What Happened to Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s Engagement Ring?

Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy is a wedding fashion icon for the ages; the first to wear and popularize the big-day slip dress, her streamlined sartorial legacy lives on nearly three decades after she and John F. Kennedy Jr. tied the knot in a secret ceremony on Cumberland Island in Georgia on September 21, 1996. Much like her wedding gown and overarching personal style, Carolyn’s engagement ring was simple and subtle. John gave her the eternity band, composed of oval-shaped diamonds and sapphires, in 1995; according to many reports, the piece was modeled off of his mother Jackie Kennedy’s “swimming ring,” a gold and emerald band (an alleged gift from the first lady’s longtime jeweler and friend Maurice Tempelsman) that his future bride was particularly fond of, per Vogue.

The origin of Carolyn’s ring, however, is a bit clearer than its current whereabouts. Much depends on whether or not the publicist and socialite was wearing her engagement ring on the night of her tragic death on July 16, 1999. She was killed on impact when the plane her husband was flying—the couple and Carolyn's older sister, Lauren, were en route to a wedding on a hazy night—hit the Atlantic Ocean; after divers recovered their bodies several days later, all three were cremated, per a Washington Post timeline. This rules out the possibility that Carolyn was buried with her engagement ring, but it doesn’t account for whether or not the piece was lost to the sea during the crash.

It's quite possible, however, that Carolyn wasn’t wearing the ring that fateful night; according to The Adventurine, she was regularly photographed without it, preferring to wear her simple gold wedding band on its own, instead. But if the fashion icon’s engagement ring wasn’t irreparably damaged or lost during the plane crash, where, exactly, is it now?

Unfortunately, the answer isn’t crystal clear. Some reports allege that the piece remained in the Kennedy family and that it was inherited by Caroline Kennedy, John’s sister, specifically. That’s definitely a possibility, when you consider the inheritance pattern of the rest of the late attorney's estate and assets, which were estimated between $30 to $100 million, per Fox Business; his sister’s children, who were all under the age of 18 at the time, were named in his will to inherit their uncle’s Tribeca apartment and his share of his mother’s Martha’s Vineyard estate, along with cash, furniture, and other family mementos. Could those family mementos have included his bride’s engagement ring? And could the piece have passed into his sister’s temporary care until her daughters, Rose and Tatiana Schlossberg, came of age? Today, both Rose and Tatiana are married, though it’s unclear if either of them are in possession of the ring.

There’s one other possibility: The lone surviving Bessette sister, Lisa. In the aftermath of Carolyn and Lauren’s deaths, tensions between the Bessette and Kennedy families rose, resulting in a wrongful death suit; a judge ultimately ruled that it was John’s error that caused the crash (he didn’t have enough pilot experience to navigate the poor weather conditions on the night of the flight). Though it’s unclear how the $15 million settlement was paid out, it’s possible that the engagement ring was baked into the deal—or simply inherited by the last Bessette sister (Carolyn's will, if she had one, has never been made public, though). As of a 2019 report, Lisa lives a life off the grid in Michigan, where she works part time as a contract editor at the University of Michigan Art Museum, per the New York Post.