RFK Jr’s Late Wife’s Sibling Told Him ‘You Killed My Sister’ Hours After His Spouse’s Suicide—She ‘Really Didn’t Want to Die’
StyleCaster Editors
The Kennedy family is famous for many things, and one of those is sadly how many members of the family have died tragically too young. President John F. Kennedy Jr. and his brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr were both assassinated, while the former president’s son John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash that also killed his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren. But now a new book is examining another tragic event for the Kennedy family.
RFK, Jr.: The Fall and Rise, written by investigative journalist Isabel Vincent, examines the death of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s second wife, Mary Richardson. Richardson died by suicide at age 52. The book is partially based on RFK Jr.‘s own journals, which were reportedly given to Vincent by a trusted source a year after Mary’s death.
Her death came after RFK Jr. filed for divorce in 2010. Vincent writes that the period afterwards was very complicated for Mary. Three days after the filing, she was arrested for drunk driving. “Mary did not want a divorce, and she did not want to lose custody of her children,” Vincent said. “Following her arrests, she attended AA meetings, but most of all, she pored over Kennedy’s diaries. In many ways, she was trying to reassure herself that she had been married to a chronic philanderer for nearly 20 years.”
She was found dead on May 16, 2012, in the barn of the couple’s Bedford, N.Y. home. A person close to Mary said that she was sober and “trying to resist Kennedy’s pressure to end the divorce negotiations in his favor” at the time of her death.
According to the book, RFK Jr. had reached out to one of Mary’s friends that day because he was “worried something had happened to Mary and that she may have hurt herself.” The two then went to the house and found Mary’s body in the barn. The book goes on to say that when Mary’s family arrived, RFK Jr. and his brother Christopher were there.
The family asked them to leave, but they reportedly refused. Mary’s sister, Nan Richardson, told him at the time, “You have killed my sister.”
Vincent told People that the family was “horrified by everything that happened.”
“They pretty much hated him,” she added. “I mean, so much so you saw that they didn’t go to the funeral and he was not invited to the Standard Hotel memorial, although I think Kerry [Kennedy] crashed,” Vincent said of the private memorial service hosted by the Richardson family. “There was a real divide, and I think that they just felt he was insensitive to what was going on with her.”
The book also revealed that the Medical Examiner’s Office report said that Mary’s “fingers were caught between the neck and the noose when she was found dead.” That made Mary’s doctor wonder if “maybe she really didn’t want to die.”
Vincent’s research for the book took over a decade. “The diaries helped me get into his head,” she said. “And Mary still occupies a very important part of his life, even though she’s dead.”
