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Anybody else would have done 20 years for manslaughter. A married man, drunk, goes parking with a young girl. A cop approaches to check out the car and he speeds off. Later the car goes into a channel. He immediately saves himself and abandons the girl, according to experts in an air bubble that lasted some 25 minutes. He walks past four homes without trying to get use of a telephone to notify authorities and swims home. The authorities perform no autopsy even though there was blood on her dress and nose which was inconsistent with drowning. He was found at an inquest to have been driving negligently but that information was withheld from a grand jury. It looked like the hands of friends in high places was screwing up the process at every level. By not going to the authorities he avoided a breath test and since no one determined the reason for the blood, he avoided questions of whether he did violence to her before they went into the water, which would have been a murder charge.

There was one theory advanced to the effect that Teddy and Mary Jo had an accident &emdash; as in, striking a stationary object &emddash; before going off the bridge. If Mary Jo had been knocked out, so that Ted and company thought she was dead, then Chappaquiddick becomes a damage control scheme. Running the car into Poucha Pond was deliberate, done to cover for the story that Teddy was disoriented for the eight hours he would require to get his BAC down to a legal level.

Because, if the authorities had found out he had been driving drunk and had an accident involving a fatality, MA state law would have required that he be charged with manslaughter, no ifs, ands, or buts.

But it was all for nothing, because MJ wasn't dead after all. At least, not right away. Oh to have been a fly on the wall when that bomb burst back at the compound....