For years, Nick Damore has been trying to find the audiotapes made by his father, investigative journalist Leo Damore, about what actually occurred at Chappaquiddick.

Leo was the writer of 1988 blockbuster ebook Senatorial Privilege, an exhaustive investigation into the occasions of July 18, 1969, when Ted Kennedy‘s automotive plunged into the waters off of Martha’s Winery 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 — stays on the middle of the Chappaquiddick thriller.

Leo’s ebook, which took eight years of analysis and encompassed greater than 200 interviews, bought greater than 1 million copies. However after the writer died by suicide in 1995, he left behind a thriller of his personal — one which his youngest son is attempting to unravel.

Nick, a center college English trainer in Connecticut, was 10 years outdated when his father died. Piecing collectively the final years of his father’s life, he lengthy questioned what occurred to the audio tapes of Leo’s most notable Chappaquiddick interviews, together with the various conversations he had with Ted Kennedy’s cousin, Joe Gargan. Tapes that went lacking after Leo’s loss of life. 

“I by no means thought I’d discover the Gargan tapes,” says Nick, now 39, referring to his father’s key interview topic. “I believed they’d been thrown away or perhaps anyone acquired there first.”

However in 2021, he acquired a name from his property lawyer {that a} long-forgotten briefcase had been discovered on the residence of 1 his father’s attorneys, Harold Fields. “They’d been cleansing out his home,” he says, “and so they discovered a briefcase beneath a mattress that mentioned ‘Leo Damore vs. Ted Kennedy’ and that had all of the tapes.”

Inside have been 9 bundles of tapes, wrapped in twine, that contained interviews with attorneys, investigators and different vital figures. “It’s fascinating to listen to Leo in his aspect,” says Nick. “It’s such as you’re watching a grasp at work.”

Gargan, who died in 2017, was one among 12 friends on the reunion social gathering on the evening of July 18, 1969, on Chappaquiddick Island, a lot of whom had labored for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential marketing campaign. 

Gargan, together with Ted Kennedy and lawyer Paul Markham, claimed they’d gone to the Dyke bridge after the senator’s automotive crashed that evening into the water beneath, to try to save Mary Jo Kopechne, who was 28. However years later, Gargan instructed Leo that Ted had requested him to lie about what occurred and say that Mary Jo was driving the automotive the evening it went over the bridge. He refused.

“It was an enormous deal for Leo to get this interview,” explains Nick. “Nobody had talked.” 

In a single alternate about Ted and the occasions of that night, Gargan tells Leo: “They have been thinking about defending the senator, there is no query about that. And so they allow us to fend for ourselves. In addition to everyone else.”

Nonetheless, there’s way more to the tapes that by no means made it into print, says Nick, who’s been painstakingly listening to them. “It’s a behind the scenes look: who knew what. It looks like Gargan was coming to phrases with the concept of coming clear, and breaking with the official model.”

“While you’re attempting to ask about one thing that’s uncomfortable, you’re not essentially going to be getting the complete fact, which is a number of what I’ve heard with the Gargan tapes,” he explains. “A variety of tip- toeing.”

As mysterious because it all stays, it is not the one puzzle his father left behind.

On the time of Leo’s loss of life, he was engaged on a ebook about President John F. Kennedy‘s mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was killed in Georgetown on October 12, 1964. The case was by no means solved.

That manuscript, which he known as Burden of Guilt, additionally went lacking after his loss of life. “I’m not satisfied that what occurred to him [his death] isn’t related to the actual fact he was engaged on such a excessive stage story about Mary Pinchot Meyer,” displays Nick. “This time he was not on the surface, Folks knew who he was. He had clout.” 

As Nick instructed PEOPLE in 2020, “Leo was getting too shut.”

“At one level,” Nick mentioned, “he claimed to have gotten the diary that outlined the connection between Mary and JFK. He additionally thought he’d discovered who had killed her.”

However on the identical time, Leo was beneath immense strain and beginning to unravel. “There have been lawsuits, he thought he was being adopted,” Nick remembers. “A part of Leo’s story is that he skilled such a transparent try and cease him from pursuing tales concerning the Kennedys. I feel Leo saved pushing it just a little bit. It consumed him.”

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Leo’s pal Jimmy Smith — a former assistant DA in Dukes County, Massachusetts, who had related Leo with Joe Gargan — instructed PEOPLE in 2018 that towards the tip of his life, Leo was “like a person being chased … very a lot afraid” earlier than his suicide.

“The core of what I’m doing is to search out 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 is how his father labeled the cassette tape he left for his son on the kitchen counter of his Connecticut condominium earlier than he killed himself. His ultimate message.

That documentary additionally grew to become the springboard for a ebook he is now engaged on.

“Understanding how lengthy Leo was on the path makes me really feel okay about taking a very long time,” he says. “It’s like Rashomon, the place everyone has a unique retelling of what occurred.”

“My objective after I began this was to grasp my father higher, discover out what was driving him,” he explains. “I had been avoiding it my whole life. Over time, it’s developed as a result of I need folks to know who Leo was. Individuals who thinking about his story and in American historical past. That’s one of many causes he needed to protect the Gargan tapes as a result of he seen it as an essential artifact of American political historical past.” 

Now that he’s discovered that piece of the puzzle, he says, ‘There’s this concept of closure, however the issue is you open the door and it results in a room with 4 extra doorways. It type of makes me marvel what else is on the market.”

“I’m simply scratching the floor.”

For extra on Chappaquiddick and Leo Damore, try PEOPLE’s 2018 podcast Cover-Up.