An explosive new book by DailyMail.com columnist Maureen Callahan poses a bombshell new theory about John F. Kennedy Jr’s 1999 plane crash that killed him, his wife Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren.
‘Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed’ has been published in an exclusive four-part Mail series covering the wild lives and scandals of the dynasty’s wives and mistresses – from Jackie Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe.
In the final extract today, Callahan delves into the private struggles of JFK Jr. and Bessette’s marriage, and examines how the couple came to die. Here, we detail the ten most shocking revelations:
An explosive new book by Maureen Callahan poses a bombshell new theory about John F. Kennedy Jr’s 1999 plane crash that killed him and his wife Carolyn Bessette.
1.
Callahan poses the bombshell theory that JFK Jr. was on a ‘murder-suicide’ mission, when he crashed his plane, killing himself, Carolyn and her sister Lauren off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard on July 16, 1999.
Despite worsening visibility, and the advice of experienced pilots to remain grounded, JFK Jr. insisted on flying. Once in the air, he cut off all communication with air traffic control and almost collided with a commercial jet.
2.
Lauren Bessette only joined the couple on the fatal flight to ‘broker a kind of peace’, Callahan writes.
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In 1999, JFK Jr. and Carolyn’s marriage was on the verge of collapse. He had already moved out of the New York City apartment he shared with Carolyn. But ‘the last thing he wanted was the press speculating about his marriage’.
So, Lauren offered to join them to smooth things over.
3.
An investigation into the crash by the National Transportation Safety Board found JFK Jr. solely responsible for the plane crash.
Carolyn and Lauren’s mother Ann Freeman received millions in a wrongful-death settlement from the Kennedy family in 2001.
4.
Carolyn enjoyed insulting her boyfriends, ‘grinding them down’ until they ‘felt nothing’, Callahan writes.
Carolyn’s motto was: ‘Date them, train them, dump them.’
She also had a jealous streak. Once, after seeing a former boyfriend light another woman’s cigarette, she tore up his apartment and attacked him on the street.
‘Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed’ has been published in an four-part Mail series covering the wild lives and scandals of the dynasty’s wives and mistresses.
5.
Riddled with insecurities, Carolyn thought herself to be ‘jolie-laide‘ (ugly-pretty), Callahan reveals.
Working as the director of publicity at Calvin Klein in the 80s and early 90s, she ‘studied’ the models, trying to understand how they ‘stayed so thin’ and maintained their good looks.
After she started dating JFK Jr, in 1994, ‘she turned toward her psychical reinvention’.
‘She was only 28 years old but [she] took to erasing her small facial lines with Botox. She plucked her lush, thick eyebrows into wisps, bleached and ironed her hair, and dropped 15 pounds with the help of cigarettes and cocaine [to kill her appetite],’ Callahan writes.
6.
After she married JFK Jr. in 1996, ‘almost immediately, there were problems’.
They would argue regularly, including in public. They infamously rowed in New York’s Washington Square Park in February 1996. JFK Jr. was pictured ‘shoving’ Carolyn, then trying to ‘yank off her engagement ring with such force that the stone broke’, Callahan says.
7.
As their marriage collapsed, Carolyn fell into a depression. She began taking ‘anti-depressants on top of the cocaine’, Callahan reveals.
Carolyn ‘confessed to her mother that she still thought about her ex-boyfriend, [a Calvin Klein] underwear model’.
Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette pictured in New York City, 1998.
8.
Despite having zero journalism or business-management experience, JFK Jr. decided to launch ‘George’ magazine in 1995.
‘With his friend and business partner Matt Berman, he enrolled in a two-day course called “How to Start Your Own Magazine”,’ Callahan writes.
He then began pitching the idea around town, looking for $20 million investment.
One executive called his pitch ‘the worst presentation I had ever seen in my life’. Within two years, the magazine was on the brink of insolvency.
9.
JFK Jr. ‘nearly killed’ his first serious girlfriend, Christina Haag, ‘more than once’, Callahan writes.
One near-death kayaking experience came in 1986, when he’d taken her open-sea kayaking in Jamaica. He forced Christina to kayak through strong seas, and they both nearly drowned.
Afterwards Christina said to him: ‘We could have died’. To which he replied: ‘Yeh… but what a way to go’.
10.
Before their marriage, when Carolyn and JFK Jr. were courting, ‘she got a thrill from denigrating him in public, calling him homophobic names in front of her fashion friends, taunting him,’ Callahan writes.