“Yeah, Billy,” he said, “I sure wish I could interview them.”
“But what about Tommy’s breaking into tears as Krebs questioned him?” I pressed. “It sounded as though Tommy was about to confess.”
“How do you know that?” Frank answered. “After all these years as the case’s prime suspect, having been under pressure not just by the police but by the media—so much so that strangers in Greenwich whispered or pointed at him as he passed—maybe Tommy was ready to reveal what he’d kept inside him all these years. That someone else killed Martha.”
I know detectives are intuitive. The best of them have a sixth sense ordinary people don’t, even police reporters like myself who have been around cops for years. But how could Frank concoct this scenario about Tommy with such certainty? No, this wasn’t mere intuition.
“You think Michael did it,” I said. “You know something, don’t you, that you’re not saying.”
“Let’s just say I’ve heard some things.”
This seemed like a good time to drop something on him—what my article about Michael had left out, what my editors at Newsday felt didn’t “add anything to the story.”
“What if I told you that while Michael was throwing stones at Martha’s window, he was up in a tree jerking off?” I said. I stared at him, awaiting his reaction.
But Frank gave away nothing. “Interesting,” he said.
•
Our meeting had gone well enough, I thought. Or at least it hadn’t gone badly. We’d established a rapport, however limited. Like Lunney and Keegan, there seemed no question that Frank sincerely wanted to solve this case. Unlike Lunney and Keegan, he sounded as though he knew what he was doing.
And he seemed to have formed a favorable impression of me. Or at least not an unfavorable one. “A lot of reporters are full of themselves,” he would say years later. “They think they are smarter than everyone else. But you came across as a regular guy. I remember you were wearing a Mets hat. And I like the Mets.”
“How about we get together again?” I said a couple of weeks later.
“Sure,” Frank said. He explained he was glad to keep the door open. “Jack and I used the media in the past. I think we owe something to reporters like yourself who pushed the case along.”
That was, of course, bullshit. If Frank felt he could have solved the case without me, I would only have seen his back, and maybe not even that. No, there had to be another reason why he was willing to see me again, one I would come to understand a year later.
This time Frank picked the time and the place—breakfast at the Put-nam Coffee Shop at the bottom of Greenwich Avenue. This time, we began by discussing the case’s participants.
“We’re off the record here, right?” Frank began. That was fine with me. We weren’t exactly breaking any news here. We merely wanted to get each other’s take on people. What Frank said about them would also give me an insight into him.
“Are you taping this?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“How do I know you don’t have a hidden tape recorder?”
“Frank, we’re only having breakfast.”
“How do I know I can believe you?”
Was he kidding? The way I worked, the way McCulloch had taught me a reporter should work, trust was everything. That was why I’d opposed Ken’s idea years before of secretly taping Keegan.
Cops, detectives, federal officers, and whoever else in law enforcement can lie to suspects to obtain their confessions. But reporters can’t lie to anyone, least of all a source like Frank. Were I to get caught in a lie or print something he had told me in confidence, I would be out of business with him, and with every other law enforcement official in Connecticut.
Hell, how did Frank think I’d gotten a look at Hale’s report? “I felt I could trust you,” McCreight had told me. Of course, as I would learn, Frank had no use for McCreight. To say nothing of Hale.
“How do you think I got a look at Murphy’s Sutton Associates report?” I said to him. Someone had trusted me to keep my mouth shut about where my information came from.
“Yeah, okay,” Frank said. He seemed satisfied, although his face remained expressionless. Frank, I was beginning to learn, was pretty good at hiding his thoughts and feelings, when he wanted to.
“So what do you think of Murphy and Krebs?” he said.
“I respect them,” I replied. Murphy still hadn’t spoken to me since the Skakels fired him. I would see him six years later at the funeral of his cousin, Vincent Danz, one of the twenty-three New York City police officers killed at the World Trade Center attack on 9/11. Murphy delivered the eulogy, followed by Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani spoke of war and acting accordingly toward our attackers. Murphy said our response should be based “not on vengeance but on justice.”
Frank said he’d never warmed up to Murphy but felt a rapport with Krebs. I understood that. Murphy was FBI formal. Frank and Krebs were both detectives. They both seemed street-savvy and easygoing, at least on the surface.
“I have great respect for Billy,” Frank said, referring to Krebs. “I just don’t understand how he could work for the Skakels.”
“What about Tom Sheridan?” I asked. Sheridan, I believed, had played a larger role in the Moxley case than anyone realized. Rushton’s oldest friend, he had become Michael’s criminal attorney after the drunken-driving accident at Windham. He had hired Murphy and Krebs “to clear the Skakel name,” as he had put it. It was Sheridan who, at Solomon’s behest, had pointed Murphy and Krebs toward Littleton—a red herring if there ever was one.
“I wouldn’t trust him.” said Frank. “His only concern is his friendship with Rushton. ‘Rucky,’” he said sarcastically. “He’d do anything to protect his friend Rucky. Including framing Littleton.” Yes, Frank was good at hiding his thoughts and feelings—when he wanted to.
“I have no problem in being candid when it comes to the Skakels,” he continued. “I never hid the fact that these people were despicable.”
“You don’t like the Skakels, I take it? I never would have figured that out.”
“Liars. Liars and drunks. They refuse to take responsibility for anything they do. They actually see themselves as victims.”
“Margolis?” I asked, referring to their longtime attorney.
“Manny’s had this case for twenty-six years. He’s used the Skakel family as a golden goose. He’s made a small fortune stonewalling the police.”
Yet the person Frank harbored the most ill will toward was one of his own—Solomon. Frank never raised his voice when he spoke of him. His hand never shook in anger. But get him started and he could rant. “You know Jack’s problem? He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. He thinks everyone else is stupid. He’s in love with the polygraph and with his image and can’t admit when he is wrong.”
What Frank didn’t say was that he felt Solomon had poisoned Browne against him.
•
We seemed to enjoy ourselves so much that we arranged a lunch at a pub in Greenwich. Another evening we met for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Stamford. Here we were, two grown men with wives and children, now spending an increasing amount of time together. At each meeting, we’d talk for hours.
Our coming together—a reporter and a detective—seemed so unnatural I said to Frank, “Jesus, if anyone noticed what was going on between us, they might think we’re gay.”
“Who gives a fuck?” he answered. “We’ve developed a friendship. It’s the truth.”
In fact, we discovered we had plenty in common. We discussed our bosses, mine at Newsday, his at the state’s attorney’s office. Neither of us had any use for them.
We compared restaurants we liked. Frank’s favorite was Dominick’s on Arthur Avenue, an Italian section of the Bronx.
“I know Dominick’s,” I said, and regaled him with stories about my old friend Judge Fusco. “Friday afternoons he held court at Mario’s, a restaurant right across the street.”
“That’s where we’ll go if this case is ever solved,” Frank said. “That’s where we’ll celebrate.”
One area where we disagreed was politics. Frank loved Rudy Giuliani and said he would campaign for him if he ran for president. I told Frank I wasn’t sure whether Giuliani’s final destination was the White House or a lunatic asylum.
Then there was golf. Frank had recently taken it up. He played every weekend at the public course in Greenwich. “Why don’t we play sometime?” he said. I begged off. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll teach you. Don’t worry, I’m no good myself.”
“Frank,” I said, “what happens when I bring up Solomon and you start to rant and we get thrown off the course?”
Once I called him on his cell phone in Rhode Island to ask about a rumor that Browne was retiring. I caught him on the third hole. “You’re killing me,” he said. “I can’t even get a shot off.”
Lastly, there were our families. Both of us agreed they came first, before work. At least in theory. Like Susan, Frank’s wife Mariann had spent months in bed, pregnant with their daughter Angela. Frank said her difficulties stemmed from a motorcycle accident before they were married. I pictured the two of them tooling around Greenwich. Frank’s hair hadn’t turned gray then. Mariann was sitting behind him, arms wrapped around his shoulders.
“We were broad-sided on the Post Road in Old Greenwich,” he said. “Mariann spent three months in the hospital. Her injuries were so serious doctors warned us she might never have a child.”
Mercifully, it had turned out well for them, as it had for Susan and me. Their two children were a few years older than ours. Frank’s son Dave, who was six inches taller than Frank, had been a star pitcher at Greenwich High. Our son Mike, who was six inches taller than me, was struggling to make his high school team.
Our daughter Jennifer was shy. “Angela was too,” Frank said. “Don’t worry. It all works out. It all just happens. Now she’s getting married. She didn’t even start dating until she was in her twenties.”
One night we were at his home in the Glenville section of Greenwich. Friendly as we were becoming, I remained a reporter and was probing why he thought Michael, not Tommy, had murdered Martha. Frank was resisting telling me. Mariann was working a late shift at the hospital. Dave was out with his friends. Angela was with her fiance, and we were alone in his kitchen, watching the Mets. That was something else we had in common. We both agreed they stank.
Another time, Frank said he had been prepared to dislike me. “Keegan and Lunney had told me about you,” he said. I could imagine what they had said.
“Your first article hadn’t come out yet but Lunney knew something was wrong. He was complaining you kept harping on the search warrant and were just trying to make the department look bad. You were always a thorn in his side. Whenever your name came up, he’d say you’re not a cop. ‘He doesn’t know what’s going on and is writing about things he doesn’t know about.’
“But I saw something else,” he continued. “I saw a reporter who was motivated and tenacious, who just didn’t want to do a story and go home but who wanted to see this thing get solved, the way I did.”
Frank also mentioned that years before he had seen me going into the police library to interview Keegan and Lunney. I asked him if Lunney told him how he’d grabbed my shirt.
“Lunney denies it,” Frank said the next time we met. “He says it never happened.” I tried to determine if Frank was smiling. I decided that he wasn’t.
“Why don’t you ask Keegan?” I said.
“I did. He denies it, too.”
“You think I’m making this up?” I said.
“Hey, Len, they tell me it never happened. What do you want me to say? Maybe you’re mixing them up with someone else.” He sounded like my former publisher at Newsday, Isenberg, who told me he’d poisoned the well, then claimed I was confused. As for Frank, he seemed torn between his loyalty to his department and his common sense.
Another time, Frank said, “You know when I started to trust you? A lot of media people had been around this case, from Dominick Dunne to Tim Dumas.” At Dominick’s urging, Dorthy had entreated Frank to talk to him and the two had spent an afternoon together. Dumas, a young writer from Greenwich, was a good resource, Frank said, because he knew the kids. He was their age and had grown up with a lot of them.
“But you were the one who seemed the most consistent,” he said. “I felt there were times when I would say things to you about the case, about what I thought about Tommy and Michael, then wait to see if they ever came back to me. I waited to hear if they would be repeated and they never were. I knew you talked to Dominick and to Dumas. But nothing I told you ever came back. So a trust developed. And from trust came friendship. And here we are.”
Years before, when I’d begun this case, I promised myself to make no alliances with sources. Frank said he felt the same. “I always thought through the years never to develop any personal relationship or feelings towards people in an investigation,” he said. “That it had to be strictly business. Otherwise, it can be dangerous. It can dog your thinking.”
But we both agreed the Moxley case was different. Frank felt the difference was Dorthy. “I think it was because of my own personal relationship with her,” he said. “I felt so bad for her. And I knew you felt that way, too. I felt you truly cared about her, that you weren’t there just as a reporter, not just as someone who came after a story. I felt you truly wanted to see this solved. That you truly wanted to see Dorthy get some relief. That you felt she was a person. I felt you saw this case as beyond a job. That you went home with it. That you slept it and lived it like I did. That’s why I could talk to you the way I do.”
That was all true, of course, but for me Dorthy was only part of it. Oh yes, she and I were close, closer perhaps than she was to Frank. I knew her family and she knew mine. There was never a time we spoke that she didn’t ask about Susan, Jennifer, or Mike.
She invited me to bring Susan and the kids to stay with her at her ski house in Vermont. I never did. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain to myself, I felt I shouldn’t be in the position of accepting a gift or favor like that from her. But one winter when I was near there with Mike and two of his friends, we stopped by. Her grandchildren were with her—her son John and Kara’s children, a little blonde boy and a little blonde girl. They had sheets over their heads and were running around the house as ghosts. I saw what joy they gave her, and refused to allow myself to think of the obvious—they were filling the void left by Martha’s death.
And then there was an incident with Jennifer. At age 13, she played on a fast-pitch softball team that traveled to Missouri and won a national championship. They had a great pitcher who later starred in high school and college. Jennifer played left field. As a reward they were invited to Yankee Stadium and, dressed in their uniforms, ran out to their positions with the Yankees. Jennifer trotted out to left with Tim Raines.
Standing behind third base watching her, tears of pride running down my cheeks, I happened to turn around. Who was sitting there but Dorthy’s son John and his wife Kara? They happened to have tickets for the game.
This had to be more than coincidence, I later told Dorthy. “Let’s take it as a sign that our lives will be forever intertwined.”
And yet Martha’s murder had become more to me than my relationship with her. It had to do with what I believed about journalism—what I believed the role of a reporter should be. As much money as Dorthy may have had, she was a victim, unable to help herself. Corny as it may sound, I still believed in the magic of what I had seen as a boy on The Big Story: that the job of a reporter and a newspaper is to help those who cannot help themselves—in this case, someone whom every other institution has failed.
My articles had not solved the Moxley case but they had started a chain reaction. If McCreight hadn’t given me Hale’s report, I would not have known about the police’s discovery of the golf club inside the Skakel house or the disagreements
between the Greenwich police and the state’s attorney’s office. Without knowing that, I would not have sought the Greenwich police file. Without that file, I could not have written my first story that helped restart the investigation. Without the reinvestigation, Solomon would not have met with Margolis and Sheridan to push his cockamamie theory of Littleton as a serial killer. That meeting led Sheridan to hire Murphy and Krebs “to clear the Skakel name.” Instead, their Sutton Associates report revealed that Tommy and Michael had lied about their whereabouts. That, in turn, would lead Frank to new witnesses.
Yet as close as Frank and I were to become, neither of us forgot that he was a detective and I was a reporter and that a gulf of values and experiences separated us. It wasn’t merely that Frank’s job was to obtain information and withhold it from the public to make his case, while mine was to report it. It also involved Frank’s loyalty to his fellow detectives and the Greenwich Police Department. Whereas I respected that, I saw such loyalty as cutting two ways. Loyalty to the institution that I felt had screwed up the Moxley murder had led not to corruption—because so far as I could tell there was no corruption—but to the cover-up of its mistakes.
Throughout our relationship, there were barriers we never crossed. Frank never asked who had given me Murphy’s Sutton report. He knew I could never divulge it. I never pressed him for copies of the Greenwich Police Department’s initial interviews with Tommy and Michael, which were not included in the police file we obtained from the Freedom of Information lawsuit. I understood Frank’s reluctance to provide them. He was shielding his partner Lunney, Lunney’s partner Carroll, and other Greenwich detectives who obviously had been less than thorough.
That was one of two subjects we could never discuss—how the Greenwich police had screwed up the case. Frank refused to hear it. Never blame Keegan or Lunney unless you wanted another Frank rant.
“They did the best they could with what they had,” he would say.
“Frank, they screwed it up. Accept it.”
“What do you think they should have done that they didn’t?”
Conviction Page 17