Conviction

by Leonard Levitt

When Frank’s traffic tour ended, Keegan picked him up and drove him around town, explaining about the department and what it expected of its officers. “He demanded loyalty, honesty, and courage of those who worked for and with him,” Frank said. “He was generous with his advice, which I have passed on to new officers.”

  One of those new officers, whom Frank broke in, was the son of a former chief. While on patrol together, the chief’s son accidentally fired his gun, shattering their patrol car window. After some discussion, he owned up to it. Police departments being what they are, it was Frank who was transferred.

  His new assignment was a nowhere post in the back-country, but Frank never questioned the transfer. “You’ll never ask, will you?” said his sergeant a few months later. “Well, I’ll tell you. They wanted someone to keep the kid under control, to make sure he didn’t get into any more trouble. And you weren’t the guy.”

  Meanwhile, Frank had married Mariann Marconi, a nurse in Greenwich Hospital’s emergency room. They’d met while he was driving the two-man “accident car” to all major calls and he’d spend a lot of time in the ER. The place was social, with unwritten rules. When the cops arrived, they brought donuts. The nurses made sure the coffee was hot.

  Mariann— “Miss Priss,” as Frank called her—had recently arrived from Syracuse and would have none of this socializing. Someone complained about her to the head nurse. Mariann was called in and informed of the facts of Greenwich life.

  As things came to pass, seven of eight nurses working in the ER married Greenwich cops. The eighth married a cop from the Port Authority.

  Frank and Mariann were one of the lucky couples to buy in Greenwich before the mid-1970s when skyrocketing prices forced cops out of the market. They paid $62,000 for a house in Glenville, the poor man’s part of town, if there is such a thing in Greenwich.

  “I got in just in time,” Frank said.

  The house had three bedrooms, a front yard, and a deck for barbecuing. Soon, they had two children, Dave and Angela, both of whom attended Greenwich’s public schools. Dave was a natural athlete. At six-foot-four inches, six inches taller than his father, he played hockey and pitched on Greenwich High’s baseball team. Angela was artistic, with a flair for drawing and sketching. She would become a graphic designer. Meanwhile, Miss Priss forced Frank to return to college and obtain a college degree—a Bachelor of Science from Iona College.

  Like all Greenwich cops, Frank worked second jobs, from driving wealthy Greenwich residents to the airports, to providing security at their parties and serving drinks as a bartender.

  “I drove. We all drove. Did I like it? No. But if my son needed a $350 pair of ice skates each year for hockey, I had to work extra for it.”

  He also provided private security for Enid Haupt, the millionaire sister of philanthropist and ambassador Walter Annenberg. Haupt owned an apartment on Park Avenue in New York that had been robbed. After that, whenever she stayed at her back-country home in Greenwich, she called the detective division.

  Frank and Lunney ran the job. At 9:00 P.M., the maid and butler let one of them in. The burglar alarm was turned on and one of them stayed until 7:00 A.M., watching TV and earning $25 an hour. When he arrived, Frank saw Haupt for ten minutes. He was gone before she woke up the next morning. It took him two nights to earn the money for his son’s ice skates, money Haupt could write a check for in less than two minutes.

  Frank also provided security for Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who lived in the back-country. “We just hit it off,” said Frank. Whenever the Giffords had a party, he arranged for guys to park cars. When the children, Cody and Cassidy, were born, Gifford, not wanting reporters to bother Kathie Lee at Greenwich Hospital, hired Frank Garr to keep them away.

  As Keegan rose through the ranks, he and Frank stayed close. In Greenwich’s Irish-dominated department, traces of anti-Italian prejudice remained. When Frank grew a mustache, one of his superiors was heard to grumble, “That’s all we need. Another guinea with a mustache.” When Keegan was promoted to captain of detectives, he brought Frank into the division as one of the first detectives of Italian origin.

  In affluent Greenwich, burglary is the most common crime. Frank soon figured out that most burglars are drug addicts and created the department’s first drug unit. He began working undercover, together with counterparts in surrounding departments and the state police, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI.

  Frank also acknowledged a secret passion—acting. He enrolled in the Weist Baron acting school in Manhattan. He used his training to play undercover roles in narcotics cases.

  From his patrol and detective work, he had learned how to deal with all sorts of people, from bankers in bow ties to heroin addicts with snot running from their noses.

  “My job was to get people to talk to me,” he explained. “To be effective as a cop, I had to reach all kinds of people. I had to be able to change personalities, to change my style in different situations.”

  The DEA guys got a kick out of watching him. Frank would go into a bar, cozy up to a dealer, and say he was an advertising guy. He’d make the dealer comfortable, convince him he had money. That way, the dealer would sell him drugs or return to his people, higher up the chain, and tell them he had a live one here, a golden goose. Frank never received public recognition for his drug arrests. He wrote the press releases for them, but because he worked undercover, he always omitted his name.

  As the Moxley case wound down and Lunney needed a place to settle, “Double J,” as Frank referred to James J. Lunney, joined him in his narcotics squad. As one by one, the detectives who’d worked on the Moxley case retired, Frank inherited it. When in 1987 Lunney retired, Frank was the department’s only member with a connection to it.

  His mother had taught him to trust no one outside his family. To Frank, that family now included the Greenwich police department. Despite my criticisms of their investigation, Frank defended Keegan and Lunney.

  When we met at that news conference at Greenwich police headquarters in August 1991, I was an outsider to him—no different from anyone else who was not part of the official investigation. As I would learn, Frank distrusted outsiders—even those who sought to help.

  Years later, after we became friends, he would quote disparagingly from my article in the Stamford Advocate and the Greenwich Time and say to me, “The Greenwich Police Department was never intimidated by the Skakels.”

  He was enraged by Detroit Chief Hale’s criticism of Keegan and Lunney. Referring to Hale’s quote in my article, Frank, teeth clenched, said, “They didn’t bungle, botch, or ‘tread lightly.”’

  He said about Hale: “No one sitting in Detroit or anywhere else for that matter can read a Greenwich police report and know how he would react at any point. Hale didn’t have the right to criticize anyone. If he wasn’t there, he should keep his mouth shut. No one was afraid of the Skakels.”

  Then, there was David Moxley’s Touche Ross colleague, John McCreight, who had showed me Hale’s report, which led to my first break in the case. When Frank began his reinvestigation, McCreight again made a behind-the-scenes move. He wrote to Greenwich’s highest elected official, First Selectman John Margenot, seeking to arrange Hale’s return, together with a second investigator, former New York City detective Vernon Geberth, author of a homicide textbook.

  “We want to be able to assure both Mr. Hale and Mr. Vernon Geberth that they will be welcomed by both the Greenwich and state authorities and that they will be able to function effectively as a team,” McCreight wrote to Margenot.

  His professionalism notwithstanding, Hale was the last person Frank wanted to work with in the Moxley murder investigation. McCreight was next to last.

  Frank complained to Greenwich police chief Moughty. “He was at a clambake in old Greenwich. I said to him, ‘Chief, this guy McCreight pushed his way in back in 1975 but it’s not happening now. He didn’t report to us then. He reported to the Moxleys. If you allow him back in, I’d r
ather be out.’”

  McCreight vanished from the investigation. The first Moxley ally to enter the case who ran afoul of Frank, he would not be the last.

  And Frank’s loyalty to the Greenwich police was returned in kind. Years later, when his work led to the arrest not of Tommy but of Michael as Martha’s killer, he called Chief Keegan in South Carolina.

  “There was no defensiveness, no justifying past actions,” Frank said. “Keegan couldn’t have been more supportive. He simply congratulated me, saying he would be here to testify if I needed him.

  “Of Michael, all he said was, ‘The little fuck lied to us.’”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Leads, Lies, and Jeans

  GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT

  1991–1995

  How do you begin an investigation into a sixteen-year-old murder, when all the detectives who worked on it retired years before? How do you proceed when the case’s prime suspect and his family refuse to be interviewed on the advice of their attorney? How do you avoid the treacheries of entering into the middle of an investigation in which your superiors had committed themselves to a suspect?

  “The only thing I had was the case file, the thousands of pages of Greenwich police reports,” Frank explained to me years later. “I must have read them twelve times. I became an encyclopedia.”

  Since 1975, the file had been kept in a locked metal box in Keegan’s office. Only Keegan, Lunney, and Carroll had been permitted to see it. All leads had been forwarded to those three—no questions asked. So sensitive was the case that detectives avoided discussing it in idle conversation. Unless you were part of the investigation, the subject was considered taboo.

  Frank set up an office in the police library with Jack Solomon, the chief investigator from the state’s attorney’s office. At the news conference they announced a $50,000 reward and set up a tip line with an answering machine. They agreed to start from scratch—as though the murder had occurred that day.

  And from day one, August 8, 1991, said Frank, the phone started ringing. Except for one person who confused the two brothers, no one called about Tommy or Ken Littleton. The only tips concerned Michael.

  “Not that anyone said Michael did it,” Frank clarified. “No, the callers said things like, ‘I just want you to know Michael was out of control.’”

  Actually, the phone had rung a few months before. Just as the William Kennedy Smith trial had indirectly precipitated the publication of my story, it also led to Frank’s first tip. The tip concerned a place he’d never heard of, the Elan School in Poland Springs, Maine, a drug rehabilitation facility for rich kids. Michael had been sent there, following a drunken driving arrest, in 1978, at age eighteen, three years after Martha’s murder.

  Frank was aware of the arrest, which had been noted in the Greenwich police file, though it would not be until years later that its relevance to Martha’s murder became clear. Driving the Skakels’ station wagon without a license, at the Skakels’ house in Windham, N.Y., accompanied by twenty-one-year-old Debbie Diehl, whose family were longtime friends, Michael had crashed the car into a telephone pole, then fled, leaving Diehl with a broken leg.

  The tip about Elan—where Michael remained for the next two years—had come in around midnight of April 29, 1991, when a Lieutenant Thomas Perry of the Palm Beach Police Department reported that his department had received a telephone call from a David Bowlin of Santa Monica, California.

  Bowlin—a convicted felon with a half-dozen aliases and arrests for car theft, drunk driving, assault, burglary, and drug possession—had also been at Elan. He told Lieutenant Perry he had just seen the television program Hard Copy, which speculated, falsely, that William Kennedy Smith had been at the Skakel house the night of the Moxley murder. The program had also mentioned earlier news accounts that Tommy Skakel, a member of the Kennedy family, was a suspect.

  According to Lieutenant Perry, Bowlin “related that the mention of this murder…made him think an acquaintance, Michael Skakel, might be involved.” As a teenager in 1977, Bowlin had been sent to Elan when Michael was there.

  “Bowlin knew Mike was related to the Kennedy family and stated Michael had told him he had been taken from the ski slopes and delivered to the facility. The relationship to Thomas Skakel and the proximity in time to the murder made Bowlin think Mike Skakel may have been involved and that he was sent to the facility to hide him from investigators,” Perry reported. This, three years after the murder.

  •

  Two ninth-grade classmates of Michael’s at Greenwich’s St. Mary’s Catholic School also called with suspicions about Michael.

  Victoria Russell Haigh, of Providence, Rhode Island, said that after the murder, Michael would bring newspaper articles about the case and read them in class.

  Diane Birney, of Carmel, New York, remembered that Michael stared at her in speech class. It happened so many times the teacher escorted him from the room.

  Two small notes in the file also provided clues.

  On a torn napkin, Frank found a mention that Michael’s polygraph with the state police had been canceled. This was a surprise. Frank knew from the file that Tommy had taken a lie detector test. He never knew Michael had been scheduled for one.

  He called Lunney, who didn’t remember any such arrangements. Maybe, he told Frank, Michael was too young. He was only fifteen.

  But that made no sense because the state police can polygraph juveniles with their parents’ okay. If Rushton had consented, Michael could have been polygraphed.

  “I’m thinking maybe it was scheduled but the old man put the kibosh on it,” said Frank. “I’m asking myself, Why would he do that since he hadn’t objected to Tommy’s?”

  The second note mentioned a conversation between Dorthy’s now-grown son John and their former neighbor, Cissy Ix, about the medical tests Tommy supposedly had taken but whose results had not been given to the police.

  In late 1991, Frank drove over to the Ixes in Belle Haven. He was surprised at how cooperative they seemed. “Cissy was very attractive, very proper. She had a faint Massachusetts accent. I liked her.” He also described her husband. “He was businesslike, dignified, reserved, and cautious with his words. I liked him too.”

  While still protective of Tommy, as she had been with Dorthy years before, Cissy had no qualms saying she always felt that Michael and Jimmy Terrien should be looked at. With all his problems, Michael had always been suspect in her mind, and she had even told this to Chief Keegan. Keegan, however, had been dismissive. He had never questioned Michael’s story of having gone to the Terriens’. If the murder had occurred at 10:00 P.M., Michael couldn’t have returned in time.

  Cissy added that two or three weeks after the murder, she had gone to Tommy’s room and asked him what had happened that night.

  “Why don’t you go and ask Jimmy Terrien?” Tommy said to her.

  To Frank, this indicated at least two people—Tommy and Jimmy—might have been involved in Martha’s murder. If the killer was Michael, that would make three.

  •

  There was also the caller who misidentified Tommy.

  May Stone Versailles of Greenwich reported that the husband of a friend said Tommy had practically admitted to the murder while at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at Greenwich Hospital in 1987.

  Frank tracked Versailles’s friend to Mill Valley, California. Then, he reached her husband. The first thing he told Frank was that it was Michael who attended the meeting.

  The husband described Michael’s standing before the group of about fifteen to twenty people, red-faced, with five o’clock shadow, his clothes too big for him but wearing brand new cowboy boots.

  He said his father had sent him to Windham, New York, and from there to Elan, where he was beaten. He escaped in the winter and nearly froze to death.

  Michael also told the group that once he had once put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger but it jammed and wouldn’t fire. Michael said he tried to fix it by banging the gun on
a table. It went off, a bullet hitting the ceiling. Because the gun hadn’t fired when he pointed it at himself, Michael told the group that God did not want him to kill himself.

  •

  Michael’s Alcoholic Anonymous connection provided Frank with another lead—Andy Pugh.

  Michael had bumped into Pugh when both turned up at an AA meeting at Greenwich’s Christ Church in the mid-1980s. Once best friends, they had been out of touch. After the meeting, Michael called Pugh, asking if he had cut off contact because he believed Michael had killed Martha.

  Michael had never been a suspect in the murder. No one in Belle Haven thought it could have been a kid, Pugh said. Everyone had accepted the Greenwich police’s theory that it was someone off the turnpike, maybe a loony. When in 1978 Michael had gone off to Elan, the speculation in Belle Haven was still that the killer was either Tommy or Littleton.

  But the more Pugh thought about the murder over the years, he told Frank, “The more it pointed to Michael. The killer was not a stranger. It was someone within that household. I found myself thinking, ‘Is it possible it was him?’”

  Pugh remembered that Michael was bigger and stronger than Martha and was a tremendous athlete. “Pound for pound, he was the strongest kid I had ever met. And he liked her. She liked him but he liked her more.” Pugh said he had once seen them wrestling around and kissing. And Michael, Pugh told Frank, was violent and aggressive when he was drinking.

  •

  Then, there was Julie Skakel’s friend Andrea Shakespeare, who had been at the Skakels the night of the murder. I had written her off as a brat when I’d interviewed her in 1984. But Frank saw something else in her—her honesty. She dropped a bombshell—no, a live grenade—in Frank’s lap.

  Frank found her in Massachusetts, married and the mother of three small children. He and Solomon drove up to see her. “She was smart, brash, a firecracker, and as open as can be,” Frank said. “I liked her immediately.”

  The night of the murder, Andrea told them, she remembered drinking tea with Julie and hearing voices outside the house shortly before 9:30. “‘Oh, that’s Martha Moxley,’ Julie said to me.” They heard another girl’s voice. Julie told Andrea it was Helen Ix’s.