FBI Report: Ted Kennedy Left Mary Jo To Drown At Chappaquiddick

Ted Kennedy's political career survived the night that Mary Jo Kopechne died in his car after a crash on Chappaquiddick Island — but The National ENQUIRER has unearthed lost FBI files blasting the Senator for failing to save his doomed passenger!

Ted was a rising political star when he drove off the Massachusetts bridge on the night of July 18, 1969. The U.S. Senator had met with five other married men at a cookout on Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969— where they were joined by six single “boiler room girls” who had worked on Bobby Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign.

Ted later left the party with 28-year-old Mary Jo. They originally drove to a cemetery before trying to flee an officer who was checking on the car. His sedan drove off the bridge, and Kennedy escaped the sinking car — and then went back to his hotel without reporting the accident, while Mary Jo slowly drowned as the sedan filled with water through the night!

Ted later insisted that he had been dazed after the accident. Disgusted insiders, however, soon leaked details of how he had reached out to advisors shortly after the car went off the bridge. Now secret FBI dispatches show how private investigators uncovered proof that Kennedy had callously abandoned the doomed campaign aide!

A flurry of letters in the FBI’s files — buried in two dossiers labeled “Mary Jo Kopechne” — cast doubt on Kennedy’s story. In a letter to Sen. John Stennis, then the chairman of the Select Committee on Standards and Conduct, private investigator Albert S. Patterson wrote: “Not just the Senator in question, but virtually every survivor of the cook-out party committed perjury, if not all.”

Patterson also claimed his investigation took longer than anticipated because “so numerous are the perjuries and so monstrous the hoax of the alleged ‘accident’ and attempted ‘rescue.’” Another transcript of a January 1970 inquest shows that Judge James A. Boyle detected so many “inconsistencies and contradictions in the testimony, it is not feasible to indicate each one.”

One file shows that Judge Boyle concluded, “I believe it probable that Kennedy knew of the hazard that lay ahead of him on Dike Road but that, for some reason not apparent from the testimony, he failed to exercise due care as he approached the bridge.” The files also reveal another private investigator wrote to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover after interviewing the “young local mortician” who had prepared Mary Jo’s body for a rush burial the day after she died.

“In his considerable experience with the drownings in the Florida canals,” said the report, “[the mortician] could not recall a single victim who did not show some vestige of… Abrasions…or some other identifying mortis.” He also emphasized the “immaculateness of Mary Jo Kopechne’s alleged drowning (only a nose and mouth congestion),” which the funeral director found unusual.

That file supports the testimony given by John Farrar at the inquest. He was the diver who recovered Mary Jo’s body — and he stated his belief that an air pocket in the car had allowed the young woman to stay alive for hours after the crash.

Ted would go on to many more scandals, but insiders blamed Chappaquiddick for ending his chances to follow his brother John into the White House. Veteran political reporter Ed Klein, however, said that Kennedy wasn't haunted by the incident. “One of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself,” recalled Klein after the Senator's death in 2009. “And he would ask people, "Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?'”