FBI investigating note that was allegedly stolen from RFK family

DALLAS - A newspaper reported yesterday that the FBI was investigating a "stolen" handwritten condolence note from Jacqueline Kennedy to Ethel Kennedy written shortly after Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 assassination.

The Dallas Morning News reported that investigators and Kennedy relatives suspected the note was taken from Robert and Ethel Kennedy's home in McLean, Va. The note, which has changed hands several times and has sold for as much as $25,000, opens with "My Ethel."

"You must be so tired," Jackie Kennedy wrote. "I stayed up till 6:30 last night just thinking and praying for you."

Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in Los Angeles during his presidential campaign. The undated note appears to have been written after his funeral on June 8, 1968.

The two-page note made its way in 2006 to Heritage Auction Galleries, a Dallas auction house, where it was consigned by a Massachusetts lawyer. One of Robert Kennedy's sons told the FBI that his family had never given or sold the note.

"It's a personal possession of my mother and obviously extremely personal," Max Kennedy, a lawyer and author who lives in Los Angeles, said Friday. "I think most people would be heartsick if it happened to them."

FBI spokesman Mark White said the note was considered "a stolen good." Agents used a search warrant to seize it Aug. 27 from the auction house, which says it has been working with the Kennedy family to facilitate the letter's return.

Steve Ivy, chief executive officer of Heritage Auction Galleries, said yesterday that Max Kennedy contacted the auction house when Heritage publicized the letter's existence for an auction not long after it was consigned there in July 2006.

Ivy said that the FBI contacted Heritage and that his auction house had cooperated with authorities.

"We speculate it took the FBI three years to turn it over [because] they had an investigation they had to conduct," Ivy said.

"We're delighted that the FBI finally is in the process of returning it to the Kennedy family, where it belongs," James Halperin, co-chairman of Heritage, told the Associated Press. "We were just waiting for them to show up."

FBI Agent John Skillestad's probable-cause affidavit details the path the letter may have taken from Virginia to Dallas. The Morning News reported that Russell Thomas Nuckols, a plumber who once worked at the Kennedy home, died Jan. 10, 1999. Nuckols' son Thomas found the letter in his father's papers, according to the Skillestad affidavit.

The son contacted the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston about the letter, but apparently got little interest. Attempts yesterday to reach Thomas Nuckols were not immediately successful.

According to the affidavit, Thomas Nuckols did not contact the Kennedy family. Nuckols sold the letter to John Reznikoff, a Connecticut dealer, for $6,000.

Reznikoff said Nuckols told him Ethel Kennedy had boxed up some belongings one day and told his father he could haul them away.

However, the affidavit said Thomas Nuckols was "dumbfounded" upon discovering the letter and "did not know how it came into his father's possession."

Eventually the letter made its way to the Dallas auction house. Richard P. Goodkin, a lawyer in Framingham, Mass., had bought the letter, valued at between $25,000 and $30,000, from a Massachusetts businessman.