Chappaquiddick: Suspicions Renewed

Monday, May. 11, 1970

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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."