JFK Jr and Carolyn ‘had marital problems’

JOHN F Kennedy Jr and his wife Carolyn were having marital problems and were living apart when they died in a plane crash in July 1999, a new book claims.

Edward Klein says Kennedy and his wife differed on whether to have a family, on drug use, on Kennedy’s outgoing lifestyle and on their Manhattan apartment.

His book, The Kennedy Curse, is excerpted in the August issue of Vanity Fair magazine. In it, he quotes friends of the couple as saying that at times, both feared the other was cheating.

Mr Kennedy married Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island, Georgia, in 1996.

Three years later, Mr Klein says, they began marriage counselling.

But after four months, Ms Bessette Kennedy stormed out when the therapist mentioned her drug use.

She began sleeping in a spare room at the apartment and Mr Kennedy, “on the verge of calling it quits,” moved into the Stanhope Hotel on Fifth Avenue.

On July 16, 1999, Mr Kennedy, 38, his 33-year-old wife and her 34-year-old sister were killed when the single-engine plane he was piloting crashed in the ocean near Martha’s Vineyard.