Heartbreaking new details about JFK Jr.’s burial at sea have been revealed for the first time, 25 years after the former president’s son was laid to rest alongside his wife Carolyn during an incredibly secret ceremony.
In a new book, JFK Jr.: An Intimate Oral Biography, by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil, the two Navy chaplains who presided over the burial speak out about the event, which at the time was shrouded in mystery and kept largely hidden from the public.
Chaplain Barry C. Black reveals that he personally carried the urns containing the ashes of John and his wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. A Roman Catholic priest carried the remains of Carolyn’s sister Lauren after all three died in a tragic plane crash off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999.
“I’ve officiated at over a hundred funerals,” he says. “I’ve never seen such palpable grief anywhere else in my life.”
Unlike the mass held at St. Thomas More Church on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which was attended by celebrities and politicians and covered by hundreds of journalists, the scattering of the ashes was a purely family affair.
New heartbreaking details have been revealed for the first time about the burial at sea of former President John F. Kennedy’s son, JFK Jr. (seen together in 1963)
JFK Jr. and his wife Carolyn Besette-Kennedy (seen together in 1998) died in a plane crash on Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, along with his sister Lauren.
Now, the two Navy chaplains who presided over her burial have shared intimate new details of the ceremony, recalling the devastating grief displayed by her sister Caroline (seen together).
Only 17 people attended, including Ted Kennedy, John’s older sister, Caroline and her husband Ed, Bobby Kennedy and Maria Shriver.
There was a moment of controversy, recalls chaplain Louis Iasiello, explaining that civilians generally do not have the right to a burial at sea from a warship.
But he adds: “President Clinton quickly put an end to that discussion. When the Commander in Chief says this is what’s going to happen, that’s exactly what happens.”
The ashes of John, Carolyn and Lauren were scattered from the destroyer USS Briscoe, anchored near where they had lost their lives in a plane crash six days earlier.
“When it came time to pour the ashes into the water,” Black says, “I led the Bessettes down first.”
When the ashes fell into the water, they clump together, he recalls, and then, “as if someone from Harry Potter touched them with a wand, the mass just disappeared.”
He then led John’s heartbroken sister Caroline up the steps to the urn. She says she touched the urn as if to indicate she was not ready to let her brother go so quickly.
“I calmed her down and we went down,” he says. “My God, it’s not even an adequate description to say she was convulsing from the pain. I can still see her.”
‘She put the ashes inside. As the ashes fell, she put her hand in the water to pour some water over herself again.’
He imagined her thinking, “I’m not going to let go of his hand.”
Another chaplain, William Petruska, remembers how Teddy hugged Caroline when she came back out of the water. “They hugged each other for a long moment… He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. He winced in pain.”
She adds: ‘We carried three beautiful wreaths – red and white carnations with red roses. We never used them. One of the family members had a canvas bag of wild flowers. They each took some and threw them overboard as they scattered the ashes.
‘I noticed that members of the Bessette family also threw envelopes into the water.’
The funeral was a star-studded event, including Muhammad Ali.
Maria Shriver and her then husband Arnold Schwarzenegger attend the funeral
Senator Ted Kennedy (right, wearing sunglasses) and other Kennedy family members were taken to the USS Briscoe to scatter the ashes.
The flag is flown at half-staff aboard the USS Briscoe naval destroyer
Carolina was “contorted with pain… As the ashes fell, she put her hand in the water to get wet again.”
JFK Jr: An Intimate Oral Biography by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil, is published by Gallery Books
John Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Lauren Bessette died in a tragic plane crash near Martha’s Vineyard in July 1999.
JFK Jr. was piloting the plane, and the book includes an in-depth analysis of what may have happened in those final moments, based on investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board.
“If I were to sit down with a friend and ask him what happened to JFK Jr., this is what I would tell him,” said Jeff Guzzetti of the NTSB.
“He took off just after sunset from New Jersey. I don’t think he intended to do it at night, but he did.”
As he followed the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island, he probably had no horizon to follow, Guzzetti says, because it was dark, the weather was foggy and he was over the ocean.
Those conditions would have required him to receive training in the use of his instruments; “however, he was not trained to fly with instruments. He was trained to look outward for visual cues. There were no visual cues.”
Guzzetti believes he was on autopilot for most of the trip, but when he turned toward Martha’s Vineyard, he disengaged it on purpose or by accident and his flight became erratic.
“Its flight path through the water is indicative of something called spatial disorientation,” he says, describing how its inner ears would have been playing tricks on its sense of direction.
“Your inner ear tells you that you are turning left when you are not. So you correct course to the right, thinking you are leveling the plane.”
These actions had fatal consequences: “Its flight path into the water coincides with what is known as a graveyard spiral. The plane spirals nose down, down, down into the grave, as if it were falling down a drain.”
He believes the ship then made one final turn before plunging, nose-down, into the Atlantic, instantly killing all three passengers.
JFK Jr: An intimate oral biography by RoseMarie Terenzio and Liz McNeil, published by Gallery Books