"I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear and put the meat in my refrigerator," Robert Kennedy Jr. said in a video posted to social media.
The mystery of how a dead bear cub ended up in New York's Central Park has been solved and the culprit is third-party presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr.
A photo from nearly a decade ago of Kennedy posing with his fingers in the mouth of a dead bear cub was unearthed by The New Yorker magazine Monday. Kennedy admitted his role in the mystery.
Kennedy, an independent candidate for president, posted a video to social media telling Roseanne Barr that he and others dumped the body of a female black bear cub in Central Park in 2014.
"A woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it. A young bear," Kennedy said. "This was the little bit of redneck in me."
In 2014, Florence Slatkin, then 79, told Inside Edition how she and her dog Paco discovered the dead bear in Central Park.
Slatkin spoke with Inside Edition on Monday. "Now if he didn't hit it, why'd he keep it a secret," she says.
Police and wildlife experts could not figure out how the bear ended up in the park and the case quickly went cold.
Kennedy said that the bear was killed by a car upstate.
"I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear and put the meat in my refrigerator," Kennedy said.
Kennedy and his friends spent the day hunting with falcons.
"I said let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like he got hit by a bike," Kennedy said. "The next day, it was on every television station. It was the front page of every paper. I was like, 'Oh my God what did I do.'"
The confession has triggered outrage.
"It's just so disrespectful and shows a real lack of any kind of compassion for animals and very poor judgment," animal rights activist Edita Birnkrant tells Inside Edition.
The news comes a month after Kennedy had to deny eating a dead dog while on vacation in Patagonia. He says it was a goat.
