Conviction

by Leonard Levitt

  “We have a murder,” they told him. He had to go, he told his wife and guests. The job came first. He was away for two days. He had a twinkle in his eye as he related the story.

  As Frank came to know him, he realized that Solomon viewed himself as better than the local cops. He could be unforgiving of them for the slightest perceived infraction. For Solomon, there were no extenuating circumstances. A local cop might go into the wrong restaurant or bar, say, one that New York City mob boss Joe Bonanno had visited thirty years before.

  Solomon would then say of the cop, “The guy’s mobbed up. He’s dirty,” and give his little laugh, “Heh, heh, heh,” which meant he knew things no one else did.

  “And he always had an angle,” said Frank. “Even with me. He never considered me an equal. Not a boob but never an equal.”

  One year Solomon invited Frank to his house for a Christmas party. “Mr. Browne is coming,” he said. “I’m a little nervous. He’s never been to my house, and I’ve got an uncle who drinks.”

  Frank was surprised. No, shocked. Hell, if Browne had come to Frank’s house and seen his uncles, they’d all be drunk. But so what? That was no reflection on him.

  And this was the first time in twenty-five years Browne was coming to Solomon’s house for dinner? The way Jack talked, it was as though they went to dinner three times a week. Frank began to wonder whether Solomon had been making up these stories about his closeness with Browne to impress him.

  Unlike Frank, Solomon had been on the Moxley case from the beginning. Like Frank, he was consumed by it.

  Unlike Frank, he discounted Tommy and Michael as suspects. Tommy had supposedly passed his polygraph. Michael had never taken one.

  Littleton, however, had failed his. “In twenty years, I’ve never had a bad call from the poly,” Solomon would say to Frank.

  Solomon was intrigued by Littleton’s phone call from Florida to David Moxley, in which he had referred to “our mutual tragedy.”

  “To me,” said Frank, “that phrase meant that both their lives—Littleton’s and David Moxley’s—had been destroyed because of Martha’s murder. Jack saw it as Littleton’s confession.”

  Not only did Solomon believe Littleton had murdered Martha. He also considered Littleton a serial killer and tried to link him to the murders of teenage girls in Williamstown, Massachusetts; Saratoga Springs, New York; Newport, New Hampshire; and Stowe, White River, and Manchester, Vermont—all of which were towns Littleton had visited.

  Solomon compiled a forty-three-page, single-spaced, typewritten profile, comparing Littleton’s movements up and down the East Coast from 1976 through the fall of 1991 with the murders of those teenage victims. He put his report into a three-ring, black spiral notebook and carried it with him everywhere.

  Early in the investigation, before Frank came on board, Solomon had accused Lunney and Carroll of “tunnel vision” when it came to Tommy. Solomon said they had locked in on him and refused to consider anyone else. But to Frank, Solomon had tunnel vision when it came to Littleton. Solomon downplayed all the calls they received about Michael. When Andrea Shakespeare told them Michael had not gone to the Terriens’, Solomon’s response was, “She’s got her times mixed up. She’s confused.” When Frank discovered the dungarees, Solomon insisted that on the night of the murder Littleton, not Michael, had worn them. His theory was that because Littleton had been sleeping in Rushton’s room, he had found the pants in the closet and worn them when he killed Martha.

  “Jack,” Frank said, “those pants are size 36–30. Littleton couldn’t get a leg into those pants.”

  “Well, I wear my pants short and high,” Solomon answered. Then, he’d tug at his pants to illustrate.

  “Jack,” Frank would say, “answer me one question and I’ll go along with it. Why did Littleton kill her?”

  “He was drinking. His horns came out,” Jack replied. Then placing his hands by his ears, he imitated a bull in heat and pranced around the room, mimicking Littleton following Martha home.

  Or he’d say, “The Skakel kids must have told Kenny something about Martha to make him think he could score with her.”

  Then, Frank said, “Solomon would start in again about Littleton’s flunking the polygraph.”

  At one point, Littleton accused the police of being willing to plant his fingerprints on the golf club shaft and theorized that a hunter in the woods might trip over it. Hearing this, Solomon contacted the Skakels and arranged for tracking dogs to sniff out hundreds of acres of hunting area on their Windham estate. He selected Windham because Littleton had driven the Skakel kids there the day after the murder. “Although there was no evidence, Jack said he believed Littleton had carried the club and thrown it into the woods,” Frank said.

  “Jack hears mutual tragedy and sees a confession. He hears a hunter in the woods and runs to Windham. It sounds good until you realize he’s got an ego the size of a house and is so obsessed, so devoured by this case you can’t trust anything he says.”

  So certain was Solomon that Littleton had murdered Martha that he attempted a ruse. He persuaded the Skakels to allow him and Frank to photograph the interior and exterior of the Skakel house on Otter Rock Drive. Then, he and Frank—who knew nothing of Solomon’s plan—drove over to Belle Haven.

  As Frank began photographing, Solomon disappeared. “The next thing I see Jack is sitting out on the porch with the Skakels’ attorneys, Margolis and Sheridan. Now, I know Jack is a bullshitter. He talks to everyone. So I don’t think anything of it. I continue doing what I thought we were down there to do.”

  Driving back to headquarters, Frank asked Solomon what he had been doing with Margolis and Sheridan. Solomon answered that he had shown them his folder on Littleton—his three-ring, black spiral book.

  Frank thought Solomon was joking, as he often did. “C’mon, Jack,” he said. “Knock it off.”

  “No, I’m serious,” Solomon answered. “I told them we are after Littleton. I want them to know we are not looking at Tommy or Michael. See, I want a shot at talking to Tommy to see what he can tell us about Littleton.”

  “‘Jack,’ I said, ‘how can you tell them something like that?’ Hell, I wasn’t ready to close the book on anybody. And I’m increasingly worried about Michael. I said, ‘Jack, let me tell you one other thing. Even if you get a confession from Littleton, on videotape, saying, “Yes, I killed Martha Moxley.” And even if you played it when you brought Littleton to court, convicted him, and sent him to jail, Margolis will never let you talk to Tommy.’”

  Solomon also began cultivating Littleton’s recently divorced wife, Mary Baker.

  “What can I say about Jack Solomon?” Mary wrote to me years later. “Jack was charismatic when I met him. I had to avoid my original characterization of him—that he reminded me of John Wayne. He had the gift of seeming strong, trustworthy and physically powerful, straightforward and blunt like JW, but wearing a brown polyester suit with a bad tie instead of cowboy duds.

  “He entertained my children, then seven and four, like a grandfather would. Taking us out to dinner at Swiss Chalet and offering them hats with CT [Connecticut] Police on them. He then realized he couldn’t give them the hats as their biological father might ask questions if he ever saw the hats.

  “He treated me as one would a daughter. On our two road trips, he was very amusing, [told] anecdotes about being lost around the Statue of Liberty, asking bums for directions in Boston when he got lost, stories of airplane flights with prisoners where the flights ended with crashes…. He offered me protection from Ken and did this in a paternal fashion. He offered to send me his wife’s hand-me-downs when he realized I was not well-off. He appeared to be what his credentials said, an Inspector for the State of Connecticut Police and a very nice human being.”

  What Solomon wanted was Mary’s help in trapping her ex-husband. And Mary agreed. She trusted cops. And she had her own history. When she was thirteen, she told him, her mother had disappeared. Six months later her body
was discovered. She’d been murdered.

  “Do you think Kenny did it?” was the first thing Solomon asked her.

  I could only imagine what Mary must have thought of him at that moment. How could Littleton have killed her mother when he was just a boy himself, lived 1,000 miles away in Massachusetts, and didn’t know her?

  What about Martha Moxley’s murder? Solomon asked her. What about his phone call to David Moxley?

  Mary told him she had first heard Ken talk about Martha’s murder in 1983 in Florida when he had been drinking. She said he had wanted to go under sodium Pentothal because he felt the police had tried to frame him. Ken had called David Moxley, she said, after fighting at a bar. At the time of the call, Ken had been hallucinating. He had taken to phoning the FBI and former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese.

  By 1984, she and Ken were fighting about money and she refused him access to her bank account. The following year he suffered a breakdown and ended up in Charles River Hospital in Mt. Auburn, Massachusetts. Upon his discharge, the only job he found was with a landscaper, who turned out to be a drug dealer. Unknowingly, Ken had been transporting drugs in his boss’s truck.

  In 1989, he and Mary separated. A year later, they were divorced and he returned to Boston and entered the McClean’s mental institution. Between his binges and bouts of depression, he talked of reconciling.

  Hearing this, Solomon sprung his trap. His plan was to bring Mary to Boston under the guise of a reconciliation, then trick Littleton into a confession. He rented Mary a motel room and bugged it, then listened in from an adjoining room.

  With Browne’s backing, Solomon applied for a wiretap order. He had to ensure that the judge who signed the order kept it sealed so that the operation would not become public. Then, he obtained technical support from the Boston Police Department to plant the wire and connect it to the next room.

  Though skeptical, Frank was impressed enough with Solomon’s investigative skills that he went along. “If it turned out Jack was right and Littleton said something incriminating, great. We’d solved the case. But I knew it wouldn’t happen.”

  By February 1992, all was ready. Solomon—with Frank in tow, powerless to stop the equivalent of a runaway locomotive—drove up to Boston to meet Mary, who had arrived from Ottawa. Solomon had rented her a room at a Howard Johnson motel. He and Frank moved in next door.

  When Littleton arrived, Mary said that before she could consider reconciling with him, she had to know the truth about Martha Moxley. She said that in 1984 while driving from New York through Connecticut he had been hallucinating and confessed to murdering Martha. He had even admitted stabbing her through the neck with the golf club shaft, she told him.

  “I never knew you were in a blackout before,” she told him in remarks sculpted by Solomon. “That…you were there when Martha Moxley died. And I mean all the other things you’ve never told me, things that would solve the case…. Like uh, ‘Oh God, she wouldn’t die. I had to stab her through the neck.’ …I mean you convinced me that you did it.” It was all a lie. Littleton had never said any such thing.

  Solomon and Frank listened from the next room, waiting for Littleton to utter the magic words—his confession that he had killed her. Instead, Littleton replied, “I said that? No. I didn’t do it. I wasn’t anywhere near the murder site.”

  At Michael’s trial years later, Browne’s successor, Fairfield County State’s Attorney Jonathan Benedict, described Solomon’s plan as “the most bizarre piece of investigative work I have ever seen.”

  “It was nuts. The whole thing was nuts,” said Frank. “But Jack wouldn’t quit.”

  Ten months later, Solomon came up with another plan. On December 7, 1992, he called Frank at home. “He says he’s watching television, one of those shows like 48 Hours, and he sees this psychiatrist—a Dr. Kathy Morrall from Denver, who works in the prison system one-on-one with inmates.

  “‘This woman, this Kathy,’ Jack says, ‘she sounds fantastic. I think we should look into something like this for Littleton.’”

  So Frank called her. She sent him her curriculum vitae. He arranged for her to fly from Colorado to New York. “She said she would need two days with Littleton. I book her into a hotel in Manhattan and make arrangements for her to come to Greenwich.”

  At Solomon’s direction, Frank also persuaded Littleton to return to Connecticut for further testing. “I had to schmooze him,” he said.

  Sounding like Keegan fifteen years before, he told Littleton that if wanted to clear himself, this was the only way. “I said I didn’t know what went wrong with the early polygraph but let’s clear it up now and you are out of it. If you want the truth, if you want to get the monkey off your back, this is the only way.”

  Still unsuspecting of Mary, Littleton asked if she could be there. “That won’t be a problem,” Frank told him.

  Littleton was still afraid of the Connecticut State Police, who had conducted his first polygraph, so Frank assured him they would choose a private, neutral polygrapher.

  Littleton asked whether he should have a lawyer. Sounding like a cop on NYPD Blue, Frank said, “You certainly have a right to one but if you want this over, you won’t clear it up because he won’t let you do it.”

  Did Frank have qualms about bringing him in again? I asked him. “No, I was simply doing my job. I didn’t think Kenny did it, but if he did, I was open to it. Unlike Jack, I wasn’t locked in. My ego wasn’t on the line. If it turned out to be him, so be it. I didn’t care who it was so long as we got him. And, no, I did not feel I was taking advantage of him by persuading him to be tested without a lawyer. I would do anything I had to do within the parameters of the law to get the job done. That’s the business I’m in.”

  Frank arranged for Mary to fly in from Ontario. Littleton still did not realize the meeting in Boston had been a trick.

  The first question was what testing method to use—sodium Pentothal, hypnotism, or a polygraph. “I don’t have to tell you Jack wanted the polygraph,” said Frank.

  Morrall knew a psychiatrist in New York City, a Dr. Stanley Portnow, who practiced hypnotism. Portnow agreed to see them in his office after hours.

  They drove down from Greenwich and waited for the doctor in a small, dark anteroom. Portnow appeared, saying he first wanted to see Littleton alone. Then, he called in Morrall.

  A few minutes later, she returned. There was a problem. Littleton wasn’t going through with the hypnosis. “Dr. Portnow,” she said, “is a little uncomfortable. He feels Ken should not do this without legal representation.”

  Solomon took it calmly. Although Frank had regarded the hypnotism skeptically, he became furious at Portnow.

  “I went nuts. He feels Ken should not do this without legal representation? Who is he to feel? I don’t care what he feels. All I want him to do is his job. If Kenny wants to take the test, who is this Portnow to say no? Why did he bring us here then? I’m so angry, I tell Solomon I want to charge him with interfering with an investigation.

  “A couple of weeks later, he has the nerve to send us a bill for $500. I tore it up. We never heard from him again.”

  But now Littleton was spooked. “We have gotten Kenny a little hincky,” Frank remembered. “He’s saying, ‘Do I need an attorney?’”

  Frank tried to soothe him. “I want to get him back to Greenwich and relax him. I’m saying, ‘If you get an attorney, you’ll never clear this up because he won’t let you do it. We all know you didn’t do it, but you can’t clear this up if you have a lawyer. He won’t let you take the polygraph.”

  That, Frank realized, was the reason Solomon had been so calm when Portnow refused to go through with the hypnotism. “Jack didn’t care about it. He only cared about the polygraph. This Kathy was just the opening to soften Kenny up for the real deal.”

  By the next day, Littleton had calmed down enough to allow Morrall to interview him, without an attorney. The interview took place in the Greenwich police library. It lasted all day. />
  As he and Solomon listened from another office, Morrall told Littleton she was aware of the burden he was carrying. She wanted to help him recall things. She then took Littleton through his conversation with Mary in the Howard Johnson motel. Still not realizing Mary had lied to him and believing he had confessed to murdering Martha, Littleton repeated her lie to Morrall.

  With that, plans were made to conduct the polygraph the following day. Here, however, things became tricky. Littleton had resisted coming to Connecticut because he distrusted the state police, who had polygraphed him fifteen years before. So Frank had found his own expert, Robert Brisentine, who had trained the state police.

  “I wanted to be sure,” said Frank. “I didn’t want anyone saying Ken flunked the polygraph because he was nervous or afraid of the state police. No matter how it comes out, I don’t want any doubt.”

  Brisentine arrived at Greenwich police headquarters late on the night of December 14, 1992. The following morning Littleton signed a release saying he was voluntarily taking the lie detector test.

  Brisentine spent eight hours with Littleton in the police library preparing him for the polygraph, asking him about himself, relaxing him. At 12:42 the following afternoon, Brisentine felt Littleton was ready. Littleton was asked five questions.

  “Did you have any quarrel with Martha Moxley on October 30, 1975?” was the first question.

  Littleton answered, “No.”

  “Did you have a golf club in your possession on October 30, 1975?”

  “No,” Littleton answered again.

  “Regarding that matter pertaining to Martha Moxley, do you intend to answer truthfully to each question about that?”

  “Yes,” Littleton answered.

  “Did you cause those injuries to Martha Moxley on October 30, 1975?”

  “No,” he answered for a third time.