3rd August, 2019
The death on Thursday of 22 year-old Saoirse Kennedy Hill, granddaughter of Robert F. Kennedy has provided fodder for the renewed speculations about the existence of a Kennedy Curse.
The “Kennedy Curse” is a pop culture label to describe untimely deaths in the iconic family — as members have died by assassination, plane crashes and other accidents stemming as far back as World War II.
Saoirse, a junior at Boston College reportedly died from a suspected drug overdose in her family’s Cape Cod home.
She was the daughter of Courtney Kennedy Hill and the granddaughter of Ethel Kennedy, 91, (who was married to the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy).
Does the Kennedy curse really exist?
In 1968, Saoirse’s grandfather Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, during his Democratic presidential campaign.
The late senator was the brother of the 35th president John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963 while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas with his wife Jacqueline. Earlier that year, the New York Post reported, the couple lost their premature son, who died two days after birth. Jacqueline died in 1994 from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 64.
And in 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., the 38-year-old editor-in-chief of George magazine and son of the first couple, crashed a small plane into the ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. JFK Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessett-Kennedy, 33, and her sister Lauren, 34, all died.
In 1969, a week after driving his car off a cliff in Martha’s Vineyard and killing passenger and political activist Mary Jo Kopechne, Senator Ted Kennedy, the former president’s brother, mused on television whether “some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.”
The senator died of cancer at age 77 in 2009.
*Adapted from Yahoo Lifestyle