Conviction

by Leonard Levitt

  I had begun this case believing the police had engaged in a cover-up. I had been wrong. The cover-up was by the newspapers that had hired me in refusing to tell me why they had killed the story.

  And what was I expected to do about it? Even my boyhood television heroes on The Big Story had never found themselves in this situation. Their pitfalls had all occurred outside their newspapers. None had involved their paper’s publisher.

  Years later, as I prepared this book, I called Isenberg to ask him to explain his decision to kill the story. He invited me to lunch at his club to discuss it. Instead, I said I would take him to lunch. We agreed to meet at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station.

  As fate would have it, that morning I received a call from, of all people, Frank Serpico. I had met him three decades before while covering the Knapp Commission police department scandal for Time magazine and we had remained friends.

  Since Isenberg had said he knew him, I told Serpico to join us for lunch. As Isenberg and I sat down, I informed him Serpico would be joining us. “Great,” he said. “I haven’t seen Frank in years.”

  Before Serpico arrived, I asked Isenberg my questions. I told him I was aware that Tony Insolia had proofread a copy of my Moxley story and had no problems with it.

  Isenberg didn’t dispute this. “Frankly,” he said, “I didn’t think Tony’s comments were thorough enough.”

  Well, that was rich. Tony had been a journalist for forty years. He had been the editor-in-chief of Newsday, one of the country’s leading newspapers. Isenberg had had virtually no journalistic experience when Laventhol hired him in Connecticut.

  I then asked him about his remark to me years before about “poisoning the well.” He denied having said it and suggested I had either imagined it or mistakenly attributed it to him. He had apparently learned over the years how dangerous a remark like that was.

  “I would never say anything like that,” he said. “And if you write in your book that I did say it, you will be doing me a great disservice.”

  Isenberg insists that the decision to kill the story stemmed from “adamant advice” he had received from a senior legal counsel for the Times-Mirror, who had advised against publication in the “strongest terms” and told him that he “would be crazy to publish it.” No one, including Isenberg, explained these legal objections to me when I was preparing the story.

  In the midst of this, Serpico arrived. “Frank,” Isenberg said, standing up to greet him. “It’s great to see you.”

  True, Serpico had been to hell and back and thirty years had passed since the Knapp commission hearings. Nonetheless, it was clear he hadn’t a clue who Isenberg was.

  •

  Despite his denial, Isenberg had indeed poisoned the well, at least in Connecticut. So long as he was publisher, the story hadn’t appeared. Ken said now it could be published. But when we re-edited it, he began asking the same questions I had answered years before. I would make the changes he requested. A few days later, he would ask them again. Our conversations became more testy. Our relationship, now brittle, snapped.

  While preparing this book, I called Ken. He had left the Connecticut papers and joined the faculty of the Columbia School of Journalism. Periodically, he asked me to speak to his classes about police reporting. I refused.

  “We won’t discuss the Moxley case,” he would say. “You can talk about covering the police in New York City.”

  “Ken, you don’t understand,” I’d tell him. “The only way I’ll do it is if we discuss the Moxley case and you explain to your class why you didn’t publish my story.”

  Nonetheless, when I called him about this book, he shared details he never had before. Perhaps my phone call had caught him off guard. Perhaps he was no longer afraid.

  “When Times-Mirror bought the papers in the late 1970s, they had a lot of trouble in Greenwich,” he began. “They tried to start a Saturday paper and it bombed. When I was hired in 1981, my mission was to start a Sunday paper. The first day we lost 2,000 in circulation. Here we had one of the richest markets and we were having problems.”

  In Ken’s opinion, the story did not appear because Isenberg did not want to run a piece about a decade-old murder. His claim of journalistic and legal shortcomings had been a cover, an excuse not to run it for fear it would offend Greenwich residents—Greenwich Time newspaper readers and advertisers.

  “Editors resign over things like this,” Ken said. “But that’s not me.”

  He added: “Why didn’t I tell you this before? Frankly, I did not want to tell people my publisher had killed the story.”

  Well, I thought, I suppose I can understand that. But what I couldn’t understand was why he didn’t publish the story after Isenberg left. By not running the story and remaining at the paper, he had lost his legitimacy. By not leveling with me, he had cost us our friendship.

  •

  One day in 1988, I read in the Times that David Moxley had died. I hadn’t seen him since my interview at Touche Ross years before. I felt I owed it to him to attend his funeral.

  I arrived late at Frank Campbell’s funeral home on Madison Avenue and slipped into a rear pew. Except for Dorthy, I recognized no one. But why should I? I was not a part of the Moxleys’ lives. I had presumed too much. My presence here mattered to no one but myself.

  I was struck by the minister’s eulogy. He never mentioned Martha, referring only to “an unspeakable tragedy.” So silent had David been about his pain that his daughter’s name was not even spoken at his passing.

  At that moment I think I hated Ken and Isenberg more than anyone on earth.

  I didn’t speak with Dorthy then. I felt I would only be a reminder of all she had lost. Unable to publish the story, I felt I had failed her.

  But not long after the funeral, she called. She had discovered a letter from David that she wanted to read to me. The letter was actually a memo, written about the phone call David had received years before from Littleton—the call in which he’d offered to take sodium Pentothal and had used the phrase “our mutual tragedy.”

  “He [Littleton] went on to explain that he was doing this simply to give himself peace of mind,” David had written. “He thought that perhaps things had happened on the night of Martha’s death that he would possibly remember under sodium Pentothal. …He specifically referred to his intention to try to remember whether or not Tommy Skakel was wearing different clothing at different times during the evening. He made specific references to Tommy stopping in his room at about 10:30 and saying he was going to his room to work on a report on President Lincoln and went on to volunteer that no such report was written.”

  His memo added that Littleton “rambled quite a bit, and in a fairly dramatic way said that he thought he had been ‘framed’ and that he thought perhaps Tommy had purposely used him as an alibi. …He made reference to how badly the police had ‘screwed up the investigation and had hung him out to dry.’

  “When I asked him why he wanted to give me the opportunity to listen to the tape of his examination, he said because he knew that I would not screw him.”

  The memo concluded by saying that Littleton had refused to allow Connecticut authorities to conduct the test and expressed David Moxley’s concern that only someone familiar with the case could frame the proper questions for him.

  “I suggested that perhaps the reporter who has been actively pursuing the investigation for some period of time had enough information that working with an independent forensic expert they could establish a line of reasoning that would be sufficiently rigorous to be useful.”

  Dorthy said she wanted me to know that the reporter David was referring to was me.

  •

  And then it happened. And it had nothing to do with anything I did. At least not then. There is a time for everything, Dorthy had said during our lowest point. Whether it was fate, luck, or coincidence, that time had arrived.

  In the spring of 1991, William Kennedy Smith, a son of John F. Kennedy’s sister
and first cousin to Tommy and Michael Skakel, went on trial for rape in Palm Beach, Florida. A false story surfaced that on the night of Martha’s murder Smith had been at the Skakel house. That rumor led to a flurry of articles on the Moxley murder.

  John Cotter, the city editor of the New York Post, had worked with me at New York Newsday and knew of my problems with the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. He sent a reporter to interview me. On his instructions, the reporter asked me whether the papers’ failure to publish the story was part of a cover-up.

  I saw this as an opportunity to shame Isenberg and pressure Ken into publishing the story. I described how he had hired me nine years before to investigate Martha’s murder and how we had obtained the Greenwich police report, showing that the Greenwich police had discovered the missing golf club inside the Skakel house the day after the murder yet failed to obtain a warrant to search the house. I described how the newspapers had refused to publish my story.

  My interview ran in the Post on May 1, 1991, under the headline, “Once again, there are hints of a cover-up.”

  On June 2, 1991, with no explanation from Ken, my story on Martha Moxley’s murder appeared on page one of the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. It filled four full pages and ran virtually as I had written it years before.

  The reaction was electrifying. Dorthy was, of course, thrilled. Far from the negative fallout Isenberg had feared, circulation increased. Although the article pointed out that the police had blundered, Greenwich residents could rest assured that their department was not corrupt and had not engaged in a cover-up.

  Even the Skakels did not protest the story. Because it pointed out that they had initially cooperated, they quoted it in defending themselves. Years later, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote of Michael’s innocence in Atlantic Monthly, he described the article as the case’s most thorough piece of journalism.

  On August 8, 1991, Keegan’s successor as Greenwich police chief, Ken Moughty, held a news conference at headquarters. At his side were State’s Attorney Donald Browne and his chief investigator Jack Solomon. They announced they had reopened the Moxley investigation.

  Next to them stood a Greenwich detective I didn’t recognize. Moughty announced that he was the detective assigned to represent the Greenwich Police Department on the case. He was Frank Garr.

  Frank Garr’s headshot from his days as an aspiring actor in New York.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “They Didn’t Bungle, Botch, or ‘Tread Lightly’”

  GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT

  1991

  When Frank Garr was growing up, he was something of a mama’s boy.

  His father Tony owned a restaurant on Westchester Avenue in the gritty city of Port Chester, just over the New York state line from Greenwich but light years away. Port Chester was a city of immigrants, and the restaurant, which Tony ran with his brothers and those of his wife Beatrice, consumed his life.

  For young Frank there were no games of catch with his dad or trips to the ballpark. The only time he spent with his father was a week each summer when the family vacationed in Spofford Lake in Keene, New Hampshire.

  Instead, Frank spent every day after school with his mother. His was the traditional old-world Italian household, where the men worked and the women reared the children. Their house was spotless, with the smells of home-cooked food. All social life revolved around the family. All holidays and celebrations—birthdays, weddings, Thanksgiving, or Christmas—were spent with his aunts, uncles, and cousins.

  Yet there were tensions that left his mother in tears and caused her to run with little Frankie to her brother’s house until tempers settled. Beatrice was one of nine children of Italian immigrants from outside Naples. Because she had had to help support her parents, she never graduated from high school. Port Chester was the center of her world. Once, as a girl, she’d taken a bus to Stamford to visit relatives. The trip had so unnerved her that she never wanted to travel again.

  Years later, after Tony moved the family to Greenwich—a step up the social and economic ladder—Beatrice was never comfortable. She hadn’t learned to drive and missed her friends and relatives and her Port Chester life. Though it was just a ten-minute car ride, she felt a million miles away.

  While Tony worked day and night in the restaurant, Beatrice took Frank shopping after school and to the movies or to amusement parks. Because she didn’t drive, they took the bus or taxis. At home, they’d snack together—a piece of Italian bread, a raw onion, and an orange—before Frank went out to play or do his homework. In the evenings, while Tony worked, they watched television together—the 1950s variety shows, Perry Como, Lawrence Welk, Jackie Gleason, and I Love Lucy.

  Despite her lack of education, his mother was, as Frank put it, “extremely wise to the ways of the world. She taught me lessons not through words but through deeds.”

  “Frankie,” she told him, “never tell people your business. Always be friendly but never intimate with anyone outside of your family.”

  To Frank, his mother was the most loving person in the world. “But if you wronged her, if you crossed her, you were fini.”

  Frank’s grandfather on his father’s side had changed his name from Carino to Garr for reasons Frank never learned. Among the family, the subject was never discussed. His paternal grandmother— “Grandma Red,” as she was called because of her fiery hair—lived in the Bronx, and as a boy Frank spent weekends at her apartment.

  Grandma Red knew New York City and took Frank all around Manhattan. A favorite spot was the automat on Forty-second Street. He loved looking in the little compartments filled with different foods. Grandma Red gave him coins to select his favorite: a bologna and cheese sandwich and lemon pie for dessert.

  Frank became familiar with Manhattan’s tourist attractions: Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and the Museum of Natural History, where his favorite exhibition was the dinosaurs. Grandma Red even took him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he stared, entranced, at the mummies.

  With his dad always at the restaurant, his mother’s brother, Frank’s Uncle Babe, became a second father. During World War II, Uncle Babe had served in the Air Force. When he returned, he drove a cab for Port Taxi at the train station. Whenever he could, little Frankie accompanied him.

  Babe let him answer the dispatcher on the cab’s two-way radio. He loved talking on it, answering when they were given a location to pick up a fare or telling the dispatcher they were clear for another call. Years later, Frank would recall this as his first experience of being on patrol.

  Uncle Babe promised Frank that if he did well in school, Babe would give him his 1958 Pontiac Bonneville or buy him any car he wanted when Frank was old enough to drive.

  “And he would have,” Frank said. But on October 30, 1958, exactly seventeen years before the murder of Martha Moxley, Frank experienced his own Halloween tragedy.

  Returning from school, he noticed his father’s and relatives’ cars parked outside. As he drew closer, he heard screaming. It was his mother. He started running and bounded through the front door. His mother was crying hysterically. His father and another uncle were trying to subdue her. They had just told her Uncle Babe had died of a heart attack.

  The mourning continued for months. Life seemed as though it would never be the same. And in some ways it never was. “To say that I miss my uncle would be an understatement,” Frank said. “His death left an enormous void in my life.”

  Uncle Babe had worn a yellow-and-white-gold band–type ring with a three-diamond setting. Frank’s aunts and uncles all wanted him to have it. When he married, it served as his wedding band. “I wear it to this day and never take it off.”

  Not a student, Frank struggled to keep up. Even then, in the early 1960s, he realized that without a high school diploma he had no chance of success. Despite poor grades, he managed to graduate in 1964.

  He took an office job with an insurance company. It did not take him long to realize this was not how he
wanted to spend his life. A year later, the decision to leave was made for him when he was drafted into the Army.

  After two months of basic training, he reported to a communications center in Duncanville, Texas, outside Dallas. Three months later he shipped out to Vietnam. He spent the next year there in the Signal Corps.

  In March 1967, he returned to the United States—to “the world,” as they called it. Four months remained of his military service. He had begun thinking of a career and considered becoming a cop.

  “My first inclination was to apply to the NYPD but I allowed myself to be talked out of it by my family,” he said. “To this day I have some regrets about that.”

  His family wanted him closer, at home in Port Chester where they had ties and an in with the police department. Frank didn’t want that. Instead, he applied to the Greenwich police department, which was considered a step up from Port Chester’s.

  While home on leave, he took the police exam, then with other returning Vietnam vets, reported to the White Sands Missile Base in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for his last four months of service. Those four months seemed to take forever while he waited for the test results. He drove a tanker truck, delivering water to troops working in the desert, and lounged in the afternoons by the base swimming pool.

  Then, he received a letter from his mother telling him he had passed the exam. On September 10, 1967, he received his honorable discharge. Ten days later, he was sworn in as a Greenwich patrolman. His first detail was directing traffic on Greenwich Avenue. Frank was twenty-two years old.

  Most people have one or two individuals who have had an impact on their lives, either positive or negative. For Frank, one of those people was Tom Keegan, the street sergeant his first night on the job.