Posted on 08/29/2009 3:09:07 PM PDT by ETL
Birth: Jul. 26, 1940
Death: Jul. 19, 1969
Teacher and Administrator, she is most remembered for her controversial death in an automobile accident with Senator Edward Kennedy; the resulting political scandal caused Kennedy to reverse his decision to run for the US Presidency. Born in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, she was the only child of insurance salesman Joseph and Gwen Kopechne. After graduating from Caldwell College, New Jersey, she taught at Montgomery Catholic High School in Montgomery, Alabama, and then moved to Washington DC to work as a secretary for Florida Senator George Smathers. Shortly afterwards, she went to work as a secretary for New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy following his election in 1964. After Senator Robert F. Kennedy's death in 1968, she moved to Matt Reese Associates, a Washington DC firm that helped politicians establish campaign headquarters, and it was there she met Senator Edward Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's younger brother.
On the evening of July 18, 1969, she attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island, near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, in honor of the "Boiler Room Girls," a name given to the six young women who had helped the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign, and who had closed up his files after his assassination in June 1968. All six of the women were single, and the six men in attendance were all married but present without their wives, and the attendees gathered for a late night party at the Lawrence Cottage, rented by Joe Gargan for the occasion.
Late that evening (the exact time is in dispute), Kennedy offered to drive Kopechne back to her hotel at the Katama Shores Motor Inn in Edgartown, and later claimed that he mistakenly took a wrong, right turn onto Dyke Road, a dirt road leading to a beach about a mile down the road, instead of turning left onto the paved Chappaquiddick Road leading to the ferryboat which they would need to use to go to Kopechne's motel.
A half-mile down Dyke Road, Kennedy drove off the side of the Dyke Bridge, and the car overturned into Poucha Pond. Kennedy got out of the overturned car, but Kopechne failed to exit the car and died. Kopechne's body was recovered later that morning; the diver reporting that Kopechne had positioned herself near the back seat wheel well where an air pocket had formed, and had apparently suffocated rather than drowned. Her parents ruled out an autopsy, so the cause of death was never officially determined.
Senator Kennedy later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury, for which he received a two-month suspended sentence and one year probation. Kopechne's death and Kennedy's failure to properly deal with the accident, along with numerous discrepancies in his account of what happened, damaged his reputation and is regarded by many as the major reason that he decided to cancel his run for the presidency in 1972 and subsequent years.
Kopechne's funeral was held on July 22, 1969, at St. Vincent's Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, and she was buried in the parish cemetery there.
(bio by: Kit and Morgan Benson)
Burial:
Saint Vincents Cemetery
Larksville
Luzerne County
Pennsylvania, USA
The new family tombstone, erected after the death of Mary Jo's mother in December, 2007.
Added by: Geoff Wilson, 9/04/2008
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=4569
I think it was a perfect choice.
I get it now. The link went to a Steve Miller video of "Take The Money And Run" (as in what Mary Jo's parents may have done in a Kennedy payoff). I had assumed the link would be to an interview with the parents or something of the sort.
But she would have certainly survived a longer time with the air pocket.
Didn’t it say in the police report that she had been clawing at the carpet of the submerged auto? I can’t EVEN imagine the horror......much less the HELL her parents went through because of that piece of manure. All the ‘wheeling and dealing’ behind the scenes to ‘save his a$$’. Disgusting.
No telling HOW many women were ‘victims’....in one way or another....to that criminal family.
If he did, I’m sure she pressed the down button on the Elevator to Hell.
Robert Kennedy actually got his start in politics working on investigations for Senator Joseph McCarthy. Joe Kennedy may have earned the family fortune off insider information but until Teddy came along, nobody in the family delighted in cozying up to Communists.
Ya know....thanks for posting this. It has to go down as one of the best ‘links to collect’....evar!
Wiki seems to have an ok piece on the incident...
Keep in mind that Teddy didn’t notify file a police report until the next day, AFTER the body had already been discovered.
From Wikipedia:
“Earlier that morning, two amateur fishermen had seen the overturned car in the water and notified the inhabitants of the cottage nearest to the pond, who called the authorities at around 8:20 am.[14] A diver was sent down and discovered Kopechne’s body at around 8:45 am.[15] The diver, John Farrar, later testified at the inquest that Kopechne’s body was pressed up in the car in the spot where an air bubble would have formed. He interpreted this to mean that Kopechne had survived for a while after the initial accident in the air bubble, and concluded that:
“Had I received a call within five to ten minutes of the accident occurring, and was able, as I was the following morning, to be at the victim’s side within twenty-five minutes of receiving the call, in such event there is a strong possibility that she would have been alive on removal from the submerged car.”[8]
Farrar believed that Kopechne “lived for at least two hours down there.”[16]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappaquiddick_incident#The_body_and_Kennedy.27s_statement
Main article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappaquiddick_incident
If I remember right, that was a satire “ad” in Mad Magazine...
How do you know he went to Hell? We are saved by faith and not by our own works. Leave the sending to hell to God and despite all Kennedy’s flaws I pray he he is saved and sent to heaven.
Sounds like he had faith, so his many, many sins don’t matter.
But not so for the Germans.
I don't know. Maybe you can find it somewhere and link us to it.
What are they shoveling? I’d bet it stunk.
>Kennedy, a man of wealth and taste......
Thanks for the youtube link. I knew that was a line from some popular song, but I couldn’t recall which.
(The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0iGenPD1B4
If you look at the memorial on that website to him & read the floral tributes you will see only praise is allowed. If you mention Mary Jo you get zapped. I left a flame with the words “no comment” and it was removed and I was told this is inappropriate. I read a few entries of sugar coated praise for his life work. One guy even said this:
Dear Ted,All of the wonderful things that you championed converted me from a die hard Republican to a Democrat for Life. You were the champion of social justice and I am so proud to be a Democrat. God Bless you.
- Jaime B. D’Arcy-Garcia
I don’t believe this (that he was always a die hard Republican) at all but it got posted.
Someone would take that wrong turn if they didn’t know their HARD left from their HARD right.
I’ve been on Chappy many times too...
I get a kick out of people who call into talk shows and spout out a different story - it’s all BS, these people do not know the roads when they spew their seminar calls.
National Lampoon.
Suppose if the body is exhumed, will it contain remnants of a fetus?
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