“And what did he say?” Frank knew he shouldn’t have interrupted but he couldn’t resist. That was exactly his question. How can you not know you killed someone?
“Well, that was his blackout. He just blacked out and he doesn’t remember any of it. He was just sitting there, crying. In my opinion, it’s best when people are doing that just to let ’em go and that’s pretty much what we do at Elan. It was kind of a standing rule. He said he just remembers looking up and seeing pine trees and he’s running through pine trees.”
Higgins was almost there. But he hadn’t quite given it up. He still hadn’t uttered the magic words: Michael told me he did it. But that was as far as Higgins would go today. He announced that he needed to take a break. “I want to think about this,” he said.
Frank didn’t want to let him think about it. This was Friday, November 1, 1996. It was a year after Frank and I had first met. Not that I knew anything about this then. It would be years before Frank would tell me about Seigan and Higgins.
Higgins told Frank to call him back on Monday. But Frank couldn’t leave it at that. “Let me ask you this and then I’ll let you go and I’ll talk to you on Monday,” he said. “Now be honest with me, it’s a yes or no answer. There is more you have to tell me, right?”
“Yeah,” Higgins said.
•
It was the longest weekend of his life. Frank passed the days thinking how he would approach Higgins. He had to try not to seem too anxious. He wanted Higgins to see that he understood him and what he was going through.
“The fact is,” Higgins began on Monday, “that the Skakel family, whether you say so or not, is an extremely well-connected family. I mean, I don’t know how well you know the Skakels.”
“I know them fairly well,” said Frank. So that was it. Higgins was afraid.
“John,” he said. It was the first time Frank had called Higgins by his first name. “I don’t want to use the word ‘afraid’ but maybe that’s an accurate term.”
“Nothing wrong with fear,” said Higgins.
“Like I told you last week when we talked, my intentions here are not to harm you or to cause you problems,” Frank replied. “My intentions here are to work with you and together get to the bottom of this. We are on the same side. You and I are teammates.”
Of course, Higgins didn’t know that his teammate was tape-recording this call, as he had the first one.
Until now, Frank had been circling Higgins. Now he was ready to go for it. “You said at the end of our conversation, we’ll start with that, what exactly did he say?”
“Well, Michael was just obviously destroyed and he was just sitting there crying, and he was probably crying for five minutes or so. I then asked him quietly, “‘Did you do it or didn’t you?’ He said, did it. I killed her.’”
I got it, thought Frank. There it is. I got it: “I did it. I killed her.”
“What did you say to him?” Frank asked. He had it but he wanted more.
“I don’t think I said anything to him. He just, I mean that was the only words he said about it. He said, ‘I killed her,’ and you know, I probably gave the guy a hug.”
Oh, sweet Jesus, this guy is telling the truth, Frank thought, exhilarated. I probably gave the guy a hug! You don’t make up a detail like that. I’ve got a guy, a credible witness who is going to get on the witness stand and say Michael Skakel told me he killed Martha Moxley!
•
Frank told me nothing then about Higgins, although when we met three weeks later, for the first time he named Michael as Martha’s killer to me. Not that it took me by surprise. He had been leading me in his direction without ever saying so.
We were at the Lakeside on a Friday morning at our table by the water. The breakfast crowd had come and gone and the place was emptying. Frank began by saying he had spent the past eight months traveling around the country interviewing witnesses. I knew that. I knew he had used my articles to get on Unsolved Mysteries and had been contacted by people. But until the day at the Lakeside, he never told me more than that.
“I’ve come up with three or four key witnesses,” he said.
“You can’t tell me who they are?”
“Nope.”
“Or where you found them?”
“I can’t tell you any more than what I told you.”
I knew better than to push him. Frank may have viewed Michael as a pressure cooker, but he was one himself. He, too, I felt, had a need to talk about the case. Except that unlike Michael he released only tiny bubbles.
Then, when I least expected it, Frank said to me, “Michael did it. I found witnesses. I’ve got proof. But I can’t tell you any more than that.”
I didn’t know what to say. This was a breakthrough. This was major. This was a major fucking breakthrough. Twenty years after the murder, five years after he’d begun investigating, Frank had found his witness. And it had been in part because of my articles.
And yet instead of celebrating, he was telling this to me as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. I didn’t get it. Not knowing what Frank had and still uncertain about Tommy’s role, I wondered if Frank was as certain about Michael’s guilt as he claimed to be.
What Frank didn’t tell me was that he felt he had enough to arrest Michael for Martha’s murder, that Higgins’s statement matched accounts Michael had given to others at Elan.
What he didn’t tell me was that on November 12, 1996, he had completed a memo to Donald Browne, describing how the Unsolved Mysteries television program had led to several people confined to Elan with Michael in the late 1970s.
“These individuals speak of a common belief among the residents at Elan that Michael Skakel had committed a murder,” Frank wrote.
“On Thursday, October 31, 1996, an individual identifying himself as Chuck Seigan contacted this office claiming that six to eight months before, he was informed by a fellow resident of Elan, John Higgins, that Michael Skakel had confessed to the murder. This fellow resident, John Higgins, was contacted and as a result of this telephone conversation along with a second conversation on November 4, 1996, confirmed that Michael Skakel did in fact admit to him that he had murdered Martha Moxley.”
What he also didn’t tell me was that when he presented his memo, Browne took no action.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“The Truth Remains the Same but a Lie Always Changes”
CONNECTICUT
1997–2000
For the next eighteen months until he left the case, Browne did nothing. With long-unsolved cases, the state of Connecticut has a kind of court of last resort—a special one-man grand jury. It is appointed by a panel of judges at the request of the state’s attorney to determine if an arrest is warranted. But Browne refused to seek it in the Moxley case.
The reason, said Frank, was Jack Solomon. Although retired, he still had Browne’s ear.
Only after the arrest and indictment would Frank tell me this and divulge the details he had discovered about Michael. Only then could I fill in what had happened to Frank during that time and understand why he had sought me out. Only then did it fall into place.
“I just couldn’t understand why Browne wouldn’t call the grand jury,” Frank said. “I suppose he lacked confidence in me. Maybe if the tables were turned and it was coming from Jack, he might have.”
Frank couldn’t stop talking about Solomon. “Jack would call me to have lunch and ask about the case. He’d been my partner for four years so I felt I could tell him things. I also thought Jack wanted to see the case solved and was happy that information I had developed could lead to an arrest. How naïve could I have been?
“When I told him about Higgins, Solomon’s reaction was: ‘Maybe he’s looking for something. Maybe he wants to be a big man.’
“When I pointed out Higgins’s testimony complemented that of other Elan witnesses, Jack would say, ‘Sounds kind of weak. Those kids are as bad as Michael. Where have they been all these years?’
�
��Whatever I would say, Jack would pooh-pooh it. He would never concede that maybe Littleton didn’t do it and Michael did. He couldn’t accept it. So I just stopped talking to him. But I knew he was talking to Browne. There may have been no evidence to link Littleton to Martha’s murder but as far as Jack was concerned, that didn’t mean Littleton hadn’t murdered Martha Moxley.”
Nearing retirement after twenty-five years as Fairfield County state’s attorney, Browne prided himself on never having lost a murder case. “One morning,” said Frank, “he enters my office, sits down in a chair by my desk and says to me, ‘Do you have everything?’
“‘I got a lot more than anyone else,’ I say. ‘He did it and we can get him.’
“‘Are you sure?’ Browne asks. ‘Do you have it all?’
“‘I have a lot more than Murphy and Krebs. We can move on this. I have enough to arrest this guy.’
“‘I just don’t want to go out a loser,’ Browne answers.
“‘Mr. Browne,’ I say, ‘if you don’t call the grand jury, you at least owe an explanation to Dorthy Moxley. If you call the grand jury and the panel turns you down, no one can fault you. If the panel calls the grand jury and they don’t indict, you’re still a hero because you did the right thing. If you call the grand jury and they do indict, you’re an even bigger hero. Even if we lose at trial, you took your best shot.
‘Mr. Browne, the only way you go out a loser is if you do nothing.’”
•
Frank wouldn’t quit. But Browne’s resistance was wearing him down. At his lowest point, Frank called and asked if I would come up to Bridgeport and see him. “We’ll talk,” he said.
Bridgeport, on an inlet on Long Island Sound, is a decaying city. From New York City, you take the Connecticut Turnpike northeast, exit on the left, go down a hill to the light, turn right, and hit Main Street. The downtown is a two-block strip of run-down buildings. The state’s attorney’s office is in the seven-story Superior Court building. You pop a right turn just past it and drive down into its underground garage. Two uniformed guards escort you to a parking space. Then they call upstairs for someone to come get you.
Frank met me at the elevator. As I turned to follow him into his office, I noticed he was wearing his hair in a ponytail. It was tied with a rubber band and made him look like an aging hippie or an undercover cop. He wasn’t either. His ponytail was a sign of rebellion, not fashion.
More than two years had passed since our first meeting at the Lakeside Diner, more than a year since Frank had found Higgins. At the time I still knew nothing about Higgins or Frank’s other Elan witnesses. Frank said only that the case was going nowhere. Browne was refusing to move.
He led me down a hallway to the small, windowless cubicle where he was sequestered. He had a bookshelf that was empty, save for three books that indicated his resolve—some would say his obsession—with the Moxley case. They were Jerry Oppenheimer’s The Other Mrs. Kennedy, the biography of Ethel Kennedy; The Senator, a nonfiction book about Ted Kennedy; and A Season in Purgatory, Dominick Dunne’s novel based on the Moxley case.
The stillness of the office was unnerving. The phone didn’t ring. No clerks or secretaries bustled in or out. Frank was out of the flow of the office’s daily activity, estranged from his law enforcement colleagues.
“No one comes in here to speak to me,” he said. “I walk down the hall, people see me coming and make the sign of the cross, as though to ward me off. I’m the office joke. A royal pain in the ass to everyone.”
As he spoke, he paced his cubicle like a prisoner. “Am I crazy?” he asked. “Am I paranoid? Why am I the only one in this office who sees the case the way I do? Why am I the only person pushing this? Why didn’t Krebs see it this way? Why didn’t Lunney and Keegan? Why don’t you see it? The whole world is wrong and I am right? Is something wrong with me?”
I’d never seen Frank this way. He’d always been mellow, his sense of humor just below the surface. I wasn’t sure now what to say to him.
“It’s probably because you know more about the case than anyone else,” I ventured. “And more than you are telling me.”
Even Connecticut’s forensic science laboratory chief Henry Lee had been dropping hints, warning him off the case, he said. “At one point, I am driving him to a lab in Stamford. Out of the blue he says to me, ‘Frank, are you sure you want to do this?’
“I say to him, ‘What do you mean?’ Lee says, ‘The next thing you know, there will be cameras, press, media. Not only you but your family will suffer.’ By now he knows I am looking at the Skakels, in particular at Michael. I am saying to myself, ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’
“I often alert detectives that they have to know how to handle the pressure,” Lee explained years later. “I tell them to mentally prepare, that you have to be aware for your family. I didn’t pressure Frank to drop the case.”
I think it was that day in Bridgeport that I began to view Frank as I had myself a decade before, the lone anguished figure battling Ken Brief and Steve Isenberg at the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time for seven years. But Frank’s position was more precarious than mine had been. I could rail at Ken, privately and in public, knowing he could not retaliate. I had another job. I worked for Newsday, covering the New York City Police Department. I could even annoy Isenberg, up to a point.
But Bridgeport was where Frank came to work every day. These were people he saw each time he entered the building. And Frank was a cop. If he opened his mouth, not only would the case be taken from him, but he risked being fired. And unlike me with my education, he could not walk out into another job.
“You know the worst thing?” he said. “The loneliness. Most investigations, especially ones of this magnitude, you work with a partner. You have someone to discuss them with, to trade ideas, to knock off and go have a drink with. In my narcotics investigations in Greenwich, I had Lunney. Here in Bridgeport I have no one.”
That was another difference in our roles, I realized. Even at my lowest points, there were people I could talk to, commiserate with, people who had supported me. For years I had grumbled about Ken to Don Forst. I had complained about Isenberg to my friend Cotter at the Post. Cotter had finally come through, printing the interview in which I had lambasted Ken. A month later Ken had published my story.
So had Don. After the editors in Long Island had refused to publish my story on the Sutton report, it had been Don who had shepherded it through in what remained of New York Newsday.
I think it was at that moment in Frank’s cubicle that I understood why he and I had developed a friendship. Or rather why he had sought me out. For me, the reason had been simple and straightforward. I had gravitated toward Frank because he was the case’s prime source. And unlike Keegan, Lunney, Solomon, and Browne, I believed he knew what he was doing.
But not until that moment did I understand why I had become his friend. When we first met, he told me he felt I cared about the case as he did, that I lived it and slept and took it home like him, that it was more than just a job.
That was all true. But there was something more, which he had never articulated. It was not until that day in Bridgeport that I realized why I had become so important to him.
Now I understood why Frank had told me that night when I left his house in Greenwich, “Thank you for keeping an open mind. Thank you for listening to me.” Frank needed me. All those years, he had been out there alone. All those years, he had been fighting Solomon. Even after Solomon retired, whenever Frank spoke to Browne, he was fighting Jack’s shadow.
Here in Bridgeport, I realized I was the only one he could talk to. I was the only one he had to listen to, to hear him vent, to bounce ideas off, even if he could not share with me the details he had discovered about Michael.
I was the closest thing to his partner.
•
Frank knew he had no smoking gun. The golf club handle from the murder weapon with Anne Skakel’s name had never been recovered. The Green
wich police had lost the dungarees Frank was certain Michael had worn the night of the murder. He wasn’t even sure about the time Martha had been killed, whether at 10:00 P.M. when the dogs started barking or at midnight after Michael had returned from the Terriens’ —if he went at all.
Yet everything in his thirty years as a cop, every pore and fiber in his body pointed to Michael. He could not share his reasons with me. He could not tell me about Dorothy Rogers, who’d heard Michael admit he’d been drunk, blacked out, and might have killed Martha. He couldn’t discuss Larry Zicarelli, the family chauffeur, who said Michael had tried to jump off the Triborough Bridge because he’d done something so bad he would either have to kill himself or leave the country. He couldn’t tell me of Higgins, who’d actually heard Michael’s confession.
Finally, there were Michael’s own words from the Sutton report, which I obviously did know about—his bizarre story of masturbating in the tree outside Martha’s window, then placing himself at the crime scene, perhaps as the murder was occurring. Michael had volunteered this information when he was not a suspect. Why? Was he afraid someone had seen him? Had he left semen behind? Or was he so consumed by guilt he had to say something that implicated him? Frank didn’t care what his reasons were. All he knew was what Michael had said.
And where was I in all this? Like the Sutton Associates report, I’d ruled out Littleton early on. No motive. Never met Martha. No knowledge of the neighborhood. End of story.
Unlike Frank, I couldn’t exculpate Tommy or explain away those extra twenty minutes he said he’d spent with Martha. If she were killed at 10:00 P.M., he’d placed himself with her at precisely that time. Nor did I accept Frank’s theory about why Tommy had lied to the police. As the Sutton report had noted, he was a consummate liar who’d fooled not only the police but the polygraph and his own doctors. I even questioned whether his mutual masturbation scenario had even occurred. Could Tommy have made up the masturbating scenario because, like Michael, he was afraid he had left semen behind?
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