“Did you have a golf club in your hand on October 30, 1975?”
“No,” Littleton repeated.
Brisentine emerged from the library and approached Frank.
“Frank,” Brisentine said, “that guy killed that girl. I polygraphed three convicts in jail that confessed to crimes and their polygraphs were not as good as this guy’s.”
Frank couldn’t believe it. “I just didn’t think he did it. But I know I am stuck with it now. I know I can never turn Jack around on any other point after this. I am the one who found Brisentine. It was my guy who said he did it. Me, I just didn’t believe Kenny did it. I see a sick, tortured individual who couldn’t take a polygraph if his life depended on it. And it did. He had literally been trying to show he did not commit this crime. I mean, why is he here? He doesn’t have to be. He is trying to show us he did not do it.”
Two days later, it all came to a head. With Brisentine gone, a meeting was arranged in the police library with Littleton and Mary to discuss why Littleton had again failed the polygraph. What Solomon needed was Littleton’s confession. Tortured as he was, Littleton wouldn’t confess.
Before they entered the library, Solomon told Frank he was going in for the kill. “He did it,” said Solomon. “I am going to hit him with it.”
“He’s not going to confess, Jack,” Frank warned. “If you do this, you’ll close the door on him. You may want to talk to him again.”
They entered the library. Frank began chatting with Mary while eyeing Solomon. “We are standing there. I can see it coming.”
Jack sat down next to Kenny, who at this point was calm, said Frank. “The next thing I know Jack leans over him, confidential-like. Jack’s father-figure routine.”
“Listen, Ken,” Solomon began.
He’s going to do it, Frank thought to himself. And it’s not going to work. He tried to interrupt, to stop him but he couldn’t get a word in.
“Ken,” Solomon began, “before you go, remember, if you did it—I am not saying you did but the polygraph says you’re lying and I never had a bad call on a polygraph, Ken. Ken, you did it. I know you did it. Give it up. You have been living with this for seventeen years. It’s time to be a man, Ken, do the right thing.”
Littleton looked up at Solomon before he spoke.
“So this is what this is all about. This is why you brought me here. It was the same thing in 1976. To accuse me. To try and make me say I did something I didn’t do.”
As he spoke, he stood up. He was shouting. “This is all you wanted to get me here for. I knew this was all you wanted. I’m getting out of here.”
The police report of December 17, 1992, reads as follows: “Upon Littleton’s request, he was transported to the Stamford railroad station for his return to Boston, Massachusetts. Miss Baker was subsequently transported to John F. Kennedy Airport for her return to Canada.”
As for Jack, said Frank, “That was the end of the line for him and Ken Littleton. It was also the end of Solomon in the Moxley investigation. When Littleton didn’t crack, Jack lost all interest, even though his beloved polygraph suggested he did commit the crime. A few days later, Jack began taking his equipment back to the state’s attorney’s office in Bridgeport. His heart was out of it.”
With Frank at the Lakeside Diner, our favorite haunt.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Caller
1992–1995
Around this time, I received a visit at New York Newsday from two men. The first was stocky and dark-haired in his late forties. He introduced himself as Jim Murphy, a retired FBI agent who headed a Long Island–based private security firm, Sutton Associates. He explained that he had been hired by Rushton Skakel as a private investigator “to clear the family name.”
The second was the Skakels’ attorney Tom Sheridan. He was white-haired and heavyset, in his late sixties, I guessed. While he moved in the Skakels’ social circles and had made a pot of money in real estate, he and his family were Al Smith Democrats, and he was comfortable among society’s lower strata. His father had had a successful law practice in New York and one of his associates was Burton Turkis, who had prosecuted high-level Brooklyn mobsters known as Murder Incorporated. It was Sheridan who had hired Murphy for the Skakels.
Both said they had sought me out because the Skakels felt my article in the Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate the year before had been fair. They had been upset by statements from the Greenwich police and State’s Attorney Browne that they had had refused to cooperate with the investigation. My article made clear that Rushton had cooperated—at least during the first few months of the investigation.
Murphy and Sheridan then explained what they wanted. They asked me to help them obtain the Greenwich police file. Although it was now a public document due to our Freedom of Information suit, the police were refusing to give them a copy.
“You can have mine,” I said without hesitation. “Make a duplicate and return it to me.”
They seemed surprised at how easily their mission had been accomplished. But I had no reason to keep the file from them. It was a public document. They were entitled to it, no matter whose side they were on.
Sheridan then explained that he had hired Murphy after he had met with Jack Solomon. Unlike Frank, I knew nothing then about Solomon’s theory of Littleton as a serial killer or of Solomon’s bizarre meeting with Sheridan and Margolis at the Skakel home to seek their help in pursuing him.
Nor was I aware of Solomon’s disagreements with Frank, whom I barely knew. Frank and I weren’t yet on the same track, though we were heading in the same direction.
“Solomon said he had a lot on Littleton,” Sheridan said. “He said he had something going with Littleton’s wife, that he thought Littleton had disposed of the golf club handle in Windham, and that they were close to indicting him.”
I was stunned to hear this. Littleton had disposed of the golf club at the Skakel’s home in Windham? He was close to being indicted? Sheridan had to be making this up, I thought, or at least exaggerating.
Murphy said that one of his employees—a six-foot-seven-inch former New York City police lieutenant named Willis Krebs—had recently interviewed Littleton’s ex-wife and former girlfriends, seeking to link him to the murders of four teenage girls on the East Coast. That was precisely what Hale in Detroit had told me the Connecticut authorities needed to do to solve the Moxley murder—interview the suspects’ wives and ex-girlfriends. Of course, Hale hadn’t been referring to Littleton, but to Tommy. And Murphy and Sheridan weren’t working for the state of Connecticut, but for the Skakels.
I remained skeptical. Littleton had no motive. And why would he hide the golf club handle with Anne Skakel’s name on it? What Sheridan and Murphy were saying about him made no sense.
“Let me ask you something,” I said to Murphy. “What if, after your investigation, you conclude Littleton did not kill Martha?”
This time it was Murphy who did not hesitate. “Before I agreed to take the case,” he answered, “Rushton Skakel assured me I could pursue the investigation wherever it led.”
“What if your investigation brings you back to the Skakels?” I persisted.
“I was assured,” Murphy answered, “that if any Skakel committed this murder—and Rushton Skakel never for a moment believed any of his children did—the family would publicly acknowledge the crime and seek to provide him with medical help.
“I felt Rushton Skakel was an honorable man,” Murphy continued. “I felt he was acting for the right reasons. I felt he was convinced that none of his children had anything to do with the murder and needed someone to demonstrate this to the public.”
Murphy added that he would keep me abreast of his investigation and suggested that I might want to write something about it. I wondered whether this was the real reason he and Sheridan had sought me out.
“Let’s see what you turn up,” I said.
A year later, a story about his investigation appeared in the Daily News (b
y Joanna Malloy, July 7, 1993). “NEW EYE ON TEEN DEATHS,” it was headlined, and under it, “Connecticut probers seek link in girls’ unsolved killings.”
The story began by saying that Connecticut law enforcement authorities were seeking to link Martha’s death with at least five other unsolved homicides and disappearances. It added that Murphy and Krebs “have learned that the unsolved killings of four other girls, and the disappearance of a fifth, in Maine, Massachusetts, and Florida, occurred when Littleton was living in those areas.”
It concluded with Murphy saying his mandate was to determine whether anyone in the Skakel family had knowledge of Martha’s death. “We were told that wherever the chips may fall, they want to know the truth. The Skakel family recognizes Mrs. Moxley’s pain and have instructed that any information that develops or contributes to the solution of the homicide is to be immediately shared with Connecticut authorities.”
Short as the story was, I saw it as a Skakel public relations ploy. They had taken their own hypothesis about Littleton and put it onto Connecticut law enforcement authorities. Murphy’s quote from the Skakel family about recognizing Mrs. Moxley’s pain depicted, the Skakels as compassionate.
But Murphy’s claim that the Skakels would share information he had developed with Connecticut authorities would return to haunt him.
•
Murphy and I met numerous times over the next two years. In all our meetings I never brought up the Daily News article, which I assumed he had given them. I viewed him as the quintessential FBI man—polite, polished, professional—and manipulative.
Over the years, however, I came to see another dimension to him. While acknowledging that the Skakels had compensated him well (the figure I heard was just south of $1 million), Murphy said he viewed this investigation, like all others, as involving more than money. I subsequently learned he had lost a son to cancer and was a lay deacon in the Roman Catholic church. As much as the Skakels had paid him, he understood money’s limitations.
And then, two years after we met, I received a phone call. The caller said he had information about Murphy’s investigation. He said that if I could be patient, it would prove worth my while.
I assured him I could be. What choice did I have? The reopened investigation had been under way for three years. Except for the story in the Daily News that I felt Murphy had planted, I had heard no more of Littleton, either as Martha’s murderer or as a serial killer. No one had been arrested. As far as I could tell, the case was going nowhere.
Early in 1995, the caller contacted me again. He began by saying that Murphy had sought an analysis by two former FBI colleagues who had run the Bureau’s Behavioral Science lab in Washington. The two, Kenneth Baker and Roger DePew, had studied hundreds of serial killers, including the sociopath of the film The Silence of the Lambs. Now retired, they had formed their own consulting company, known as the Academy Group of Manassas, Virginia.
The Academy Group, the caller said, had noted Martha’s lack of defense wounds on her arms and hands and the fact that no screams were heard. This indicated, he said, that Martha did not expect the attack and knew her attacker.
Over the phone, I said, “You’re saying Martha knew her killer.”
“Martha didn’t know Littleton,” I heard myself saying out loud. Littleton had moved into the Skakel house the night of the murder. He had never spoken to her or even seen her before that night.
“That’s what it would look like,” replied the caller.
But he was not finished. As part of the investigation, he continued, Murphy’s investigator Krebs had interviewed Tommy and Michael. Tommy’s interview had occurred in Margolis’s office. Margolis had been there with another Murphy employee and former FBI colleague, Richard McCarthy, who was a friend of Sheridan. It was through McCarthy that Sheridan had found Murphy.
Krebs, said the caller, had begun his questioning of Tommy with a warning: Henry Lee, the state’s renowned forensic pathologist, was conducting tests to determine whether the killer had left DNA traces. With that, Tommy confided something he had never told the Greenwich police.
In 1975 at age seventeen, Tommy told the Greenwich police he had last seen Martha at 9:30 P.M. outside his house when he went inside to write a school report on Abraham Lincoln—a report no teacher had assigned. Now, on October 7, 1993, at age thirty-six and the father of two young children, Tommy told Krebs he had returned outside, where Martha waited for him. He said he and Martha had spent the next twenty minutes together before he returned home. As he had told the Greenwich police in 1975, Tommy maintained Martha was alive when they parted. The last he saw of her, he said, was walking across his lawn toward her house. Only now he said it was just before 10:00 P.M.
As Tommy told this story, he began to cry. The caller said that Krebs felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough, perhaps a confession. But McCarthy interrupted, asking if Tommy wanted to collect himself. Margolis used the break to halt the interview.
I could not believe what I was hearing. This was the break all of us connected to the case had been waiting for. Even without a confession, those twenty minutes placed him with Martha just minutes before the time the police believed she had been murdered.
But the caller was not finished. He said Krebs had also interviewed Michael. The interview had occurred at Sheridan’s home in Windham on August 4, 1992. Krebs had given Michael the same warning that he had given Tommy about Henry Lee and the DNA. It was then that Michael told the most bizarre story Krebs had ever heard.
In 1975, at age fifteen, Michael told Greenwich police he had returned from his cousin Jimmy Terrien’s at 11:00 P.M. and gone to straight to bed. Now in 1992 at age thirty-five, he told Krebs that around midnight he went to Martha’s house and climbed a tree outside her window.
“Martha, Martha,” he said he yelled, but there was no answer. He threw stones at the window but she did not appear. He then masturbated to orgasm in the tree.
When he climbed down, he stopped under a streetlight. He said he could feel someone’s presence in the very place her body would be discovered the next day. He yelled into the darkness, threw something, then ran back to his house. Everyone was asleep. All doors were locked so he climbed in through a window and went to bed.
•
Stunning as all this was, I wasn’t ready to publish the story. First, I needed corroboration. The word of a man on the phone, who refused to allow me to use his name, was not enough. I called Murphy, who for reasons I only later understood, refused to speak to me. Then, I called Sheridan.
He invited me to lunch at the New York Athletic Club overlooking Central Park, with its full-length gymnasium, basketball and squash courts, swimming pool, and upstairs bedrooms for men on the lam from their wives.
I began by saying I was aware of Tommy’s and Michael’s new stories. Seated across from me, Sheridan said nothing. His silence was my confirmation.
Michael’s account did not seem to concern him. Bizarre as it was, he agreed that if Martha had been murdered at 10:00 P.M., whatever Michael had done in the tree by her window and whether or not he had passed the murder scene was irrelevant.
But Tommy’s situation was different. “Why would he place himself with Martha at precisely the time she had been murdered?” I asked him.
“Oh,” he said, “So you know about the mutual masturbation.”
“The what?” I wanted to shout. The what? Poor Sheridan. He had just blurted out something I hadn’t known. The caller had merely said Tommy and Martha spent another twenty minutes together. Did Sheridan mean that during those twenty minutes they had engaged in mutual masturbation?
Not wanting to reveal my ignorance, I said as nonchalantly as I could, “Okay, let’s say Tommy is telling the truth—that Martha was alive when he left her. Why didn’t he tell this to the police? Why did he make up the story about the Abraham Lincoln report?”
“He was afraid of his father,” Sheridan answered. “Old man Skakel was a nut about sex,” he said, describ
ing how Rushton had thrashed Michael after catching him reading Playboy magazines.
“He would have come down on his children very hard if they had anything to do with sex. And that’s why Michael didn’t tell the police about what he had done in the tree.”
I didn’t buy it. Fear of their father about sex was the reason both Tommy and Michael had lied to the police about their whereabouts on the night of a murder? If that were true, why couldn’t each have told the truth and just omitted the masturbation? Why couldn’t Tommy have told the police he last saw Martha shortly before 10:00 without revealing the sex? Why did he make up the Abraham Lincoln report?
Why couldn’t Michael have said that after arriving home from the Terriens’, he had gone outside around midnight, climbed the tree, and thrown stones at Martha’s window, leaving it at that?
And why had Tommy broken down before Krebs? That couldn’t have been because of his concerns about sex. He was a man then. He was thirty-six years old.
No, a more likely reason, I felt, was that both Tommy and Michael were using their masturbation stories to explain away their DNA. That could only mean that one or both was involved in Martha’s murder or in moving her body.
My caller had also promised to show me documents supporting all he had told me but said I’d have to wait a little longer. It had been thirteen years since I had started on the Moxley case. It had taken me two years to write the story, and seven years for the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time to run it. As far as I knew, the four subsequent years had produced nothing—no arrest, no indictment, and no new evidence.
I could wait a little longer. Because with what I had, I knew everything was going to change.
•
In July 1995, the caller came to my house. I remember it was a Saturday. Susan was out with the children. Jennifer, that three-and-a-half-pound baby, was now twelve and playing in a fast-pitch softball tournament. Mike, now ten, was playing Little League. Ordinarily, I would have been at their games. I was a baseball nut as a kid; now I was a baseball nut as a parent. But ever since the caller had approached me, the Moxley case had taken on a new urgency.
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