But if he drove the car into the water, he would have been wet.
“Kennedy’s clothes were dry”
That is what the witness who Kennedy spoke to at the hotel said. The car had gone in the water several hours before so he might have dried from the original incident.
The point was Kennedy did not swim back to the mainland in the middle of the night. No one saw him in wet clothes walking from the dock to the hotel. No one in the hotel saw him in wet clothes.
The theory by Leo Damore and others is that Kennedy, under the influence of drugs and alcohol, and fleeing from the deputy sheriff crashed his car into a tree on the narrow, dirt road in the dark. Mary Jo, who was pregnant, was hurt and they panicked. To cover it up, they rigged the car with Mary Jo in it to go in the water. In the pitch dark they did not realize that the car would be visible when the tide went out next morning. That was one of Kennedy’s original stories, that Mary Jo was driving. But they were afraid of an autopsy on Mary Jo.
It is a theory. But the car was damaged much worse than it would have been from just going into the water.