leaves over an hour of Kennedy's time with Kopechne unaccounted for before the crash.
About a minute later, Look saw Kennedy's party guests, Nance and Mary Ellen Lyons and Ray LaRosa, dancing in a conga line down the middle of Chappaquiddick Road, a short distance south of Dike Road bridge. He stopped to ask if they needed a ride, which they declined. LaRosa and the Lyons sisters corroborated Look's testimony about meeting him on the road and the verbal exchange, but they were unsure of the time. They also said they saw a vehicle driving north on Chappaquiddick Road, which they could not describe in any detail.
Dike Road leads to Dike Bridge, a wooden structure angled obliquely to the road, crossing the channel connecting Cape Pogue Pond to the north and Poucha Pond to the south, leading eastward to a barrier beach known as Tom's Neck Point. At the time, the bridge was not fitted with guardrails. A fraction of a second before Kennedy reached the bridge, he applied his brakes and lost control of the car, which launched over the southern end of the bridge, plunged nose-first into the channel, and flipped over, resting on its roof in six to eight feet of water.
Rescue attempts
Kennedy was able to swim free of the vehicle, but Kopechne was not. Kennedy said that he called her name several times from the shore and tried to swim down to reach her seven or eight times. He then rested on the bank for around fifteen minutes before he returned on foot to Lawrence Cottage. He denied seeing any house with a light on during his fifteen-minute walk back. His route took him past four houses from which he could have telephoned to summon help before he reached the cottage, but he did not attempt to contact the residents. The first of the houses was Dike House, from the bridge and occupied by Sylvia Malm and her family. Malm stated later that she was home, she had a phone, and she had left a light on at the residence when she retired that evening.Kennedy returned to the cottage, where the party was still in progress, but rather than alerting all of the guests to the crash, he quietly summoned Gargan and Markham, and collapsed in the back seat of a rented Plymouth Valiant parked in the driveway. Gargan drove the three to the site of the crash to try to rescue Kopechne from the car. Gargan and Markham jumped into the tidal pond and tried repeatedly to rescue her, but were not able to, due to the strong tidal current. After they recovered, Gargan drove Kennedy and Markham to the ferry landing. The three were all lawyers, and they discussed what they should do while standing next to a public phone booth at the landing. Gargan and Markham insisted multiple times that the crash had to be reported to the authorities.