Chappaquiddick: A Fatal Attraction as Tourists Flock to Accident Site : Ted Kennedy: Twenty-five years after the car crash that killed Mary Jo Kopechne, the bridge draws 50 cars of visitors a day. A writer sees similarities to the Simpson case.

It sounded like the ideal spot for a summer vacation: a waterfront island cottage at the end of a dead-end dirt road, near an abandoned bridge.

What Andrea Meaney didn’t know was that the bridge was the site of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s car accident 25 years ago--and a celebrated tourist attraction ever since.

She soon found out. On the first day of her vacation, Meaney counted more than 50 cars and bicycles trundling down the otherwise remote road, all carrying people who checked out Dike Bridge, turned around and left.

On the second day, she found it necessary to put a sign in the front yard urging motorists to slow down and watch out for her three dogs.

“The realtor didn’t tell me this was the bridge. I don’t think she thought it was a selling point,” said Meaney, 32, of Washington, D.C. “For what’s supposed to be a quiet place, this is like a highway.”

On the night of July 18, 1969, Kennedy’s Oldsmobile plunged off Dike Bridge into a tidal pond. He swam to safety, leaving Mary Jo Kopechne in the car. She drowned. He waited 10 hours to report the accident.

A quarter of a century may have passed, but the scandal and mystery surrounding Chappaquiddick still mesmerize, thanks to the world’s fascination with Kennedys, celebrities, controversy and crime.

Best-selling true crime writer Ann Rule said Chappaquiddick is not unlike the O. J. Simpson case. Such shocking levelings of large personalities are rare and enduring, she said, because people like to see their heroes fail.

“With Ted Kennedy, with O. J. Simpson, we were quite willing to almost deify them,” Rule said. “But there’s part of us that says, ‘They’re not so great. Maybe I only make $25,000, but at least I’m not sitting in a courtroom or a jail.’ ”

Most of the players in the Chappaquiddick drama are quiet now. Mary Jo Kopechne’s first cousin, Georgetta Potosky, said the family remembers her on her birthday, which falls 10 days after the anniversary of her death.

Her parents decline interviews.

“Mr. Kopechne and I are getting a little too old for this,” Gwendolyn Kopechne said from her home in Stillwater, Pa. “We just don’t talk about it anymore.”

Chappaquiddick is reachable by ferry from nearby Martha’s Vineyard. Guides are sure to mention the infamous accident when Vineyard tour buses pass the ferry landing.

Ferry drivers say at least 10 people a day ask for directions to the bridge, which long has been closed in disrepair and blocked off by a chain-link fence. Before, tourists used to tear off pieces of its wood as souvenirs, said Richard Reston, editor and publisher of the Vineyard Gazette newspaper.

To mark the 25th anniversary, the British Broadcasting Corp. came to the island this spring to re-create the incident for a documentary.

On the day of the accident, the 37-year-old Ted Kennedy had sailed in a Vineyard yacht race. Afterward, a Kennedy cousin threw a party at a small house on Chappaquiddick. At the party were Kopechne and the five other so-called “boiler room girls” who had worked on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign.

Kennedy said he and Kopechne had been trying to catch the ferry to the Vineyard, but took a wrong turn onto the dirt road that led to the Dike Bridge sometime between 11:30 p.m. and 1 a.m.

He has expressed sadness over the incident, calling his actions that night “irrational and indefensible and inexcusable and inexplicable.”

“I bear full responsibility for the tragedy, and I always will,” he said in a statement issued Friday. “I have expressed my remorse to my family, the Kopechne family, and the people of Massachusetts. I only wish I had the power to do more to ease the continuing pain I feel and that Mr. and Mrs. Kopechne feel for Mary Jo’s loss.”

In his book “Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up”--one of at least four written about the accident--Leo Damore asserts that Kennedy failed to notify the authorities immediately because he wanted to concoct a story that Kopechne was alone in the car.

He also called the crime an “equalizer” that brought Kennedy down to the level of the common man. Anyone could imagine driving home from a party, perhaps a little tipsy, and having an accident, Damore said.

What people could not understand, he said, was why Kennedy did not seek help sooner by going to the cottage nearby.

“You could put yourself in his shoes, and any teen-ager would have known what to do. You go to the nearest house and bang on the door,” Damore said. “I think this was the first episode that pierced the mythology of the Kennedys as intrepid, fearless and confrontational.”

At an inquest, Kennedy said he was in shock after the accident. He said that he had planned to report it after he swam across to Martha’s Vineyard, but that the tide held him back and wore him out. He spent the night at a hotel on the Vineyard and, in the morning, cleanly shaven and nattily dressed, went to the police station.

Kennedy pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident, received a two-month suspended sentence and his license was revoked for a year.

The accident was widely thought to guarantee that Kennedy would never be President, and some thought it would end his political career.

But the senator, now 62, has continued to win election after election and remain popular with his constituents, despite fresh allegations that have surfaced in connection with the accident over the years.

In 1980, a lawyer for New England Telephone Co. had said that despite a subpoena, not all of Kennedy’s telephone calls in the 24 hours after the drowning were put in court records. And in 1989, grand jurors who investigated the accident came forward to say that the district attorney had hindered their probe.

“Everyone knew the truth hadn’t been told,” Damore said, “so a mystery of this caliber is going to remain in people’s minds, particularly when it involves the most famous family in the country.”