The Bridge at Chappaquiddick

On the night of July 18, 1969, a black Oldsmobile plunged off a narrow one-lane bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. By morning, the car had been found submerged. Inside was the body of Mary Jo Kopechne, twenty-eight years old, a former campaign worker for Robert Kennedy. The next morning, Senator Ted Kennedy walked into the Edgartown police station and identified himself as the driver.

What happened in those hours has never been fully explained. Kennedy himself said his behavior that night "made no sense to me at all" and called his failure to report the accident "indefensible." A judicial inquest later concluded he had driven negligently, if not recklessly. No charges were ever filed.

The questions that followed would haunt Kennedy for the rest of his life and cost him the presidency. Why didn't he immediately report the accident? Was he drunk? Was there an affair he was trying to conceal? Who else knew, and when? Was Kennedy even driving the car?

Jack Olsen was the first journalist to investigate the incident in depth, going to Chappaquiddick Island to interview the islanders directly, examining and re-examining the physical evidence, and tracking down the contradictory statements of everyone with any knowledge of that night. What he found led him to an alternate theory of events, one that turns much of the circumstantial evidence into a disturbing new logic and raises questions that the official record cannot answer.

The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, published in 1970, remains the first and most focused investigative account of an incident that became, in the words of one historian, "the most speculated-upon car accident in American history until Princess Diana's fatal ride, twenty-eight years later."

New York Times bestselling author Jack Olsen, known as "the dean of true crime," brings his signature rigor and journalistic precision to one of the most consequential and unresolved mysteries in American political history.