The House of Kennedy(66)
Nevertheless, Patricia Bowman says she finally manages to escape from Willie and runs into the house, where she hides in the kitchen. When she spots a phone on the counter, she uses it to call her friend Anne Mercer.
“I wanted somebody to come and help me feel safe. And I didn’t know that the police would care or would come,” Bowman says, explaining why she calls Mercer instead of 911. “I had just been raped by a Kennedy. And I didn’t know what power they held,” she says. “These are political people and…maybe they owned the police.”
As soon as she hangs up, Bowman says, she hears Willie calling for her. He finds her hiding in the kitchen and pulls her into another room. But this time Bowman confronts him.
“I told him that he raped me, and he looked at me, the calmest, smuggest, most arrogant man, and he said, ‘No one will believe you.’”
Chapter 44
Anne Mercer and her boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, arrive at the Kennedy estate about fifteen minutes after getting the call from Patricia Bowman. “She was literally shaking and she looked messed up, her hair and makeup was running,” Mercer recalls. Willie, on the other hand, looks “disheveled” but calm.
Mercer and Desiderio take Bowman back to Mercer’s house, but before leaving the house on North Ocean Boulevard, they swipe a few small items—a framed photo, a notepad, a decorative urn—as proof they have indeed all been there.
Mercer gives Bowman a change of clothes.
Nine hours later, Patricia Bowman is at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office to file a report of rape—and to name her attacker. The Kennedy name drops with a thud.
Later that afternoon, Bowman is at Humana Hospital, where she undergoes forensic tests and is treated for minor back injuries. “I felt all this fear and this dirtiness,” she says. “I was just so afraid and confused by everything that had happened to me. I was a mess.”
The attending physician, Dr. Rebecca Prostko, is convinced “there was a traumatic event of some sort.” She later testifies, “Regressive behavior is a little hard to fake.”
While Bowman is being examined at the hospital that Saturday afternoon, Ted hosts a luncheon at the mansion. At the quiet gathering, there is no mention of the previous night’s “incident,” though there is talk between the cousins. As per the police investigation, Patrick recalls Willie telling him Bowman was “really whacked out,” and that they’d had sex without protection, later adding, “This is really a setup, isn’t it?” Another witness statement notes an overheard conversation at Chuck & Harold’s, a Palm Beach celebrity hangout, where a nearby patron hears the senator say to Willie, “And she will say it is rape.”
Regardless of what else is going on, the Kennedys hold fast to holiday tradition. On Easter Sunday, the clan attends Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church. But rumors that something shocking has happened at the Kennedy estate are already spreading, although some locals take a rather blasé attitude.
“Over the years I’ve been to many parties at the Kennedy house,” socialite Susan Polan tells People magazine. “One plays tennis there, one goes to parties there, but there are times when you don’t go up to the Kennedy house unless you expect to be raucous. They’re a lot of fun, but they’re just boys, and boys will be boys.”
Nevertheless, by late afternoon on Monday, April 1, 1991, Palm Beach detectives are knocking at the door of the mansion, though most of the family has already left town.
Sadly, it’s not the first time Palm Beach detectives have needed to talk to the Kennedy family at Easter.
Seven years earlier, over Easter week 1984, Ethel and Bobby Kennedy’s twenty-eight-year-old son David Anthony Kennedy was found dead of a fatal overdose in Room 107 of the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach.
The family is devastated, but not shocked—for years they’ve all been asking each other what to do about David and his escalating addictions.
David—the fourth of Bobby and Ethel’s eleven children, after Kathleen, Joe, and Bobby Jr.—has always been a sensitive, small boy. Family friend Chuck McDermott remembers, “There was some level on which David tapped his father’s sensitivity. You would find him walking with David or with his arm around David. David just seemed to need it.”
In April 1968, Bobby consults the child psychologist Robert Coles when twelve-year-old David has a run-in with police, who catch the boy throwing rocks at motorists passing near Hickory Hill. Coles recalls Bobby’s eyes widening when he makes the connection that David “was a little like him, throwing rocks at strangers—or LBJ,” as Bobby had been metaphorically doing since Jack’s death in 1963.
A few months later, on June 4, David nearly drowns while swimming in the Pacific, but his father is able to jump in to save him. Later that same night, while up watching Bobby’s victory in the California primary, David is horrified to witness his father’s assassination live on TV.
His near-death experience “made Bob even larger than life to David,” remarks Kennedy family friend John Seigenthaler. “And then 12 hours later, he lost this father in a most horrible way.” Ethel similarly notes to her personal assistant, Noelle Bombardier, that Bobby “saved David’s life the very same day he lost his own, and David really never could understand any of it,” theorizing, “It was as if he thought God had traded his life in for his dad’s.”