I was curious how Ethel Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy’s widow and an American icon, would describe her nephew. I wondered whether she harbored him any ill will for the death of her own son Michael. Whatever she may have felt did not make its way into her letter. Ethel Kennedy wrote only in clichés.
“With a heavy heart yet with hope born of the morning sun, I write to ask that your compassion will tip the scales in your decision regarding my nephew, Michael Skakel,” she began. The letter ended: “I pray that you will season justice with that twice blessed attribute of God, mercy, and let him continue to enrich our lives.”
Finally, Michael spoke. Despite his conviction, he was unrepentant. “I have thought every day, ‘Why has my life come to this?’” he began. Then, his voice breaking, he said, “I’ve been accused of a crime I’d love to be able to say I did, so they [the Moxley family] can sleep. So that the Moxleys can finally find peace. But I can’t. Because that would be a lie. To do that is a lie before my God.
“I cannot bear false witness against anyone or myself. I cannot tell a lie before my God. Jesus Christ told people as he walked around the world that he loved them. Should he go to jail for that?”
Was Michael comparing himself to Jesus Christ? Is that how he saw himself? Frank would say afterward I was overreacting, that Michael was simply repeating the standard refrain of reformed alcoholics who like to cry “victim.”
Judge Kavanewsky was as unmoved as I. He sentenced Michael to twenty years, making him eligible for parole in eleven.
CHAPTER TWENTY–FOUR
“You and I Will Still Be There”
NEW YORK CITY
2002–2004
With the trial over, I returned to my job at One Police Plaza in New York City. Frank returned to his in Bridgeport. Although our paths were diverging, we continued to meet. We spoke regularly on the phone. Except for Michael’s conviction, the most rewarding part of the Moxley case for me had been our friendship.
I regaled Frank with my problems at Police Plaza. There was a new police commissioner, Ray Kelly. As usual, he didn’t like what I was writing about him. His predecessors had taken my knocks in silent fury. Kelly took an afternoon off from fighting crime to brave the Long Island Expressway and meet with my editors at Newsday to complain. As my boss, Les Payne put it to me, “He wants your head on a platter.”
Frank, meanwhile, had the possibility of a promotion. The supervisor of inspectors was about to retire. That had been Solomon’s job under Browne. Frank wasn’t sure who Benedict would choose. Frank thought it might go a colleague with more seniority but he refused to lobby. In the end Benedict chose Frank. It was his final vindication.
Not long after the verdict, I called Dominick. I had a last piece of unfinished business to settle with him.
We met for lunch at Michael’s, a writer’s spot in midtown that he selected. As I took the subway uptown from Police Plaza, I realized I was looking forward to seeing him. Say what you will of him—and over the years Frank and I had said plenty—he was always entertaining, replete with gossip and sometimes even real news.
He was being sued by former California Congressman Gary Condit over an article he had written in Vanity Fair. Condit had had an affair with Chandra Levy, a young intern in his Washington office, who disappeared. Dominick had written that he had overheard someone say at a cocktail party that Condit was at the heart of a Middle East call girl ring that had dropped Levy’s body from a plane over the Atlantic Ocean. After her body was subsequently discovered in a Washington park, Condit sued Dominick for libel.
Dominick said he wanted to settle but that Vanity Fair wanted him to fight it. I couldn’t figure out why he had ever printed something so obviously libelous based on cocktail-party chatter. Better he had stuck to fiction.
But my reason for seeing him had nothing to do with Condit. Although we had made our peace, I had never quite forgiven him for the fax he’d sent me years before. I brought it to our lunch. Over dessert, I handed it to him.
“Oh my,” he said as he read it. “Did I hurt you? Please forgive me. I was so wrapped up in the case because of my daughter. And,” he added, “I just love Frank. He and I are very close now. It’s funny, isn’t it? You never know how life will turn out.”
I smiled. I found myself thinking of Frank’s mother Beatrice, who had taught her son never to forgive a slight.
Dominick looked up at me and smiled too, sheepishly, I thought. “But you know, Len, it’s true what I wrote about giving the Sutton report to Mark Fuhrman. That was brilliant.”
This time, I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help myself. It was impossible to remain angry at him.
Meanwhile, the Skakels had filed notice of Michael’s appeal and turned on Mickey. Just weeks after the verdict, their new lawyers, appellate specialists from Hartford, charged that he had failed to make a basic argument, based on what they said was the case’s strongest legal point—that in 1975 there was a five-year statute of limitation on murder. They suggested he had intentionally failed to pursue that theory. In the Atlantic Monthly, Bobby Kennedy Jr. wrote that an early appeal “would have deprived Sherman of the nationally publicized trial he expected would boost his career.” In the article, Kennedy also continued to maintain that Littleton was more likely Martha’s killer than Michael.
Unfair as this may have been to Mickey, I shed no tears for him. Such family anger, he jauntily explained, “came with the territory.” I suppose he could afford to be magnanimous. The Skakels had paid him plenty for his services. The figure heard was over $1 million.
And despite Michael’s conviction, Mickey’s practice flourished. Liza Minnelli hired him. So did local residents. His draw now was less that he would get a client acquitted than that he could draw media coverage.
He also became a regular on Court TV and the talk show circuit. I bumped into him a couple of times in New York. He had a new girlfriend and was hanging out at Elaine’s, another spot frequented by writers.
“People come up to me now,” he said to me. “They say, ‘Hey, you’re that guy from the O.J. case.’ I say, ‘No, try the Michael Skakel case,’ They say, ‘Oh, yeah, I saw you on television.’”
“How do you feel about the Skakels turning on you?” I asked.
“Devastated,” he said, glancing over my shoulder, checking out the celebrity crowd. Clearly, he had moved on.
There was one last thing I felt I had to do, one more person I had to see. And I had to do it alone, with no help from Frank or anyone else. I wanted to see Tom Sheridan, Michael’s first attorney. He knew more about Michael than anyone else, even more, I felt, than Frank, though whether Sheridan would talk to me about Michael was another question.
He lived in a brownstone in the 50s off Tenth Avenue, where he also had his law office. I hadn’t seen him in years and was taken aback at how he had aged. The last time I’d visited him we’d had lunch at a pub around the corner that was pretty good. Now, he was seventy-seven years old and suffering from emphysema. He carried a bottle of liquid oxygen that he breathed whenever he became fatigued, which was often. I brought in sandwiches because he could barely walk.
But there was nothing wrong with his mind. He remembered in detail events that had occurred twenty-five years before.
I began by saying that with Michael’s trial over, I was writing a book.
“You should,” he said. We’d always gotten along. I think he appreciated that I’d helped him and Murphy out years before, when I’d given them my copy of the Greenwich police report.
But hiring Murphy had proved his undoing with the Skakels. Despite his fifty-year friendship with Rushton and his decades of service to his family, they had turned on him as they later would on Mickey. They never forgave him for the troubles the investigation had caused when word of Tommy’s and Michael’s lies to the police leaked out. And Michael had never forgiven him for literally having had him kidnapped and sent to Elan.
There were also the children’s trust funds from their grandp
arents. Sheridan had been in charge of them. The children wanted their money and pleaded with their father to keep Sheridan out of their affairs.
“Rush Jr. called and said the kids had petitioned to keep me away,” Sheridan said. “To tell you the truth, it was a burden removed from my life.”
Then he said something startling. “Going to prison is probably the best thing that could have happened to Michael.”
That was a strange remark from a lawyer who over the years had professed Michael’s innocence. I asked what he meant.
“It might do him a world of good,” he said. “Things happen in this life. It might be the making of him. I do feel badly. A sick person has been wrongly accused. But I think it is for his own good that this happened. He is not the first person to be wrongly accused. He’ll probably do lots of good work there as a counselor with other inmates and their addiction problems. He’s very good at that.”
I couldn’t figure out what Sheridan meant. Was he saying that while he believed Michael did not murder Martha, his conviction was divine retribution for other transgressions?
“Michael is a sociopath and a sick personality with a mental disorder but he did not do it,” Sheridan said. “He did not kill Martha Moxley.”
He then described his visit to Elan with Father Connolly shortly after Michael had been admitted. There was more to the story than what Connolly had told Frank. Far more. According to Sheridan, Connolly reported that a counselor at Elan told him Michael said that on the night of the murder he’d been covered in blood. Sheridan added that Michael also told him he thought he might have killed Martha.
“When we went up to Elan, two, three weeks later, they were giving him a real grilling,” Sheridan said. “I spoke to Michael alone. Michael said, ‘I was out that night. I might have done it, Mr. Sheridan. If she caught me whacking off, I might have whacked her.’”
“‘What about the bloody clothes, Michael?’” Sheridan said he had asked. “‘Michael, how did you clean the blood off yourself?’ Michael just stared at me. He didn’t know.”
Sheridan said that when he discussed this with Father Connolly, who was also a psychologist, the priest told Sheridan that because of Michael’s behavior disorder, he could have been “fantasizing.” Despite all Sheridan knew about him, he refused to believe that his best friend Rucky’s son was capable of murder. Fantasizing. That’s what it was. That’s what Michael had done. He was having a “guilt trip,” Sheridan decided.
Two years later, Sheridan continued, “Michael graduated from Elan with hugs and kisses from his family. For years, he was in and out of treatment. He couldn’t get a job. He said the Moxley case was hanging over him and he was forever asking his father for money. I felt he was using this to extort money from his old man. I wouldn’t let him come home. He stayed at his cousin Terrien’s.”
Through the years, said Sheridan, Michael’s fear that he may have killed Martha became a recurrent theme. “He spent years thinking he did it. He told me he didn’t know when Martha was killed but that if it was after 12:30, he would be in deep shit. I went through two sessions like this with him after he got out of Elan. Two flashbacks: ‘Could I have done this?’ he asked.”
Sheridan brought him to Dr. Lesse, who tested him with sodium Pentothal. “Lesse told me, ‘No way.’” At another point, Lesse’s associate had Michael tested and hypnotized. “He said Michael had no involvement in the murder but recommended he be hospitalized and given psychotherapy.”
The years passed. “Everything seemed fine,” Sheridan said, until the Krebs interview.
“During the questioning, which occurred in my office, Michael was reliving it. Afterwards, he came down to see me. He said, ‘Do you think I could have done it? I had a load on.’ I felt he was having another guilt trip. He was saying he believed he may have murdered Martha but couldn’t remember. I thought, ‘Here we go again.’”
Sheridan then fired Murphy and Krebs. “I didn’t think it was necessary to spend any more money,” he said. “It was not my duty to do what the Greenwich police should have done at the beginning. And if Martha was killed at 10:00 P.M., as the police said, Michael was in the clear because he was at the Terriens’.”
We had been talking more than two hours. I still did not know what to make of what he was saying. He had provided more damning information about Michael than anything that had come out at his trial. I couldn’t get out of my mind what he had said about Michael’s virtually confessing to him at least twice. That and what Michael had told the counselor at Elan about the blood. How could Sheridan continue to maintain Michael was innocent?
I had one more question. It was about Margo, Sheridan’s niece, who had married Michael and was divorcing him. “Knowing all you did about Michael,” I asked, “did you warn her about him?”
Sheridan said he hadn’t.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Lawyer—client privilege,” he answered. I stared at him an extra second, waiting for him to smile at what I assumed was a joke. He did not.
•
On a cold January morning in 2003, I attended the funeral of Rushton Skakel. He had died the week before in Hobe Sound but the service was held at St. Mary’s Church on Greenwich Avenue. The church was packed. Not a seat went unfilled.
The family sat in the front rows on the left. They were all there but Michael. Although his brothers each wore coats and ties, I noted that none of them wore a suit. Only the rich can indulge in such informality. Jimmy Terrien, tieless, sat a few rows behind them.
Ethel Kennedy was said to have appeared, although I didn’t see her. I did see Andrew Cuomo, the son of New York’s former governor, who at the time was married to Ethel’s daughter Kerry. My first thought was one of surprise that Andrew had known Rushton.
Tommy was listed in the program to read a verse from the Book of Wisdom but for reasons I never learned, Rush Jr. took over for him. David also read from the book of Matthew. As he reached the portion: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,” his voice broke. He collected himself and continued, “I needed clothes and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me. I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
No fewer than nine priests sat on the stage. The mass was led by Father Aidan Hynes, who had been Rushton’s priest in Hobe Sound.
“I bless the body of Rushton Skakel,” he began in a brogue. There was something reassuring about that brogue. It was as though the mourners were getting the real thing, the true old-time Irish Catholicism.
As the priest spoke, I imagined Rushton as a boy. Yes, the silver spoon had been in his mouth but there had been all that chaos with his absentee parents. He was not particularly intelligent, nor effectual in business, but he was not unkind. As Sheridan had said, there was nothing in him of the double-cross.
Yet the chaos of his childhood had followed him as a parent. As a father he had been a disaster. Sheridan had said something else to me about him: He should never have had children.
Rushton “had an abiding faith. God is not interested in ends. It is how you strive. He had terrible difficulties in his last years,” the priest intoned, “but he had charity. I never heard him utter an unkind word. Rush tried to see things as God sees them. He tried.”
He then cited a litany of names Rushton had known and lost: his father, George Skakel Sr.; his mother, Big Ann; his older brother, George Jr.—all of them killed in plane crashes; George’s wife Pat Caroon, an alcoholic who died at the dinner table when she choked on a piece of meat; Rushton Sr.’s brother Jimmy and his wife Virginia, both of them also alcoholics; his sister Georgeann and his brother-in-law, George Dowdle, Jimmy Terrien’s biological father, who had drunk himself to death the day Terrien was born; and Senator Robert Kennedy, RFK, Ethel’s husband (whom I knew Rushton and the other Skakels had despised).
His old friend Victor Ziminsky then told the gin rummy story from the company plane, the Great Lakes Convair, when one of the two
engines had conked out and Rushton had ambled up to speak to the pilot, then made three short stops, chatting with other guests before he sat down and knocked with three points. “We were all calm,” Ziminsky said, “because Rushton had been calm.”
John Skakel, Johnny—the boy who according to Andy Pugh, had had murderous fights with Michael—also spoke. “Dad loved many people,” he began. “He reserved a special spot for all his children.”
Again, I recalled the trial. Rushton, in the last stages of dementia had come up to testify. At the end of his testimony, Michael had mouthed the words “I love you.”
Of course, it had all been for show. In pleading for leniency for Michael, everyone had made a big deal of how Rushton had abused him. Now, it was love that served their purpose.
Then, Johnny cited his mother’s illness, what he called, “God’s plan to take her from this life.” Referring to Michael’s conviction, he said of his father, “In his last years, he faced the indignity of having his son wrongly accused. He chose not to get down on the level of those who have attacked the family.”
So there it was again. No responsibility. No accountability. This was Michael Skakel’s brother John speaking. He was throwing down the family gauntlet. Their denial would continue. They would never admit it. They would never acknowledge what Michael had done, and we would never be certain of exactly what had occurred that night.
I was sitting on the aisle toward the rear of the church. A woman and a little boy sat down next to me. He was perhaps three or four, and the woman did not appear to be his mother. He held a plastic toy and was fidgeting in his seat, fighting to stay quiet. “Shh, Georgie,” the woman whispered. I realized this was Michael’s son. In his plea for leniency, Michael had asked the judge to consider little Georgie so that he would not grow up without a father.
Georgie had Michael’s fair coloring and round face but he was adorable. His mother Margo, Sheridan’s niece, had also come to the funeral, though for some reason, she was not sitting with Georgie.
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