Here is to Sir Teddy The Fat Bastard

Fat bastard Teddy Kennedy got knighted and all I got was this little air pocket in which to suffocate. MaryJo Kopechnie

What happened next has remained in dispute, with an unexplained gap of one hour. [here is where the car went in and see how far he would have had to walk to a house to call for help?]“Kennedy said he mistakenly turned right onto a gravel road and skidded off the bridge, the car landing upside-down in eight feet of water. After escaping the car, he tried unsuccessfully to rescue Ms. Kopechne, then staggered a mile back to the party cottage, where he got his cousin Joseph Gargan and friend Paul Markham to return for a second rescue try.Failing that, they went to the ferry landing, where, they said, Kennedy “impulsively” jumped into the water and swam across to Edgartown, by his own account “nearly drowning a second time.”Gargan and Markham, a former federal prosecutor in Boston, said they assumed that Kennedy, once at Edgartown, would contact the police, and were stunned the next morning to discover he had not done so. In fact it was a full nine hours — and after he learned that the submerged car with a body inside had been discovered — that Kennedy reported the accident to police and said he had been the driver. At this point the Kennedy clout in Massachusetts kicked in. The other partygoers quickly left the island, and Ms. Kopechne’s body was flown by Kennedy-chartered plane to her hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pa. No autopsy was performed. Kennedy attended the funeral, with a neck brace he was never seen wearing again. After a week’s silence, holed up at the family’s Hyannis compound with such Kennedy “brain trust” figures as Ted Sorenson, Robert F. McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., he told Massachusetts voters in a televised speech that he had been distraught and confused, wondered if there was a “curse” on the Kennedy family, and asked them to decide whether he should continue in the Senate. Despite widespread media criticism — The New York Times said the speech “raises more questions than it answers” and criticized Massachusetts officials for soft-pedaling the inquiry — aides to Kennedy claimed the public overwhelmingly supported his staying in office. A week after the accident, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was given a two-month suspended jail sentence and a year’s probation. Numerous investigations by authors and news organizations spawned a variety of theories, among them that Ms. Kopechne or Gargan was driving the car. But none of these held up under careful analysis. In 1975, The Associated Press found numerous points of conflict between the sworn testimony of Kennedy and others at a 1970 inquest at Edgartown and a court hearing in Pennsylvania. The partygoers, most of whom did not know at the time exactly what had happened, have remained all but silent for three decades. Kennedy himself has addressed the subject on occasion without adding new information or clarifying unanswered questions.”

Sir Teddy left her there in the car to suffocate!

– Frieh was suprised no autopsy had been ordered in the case. “I figured there should have been one for three reasons: the type of accident it was; the important people involved; and the fact that insurance companies would be hounding officials over double indemnity claims.”
– Frieh began preparing the body for the embalming process. As was customary in drowning cases, a body block was affixed under the diaphragm to provide abdominal compression and thereby remove any water from the lungs and stomach. He observed “a very slight bit of moisture,” which he estimated to be less than a tea-cup. “I did raise an eyebrow in the sense that I was expecting much more moisture.”
– Because the car had gone over a bridge, Frieh wondered if there might be some injury Dr. Mills had missed during his brief on-scene examination. After a thorough examination, he discovered no bruises or marks on the body, except for a slight abrasion on the left hand knuckle.

– Frieh was beginning to doubt the validity of the medical examiner’s diagnosis. The lack of water evacuated from the body was “unusual” in a drowning case. Frieh suspected that instead, the accident victim may have suffocated to death. His observations strongly supported scuba diver John Farrar’s theory that Mary Jo Kopechne had survived in the submerged automobile by breathing a pocket of trapped air, and had died by suffocation only after the oxygen had been depleted.

 

 

“According to Crimmins, it was 11:15 p.m. when Kennedy asked for the car keys. The senator said he was tired and wanted to return to his hotel on the last ferry. He said he would drive Kopechne back to Edgartown, too, because she’d had too much sun and wasn’t feeling well.

His request was unusual. The senator rarely drove himself anywhere, in Washington or Massachusetts. And his departure left behind one car for 10 people, most of them planning to return that night to rooms in Edgartown.

But the pair’s departure caused hardly a ripple. Kopechne told no one she was ill, or that she was leaving, her friends said. She left behind her purse and the key to her hotel room.

They headed for the L-shaped intersection, where the paved road curved left toward the ferry and the hard-to-see right turn led to the bridge.

Kennedy’s story has not changed in 40 years: He was confused. He thought the ferry was the other way. He turned right.

There were no lights or signs to alert a nighttime driver to the bridge, which was at an odd angle to the road. By the time Kennedy knew what was happening, it was too late. The front tires of the Oldsmobile lifted up, over the stacked planks that were the only barrier on the right edge of the bridge.

The black sedan was in flight. It hit the water and sank, settling upside down in the pond.

The next thing Kennedy knew was that he was going to die.

“There was complete blackness,” he said later, according to a court transcript. “Water seemed to rush in from every point, from the windshield, from underneath me, above me.”

Conscious of Kopechne struggling beside him, he lifted the driver’s door handle and pressed. Nothing happened.

He drew what he believed was his last breath.

And then, somehow, he escaped, “pushing, pressing, and coming up to the surface” with “no idea in the world how I got out of that car.”

He would recall being swept away by the tide, calling out Kopechne’s name as he drifted. He said he recovered his footing and waded back to the car through waist-deep water, guided by the glow of the headlights underwater.

He dove below the surface, trying to get to Kopechne. He failed, and tried again, seven or eight times in all. By then he was exhausted, barely able to hold his breath.

Finally, he let himself float away. He crawled onto shore and lay there, coughing and gasping. Then he staggered up the bank and started back up Dike Road, “walking, trotting, jogging, stumbling, as fast as I possibly could.”

 

 

 

“Fat bastard Teddy Kennedy got Knighted and all I got was this little air space to suffocate in. Oh well. He’ll get his…” MaryJo