For nearly a quarter-cenury after 15-year-old Martha Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club in the exclusive Greenwich, Connecticut, enclave of Belle Haven, police were stymied. Finally, last winter, Michael Skakel, son of a wealthy neighbor and nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was indicted for murder. Dominick Dunne, who based his best-selling A Season in Purgatory on the crime, charts his fateful involvement with the case: a rumor heard at the William Kennedy Smith trial, a growing friendship with Martha’s mother, shocking revelations by two informants—and a town that still may hold secrets about a girl’s violent death.
BY DOMINICK DUNNE
They were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
On October 30, 1975, a 15-year-old girl named Martha Moxley was viciously bludgeoned to death in the most exclusive part of Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the most exclusive communities in the United States, where rich people live in grand mansions on lush grounds and go to country clubs and yacht clubs and always feel perfectly safe. The girl’s body was dragged 60 or 80 feet and left under a pine tree near her parents’ house, where it was discovered the following day by a schoolmate.
The only thing that said Greenwich about the crime was that the murder weapon was a No. 6 Toney Penna golf club. Martha was struck so hard that the shaft broke into four pieces, only three of which were discovered at the scene of the crime. The grip part, which might have had fingerprints of the perpetrator on it, has never been found. The killer used one of the pieces, which had a sharp point, as a dagger and stabbed Martha Moxley through her neck.
For a lot of people in Greenwich, it was inconceivable that one of their own kind could have committed such a heinous crime. They talked about how some awful transient must have come in from Interstate 95 and killed the poor girl. Behind closed doors, however, a lot of people in Belle Haven, as the exclusive enclave is called, firmly believed that the perpetrator was most likely one of the brothers who lived in the beautiful residence of Rushton Skakel, a widower with six unruly sons and a daughter and a staff consisting of a tutor, a nanny, a cook, and a gardener. Tommy Skakel, then 17, was the last person to be seen with Martha, and they were roughhousing. Rushton Skakel’s very rich family had been residents of Greenwich for three generations. Martha’s parents had been residents for only a little over a year. For a quarter of a century, the murder has gone unsolved. This is not a step-by-step account of the case. This is a mini-memoir of my part in this story many years later.
In 1991, when I was covering the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in West Palm Beach for Vanity Fair, a rumor circulated around the courthouse that Willie Smith had been an overnight guest at the Rushton Skakel house in Greenwich the night Martha Moxley was killed. Although Tommy Skakel, the second son, had been considered a suspect for years, no charges had ever been brought, and the case was at a standstill. In the end the rumor turned out to be bogus; Willie Smith had not been in the Skakel house that night. But my curiosity had been aroused. “What ever happened to that case?,” I asked someone I knew in Greenwich. “Nothing,” I was told. At that point, 16 years had gone by since the murder. “Remind me of exactly what happened,” I said.
A young girl was beaten to death with a golf club that belonged to a set of clubs in the Skakel house. The Skakels had always enjoyed a bad reputation, and Tommy was thought to have been involved. “What happened to the family of the dead girl?,” I asked. They moved away. Then the father died. “Where’s the mother?” Annapolis, Maryland, was the answer. Her name was Dorthy Moxley. Somehow I felt drawn to this woman. I wrote her and asked if I could come and see her. I said I wanted to talk about her daughter’s murder. In those days she was media-shy. She did not ask me to her house. Instead we met at a coffee shop in the Baltimore/ Washington airport. I asked her why she had moved away from Greenwich, since that meant there was no one there to keep the case alive. She said she could not bear to look out her windows at the Skakel house. As she described it, I called it a house of secrets. She said she didn’t know who had killed her daughter, but she was sure that someone in that house either had done it or knew who had. She told me that the day after the murder there were limousines with out-of-state license plates parked in the Skakel driveway. In 1988 she and her husband, David, who was then head of the New York office of Touche Ross, moved with their son. John, to New York. After her husband died and her son married, Dorthy Moxley moved to a condominium in Annapolis.
I had just written three best-selling novels in a row, and they had all been made into TV mini-series. I told Mrs. Moxley that I thought I could write another based loosely on her daughter’s murder, since no facts were known publicly at the time, and it might turn a spotlight on the long-dormant case. She said she wasn’t sure. Then I told her that I too was the parent of a murdered daughter. Our daughters had been born a year apart, and each was viciously attacked by a man she knew on October 30, although in different years. That moment marked the beginning of our friendship. She said O.K., I could write the book.
I changed the murder weapon to a baseball bat, because I didn’t want to be sued by the Skakels. I also changed the family makeup a bit and gave some Kennedy touches to the Skakels, whom I called the Bradleys. I threw in a little of my own large Irish Catholic family, too. All of this was for libel reasons. A Season in Purgatory came out in 1993, and it made the bestseller lists. The CBS Evening News did a long segment on how the book had helped to revive interest in a 1975 murder case in Greenwich, Connecticut. Martha Moxley was soon back in the news, and I was on television quite often talking about her murder. I learned that in certain houses in Greenwich the subject was being discussed again for the first time in years. But no one came forward.
During my book tour for A Season in Purgatory, a tall, handsome, well-dressed African-American woman came up to me in the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver and said that she had information about the Moxley case. We met later at the Brown Palace Hotel. She was a forensic psychologist, and early on she had been hired by the Greenwich police to work on the case. For some reason, which she did not explain, she either left or was let go. She had with her the autopsy pictures of Martha Moxley’s body, which no one but the police had ever seen. They were large photographs, about 11 by 14 inches, and simply awful to behold. It is one thing to discuss being bludgeoned by a golf club; it is quite another to see the effects of such an attack. One of the blows had taken off a portion of the right side of Martha’s scalp, which was hanging by a piece of skin down over her face. You could see the wound where a short, pointed piece of the shaft had been stabbed into the side of her neck. In one full shot you could see that her jeans had been pulled down. I felt faint. “He had to have been drunk, or stoned, to have done that to her,” I said, not wanting to see any more. I felt that this woman, whose name I did not write in my notebook—at her request—and which I subsequently forgot, knew more than she was telling me. But I liked her. I trusted her. As she was leaving, she said, “It wasn’t Tommy.” She repeated it. Up till then, Tommy Skakel had been the major suspect in the case. I was convinced that he had done it, and had said so on television. Her words haunted me.
Back home at my house in Connecticut after the book tour, I was visited by several members of the police team involved in the Moxley case, including Frank Garr, who had played a major part in the investigation from the beginning. They brought me a Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice coffee mug, a Connecticut State Police plaque for my wall, and a Connecticut State Police T-shirt. They asked me to stop criticizing the police work on the case, which I agreed to do. They said it wasn’t helping in their ongoing investigation. In the pleasant conversation that ensued, I happened to mention that I had seen photographs of the autopsy. They looked stunned. I said someone had shown them to me in Denver. I saw them look at one another, very upset. “She stole those pictures,” one said to another. I do not know the mystery behind that story, but there certainly is one. All my attempts to track down my informant have come to naught.
In May 1996, an excellent mini-series of A Season in Purgatory, produced by Aaron Spelling, David Brown, and Buzz Berger, was telecast on CBS. The network publicized the show every day for a week before it went on, saying it was based on an actual crime in Greenwich, Connecticut. Newspaper stories talked about the real murder in relation to the mini-series. People were soon discussing the case regularly and openly, but there never seemed to be any progress in solving it.
Seven months after the miniseries aired, an extraordinary thing happened. I had a call at my New York apartment from Bernice Ellis, the receptionist at Vanity Fair, who, along with her other duties, monitors calls that come in for the magazine’s writers. She knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff. “It’s about the Moxley case,” she said. “I think you should talk to this guy”
I did, and we made a lunch date for the next day at Patroon, a restaurant on East 46th Street. Carrying a manila envelope, he came into the restaurant wearing jeans and a T-shirt. That wasn’t quite the dress code for Patroon, but they let him in. I hadn’t imagined, talking to him on the phone, how young he was going to be. He was 24, but could easily have passed for 17. A recent university graduate and fledgling author, he had already had an article published in a national magazine. This is the story he told me.
In 1991, Rushton Skakel, wanting to take the spotlight of suspicion off his sons, had hired a private-detective service in New York called Sutton Associates to investigate Martha Moxley’s murder. The agents, who were all former detectives or police officers, signed confidentiality agreements never to reveal anything they learned in the course of their investigation. They were given access to the seven Skakel children and were guaranteed cooperation in a way that the Greenwich police never had been. During the process, Michael Skakel, who had never been a suspect, because he had an alibi that he had been at a cousin’s house watching a Monty Python movie at the time of the murder, changed his story completely. He told the detectives that he had climbed a tree outside Martha’s bedroom window and masturbated. The agency worked for nearly three years on the assignment. My source told me that the bill for the private investigation was $750,000, and I have subsequently heard a figure even higher than that. When it came time to give the results to Skakel, the agency knew it had to put all its findings into a cohesive report that he could read and digest. Through a friend, the young recent graduate got the job of putting the detectives’ findings—from psychiatric reports to interviews—into a narrative form, with a time line and profiles of Skakel family members.
When the report was presented to Rushton Skakel, it indicated that Tommy had not killed Martha Moxley. Michael, the fourth Skakel son, who had never been a suspect, had in all probability killed her. The report suggested that Tommy may have helped his brother move the body. Michael and Tommy were very competitive and fought constantly. Michael had a crush on Martha, so Tommy moved in on his territory. That was the way they behaved. Rushton Skakel, an acknowledged alcoholic, was presumably undone by the findings. He paid the agency, and the report was stashed away, never to see the light of day. But the young man with whom I was having lunch had become emotionally involved in the story he was hired to put together. It was my perception that he had developed an enormous sympathy for Martha Moxley and her mother, and that he was outraged that justice would not be done, that money could make a difference even in a case of murder. Because he was hired several years after the private detectives, no one had thought to have him sign the confidentiality oath. He had read my book and seen me on television, so he secretly appropriated the report and called me at Vanity Fair. Sitting there in Patroon, he handed me the Sutton report.
He was deeply frightened that something bad could happen to him, he said, and he had reason to be. I promised that I would never reveal his name. My plan was to take the report to my house in Connecticut and read it slowly over the next few days before deciding how to deal with the amazing information it contained. But I didn’t keep my word. Before I left for the country, hoping to buoy up Dorthy Moxley’s spirits, I told her I was in possession of some incredible news. I learned from this experience that everyone tells a secret to at least one person, and Dorthy, in her excitement, did just that. The person she told, apparently jealous of my stash, called Sutton Associates and said that some kid who worked for them had given Dominick Dunne the Skakel report. Confronted, the young man felt betrayed and frightened. I felt awful for having caused him so much anxiety.
Rushton Skakel had attended Canterbury, the Catholic boarding school in New Milford, Connecticut, which was then for boys only. I also attended Canterbury. Rushton, or Rush, as he was called, was a few years ahead of me, although I did not know him or even remember him until I saw him at Robert Kennedy and Ethel Skakel’s wedding in Greenwich, Connecticut, on June 17, 1950. I was there not on a direct invitation from the Skakels but as the date of my then girlfriend, Barbara Cahill, who had been a classmate of Ethel’s at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, the school of choice for proper Catholic girls from rich families. We arrived from New York by yacht for the wedding and reception. I remember being dazzled by the beauty of the Skakel estate, on Lake Avenue. The bridesmaids were Skakel sisters and Kennedy sisters and a cousin of Ethel’s. It was the first time I ever saw Rose Kennedy, the wife of the former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. She wore a silk dress from Paris and carried a parasol of the same material. She was the absolute queen of Irish Catholic society, and people stepped back as she made her way through the nearly 2,000 guests, greeting friends and meeting strangers. Jack and Bobby Kennedy, the best man and groom, in cutaways, already possessed the glamour and looks that were shortly to fascinate the nation. From every point of view, it was a marriage made in heaven, except that, even then, there was backstage trouble between the Skakel and Kennedy families, which exists to this day.
The Skakel money was from Great Lakes Carbon, once one of the largest privately held companies in the world. The Kennedy fortune came primarily from liquor. By some reports, the Skakels were even richer than the Kennedys. Ethel’s father, George Skakel, despised Bobby’s father, Joe Kennedy. In his book The Other Mrs. Kennedy, Jerry Oppenheimer quotes Skakel referring to Joe Kennedy as “low-life, Irish trash.” This love-hate relationship between the families is also mentioned in a book proposal that Michael Skakel wrote in 1998, almost two years before he was indicted for the murder of Martha Moxley. He writes that his maternal grandfather “was betrayed, slandered, and vilified” by Joseph Kennedy.
The Skakels are right up there with the Kennedys in the tragedy department. Ethel and Rushton’s parents were killed in a private-plane crash in 1955. Their brother George was also killed in a plane crash, and his wife choked to death on a piece of meat at a small dinner party. Rushton’s son Tommy, the longtime suspect, was thrown from a moving car when he was four and sustained severe head injuries. Rushton’s wife, Ann Reynolds Skakel, died an agonizing death from cancer in 1973, leaving him to raise his unruly tribe of six sons and a daughter. One of Ann Skakel’s golf clubs was the weapon that killed Martha Moxley.
A lot of people wanted to get their hands on the Sutton report, but I wasn’t willing to share it until the right person came along. My assistant, Arthur Gorton, hid the report so that even I wouldn’t know where it was in the event that a wrong person would come after it. In time I gave a copy to Greenwich detective Frank Garr, because he asked for it. It surprised me that I never heard a word from him after that. It’s not the sort of report you read and dismiss. Despite some of the startling information in it, nothing advanced the case as a result of Garr’s having it. Eventually I came to the conclusion that nothing ever would.
Then another extraordinary thing happened. I received a telephone call from Lucianne Goldberg, who was then a literary agent and whom I had known since I covered the 1984 trial of Claus von Bülow for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, in Providence, Rhode Island, for Vanity Fair. The call came several months prior to the arrival in Goldberg’s life of Linda Tripp, with her salacious tales of Monica Lewinsky, blow jobs in the Oval Office, and a semen-stained dress that almost changed the course of American history. Goldberg had become the literary agent of Mark Fuhrman. After he exited from the O. J. Simpson trial in disgrace, Fuhrman had written a book called Murder in Brentwood, a fascinating account of the Simpson case from a detective’s point of view, which had become a best-seller. Fuhrman will always be a controversial character, but he also happens to be one of America’s great detectives. Goldberg said she was looking for an unsolved murder on which Fuhrman could next turn his detective skills for another book. It was a magic moment. “The Moxley case,” I said excitedly. “I have some incredible information that I will give him.”
In some accounts of this story it has been said that I became friends with Mark Fuhrman during the Simpson trial. That is not true. Although I was present in the courtroom each time he appeared on the witness stand, I never spoke a word to him. In fact, I had the same hostile feelings toward him back then that everyone who didn’t want to see race brought into that case had. I met him for the first time through Lucianne Goldberg. I took him to lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, and people practically fell off their banquettes trying to get a look at him. He came up to my house in Connecticut, where I gave him the Sutton report, and we talked through the case. I called Dorthy Moxley, who agreed to meet with him. He was excited about the story and eager to go to Greenwich and check things out.
I gave a cocktail party for him. I’ve always admired cops, and I hate to see the way they are treated on the stand by defense attorneys at murder trials. I invited several of the local cops and their wives, as well as some O.J. junkies among the weekenders who wanted to meet the famous—or infamous—Mark Fuhrman. I also called to invite Frank Garr, thinking he would be thrilled that another book on the case was in the works. He wasn’t thrilled at all. He declined to come to the party and said he was writing his own book on the case. I was surprised at that, considering that nothing had been accomplished in 22 years. Garr now claims that he was not invited to the party and that he never planned to write a book about the case. What I realized from that call, however, was that Fuhrman was going to get a hard time from the Greenwich police.
I have never regretted giving the Sutton report to Mark Fuhrman, even though it bothered some people greatly. I knew that he would be able to run with the powerful material in the report. Fuhrman is an attention-getter, and people have strong feelings about him. A lot of people hate him, but plenty of others admire him. He was a ruined man after the O. J. Simpson trial, while the man I believe to be the killer of two people walked free. In that courtroom, the charismatic lawyer Johnnie Cochran mesmerized people into believing that to say the n-word was a worse crime than to slit the throats of two people. To me, the two things don’t compare in any way, and I knew for sure that the n-word would never pass Mark Fuhrman’s lips again. Extremely articulate, he knows how to handle himself on television. Nothing throws him. One of television’s great nights was when Fuhrman took on F. Lee Bailey, his tormentor at the Simpson trial, on Larry King’s show. He wiped the floor with Bailey, who had done jail time since the Simpson trial, and who had been taken off after his arrest in leg-irons. I knew that Fuhrman would get on all the television shows and make the name Martha Moxley known throughout the land. He so pissed off the Greenwich police that they virtually kicked him out of town. Everything he did was in the news. He was fearless in his statements about Michael Skakel’s being the killer. And I firmly believe that his book Murder in Greenwich, for which I wrote the introduction, is what caused a grand jury to be called after 25 years.
Stephen Carroll, a detective present at the murder scene in 1975, is one of the heroes of this story. Now retired, he has had an enduring passion to see Martha Moxley’s killer brought to justice. Carroll was one of the few members of the Greenwich police—perhaps the only one—to understand that Fuhrman had the power to make something happen after all those years. Other police officers stopped speaking to Carroll, and he failed to get a seat at the hearings in Stamford this past June, possibly on the grounds that he would be a witness at the trial.
Among the guests at the cocktail party I gave for Mark Fuhrman was a friend of mine, Connecticut state trooper Conrad Winalski, who appears as a character in my novel Another City, Not My Own. Like a great many cops, he is an admirer of Fuhrman’s, and he was up on the details of the Moxley case. Months later, on May 2, 1998, Winalski was on desk duty at the police station in Westbrook, Connecticut, when a man came in carrying a woman’s pocketbook he had picked up on the side of the road along Interstate 95 in nearby Groton. There was a name and telephone number in the bag, and when Winalski called, the owner was thrilled that her bag had been found. For some reason she had placed it on the roof of her truck, and it had blown off when she drove away. Winalski thanked the man who had turned in the pocketbook and asked for his name so that he could enter it into the field notebook. His name was Michael Skakel.
Winalski, shocked, looked at him. “Do you know who I am?” asked Skakel. Winalski said yes, he had read a book about the case. “By that fucking asshole Dominick Dunne?” asked Skakel. He also had some choice names for Fuhrman. Winalski did not tell him that he knew us both. He later quoted Skakel as saying, “If I had time, I’d tell you exactly what happened. You’ll find out. I’m writing a book about it. It’ll come out in eight or nine months.” He was in an amiable, chatty mood, according to Winalski, and he went on to say that he was clean and dry. Winalski said Skakel then said, “Better than anyone, Dunne should know. He’s an alcoholic. He goes to meetings. He understands.” Skakel told Winalski, “People thought I was retarded when I was younger. I went to 13 schools. Finally they found out I was dyslexic.”
The night before Michael Skakel was indicted, I had a call from Dorthy Moxley. Over the years, since our first meeting at the Baltimore/Washington airport, she and I have become friends. My admiration for her strength and sense of purpose in seeking justice in her daughter’s murder is limitless. She said that she had never thought this day would come. “You started it, and I’ll never forget,” she said. We had a little cry over our murdered daughters. She told me I was one of her “angels.” Other of her angels include inspector Frank Garr, Mark Fuhrman, and Newsday reporter Len Levitt, who has pursued the story with fierce determination from the start. Once friendly, he and I had a falling-out over the fact that I gave the Sutton report to Fuhrman, but we are on the same side and always have been. Our friendship was restored during the hearings on the case in Stamford in June. One day I needed a ride to the railroad station, and he offered to drive me. He lives in Stamford and was on his way to watch his son play in a baseball game. I told him a story about my granddaughter, and soon all was right again.
The night before the indictment, I also talked with Fuhrman, who was in New York to appear on Good Morning America and Geraldo Rivera’s show. He said that the great irony was that the Sutton report, for which Rushton Skakel had paid so much money in order to have his son Tommy’s name cleared, was the very thing that had brought about Michael’s indictment. Without it, the case would have been whispered about but ultimately forgotten, as it almost was back in 1991, when I first went to see Dorthy Moxley. A few days later, Good Morning America hired Fuhrman to be a commentator at the upcoming trial and announced it in the papers. A few days after that, ABC fired him. I knew from Fuhrman’s writing partner, Steve Weeks, that he was devastated. He returned to his home in Idaho.
When the hearings were under way, I saw Charlie Gibson, the co-host with Diane Sawyer of Good Morning America, at show-business reporter Claudia Cohen’s farewell party for Kathie Lee Gifford at Swifty’s restaurant. Several of the ABC hierarchy were there. During dinner, Gibson asked me across the table if Mark Fuhrman was at the hearings. I said no. “Was it because of us?” he asked. “I think so,” I replied. He said the reason the show had let Fuhrman go was that there had been complaints from minority members in the news department. He said the situation had been badly handled—things should have been checked out before Fuhrman was offered the job. Although Fuhrman’s extraordinary work on the Moxley-Skakel case has brought about a redemption in his life, there will always be some who can never forgive him.
Fuhrman’s mention of the Sutton report, the night before Michael Skakel’s indictment, made me remember the young man who had removed it from Sutton Associates and given it to me four years earlier. I had never heard from him again, or ever revealed his name, although another writer petulantly did in a book he wrote on the case. I was not sure if he still lived in New York. I dialed the number I had in my notes and recognized his voice on the answering machine. Calling him by his first name, I left a message saying, in effect, “Michael Skakel is going to be indicted tomorrow in Stamford. I want you to know that I consider you the hero of this story. You’re the one who made it happen. What you did was very brave.” About a week later, he left a message on my machine thanking me.
A fascinating and tragic side figure in this story is a man named Ken Littleton. In 1975 he was a 23-year-old graduate of Williams College who taught science and coached sports at the exclusive Brunswick School, which three of the Skakel boys attended. He was hired by Rushton Skakel to be a live-in tutor for his sons and help curb their wild ways. His first night on the job turned out to be the night of the murder.
Early that evening, he took some of the Skakel children to the Belle Haven Club for dinner, since their father was away on a hunting holiday. A few of them, including Tommy and Michael, drank considerably, although they were only teenagers. There is no indication that either Littleton or the club objected. It was the night before Halloween, called “mischief night.” About a dozen friends, including Martha Moxley, went to the Skakel house after dinner. Some of the Skakel boys went over to the house of their cousins the Terriens. No one bothered to check with Ken Littleton whether that was all right, so clearly he was not emerging as an authority figure in the minds of the Skakel brothers. After the body of Martha Moxley was discovered the next day, Littleton became a prime suspect. Nearly a year later he left the house after a falling-out with Rushton, and over the years he was interrogated again and again.
It would have been a great convenience for everyone to blame the murder on the tutor; indeed, the mother of one girl present that evening later went as far as to suggest to the police that Littleton had done it. The experience of that night virtually ruined Littleton’s life. Subsequently he was arrested in Nantucket for grand larceny, breaking and entering, and burglary. He became alcoholic. It is possible that Littleton knew more than he told the police. But there’s one thing I’m sure he didn’t do: he did not kill Martha Moxley.
The woman who pointed the finger at Ken Littleton as Martha Moxley’s killer went to visit Dorthy Moxley at her current home in New Jersey after Mark Fuhrman’s book came out but before Michael Skakel was indicted. She took along her daughter, who had been at the Skakel house the night Martha was murdered. The two women had not seen each other in years. During lunch, the visitor asked Dorthy Moxley, whose friend she had once been, to give up pursuing the case. So much time had gone by, she argued. What good would it do? Hadn’t the Skakels suffered enough? Dorthy Moxley said, “Would you ask that if it was your daughter?” Then the visitors left.
I believe that many people who lived in Belle Haven back then know things about the murder that they haven’t told. I got a call last year from a distraught woman who had just attended her 25th reunion at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich. She was horrified that several of the girls who had been at the Skakels’ house on mischief night in 1975 were talking openly about it, telling what they knew and what their parents had known. But none of them wanted to come forward. Best not to get involved, they all agreed.
Last winter I was stopped on the street on the Upper East Side by a man who told me he used to be a good friend of Michael Skakel’s. “Michael told me he was so drunk he didn’t remember whether he did it or not,” the man said. When I asked him what his name was, he walked away. There was no way I could evaluate his statement, even though it would turn out to be consistent with some testimony given at the trial.
This past July, I was browsing in the Northshire bookshop in Manchester, Vermont. A very good-looking woman came up to me and told me she was from Greenwich. “I read Mark Fuhrman’s book and agree with every word,” she said. “My first husband lived very near the Skakels.” It turned out that I had gone to school with her first husband’s brother. “Do you think they’re going to get this guy?” she wanted to know. At the time, the judge’s ruling on whether the case would go to trial had still not come down. Then she said the most startling thing: “I know where the grip part of the golf club is.” “You do?,” I asked, stunned. “A lot of people in Greenwich know,” she said. “Are you going to tell me? It’s very important,” I said. “No,” she replied and left the store.
Three days after Michael Skakel was indicted, Robert Kennedy Jr. was quoted in The New York Times as saying that I had a vendetta and that Mark Fuhrman was in this for the money. The next day a reporter from the Times came to interview me for the “Public Lives” column. She asked if it was true that I had a vendetta. I do have a vendetta against people who get away with rape and murder, although I knew that was not what Kennedy meant. The reporter had just called Robert Kennedy Jr., she said, and he had told her his cousin was not guilty. My feeling was that Kennedy had brought her around to the same opinion, but I do not know that. She said she had never heard anyone speak as badly about another person as Kennedy had spoken about me. That startled me, because to the best of my knowledge I have never met him, although he has ample reason to dislike me because of my coverage of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial and the many Kennedyesque touches in my book A Season in Purgatory. A Hudson River environmentalist, he is often photographed walking about with a falcon on his forefinger. I asked the reporter what Kennedy had said about me, but she declined to tell me, saying it was off the record.
Robert Kennedy’s defense of his cousin surprised me, as did his subsequent appearance on Skakel’s behalf at the hearings in Stamford. In Michael Skakel’s book proposal, which had leaked into the hands of certain members of the press, myself included, he quotes Robert Kennedy as saying about his brother Michael Kennedy, “Oh, my God, he’s just like Willie,” meaning their cousin William Kennedy Smith. Skakel continues: “Questioned further, he tells me that William Kennedy Smith was guilty of rape, that his acquittal was the result of Kennedy power.” (Robert Kennedy denies having made these remarks.) At times, Skakel’s depiction of the family of Ethel and Robert Kennedy is absolutely lethal, although he is admiring of Robert junior’s return to sobriety, which they did together. The much-gossiped-about book proposal had two titles. One version was called Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean. The second, toned-down version bore the title The Obvious. The proposal, which was submitted to five publishers before Skakel’s indictment, has been scrapped. The book will probably never be written.
When Congressman Joseph Kennedy was planning to run for the governorship of Massachusetts in 1998, he wanted his brother Michael to be his campaign manager. Michael Kennedy ran Citizens Energy Corporation, a nonprofit fund based in Boston which provides heat and fuel for the poor. In Michael Kennedy’s absence, they brought in their cousin Michael Skakel to mind the store. Somewhere along the line, there was a disagreement between the cousins, and Michael Kennedy dismissed Michael Skakel. It is generally agreed that it was Michael Skakel who, in revenge, leaked to the papers that Michael Kennedy was having an affair with a teenage baby-sitter. The news was devastating to the Kennedy family. John Kennedy Jr., then the editor of George magazine, described his cousins as poster boys for bad behavior. Michael Kennedy and his wife, Victoria Gifford Kennedy, the daughter of Frank Gifford, filed for divorce. The father of the baby-sitter, who was a family friend and contributor to the Democratic Party, threatened to sue Kennedy. In 1997, Michael Kennedy was killed in an accident in Aspen while playing football on skis. Joe Kennedy dropped out of the gubernatorial race and later left Congress. “I am a member of a family sick unto death with generations of secrets,” Michael Skakel writes in his proposal.
At a party in New York, I heard from a renowned author with close ties to the Kennedy family that the Kennedys were distressed that Michael Skakel was constantly identified in the press as the nephew of Ethel and Robert Kennedy, because it dragged the Kennedy name into a murder case in which they had no involvement whatsoever. The fact of the matter is, had it not been for the Kennedy connection, this story would not have aroused nearly so much interest. The same person told me that the Kennedys were pressing for a plea bargain so that the case would not go to trial, but that there was a reluctance on the part of Michael Skakel and his lawyer, Mickey Sherman, who seemed sure that Michael would be acquitted. Since my informant had not spoken off the record, I repeated the remarks to several people, and eventually an item appeared in Liz Smith’s column. Sherman called Smith to deny absolutely that there had ever been talk of a plea bargain, which she dutifully printed.
When I arrived at the courthouse in Stamford at 8:30 A.M. on June 28, the word had already been spread to the press by Mickey Sherman that Robert Kennedy Jr. might be attending the session that day. “Maybe even Ethel, I heard,” one journalist said to me, but Ethel was a no-show. Then along came Robert Kennedy Jr. and his brother Douglas. Robert made a forceful statement to the media that his cousin was not guilty. He said, “It is a horrible, unspeakable tragedy, but it only compounds it to blame Michael, who is innocent.”
Kennedy was newsworthy himself that week, because eight of his board members at Riverkeeper, the environmental group he heads, resigned in protest after he secretly rehired a fired board member who had smuggled rare cockatoo eggs into the United States to be hatched and sold as pets. Kennedy sat with the Skakel family during the morning session, gave Michael an in-full-view bear hug at the lunch break, but did not return for the afternoon session. It reminded me of John Kennedy Jr.’s courtesy visit to the William Kennedy Smith trial in West Palm Beach, where he posed for pictures and left, never to return.
Lorraine Murphy, the trial-court administrator who had the terrible job of trying to satisfy the seating demands of the press in the very small courtroom in Stamford, was extremely good to me, and I was well seated for the whole enchilada, never having to share my seat with anyone. Two of my pals from the O. J. Simpson trial were also there. Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote a best-seller about that trial and another about the Clinton impeachment, was covering the hearings for ABC News and The New Yorker. Dan Abrams, who has become a star legal reporter since the Simpson trial, was covering them for NBC News.
For me, one of the most interesting things to observe in a courtroom is the interplay between the families of the victim and the defendant. Dorthy Moxley, her son, John, and daughter-in-law, Cara, her late husband’s sister, Mary Jo Rahatz, the Newsday reporter Len Levitt, and an advocate for Victims Rights sat in the row in front of me. Over the years Dorthy has become very media-savvy, and she is extremely popular with the press. Across the aisle, directly behind Michael Skakel at the defense table, sat the Skakels. Although the Skakel family is famously dysfunctional, four of Michael’s five brothers, his sister, and his brother-in-law gave the appearance of a united family. Tommy Skakel, the longtime suspect, was not present, although his lawyer, Manny Margolis, who has represented him for almost 25 years, was. Michael’s wife was not present. Nor was his father, Rushton Skakel. Rushton, who now lives in Hobe Sound, Florida, with his second wife, did everything possible, including having his lawyers declare him mentally unstable, to avoid testifying before the grand jury. In his book proposal, Michael calls his father an alcoholic and reveals an abiding hatred of him. Curiously, Michael and his wife, the niece of another Skakel lawyer, lived in the same condominium complex in Hobe Sound as Michael’s father, but they have recently purchased a house in Windham, New York, where the Skakel family had a weekend house at the time of the murder.
Because this was a probable-cause hearing, not a trial, there was no jury. It would later be up to the judge, Maureen Dennis, a former public defender, to decide whether there was sufficient evidence to go to trial and, if so, whether the defendant should be tried as a juvenile or as an adult. Skakel was 15 in 1975; he is now 39.
The prosecution called in three former acquaintances from the Elan School in Poland Springs, Maine, who say they heard Skakel confess to the crime. The school, which has a current tuition of nearly $50,000 a year, is, or was, a reform school for the children of the rich. It was a place to send troubled, drunk, drugged kids whose families had given up on them. In addition to whatever else Michael Skakel was, he was a drunk and a drugger when Rushton Skakel sent him there sometime after the murder. When he ran away from Elan, and he did several times, he was always caught and sent back. In his book proposal, Michael Skakel describes Elan as a concentration camp for kids, “where I was subjected to a level of torture deemed unacceptable even for prisoners of war.”
During the hearings, I watched Joe Ricci, the headmaster of Elan, on the Geraldo Rivera show. No tweed sport coat and gray flannels in the New England prep-school tradition for Ricci: he had a shaved head, wore a black shirt and jacket, and sweated noticeably as he answered questions and decried former students of the school who had taken the stand to testify against Skakel. He appeared to be reading his answers off file cards. “I bet Mickey Sherman gave him those answers he’s reading,” said a lady I know, who happens to know Sherman very well. “Doesn’t it sound like Mickey?” Sherman denies having coached Joe Ricci.
John Higgins, who is now 37, described the school as “a place to hide your kids if they bothered you. . . . It was a place for my stepdad to keep me at bay.” After Higgins had been at the school for six months or so, he made the acquaintance of Michael Skakel. They met in their dual roles as “night owls,” guards who kept watch on other students to prevent them from running away. “He related to me he had been involved with a murder,” said Higgins. He said they had talked for a couple of hours. He said that Michael had told him he took a golf club out of a bag and was running through the woods and had a blackout. “He said he didn’t know if he did it. He couldn’t remember if he did it.”
In the jury box, which was in front of me, I could see two sketch artists, who had the best view of Michael, begin excitedly drawing tears on his face. I looked over at him, and although his face was turned away, I could see that he was crying. Soon everyone was staring at him. It was close to lunchtime, and Judge Dennis called a break. As the courtroom began to clear, Michael Skakel stood up and turned to his siblings, his face drenched with tears. His four brothers and his brother-in-law all crowded around him and hugged him. His sister, Julie, who became the mother in the family after their mother’s death, was crying as she kissed Michael on the cheek. Still wrapped together as one, the seven of them moved slowly out of the courtroom into the corridor.
Most people had left the building for lunch. Michael moved away from his siblings, and his face had the look of a man in psychic pain. He leaned forward until he was almost doubled in two, and sobbed uncontrollably. For a moment I thought he might confess. Only once before had I seen a man cry with such utter hopelessness. Jason Simpson, the son of O. J. Simpson from his first marriage, sobbed in that manner on the floor of the courtroom, unable to be comforted by his mother, his sister, or his aunts, on the morning before his father’s acquittal was announced. Later, when my eyes met with Michael Skakel’s, he looked defeated to me. Meanwhile, outside in front of the cameras, Mickey Sherman, in a supremely unclassy moment, with a sneer on his face and a note of contempt in his voice, referred to John Higgins as a moron.
Then a second Elan alumnus, Gregory Coleman, who at the time was in a maximum-security prison in Rochester, New York, for criminal trespassing on his former wife’s house, took the stand. He had been sent to Elan after stealing a television set. He was one of many students who participated in punishing a female student for some infraction he could not remember by beating her with wooden paddles and their hands. “She went into shock . . . urinated on herself [and] defecated on herself,” said Coleman, who was put in charge of guarding Michael Skakel after he ran away. He said Skakel had special privileges—he had a stereo and could listen to music. Coleman once said, “This guy can get away with murder.” He said that Skakel replied, “I’m going to get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy.” Using a golf term, Coleman testified, Skakel said he “drove her skull” after she resisted his advances. On a later occasion, Coleman said, Michael told him that he had masturbated on Martha’s body. During a primal-scream session, Michael Skakel was told to scream, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Coleman’s testimony was another setback for Michael Skakel. Mickey Sherman told the television reporters outside the courthouse that Michael was crying because he couldn’t bear hearing the witnesses lie.
There is something very likable about Mickey Sherman. I have known him, though not well, since 1994, and we have been on Burden of Proof and other talk shows together. He is fun to be with. He’s a regular at Elaine’s, the Upper East Side hangout for the literary set and reporters, and he loves media attention. What Robert Shapiro was to the Simpson trial in matters of publicity, Mickey Sherman is to the Skakel case. One of his close friends is the singer Michael Bolton. In fact, Bolton’s very tall bodyguard served as Michael Skakel’s bodyguard during the hearings in Stamford. The first time I telephoned Sherman, it was to check out a story I’d heard—that he and the model Paula Barbieri were lying side by side on lounge chairs at the swimming pool of the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, where both were the guests of Michael Bolton, when Paula got the telephone call informing her that Nicole Brown Simpson, her boyfriend O. J. Simpson’s wife, and a man named Ronald Goldman had been murdered the night before. Yes, it was true, Sherman said, but he asked me not to use it. He wanted to be a talking head on television during the Simpson trial, and the public association with Barbieri, whom he had seen only that once, might inhibit that. I didn’t use the information, but now it doesn’t matter. On one of the television shows on which we appeared, he kept saying that the Sutton report was “stolen,” but he made it sound as if stealing it were a worse crime than the murder of Martha Moxley.
I was surprised to run into Sherman in Los Angeles during the Academy Awards festivities this past March. I was having lunch in the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel with the playwright Mart Crowley when Sherman walked in. We greeted each other, and he sat on the stool next to me. He said he was surprised that I hadn’t been at Michael Skakel’s arraignment, which had taken place a week or two previously. I hadn’t been able to attend. “What did you think of what Michael said to Mrs. Moxley?” he asked proudly. (Skakel had gone up to Dorthy Moxley at the courthouse and told her she had the wrong guy, and his remark made all the papers and newscasts.) I told Sherman what I thought of it. I said, “I thought it was fake and staged, and I’ll bet that you wrote the line for him to say. It was like Johnnie Cochran giving the ‘absolutely 100 percent not guilty’ line to O. J. Simpson. Would you like to hear what Dorthy Moxley thought about that stunt? She was deeply offended. She said to me on the telephone, ‘How dare he come into my space? I haven’t seen him for 25 years, and he’s on trial for killing my daughter. How dare he call me Dorthy?’” You can say things like that to Mickey Sherman, and he doesn’t get mad.
I predicted, quite incorrectly, that Judge Dennis’s ruling as to whether to proceed to trial or not would come down quickly. I felt that I could have arrived at the correct ruling in less time than it took the O. J. Simpson jury to arrive at its acquittal. But the judge took her own sweet time. After two weeks with no word, I went off to Monte Carlo to work on another story of death and mystery. I returned after 10 days. I called my friends in the press. I called the district attorney’s office. There had still not been a peep from the judge.
Then on August 17, nearly six weeks after the conclusion of the hearings, Judge Dennis released her ruling. She wrote about John Higgins and Gregory Coleman, Skakel’s schoolmates at Elan, whose testimony had made him cry in the courtroom, “having observed the conduct, demeanor and attitudes of these witnesses, the court finds them each to be credible.” She said in her 13-page statement, “The court finds that the specific element of intent to cause death has been proven well beyond a mere suspicion.” Mickey Sherman, who happened to be appearing on Court TV on another case at the time the judge’s ruling came over the wire, professed on television not to be surprised. Judge Dennis delayed her decision as to whether Skakel should be tried as a juvenile or an adult. If he is tried as a juvenile and found guilty, he could possibly receive four years at most. If he is tried as an adult, he could receive 65 years, or so Mickey Sherman told Katie Couric on the Today show the next morning. I called Dorthy Moxley for her reaction. “I’ve been patient for 25 years,” she said.
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