When the granddaughter of assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy died in 2019, the world once again pondered what is known as the Kennedy family ‘curse’. Saoirse, 22, reportedly died of a drug overdose, possibly linked to her depression. The details remain murky, like many of the events surrounding the Kennedy family history.

Here are nine other painful secrets and skeleton buried deep in the family’s closet, including three curious murders.

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Rosemary Kennedy's lobotomy‍

Rosemary Kennedy was the eldest daughter of the dynasty, and her parents feared her learning disability and low IQ were the cause of great trauma. That, coupled with Rosemary’s attractiveness, made the young woman a target for men on the prowl. It was a dangerous combination. Rosemary’s father, Joseph Kennedy, arranged a frontal lobotomy when she was 23, hoping it would reduce her anxiety and depression. Instead, the procedure left Rosemary completely disabled and she was institutionalized in the 1940s. Her condition remained a secret for decades.

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Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, life with a cheating husband‍

JFK’s mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was born into a political family. Her father was the mayor of Boston and he didn’t approve of her boyfriend and future husband, Joseph, whom she’d met at age 17. They dated secretly, married on the eve of WWI in 1914, and raised nine children - but there were many heartbreaks and infidelities to follow. Even at age 60, Joseph was flaunting his affair with his 24-year-old secretary in front of Rose, who tolerated his cheating with the help of tranquilizers, according to Ronald Kessler, author of The Sins of the Father.

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Senator Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick

A deadly incident at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts in July 1969 haunted Ted Kennedy for the rest of his life. The senator was at a party with Mary Jo Kopechne and the two were driving later that evening when Kennedy’s car careened off a bridge and into the water. Instead of calling the police or knocking on a nearby neighbor’s door, Kennedy consulted his lawyer and friends before returning to his hotel. Kopechne’s body was recovered in the car the next morning. Decades later, Police Chief Dominick Arena, who charged Ted with leaving the scene of the accident, still wondered why the senator waited so long to report what happened: “I’ll never understand why he left Mary Jo in the car for 10 hours before he reported the accident.” Kennedy received a two-month suspended sentence.

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Michael Skakel’s murder trial‍

Michael Skakel, a cousin of the Kennedys, was convicted of beating his neighbor Martha Moxley to death with a golf club in 1975, when they were both 15 and living in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Connecticut Supreme Court eventually overturned the murder conviction and ordered a new trial however, on the grounds that Skakel’s lawyer had not provided effective representation. Exactly 45 years after Martha’s body was found under a tree, prosecutors announced there would be no second murder trial. As it had taken 25 years for Skakel to be convicted initially, many witnesses had since died and memories had faded. In 2020, prosecutors said it would likely be impossible to get a second conviction as a result. Skakel maintains his innocence.

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President John F. Kennedy - like father, like son‍

Although JFK cultivated the media profile of a devoted family man, he was by all accounts a prolific philanderer. JFK’s rumored affairs included movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich - among many others. One of his long-standing lovers was Judith Campbell, an ex of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, who claimed she was used as a courier for packages between JFK and the mafia. Jackie, aware of JFK’s infidelities, reportedly met with her father-in-law, who offered her $1m to stay quiet but Jackie bartered for a better deal.

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Jackie Kennedy’s short-lived engagement to a stockbroker

Jacqueline Bouvier was initially engaged to marry a stockbroker, John G. W. Husted Jr. The American stockbroker grew up in England and joined the American Field Service in WWII. When he graduated from Yale and began working as a stockbroker (much like Jackie's father) he met his match. The attraction was instantaneous and they were engaged within a month, according to Barbara Leaming, author of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story. They were supposed to marry in June 1952 but the whirlwind romance wasn’t to last. Author J. Randy Taraborrelli said Jackie’s mother convinced her to drop Husted because he didn’t make enough money. Jackie is said to have ended the engagement by putting the ring in Husted's pocket. He later described his fiancé as ‘ice cold, like we never knew each other’.

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Robert Kennedy’s assassination‍

Bobby Kennedy put his career on hold to help his brother’s election campaign and was rewarded with the job of Attorney General, but it would be a difficult role. In the months after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, JFK wanted Bobby to oversee Operation Mongoose, a campaign of terrorist attacks and covert operations aimed at removing Cuba’s Fidel Castro from power. Millions were spent building secret bases, training spies, and plotting operations - there were at least eight failed attempts on the communist leader’s life. By 1968, Robert was a candidate in the Democratic Party presidential primaries when he was shot dead in Los Angeles. While a Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Sirhan confessed and was convicted, there was little credible evidence that he was the shooter or that he acted alone, sparking many conspiracy theories.

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Who killed JFK?‍

It’s the secret that has launched 1,000 books and even more conspiracy theories. One of the intriguing theories involves Lee Harvey Oswald and his visit to Mexico before Kennedy’s death in 1963. Was Oswald there to finalize assassination plans and plot his escape from the US after the shooting? Oswald visited the Cuban and Russian embassies on his six-day trip but accounts vary as to why. The mystery of JFK’s assassination has stumped the world’s greatest minds. Why not decide for yourself which of these 10 theories may be true?

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Jackie Kennedy’s heartbreak

When Jackie, still wearing her blood-stained Chanel suit, returned to the White House at 4 am on November 23, 1963, she quietly confided her deepest fears to her personal assistant, Providencia Paredes. “She was scared,” Paredes told People. “She cried and she said, ‘I thought they might kill me too.’” Jackie didn’t want her children to suffer, however, so she kept her pain to herself and threw John Jr. a birthday party hours after his father’s funeral, fulfilling a promise she’d made earlier. “They were so young,” Parades said. “She did not want them to be sad.” Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who guarded Jackie during the Dallas motorcade and later in New York, said the first year after the assassination was challenging: “She didn’t have the same radiance as before. But she grew stronger. She was already thinking about his legacy. She was always thinking ahead.”