on the morning of July 19, after Kopechne’s body had been found in his submerged car in Poucha Pond. But Kennedy didn’t contact local police until 10 a.m. To charge Kennedy with involuntary manslaughter, the police would have had to establish that he did something illegal, like speeding or driving under the influence. Though the fact that Kopechne left her purse and hotel room key behind at the cottage cast doubt on this claim, no evidence ever surfaced that the two had a romantic or sexual relationship. Kennedy later stated that Kopechne felt ill and that they were headed for the ferry to Edgartown, where both were staying in different hotels. Late in the evening, Kennedy and Kopechne left the party together. On the night of July 18, Kopechne and the other “boiler room girls” (as they were known) attended a cookout at a cottage on Chappaquiddick, along with Kennedy and five other men. The weekend of the accident, Kennedy operatives had invited Kopechne- who continued working in politics after the assassination-and five other women who had worked on the campaign to reunite on the Vineyard in recognition of their work. During his 1968 presidential campaign, Kopechne helped write the candidate’s speeches. After obtaining a business degree, she taught at a Catholic mission school in Alabama and worked for a Florida senator before getting a job in Robert Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy’s presidential campaign while in college. Kopechne, who grew up in New Jersey, had volunteered for John F. The report from the inquest into the accident released by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1970 concluded that as there was no evidence any air remained in the submerged car, it wouldn’t seek or allow any testimony about how long she may have lived, as “this could only be conjecture and purely speculative.” Lange and Katherine DeWitt Jr., authors of Chappaquiddick: The Real Story-maintain that the cold temperature of the water and the condition of the car made it unlikely she survived for any extended period of time. While some observers of the case suspected she could have been saved if Kennedy had gone for help earlier, others-including James E.T. Her face was pressed into the footwell, and her hands gripped the back of the front seat, as if she had been trying to push her head into a pocket of air. When John Farrar, a diver for the local fire department, found Kopechne’s body the morning after the crash, its positioning suggested she had remained alive for an unknown period of time after the car went underwater. Kopechne likely did not die instantaneously, but her final moments remain a mystery. How long was Mary Jo Kopechne alive after the car flipped? (Credit: Express Newspapers/Getty Images) Map of Chappaquiddick, just off the island of Martha’s Vineyard, that shows the locations of the major events of the evening of July 18, 1969, when a car driven by Senator Ted Kennedy crashed off of a bridge resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. In a speech the following week, Kennedy maintained he had not driven drunk, and that there was “no truth, no truth whatever to the widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct that have been leveled at my behavior and regarding that evening.” Kennedy attributed his actions after the accident to injury (he suffered a concussion), shock and confusion. How did Kennedy end up driving off the bridge? Was he drunk? What were he and Kopechne doing together that night? Was there a third person in the car? Why did he wait so long to report the accident? Conspiracy theories and questions endure. The incident at Chappaquiddick ended Kopechne’s young life and derailed Ted Kennedy’s presidential ambitions for good, but nearly half a century later, the details of what happened that fateful night remain unclear. As a result, Mary Jo Kopechne remained underwater for some nine hours until her body was recovered the next morning. But rather than report the accident to the police at that time, Kennedy returned to his hotel in Edgartown. He then drove back to the scene with his cousin, Joseph Gargan, and aide Paul Markham, who both tried in vain to reach Kopechne. Kennedy later claimed he dove repeatedly “into the strong and murky current” to try and find Kopechne before making his way back to the cottage. Though newspaper headlines at the time identified her simply as a “blonde,” she was 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, a respected political operative who had worked on the presidential campaign of Senator Kennedy’s brother, Robert Kennedy. The 37-year-old Kennedy survived the crash, but the young woman riding with him in the car didn’t. Senator Edward Kennedy plunged off the Dike Bridge on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, off Martha’s Vineyard, landing upside down in the tidal Poucha Pond. Late on the night of July 18, 1969, a black Oldsmobile driven by U.S.
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