It was Jean Kennedy Smith’s turn to have the house in Palm Beach.

The winter had been a time of mourning. Her husband, Stephen, died of cancer in August 1990.

But it was Easter now, a time of renewal. The children would be down.

There was Stephen Jr., a lawyer teaching a course at Harvard; Kym, a high school senior; Amanda, a Harvard graduate student; and Willie, 30, a medical student at Georgetown. Willie would take one quick holiday with his family before the final crush of medical board exams and, if all went well, the start of his residency as a doctor in New Mexico.

In a family well acquainted with violent and untimely death, Stephen Smith’s slow, painful one was wrenching in its own way. His death created a leadership vacuum in the clan. Although an in-law, Smith had succeeded family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy in managing the family’s businesses, its political successes and its crises, including the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident in which Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in Sen. Edward Kennedy’s car after it plunged off a bridge.

For Easter, Jean Smith invited her brother, the senator, and his son, Patrick, a Rhode Island state legislator.

Willie Smith arrived on Thursday evening, March 28. The senator and Patrick Kennedy had arrived the day before, kicking off the festivities by leading the other male houseguests to a nightspot called Au Bar.

Patrick Kennedy invited a woman home that night. But when it came time for her to leave, about 4 a.m., she apparently was too drunk to drive. Patrick had caretaker Dennis Spear take her home, packing his bicycle in the trunk so he could ride the 10 miles back to the estate.

On Good Friday, there were more than 20 for lunch by the pool. Daiquiris, a Kennedy lunchtime tradition, preceded lobster salad, shrimp salad, tossed green salad and a cold noodle dish prepared by 80-year-old Nellie McGrail, who began service of the family under matriarch Rose Kennedy. And there was wine — a case of it consumed throughout the afternoon.

That evening the young Kennedys played charades before heading to a place called Lulu’s for dancing and champagne. They made it an early evening.

But about midnight, as Patrick and Willie settled into twin beds in the room they shared, the senator roused them for a nightcap.

— A 29-year-old Jupiter woman swept her hair back in a twist and put on a chic, black Ann Taylor dress, black nylons and heels. A single mother with a daughter almost 2, she was eager for a night on the town with friends.

Her girlfriends had planned a casual evening of television and take-out dinner, but when the woman showed up at Anne Mercer’s house all dressed up, Mercer relented. She poured them a glass of red wine, changed her jeans and made reservations at the Palm Beach restaurant her boyfriend’s father owned.

They dropped by another friend’s home on the way. Sipping another glass of wine, they “sat around and discussed baby stuff, you know, talked about new babies … and how wonderful her little boy was and how great my girl is,” the woman said later.

After dinner, Mercer’s boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, suggested Au Bar. “We must go down there ’cause that’s the hopping place,” he said.

“It had been since December since I’d been out, and I was having a nice time,” the woman later said. “It was nice to get away from my Mommy role.”

At Au Bar, she bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

— Teddy Kennedy ordered a Chivas Regal scotch and soda and he and Patrick took a table near the dance floor. Smith wandered off, literally bumping into the Jupiter woman as she looked for the ladies’ room. Over the music, he introduced himself as William. He asked her to dance. She accepted.

He introduced her to his uncle and cousin, but it took a few minutes for her to realize who they were.

“I said, ‘You must think I’m pretty much of a ditz for not recognizing your uncle as Ted Kennedy,”‘ she said later, “and (William) said that, no, he found that refreshing.”

Meanwhile, Teddy Kennedy and Mercer became involved in what one bystander described as a “little kabob.” The senator thought Mercer had slighted his son. Mercer thought the Kennedys were commandeering her table.

Teddy Kennedy stormed out, with Patrick following. When Smith looked around for them, they were gone. He asked the woman for a ride home. She agreed.

She wanted to trust William. He was the first man she had met since having her daughter, an experience that left her an unmarried mother — and leery of men. William listened to her talk about her daughter. He passed her tests, showing her his driver’s license when she asked, understanding the medical terms she dropped to see if he really was a medical student.

“I feel safe around medical people …,” she said later. “They saved my daughter’s life.”

After the quick ride to the mansion, she pulled her black Mazda convertible into the parking lot at the house and they kissed goodnight. Then Willie asked her if she wanted to go inside, maybe take a walk on the beach.

They walked through the house, past the senator and Patrick talking in the kitchen, and out the back door toward the ocean.

“We were kicking around the sand like a Publix commercial,” she said. “I’d met somebody who I thought could become a friend. You know, it was just nice, and we kissed a couple of times. … It seemed very innocent to me.

“And then he asked me if I wanted to go swimming.”

She thought that an odd idea. The water was cold, it was dark and she couldn’t swim.

“And he started to take his shirt off, and then he started to unzip his pants.”

She turned her back, deciding it was time to leave.

“I’ve had a nice night with a nice guy,” she remembered thinking as she climbed the beach stairs. “It would be nice if he called again, but, hey, let’s be realistic, he’s a Kennedy.”

As she reached the last step, she felt a hand on her ankle pull her to the ground, she later told police. Without realizing what was happening, she jerked free and started running across the lawn, looking for the way out. But she was tackled again near the pool, she said.

“He was on top of me … pressing into my chest with his body and I couldn’t move. … I remember feeling my dress go up around my hips and my waist,” she told police.

“And I was yelling, ‘No!’ and to stop and he wouldn’t. .. I couldn’t figure out why, why he wasn’t stopping and why nobody was helping me.”

She said she squirmed from beneath him and ran toward the house. She was afraid to go inside, but she could hear him calling her name. In the kitchen, there was a small space between a water cooler and a pantry door. She crouched there.

“I couldn’t move because I thought if I moved to get out, he would find me.”

On the counter, she could see a portable phone.

“I know I was thinking that these are the Kennedys. These are political people and … maybe they owned the police.”

She grabbed the phone and dialed Mercer’s number.

— When the cousins awoke on Saturday, Patrick asked Willie about the woman, “How was she? … Did you wear protection?”

Willie and Patrick did not talk again about the preceding night, or tell other family members.

“It all seemed sort of surreal,” Patrick said. “And that didn’t fit into the context of a new day that was bright and that we had had a tennis game scheduled for.”

That afternoon, they met another young woman walking her dog on the beach. Smith asked her to see a movie that night and he asked for her phone number. Peggy Scheid declined both requests, so Smith gave her his phone number, insisting that she repeat it first so she would not forget.

— For the Jupiter woman, the hours after she left the Kennedy estate were a blurred race of thoughts and motion. She could not sleep at Mercer’s. She worried about her daughter, that the Kennedys would somehow harm her. She wanted to be alone at her home where she had a burglar alarm. She wanted her daughter there, but it was too early to go to her mother’s to pick her up. She had to calm down, she thought, so she called the rape hotline for advice.

“She was crying and she said, ‘I was raped,”‘ said Barbara Parks, a volunteer who took the call.

When Parks referred the woman to a counselor, the woman begged her, “No, don’t hang up. Please don’t hang up. … I trusted him.”

The rape counselor convinced the woman she should go to police.

Barefoot, wearing shorts and a borrowed Madonna concert T-shirt, she pulled her knees to her chest as the Sheriff’s Office detective coaxed her story from her.

The next step was a medical examination. The woman said she was tender in the ribs. When Dr. Rebecca Prostko suggested an X-ray, the woman “exhibited extremely regressed behavior,” Prostko said. “She curled up in a ball on the table and said, ‘I can’t believe this happened to me.”‘

After the exam, the woman had to go to Palm Beach to tell detectives there what happened.

Her first statement to Detective Christine Rigolo was a jumble of run-on thoughts and memory gaps. She remembered the events of the night, hiding in the pantry, seeing a phone and calling Mercer to come pick her up.

But there was a troubling blank in her memory. After calling Mercer, the next thing she remembered was being in another room, possibly a study, with Smith denying that he had raped her.

Patrick Kennedy later said the woman left the estate during that time. Smith had walked the woman to her car. When he returned with Patrick to the house, the woman was there. “‘Do you want to talk?”‘ Patrick heard his cousin ask as he showed her into the study.

There were other inconsistencies in the woman’s statements. In her hysterical blabbering to Mercer, she said something about being raped twice, and that “he was watching.” Later when police asked her, she did not remember saying these things.

In the course of four interviews with police, some pieces came together. She remembered taking things from the house, a notepad and photograph, and getting Desiderio to take an urn. No one would believe her otherwise, she said.

She remembered why she thought that too.

“No one will believe you,” she recalled Smith telling her in the study. “He just sat there like he’d just got done watching a football game or something. He just very calmly said, ‘No, I didn’t rape you,’ and I said, ‘Yes, you did rape me,’ and he said, ‘Well, either way, no one will believe you.”‘

— Jean Smith was to make a quick trip to an arts benefit in New York after Easter, then return for another two weeks in Palm Beach.

But only reporters went to the Kennedy compound after Easter.

On Monday, police issued a news release about a sexual battery at the Kennedy estate. It would be more than a month before any Kennedy would return to Palm Beach, and then it was Smith coming back to be booked on the charges and to declare them a “damnable lie.” He was back again within the month to plead his innocence to a judge.

The woman during that time gave additional statements to the police. And as her story gradually came together, so did her resolve to prosecute.

“I did not want to be raped,” she told police. “I told him no. I told him to stop. I tried to push him off of me and out of me and he wouldn’t stop.

“I don’t care if he thinks nobody’s going to believe me. He raped me.”

—- Staff Writer John Grogan contributed to this report.

KENNEDY ESTATE

William Kennedy Smith is charged with sexual battery and battery after a woman said she was raped at teh Kennedy estate on March 20. Here are some of the details surrounding the event:

1. Jupiter woman and Smith arrive at the parking lot of the compound about 3 or 3:30 a.m. They enter the house, then go to the beach.

2. Smith invites woman for swim, but she declines. When Smith begins to disrobe, she leaves.

3. Woman says that as she is walking up the stairs from the beach, her leg is grabbed from behind. She breaks free and runs toward the swimming pool.

4. Woman says Smith tackles and assaults her.

5. The woman runs into the house and hides near the pantry. She calls a friend, tells her she has been raped and asks the friend to pick her up.

SPECTATORS’ GUIDE

The William Kennedy Smith trial:

— OPENING DAY: 9 a.m., completion of jury selection followed by hearing on pretrial motions; 1:30 p.m., opening statements.

— DAILY SCHEDULE: 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., with 20-minute recesses in the morning and afternoon and an hour for lunch. Court will be in session on Saturday, Dec. 7, if not subsequent Saturdays.

— WHERE: Courtroom 411, County Courthouse, 300 N. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach.

— SEATS: Sixteen spectator seats available. Tickets, valid through the morning or afternoon sessions only, will be issued in Room 123 to the first 16 people in line 15 minutes before each court session. Spectators may leave during testimony, but may not return until the next break, unless that break is lunch. In that case, they must get another ticket for the afternoon session.

— LOOKING ON: For those who just want to see Smith and his entourage, look for them arriving or leaving the courthouse. The best bet is to come around noon or 6 p.m., times when they are likely to talk to the media. Go to the area between the courthouse and parking garage, which is set up by the media for interviews.

WHO’S WHO

Sketches of the principal figures in the rape case involving William Kennedy Smith.

WILLIAM KENNEDY SMITH

Age 31. Charged with sexual battery and battery. Son of Jean Kennedy Smith and the late Stephen Smith. Nephew to John F. Kennedy and Sen. Edward Kennedy. Graduated Duke University with history degree, Georgetown University medical school.

THE ACCUSER

Age 30. Raised in Ohio. Moved to Jupiter with mother and stepfather, retired millionaire industrialist. Worked at Disney World’s accounting department, law office in Winter Park. Is single mother of 2-year-old daughter.

SEN. EDWARD KENNEDY

Age 59. Elected in 1962. Unsuccessfully sought Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. Questioned and cleared in investigation into obstruction of justice after the March incident at the estate.

PATRICK KENNEDY

Age 24. Rhode Island state representative since 1989. Son of the senator, cousin to Smith. Graduated with honors in May from Providence College.

ANNE MERCER

Age 32. Friend of accuser and daughter of Leonard Mercer, former owner of Fort Lauderdale’s Galt Ocean Mile Hotel and Ta-boo restaurant in Palm Beach. Sold story of night’s events for $25,000 to television tabloid A Current Affair.

CHUCK DESIDERIO

Age 34. Mercer’s boyfriend. Former manager of Renato’s restaurant in Palm Beach, and son of owner.

JUDGE MARY LUPO

Age 44. Palm Beach County Circuit Court. Elected in 1984. Served in civil division until transferred to criminal division in January. Law degree in 1974 from Georgetown University. Served as domestic relations commissioner and prosecutor before being elected to county bench in 1978.

MOIRA LASCH

Age 40. Assistant state attorney. A prosecutor in Palm Beach County for 14 years, now serving as chief of felony division. Named Florida Prosecutor of the Year for gaining convictions against Robert Spearman and two men he hired to murder his wife, West Palm Beach Assistant City Manager Anita Spearman. Received her law degree from the University of Maryland.

ROY BLACK

Age 46. Defense attorney. Partner in Miami firm of Black & Furci. Defended Miami police officer William Lozano, winning a new trial on two manslaughter charges stemming from January 1989 killings that sparked civil disturbance in Miami. Successfully defended Miami Officer Luis Alvarez, acquitted in a similar killing that sparked racial riots in December 1982. Received his bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Miami.

CHRONOLOGY

Events of Easter weekend, compiled from witnesses’ statements to police and attorneys:

FRIDAY, MARCH 29

— 10 p.m.: The Jupiter woman, Anne Mercer and Mercer’s boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, dine at Renato’s in Palm Beach.

— 10:30 p.m.: William Kennedy Smith, Patrick Kennedy and friends go to Lulu’s restaurant in Palm Beach.

— 11:45 p.m.: Smith and Kennedy go home. (Smith’s sister, friends and undercover officer Mariellen Norton put their departure as late as 1:15 a.m., possibly 2 a.m.)

— About midnight: Woman, Mercer and Desiderio go to Au Bar in Palm Beach. Sen. Edward Kennedy rouses his son Patrick and nephew Smith for a drink.

SATURDAY, MARCH 30

— 12:30 a.m.: Kennedys and Smith arrive at Au Bar.

— 1:30 a.m.: Senator and Patrick Kennedy leave Au Bar after an argument with Mercer.

— About 2:15 a.m.: Smith notices his uncle and cousin have left and gets woman to give him a ride.

— 3-3:30 a.m. (estimated): Woman and Smith go through house to walk on beach. Smith invites her to swim, but she declines. Smith starts to disrobe and woman turns to leave. As she walks up stairs, woman’s leg is grabbed from behind. She breaks free and runs, but says Smith tackles and rapes her.

— 3:30-4 a.m. (estimated): Woman runs into house and hides by a pantry door. She calls Mercer, says she has been raped, asks Mercer to pick her up.

— 4:20-4:25 a.m.: Patrick Kennedy walks guest Michele Cassone to her car, watches Smith say goodbye to someone, who then drives away. Patrick Kennedy and Smith walk back inside, find woman is back, Patrick says. Smith asks if she wants to talk, invites her into study, Patrick says.

— 4-4:30 a.m. (estimated): Woman says Smith pulls her into study, denies raping her, says no one would believe her claim. She leaves house, too upset to drive, she says.

— About 4:30 a.m.: Mercer and Desiderio arrive at Kennedy estate. Woman and Desiderio take photograph, legal pad, urn. The three leave shortly afterward.

— 9 a.m.: Woman calls rape hotline.

— 11 a.m.: Woman goes to Sheriff’s Office. Smith and Patrick Kennedy eat breakfast, talk about previous night.

— 2:32 p.m.: Woman undergoes rape exam at Humana Hospital.

— 3:30 p.m.: Woman goes to Palm Beach Police Department, where police technician Peggy Irvine photographs a bruise on her leg and detective Christine Rigolo takes first taped statement.

— 7 p.m.: Rigolo interviews Mercer and Desiderio.

— 8:30 p.m.: Kennedys have dinner, followed by game of charades.

SUNDAY, MARCH 31

— 9 a.m.: Sen. Kennedy, Patrick Kennedy, Smith, his mother Jean Smith and friends go to Mass.

— 1:30 p.m.: Lunch at Kennedy estate.

— Palm Beach police arrive, asking for Smith and the senator. Family friend William Barry says they are gone. Housekeeper Jean Saba later contradicts Barry, saying Smith and senator were at lunch.

— 2:15 p.m.: Smith leaves for airport.

— 2:30 p.m.: Police Sgt. Keith Robinson telephones senator. Housekeeper says he and Smith are gone to airport. The senator is still in town, though.

— 6 p.m.: Barry tells Sen. Kennedy and Patrick Kennedy about the sexual assault allegation, Patrick says.

MONDAY, APRIL 1

— 8-8:30 a.m.: Sen. Kennedy flies back to Washington.

— 10:30 a.m.: Police make first public statement about rape report.

— Noon: Jean Smith and Patrick Kennedy leave Palm Beach. Sen. Kennedy says he first learns about rape allegation from family attorney.