Mary Richardson Kennedy tried to kill herself twice in the 1980s and showed suicidal behavior in the 1990s before she was sadly successful last year, her loved ones said in a published report.
The wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who hanged herself a year ago today in Bedford, had been hurting emotionally for years, but the suicide still shocked her closest friends and family, according to The Daily Beast.
“I know you think Mary’s going to kill herself,” brother Thomas Richardson reportedly wrote in an email to Kennedy in 1997, “but I guarantee she won’t. I may regret those words one day, but that’s how I feel.”
Even before marrying Kennedy in 1994, Mary’s mental and emotional challenges had nearly gotten to her.
She tried to kill herself in 1985 by placing a bag over her head, according to the online magazine. Mary swallowed 200 barbiturates in 1986 but she threw up and survived that suicide attempt, the Daily Beast also reported.
Mary was just 52 when she went missing a year ago today, sending family and friends on a wild scramble for her.
AA sponsor Shannon White eventually found Mary’s hanging body in a barn on Kennedy’s Bedford estate.
Kennedy arrived at the barn moments after White’s grisly discovery and she screamed: “Don’t go in there!”
Kennedy reportedly brushed past White and tried to lift Mary before realizing she was dead.
Mary’s sad, emotional descent came despite living out her childhood dream of becoming a Kennedy.
Mary and longtime pal Kerry Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr.’s sister, were best friends and roommates at Vermont’s Putney School.
Friends recalled that Kerry and Mary were once asked, as school girls, where they believed they’d be in 25 years.
While Kerry gave a stock answer of having kids and a husband, a friend said Mary’s halfway joking answer was: “That sounds really nice. If I could just have a room in Kerry’s house, that would be so great.”
“She wanted to be part of that family so badly,” the friend said.
And for many in the famous political family, Richardson seemed to be a good fit for their glamorous, civic-minded clan.
RFK’s wife Ethel Kennedy “referred to Mary as her fifth daughter,” according to Michael Mailer, who lived with Mary before she married Kennedy.
As her marriage to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fell apart, Mary feared losing her kids and spot in the famed family.
“Mary very much liked being a Kennedy,” said her lawyer Peter Bienstock, “and was extraordinarily upset over how badly that she felt she was treated at Hyannis Port as things progressed.”
Kerry said Mary’s mental struggles were hard to gauge because she could be so sociable and bubbly.
“Mary’s was a classic mental illness,” Kerry said, “which made her so unlike herself — kind, generous, a wonderful mother, perfect friend, force for good on our earth—that it was as if she’d been invaded by a foreign body. Every time I saw it happening, it scared me. I never held her accountable because that was her disease, not who she was as a person, and we all knew it.”
