An upcoming biography exploring the tumultuous life of Robert F. Kennedy Jr reveals new details surrounding his failed marriage with his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, and her 2012 suicide – including a medical examiner’s report that left her doctor with questions about her intentions.

RFK, Jr: The Fall and Rise by investigative reporter Isabel Vincent, examines Mary’s final months and details how RFK Jr discovered his then-estranged wife hanging in the barn of their Bedford, New York home on May 16, 2012, at age 52. The couple had four kids together: Conor, Aidan, Kyra and William.

“It was Kennedy, accompanied by Mary’s friend Shannon White, who found her body in the barn after the housekeeper alerted him that Mary was missing. It was Kennedy who made the 911 call,” Vincent writes.

“Mary’s remains were taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office. The report noted her fingers were caught between the neck and the noose when she was found dead. Maybe she really didn’t want to die,” Mary’s doctor said upon learning of that detail, according to Vincent.

White later told police that RFK Jr had called her that morning, worried about Mary and concerned “she may have hurt herself.”

No suicide note was ever publicly confirmed to be found, although Vincent details a frantic search by Mary’s siblings hours after her death that resulted in RFK Jr being asked to leave the property.

“Hours after her death, when some of her siblings showed up at the house and rifled through her drawers, desperately searching for a suicide note, they were met by Kennedy and his brother Chris,” Vincent reports. “The Richardsons asked the Kennedys to leave and a confrontation ensued.”

“You have killed my sister,” Mary’s sister Nan Richardson told RFK Jr, according to the book.

Mary’s last years were marred by a painful divorce she did not want, working on her sobriety after a DUI arrest, allegations of abuse and neglect levelled by RFK Jr and the cold shoulder from the Kennedy family, the biography claims.

“I think that she was without her career, without her children, and with the fear of losing her children, and I think that was very upsetting to her,” Vincent tells People.

Vincent reports that Mary had obtained some of RFK Jr’s diaries, which the now-US health secretary has admitted to keeping as part of his decades-long recovery journey after struggling with addiction earlier in his life.

“Mary did not want a divorce, and she did not want to lose custody of her children,” Vincent wrote. “Following her arrests, she diligently attended AA meetings and continued with her yoga classes but most of all she pored over Kennedy’s diaries.”

“In many ways, she was trying to reassure herself that she had been married to a chronic philanderer for nearly 20 years,” Vincent added in the book.

By the time of Mary’s death, RFK Jr was seeing Cheryl Hines. The pair later married and remain together more than a decade later, even as public allegations of infidelity have continued to follow him to Washington as he enacts his Make America Healthy Again agenda on behalf of President Donald Trump’s administration.

“My source said she was very upset about it, particularly when Hines started putting on social media all about how much the kids were bonding with her,” Vincent tells People. “And that really hurt her because she was in a situation where he had threatened to take the children away because she had all of these problems with substance abuse and was just going through a very hard time. So that, I was told, was truly devastating.”

Mary was initially buried next to Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver at Saint Francis Xavier Cemetery in Centerville, Mississippi, not far from the Hyannis Port centre of the Kennedy universe. A few days after her burial, however, the man who married her into the Kennedy family moved her remains to an unmarked grave at the edge of the cemetery.

• A Tell Media report / Source: People