His death was announced by the Gately Funeral Home in Melrose, Massachusetts.
Markham, a former U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, had a long legal career. He prosecuted organized crime figures, including Raymond Patriarca, the boss of the New England Cosa Nostra. He was part of the Justice Department team in 1968 that prosecuted Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famed child-rearing expert, on charges of advising young men on how to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. (Spock was convicted but the verdict was overturned on appeal.)
But Markham, a longtime Kennedy family friend, was perhaps best known for having been swept up in the tragedy known as Chappaquiddick, named for a tiny island off Martha’s Vineyard.
On July 18, 1969, Kennedy drove off a bridge on the island in an accident that killed the young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, and effectively derailed his presidential ambitions. The name of the island would enter the political lexicon as shorthand for a permanent stain on Kennedy’s character, despite the subsequent achievements of his long Senate career.
That night, Kennedy and Kopechne had been at a party that included the “boiler room girls” — the women, of whom Kopechne was one, who had worked on the 1968 presidential campaign of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Kopechne, 28, and Ted Kennedy, 37, left the party early. With Kennedy behind the wheel, they plunged off a small bridge into a tidal pond. The car turned upside down. Kennedy surfaced but Kopechne did not.
Kennedy said later that he had dived “into the strong and murky current” multiple times in a vain attempt to extract Kopechne from the car. He then made his way back to the party, where he collected a cousin, Joseph F. Gargan, and Markham, who had recently stepped down as U.S. attorney.
The three drove back to the scene.
“Up to this time, I didn’t know what the accident really was, and I remember saying, ‘Holy God,’” Markham testified at an inquest.
He said that he and Gargan had stripped down and dived repeatedly for about 45 minutes to try to reach Kopechne. They were unsuccessful.
They then told the senator that he had to report the accident, and he agreed to do so. According to testimony at the inquest, Kennedy instructed the men not to tell the others at the party about what had happened, and they parted. Kennedy would make 17 phone calls, but none to the police.
The next morning, the car and Kopechne’s body were found by a fisherman and his son, who alerted the police.
Markham said at the inquest that he had been astonished to learn that Kennedy did not immediately report the accident to the police, and that a “heated conversation” between the two had ensued.
Almost 10 hours after the accident, Markham and Kennedy went to the Edgartown Police Department, on Martha’s Vineyard. The senator dictated a statement to Markham, who took it down in longhand and gave it to the police chief.
Kennedy pleaded guilty a week later to leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence, was placed on probation for one year and had his driver’s license suspended for a year.
A month after Kopechne’s death, her mother, Gwen Kopechne, told reporters that she thought that Markham and Gargan should have gone to the police themselves and that their failure to do so immediately “invited all kinds of awful speculation.”
Numerous questions from that night — Had Kennedy and Kopechne become romantically involved? Did he really take a wrong turn, as he maintained? Did alcohol play a role? Why didn’t he report the accident? — remain unanswered. Now, with the four principals dead, the full story may never be known. (Kennedy died in 2009, Gargan in 2017.)
In an interview with The New York Times 10 years after the incident, Kennedy said he had ordered Markham and Gargan not to go to the police “because I was the responsible person in the accident and I felt I should report it.” But he did not do so immediately, he long maintained, because he was too shocked and confused in the aftermath of such a traumatic event.
Paul Francis Markham was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on May 22, 1930, to James E. and Mary (Fitzgerald) Markham. His father, a lawyer, worked in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration overseeing seized assets in World War II. His mother, a former model for the Jordan Marsh department store, was a homemaker.
Paul grew up in Washington and attended Georgetown Preparatory School. He studied economics at Villanova University, dropped out to serve in the Coast Guard and then resumed his studies, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1955. He graduated from Boston University School of Law in 1958.
He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar that year and worked at a personal injury law firm before becoming an adviser to the Small Business Administration.
Markham was appointed assistant U.S. attorney in 1964 by Robert F. Kennedy, who was the attorney general at the time. Markham ascended to the top job of U.S. attorney in 1966 and remained there until 1969, when Richard M. Nixon became president. He resigned to work in private practice and retired in 2004.
He is survived by his wife, Claire Markham; four daughters, Ellen, Jane and Susan Markham and Mary Soldati; two sons, Paul and John; and 10 grandchildren.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.