Secret Chappaquiddick Tapes Found of Ted Kennedy’s Cousin: What They Reveal (Exclusive)

For years, Nick Damore has been searching for the audiotapes made by his father, investigative journalist Leo Damore, about what really happened at Chappaquiddick.

Leo was the author of 1988 blockbuster book Senatorial Privilege, an exhaustive investigation into the events of July 18, 1969, when Ted Kennedy‘s car plunged into the waters off of Martha’s Vineyard and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, was left to die. The senator waited 10 hours to alert the authorities, a delay that — even 56 years later — remains at the center of the Chappaquiddick mystery.

Leo’s book, which took eight years of research and encompassed more than 200 interviews, sold more than 1 million copies. But after the author died by suicide in 1995, he left behind a mystery of his own — one that his youngest son is trying to unravel.

Nick, a middle school English teacher in Connecticut, was 10 years old when his father died. Piecing together the last years of his father’s life, he long wondered what happened to the audio tapes of Leo’s most notable Chappaquiddick interviews, including the many conversations he had with Ted Kennedy’s cousin, Joe Gargan. Tapes that went missing after Leo’s death. 

“I never thought I’d find the Gargan tapes,” says Nick, now 39, referring to his father’s key interview subject. “I thought they’d been thrown away or maybe somebody got there first.”

But in 2021, he got a call from his estate attorney that a long-forgotten briefcase had been found at the home of one his father’s lawyers, Harold Fields. “They’d been cleaning out his house,” he says, “and they found a briefcase under a bed that said ‘Leo Damore vs. Ted Kennedy’ and that had all the tapes.”

Inside were nine bundles of tapes, wrapped in twine, that contained interviews with attorneys, investigators and other significant figures. “It’s fascinating to hear Leo in his element,” says Nick. “It’s like you’re watching a master at work.”

Gargan, who died in 2017, was one of 12 guests at the reunion party on the night of July 18, 1969, on Chappaquiddick Island, many of whom had worked for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign. 

Gargan, along with Ted Kennedy and attorney Paul Markham, claimed they’d gone to the Dyke bridge after the senator’s car crashed that night into the water below, to try and save Mary Jo Kopechne, who was 28. But years later, Gargan told Leo that Ted had asked him to lie about what happened and say that Mary Jo was driving the car the night it went over the bridge. He refused.

“It was a huge deal for Leo to get this interview,” explains Nick. “No one had talked.” 

In one exchange about Ted and the events of that evening, Gargan tells Leo: “They were interested in protecting the senator, there’s no question about that. And they let us fend for ourselves. As well as everybody else.”

Still, there’s much more to the tapes that never made it into print, says Nick, who’s been painstakingly listening to them. “It’s a behind the scenes look: who knew what. It seems like Gargan was coming to terms with the idea of coming clean, and breaking with the official version.”

“When you’re trying to ask about something that’s uncomfortable, you’re not necessarily going to be getting the full truth, which is a lot of what I’ve heard with the Gargan tapes,” he explains. “A lot of tip- toeing.”

As mysterious as it all remains, it’s not the only puzzle his father left behind.

At the time of Leo’s death, he was working on a book about President John F. Kennedy‘s mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was killed in Georgetown on October 12, 1964. The case was never solved.

That manuscript, which he called Burden of Guilt, also went missing after his death. “I’m not convinced that what happened to him [his death] is not connected to the fact he was working on such a high level story about Mary Pinchot Meyer,” reflects Nick. “This time he was not on the outside, People knew who he was. He had clout.” 

As Nick told PEOPLE in 2020, “Leo was getting too close.”

“At one point,” Nick said, “he claimed to have gotten the diary that outlined the relationship between Mary and JFK. He also thought he’d found out who had killed her.”

But at the same time, Leo was under immense pressure and starting to unravel. “There were lawsuits, he thought he was being followed,” Nick remembers. “Part of Leo’s story is that he experienced such a clear attempt to stop him from pursuing stories about the Kennedys. I think Leo kept pushing it a little bit. It consumed him.”

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Leo’s friend Jimmy Smith — a former assistant DA in Dukes County, Massachusetts, who had connected Leo with Joe Gargan — told PEOPLE in 2018 that toward the end of his life, Leo was “like a man being chased … very much afraid” before his suicide.

“The core of what I’m doing is to find out what’s true and what’s not true,” says Nick, who in 2023 made a documentary about his father, For Nick, From Dad. That’s how his father labeled the cassette tape he left for his son on the kitchen counter of his Connecticut apartment before he killed himself. His final message.

That documentary also became the springboard for a book he’s now working on.

“Knowing how long Leo was on the trail makes me feel okay about taking a long time,” he says. “It’s like Rashomon, where everybody has a different retelling of what happened.”

“My goal when I started this was to understand my father better, find out what was driving him,” he explains. “I had been avoiding it my entire life. Over time, it’s evolved because I want people to know who Leo was. People who interested in his story and in American history. That’s one of the reasons he wanted to preserve the Gargan tapes because he viewed it as an important artifact of American political history.” 

Now that he’s found that piece of the puzzle, he says, ‘There’s this idea of closure, but the problem is you open the door and it leads to a room with four more doors. It kind of makes me wonder what else is out there.”

“I’m just scratching the surface.”

For more on Chappaquiddick and Leo Damore, check out PEOPLE’s 2018 podcast Cover-Up.