Watch: Robert F Kennedy Jr admits to dumping dead bear in Central Park

From claiming that doctors found a worm in his brain to fending off reports that he had taken a bite out of a dog carcass in Korea, Robert F Kennedy Jr has emerged as one of the most eccentric presidential candidates in US history.

In the latest surreal disclosure, Mr Kennedy has admitted dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, New York City solving a riddle which has puzzled locals for a decade.

The 70-year-old son of assassinated presidential candidate Robert Kennedy confessed to the prank, which entailed leaving a bicycle at the scene to make it look like an accident, in a campaign video late on Sunday night.

Mr Kennedy, whose recent poll ratings have slumped, said he had been forced to publish the video to get ahead of a story due to be published in the New Yorker magazine.

“Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one, @‌NewYorker…” Mr Kennedy posted with a video of himself at a kitchen table talking to Roseanne Barr, the comedian.

The New Yorker published its piece on Monday morning with a never-seen-before picture of Kennedy with his hand in a bear cub’s mouth as the animal lay dead in the back of his car.

The incident raises yet further questions over the controversial Independent challenging Donald Trump and Kamala Harris for the White House.

But it also settles a long-running mystery over the bear cub found in the city’s park in 2014.

Reports from the time suggest the bear was found under some bushes by 79-year-old Florence Slatkin while walking her dog. Next to it was the bicycle.

“The mouth was open and it looked bloody,” she told the fascinated press.

The bear became the subject of an investigation by the Police Department’s animal cruelty squad and taken away for analysis by the conservation department’s wildlife health unit.

The New York Post quoted police as believing the baby bear was likely “murdered”.

Elizabeth Kaledin, a spokesman for the Central Park Conservancy, said in a statement at the time: “The news that a dead black bear cub was found in Central Park is beyond upsetting.”

By the next day the circumstances around the bear’s demise had become clearer.

Mr Kennedy’s niece Tatiana Schlossberg, a journalist at the time for the New York Times,  reported that authorities had concluded it had been by a car.

“But so many questions remain unanswered: How did the bear end up in Central Park? Was there foul play involved? Did she die in the park, or was she dumped there?”

The LA Times was ready to consign the story to the pantheon of bizarre animal tales in the city. Among them, the man who kept a 425-pound tiger in his flat until it bit him. And the venomous cobra who went on the loose after escaping from the Bronx zoo.

There the story would have stayed had it not been for the New Yorker, which decided to write a profile on the presidential candidate.

Clearly there had been gossip suggesting that Mr Kennedy, who has a reputation for eccentricity, may have been involved.

One of the magazine’s fact checkers put the tale to him and Mr Kennedy opted to confess on video.

According to Mr Kennedy he picked up the bear after it had been hit by a woman in a van as he was driving towards the Hudson Valley.

“So, I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear, and it was in very good condition, and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator,” Mr Kennedy told Barr in a video at a kitchen table.

“And you do that in New York state. You can get a bear tag for roadkill bear.”

Things did not go quite according to plan. With Mr Kennedy running late after a day’s falconing and then dinner at the Peter Luger Steakhouse in the city, he had to go to the airport and did not have time to go home and put the bear carcass in the fridge.

“And the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” he said.

“So, then I thought, you know – at that time this was the little bit of the redneck me – there’d been a series of bicycle accidents in New York. They had just put in the bike lanes and so a couple of people were getting killed and it was every day and people were badly injured every day, it was in the press.”

Thinking quickly, he says he dumped an old bike which he also had in the car alongside the dead bear.

The next day all hell broke loose.

“It was like it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper and I turned on the TV and there was like a mile of yellow tape and there were 20 cop cars, there were helicopters flying over it.

“And I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I do?’ And then there were some people on TV in Tyvek suits with gloves on lifting up the bike and they’re saying they’re gonna take this up to Albany to get it fingerprinted,” he said.

“And I was worried because my prints were all over that bike.”

The New Yorker’s subsequent article said he had come across the dead bear while driving in upstate New York, and loaded it into his car to “show off to his friends”.

The piece continued: “A person with knowledge of the event said that Kennedy thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist.”

When The New Yorker asked him about it, he replied: “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm.”|

He has previously claimed that doctors have found a dead worm in his brain. A legal deposition over a divorce said: “He sought treatment and said in the deposition two years later that a doctor told him the issues could be ‘caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died’.”

Mr Kennedy has also recently been forced to deny that he took a bite out of a dog carcass on a trip to Korea.

The presidential candidate reportedly posed with the barbecued remains of a dog in a photo taken in 2010 – the same year he had the tapeworm removed from his brain.

In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, Mr Kennedy, who is a strong anti-vaxxer who has repeated numerous conspiracy theories, was favoured by 8 per cent of voters, a significant fall in recent weeks. He has yet to qualify for the ballot in many states ahead of the Nov 5 election, but his inclusion could be critical to a very tight election.

Any charges he may have faced for dumping the dead bear in the park would now fall outside the the state’s statute of limitations.