Chappaquiddick: Suspicions Renewed

FACED with a brutal truth, the mind can rebel and seek escape in fantasy. As Senator Edward Kennedy explained at the January inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, his mind did just that on the morning following the tragedy at Chappaquiddick last July. It tried to believe that somehow Mary Jo had survived the plunge into Poucha Pond. Said Kennedy: "I willed that she remained alive."

Later in the inquest, Kennedy tried to explain one of the most incomprehensible aspects of the Kopechne case --why he failed to summon help immediately after he, his cousin Joseph Gargan and friend Paul Markham had failed to rescue Mary Jo. Said the Senator: "I was completely convinced . . . that no further help and assistance would do Mary Jo any more good. I realized that she must be drowned and still in the car at this time, and it appeared the question in my mind was what should be done about the accident."

Precisely what he did--and did not do --about the accident might have been cleared up by the long-delayed publication of the inquest record. Instead, the 763-page transcript only rekindled suspicions that have surrounded the case from the outset. The report of Justice James Boyle, the crusty Vineyarder who presided over the inquest, concluded that "negligence" on Kennedy's part "appears" to have contributed to the accident. Kennedy admitted traveling at 20 m.p.h. over treacherous Dike Bridge; Boyle termed that speed excessive. Worse, from Kennedy's viewpoint, was Boyle's official finding challenging Kennedy's story that he and Mary Jo left a party to go to the ferry that would take them from Chappaquiddick to their separate lodgings in Edgartown. A paved road bearing left led to the ferry. A dirt road going right led to Dike Bridge and a deserted beach. Said Boyle: "I infer that Kennedy and Kopechne did not intend to return to Edgartown at that time; that Kennedy did not intend to drive to the ferry slip and his turn onto Dike Road was intentional."

Boyle drew his inferences from several new points established at the inquest. One was that Kennedy visited the island a few hours before the party, which was attended by the six "boiler-room girls" from Bobby Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign and five of Ted's men friends. The testimony made it clear that Kennedy that day crossed Dike Bridge twice and traveled the ferry road three times; the implication was that he was not unfamiliar with the geography.

Boyle was disturbed as well by the fact that Kennedy told only his chauffeur, Jack Crimmins, that he was leaving the party with Mary Jo, while the young woman herself told no one. Also, Mary Jo left her purse behind when she departed with Kennedy and failed to ask her roommate for the key to their motel room.

Time Difference. According to the eleven surviving participants, the party was sedate. They said that there was no heavy drinking, but a good deal of casual ambling around the cottage. Kennedy said that he had two rum and Cokes. Mary Jo consumed a small amount of alcohol. The inquest also confirmed why Rosemary Keough's purse, and not Mary Jo's, was later found in the Senator's submerged car. Miss Keough, it seemed, had accompanied Charles Tretter, one of Kennedy's friends, on a trip back to Edgartown for a radio earlier in the evening, and had left her purse in the Senator's Oldsmobile.

The transcript does not explain one of the case's most glaring inconsistencies: the discrepancy between the testimony of Christopher Look, a part-time deputy sheriff, and Kennedy over the probable time of the accident. Kennedy testified that he left the cottage with Mary Jo at approximately 11:15 p.m. on July 18, and did not stop his car before it ran off the bridge. Those at the party confirm Kennedy's departure time. But Look testified that while returning from work in Edgartown he saw a car fitting the description of Kennedy's stopped near the turn to Dike Road about 12:40 a.m., nearly half an hour after Kennedy said he had returned to the cottage on foot, and more than an hour after the Senator said that the accident had occurred. Spotting at least two passengers and thinking that they might be lost, Look said, he stopped his car and began to walk toward the halted vehicle, only to see it start down Dike Road toward the bridge. Look did not follow the car, but he did notice its license plate. He testified that it began with the letter L and had 7s as the first and last digits. Kennedy's license plate was L78207.

Look could, of course, have been mistaken. But if he really did spot Kennedy's car, then the accident could not have occurred when Kennedy said it" did, and it is highly improbable that Kennedy and his friends would have had time for the rescue attempts they claimed to have made before Kennedy was seen in Edgartown. This would mean that Kennedy lied or erred about both the time of the accident and the events that followed it, and that those at the party were, at the very least, mistaken in their statements that he returned to the cottage at 12:15. One other possibility was that Kennedy and Mary Jo left the cottage at 11:15 but did not actually drive off until later.

The transcript told a great deal about Kennedy's state of mind at the time of the accident. In a televised act of contrition a week after Chappaquiddick, the Senator was uncertain as to the length of time he spent trying to rescue Mary Jo and vague as to how long it took him to make his way back to the cottage where his friends were partying. By the time of the inquest, his memory had improved considerably. His testimony vividly described his and Mary Jo's struggles to get out of the overturned car and his own seemingly miraculous escape: "I can remember the last sensation of being completely out of air and inhaling what must have been half a lungful of water and assuming that I was going to drown and that no one was going to be looking for us that night until the next morning, and then somehow I can remember coming up to the last energy of just pushing, pressing and coming up to the surface."

He was even more specific on what happened after he surfaced and caught his breath some 30 feet downstream from the car. According to his account, he dived down to the car seven or eight times during a 15-to 20-minute period, trying to reach Mary Jo, then spent another 15 or 20 minutes resting on the bank before starting down the road to the cottage.

Kennedy's companions placed his return to the cottage at 12:15 a.m. Gargan and Markham told almost identical stories of their return to the bridge with Kennedy, and their attempts to bring up Mary Jo. Gargan and Markham insisted that they advised Kennedy repeatedly to report the accident and summon help. By the time the trio reached the Chappaquiddick ferry landing, Kennedy seemed to agree. Believing somehow that a full explanation would send Mary Jo's girl friends down to the bridge in a fruitless--and dangerous --attempt to dive for her themselves, Kennedy instructed Markham and Gargan not to alarm them, said that he would take care of reporting the accident, then plunged alone into the channel and swam across to Edgartown. This despite the fact that the ferry could have been summoned by telephone. Gargan acknowledged that earlier in the day he had discussed post-midnight ferry service with the boat operators. Also, a sign giving instructions about the service was at the landing.

"Moral Strength." Kennedy did not report the accident on reaching Edgartown. Instead, he returned to his hotel, changed his clothes and, after a brief conversation with Innkeeper Russell Peachey in which he pointedly asked the time (2:25 a.m.), paced the floor of his room until daylight. Then occurred one of the more bizarre events in an already fantastic case. Rhode Island Businessman Ross Richards, who had won the previous day's sailing race, testified that he ran into Kennedy outside the hotel around 7:30 a.m. Giving no indication in manner or appearance that anything out of the ordinary had happened, Kennedy calmly discussed boating, even said that he might accept Richards' invitation to join him and his friends for breakfast.

He was still chatting with Richards and others when Gargan and Markham arrived at the hotel and asked him what he had done about the accident. He had done nothing. As Kennedy explained at the inquest: "I just couldn't gain the strength within me, the moral strength, to call Mrs. Kopechne at 2 in the morning and tell her that her daughter was dead." It was 9 before Kennedy notified the police. It was still later--around 11 a.m.--that Gargan told the five women who had been at the party that Mary Jo was dead.

The release of the transcript and Justice Boyle's report seemed to preclude any further criminal action against Kennedy, though a new grand jury investigation is theoretically possible. But it did nothing to solve the mysteries that still surround the case or to resolve the doubts about Kennedy's veracity. It also failed to account for local officials' inept handling of the case from beginning to end. Police Chief Dominick Arena never asked Kennedy why he had not reported the accident for nine hours. District Attorney Edmund Dinis seemed noticeably reluctant to enter the case at all, then pressed belatedly--and vainly--for court permission to exhume Mary Jo's body so that an autopsy could be performed. His questions throughout the inquest were somewhat less than probing. Justice Boyle's handling of the inquest findings was inconclusive. He was empowered to bring charges, such as negligent driving or perjury, against Kennedy if he felt that they were warranted; instead, he merely wrote a report implying negligence and questioning Kennedy's credibility. Last week Boyle, 63, retired after 36 years of court service.

No one is more disturbed by these loose ends than Kennedy himself. He knew for weeks that Boyle's report was coming; he was predictably infuriated by it. "I responded as completely and as truthfully as I could to the questions that were put to me by the judge as well as the district attorney," Kennedy said. "It's my own personal view that the inferences and ultimate conclusions are not satisfactory, and I reject those."

There is little Kennedy can do to ameliorate his situation, and he realizes this only too well. Asked last week if he would have anything further to say about Chappaquiddick, Kennedy answered firmly: "No, never." But he did speak out on other matters. Continuing his re-emergence into public life, he appeared on his first broadcast interview program in two years, using the occasion to reiterate his claim that he will not be a presidential candidate in 1972. He addressed a group of Boston advertising people and branded as "madness" President Nixon's decision to carry the Viet Nam War across the border into Cambodia. He also kept his promise to the Boston Pops Orchestra to narrate Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait. The occasion was not without a touch of irony. The opening lines of the narrative quote Lincoln: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We . . . will be remembered in spite of ourselves."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.