Bizzare confession

Kennedy dumped dead bear cub in Central Park

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

(Bild: APA/Las Vegas Sun)

Almost ten years ago, a dead bear cub in New York's Central Park caused a mystery. The animal lay there in 2014 with severe wounds - its head was on the back wheel of a bicycle. Now the independent US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has admitted that he was responsible for the incident.

The discovery caused confusion in October 2014 - a walker and her dog had found the dead black bear cub. It was terrible and very strange, explained the discoverer Florence Slatkin at the time and wondered: "Why was the bike there?" Investigations revealed that no black bear from nearby zoos was missing; the animals are not native to Central Park.

In 2014, Florence Slatkin showed where she had made the gruesome discovery.

(Bild: Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Kennedy describes incident in video
This mystery has now been solved - presidential candidate Kennedy, of all people, admitted to having something to do with the incident. In a video that he published on the X platform, he explained that he had placed the bear in the park. With this step, he wanted to pre-empt an article in the "New Yorker", which wanted to uncover this bizarre case. Kennedy explained that this was a "bad story".

Here Kennedy explains how the bear cub ended up in the park:

Kennedy wanted to recycle carcass
According to his confession, Kennedy had taken the bear with him when he was on a falconry expedition through the Hudson Valley in New York. The animal had been run over by a van - Kennedy had intended to skin and eat it. But he wouldn't have had time to do so because he had a flight to catch.

"We thought it would be amusing"
Some of his group - in a drunken state - then had the idea of leaving the carcass in Central Park and making it look as if the bear had been hit by a bicycle. He happened to have the old vehicle in his car. "We thought it would be amusing," the presidential candidate justified himself. "The next day it was on all the TV stations," Kennedy told actress Roseanne Barr in the X video. "I just thought: 'Oh my God, what have I done?"

He was worried because the bike was covered in his fingerprints, he said. "Luckily the story calmed down after a while," says Kennedy.

Kennedy comes from the US political dynasty of the same name. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, he is favored by eight percent of voters and is considered to have no chance. However, as every vote could potentially count in the election in November, his participation could become a problem for the Republican and Democratic candidates, even if Kennedy would only take a few voters away from them.