Car Crash Cover-Ups

Abstract

once upon a time, this tragic fairy tale begins, there were two fatal car crashes on two separate summer nights. The first took place on a dark road on Chappaquidick Island in Massachusetts on July 18, 1969, and involved a powerful United States senator from a legendary political family and a younger female veteran of his brother’s 1968 presidential campaign. The crash happened after the two left a small party where alcohol was allegedly present and then, somehow, drove off a bridge into Poucha Pond. Only the senator and driver, Edward Kennedy, escaped the car and survived the crash. The second of these two crashes, on August 31, 1997, fatally struck down the playboy son of an Egyptian millionaire and the divorced Princess of Wales in a dark Parisian tunnel. Their death car, a high-powered Mercedes, was driven by a man apparently under the influence of alcohol and drugs, their deaths attended by a train of the infamously zealous photographers known as paparazzi. So how can these two separate car crashes be part of the same bleak fairy tale, chronicled repeatedly by widely different media sources both contemporaneously and in the years to follow? The deaths of Diana Windsor, the princess, and Mary Jo Kopechne, the political functionary, are separated by nearly thirty years and two continents. There is no literal connection between the principal characters of each tragedy.