At this point, it’s useful to examine what precisely Kennedy said about the incident in his August 2024 video, in which he is speaking with, for some reason, Roseanne Barr.
“I was taking a group of people falconing up in Goshen, New York, up in the Hudson Valley,” Kennedy says. (Goshen is in Orange County, NY, home to a bear population that Hynes theorized the cub may have belonged to.) “And then a woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it.”
Kennedy claims that he put the bear in his van with a plan to “skin the bear” and “put the meat in my refrigerator,” because she was in “very good condition.”
“And you can do that in New York State; you can get a bear tag for a roadkill bear,” Kennedy adds.
He and his friends had a wonderful time falconing, Kennedy says, and the day grew late. Eventually, he found himself running behind for a trip “right back to the city” for dinner at Peter Luger Steak House—presumably the original location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, rather than its Long Island location—and decided he didn’t have enough time to drop off the bear at his Westchester, New York, home. So the bear came to (apparently) Brooklyn. But when Kennedy’s dinner also ran long, he realized he had to go to the airport.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” Kennedy says, insisting for the second time that he was absolutely not breaking any laws that day. “I had an old bike in my car that somebody had asked me to get rid of. I said, ‘Let’s go put the bear in Central Park, and we’ll make it look like he got hit by a bike.’ It’d be fun, funny for people.” He explains that there had been “a series” of fatal bicycle accidents around that time—there had been two in recent months—which inspired the idea.
In the video, Kennedy claims that he was surprised to wake up the next morning and find that the story of a dead baby black bear in Central Park was big news—again, bears do not live in Central Park outside of its zoo—and had prompted a major law enforcement response. What made Kennedy especially anxious, he claims, was a news report that said the bike was being sent to a forensic lab for fingerprinting.
As HellGate summarized shortly after Kennedy’s video was posted, “???????????”
Despite the new documents that WIRED is able to disclose, there are lingering questions about the decisions Kennedy made that day in 2014. Let’s review the timeline: The bear was discovered on the morning of Monday, October 6, 2014. If Kennedy indeed disposed of the bear the night before, that would have been Sunday, October 5, 2014.
Kennedy claims that he found the bear in the Hudson Valley area on a road approaching Goshen, New York. Stopping in Westchester on his way to Peter Luger would have added about 35 to 70 minutes to the trip. Perhaps, even if he was meeting friends familiar with his purported love for animal carcasses (his daughter once alleged he decapitated a dead whale with a chainsaw, strapped its head to the top of his minivan, and brought it home, though a subsequent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration investigation said her claim was “unfounded”), he would’ve been unacceptably late. But why couldn’t Kennedy have just abandoned his mission to skin and butcher this baby bear by placing it in a wooded area anywhere between Goshen and New York City, especially knowing that he had a flight later? Only one man knows the answer.