Conviction

by Leonard Levitt

  Finally, I didn’t accept Frank’s theory about why Tommy had broken into tears as Krebs questioned him. Frank believed Tommy had taken the heat all these years and was about to finger Michael. I felt Tommy feared Krebs was closing in on him.

  And knowing nothing of Frank’s witnesses, I was not as certain as he was about Michael. Watching Frank in emotional disarray, I didn’t dare press him on it.

  •

  Then, Cissy Ix revealed something to Frank she’d never said before. Over the years, he had remained in touch with her and her husband Bob. He’d been surprised at how cooperative they seemed, considering how close they were to the Skakels. Periodically, Frank would telephone, then drive out to visit them in Belle Haven.

  “I kept going back because I knew she wasn’t giving me everything. She was too intimate with the Skakels not to know more than what she was telling me. This time, I had told them I was coming and I assumed they must have been talking about the case.”

  “You know about the change of stories,” he began, referring to my articles. “I can understand why Tommy would lie but why would Michael humiliate himself and say something like that, placing himself at the murder scene?

  “I know you felt he was more capable of this than the police had thought,” Frank said to Cissy. “And that’s when she spilled it.”

  This time, Cissy told Frank that sometime after Martha’s murder, Rushton had visited Michael’s bedroom and told her he’d found him dressed in women’s clothing. Rushton discussed having tests performed on Michael and Cissy agreed.

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this, Frank,…” she said.

  “Tell him, Cissy,” commanded Bob Ix, seated beside her. “Tell him.”

  Sometime after the murder—Cissy was not sure of the date—Rushton came to their house and said Michael had confided that he may have murdered Martha.

  “According to Mrs. Ix,” Frank’s report of November 20, 1997, read, “Michael told his father he had been drinking on the night in question, had blacked out, and may have murdered Martha. Mrs. Ix claims that due to a confidence she believed she owed Mr. Skakel, she has never revealed this information to anyone.”

  Frank sat there, wearing his best poker face, not letting on that this was another breakthrough. Now he felt he had someone on the inside, someone as close to the Skakel family as he could find.

  “You can’t do much better than that,” he thought, “short of the old man himself telling this to me. And that wasn’t going to happen.”

  •

  Three months later, Father Mark Connolly, the Skakel family priest, told Frank of another admission Michael had made. It had occurred nearly twenty years before at Elan.

  Frank had interviewed Connolly early in the investigation. He and Solomon had driven out to the rectory at St. Michael’s on North Street, where he was the monsignor. Connolly had been forthcoming but afraid.

  Just days before the murder, he said, “the boys,” Tommy and Michael, had put up a ladder against Martha’s house to peep in her window, he told Frank. Connolly then asked Frank to protect him by not even filing a written report of their interview.

  “Why is that, Father?” Frank asked.

  “Well,” said Connolly, “Michael could be hard to control.” Connolly said he was careful in what he said to Michael because he knew of Michael’s temper and that he was capable of destroying the rectory.

  Connolly was also a psychologist and had advised the family on schools for Michael. He had been consulted about sending Michael to Elan. Shortly after Michael was admitted, Connolly now told Frank, he visited him with Rushton Skakel and Tom Sheridan. A counselor advised them that Michael had described being covered in blood the night of the murder.

  “He said Michael told him there was blood all over the place,” Connolly remembered.

  Later, Connolly told Frank, Michael visited him at his home and denied that the talk with his counselor had ever taken place. “Michael said it was all a lie,” Connolly said.

  •

  Frank had also stayed in touch with Andy Pugh, Michael’s best friend as a teenager. Frank knew how valuable Pugh could be as a witness. In one conversation he told Frank how, after the murder, everything about the Skakels changed. Before the murder, their house was wide open. The day after the murder, it was locked down.

  “You couldn’t get in; it was like a fortress,” Pugh said. When a few days after the murder Pugh came over to see Michael, a suit—someone hired by the Skakels—had stopped him at the door, then went and fetched Michael for him. Why the change? Frank wondered. Were the Skakels afraid that the hitchhiker off the turnpike might return and harm their children? Unlikely, Frank thought.

  Now, early in 1998, Pugh told Frank something he’d never revealed before. As teenagers, Pugh said, he and Michael had played together every day after school, climbing trees. Their favorite was a pine at the edge of the adjoining Moxley property that was surrounded by smaller, thinner pines. Unlike the smaller ones, their pine tree had branches like a ladder. Six feet off the ground, the branches swept down and covered the ground, resembling a tee-pee where they could go in the rain. He and Michael referred to the pine as “The Tree.”

  “In the early 1990s,” Pugh said to Frank, “Michael contacted me. He suggested we restart our friendship. He said that because the golf club had come from his house, he could understand why I thought he might have killed Martha. He denied he had, but he told me that by a strange coincidence he had been outside on the night of the murder and had climbed a tree and masturbated in it.”

  “You mean the tree outside Martha’s window?” said Frank.

  “No,” said Pugh, “It was ‘The Tree’ —the pine at the edge of the Moxley property.”

  That was the tree where Martha’s body was discovered.

  •

  Then Frank’s former employer, Frank Gifford, told him about Michael Meredith, the troubled son of former Dallas Cowboys football star Don Meredith, Gifford’s television partner on ABC’s original Monday Night Football. Gifford also had a Kennedy connection. His daughter Vicki had been married to Ethel’s son, Michael Kennedy. In a horrible scandal, Michael Kennedy was caught cheating on his wife with the family’s teenage baby-sitter and later that year died in a freak ski accident.

  A few years younger than Michael Skakel, Meredith had also been at Elan. In 1986, after both had graduated, Meredith spent the summer at the Skakel house in Greenwich as he and Michael prepared a lawsuit against the school and its owner, Joe Ricci.

  One evening, Michael Skakel told Meredith that on the night of Martha’s murder he had been in a tree on the Moxley property where he jerked off while watching Martha through her window after she’d come out of the shower. While in the tree, he said, he saw Tommy walk through Moxley’s property toward their house. He then climbed down from the tree and went home without his brother seeing him.

  The truth remains the same but a lie always changes, Frank thought. Here was yet another variation. This time, Michael claimed to have seen Martha in the shower, and implicated his brother Tommy. In addition, this masturbation-in-the-tree story predated the one Michael had told to Krebs of Sutton Associates, who had heard it in 1992. Jesus Christ, Frank thought, Michael had been telling a version of that story for years.

  •

  Frank felt that Elan was the key. He obtained a warrant for Michael’s medical records and on a crisp fall day drove up to Poland Springs, Maine. Leaving the main road, with red and gold leaves covering the ground, he passed fields of tall grass that opened into a campsite with wooden dormitories and quonset huts. Frank found himself thinking that Elan resembled a summer camp. He half-expected to see kids running around in their sailing gear, except that there was no water.

  Instead, the first thing he heard were screams. Although he was to learn they were part of what was known at Elan as “primal scream therapy,” he wasn’t prepared for them.

  Frank’s warrant also sought notes and recordings by Ricci and othe
r staff about Martha’s murder. Detective Mike Pulire of Maine’s attorney general’s office, who accompanied him, had briefed Frank on Ricci, a self-made, wheeler-dealer millionaire in his forties from New York, who roamed the grounds at Elan like a commandant with a Doberman.

  Ricci also owned Maine’s Scarborough Downs race track and had made an unsuccessful run for governor. When he applied for a loan with Key Bank in Maine, they somehow connected him with organized crime and rejected it. Ricci filed suit and won a judgment of $16 million.

  So far as anyone knew, he was not married but had two children. Female residents supposedly came over to “baby-sit” for him. One of them reported finding him drunk in his trailer with a half-inch stack of $100 bills.

  John Higgins, Chuck Seigan, Dorothy Rogers, and Michael Meredith had all told Frank horror stories about Ricci and Elan. Residents, known as “gorillas on duty,” walked around with baseball bats, making sure no one escaped. One resident had been forced to stay up thirty-six hours. When he nodded off, they put him in the shower to wake him up. He was denied food for another thirty-six hours.

  Another punishment was the boxing ring, where, one at a time, the “gorillas” took turns beating up the more fractious residents. Then, there was the story of Kim Freehill. She had been paddled so hard because of her bad attitude that she collapsed and had to be airlifted to a hospital.

  As he and Pulire walked around, they happened to see a father and his teenage daughter. She was a beautiful, blonde, angelic-looking girl, Frank thought. He didn’t know anything about her. She could have been the devil. But he had this urge to run over to the father and say to him, “Whatever you do, don’t send her here.”

  Instead, he and Pulire went searching for Ricci. He was not there. Through his attorney in Portland, he stated that he did not believe any files concerning Michael existed but directed staff members to cooperate.

  Frank walked up an old wooden staircase to a stuffy, dormer-like attic, lined with old metal filing cabinets that supposedly contained the records of all Elan’s past residents. Each file, Frank noted, was two to three inches thick. Except Michael’s. It contained only a few pages.

  As Frank glanced through them, he saw they contained only Michael’s education and employment history. There were no tapes of interviews, no notes of meetings, nothing about the group sessions in which Michael was supposedly questioned about his involvement in Martha’s murder. Frank believed the file had been purged.

  A 1975 yearbook picture of Michael Skakel (top center).

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Stars and the Hacks

  CONNECTICUT

  1997–2000

  I wanted to throttle Dominick Dunne.

  The cherubic-looking, seventy-something celebrity writer, supposedly a source of comfort to families of murder victims, had just sent Dorthy into hysterics.

  In early 1997, she called me in tears after a phone conversation with him. Dominick had told her that in all the years the police investigated Martha’s killer, they’d focused on the wrong person.

  “Who is the right person?” Dorthy asked him.

  “I can’t tell you that now,” he answered, then hung up.

  Amidst her tears, she told me that one of Jim Murphy’s employees had given Dominick a copy of Murphy’s Sutton Associates report, which Dominick claimed contained shocking revelations. She asked if I would call him to learn what he meant.

  I, too, wanted to know. Had he discovered something I’d overlooked when writing about the report two years before? Dominick and I were acquainted. One might even say we were friends. We’d met at the Greenwich police news conference in 1991, where the reopening of the case was announced. With his shock of gray hair and wearing a suit and tie, Dominick had arrived with Dorthy to begin researching his novel about Martha’s murder. When she introduced us, he offered that he might be able to help the police solve the case through what he termed his “upper-class connections.”

  I nearly burst out laughing. Did Dominick think he could waltz into a fifteen-year-old murder case and help the police solve it like Hercule Poirot? Maybe that happened in Agatha Christie mysteries, but this was real life.

  Little did I suspect that after his novel about the murder appeared, people would flock to him with all sorts of tips.

  After meeting him that day in Greenwich, I bought his first bestseller, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (New York: Random House, 1985). Coincidentally, it was based on something I knew about—the murder of Long Island horseman and socialite William Woodward.

  That was the murder detective Frank Steiner had supposedly solved. When I interviewed Steiner at Newsday twenty years after the case, he explained to me that shortly before Woodward’s death, he had arrested a German immigrant, Paul Wirths, for a series of burglaries on the north shore of Long Island. Wirths had come to the United States to live with his aunt and uncle and train as a bricklayer’s apprentice. A scaffold had fallen on him and he had broken his arm. Unable to work, he began to steal.

  The day after Woodward’s shooting, Wirths was arrested just over the county line for another burglary. When Steiner questioned him in jail, Wirths denied knowing about the Woodward shooting.

  “Paul,” Steiner said to him, “Ann Woodward has two young children. Is there anything you can say that will help her?”

  At four o’clock the next morning, Steiner said Wirths telephoned him at home and confessed to being the prowler on the Woodward estate. He was swiftly deported and Ann Woodward was never charged. The Woodward estate was rumored to have paid Steiner $50,000 for Wirth’s false confession.

  In The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, Dominick captured all of this. Although Dominick had never met him, he even captured Steiner’s legal shenanigans. He had melded the mores of upper-class society with the factual details of the Woodward murder into a larger fictional truth.

  He would do something similar in the Moxley case. With his novelist’s eye, he would turn the Sutton report into the murder’s Rosetta stone, providing him with the psychological underpinnings to make Michael—with his history of bed-wetting, cross-dressing, window-peeping, alcoholism, drug abuse, and violence—the obvious murderer.

  Of course, Dominick knew even less about Frank’s investigation of Michael than I did. But when Michael was arrested years later, Dominick took credit. As he wrote in the introduction to Justice (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2001), a collection of his Vanity Fair articles, “A young man appeared out of nowhere to hand me a secret report by a private detective agency hired by the father of Michael Skakel that led directly to the indictment and trial of Skakel for the murder of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley twenty-five years earlier.”

  I subsequently began reading Dominick’s books and articles to discover all I could about him. He had grown up in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of a heart surgeon. His younger brother was the novelist John Gregory Dunne (married to the writer Joan Didion) and the author of True Confessions, based on the Black Dahlia murder in Los Angeles, one of the grittiest crime novels I’ve ever read.

  Dominick had attended the same boarding school as Rushton Skakel and been a guest at Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s wedding. Despite his family’s wealth, the Dunnes had remained outsiders to Hartford’s Protestant society, which dismissed them as Irish Catholic and nouveau riche. George Skakel Sr.’s family had suffered similarly when they’d moved to Greenwich in the 1930s.

  Dominick also shared common ground with Michael. Like Michael, he had been tormented by his father, who wanted his son to be an athlete— “more manly,” as Dominick put it. Once, his father became so enraged, he beat Dominick with a wooden coat hanger, striking his left ear so severely it turned purple and swelled to three times its size. To this day, Dominick says he remains partially deaf in that ear.

  “I’m surprised you never made the connection to Michael when you wrote about the case,” I said to him.

  “You’re right,” he answered. “I never thought of it,” adding that his father died before they
ever made peace. “We never had that talk,” he said, as though a conversation can heal a childhood of wounds.

  For reasons I never understood, Dominick never wrote about the one thing he had done that pleased his father. At age eighteen, during World War II, he was drafted and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and received a bronze star for saving a soldier’s life.

  As he related this to me over lunch years later, his eyes filled with tears. “I was so scared. There were two wounded men and the lieutenant said we had to leave them. I don’t understand what happened next but another soldier and I—another rich kid; he had gone to Choate; the two of us were known as “The Gold Dust Twins” —ran back to them. I don’t know how but I had this surge of adrenaline and carried one of them to a passing ambulance. He squeezed my hand in thanks. I never knew his name.”

  The story made the Hartford newspapers, but his father never acknowledged his son’s bravery. One night, his family went to dinner at their country club. “It was a Thursday night—maid’s night out,” Dominick said. “A woman, a friend of the family, approached me and said how proud everyone was of me, especially my father. I don’t know why but I started to cry.”

  After the war, Dominick moved to Los Angeles, where he became a movie and television producer. Thirty years later, his career flamed out and he sank into alcoholism and drugs. He was, he wrote, “as my agent told me, all washed up, which I already knew.”

  By force of will, he spent six months in a cabin in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, drying out. At age fifty, he began his second career as a writer. His catalyst was David Begelman, a Hollywood executive who’d forged a $10,000 check in the name of actor Cliff Robertson. When two reporters from the Washington Post came around, Dominick provided them with information he says broke open the story.

  “It was thrilling for me to know I played a part in it,” he wrote in an article titled “Justice” in Vanity Fair. “I felt a kind of excitement within myself…I could do what these guys are doing….”