Conviction

by Leonard Levitt

  But Benedict refused to be pushed. He was waiting for some lab work that later proved inconsequential. “Even if we move now,” he said, “Fuhrman and Dominick will say we rushed it just to beat his book.”

  Frank saw another problem. Benedict wanted a “second chair,” an experienced criminal lawyer working under him, someone from the chief state’s attorney’s office. Frank protested. He distrusted the motives of the chief state’s attorney, John Bailey Jr. Bailey’s father had been Connecticut’s Democratic state chairman in the 1960s and supported John F. Kennedy for President. In return, Kennedy had appointed him national Democratic chair. While John Bailey Jr. reveled in the spotlight, seeking out newspaper and television reporters, he had avoided the media in the Moxley case, perhaps the most publicized murder in the state’s history.

  “You never saw him at any press conference,” Frank said to me one night that spring, just a month after Browne had resigned. We were alone at his house. His children were out. Mariann was working the late shift at the hospital. Again, we were sitting in his kitchen, assessing the case, discussing how far it had come. Benedict was about to call the grand jury. It seemed like a miracle.

  “When we announced a reward, Bailey didn’t appear,” Frank continued. “He never wanted any part of it. So I am thinking, ‘Why does the chief state’s attorney’s office want to be involved now?’”

  At Benedict’s request, Bailey sent two assistants—Chris Morano and Dominick Galluzo. “I’m asking myself, are they here to help or to watch what is going on? I didn’t trust either of them. I had no use for them and they knew it.”

  Frank felt his suspicions proved justified when he discovered both of them meeting with Fuhrman. At least twice, he said, he discovered they’d been together in New York. Their intermediary was Dominick Dunne, who was Morano’s neighbor on the eastern Connecticut shore.

  “I am telling Benedict that Fuhrman is the most notorious liar in America. I am hearing that Fuhrman is pushing to get himself called as a witness before the grand jury and that Morano and Galluzo are helping him. I’m telling myself it will be over my dead body,” Frank said.

  “Frank,” I said, “you’re making too much of this. Benedict is going to call the grand jury. That’s what’s important. That’s what you’ve been waiting for.”

  It was nearly midnight when I left his house. As I drove home, I couldn’t decide if what he was telling me were true or whether he had been out there so alone for so long he had lost his sense of proportion. He seemed oblivious that his moment of triumph was about to arrive.

  That night I had a dream. The two of us were, of all places, at the north pole. We were standing just a few feet apart. I was on the shore but Frank was on an ice floe, moving past me, beyond my reach, heading out to sea. As Frank passed by, he was waving his arms, shouting his warnings about Fuhrman.

  As it turned out, Fuhrman never testified before the grand jury. As much as he tried, Benedict refused to let him.

  He had apparently picked up Frank’s SOS.

  •

  Then, just before the grand jury was called, Fuhrman’s book appeared, naming Michael as Martha’s probable killer. For years, Frank had complained to me that no one saw the case as he did. Finally, someone had: Of all people, it was Mark Fuhrman.

  Not only that, but Fuhrman’s theory about the time of death matched Frank’s. Like Frank, Fuhrman believed the murder had occurred not at 10:00 P.M. while Michael was at the Terriens’ but around midnight, after he returned.

  On the book’s cover was a color photo of Martha with long blonde hair to her shoulders. “Using his detective skills to analyze the case and uncover explosive new information—including top secret documents compiled by the Skakels’ own investigators,” the book jacket stated, “Mark Fuhrman will reveal how the local police mishandled the case from the beginning; how wealth and influence interfered with the investigation…and how authorities tried to stop Fuhrman’s investigation.”

  Beating the drum for Fuhrman was Dominick. In his article “Trail of Guilt,” he wrote, “I firmly believe that his book, Murder in Greenwich, for which I wrote the introduction, is what caused a grand jury to be called after twenty-five years.”

  I had to give Fuhrman credit. He knew little about the case—far less than Frank—but his instincts were right. He’d pieced together the general terms of it. I remembered hearing Alan Dershowitz, one of Simpson’s lawyers from the O.J. case, say of Fuhrman that he was smarter than anyone else on the prosecution team including all the lawyers. But, said Dershowitz, “If his own credibility is involved, the defense will make mincement of him.”

  Fuhrman was generous to me. He cited my articles and listed me in his acknowledgments although I had done nothing to help him. But he was brutal to Frank. To Fuhrman, Frank was one of the so-called “authorities” who had tried to stop his investigation.

  “I tried at least to convince Frank to have lunch with me—I’ve never known a cop to turn down a free meal—but my efforts were fruitless,” he wrote. “Frank wouldn’t cooperate with me, wouldn’t meet with me, wouldn’t have lunch with me, nothing. He said he was too busy now, and in the future.

  “As I hung up the phone,” Fuhrman continued, “I could only assume that Frank was afraid of something…. I sensed that something else was behind Frank’s refusal to work with me. Something was starting to smell, but I didn’t know what it was.”

  I was also starting to smell something. It was only then that I realized what Fuhrman was about. Just as Dominick’s forte—or schtick—was celebrity murders, Fuhrman’s was murders the police had bungled. And the person Fuhrman claimed had bungled the Moxley case was the man who had figured it out six years before.

  “Dominick Dunne gave Frank Garr a copy of the Sutton Associates files in the winter of 1997,” Fuhrman wrote. “Yet apparently Frank had talked to hardly any of the people I interviewed whose names I got from the files. And none of the leads I followed showed any of Garr’s tracks.”

  In the afterword to his paperback edition, he took another tack. “I did have evidence to give to the authorities but I had no intention of giving it to Frank Garr,” he wrote. “Instead, I went over his head, contacting Connecticut state officials and offering my total cooperation with their investigation…as well as information I was not able to include in the book.”

  Frank was so upset he called me. I drove over to his house. While I sat at his kitchen table, Frank paced the room. “He is such a liar. He, better than anyone, knows I couldn’t talk to him about the case, even if I wanted to.”

  With that he flicked on the television. There on CNN or Fox or one of the network talk shows was Fuhrman. He was crowing over how he’d solved the Moxley murder.

  Frank and I turned and looked at each other. I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Frank opened his mouth but no words came. If ever I saw a man crushed, this was it.

  He’d fought with his superiors for nearly a decade over Michael. He’d been ostracized by his colleagues and ridiculed by his bosses yet had virtually single-handedly gotten a grand jury impaneled. And here was Fuhrman, with barely a connection to the case, taking the credit.

  And I, with my Ivy League education, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism with thirty years of newspaper experience, was powerless to help him. I wanted to reach over and hug him, or at least touch his arm in commiseration. I didn’t, though. Instead, all I could think to say was, “Frank, I’m so very sorry.”

  But I made a promise to myself, and to him. When the case was over, I promised that no matter which way it went, no matter how the grand jury ruled, I would tell the story, his and mine.

  Frank shook his head. “I pray that you do,” he said. “And I’ll try to help you. But you’re only jerking yourself off. Nobody will listen. Nobody will believe you.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Face of the Killer

  CONNECTICUT

  1998–2000

  It was a Thursday night in December
1998. Late. Mariann and the kids were asleep. But Frank was just getting started. He sat in his study on the second floor. It had been Dave’s room before he moved downstairs and took over the basement. Frank was seated on the couch, his tape recorder on, seven audiotapes spread out before him.

  Just a few hours before, he had returned from Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Michael’s audiotaped memoir and manuscript. He had obtained an out-of-state subpoena and driven up to the Cambridge home of Michael’s ghostwriter, Richard Hoffman.

  “Do I have to give you everything?” Hoffman asked when Frank presented him with the subpoena.

  “Yes, you do,” Frank answered.

  Hoffman went upstairs and returned with a cardboard box. In it were Michael’s manuscript and the seven audiotapes.

  Late that Thursday night, Frank sat in his study, reading Michael’s thirty-seven-page proposal: “The first account by an insider of the avarice, perversion and gangsterism of ‘America’s Royal Family.’” In it Michael promised to unmask “the truth about the…cover-up and my betrayal at the hands of the ruthless Kennedy machine when I would no longer lie to hide the truth about my cousin’s behavior.” The cousin was his aunt Ethel’s son, Michael Kennedy.

  The memoir described how after Elan, Michael had found sobriety and become a mentor to his troubled Kennedy cousins, his aunt Ethel’s children. When Bobby Jr. was arrested for heroin possession in 1983 after passing out in the bathroom of a Republic Airlines plane with a needle in his arm, Michael helped him begin treatment.

  He also tried to get David Kennedy into a program. Ethel, however, refused to allow her son to register under his Kennedy name. A few weeks later, David was found dead in a Palm Beach hotel room of a drug overdose.

  Michael also tried to help another cousin—Frank Gifford’s son-in-law, Michael Kennedy, who was having an affair with his family’s fifteen-year-old baby-sitter. The two Michaels had become close. Michael Kennedy managed the gubernatorial campaign of his older brother, Joe Kennedy II, and obtained a job there for Michael Skakel as a driver.

  Michael Skakel wrote that he tried to help his cousin enter treatment for alcoholism and sexual addiction. Skakel said he asked Bobby Jr. and Joe for help but they refused. A grand jury was called to investigate Michael Kennedy for statutory rape of the baby-sitter, and Michael Skakel testified. Six months later, Michael Kennedy died in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado. The Kennedys blamed Michael Skakel.

  “The timeless Kennedy strategy of circling the wagons and looking for a scapegoat began,” he wrote. “I was blind-sided by a series of betrayals that were designed to assassinate my character and sacrifice me to the media in order to hide the sordid truth about my cousin’s addiction and its many secret consequences. All the idealistic talk was conceived as a useful mythology to hide reality, not only about Michael but about his brother Joe and even about my aunt Ethel….”

  Specifically, Michael wrote, the Kennedys told a reporter for the Boston Herald that Michael Skakel was “a suspect in an old unsolved murder and was trying to extort $250,000 from them by fabricating a story about Michael Kennedy and the family baby-sitter.”

  One tape described the 1978 car accident in Windham that got Skakel sent to Elan. Michael described how Tom Sheridan brought in two goons, who literally kidnapped him from his Windham skihouse. Michael said he tried to escape by jumping out a second-story window into the snow.

  “‘I want a different lawyer!’ I screamed. ‘Sheridan! You’re fired! You hear me? You work for my family, you bastard. You can’t do this! You’re fired! Now, I’m firing you! You hear me?’”

  He then described how Sheridan had flown with him on the Skakels’ plane to Poland Springs, Maine, where a van met them at the airport and drove them to Elan. Like Frank, the first thing Michael had heard were people screaming.

  “They threw me into a horrible barracks. People were screaming. They had signs around their necks. I was strip-searched, given a cold shower, placed in a room with plastic covers over the windows.”

  In two years, Michael said he received only two letters from his father. One said Tommy was on a yacht in South America. The second said Rushton was in Vail skiing.

  At monthly meetings, he said, the Elan counselors stood him up in front of a group of residents and asked him, “‘Did you get any mail this month?’ …just like to make sure everyone knew Skakel is a piece of shit.’” On the tape, his voice broke and he began to sob.

  “They beat me up for failing school,” Frank heard him saying. “I just couldn’t do the work and they just humiliated me.”

  At one point, he was forced to wear a four-foot-high dunce cap and a sign around his neck with his name and the words, “Please confront me about why I murdered my friend.”

  He spoke of how another resident told him, “Just admit you did this, just admit you killed the girl and this will all end.”

  He escaped three times. After one attempt, his punishment was to clean toilets. After a second, he was placed in a boxing ring, where people took turns beating him up. One fall, he escaped a third time, hid in the freezing cold, then caught a ride with a trucker and ended up at the Terriens’, where he stayed through Christmas.

  At 2:00 A.M., Frank made himself a pot of coffee. He put on his earphones so as not to disturb anyone in the house. His tape recorder was at his side, his computer on his desk, in case he needed to transcribe, and the manuscript was open beside him.

  For the next two days and nights, Frank listened. After seven hours, he fell asleep on the couch with the tapes going. He keyed his mind for the words “Martha Moxley,” and “Halloween.” Whenever those subjects were mentioned, he stopped the machine and transcribed them on his computer, giving each a heading and counter number to catalog them.

  Then Frank came to the tape of that Halloween Eve, a tape that would be played at the trial. Here it was. Frank held his breath as he listened.

  “I guess the best way to start,” said Michael, “is to say that for us, for the Skakel home, Halloween was the best holiday of the year, better than Christmas, better than New Year’s, better than the Fourth of July, because we got to go out.

  “It was like our day. We got to go out and do mischiefness [sic]. I mean, actually, Mischief Night was better than Halloween….”

  Michael went into intricate detail on how they prepared for the big night. “We saved up fireworks, smoke bombs; we made funnelators, which are slingshots that you take twenty feet of surgical tubing, cut it in half so you have ten feet on each side.”

  Then he described how “you take a regular household funnel and you make two holes on the bottom of it, and you wire it through and you thread the surgical tubing through it and then you drop a rope with a knot in it and then it’s a human slingshot.

  “And you can take an egg or an apple and shoot the thing 200 yards. You could hit a parked car or anybody driving by from 200 yards away and safely be able to run away without getting caught. I mean you could hit houses. I mean it was like, hit other kids. I mean it was war time.”

  Listening to him, Frank had to remind himself this was a grown man talking. Michael was nearly forty, but he sounded like a teenager.

  “And that particular Halloween,” he continued, “my dad was on a hunting trip, which he usually was, up at this guy Gil Wayman’s house up in Cambridge, New York…. And so it was great. It was like actually a weekend where we’d be away from him.”

  Michael then described how he’d come home early from school to get his “arsenal” ready for the following night. “Getting eggs together and shaving cream like taking a pin sticking it in a shaving cream can and then lighting a butane lighter so that it would make the hole really small so if you shot it the shaving cream went really far.”

  Then, there were the “snakes” — “the little cylinders you light and it makes a snake and tons of smoke. I got tons of those and crushed them up and put them in like canisters to make big smoke bombs.” Michael was nuts, Frank decided.

  Th
en, to make Halloween perfect, Michael’s cousin Jimmy Terrien appeared. “Jimmy was great,” Michael said. “Jimmy was like the Captain of Mayhem.” Another nut, thought Frank. Two nuts.

  Next, Michael described Ken Littleton, who was spending his first night at the Skakels’. The adult nominally in charge, Littleton, had taken them all to the Belle Haven Club for dinner, along with Terrien and Julie’s friend Andrea Shakespeare. Littleton had allowed Michael to order rum and tonics and planter’s punch.

  “I thought, ‘this is great,’” Michael said. “‘He’s gonna come live at our house and we can drink together and he won’t give me such a hard time at school.’ …Ken was like the football coach at school and we were eating at this great place and ordering drinks and he’s not saying anything. I’m ordering planter’s punches and rum and tonics and I just turned fifteen and the guy’s not saying a peep.”

  Strangely, however, Michael had also said, “Littleton scared the shit out of me ’cause he just seemed like one of those people that wouldn’t hesitate to pummel you. He was a big guy like a football coach and just seemed like he had absolutely no sense of humor. He just had that weird quietness about him.”

  That made Frank uneasy. Something was wrong. Michael had just said how great it was to be with Littleton and how they might become drinking buddies. But now, there was this “weird quietness.” Frank wondered whether Michael could be setting Littleton up. He turned to the manuscript to see if it said anything more about Littleton.

  Instead he read, “After dinner we went back to the house. We were all drinking my father’s booze…trying to act like grown-ups. This turned out to be pretty boring, though, so after a while we began to chase each other around, whooping and giving out ‘noogies’ to each other and knocking things over.” Typical Skakel behavior, thought Frank. What a family. What a bunch of lunatics.

  “Then my cousin Jimmy suggested we go over to his house to watch a new show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, that was supposed to be really funny and was going on the air for the first time that night. He also said he had some great pot over at his place.”