ON the little island of Chappaquiddick last week, tourists gawked at the scene, and souvenir hunters chipped pieces of wood away from Dike Bridge. For a time the car that Senator Edward Kennedy had driven off the bridge the night of July 18-19 was left unprotected, and some people went so far as to take bits of shattered glass and strips of chrome from it. Those curious about what happened that night meanwhile continued to chip away at Kennedy's patchy story of the accident that took the life of Mary Jo Kopechne.
So far, nearly all of the investigators have been reporters exploring the gaps in Kennedy's account. Though a woman died, Massachusetts authorities have questioned no one who could tell them directly what happened the night of the accident.
Kennedy himself escaped questioning by pleading guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident. Still, District Attorney Edmund Dinis was apparently so annoyed by criticism of his office's handling of the case that last week he belatedly sought an inquiry, taking the unusual step of asking the state superior court to begin a formal inquest. Normally the lower district court conducts inquests.
Twin Rebuffs. Even that effort was misdirected. G. Joseph Tauro, chief justice of the superior court—and a Republican appointee—said that the district court was Dinis' proper forum. Turning to Judge Kenneth Nash, administrative head of the district courts, Dinis was once again rebuffed; the responsibility for holding an inquest, Judge
Nash said, lay with Judge James Boyle, presiding jurist of the area in which the accident occurred. By week's end Boyle had not said anything about his intentions. Since Boyle had presided over the proceeding at which Kennedy pleaded guilty, however, the judge could probably be expected to disqualify himself on the question of an inquest.
How the procedural difficulties would be resolved—if at all—was impossible to say. The fact is that a full inquiry is long overdue. So far, the lapse in time has served only to open new doubts about what really happened. > The question of the time of the accident has been raised again.
There are new indications that it did not take place shortly after 11:15 p.m., as Kennedy said, but sometime after 12:40 a.m. Dr. Donald R. Mills, the associate medical examiner, said that Mary Jo could have died anywhere from five to eight hours before 9:30 a.m., when he looked at the body. Even using a very outside limit of nine hours, that would have placed the moment of death no earlier than 12:30 a.m. Dr. Mills admitted that a judgment based on the degree of rigor mortis is "at best inexact"; there was no autopsy. Still, Mills' statement either casts doubt on Kennedy's account as to the time of the accident or, even worse for the Senator, raises anew the possibility that Mary Jo remained alive for a time after the car sank in Poucha Pond.