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The day after her body was found, the headline of the New York Daily News read: “Teddy Escapes, Blonde Drowns.” And that about summed up the coverage of her tragic death — the stories that followed were always about Kennedy — never about Mary Jo.
But now, almost 50 years later,PEOPLE’s new podcast,Cover-Up, produced in conjunction with Cadence13,puts a new lens on the tragic accident, exploring itsenduring mysterythrough interviews with over 50 people, including Kopechne’s cousin and closest living relative, law enforcement officials who oversaw the investigation, the diver who recovered her body from the car, and many more.
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But all these details were left out at the time.
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And in a 2009 interview with the Miller Center, Tunney described his friend’s extraordinary grief that summer of 1969.
“I could tell there was a wildness in his brain,” Tunney said. “There was kind of a wildness there that was almost a flaunting of rules of the game, so to speak, because he was so angry. There was an anger that he felt about the unfairness of the way his brothers had been gunned down.”
In 1941, when Ted was 8 years old, his older sister Rosemary was given a lobotomy on their father’s orders. The procedure was a disaster and Rosemary, then 23, was left with the mental capacities of a toddler and sent to live at a Catholic school for the disabled in Wisconsin. She lived there for 56 years until her death in 2005.
After the lobotomy, no one told young Ted what had happened to his eldest sister. And he thought he might disappear too — if he did not do what his father wanted.
After Mary Jo’s death, Ted told his biographer Burton Hersh, author ofEdward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography, that he was “dealing with the suppressed anxieties of the eight year old who dreaded that he would prove unworthy of his father like the lobotomized Rosemary and disappear as well.”
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Ted’s anxieties worsened when Joe Kennedy died four months after Chappaquiddick, on Nov. 18, 1969.
“This was a very heavy burden for Ted for the rest of his life,” Hersh added. “He said to me, ‘I killed my father.’ ”
As for Ted’s role in Mary Jo’s death, her cousin Georgetta has no doubt that he was responsible.
“I believe, no matter what part he did or did not play in Mary Jo’s death, that she died because of him,” Georgetta says now. “He knew it and knew he was responsible. There is so much we do not know.”
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There are still so many unanswered questions for Mary Jo’s family. Georgetta doesn’t understand why Mary Jo tested with a high blood alcohol level. “She was not even a social drinker. If she had one drink she’d nurse it all night,” Georgetta says.
The uncharacteristically elevated alcohol level led some of Mary Jo’s friends — including her former boyfriend Dick Toole — to believe something else may have happened that night.
“I wondered if [Ted] even knew she was in the car,” Toole says. “She was the type of person that rather than break somebody’s fun up, she might climb in the back and sleep. She was not a drinker.”
For more on the Chappaquiddick scandal, subscribe now toCover-UponApple Podcasts,Spotify,Google Playor wherever podcasts are available. And to continue the discussion, joinour Facebook groupor reach us directly atcoverup@people.com.
But there was so much more to Mary Jo’s story. Georgetta reveals one particularly poignant moment she and Mary Jo shared, when Mary Jo once wondered if they’d ever be famous.
And in a strange and very sad way, she did become famous. No one knew anything about Mary Jo Kopechne, but her name entered the history books. And decades later, the mystery surrounding her death endures.
source: people.com
