Conviction

by Leonard Levitt

  “For some reason, I don’t know who told me…I never thought Michael made the trip to the Terriens’. I thought it was the three boys.”

  Mickey then asked if she had ever seen in him in the house.

  “No,” she had answered. “Did I see him leave? No.”

  “Where did you see Michael after the car left?”

  “I did not see Michael,” she replied.

  Mickey left the impression she could have been mistaken—that her memory could have failed her after all these years.

  Then, in what to me seemed like a surprising and unexpected move, Benedict subpoenaed Rushton Skakel from Hobe Sound, Florida, where he was said to be suffering from dementia. Rushton’s appearance was the state’s reminder to the Skakels that if they couldn’t convict Michael, they could make life miserable for every member of his family.

  Rushton proved useless as a witness. Not only could he not remember details of the murder, he couldn’t recall what had occurred six months before—on 9/11. What struck me was what happened after he’d completed his testimony. Michael walked up to him, placed his hands on his father’s shoulders, and mouthed the words “I love you.”

  Either Michael had had some potent therapy over the years, considering how his teenage psychiatric reports had described his feelings toward his father, or he was playing it for all it was worth.

  The state also blew it with Andy Pugh. Like Andrea Shakespeare Renna, Andy Pugh was also from their world and not afraid to take on the Skakels. He had been prepared to place his old friend at the murder scene, ready to say that the pine tree Michael jerked off in was not the one outside Martha’s window but “The Tree” they had climbed as teenagers—the tree under which her body was found.

  Perhaps Michael sensed the potential damage of Pugh’s testimony. As Pugh began testifying, he noticed Michael silently mouthing the words “You fucking liar.”

  But Morano, who was questioning Pugh, glossed over all this. He never made the connection between the tree where Martha’s body was found and the tree he and Michael had climbed as teenagers.

  “What happened?” I said to him afterwards. “What happened to ‘The Tree’?”

  “I was waiting for Mickey to cross-examine him before I asked about it,” Morano answered. Perhaps Mickey sensed the potential damage as well, for he never asked Pugh any questions. Morano had blown it.

  When I asked Benedict about this, he shook his head in disgust. But not Frank. We were again at Dunkin’ Donuts. Frank was already fuming at Morano, whom he had seen slipping out the day before with Fuhrman. When I mentioned Morano’s explanation for not questioning Pugh about “The Tree,” Frank couldn’t contain himself.

  “What he told you was bullshit,” he said. “Morano wasn’t waiting for Mickey to cross-examine Pugh. I think he just forgot about ‘The Tree.’”

  Mickey also defused the testimony of the Skakels’ chauffeur, Larry Zicarelli, who recounted how he’d pulled Michael down from the Triborough Bridge after Michael said he’d done something so bad he had to either kill himself or leave the country. That something was obviously Martha’s murder.

  Mickey suggested another explanation. “Do you know,” he asked Zicarelli, “whether or not, the night before, Michael slept in his dead mother’s dress?”

  Outside the courtroom, Mickey provided another variation. Michael hadn’t actually been sleeping in his mother’s dress, Mickey said. He’d just been holding it.

  Mickey’s account gave me my only opportunity to talk to Michael. His bodyguard had kept reporters away from him all through the trial.

  “Hey, Mike,” I called to him outside the courthouse as we broke for lunch, “what’s with the dress?”

  He was apparently so flustered he blurted out, “I wasn’t wearing the dress. I was holding it in my arms when I went to sleep. It was my mom’s. She was dying for four years. She died when I was twelve. My father used to make us kneel on marble floors for hours, praying she would live. I was looking for a mom.”

  He spoke matter-of-factly, with no emotion, as though he’d had practice in giving this explanation. Michael had it down pat. It sounded like something right out of a psychiatrist’s manual. “I was looking for a mom.” Or had I become too cynical? Maybe I’d been hanging around Frank too long.

  Dominick, again at my heels, overheard him. “My God,” he said, “I actually feel sorry for him.”

  Oh, boy! I thought to myself. If Dominick—who’d pinned his reputation with the Sutton report on Michael’s guilt—felt sympathy toward him, this case was in trouble.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–THREE

  “It’s Michael. It Can’t Be Anyone Else. It’s Him”

  In retrospect, Mickey would have been wiser not to have put on a defense, for it appeared as if each of Michael’s relatives was lying to protect him. The first was his cousin Jimmy Terrien. Now forty-four years old, short, sinewy, and balding, wearing a sport jacket and open-necked shirt, he bristled when on the witness stand he was introduced as Jim Terrien.

  “I’m not referred to as Jim Terrien,” he said. Rather, he went by his biological father’s name “Dowdle.”

  Mickey had called Terrien to confirm Michael’s alibi: that on the night of Martha’s murder, Michael and two of his brothers had gone to Terrien’s house in the back-country to watch Monty Python on television. But Terrien couldn’t remember details. Most questions he answered with “I don’t remember.”

  Again, as Terrien spoke, Michael could be seen silently mouthing words to him. This time, it appeared Michael was saying “Good job.”

  After he completed his testimony, Michael walked over and offered him a hug. Terrien side-stepped him, avoiding his embrace. Without a word or a look back, he walked out of the courtroom, entered a waiting car, and was gone.

  I was too far away to make out Michael’s expression. People who saw it said he seemed stunned.

  His sister Georgeann proved even less reliable. She began by saying she had seen Michael, his two older brothers, and Jimmy arrive at their home. Had she actually seen them? she was asked. She admitted she hadn’t because she was closeted in the library with a “beau.”

  She had heard their voices, she said. But could she identify any of them as Michael’s? She could not. When she left the courthouse she was in tears.

  Michael’s sister Julie was worse. She, too, couldn’t remember details. In 1975, she told the police she had left the house at 9:30 to drive Andrea home but that when they got to the car, she realized she had forgotten her keys and asked Andrea to run inside for them. Sitting in her car, she saw Tommy saying good-night to Martha at the side of their house. A moment later, she said, she saw Tommy and Littleton answering the door for Andrea.

  Just then, she testified, a figure darted by. She hadn’t recognized it but had cried out, “Michael, get back here.”

  “You see this figure that you yell ‘Michael come back’ to,” said Benedict, cross-examining her. “That is very shortly before you see Tom and Martha by the side door.”

  “I would say so,” Julie said. “But,” she added, “I don’t think it was Michael.”

  One person Julie remembered seeing inside the house around 10:00 P.M. was Littleton. She recalled he had changed his clothes. But, she acknowledged, she had never mentioned this before, either to the Greenwich police or to the grand jury. How could anyone escape the conclusion that she, like Terrien and Georgeann, was lying to protect Michael?

  •

  Final arguments. That’s when it began to turn around.

  Mickey was his wise-ass self, master of the one-liner, the two-second sound-byte.

  “He didn’t do it,” he began. “He doesn’t know who did it. He wasn’t there when the crime was committed, and he never confessed. That’s the whole case.”

  The state’s witnesses raised more questions than answers, he continued, noting that earlier police suspicions had rested first on Tommy, then on Littleton. “Were the Ken Littleton confessions any less compelling, any les
s persuasive than [Higgins’s and Coleman’s] garbage?” he asked. The state, he said, had played “investigative musical chairs for twenty-seven years.”

  Denying the Skakel family tried to cover up Michael’s role in the murder, he said, “I have to tell you this is the worst-run conspiracy I have ever seen. Most importantly they forgot to find somebody to hide the golf clubs.” Was he referring to the matching clubs Lunney had discovered in the Skakel home the day Martha’s body was found? I assumed so. To me, his glibness—and vagueness—epitomized his entire approach to the case.

  Then, it was Benedict’s turn.

  “Martha Moxley, a pretty, athletic, flirtatious fifteen-year-old kid, one who we learned from her diary was as any fifteen-year-old girl, just beginning to come into womanhood,” he began. “Unfortunately, as we learned from the words of the defendant, from Richard Hoffman and from Martha’s diary, she was also drawn into the vortex of the competing hormones of two of the young boys who lived across Walsh Lane.”

  He sounded folksy, colloquial. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen.

  Yes, he acknowledged, he did not know the time the murder occurred. Was it at 10:00 P.M. when the dogs barked? Or was it later after Michael returned from the Terriens’? It didn’t matter, he said. The state only had to prove that Martha had been murdered between 9:30 and 5:30 A.M. the next morning, as the autopsy report had stated.

  He then described the Moxley property, in particular, the trees, providing more detail than his witnesses had. The first tree, by the side of the house, he said, rose to permit a view into Martha’s bedroom. But, he added, it was too thin to climb. Dorthy had said the only way you could climb it was if you were a monkey. Two cedar trees rose up by her brother John’s bedroom, Benedict continued, but they were so thin-limbed no human could climb them either. And, of course, there is the third tree. “It is certainly climbable but that’s not the point. It is a place where a body could be hidden, where a body was hidden, the place where the evidence in this trial says Michael Skakel dragged the body of Martha Moxley.”

  Next, he set the murder scene—the Skakels returning from dinner at the Belle Haven Club; Martha arriving with three friends; she and Michael getting into the Lincoln in the driveway.

  “This was the defendant’s big moment,” Benedict said. “Unfortunately, they were joined by brother Thomas, Michael’s nemesis, who wound up with the girl that night, at least for a little while.”

  He then described the trip to the Terriens’. Exactly who went there, he noted, was one of the case’s controversies. “The next thing that happened is that it was time for sister Julie to take Andrea Shakespeare Renna home. As these two were stepping out the front door, a figure darted by, causing Julie to yell, ‘Michael, come back here,’ which was occurring at the very same time brother Thomas was parting from Martha by the side door in the driveway.”

  “And at that very point, the departure to Terrien’s house has already taken place,” he continued. “The Lincoln was already en route to north Greenwich.” What was that? This was a point I had not heard made before. Where was Benedict going with it? As had Andrea, he was suggesting Michael never went to the Terriens’.

  And then Benedict came to the heart of it—Michael’s whereabouts the night of the murder, a story that had changed over the years as Michael told it to different people. Michael, said Benedict, had started talking about the murder within twenty-four hours. The day Martha’s body was found, he had said to Andrea Shakespeare, “Martha is dead and Tommy and I were the last ones to see her.”

  A year later, he told the family chauffeur Zicarelli, “I have done a terrible thing. You wouldn’t speak to me again if you knew it. I have to kill myself or get out of the country.”

  In 1978 or 1979, he told Dorothy Rogers at Elan he was in a blackout and that he might have done it. Also at Elan, he had told Coleman, “I can get away with anything” because he was a Kennedy. He told John Higgins, “I did it.”

  Around 1982 he confided in his father, who told Cissy Ix he might have done it while drunk.

  “In 1985 he told Michael Meredith that he had climbed a tree and spied on Martha…and conveniently pointed his finger at Thomas coursing through the yard towards Martha’s house.”

  In 1992 he told a similar story to Andy Pugh, although the tree, he told Pugh, was not by her window but where her body was found.

  There was an edge to Benedict’s voice now. He was into it, all right. My God, I found myself thinking, Benedict had put it all together. And the jury was listening. You could see them tensing, leaning forward in their seats as he spoke. Not a sound. He had them. They were into this the way he was. Yes, I’d underestimated him.

  I looked over at Frank. He was watching the jury. “They were hanging on his every word,” he would tell me later. “He was connecting all the dots.” He and Benedict had had a running conversation about what he would tell the jury in his summation.

  “Your job is to get the jury to see one big picture,” Frank had said to him. To me, Frank said, “He was doing exactly what we said he had to do.”

  Ever since October 31, 1975, Benedict continued, either Thomas or Michael had been the case’s prime suspect. “It has been one of most notorious cases in the country’s history in the last twenty-seven years, not to mention that it was these people’s innocent next-door neighbor, a playmate of some of them, who was murdered.” And yet, no one in the family remembered anything.

  He moved on to Michael, the troubled teenager. “Clearly, the defendant had a major problem. Already he was an alcoholic, a substance abuser. Already he was beyond the control of his family. He was becoming suicidal. I doubt his family was even aware of the sexual turmoil he was going through. Elan was a last resort.”

  Then, he returned to Andrea Shakespeare and prepared for his final assault. He began by saying she was unshakable in her conviction that Michael never went to the Terriens’. Again, he mentioned the figure Julie saw while they were out at the station wagon about to drive Andrea home and how Julie had cried out, “Michael, get back here!”

  I found myself listening as intently as the jury, but for another reason. I was certain now what Benedict doing. He was indicating that the murder had occurred at 10:00 P.M. His theory was different from Frank’s.

  And then he launched it. His entire summation had been leading us to this point. He had planted the bomb that was now set to explode in Michael’s face. As Benedict put it, “The fact that gives the lie to his entire alibi.”

  Yes, he had taken something from Michael’s autobiography that Frank had dismissed. Frank had believed the murder had occurred later, after Michael had returned from the Terriens’. He had told me he felt Michael had gone to the Terriens’ because he had given so much detail about what he had done there that night as he lay on the bed watching Monty Python and fantasizing about Martha. Now, however, Benedict was saying something else.

  Quoting Michael’s words from his memoir, Benedict read aloud, “I got home and most of the lights were out. I went walking around the house. Nobody was on the porch. I went upstairs to my sister’s room. Her door was closed and I remember that Andrea had gone home.”

  Frank had dismissed this scenario, concluding that Michael was lying, that considering his relationship with his sister, he had no reason to go to his sister’s room and that he never gave Andrea a thought. Benedict dismissed it as well but for a different reason.

  He paused in his summation. Slowly and deliberately, he showed that it was impossible for events to have unfolded as Michael had claimed.

  “On supposedly getting home from the Terriens’, he goes to his sister’s room and remembers that Andrea had gone home.

  “But the car had departed for the Terriens’ before Julie and Andrea had stepped out of the house to take Andrea home. Somebody who had actually left already would have had no idea of Julie’s trip to take Andrea home.”

  I thought I heard the jury’s collective gasp of recognition. Or perhaps it was my own.<
br />
  Oh my God, I found myself thinking, Benedict had done it.

  •

  Dominick said Benedict’s closing argument had changed everything but I wasn’t so sure. Two years before, I’d covered the murder trial of four New York City cops charged with firing forty-one shots at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant. The prosecution had not presented much of a case but gave a terrific closing argument. It didn’t work because the evidence had been so weak. The cops were all acquitted.

  Yet again, perhaps for the hundredth time, I found myself with Frank at our haunt, Dunkin’ Donuts, trying to sort out my feelings about the evidence. This time it was evening. The courthouse had closed. Everyone had gone. Except for a waitress, we were alone.

  “Let’s take the worst-case scenario,” I said to him. “You have no eyewitnesses, no direct evidence, no DNA.”

  “Okay, but he admitted it to two people.”

  “Yeah, but one of them, Coleman, was a junkie.”

  “But his testimony is believable. He was one of most believable people I’ve ever known.”

  I didn’t buy it. And I worried to myself that Frank wanted to convict Michael so badly he had fallen in love with Coleman the way Mickey had with Michael.

  “Zicarelli’s story was strong but Mickey defused it,” I said. “Michael had a history of cross-dressing. I thought the story about his mother’s dress sounded plausible.”

  “Hey, Len, are you kidding? That’s why he has to leave the country? Because he was wearing his mother’s dress? I don’t think so.”

  “And they screwed up on Pugh. The jury never heard about ‘The Tree.’”

  “Don’t get me started on Morano.”

  On further examination, even Benedict’s summation troubled me. His theory, from Michael’s own words in his autobiography, indicated he hadn’t gone to the Terriens’. It had seemed so strong then, the icing on the cake, perhaps even the smoking gun.

  But that wasn’t Frank’s theory. When he had listened to the tapes, he had dismissed much of what Michael had said about those last few hours. “He went to Julie’s room?” Frank had said to me. “Why would he do that? Julie was scared to death of him. He thought about Andrea? Hell, he was making it up.”