physician, Dr. Rebecca Prostko, is convinced “there was a traumatic event of some sort.” She later testifies, “Regressive behavior is a little hard to fake.”
While Bowman is being examined at the hospital that Saturday afternoon, Ted hosts a luncheon at the mansion. At the quiet gathering, there is no mention of the previous night’s “incident,” though there is talk between the cousins. As per the police investigation, Patrick recalls Willie telling him Bowman was “really whacked out,” and that they’d had sex without protection, later adding, “This is really a setup, isn’t it?” Another witness statement notes an overheard conversation at Chuck & Harold’s, a Palm Beach celebrity hangout, where a nearby patron hears the senator say to Willie, “And she will say it is rape.”
Regardless of what else is going on, the Kennedys hold fast to holiday tradition. On Easter Sunday, the clan attends Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church. But rumors that something shocking has happened at the Kennedy estate are already spreading, although some locals take a rather blasé attitude.
“Over the years I’ve been to many parties at the Kennedy house,” socialite Susan Polan tells People magazine. “One plays tennis there, one goes to parties there, but there are times when you don’t go up to the Kennedy house unless you expect to be raucous. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re just boys, and boys will be boys.”
Nevertheless, by late afternoon on Monday, April 1, 1991, Palm Beach detectives are knocking at the door of the mansion, though most of the family has already left town.
Sadly, it’s not the first time Palm Beach detectives have needed to talk to the Kennedy family at Easter.
Seven years earlier, over Easter week 1984, Ethel and Bobby Kennedy’s twenty-eight-year-old son David Anthony Kennedy was found dead of a fatal overdose in Room 107 of the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach.
The family is devastated, but not shocked—for years they’ve all been asking each other what to do about David and his escalating addictions.
David—the fourth of Bobby and Ethel’s eleven children, after Kathleen, Joe, and Bobby Jr.—has always been a sensitive, small boy. Family friend Chuck McDermott remembers, “There was some level on which David tapped his father’s sensitivity. You would find him walking with David or with his arm around David. David just seemed to need it.”
In April 1968, Bobby consults the child psychologist Robert Coles when twelve-year-old David has a run-in with police, who catch the boy throwing rocks at motorists passing near Hickory Hill. Coles recalls Bobby’s eyes widening when he makes the connection that David “was a little like him, throwing rocks at strangers—or LBJ,” as Bobby had been metaphorically doing since Jack’s death in 1963.
A few months later, on June 4, David nearly drowns while swimming in the Pacific, but his father is able to jump in to save him. Later that same night, while up watching Bobby’s victory in the California primary, David is horrified to witness his father’s assassination live on TV.
His near-death experience “made Bob even larger than life to David,” remarks Kennedy family friend John Seigenthaler. “And then 12 hours later, he lost this father in a most horrible way.” Ethel similarly notes to her personal assistant, Noelle Bombardier, that Bobby “saved David’s life the very same day he lost his own, and David really never could understand any of it,” theorizing, “It was as if he thought God had traded his life in for his dad’s.”
The boy’s trauma is largely swept under the rug, however. “No one ever talked to me about what I was feeling,” David states. When he tries to bring it up to his mother, Ethel snaps that “It’s not a subject I want to discuss.” What they do instead, apparently, is medicate his emotional pain away. “We took him to the doctor and the doctor put him on some medication. One thing led to another,” Ethel tells Bombardier. David moves on to recreational drugs, and by the time he’s fifteen, he and his cousin Christopher Lawford are hitchhiking to New York City and buying heroin in Central Park. “David and I sort of decided together that there really wasn’t any reason to be good any more, so we might as well be bad,” Chris recalls.
In August 1973, when David is eighteen, he’s injured in a jeep accident on Nantucket caused by his older brother Joe. Joe, David, and five teenage girls, including David’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Pamela Kelley, are all in the car at the time. Joe “was