When John F. Kennedy Jr. lost control of his Piper Saratoga II on the night of July 16, 1999, Captain W. Russell “Russ” Webster was among the first responders to reach the scene.
The aircraft went down seven and a quarter miles off Martha’s Vineyard’s southwestern tip, killing Kennedy, his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren instantly. The wreckage came to rest 116 feet below the Atlantic’s surface.
Because the crash occurred within his jurisdiction as commander of Coast Guard Group Woods Hole, on Cape Cod’s western edge, Webster became the operations incident commander. He oversaw a grueling five-day effort that became the largest search-and-rescue mission in U.S. history involving private citizens killed in a small-aircraft crash.
Twenty-seven years later, Webster recounts those events in The Last Flight: The Untold Story of the Search for JFK Jr and the Race Against the Atlantic, written with his historian wife, Theresa Mitchell Webster.
In this exclusive excerpt, he explains how the Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Navy joined forces to locate the wreckage, recover the three victims in an extraordinarily difficult operation, and respectfully commit them to the sea.
Aboard the vessel, Senator Ted Kennedy watches the divers descend. Wearing a red-and-white striped short-sleeved polo shirt and a life jacket, he keeps his face unreadable.
He has made one firm request: Navy divers must bring John, Carolyn and Lauren to the surface together. His nephew, he insists, must not appear to have received special treatment—even in death.
The divers have only a limited window once they reach the wreck. Their movements send silt swirling across the ocean floor, making visibility even worse. Still, shafts of sunlight passing through the 116 feet of water offer a small amount of natural illumination during the descent.
JFK Jr. and his wife Carolyn died instantly in the crash
The wreckage of the single-engine Saratoga came to rest 116 feet below the ocean’s surface
Ted Kennedy aboard the USS Grasp on Wednesday morning, July 21, 1999, receives a briefing from Lieutenant Commander Eric Anderson
Kennedy is lying on his side on the seafloor beside the shattered Saratoga.
With care and solemnity, the divers raise his remains and carry him to the body bags secured on the Navy salvage basket.
That is when they realize Kennedy’s legs are missing—or, according to retired Navy diver Josh Benjamins, that is what they report to their superiors.
Regardless of what has happened, the divers still have a task to complete.
At 116 feet, visibility is extremely poor. Even so, the divers carefully remove the tape holding the rolled body bags to the basket. They unroll one bag across the seafloor, then slowly open the zipper running its full length.
Once the bag is fully open, they lower Kennedy inside. The bag is then raised and fastened at four points.
The divers now turn to recovering the Bessette sisters.
Moving through clouds of disturbed sand in the dim water, they make their way back to the fuselage to retrieve Carolyn and Lauren.
Both women’s bodies are intact, but suffered severe and extensive damage. Frank Ciaccio of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), who later witnessed the autopsies, would say only that Carolyn and Lauren “were not facially recognizable.”
The impact of the crash forced the backs of their seats to fold in forward over them.
The wreckage of JFK Jr’s plane was pulled from the water
The rescue team fought the tides and the weather to recover the beloved son of a slain president and his passengers (photographed: John and Carolyn in January 1997)
The divers pry the seats back, slowly, then cut the seat belts. They can’t tell which sister is which except by hair color. Lauren is a brunette, Carolyn an unmistakable blonde.
In a high-impact collision, this is not an unexpected outcome. Out of respect for the Kennedy and Bessette families, we leave further descriptions unsaid.
The first sister is lifted from her seat and, using a fireman’s shoulder carry, her diver exits the fuselage, slowly and with great care, and walks toward the salvage basket.
He places the deceased into a body bag.
He returns to the basket and, together with another diver, retrieves the second sister and places her into a body bag.
It’s zipped, slowly, methodically. Both sisters are finally secured, together at last.
The Navy divers prepare to surface.
But before the basket reaches the surface, the Navy’s Jeff Pauls informs Senator Kennedy about the suspected condition of his nephew’s remains.
The uncertainty unsettles all. Will the other half of his body – if the impact had indeed cut JFK Jr in half – rise on its own?
Then the dive team and the basket holding the deceased ascend into daylight. All three victims are together in the salvage basket, just as Senator Kennedy had insisted. For the first time in days, JFK Jr, Carolyn, and Lauren are above the waterline.
It will be a few hours before a second dive team descends to attempt to raise the fuselage and engine.
In Pocasset, north of Woods Hole, the afternoon slides into early evening.
Three men – and only those three – are in a small, cream-tiled room at the aging Barnstable County Hospital, site of the medical examiner’s office.
There, a pathologist, a Massachusetts State Police photographer, and Frank Ciaccio of the NTSB are present for the autopsies.
The medical examiner is methodical in his work during the four-hour autopsy procedures. There is very little talking; they discuss only what is essential.
Captain Webster coordinates the exit strategy meeting with Rear Admiral Richard M Larrabee (hand on chin), NTSB Chairman Jim Hall, and NTSB Managing Director Pete Goelz (leaning on table)
Deep sea Navy divers prepare to descend 116 feet to the Atlantic floor to retrieve the remains of John, Carolyn, and Lauren
As Coast Guard Commander of Group Woods Hole on the western edge of Cape Cod, Webster (left) served as Incident Commander for Operations
‘There is no other extenuating conversation going on in the room, compared to other cases that I have worked on,’ remembers Ciaccio. ‘In all my years of doing autopsies and everything, this was probably one of the most solemn I was ever a part of.’
It is determined that John, Carolyn, and Lauren were killed instantly from numerous traumatic injuries when the Saratoga slammed into the Atlantic.
Toxicology tests on JFK Jr reveal no alcohol or drug use.
‘You never want to make these things personal,’ adds Ciaccio. ‘But I think what made this very difficult for a lot of us is what we knew of the person. The two others in the room told me afterward they visualized this little boy saluting his father, the president, when he had died. It was very solemn. We knew what our job was.’
The question of the condition of Kennedy’s body has been answered yet remains controversial.
The story I was told at the time of the tragedy was that JFK Jr’s legs were folded up into his chest cavity, and this was revealed during the medical examiner’s autopsy.
Others concur. ‘The report I received was that he had been jammed up, so that he was basically compressed from the impact. But everything was there. It was just mashed together,’ says the USS Grasp’s commanding officer, Eric Anderson. [Grasp was the Navy rescue and salvage ship that led recovery operations.]
The NTSB’s forensic anthropologist, Frank Ciaccio, as noted before, witnessed the autopsies: ‘I will tell you 100 percent that [the report that Kennedy’s legs were missing] is false. His legs were not severed.
‘His legs were in fact fragile and hanging on by tendons and muscles. But they were not amputated at all.’
This account differs from that of Navy diver Josh Benjamins.
Benjamins is one of two divers on the second plunge a few hours after the three deceased were respectfully recovered.
According to Benjamins, he and his diving partner are briefed by the master diver during the safety check process. The two are tasked with retrieving the plane wreckage and the engine. Unofficially, however, they are to undertake ‘a quick search for the legs.’
Benjamins says the first set of divers did a quick check but didn’t see any body parts.
Benjamins and his partner descend. They first search for human limbs. Finding none, the divers set to work hoisting the fuselage and, minutes later, the engine.
A flag flies at half staff at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port on July 19, 1999
The public mourned the deaths, creating a makeshift shrine outside their apartment building in New York
Family members embrace at the burial service
Benjamins insists, even after all these years, that what he had heard that day was that ‘[Kennedy’s] torso up was all they had’ before he was placed in the body bag.
‘They both [the divers below] had actual physical hands on him, and they both had done multiple body jobs before. They went on record saying, “We know for sure that only his upper half was recovered,”‘ Benjamins will recall.
‘Somewhere the story changed,’ he says.
From Tuesday through Thursday, Navy divers continue to recover items at the wreck site, Benjamins recalls. This is to be the Navy’s last plunge in recovery efforts.
Always in pairs, this last set of divers goes for the larger remnants first: bits of wreckage like parts of the wings. When big items are placed in the salvage basket, the divers reach for smaller things, digging through sand and silt in the low light. They come up with watch bands and CDs and hats.
Something else is discovered: a chunk of scalp tightly wrapped around an air diving hose. Benjamins, then a mere 23 years old, is manning the communications microphone when word of the discovery reaches him.
‘Hey, Topside, we have this substantial size scalp with long blonde hair wrapped around our umbilical [the communications hose that acted like a lifeline to above]. What do we do?’
Benjamins recalls turning to a senior diver and relaying the message.
‘No, you didn’t,’ is the reply – in other words, no, you didn’t see anything of the kind.
The divers untangle the tissue and convey the locks to the currents.
‘So, in all our wisdom mindset, [we thought] what was the difference? They did a ceremony, they put them at sea, let them go to sea.’
The last physical part of Carolyn remaining on Earth had its own burial at sea the same day her ashes were conveyed to the nearby depths.
Taken from The Last Flight by Captain W Russell ‘Russ’ Webster and Theresa Mitchell Webster. Copyright © 2026 by William Russell Webster and Theresa Mitchell Webster. Used by permission of Harper Select, an imprint of HarperCollins Focus, LLC.
