Legends of True Crime Reporting: Leo Damore

With all modesty aside, I’ve got it. I cracked this thing. I know it seems incomprehensible. Who is Leo Damore?

--Leo Damore

Leo Damore (1929-1995) was born in Canada and graduated from the journalism school at Kent State University in Ohio. He then moved to New York state, and while a cub reporter at the Cape Cod News in summer 1969, he covered the story of his career—the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquidick Island; the young, attractive woman was a passenger in the vehicle driven by U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, who did not report the accident for ten hours.

Damore interviewed hundreds of people and turned the results of his dogged and meticulous reporting into a book. Random House paid him a $250,000 advance for Senatorial Privilege, but upon receipt of the manuscript, Random House grew nervous.

The controversy stemmed from the most explosive charge in the book: Damore claimed that Kennedy urged Joseph Gargan (a Kennedy cousin and one of two men who returned with Kennedy to the accident scene) to lie and say that Ms. Kopechne was in the car alone (read: cover-up). “I’m going to say Mary Jo was driving,” said Kennedy, per Gargan, per Damore.

Although Damore had a named source for the story, he did not have Gargan’s statement on tape, though he did have 30 hours of recorded interviews with Gargan, who’d been a tough nut to crack. Gargan had otherwise maintained silence on the subject for years and neither confirmed nor denied Damore’s account when it broke in spring 1988. Damore’s assurances of the accuracy of his reporting did not placate Random House, which refused to publish the book. Penthouse also backed out of a $10,000 deal to publish excerpts. Damore filed suit against Random House but was forced to settle.

Damore ran into even more legal snags in 1989 when one of the police officers who investigated the Chappaquiddick incident sued Damore, claiming that the author promised him $50,000 for insider information on the case. Damore said he reimbursed the policeman $1,000 for expenses but never promised further payment.

Damore eventually beat back the legal problems and found another (politically conservative) publisher for his book, which went on to bestsellerdom in 1988-89.

Damore’s works include:

Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up (Regnery, 1988)

The Cape Cod Years of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Four Walls Eight Windows Anniversary Edition, 1993)

The Crime of Dorothy Sheridan (Dell, 1992). An account of the death of the five-year-old daughter of Dorothy Sheridan, a Christian Scientist who refused medical treatment for the child, who was severely ill with pneumonia. Sheridan was convicted of manslaughter.

In His Garden; The Anatomy of a Murderer (Arbor House, 1981). An account of several Cape Cod murders in summer 1968 committed by Antone Charles Costa, who killed himself after he was convicted of some of the murders. Damore’s book includes excerpts from Costa’s own accounts of his crimes.

Cache, A Novel of Suspense (Arbor House, 1979).

Damore also investigated the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer, one of John F. Kennedy’s mistresses, concluding that the CIA was involved in her death. But his book was never published. He retained all of his voluminous notes and resources on all the cases he investigated, which are now at the Kent state library. Sadly, Leo Damore took his own life in 1995.

Comments

[Liza]

Actually the Costa murders (the ones he was convicted of) took place on January 25, 1969. They believe he was responsible for many more. The other killings associated with Tony but for which they never tried him, started in June of 1966 and ended when he was arrested in March of 1969.