Leo Damore - Chappaquiddick: Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-Up

Table of Contents

To James Harold Smith

Class of 1947

B. M. C. Durfee High School

Fall River, MA

For thou hast lost thy princely privilege

With vile participation.

HENRY IV, PART I ACT III, SC. II

Appendix 1 Edgartown police report of the accident by Chief Dominick J. Arena. Courtesy Dominick Arena.

Appendix 2 Registry Inspector George Kennedys preliminary report of the accident. Courtesy Paula Golden, Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Appendix 3 Operators report of the accident submitted by Senator Kennedy. Courtesy Paul Golden, Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Appendix 4 List of 17 phone calls made during July 18-19, 1969, submitted as Exhibit #4 at the inquest, shows no calls made during the more than nine-hour delay in reporting the accident. Courtesy Phillip A. Rollins.

Appendix 5 Statement of accident submitted to Chief Arena by Senator Kennedy. Inquest Exhibit #2Courtesy Philip A. Rollins.

Appendix 6 Report of Registry Hearing which found Senator Kennedy to have been speeding and at serious fault in the accident. Courtesy Paula Golden, Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.

Appendix 7 Registrar Richard McLaughlin notified Senator Kennedy of the result of a hearing which found him at serious fault in the accident. Kennedys license was revoked for an additional six months. Courtesy Paula Golden, Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.

THE FERRY AT EDGARTOWN, ON MARTHAS VINEYARD, WAS NOT scheduled to begin operation until 7:30 A.M. on Saturday, July 19, 1969. Nevertheless, ferryman Richard Hewitt beckoned a blue Ford waiting at the dock at 7 A.M. on board the On Time, a raft-like vessel that crossed the 150-yard channel to the island of Chappaquiddick in under four minutes.

The Ford proceeded on Chappaquiddick Road to a sweeping, hairpin curve, leaving the asphalt for the dirt ruts of Dike Road. A bumpy half-mile away was a wooden structure perched on pilings spanning a tidal pool called Poucha Pond. After negotiating the narrow bridge, the Ford discharged Robert Samuel, a high school science teacher, and 15-year-old Joseph Cappavella. Burdened with fishing gear, they continued on foot along a sand track between ranks of dunes to East Beach. After an hour of fruitless casting into the surf along that deserted stretch of shoreline, the two returned to the car. Samuel was contemplating fishing off the bridge into the pond when his attention was drawn to the glint of metal reflecting off a dark shape in the water ten feet away, on the south side of the bridge.

Looking closer through the ripples of tidewater, he discovered the shadowy outline of an automobile turned onto its roof, front end angled toward the bridge. Samuel made out the wavery numbers of a license plate on the cars inverted bumper.

Samuel and Cappavella headed at once for a cottage 400 feet from the pond. Dyke House, read the printing on a mailbox beside the weathered shingles of the former hunting camp owned by Chappaquiddick resident Antone Bettencourt and leased for the summer to Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Malm of Lebanon, Pennsylvania. A self-possessed woman of middle age, Mrs. Malm was preparing breakfast when she responded to Samuels knock at her back door and received his report that a car was overturned in the pond. Then, Samuel and Cappavella returned to drop fishing lines off the bridge, oblivious to the car submerged on the other side.

Mrs. Malm telephoned the Island Communications Center maintained by the Dukes County sheriffs office at Marthas Vineyard airport.

At 8:20 A.M. a call from the Center was logged at the two-room police station located on the first floor of Edgartowns white clapboard town hall.

Policewoman Carmen Salvador relayed the information that an automobile was under water at Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick to Police Chief Dominick James Arena. She said, Do you want to send somebody over there?

No, Arena said. Ill go.

Arena left the station with the cruisers blue dome-light flashing. A sultry, clouding-up morning presaged poor weather for the second day of the Edgartown Yacht Clubs annual regatta. For 13 years a Massachusetts state trooper assigned traffic duty and security at Bostons Logan International Airport, Arena was later attached to the Attorney Generals criminal division, handling evidence of government corruption unearthed by the Massachusetts Crime Commission. Because of my personality, and because I could handle people, I was running the jury room as far as witnesses were concerned to keep them happy and keep the lawyers happy, Arena said.

A newspaper story about a town meeting voting to raise the salary of its police chief to $10,000 in hopes of filling the vacant position prompted Arena to apply for the job even before he knew where that town was. The town, which he found on a map, would turn out to be Edgartown, a picturesque former whaling port described as tidy, shipshape and sparkling clean. In May 1967, Trooper Arena became Chief Arena, taking on a job which, in many ways, cast him as a virtual legate of the Chamber of Commerce: Policing the occasional excesses of seasonal pleasure-seekers upon whom Edgartowns tourist economy depended.

Pulling up to the ferry landing at the foot of Daggett Street, Arena asked Dick Hewitt, You hear anything about an accident at the Dike Bridge?

Not until now, Hewitt said.

Chappaquiddick looked no more than two swimming-pool lengths away, the channel as close-quartered as everything else was in Edgartown, including the two-car ferry that chugged Arena across. Apart from the modest swank of the beach clubs cabanas, the island was a backwater of modest cottages midst groves of scrub pine and pin oak. In twenty years, the bridge at the end of Dike Road never had been the locale of an automobile accident.