Yet it was Fuhrman, not Frank, who remained the focus of attention. The media regarded him as the expert on Martha’s murder. During breaks in the trial, packs of reporters surrounded him. Frank and I watched, silent and ignored.
A producer from one of the networks, whose job was to ingratiate herself with anyone involved in the case, cozied up to me, saying she was interested in having me tell “my story.” I made the mistake of having lunch with her and a criminal lawyer the network had brought up from New York who claimed he knew me, then picked my brain about what the producer described as “my insights.”
I never heard from her again. A few days later, I spotted the two of them outside the courthouse. A camera crew was filming him while she stood to the side. I stopped to listen. The criminal lawyer was analyzing the case, offering “my insights.”
“Don’t feel too bad,” Frank laughed when I told him the story. “No one is interested in ‘my story’ either.”
•
I think because the Skakels felt so cocky, they made the decision to protect Tommy. I even wondered whether hiring Mickey, at Manny Margolis’s behest, had come with that arrangement, to keep the focus off Tommy, whom Margolis still represented.
Instead, Margolis and Mickey decided that Michael’s best defense rested with Ken Littleton. Maybe Jack Solomon had pumped them up with his stories about Littleton as a serial killer. Or maybe, as I suspected, they wanted to keep the spotlight as far away as they could from the Skakels.
“Solomon was instrumental,” Mickey would say to me after the trial. “He spent hours with us. He put Littleton behind the eight ball.”
Mickey or Margolis or whoever was calling the shots decided to argue that Martha’s murder had occurred at 10:00 P.M., thus providing Michael with his alibi at the Terriens’.
But wouldn’t Tommy’s encounter with Martha just minutes before then create more suspicion than Littleton would? I asked Mickey. Wouldn’t the jurors feel that Tommy had something to hide after he told the Greenwich police he had last seen Martha at 9:30 when he went inside to write his Abraham Lincoln report, omitting those twenty minutes he spent with her just before her death?
Mickey insisted that concentrating on Littleton, not Tommy, was his decision. I didn’t believe him. I suspected that Margolis had influenced him to keep the focus off Tommy. I found myself wondering whether Mickey had been hired not merely to defend Michael but to protect the other Skakels. Whatever the reason, a year after the trial Mickey admitted to me that ignoring Tommy as he had done had been a tragic mistake for Michael.
Knowing that Mickey would portray Littleton as the killer, Benedict opened the trial by putting Littleton on the stand. So the trial began with a three-day sideshow—featuring a former wild man, a manic-depressive on half a dozen medications. I hadn’t seen him in twenty years and had forgotten how large a man he was. In those twenty years, he had been in and out of mental institutions and attempted suicide. His hair had turned gray. No doubt because of his meds, he sounded robotic. He responded to questions in a sing-song cadence, appending the word “Mister” at the end of each response to whoever was questioning him. How would the jury view him, I wondered. Killer or victim? Frankenstein or Forrest Gump?
Mickey began by playing Mary Baker’s secretly recorded, decade-old tape from the Howard Johnson motel outside Boston, where at Solomon’s direction she had tried to trick her ex-husband into a confession by lying to him about what he had told her about the murder.
“Did you ever tell Mary that you stabbed Martha Moxley through the neck?” Mickey asked him.
“Yes, I did, Mr. Sherman,” Littleton replied in his sing-song voice. My God, I thought, he doesn’t know what he is saying. Ten years later, he still doesn’t realize Mary lied to him by telling him he had said something to her that he hadn’t.
Benedict jumped in to protect him. “Do you remember telling her that?” he asked.
“No, Mr. Benedict,” Littleton answered.
“Do you recall ever admitting to the killing?” Benedict continued.
“No, Mr. Benedict.” This poor, wounded creature. He was lost. His mind was shot.
Mickey then played a tape of Littleton’s decade-old interview with Denver psychiatrist Kathy Morrall at Greenwich police headquarters, where, Mickey crowed, Littleton had confessed to killing Martha.
Repeating the lie Mary told him he had uttered in the back seat of their car after a drinking bout, Littleton said on the tape to Morrall, “This is when I said, ‘I did it.’”
“And what did you tell Dr. Morrall that you said to Mary?” Mickey continued.
“I did it, Mr. Sherman.”
“And when you say, ‘I did it,’ you are talking about that you committed the murder of Martha Moxley?”
“Correct, Mr. Sherman.”
It was agonizing listening to Littleton. If people didn’t know better, they would think he was actually confessing to Martha’s murder when what he was referring to was what Mary had lied to him and told him he had said.
“How can you not feel sorry for the guy?” Frank said when we discussed the testimony later that day. “He’s tormented by this case. It’s destroyed his life.”
Frank and I discovered a Dunkin’ Donuts in a shopping mall across the street from the courthouse, where we could disappear and discuss each witness’s testimony. Or we’d meet at nine o’clock before court began or duck out at lunch or during breaks. The coffee was pretty good and no one ever came around and disturbed us.
After his testimony, Littleton approached me. With him was a tall, attractive woman with staggeringly blue eyes, whom he introduced as his fiancée, Ann Drake. Both of them thanked me for my support. Littleton actually remembered me from twenty years before when I had interviewed him with Mary in Ottawa.
“Do you know who Ann Drake is?” said Frank. “She’s heiress to a fortune.” He shook his head, as though pondering why she would be mixed up with Littleton. “She must have her own problems,” he said.
Later that afternoon, I bumped into Mary in the prosecution’s basement office. Because of my friendship with Frank, Benedict had granted me license to wander down there.
Mary also had been brought to Connecticut to testify and was having as difficult a time as Ken but for different reasons. It had been ten years since she had seen him and when they met again, he didn’t recognize her. Worse, she said, he didn’t remember her.
She told me she had greeted him, the father of their two children, with a pert, “Hi, I’m Mary Baker.” “Hi,” he had answered. “I’m Ken Littleton.”
If that was unnerving, so was her encounter with Jack Solomon. He didn’t remember her either.
Solomon was next on the witness stand. Mickey asked whether he had directed Mary to lie to trick Littleton into confessing to the murder. “Absolutely not,” he answered.
Absolutely not? Was that the story Solomon had been giving Mickey during all those hours he spent briefing him? I craned to look at Frank. He was in his wooden chair against the railing, motionless, expressionless. I knew he was seething. He couldn’t believe Jack was saying this, he would tell me later. “My jaw was shaking. I was sitting there, furious, trying not to express anything, not wanting anyone to see what I was really feeling.”
“Are you aware of any confessions or admissions Littleton made to Mary?” Mickey had continued in his questioning of Solomon.
“Many,” Solomon answered.
Many confessions or admissions? Where had Jack come up with that one? He then explained he had listened to thirty tape-recorded conversations Mary had sent him from Ottawa. How could that be? If true, why hadn’t he arrested Littleton? Again, I looked at Frank. He hadn’t moved. Whatever loathing he felt for Fuhrman, he felt in spades for Solomon.
After his testimony, a furious Benedict summoned Jack to the office in the basement. “You show us where Kenny confessed, Jack,” Benedict told him. “Go through your notes. Go through your tapes. Find it and show us where Ken Littleton said
he killed Martha Moxley.”
Benedict had Frank bring Solomon all his old notebooks, most notably his forty-three-page profile of Littleton, all of which were now state’s evidence. Frank handed them to Benedict. He refused to acknowledge Solomon.
“He’s going through them,” Frank said to me later. “Benedict asks him, ‘Anything yet?’ ‘No,’ says Jack. ‘But, heh, heh, heh,’ and gives his little laugh. ‘Something’s torn out here.’” Solomon was, of course, implying that Frank had ripped out the pages.
“Typical Jack,” said Frank. “That’s how far he would go, saying I would tear something out of his notebook that was incriminating. To me, that was worse than anything he said on the witness stand.”
Frank let it go. He didn’t want to cause Benedict any problems. Not now, during the trial. When Benedict went upstairs, Frank remained with Solomon in the basement as he and Jack listened to his tapes.
“I refused to leave Jack alone with them,” he said. “I wouldn’t speak to him. My tongue would fall out of my mouth before I would say a word to him.”
“You know,” he added, “cops can go bad. They steal money. They beat up their wives or their girlfriends. But what Jack did was treachery.”
Benedict, meanwhile, wasn’t finished with him. The following Monday, he put Solomon back on the witness stand. Jack was forced to acknowledge he had told Mary to lie to Littleton to trick him into confessing. And, he admitted, there had never been a confession.
•
I felt Benedict had fought Mickey to at least a draw over Littleton. But what would the jury think? What would they think of the competence of the state of Connecticut, which had employed Solomon as its lead investigator? I shuddered at the possibilities.
Frank was more optimistic. “I thought Benedict was great,” he said. “I thought he succeeded in shooting down what Mickey was trying to do through Solomon—to make Littleton out to be the killer.”
But things did not improve when the state’s first key witness, Cissy Ix, flip-flopped. Susan Gill had been preparing Cissy for her testimony in the office in the basement. In the midst of preparation, Cissy denied ever saying Michael’s father feared his drunken son might have killed Martha. That meant Cissy was refuting her statement both to Frank and to the grand jury.
Susan Gill was a cautious and meticulous appellate lawyer but she had handled few murder cases, none as publicized as this. She rushed to find Frank. “You better get in there,” she said to him. “Cissy is claiming she didn’t say what is in your report.”
Frank walked over. “Is there a problem, Mrs. Ix?” he began. He had always been formal with her. He liked her but kept a distance. She called him Frank, but to him she was Mrs. Ix. He handed her a copy of her statement to him from five years ago.
Cissy said Frank had been mistaken. Rushton had never said anything negative about Michael.
Frank turned to her husband, Bob Ix, seated next to her. “Mr. Ix, you were there that day. You said to her, ‘Cissy, tell him. Tell him, Cissy.’”
“No, Frank,” he answered. “That’s not how we remember it.”
Frank stared at him without speaking. You lying son-of-a-bitch, he wanted to say. Mister former president of Cadbury-Schweppes, you are a fucking liar. Instead, he stood up. “I have nothing further to say to either one of you,” he said. He picked up his report and walked out of the room.
On the witness stand that afternoon, Cissy said that both her statements to Frank and to the grand jury were wrong. “I put into Rush’s mouth what I actually thought…. It was my thinking as opposed to Rush’s. I know Rush never heard from Michael that he ever killed anyone…. It was a terrible thing that I did. That was my mistake. I was wrong. I was very, very wrong. Michael never admitted anything to Mr. Skakel.”
My God, I found myself thinking as I listened to her, why would Cissy change her testimony and risk committing perjury to protect the Skakels?
When she fled the courtroom, I ran after her. She and her husband were in the hallway, walking toward the courthouse’s rear exit, when I caught up to them. “Cissy, why would you say that?” I asked her. “Why did you change your testimony?” She refused to acknowledge me. She continued walking with her husband out the courthouse door.
I turned around and bumped into, of all people, Dominick Dunne. Short, stocky, and gray-haired, here he was, seventy-six years old and recovering from prostate cancer, and he was hustling like a reporter fifty years younger.
“Did you hear what that woman just said?” he shouted so that everyone in the hallway could hear him. He was wearing a suit, and he stopped and placed his hands on his hips. “That bitch,” he shouted again.
After court ended, I wandered down to the basement looking for Frank. “You want to know why Cissy changed her testimony?” he said. “It’s simple. Because despite all that she knows about Michael, she still wants to be the Skakels’ friend. She is so concerned with her neighbors, with Belle Haven, with Greenwich. She does not want to be perceived as a traitor to any of them.”
•
I thought the state picked up some traction with its next few witnesses. First, there was John Higgins. Frank had read Higgins correctly from their two conversations six years before. Higgins didn’t want to testify. But he was one of Frank’s only two eyewitnesses to Michael’s confession. He had to come.
Higgins had also testified at the probable cause hearing in Stamford the year before. An hour before his testimony, Frank showed him the transcript of their telephone conversations. It was then that Higgins realized Frank had taped him. He never forgave Frank.
“I knew he’d be pissed,” Frank said. “That’s why I waited until the last minute. But I wanted him in Connecticut when he got pissed.”
Stocky, with light brown hair and in his late thirties or early forties, Higgins had seethed all through his testimony that day. He was so high-strung that when Mickey badgered him on cross-examination, Higgins lost his temper.
Now two years later, Higgins again resisted coming to Connecticut. “I didn’t doubt he would do it,” said Frank. “I felt he wanted to do the right thing. But he remained pissed off at me and pissed off at authority figures in general. He knew I needed him. And I knew he wasn’t going to make it easy for me.”
“I don’t care about you. The only person I would do it for is Dorthy Moxley,” Higgins said to Frank. Higgins then telephoned Dorthy, saying he didn’t want to testify but would if she asked him to.
“I think Frank told me he might be calling,” Dorthy later remembered. “I had never spoken to him before and didn’t know anything about him until Frank called me.
“When John called, he told me how he didn’t want to get involved. I remember saying, ‘It would be wonderful if you would. We really need you.’
“He said, ‘If you ask me, I will do it.’
“It’s so hard to admit your faults. I think he resisted testifying because he was ashamed that as kid he had had to go to a reform school like Elan.”
After he testified, I saw him and Dorthy embracing as he left the courthouse. “I wanted him to know how grateful I am that he was there,” she said. “I will always have a soft spot in my heart for John Higgins.”
Here in Norwalk his testimony lasted only a few minutes. Mickey attempted to portray him as a grandstander, testifying only because he wanted his fifteen minutes of fame. But that fell flat.
This time he didn’t let Mickey upset him. Or if so, he didn’t show it. In a calm monotone he said what he had to. He repeated the story he had told Frank in 1996—how a sobbing Michael Skakel admitted to him he had murdered Martha Moxley.
Benedict was also able to get in the late Greg Coleman’s pretrial testimony of Michael’s saying, “I’m a Kennedy. I am going to get away with murder.” It was read aloud to the jury with Benedict and Mickey asking the questions and Morano reading from Coleman’s transcript.
Then, Michael’s ghostwriter, Richard Hoffman, identified Michael’s seven audiotapes, which were also p
layed to the jury. Here was Michael in his own words, describing his going out and looking for Martha, masturbating in the tree outside her window and passing the crime scene. I watched the jurors’ faces as they listened but could discern nothing. How could they not be moved by all this?
But to me it was Andrea Shakespeare Renna who provided the most damaging testimony against Michael. Unlike Cissy, she didn’t flinch before the Skakels nor disavow what she had told Frank. She testified that Michael had never gone to the Terriens’.
Susan Gill was doing the questioning. This time there were no surprises. “Was Michael Skakel in the house after the car left?” Gill asked.
“Yes,” answered Renna.
“From 1975 to today, have you been certain Michael was home after the car left?”
“Yes,” Renna said.
“Is there any doubt that Michael was home after that car left?”
“No.”
She added that she had attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart school with Julie and been called to the headmaster’s office the day Martha’s body was found. Both she and Julie were told to return immediately to the Skakels’. When they arrived, she said, Michael came running out to their car, telling them Martha had been killed.
“What did Michael say to you?” Gill asked her.
“That he and Tommy were the last to see Martha that night.”
Mickey couldn’t suggest an ulterior motive. Andrea Shakespeare Renna was no Ken Littleton, whose testimony could be manipulated. She was no ex-junkie from Elan like Gregory Coleman. Her father had gone from being a vice president at CBS to ambassador to the Vatican. She came from the Skakels’ world.
But Mickey did raise questions about Andrea’s testimony—specifically, her certainty that Michael had not gone to the Terriens’. Cross-examining her, he asked how she knew Michael had not gone.
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