Aide Says Kennedy Didn’t Pen Chappaquiddick Police Report

BOSTON — Sen. Edward M. Kennedy did not write the Chappaquiddick Island accident report that was given to police at the time and recently sold for $40,000, according to a Kennedy aide.

Edward Martin of Kennedy’s Boston office said the handwritten report Kennedy handed to then-Edgartown Police Chief Dominic Arena in 1969 was not written by the senator.

The first page of the two-page report, written on lined, yellow paper, recently turned up in the hands of a Nevada documents dealer who asked a dealer in Newton to check its authenticity.

Martin said Kenneth Rendell, a documents expert, sent him a photocopy of the paper.

“While I could not testify to authenticity of the statement, I could say it was not Kennedy’s handwriting,” the Boston Herald quoted Martin as saying today.

Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign worker for Kennedy’s late brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York, was killed when a car driven by Edward Kennedy went off a bridge at Chappaquiddick and into a tidal pond.

Arena, now police chief in Lincoln, said he asked Kennedy the day after the accident what had happened, and Kennedy and a lawyer, Paul Markham, went into a room to write an account.

Arena said Kennedy handed him the two-page report, but the chief was not sure which of the two men wrote it. He said he typed out what was written and threw the handwritten report into a wastebasket. Arena said he found out four years later that a secretary at the police station saved one of the sheets.