Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit

by Robert F. Kennedy

  AUGUST 24, 2003: Investigator Vito Colucci videotapes an interview with Tony Bryant in the Wyndham Hotel in Coconut Grove, Florida.

  OCTOBER 12, 2004: Regan Books publishes Len Levitt’s Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder.

  MARCH 2005: Dominick Dunne settles the $11 million defamation lawsuit brought against him by former Congressman Gary Condit.

  AUGUST 25, 2005: Hubie Santos and Hope Seeley file a petition for a new trial, based on the revelations of Tony Bryant.

  SEPTEMBER 1, 2006: Tony Bryant invokes his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when questioned by Skakel attorneys in Miami.

  OCTOBER 25, 2007: Superior Court Judge Edward Karazin rejects Michael Skakel’s appeal.

  FEBRUARY 23, 2008: Tom Sheridan dies at 83 of emphysema.

  OCTOBER 6, 2008: Crawford Mills commits suicide at 47.

  AUGUST 26, 2009: Dominick Dunne dies at 83 of bladder cancer.

  APRIL 12, 2010: Connecticut State Supreme Court upholds 2007 decision to deny Michael Skakel appeal for new trial in a 4 to 1 decision.

  JUNE 30, 2010: Mickey Sherman pleads guilty in federal court to willfully failing to pay taxes for 2001 and 2002. Prior to his plea, he pays about $400,000 of the $420,710 he owes in taxes, interest, and penalties owed for those years.

  FEBRUARY 8, 2011: Peter Ziluca dies at 51 of an apparent overdose from a combination of vodka, hydrocodone, and cocaine.

  MARCH 15, 2011: Mickey Sherman turns himself in to federal prison in Otisville, NY, for a one year, one day prison sentence for tax evasion.

  AUGUST 17, 2011: Manny Margolis dies at 85 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  OCTOBER 24, 2012: Connecticut Department of Correction denies Michael Skakel’s request for parole.

  JANUARY 2013: Prosecution witness John Higgins dies in his sleep.

  OCTOBER 23, 2013: Judge Thomas Bishop grants Michael Skakel a new trial based on his habeas corpus appeal, stating the Mickey Sherman’s defense was “constitutionally deficient” and so lacking that “the state procured a judgment of conviction that lacks reliability.”

  NOVEMBER 21, 2013: Michael Skakel is released from prison after posting $1.2 million bail.

  OCTOBER 31, 2014: Michael Skakel settles his 2013 slander lawsuit against HLN host Nancy Grace and Time Warner, Inc. The company releases a statement apologizing for erroneously reporting that Michael Skakel’s DNA was found at the Martha Moxley crime scene.

  FEBRUARY 24, 2016: Prosecutor Susan Gill presents oral arguments to the Connecticut Supreme Court that Michael Skakel should not receive a new trial. Defense lawyer Hubie Santos argues that “the weight of the evidence is that Tommy Skakel killed Martha Moxley.”

  FEBRUARY 25, 2016–PRESENT: Michael Skakel awaits the Supreme Court’s decision about his fate.

  INTRODUCTION

  The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.

  —Malcom X

  On October 30, 1975, someone killed 15-year-old Martha Moxley outside her home in the swanky Belle Haven section of Greenwich, Connecticut. Martha was friend and next-door neighbor to my cousin, Michael Skakel, who celebrated his 15th birthday five weeks earlier. At the time of Martha’s murder, Michael was eleven miles away with five eyewitnesses. Prior to 1998, no police agency had ever considered Michael a suspect in Martha’s murder.

  Twenty-seven years after Martha’s death, the State of Connecticut spent some $25 million to convict Michael Skakel of murdering Martha. At Michael’s criminal trial, the State offered no physical or forensic evidence, no fingerprints or DNA, no eyewitness testimony linking Michael to the murder. Indeed, bungling police investigators had lost many items of physical evidence that might have exculpated Michael, including a bloodied section of the golf club used as a murder weapon; vaginal and anal swabs and slides from the victim made by the Connecticut medical examiner; blood-stained, size-13 Keds sneakers; the bloody pants of a large adult male, shown by police to witnesses following the crime; several hairs removed from Martha’s body; and beer cans taken from the crime scene. With no evidence linking Michael to the killing, the State tried him based on the perjured testimony of three confession witnesses suborned by a crooked and malevolent cop obsessed with winning his career case. Despite Michael’s ironclad alibi, and the State’s obvious evidentiary defects, a Connecticut court, nevertheless, convicted him of Martha’s murder in 2002 after a six-week jury trial. The trial court judge, John F. Kavanewsky Jr., sentenced Michael to a term of 20 years to life in prison.

  Because of the dearth of evidence against him and his airtight alibi, a number of people had to commit selfish, malicious, or illegal acts in order to convict Michael, who found himself in a confluence where the pooled ambitions of several unscrupulous men and women intersected to sweep him away. Among these scoundrels were a craven family bursar and lawyer, Tom Sheridan, who leaked selective lies to incriminate Michael, a boy whose legal troubles represented to Sheridan a permanent gravy train; Dominick “Nick” Dunne, a nationally published gossip columnist who minted his long campaign against the Skakel family into lucrative books, TV shows, and the celebrity he craved; Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced LA policeman, convicted perjurer, and racist, who wrote a shoddy and inaccurate account of the Moxley murder, pointing the finger at Michael in an effort to rehabilitate his own damaged reputation; Frank Garr, a morally corrupt Greenwich Police officer who rescued his failing career by cajoling, harassing, intimidating, and tampering with witnesses, and suborning perjury to gin up a case against Michael, whose family he despised; Jonathan Benedict, an unscrupulous prosecutor with elastic ethics, who put ambition ahead of truth and justice, and who illegally concealed exculpatory evidence to win Michael’s conviction; and Len Levitt, Garr’s sidekick and dupe, a starstruck local reporter who penned a secret deal with Garr to split the proceeds of a book and any subsequent movie deals arising out of their efforts to convict Michael. Following their own selfish agendas, these men meshed together a net of lies that would ensnare Michael and put him behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.

  Michael compounded his problems by hiring Mickey Sherman, a slick but incompetent, dissolute, and pathologically narcissistic wannabe television lawyer. Sherman, who described himself as a “media whore,” drank, gambled, and luxury-binged away the $2.2 million that Michael’s friends and family had scraped together to finance his defense.

  A cyclone of media malpractice consolidated the perfect storm of greed and ambition that ended in Michael’s imprisonment. His conviction was a failure of the legal system. It was also a failure of the press. The prevailing news story crafted by Dunne, Fuhrman, and a conniving prosecutor—of the spoiled rich “Kennedy cousin” using political power and connections to get away with murder—was flypaper to the national media that parlayed the narrative into a cottage industry. In a classic and corrupt loop, the media vultures hungry for ratings egged on Connecticut prosecutors to file scurrilous murder charges against Michael. The 18 satellite trucks and almost 55 reporters attending Michael’s trial signified a journalistic obsession with the case that was 10 miles wide and an inch deep. With 401 reporters certified to cover the case, only one, Leslie Stahl, bothered to look beneath the flimsy veneer at the myriad facts undermining the prosecutor’s frail parable. A new breed of TV lawyers, led by CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin and HLN’s Nancy Grace and Beth Karas, stoked the pitchfork brigade and officiated over Michael’s press lynching. The media lemming stampede was evidence of a broken system that sacrificed Michael on the altar of ratings and revenue, and compounded the tragedy of Martha Moxley’s death with the conviction of an innocent man.

  Sympathy for Mrs. Dorthy Moxley, Martha’s mother, and the narrative of the Kennedy kid who got away with murder, were ferociously embraced by press, police, and prosecutor. It swayed Connecticut’s judicial system, which obligingly dismantled the imposing legal barriers to wrongfully jail Mic
hael for his implausible role in a 27-year-old crime. The courts, which are meant to safeguard individual rights against the volatile tides of public passions, instead capitulated to the mob. The judicial system shamefully bent its own rules and overturned longstanding black-letter precedent regarding its ironclad five-year statute of limitations on non-capital murder in the State of Connecticut.

  I am going to show that Michael Skakel did not and could not have killed Martha Moxley; how and why he got framed for the crime; who did the framing; and how they accomplished it. I’m also going to show how I tracked down the likely killers, phantoms who moved in and out of Greenwich like shadows, and whose presence was detected by neither police nor press during 30 years of flawed investigations. Despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt, Connecticut prosecutors and police still refuse to investigate them. Today, those men walk free, as entrenched, ego-bound police and prosecutors stick to their guns and refuse to acknowledge their mistake.

  Michael is my cousin, and it would be natural for a reader to suspect I’m in the tank for him. For this reason, I will methodically lay out the overwhelming evidence that supports Michael’s innocence. I mean to be painfully honest in telling this story, even relating things that some members of my family will find difficult to read. I will share personal stories and memories that I would otherwise never discuss. I do this because Michael’s freedom, reputation, and constitutional rights are more important than the privacy I sacrifice by recounting these anecdotes.

  There are broader issues, as well, that need airing, including the abuse of police and prosecutorial power and the role of the media in our democracy. Michael’s ordeal is a parable about how mercilessly the flames of passion and prejudice consume even the most privileged individual when democracy’s firewalls—police, prosecutors, the justice system, the press—give way to the clamoring of the mob. The inferno that devoured Michael is no anomaly. It feeds every day on the economically disadvantaged and minorities. Only visibility distinguished Michael. Mostly the casualties of their broken institutions are the invisible and discarded—people living in ghettos and fringe communities, from Ferguson to Baltimore.

  Michael has spent 11½ years in jail. In October 2013, after a successful habeas corpus appeal, a courageous appellant court judge, Thomas Bishop, ordered Michael released from prison based on his claim that his lawyer was so monumentally incompetent that Michael did not receive a fair trial. When Fairfield County prosecutors appealed Judge Bishop’s 128-page ruling in favor of Michael to the Connecticut Supreme Court, I hired a private investigator, Larry Holifield, and began working on this book. As of this writing, Judge Bishop’s ruling in Michael’s favor is on appeal by prosecutors to a six-judge panel of the Connecticut Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court decides against Michael, he will return to prison to serve out his sentence. If the justices rule in his favor, the new Fairfield County prosecutor will decide whether to retry Michael for the Moxley murder. Michael would then face a new trial.

  I know that Michael Skakel is innocent. I expect that anyone who reads this book will be similarly convinced, and, if I’ve done my job in writing it, they will also finally understand how the players and events conspired to jail him. Finally, if prosecutors have the courage to acknowledge their mistake, I will have provided police a blueprint to finally indict, try, and convict Martha’s true killers.

  This is the story of two crimes: the murder of Martha Moxley and the wrongful imprisonment of my cousin Michael Skakel.

  Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

  Mt. Kisco, New York

  PART I

  The Stage

  CHAPTER 1

  The Murder

  Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

  —Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 p.m., on the evening of Thursday, October 30, 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley finished a grilled cheese sandwich and left her home on Walsh Lane to socialize around her Belle Haven neighborhood.

  Belle Haven is a well-heeled enclave of 120 houses on Long Island Sound in Greenwich, Connecticut. Eighteen months earlier, the Moxleys had relocated there from Piedmont, California. Martha was a sophomore at Greenwich High School. Her brother, John, was a senior. Martha’s father, David, who headed the New York office of Touche Ross, an international consulting and accounting firm, was away that night in Atlanta for a conference.

  It was Halloween eve, a popular anniversary that Belle Haven teens referred to as “Mischief Night” or “Hell Night.” Neighborhood children played pranks such as ringing doorbells, toilet papering houses, soaping windows, and throwing eggs. As she left home, Martha slipped into her blue winter parka against unseasonable cold; temperatures that night would dip just below freezing.

  According to Martha’s mother, Dorthy Moxley, Martha and her friend Helen Ix set out from the Moxley property with 11-year-old neighbor, Geoffrey “Geoff” Byrne, who would unwillingly play a pivotal role in Martha’s murder and whose life would be destroyed by the event nearly as surely as Martha’s. The trio headed for the Skakel house in search of Michael and his older brother Tommy. According to the Skakel gardener, Franz Wittine, all six Skakel children—Rush Jr., 19; Julie, 18; Tommy, 17; John, 16; Michael, 15; David, 12; and Stephen, 9—together with their new 23-year-old tutor, Kenneth “Kenny” Littleton; their cousin James “Jimmy” Dowdle, age 17; and Julie Skakel’s friend Andrea Shakespeare, age 16, were having a 6:00 p.m. dinner at the nearby Belle Haven Club. Littleton, a football coach and teacher at Brunswick, the private day school the Skakel boys attended, had been hired a week earlier by Rushton “Rucky” Skakel Sr., father of the Skakel children and my mother’s brother, to help look after the children and to tutor Tommy and Michael. Rucky was away on a hunting trip, and would not return until the following evening. Rucky’s wife, Anne Reynolds Skakel, had passed away two years before after a prolonged battle with brain cancer. Littleton was celebrating his first day on the job by drinking with his teenage charges. Rucky, an alcoholic, exerted only anemic parental supervision. A minor household army, including a cook, a housekeeper, a gardener, and, now, Littleton, managed the chaotic homestead.

  After leaving the Skakels’, Martha, Helen Ix, and Geoff continued, in Helen’s words, “messing around” Belle Haven, and then stopped for a short visit at the home of the Moukad family on Otter Rock Drive, where Martha ate some ice cream. There, they picked up another neighborhood friend, Jackie Wetenhall. The group, now a quartet, left the Moukad home and headed back toward the Skakels’.

  According to various trial testimony, Littleton returned with the kids from the Belle Haven Club between 8:30 p.m. and 8:45 p.m. For about 15 or 20 minutes they all remained in the house, mostly drinking and playing games. Jimmy Dowdle recalled drinking at least one more Heineken along with Michael and John, with whom he was playing backgammon on the enclosed back sunporch. Michael recalls breaking out two Heinekens for Jimmy and John. As he handed them the bottles, according to his testimony during his 2013 habeas hearing, Michael looked down toward the Skakels’ backyard chipping tee and saw a group of large boys he did not recognize on the lawn. Michael also shared this detail with author Richard Hoffman in 1997, who was ghostwriting Michael’s memoir, four years before the identity of these figures would become a crucial factor in this case. Among those strangers, in all likelihood, was the murderer—or murderers—who would bludgeon Martha Moxley to death 75 minutes later.

  On the day Martha’s body was discovered, Helen Ix told police that after leaving the Moukads’ house the night before, she, Martha, and Geoff appeared at the Skakels’ at “about 9:10 p.m.” Michael told police that at approximately 9:10 p.m., he saw Martha, Helen, and Geoff come into the backyard. He motioned for them to go to a door between the sunporch and the mudroom where he let them into the house. He told police that he led his three friends through the house and out the kitchen door into the driveway. Michael said he and his friends then climbed into Rucky’s Lincoln Continental that was parked by the side kitchen entr
ance to talk and listen to eight-track tapes.

  “Martha was my friend,” Michael told me recently. “I would have liked to kiss her, but I would have liked to kiss just about any girl back then.” Michael, a virgin in early puberty, had teen crushes on Francie, the daughter of a family friend from nearby Armonk, New York, and on his Belle Haven neighbor Jackie Wetenhall. The runt of the Skakel litter, he was a scrawny kid who was always the smallest person in his class and at summer camp. “I was five foot five, weighed about 120 pounds and looked like a girl,” he said. “Martha was my size and could have kicked my ass.” The photo of Michael stolen by Detective Frank Garr that prosecutor Jonathan Benedict presented to Michael’s jury, without objection from Michael’s attorney, Mickey Sherman, depicted a beefy Michael four years after the murder. By then, he had passed puberty and had spent 24 months doing push-ups and bulking up for self-preservation at Élan, a brutal Maine reform school and drug rehabilitation facility he was attending.

  Tommy told police that between 9:15 p.m. and 9:20 p.m., he had gone out to the Lincoln to find a tape. He climbed in the front seat beside Martha. Martha’s diary revealed that she, Michael, Tommy, and several other teenagers from Belle Haven enjoyed a close friendship, often socializing at each other’s homes. Martha and Tommy Skakel had developed mutual crushes.

  Around 9:15 p.m., Rush Jr. along with John and their cousin Jimmy, having finished their backgammon game, appeared in the driveway, saying they needed to use the car to take Jimmy back to the Terrien/Dowdle home, a stone gothic fortress known as Sursum Corda (Latin for “lift up your hearts,” the opening line to the Eucharistic prayer). Sursum Corda sat on Jimmy’s mother, Georgeann Terrien’s, sprawling back-country estate 11 miles away, over a narrow, winding two-lane. The boys all intended to watch the 10:00 p.m. American premier of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Rush Jr., a Dartmouth junior, had fallen in love with the British screwball comedy when he saw it with a test audience in Hanover, New Hampshire, and was anxious to showcase it for his brothers and cousin.