25 YEARS LATER: WHISPERS OF A YOUNG LIFE LOST<\/p>\n
Sunday, July 10, 1994<\/p>\n
Page: 1A
\nBy DAWN SHURMAITIS<\/p>\n
Even in death, Mary Jo Kopechne didn’t get top billing.<\/p>\n
The most important thing wasn’t that she died. It was where she died —
\ninside the submerged car of U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy.<\/p>\n
The investigators gathering at Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island that
\nmuggy morning of July 19, 1969, didn’t even know the dead girl’s name.<\/p>\n
Kopechne, a 28-year-old Forty Fort native, had no identification. Police on
\nthe Massachusetts island assumed she was Rosemary Keough, the name found in
\na purse recovered from the overturned Oldsmobile 88.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until a freshly showered and dressed Kennedy finally appeared at
\nthe Edgartown police station — 10 hours after the accident — that police
\nheard the name Mary Jo Kopechne for the first time.<\/p>\n
They heard it from Kennedy — who couldn’t pronounce it.<\/p>\n
A Kennedy car was in the drink. That’s what mattered.<\/p>\n
But for Gwen and Joe Kopechne, only one name remains important, even 25
\nyears later: Mary Jo.<\/p>\n
“They don’t write about Mary Jo,” says her mother, Gwen, who is 76 and
\nliving in the Poconos with her husband, Joe, 81.<\/p>\n
“She was a good kid. They don’t write about that.”<\/p>\n
Kennedy survived his late-night plunge into the island’s Poucha Pond, but
\nhis hopes for the presidency might have died with Mary Jo.<\/p>\n
If Chappaquiddick hadn’t happened, Kennedy might have defeated Richard
\nNixon in \u201872. Watergate might have remained just another D.C. hotel.<\/p>\n
If Chappaquiddick hadn’t happened, Mary Jo Kopechne would be nearly 54
\ntoday. Like the other Kennedy campaign aides she partied with that hot July
\nweekend, Mary Jo might have continued her political work. She might be
\nmarried and a mother.<\/p>\n
Instead, she lies in a Larksville grave simply marked “Mary Jo.”<\/p>\n
There’s no plaque at Chappaquiddick commemorating Mary Jo.<\/p>\n
Rotting pilings are all that remain of Dike Bridge and the scene of what
\nbecame known as the most famous traffic accident in American history.<\/p>\n
It didn’t start off that way.<\/p>\n
According to newspaper clippings from that time and a definitive book
\nwritten by Leo Damore — “Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick
\nCover-up” — few questions were asked and little police work was ever
\nconducted into the circumstances surrounding Mary Jo’s death.<\/p>\n
So casual was the initial investigation that Edgartown police chief
\nDominick Arena swam to the overturned Oldsmobile and climbed on top. Feet
\ndangling, he sat there until the tow truck arrived.<\/p>\n
Arena had no idea he was sitting on top of a body, no idea he was sitting
\non top of the latest Kennedy tragedy.<\/p>\n
From day one, Kennedy never wavered from his story: He was taking Mary Jo
\nto the ferry back to her Edgartown hotel when he took a wrong turn onto a
\ndirt road and accidentally drove off the Dike bridge.<\/p>\n
Kennedy, 37 and serving his second term in the Senate, had summered on the
\nMassachusetts coast since childhood. By his own admission, he was in good
\nphysical shape. Mary Jo weighed less than 125 pounds.<\/p>\n
Kennedy told police he dove repeatedly to save her, but was beaten by the
\nstrong current and exhaustion.<\/p>\n
Through the years one question has persisted: Was Kennedy more interested
\nin saving his political career than in saving Mary Jo?<\/p>\n
Chappaquiddick is a peninsula of Martha’s Vineyard, an island home to
\nnumerous celebrities. Some island residents remain convinced Mary Jo could
\nhave been saved had Kennedy immediately called for help.<\/p>\n
Instead, he walked 1.2 miles back to the cottage where Mary Jo and other
\nformer campaign workers for Bobby Kennedy, including Rosemary Keough, had
\ncooked steaks and sung Irish songs an hour earlier.<\/p>\n
As he left the accident scene, Kennedy passed a cottage occupied by a
\nLebanon, Pa. couple. That cottage had a phone.<\/p>\n
When Kennedy reached the party, still in progress, he asked two friends to
\ntake him back to the bridge. The two men — Joe Gargan, a Kennedy cousin,
\nand Paul Markham, a former U.S. attorney — told police they also failed in
\ntheir attempts to rescue Mary Jo.<\/p>\n
Believing the girl was dead, Gargan and Markham dropped Kennedy off at the
\nferry leading to town, and to the police station. Too impatient to wait for
\na boat, Kennedy jumped in the water and swam the 500-yard channel that
\nfronted his hotel, the Shiretown Inn. His friends assumed he was going to
\nreport the accident.<\/p>\n
Kennedy did — at 10 a.m. the next morning.<\/p>\n
Two boys fishing early the next morning were the first to see the submerged
\ncar and call police. By 8 a.m. when police arrived, Mary Jo had been under
\nwater nearly eight hours.<\/p>\n
“We could have saved that girl. No doubt in my mind,” says Robert Maciel,
\nwho, in 1969, was a member of the island’s newly formed rescue squad. A
\ndiver could have been at the scene within 15 minutes, Maciel says.<\/p>\n
“That’s hard to think about. It tears me up.”<\/p>\n
Unnecessary suffering<\/p>\n
Mary Jo’s body was floating in the upside down car, her face pressed into
\nthe footwell — the last space to fill with water.<\/p>\n
Her sandal-clad feet were the first thing diver John Farrar saw when he
\nlooked inside the car, submerged in 8 feet of water. In 1975, during one of
\ntheir periodic visits to Chappaquiddick, the Kopechnes talked to Farrar in
\nan interview recorded by journalist Gerald Kelly of the Martha’s Vineyard
\nTimes.<\/p>\n
“They were very nice people, very quiet, very unassuming,” Kelly says of
\nthe Kopechnes.<\/p>\n
Farrar said Mary Jo spent the last minutes of her life re-breathing her own
\nair.<\/p>\n
“It is a terrible thing,” he said in the interview. “As the CO2 builds up,
\nyou breathe heavier and heavier. The emotional trauma is extensive. The
\nanxiety is unbelievable. Imagine putting a plastic bag over your head.
\nThink of struggling to get out, knowing you might be breathing your last.<\/p>\n
“She definitely was conscious.”<\/p>\n
When Mary Jo’s body was pulled from the car, she looked asleep, Farrar
\nsaid. There was no sign of trauma, except for faint blood on her nose and
\nmouth.<\/p>\n
She was fully clothed in a long-sleeved white blouse and navy slacks.
\nEverything was zipped and buttoned.<\/p>\n
Dr. Donald Mills wrote “drowned” on the death certificate under cause of
\ndeath. He embalmed the body and shipped it to Wilkes-Barre without
\nperforming an autopsy. No one ordered one.<\/p>\n
Two months later, the district attorney whose jurisdiction included
\nMartha’s Vineyard petitioned Luzerne County Court to exhume Mary Jo’s body
\nfor an autopsy. Judge Bernard Brominski refused to grant the request.<\/p>\n
“I felt no crime was committed,” Brominski said recently.<\/p>\n
Recalling the horror<\/p>\n
Exactly what happened on Chappaquiddick 25 years ago continues to invite
\nspeculation:<\/p>\n
Mary Jo was asleep in the back seat.<\/p>\n
Mary Jo was driving.<\/p>\n
Rosemary Keough was in the car.<\/p>\n
Kennedy wasn’t even in the car; a mystery man was driving.<\/p>\n
The most damning evidence surfaced in 1988 in Damore’s book. For the first
\ntime, a Kennedy cousin who was co-host of the Chappaquiddick party spoke at
\nlength.<\/p>\n
Kennedy wanted his cousin, Joe Gargan, to tell police Mary Jo was driving
\nthe car. According to the book, Kennedy wanted Gargan to lie.<\/p>\n
Gargan refused.<\/p>\n
Seven days after Mary Jo was pulled from the water, Kennedy pleaded guilty
\nto leaving the scene of an accident and was given a two-month suspended
\nsentence and a year probation.<\/p>\n
He faced no further court action.<\/p>\n
“There were very serious reservations about how the story came out and how
\nit was handled,” says Richard Reston, co-publisher of the Vineyard Gazette.
\nReston’s father, James “Scotty” Reston, executive editor of the New York
\nTimes, was one of the first newsmen on the scene.<\/p>\n
“Obviously, there are doubts,” says publisher Reston. “But if there are
\nthose in this community who know more about the circumstances, they are not
\ntalking.”<\/p>\n
After the tragedy, the bridge became a maudlin tourist attraction. Visitors
\nbroke off pieces as souvenirs. Eventually, it was torn down. But this year,
\nsays Reston, island residents began talking seriously about rebuilding,
\nmainly to give fishermen access to the beach across Poucha Pond.<\/p>\n
“The Kennedy tragedy put this place on the map in a very unfortunate way,”
\nsays Reston.<\/p>\n
Today, tourists still visit Chappaquiddick, still puzzle over the
\ncircumstances of Mary Jo Kopechne’s death.<\/p>\n
“JFK’s assassination and the incident at Chappaquiddick are two mysteries
\nwe’ll probably never solve,” says a Connecticut woman visiting the island.<\/p>\n
“It really was an American tragedy.”<\/p>\n
Family above fault<\/p>\n
Martha’s Vineyard resident Les Leland was 29 years old when Mary Jo died —
\none week shy of her own 29th birthday.<\/p>\n
A pharmacist working in his family store in Vineyard Haven, Leland was —
\nby coincidence — foreman of the grand jury already in session at the Dukes
\nCounty court house in 1969.<\/p>\n
A few days after the accident, Leland asked law-enforcement officials about
\nconvening the grand jury for a special session to look into Mary Jo’s
\ndeath. Almost immediately, he got a phone call. Police Chief Dominick Arena
\nand then-county prosecutor Walter Steele wanted to take Leland for a ride
\nin an unmarked police car.<\/p>\n
“They wanted to assure me this was nothing more than an accident, a simple
\naccident,” Leland says. “They told me there was no reason for the grand
\njury to be involved. They said `We’re going to take care of it.’ ”<\/p>\n
Both men since have denied the conversation with Leland. Looking back, he
\nis convinced the two officials were trying to do the right thing. They
\nreally were convinced it was just an accident, a freak occurrence.<\/p>\n
“They didn’t have all the facts. They were naive, too. Unfortunately, a
\nyoung lady lost her life.”<\/p>\n
During that period, Leland received three death threats. Sent in the mail
\nwas a picture of Mary Jo’s grave, an image that still sticks in his mind.
\nNow 54, Leland remains in touch with the Kopechnes, calling at least twice
\na year.<\/p>\n
“I still get upset about it. I still think about it. I was able to go on
\nwith life and hers was snuffed out.”<\/p>\n
The grand jury finally did convene in April 1970. But Leland says District
\nAttorney Edmund Dinis frustrated their attempts to get information and
\nafter two fruitless sessions, the jury dissolved.<\/p>\n
On April 7, 1970, Dinis closed the case.<\/p>\n
One month later, an investigative arm of the Massachusetts Division of
\nMotor Vehicles found Kennedy was speeding and “at serious fault” in the
\naccident. Kennedy’s license was reinstated in November 1970 — three weeks
\nafter his re-election to the U.S. Senate with 64 percent of the vote. First
\nelected to the Senate in 1962, Kennedy hasn’t lost yet.<\/p>\n
“You have to think back to what it was like 25 years ago,” Leland says.
\n“This was pre-Watergate. You believed in your senators and presidents. You
\nput them on a pedestal. They were above reproach.<\/p>\n
“If they told you it was an accident, you believed, just like I believed.”<\/p>\n
Dinis is an attorney in New Bedford, Mass. In 1988, he told author Damore,
\n“There’s no question in my mind that the grand jury would have brought an
\nindictment against Ted Kennedy for manslaughter, if I had given them the
\ncase.”<\/p>\n
This year, for the first time in a political career that spans nearly four
\ndecades, Kennedy is facing a tough re-election fight. His main opponent,
\nMit Romney, is a young, attractive and well-connected Republican.<\/p>\n
But in the end, newspaperman Reston predicts, Kennedy will win.<\/p>\n
“When you come right down to it, it’s awful hard to beat the Kennedy name.”
\n————————————————————————
\nAll content \u00a9 TIMES LEADER and may not be republished without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
25 YEARS LATER: WHISPERS OF A YOUNG LIFE LOST Sunday, July 10, 1994 Page: 1A By DAWN SHURMAITIS Even in death, Mary Jo Kopechne didn’t get top billing. The most important thing wasn’t that she died. It was where she died — inside the submerged car of U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy. The investigators gathering at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}