“Well, for one thing, they didn’t get a warrant to search the Skakel house. They found the matching golf club the day the body was found. They didn’t immediately get a search warrant.”
“You weren’t there. Unless you are there, you don’t know the circumstances. They already had access. Maybe they thought they could get more with sugar than with vinegar. They felt they had an open door and maybe could develop things. Maybe they were concerned that if they shut that door, it would remain shut.
“Sure, they might do things differently,” he’d allow. “There’s no investigation I ever did, I wouldn’t do things differently.
“And let me tell you something else. Lunney and Carroll were senior detectives with upwards of twenty years’ experience. They worked around the wealthiest people in the world. Nobody was intimidated by the Skakels’ wealth.”
“Carroll told me he was intimidated, Frank. He went on television and said he was intimidated.”
“That was after the fact. Who knows what was going on with him then?”
“Carroll said it himself. They eliminated, rather than zeroed in on the Skakels.”
“There is nothing wrong with eliminating. You do both.”
“Frank, the whole mindset was wrong. Chief Baran’s first words to the media were that kids always leave golf clubs lying around outside and someone might have come in and picked it up to murder Martha.” I didn’t bother mentioning the hundreds of wasted manpower hours they’d spent investigating the neighbor, Hammond.
“What about their refusal to expand the time of death beyond 10:00 P.M.? They locked themselves in to that 10:00 P.M. because of the dogs. You yourself said that back in the ’80s, you’d say to Lunney, ‘Are you sure about those dogs?’ Because of that, they refused to consider Michael because they felt that at 10:00 P.M., he was at the Terriens’.”
“Okay, maybe people made bad decisions. But that’s not screwing it up.”
The second subject was my 1991 article. Bring that up and Frank turned testy. “That article you wrote in 1991 that you always refer to as restarting the investigation,” he would begin. “It didn’t restart anything. I was already looking into the case. That April, some guy called the Palm Beach, Florida, police. It was during the William Kennedy Smith rape trial. The guy mentioned he and Michael had been together in a drug rehabilitation place called Elan.”
“You don’t think my article helped restart the investigation?”
“It had no impact at all.”
“Frank, the article came out in May. Two months later, the Greenwich police and state’s attorney hold a news conference saying they’re reopening the case.”
“You think that was because of your article? We restarted the investigation because of William Kennedy Smith. Someone started a rumor that he had been at the Skakels the night of Martha’s murder. The timing of your article was coincidental.”
These arguments got us nowhere. I decided they were pointless.
“Let’s not discuss it anymore,” I said to Frank.
“But you’re the writer,” he said. “You get the last word.”
The question I continued to ask myself was not why I had chosen to befriend Frank. That was obvious. Whether or not I liked him—and I did—he was the case’s primary source. No, the question was why Frank had chosen to befriend me. His closest friends and longtime colleagues, Keegan and Lunney, had warned him off me. Lunney had told him I only wanted to hurt him. Yet here was Frank opening up to me about the case, albeit not fully, never sharing key details as much as dropping hints.
One night as I left his house, he said to me, “Thanks for listening. Thanks for keeping an open mind.” It would be another year before I understood what he meant.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Confession
STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT
1995–1996
What Frank had to do was to find an eyewitness. Not necessarily to the murder, since that would prove next to impossible, but an eyewitness to an admission, a confession. In early 1996, three months after we met, Frank would use my articles on the Sutton report for that. He didn’t tell me about it, though. As much as we were coming to trust each other, he didn’t share with me with what he knew about Michael—at least not then.
The year before, Frank had approached some nationally syndicated television shows, urging them to feature the Moxley murder. He felt there were kids in the neighborhood who might have seen or heard something they hadn’t told the police. God knows who Michael or Tommy might have confided in. At the time, those kids were teenagers and wouldn’t talk to the cops. Teenagers like Andy Pugh.
At age fifteen, Pugh, like all teenagers, was not about to volunteer information to the police unless specifically asked—and maybe not even then. But now, twenty years later, many of those kids’ attitudes and outlooks might have changed. Many of them had families of their own. They might feel differently about cooperating.
But every TV program turned Frank down. The Moxley case may have been news when it was reopened in 1991. But by 1995, the networks had lost interest.
In December, a month after my Sutton articles appeared, Frank again contacted Unsolved Mysteries. “Now you have something,” they said. They sent a film crew to his office in Bridgeport.
Two months later, they called him from Burbank, California. They wanted to air a segment on the Moxley murder and needed someone from the investigation in the studio, in case viewers phoned in with tips.
“I think I should go out there,” Frank told Browne.
But while on the plane, he panicked. “I got everyone believing this program is the icebreaker. But what if no one calls? Or what if people call and say it’s Tommy or Littleton and I am thinking Michael?”
•
Inside the Burbank studio, he was ushered into a huge room with operators seated at telephone screens. After the show aired he was to walk around the room, waiting for calls. The operators would hold up different-colored cards. A white card meant “Come over when you have a chance.” A green card was more urgent. A red meant “hot tip.”
As the show aired, Frank saw hands go up holding red cards. The operators were typing the information out on screens. Frank scurried around the room with a pencil and pad, speaking briefly to callers. He had only time to get their name, phone number, address, and a quick recap of their stories before moving on.
There were no calls about Tommy or Littleton. Virtually every tip concerned Michael. Most came from former residents of Elan. “This is so and so. I just want you to know I watched the show. Michael Skakel was nuts,” someone said. Or “I was up at Elan with Michael and he said he killed a girl with a golf club.”
Frank scribbled all this down. He was afraid others would hang up before he reached them. A Phil Lawrence called from Florida, saying he had attended a group therapy session at Elan where Michael confessed to killing Martha. “I was there. Michael admitted he was under the influence of alcohol and killed her with a golf club.”
Elan’s owner, Joe Ricci, must have heard Michael admit to killing Martha, Lawrence added. “Michael had these private meetings with Joe that most people didn’t get the luxury of having,” said Lawrence. “Ricci was my legal guardian. I had maybe one.”
And Ricci tape-recorded everything, Lawrence added. “I guarantee you he has a recording of Michael’s confession. I’d bet the moon on it. I bet you anything he taped any conversations he had with Mike ’cause he’s not dumb.”
“Who is this Ricci?” Frank asked. “Is he a psychiatrist? A psychologist?”
“Are you kidding? He’s an ex-junkie from New York.” As it turned out Ricci was from Port Chester. He’d lived in the same housing project as a cousin of Frank’s.
Frank returned to Bridgeport with leads and prayers that these people were telling the truth. He began with former Elan resident Diane Hozman, who was now, of all things, a clinical psychologist in Palm Springs, California, telling people how to run their lives. Hozman remembered talking to
Michael in Elan’s dining room, where he had been confined after one of his escapes. Michael told her he thought he’d killed a girl but was unable to remember details. Michael recalled getting out of bed late at night after a party at his house. He said he’d walked a girl home and that something had happened under a tree. Michael told her he had kissed the girl and made out with her under the tree. Then he returned home, climbing in through his window.
Another Elan alum, Anna Goodman, saw Ricci confront Michael about the murder at a therapy session, and forced him to wear a sign around his neck that read: “Ask me why I killed my friend, Martha Moxley.” Frank had heard this before. Dorothy Rogers, the Greenwich girl he’d traced to Graham, North Carolina, had said something similar. As part of their therapy at Elan, she said a staff member had asked Michael, “Why did you crush Moxley’s chest with a golf club?”
Why would Ricci confront Michael about the murder, Frank asked himself again. When Michael was sent to Elan in 1978, he hadn’t been a suspect. How would people at Elan have had suspicions about him unless someone in or close to the family had told them?
These stories sounded true and dovetailed with what others had told him. He recalled Phil Lawrence’s read on Michael. “He was very nice, very friendly but the things he used to talk about didn’t seem to fit with him. He’d talk about weird things. The big thing he used to talk about was he’d go out and get drunk and wake up in women’s clothes the next morning.” That information, Frank knew, Lawrence hadn’t made up.
By now Frank was convinced the crime was sexually motivated. Had Michael been spurned? Had he been unable to perform? Had Martha taunted him? Frank knew Michael hadn’t gone out that night intending to kill her. But something had gone terribly wrong. He was drinking, smoking pot. He had lost control.
Yet again, Frank thought how Michael was like a pressure cooker, how he needed to talk about the murder to let off steam. From the first day, he couldn’t shut up about it. He was the only Skakel who couldn’t. When the body was discovered he was rushing around outside telling people, “They found the body.” He was telling people he and Tommy were the last two people to see Martha alive.
He talked about it at school. He brought in newspaper articles. Later, he spoke about it at AA meetings. On the Triborough Bridge he said he had done something so bad, he had to kill himself. He couldn’t shut up about it at Elan. He said he was drunk and may have killed her but he couldn’t remember.
But each time he told his version of innocence, his story changed because it was a lie. Regardless of the details, each version revealed Michael’s involvement.
•
Frank was so close but he wasn’t yet there. He knew in his gut Michael had done it, but he remained just beyond Frank’s reach. What he needed was someone who had actually heard Michael’s confession. A lot of people had heard things to suggest Michael killed Martha. But Frank needed a credible witness to go on the witness stand and testify to that.
Frank felt strangely confident he would find one. “I knew there was someone out there who knew. I had no doubt that this person was out there because Michael talked about the murder to anyone he spoke to. Even after I had left L.A. and flown back to Greenwich, calls were coming into the station from people who knew him. My only question was would that person who knew come forward.”
In his obsession to talk about the murder with anyone he encountered, even with people he had barely met, Michael was almost like Littleton, Frank thought.
“People thought Littleton had done it,” said Frank. “He was easily manipulated and he couldn’t stop talking about it because he wanted to clear himself. Michael was the same way. Only he couldn’t shut up because I think it was eating away at him.”
The call Frank was waiting for came on Halloween, eight months after he appeared on Unsolved Mysteries. It came to the Greenwich Police Department. A Chicago man, Chuck Seigan, said he had been at Elan with someone named John Higgins. Higgins had heard Michael say he beat Martha to death with a golf club.
Seigan had been admitted to Elan in February 1977 at the age of twenty, and Michael arrived in 1978. Everyone at Elan, he said, believed the Skakel family had committed Michael, fearing he’d killed Martha. Michael said his father had put him there, believing he was too weak to withstand questioning from the police or the press.
Often, Michael broke down in tears, claiming he didn’t know whether or not he committed the murder, Seigan said. At group sessions, Michael would shake his head and cry, “I don’t know if I did or didn’t, I don’t know.”
“Cry about what?” Frank asked.
“The fact that he just didn’t know whether he did or didn’t.”
He didn’t know if he did or didn’t? Who wonders whether or not they killed somebody? thought Frank. Who was so drunk that they couldn’t remember the next morning whether or not they had killed someone?
Seigan said he felt uncomfortable with Michael because he was a Kennedy nephew, but his friend Higgins seemed at ease around him. The pair roomed together for four months. During that time, Seigan said, Higgins confronted Michael about the murder.
“Well, did you or didn’t you do it?” Higgins had asked.
“Yes, I did it,” Michael replied.
Seigan told Frank he learned this only a few months ago—after Unsolved Mysteries aired. Higgins telephoned Seigan, saying he had information about a murder. Higgins said he felt “shitty” that Michael had confessed to him. He said he was “pissed” at Michael. “Why did he have to tell me?” Higgins had said to Seigan.
Frank knew his call to Higgins could break open the case. As he dialed, he found himself panicking. It wasn’t the panic he’d felt on the plane to Burbank. Rather, it was that he didn’t know what to expect. From Seigan’s description, he couldn’t read Higgins. He decided to tape the call. If Higgins changed his story, Frank could lock him into his statement.
“You obviously are familiar with the murder of Martha Moxley,” he began when Higgins answered. It was an open-ended sentence, allowing him to begin sizing up Higgins by his response. Years later, as Frank told this to me, it reminded me of how meticulous he was, how he tried to peer into someone’s character before he’d met him and set him up to reveal his true nature. I had visions of him planning his first interview with me at the Lakeside.
“Well, it’s interesting that anyone else would know that I know, other than a few select people,” Higgins answered. “I’ve almost called the state’s attorney’s office to say what I know because this family is, as far as I’m concerned, getting away with murder and there’s a problem because they’re an extremely powerful family and the last thing I want is any kind of problem.”
“We are certainly the last people on earth that are going to cause you any problem,” Frank answered. That was certainly true.
“Well, I was at a place called Elan,” Higgins continued. “And I was there at the time Michael Skakel was there, which was shortly after the murder. I’m thirty-four now so it was when I was sixteen or seventeen, and we ended up being on the same security staff and we would sit out at night on the back porch and keep an eye out for people running away from the place. It was a pretty bad place. They probably should have run away.”
Frank found himself liking Higgins for that remark. From the little he’d learned about Elan, Higgins was on the money.
“I’d been there a year already and he never really said why he was there,” Higgins went on. “And we got into a conversation about the fact that he didn’t know whether he murdered somebody or not. Now, obviously, I knew nothing about Moxley or anything else at this time. He told me he remembers being in his garage, having a golf club, being in tall pine trees, and waking up back in his house, and his big dilemma at the time was he doesn’t know if he did it or not….
“He said they sent him and they left his brother because he’s the cool, calm collected guy to deal with whatever might come to the family on the case, and obviously Tom was good at dealing with this and Mic
hael apparently wasn’t.”
Oh, this is good, Frank thought. This is real good. He knows the family. He knows the Skakels. He’s got it exactly right.
“He described a party. I think it was near Halloween,” Higgins continued. “Yeah, I can remember him telling me about walking through the woods, being in the pine trees.”
Only Michael could have known about the pine trees, Frank thought. No way Higgins could have known that on his own. He has to have heard that from Michael.
“He was like crying when he was telling me this,” Higgins continued. “The nut of the conversation was he had no idea what had happened but he knew that he was sent away after this whole thing occurred because he thinks his parents thought he did it or he doesn’t know if he did it and that they were trying to protect him.”
“Did he mention he blacked out?” Frank asked.
“Yeah, he did mention a blackout.” Higgins paused. “This is tough.” Uh oh. Frank sensed resistance. Higgins was hesitating.
“My feeling is that this has been bothering you,” Frank said. He wanted Higgins to keep going.
“Let me ask you something,” Higgins interrupted. “Is my talking to you right now, is there any way that I can be subpoenaed to give this information?”
“Uh, no,” Frank lied. Higgins, of course, had no idea Frank was taping him, that he could in fact be subpoenaed. Reporters must never lie but detectives do all the time.
Then quickly, seamlessly, so that Higgins would not dwell on it, Frank shifted direction. “You have to think in terms of the victim’s family.”
“Let them put it to rest,” Higgins answered. Yes, that was the type of response Frank wanted.
“He remembers being in his garage, going through a golf bag,” Higgins continued. “The first part of the conversation was that somebody got murdered. He remembers running through the pine trees. He doesn’t remember where he ended up but he ended up back in his house, and everything after that was a blackout, and then the next day he heard that this girl was killed with a golf club and that’s why he thinks that he may have done it but he doesn’t know that he did it. I asked him how can he not know if he did it or not?”
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