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 U.S. 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 11:15 p.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 11:30 p.m. Friday and 1 a.m. Saturday. An off-duty deputy sheriff stated he saw a car matching Kennedy's license plate at 12:40 a.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 U.S. 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
U.S. Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy, 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 8:30 p.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 2 miles (3.2 km) 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 (which he did not usually drive) 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 11:15 p.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 one-half mile (0.8 km) 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 two and a half miles (4.0 km). There was also a northbound unpaved Cemetery Road at this intersection.
Part-time Deputy Sheriff Christopher "Huck" Look left work by 12:30 a.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 12:40 a.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 25 to 30 feet (7.6 to 9.1 m) 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 (L78–207) 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 seven-tenths of a mile (1.1 km) 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 (1.8 to 2.4 m) 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, 150 yards (140 m) 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.
Kennedy's reaction
At the ferry landing, Kennedy dove into the water and swam 500 feet (150 m) across the channel to Edgartown. He then walked to his hotel room, removed his clothes, and collapsed on his bed. He later put on dry clothes, left his room, and asked someone what the time was; it was somewhere around 2:30 a.m., he recalled. Gargan and Markham had driven the rented Plymouth back to the cottage; they entered the cottage at approximately 2 a.m. but told no one what had happened. When questioned by the guests, they said that Kennedy had swum back to Edgartown, and Kopechne was probably at her hotel. Gargan then told everyone to get some sleep. By 7:30 a.m., Kennedy was talking casually to the winner of the previous day's sailing race and gave no indication that anything was amiss. At 8 a.m., Gargan and Markham had crossed back to Edgartown on the ferry and met Kennedy.
Recovery of the body
A short time after 8 a.m., a man and a fifteen-year-old boy who were fishing off Tom's Neck Point saw Kennedy's submerged car in Poucha Pond and notified the residents of the cottage nearest the scene, who in turn called the authorities at about 8:20 a.m. Edgartown Police Chief Dominick James Arena arrived at the scene about ten or fifteen minutes later. He attempted to examine the interior of the submerged vehicle, then summoned a trained scuba diver and equipment capable of towing or winching the vehicle out of the water. John Farrar, captain of the Edgartown Fire Rescue unit, arrived at 8:45 a.m., equipped with scuba gear and discovered Kopechne's body in the back seat; he extricated it from the vehicle within ten minutes. Police checked the car's license plate and saw that it was registered to Kennedy. Rosemary Keough's purse was found in the front passenger compartment of the car, causing Arena to misidentify Kopechne.
Meanwhile, Kennedy, Gargan, and Markham crossed back to Chappaquiddick Island on the ferry, where Kennedy made a series of telephone calls from a payphone near the ferry crossing—the same phone that the three men had stood by approximately six hours earlier, discussing Kennedy's options. Kennedy called friends and lawyers for advice but did not notify the authorities that he was the operator of the vehicle, which was still upside down in the pond. He called his brother-in-law Stephen Edward Smith, Congressman John V. Tunney and others that morning, but he still did not report the accident to authorities.
Kennedy was still at the payphone when he heard that his car and Kopechne's body had been discovered; he then crossed back to Edgartown to go to the police station with Markham. Meanwhile, Gargan went to the Katama Shores to inform the Boiler Room Girls of the incident. Kennedy entered the police station at approximately 9:50 a.m. He asked to make some telephone calls and was told he could use Arena's office. When Arena returned to the station at 10:00 a.m., he was "stunned" to learn Kennedy already knew of the accident and the true identity of the victim, and admitted he was the driver. Arena led Kennedy to another empty office where he could privately dictate his statement to Markham, who wrote it out in longhand. Arena then typed out the statement:
On July 18, 1969, at approximately 11:15 p.m. in Chappaquiddick, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown. I was unfamiliar with the road and turned right onto Dyke [sic] Road, instead of bearing hard left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately one-half mile on Dyke [sic] Road, I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge. There was one passenger with me, one Miss Mary ___, a former secretary of my brother, Sen. Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water, and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and the window of the car, but have no re-collection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface, and then repeatedly dove down to the car, in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage, and I climbed into the backseat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.
Kennedy said the statement was correct as Arena typed it, but did not sign it.