26 Years Later: THE TRUTH ABOUT JFK JR.'S MARRIAGE

MORE THAN TWO DECADES AFTER THEIR TRAGIC DEATHS, THOSE CLOSEST TO JOHN F. KENNEDY JR. AND CAROLYN BESSETTE OPEN UP ABOUT THE MYSTERIES THAT STILL SURROUND THEIR FRACTURED FAIRY TALE.

- 

John "lived and breathed Carolyn," an unnamed friend told author Edward Klein. The pair were snapped mid-argument in 1996.

THEY were blissfully happy. Descending the wooden steps of the tiny First African Baptist Church on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, John F. Kennedy Jr. couldn't take his eyes off his new wife. He and Carolyn Bessette, dazzling in a slinky bias-cut Narciso Rodriguez slip dress, “came out of the chapel and John reached, as a prince would, for the hand of his bride and brought it to his lips and kissed [it],” Denis Reggie, the brother-in-law of the late Senator Ted Kennedy — and the only photographer on the September 1996 wedding’s 35-member guest list — recalled to Today more than two decades later. As Denis captured the moment, “there was a magic there,” he remembered. “You can see [it] in Carolyn’s face, surprise and elation and love and romance and all those wonderful things.”

Less than three years later, that hopeful beginning ended in tragedy. On July 16, 1999, the Piper Saratoga plane 38-year-old JFK Jr. was piloting plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Massachusetts’ Martha’s Vineyard, instantly killing him, Carolyn, 33, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, 34. Investigators determined the son of the late President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — who many will forever remember as John-John, the little boy saluting his assassinated father’s coffin — suffered from spatial disorientation on the foggy night en route to cousin Rory Kennedy’s wedding.

GREAT CATCH Considered one of America's most eligible bachelors in the 1980s and '90s, John dated Daryl Hannah, 64, Sarah Jessica Parker, 60, and Brooke Shields, 60, and was linked to Madonna, 66, and Sharon Stone, 67, before he met Carolyn.