Andrea said she never saw either one of them. “I am happy now I never did,” she said.
Frank tried to jog her memory. He reminded her of the Skakel car pulling out of the driveway with Michael and his brother driving to the Terriens’.
“Michael went to the Terriens’?” Andrea said.
“Yeah,” Frank answered, “Michael got in the backseat.”
“I was always under the impression Michael was in the house when the car left,” she said, “that Michael didn’t go.”
Frank was stunned. This was the first time he or anyone else connected to the investigation had heard that Michael didn’t go to the Terriens’.
“How do you know that?” he said to her.
“I just have this impression,” she answered. “I am as sure as I can be.”
But no matter how hard he pushed her, Andrea could not explain why she thought Michael did not take that trip. This was June 1991, sixteen years after the murder. “I must have talked to her 165 times between that day and the last day I saw her in court eleven years later,” said Frank. “Each time, I would say to her, ‘Andrea, just tell me why you are so sure Michael didn’t go.’”
Each time she would answer, “All I can tell you, Frank, is that he didn’t go. I can’t tell you why.”
So what do you do with this information? Frank asked himself. Nothing then. You just tuck it away in the back of your mind.
•
In the file, Frank also discovered Dorothy Rogers. She was the first witness he found to whom Michael had made an admission about Martha’s murder.
Dated September 10, 1980, from Greenwich detective Rich Haug, a memo in the file said that Rogers, then nineteen years old, had been brought in for questioning about a fire she had set at her parents’ house in the back-country. She mentioned that from June 1978 to June 1979, she’d been at Elan, where she and Michael often spoke. Once, she said, he’d brought up Martha Moxley. He’d confessed to her that he was drunk and might have murdered her during a blackout period.
Rogers added that part of their therapy at Elan was a general meeting of patients and staff. Everyone formed a circle around one person, who stood in the middle. One night Michael was in the middle and a staff member asked him, “Why did you crush Martha Moxley’s chest with a golf club?” Michael didn’t answer.
Reading through the file, Frank found himself thinking that this had occurred in 1978 or 1979—when Michael was not a suspect. Why would anyone—how would anyone know to ask him about Martha’s murder?
So Frank went to Haug, the detective who’d investigated the Rogers fire and asked whether anyone had acted on his memo. Haug said he’d passed it on to the captain of detectives.
Frank knew anything regarding the Moxley case went to Lunney. But Lunney said he’d never seen it. He didn’t remember it.
So Frank began to search for Dorothy Rogers. He found her date of birth, searched for a record of a driver’s license, for any activity regarding her Social Security number or employment history.
He picked up a lead that she might have been in Anaheim, California. He contacted the Anaheim Police Department, which connected him to its vice squad. Detectives there thought they knew her. They remembered a street person with the description Frank had given them. But they hadn’t seen her in years. Maybe she was dead.
It bothered Frank so he kept calling around. He called corrections departments in Anaheim and the surrounding areas, then tracked her to, of all places, Graham, North Carolina. She was on probation. Married. Her name was now Dorothy Mickey. She was an alcoholic. Frank found her probation officer. Then he flew to Graham.
On the flight, he wondered how he would get her to talk to him. He assumed she didn’t like cops. And if she did talk, how good was her memory, and would she be a credible witness?
“Well, she looked like a drunk,” Frank recalled after he saw her. “A lot of hard miles on her. Her teeth were bad. She looked drawn. Here she was, a rich back-country Greenwich girl who anyone could see had once been attractive, and she looked like trailer trash.”
But she was willing to talk to him.
She had a southern accent. Frank couldn’t believe she came from Greenwich. “She had come from a life of privilege and look what she had done to herself, although I know this happens to a lot of people.”
Her memory was foggy but not as bad as he had feared. She remembered Michael and what he had told her.
While in Greenwich, she said she had twice stolen her family car and driven to Maine. Each time she was arrested and returned to Greenwich. Finally, her family sent her to Elan. She stayed eleven months.
Michael, she remembered, was already there when she arrived. At a dance, she asked him about the Moxley murder. He told her the police believed either he or his brother Tommy was responsible.
“So she’s telling me this,” Frank remembered, “and I am thinking, there is no way Michael was a suspect then. Only Tommy was. For Michael to claim the police thought he might be responsible for this murder or that the police might arrest and charge him with the murder was, in my eyes, an example of what we call ‘consciousness of guilt.’”
Rogers said Michael had also told her that on the night of the murder he had gotten drunk. He claimed to have blacked out and couldn’t remember what he did but was afraid that he might have committed the murder. He woke up in his house or in a car in a daze, she recalled his saying. A relative or an attorney insisted he stay at Elan or face murder charges.
Michael’s story made Frank think of a pressure cooker. It was as though Michael were letting off steam. Frank realized Michael had been blabbing about the murder for years, releasing thoughts that had been weighing on him. Was this his way of coping, Frank wondered, short of admitting he had killed her?
Frank told Rogers to make sure to stay in touch with him. He knew he would use her at some point. Her story was powerful, and it dovetailed with his suspicions.
Sometimes, Frank had to call Rogers’s mother to learn her whereabouts, mostly in and out of jail as she battled her addiction. Sometimes, Rogers called him from various prisons.
“Frank,” she would say, “I just want you to know where I am….”
•
And there was the Skakel family chauffeur, Larry Zicarelli. He told Frank that Michael said he had done something so bad he felt he had to kill himself.
Zicarelli had been hired six months after the murder in the spring of 1976, replacing the Skakel’s longtime caretaker, Franz Wittine, who had lived in a guest room in the basement and recently retired.
Every Friday at 4:00 P.M., Zicarelli said, he drove Michael to a psychiatrist in New York City. One Friday morning, Zicarelli recalled, Michael came downstairs shouting at his father. He raced outside, screaming, “You’re not my father.” Then he jumped into a car in the driveway and tried to drive it through a fence.
Zicarelli ran outside to the car. Michael pulled out a switchblade knife and pointed it at him.
“Start driving this fucking car or I’ll stab you to death,” he screamed. Zicarelli turned to Rushton, who nodded his approval, thinking it might calm Michael down.
Zicarelli talked Michael into putting away the knife, then drove him into the city. But on Park Avenue, Michael jumped out and, without a word, ran off.
Zicarelli didn’t know what to do so he drove to Rushton’s office at Great Lakes Carbon nearby. There, they told him Michael’s appointment with the psychiatrist had been changed from 4:00 to 2:00 P.M. That’s where Michael had probably gone.
Zicarelli drove over to the psychiatrist’s and waited for Michael to appear. Sure enough, an hour before his appointment, Michael showed up. Zicarelli asked him why he had run off.
“You’re the only person I can trust,” Michael told him.
Zicarelli bought him lunch, then waited for him to finish his appointment. When Michael came out, he was in tears.
He got into the car and Zicarelli headed back to Greenwich. But driving onto the Triboroug
h Bridge, Michael again jumped from the car.
“I’ve done something very bad. I’m in a lot of trouble. I’ve either got to kill myself or leave the country,” he shouted as he crossed traffic lanes and began climbing up one of the bridge’s spans.
Zicarelli pulled the car over. He jumped out, chased after him, pulled him down.
He drove Michael back to Greenwich and quit the next day.
Lunney and Carroll had been keeping tabs on the Skakels and had gotten to know Zicarelli. They had asked him to keep an eye out and to call them about anything suspicious. Over the years, Zicarelli met with them. But he never told them about the incident on the bridge.
Instead, early in 1992, he mentioned the incident to his friend Edwin Jones. Jones, who’d seen stories in the paper about the reopened investigation, called the Greenwich police.
“Why did you wait so long to tell your story?” Frank asked when he questioned Zicarelli. “I was afraid,” Zicarelli explained. “I was so afraid of those people. My wife told me, ‘Don’t ever say anything to anyone. Don’t cause any trouble.’
“Besides,” Zicarelli added, “nothing was going on with the investigation all these years.”
“It is now,” Frank answered.
•
Finally, there were the jeans. For Frank, they cinched the case against Michael.
Early in 1992, he was poring through the case file for what seemed the hundredth time. On November 5, 1975, less than a week after the murder, he read that two sanitation men had found a black plastic garbage bag outside the Skakel home. The bag held a pair of Tretorn sneakers and blue, size 36–30 Wrangler jeans.
Both had stains resembling blood. The stains were on the bottom of the jeans and tops of the sneakers. Inside the jeans’ right pocket was a laundry stamp with the name “Matthai-B.”
Tests of the stains done at the state lab in 1975 came back negative for blood. But the lab discovered a long blonde hair on the dungarees. The lab report suggested the police compare the hair to Martha’s, so the following day the police sent the jeans, sneakers, and the blonde hair to the FBI lab in Washington.
Four days later, at 9:20 P.M., November 9, 1975, Frank read, detectives asked Rushton Skakel about the sneakers and jeans. He said they were Michael’s. While in camp the previous summer in New Hampshire, Michael had swapped clothes with another boy, believed to be the “Matthai-B” of the laundry stamp.
Frank knew he couldn’t speak to Rushton or any of the Skakels. Margolis had forbidden that. Frank’s last conversation with Rushton had occurred six months before, when he and Solomon had come to question Cissy Ix, following up about Tommy’s medical tests.
While interviewing Cissy, she had telephoned Rushton, who offered to show them the test results. Frank and Solomon had walked across the street to Rushton’s home on Otter Rock Drive but Rushton then said he couldn’t find them. He asked them to call him the next day.
Instead, Tom Sheridan called. It was the first time Frank had spoken to him. He explained that he’d been Michael’s criminal attorney since 1978 when Michael was arrested for drunken driving in Windham. Writing of the incident years later to the private investigators the Skakels had hired, Sheridan described Michael as “obviously a disturbed person and hooked on either booze or pot. He showed little or no remorse for having nearly killed the companion in his car and when confronted with the potential problem of a subsequent conviction for drunken driving, his only comment was, ‘Next time I won’t get caught.’”
What Frank would later learn was that Michael’s drunken-driving arrest had raised concerns among the Skakels about his possible involvement in Martha’s murder.
Sheridan asked Frank not to contact Rushton or any of the Skakels about the test results until Margolis was notified. Frank knew then that he would never see them.
Now, six months later, in early 1992, Frank decided to call Sheridan about the jeans.
He told Sheridan of Rushton’s statement in November 1975, that the dungarees were Michael’s. Sheridan promised to find out. A few days later he called. Michael, Sheridan told Frank, didn’t know why his father had said this. Michael said he had never gone to camp in New Hampshire or anywhere else.
“So I’m thinking, why would Michael say he had never been to camp when, back in 1975, the old man said he had?” Frank mused as he returned to the police file, searching now for the results of the testing of the long blonde hair, comparing it to Martha’s.
In the file, he discovered a December 5, 1975, report from the FBI lab, indicating the tests had been completed. But there was no mention of the results. A notation on February 9, 1976, stated that all evidence sent to the FBI lab had been returned to the Greenwich police.
All the Moxley case evidence was kept inside a large carton in a safe in the basement of Greenwich police headquarters. Inside the carton were smaller boxes and envelopes with more evidence.
“I pull it all out. I am going through that box like a madman.” Inside one of the envelopes, he located photographs of the jeans and the sneakers. But the items themselves were missing. He called Jim Lunney. Lunney remembered the jeans, although he had no idea where they were.
But the long blonde hair was there. It had been removed from the jeans and returned from the FBI lab. It was mounted on a slide inside one of the smaller evidence cartons. It had been sitting there all these years.
Frank called Henry Lee, the chief of Connecticut’s Forensic Science Laboratory to compare the hair to Martha’s. Frank was so excited he drove it up himself to Lee’s office in Meriden. A few days later, Lee called him. The hair was Martha’s.
Okay, Frank thought, what did he have? There is this pair of lost jeans that Rushton says belongs to Michael, which he could have worn the night of the murder. Martha’s hair is found on it. But that’s not proof of murder. The hair could have come off when she brushed against him, say when they were sitting in the Lincoln parked in the Skakel driveway. But why did Michael deny the jeans were his?
The key, he believed, was the name Matthai of the laundry mark. What could that be?
Not long afterward, Frank discovered a directory with phone numbers and addresses with every kind of name east and west of the Mississippi. From the directory, he obtained a list of ninety-nine Matthais. He started calling. Every night, he would take the list home with him and call.
“This is Frank Garr,” he would begin. “I am calling from the Greenwich Police Department. Please bear with me.” And he would explain what he was looking for.
And then two months after he had begun, he found a Betty Matthai of Baltimore. Betty Matthai said she had a thirty-four-year-old son, Dr. William [Bill] Matthai, a cardiologist at Cooper Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, and two nephews, Bruce and Chris Matthai. All had attended Camp Pasquaney in Bristol, New Hampshire. Bill, she said, probably wore size 36–30 jeans.
Frank called Dr. William Matthai. Yes, he told Frank, he had gone to Camp Pasquaney in 1975, at age sixteen. Yes, he did own Wrangler dungarees, size 36–30.
“Crazy question,” said Frank. “Did you ever hear of a kid named Michael Skakel?”
“Oh, that nut?” Matthai answered.
Frank’s heart began pounding. He didn’t want Matthai to think he was jumping for joy, but he had to fight to keep himself under control. Matthai remembered Michael. Michael hadn’t wanted to come to camp and had been his usual disruptive self. Michael had gotten wet and Matthai had given Michael his jeans.
There it was. There was the lie. The jeans were Michael’s. He had lied about it. Why?
Frank called the camp and reached its director, John Gemmill, who had been there in 1975. There had been eighty-five campers that year. Michael was among them. Gemmill even found Michael’s picture in the 1975 camp yearbook.
So what did it all mean, linking the dungarees to Michael? As far as evidence, it meant nothing, as the jeans had been lost. The stains on them had been determined not to be blood. And Martha’s blonde hair could have come off at anoth
er point earlier in the evening.
But to Frank, the key was Michael’s lie.
“For me it was a gut thing. That’s when I knew Michael was our guy.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In Love with the Poly
GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT
1991–1995
And yet the case against Michael went nowhere. The reason was Frank’s partner from the state’s attorney’s office, Jack Solomon. Though in theory they were equal, Solomon was running the show.
Of medium height, stocky, and gray-haired, Solomon was a legend in Connecticut law enforcement. He had begun as a state trooper and was considered a “a detective’s detective.” But he became Frank’s nemesis. Approaching sixty, he had worked under Fairfield County State’s Attorney Donald Browne for twenty-five years and was so relied upon by Browne that he virtually ran the office.
He told anyone who would listen that Browne was his hero— “the man I admire more than any other in the world,” the only prosecutor he knew who’d never lost a murder case.
Solomon talked nonstop and seemed in perpetual motion, which was why he later had the nickname “Richochet Rabbit.” He had two speeds, Frank liked to say of him, fast and faster. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” was how he spoke. All jokes and chit-chat. When he walked, Frank had to run to keep pace with him.
Although the Greenwich Police Department had a no-smoking rule, Frank found himself bringing in ashtrays for Solomon, who tore through three and a half packs a day. When people became angry at this, Frank explained to them, “If I didn’t let that man smoke he’d spiral right up through the ceiling.”
Driving up to Ken Littleton’s alma mater, Williams College, Solomon popped a button on his pants during one of his rants. They had to pull off the highway to get a needle and thread to sew the button back on because the pants were falling off him.
Solomon seemed to know everyone and was forever discussing his high-profile cases. He told a story about sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with twenty people around the table when the phone rang. It was the state’s attorney’s office in Bridgeport.
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