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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  In the 1990s, Michael told investigators from Sutton Associates—a Nassau County (New York) investigative firm that Rucky Skakel hired in 1992 to re-investigate the Moxley murder—that Martha declined his invitation to come with them to Sursum Corda, citing her 9:30 p.m. curfew. Michael and Martha made plans to go trick-or-treating the following night. With that, Rush Jr. backed the car out onto the street and headed off to Sursum Corda with his brothers John and Michael and his cousin, Jimmy, leaving Helen Ix, Martha, Geoff, and Tommy standing in the driveway. The facts of this departure and the occupants of the car have never been plausibly disputed. Tommy and Jimmy told this to police in 1975. John did as well; on December 9, 1975, he passed a polygraph administered by Connecticut State Police, asking him, “On October 30, from 9:30 to 10:30 p.m., were you with Mike, Rush, and James Terrien?” Georgeann Dowdle, Jimmy Dowdle’s sister (of the same first name as their mother, Georgeann Terrien), told police in November 1975 that she remembered seeing John, Michael, Rush Jr., and her brother arriving at Sursum Corda “just before 10:00 p.m.” A 1992 police report confirms the approximate time of the Lincoln’s departure from the Skakel home, as well as the four occupants of the car.

  A few minutes after the Lincoln exited the driveway (around 9:20 p.m.), Helen Ix and Geoff decided to leave. Helen testified in 2002 that she felt like a “third wheel” because Martha and Tommy became “playful … flirtatious” at the end of the darkened driveway. Helen also had a 9:30 p.m. curfew. “It was time to go home,” she testified. It was the last time she saw her friend Martha alive.

  A gentleman at 11 years old, Geoff walked Helen to her door and then disappeared into a nightmare that would not end until his own death five years later. The day after searchers discovered Martha’s body, Geoff told the police that, after escorting Helen to her house, he heard “footsteps following him” and bolted home with someone in pursuit. He was too spooked, he said, to turn and see who was dogging him.

  At approximately 9:30 p.m., only 10 minutes after Helen and Geoff departed the Skakel driveway, Julie drove Andrea home in the family station wagon, according to Julie’s October 31, 1975, interview. While she was in the driveway waiting for Andrea to get in the car, Julie “observed a shadow of a person” running in front of her house in a crouched position. She told police the figure disappeared into the wooded area adjacent to the asphalt. Andrea confirmed to police that she, too, heard the figure running by her. For many years various homicide investigators wondered about the identity of this mysterious figure that both girls saw or heard only 25 minutes before Martha’s murder.

  On October 31, 1975, Tommy told police that after his brothers and Helen and Geoff left, he and Martha chatted for a few minutes, and said goodnight. He watched Martha walk toward the rear yard, and then he went into the side door of his house. Eighteen years later, Tommy changed his story, telling Sutton Associates investigators in an October 1993 interview that as soon as his sister, Julie, drove off, he and Martha snuck behind the toolshed and engaged in a sexual encounter that lasted 20 minutes, and ended in mutual masturbation to orgasm. Following their dalliance, around 9:50 p.m., the two rearranged their clothes and Martha said goodnight. Just before he ducked in the kitchen door, Tommy watched Martha hurrying across the Skakel rear lawn chipping tee toward her house, 20 minutes late for her curfew. It would have been a three-minute walk but for the savage ambush that extinguished her young life. When police discovered Martha’s body, they found that she had written the name “Tom” on her left moccasin.

  Julie returned from dropping off Andrea at 9:55 p.m., a fact she has attested to on many occasions, including a March 1993 interview under hypnosis. Julie recounted that when she pulled into her driveway, she was frightened to see a large man, bigger than any of her brothers, “crouched, big, dark, maybe even hooded,” dashing across the Skakel property between her car and the front of her house. Julie recalled that the figure was carrying an object in his left hand, and ran across the driveway and into the hedge only feet from the toolshed, where Tommy and Martha had just completed their make-out session. Julie told me that she watched terrified from her car as the figure sprinted south to north the full length of the Skakel home. I believe that this man may have been one of Martha’s murderers closing in for the kill.

  Connecticut medical examiner Elliot Gross, who performed Martha’s autopsy, originally estimated that Martha died between 9:30 p.m. and 12 p.m. the following day when her body was discovered, “but closer to 9:30 p.m.” The Greenwich police sought outside help to determine a more exact time of death. They consulted one of the country’s preeminent forensic pathologists, Houston’s Joseph Jachimczyk. Dr. Jachimczyk established the time between 9:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., based on the condition of Martha’s bladder and the three ounces of unabsorbed liquid in her stomach. Connecticut police conferred with Detroit’s medical examiner, Werner Spitz, and two New York City deputy chief medical examiners, Michael Baden and John Devlin. All of them generally concurred with Jachimczyk.

  Non-forensic indicators also suggested a 10:00 p.m. time of death. Martha, who had a 9:30 p.m. curfew, had gotten into trouble the prior weekend for breaking it. In a 2014 interview with investigator Vito Colucci, Helen Ix recalled that it was important for Martha to return home by 9:30 p.m. to avoid further angering her mother. Martha’s best friend, Margie Walker, confirmed in a May 2016 interview with me that Martha intended to keep her curfew that night. Margie, who was grounded, told me that Martha promised to call as soon as she got home at 9:30 p.m. to give her the lowdown on Mischief Night. “For her to have broken curfew that night would have been really weird,” Margie recounted.

  Dorthy Moxley, testifying at Michael’s trial in 2002, said she was painting in the master bedroom when, sometime between 9:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., she heard a loud “commotion” in the yard on the side of the house where Martha’s body would later be discovered. Mrs. Moxley testified that the ruckus consisted of “excited voices” and incessant barking. In 1983, she recalled to both reporter Leonard Levitt and Greenwich detective James Lunney that she heard Martha’s screams; she confirmed this memory during a 1993 hypnosis session encouraged by state investigators. Greenwich Police continually ignored her consistent recollection. “I have told people this over and over again and nobody has ever … paid much attention to the fact that I heard these voices,” she testified in 2002. “I have always been trying to convince them … about the voices I heard and nobody … really believed.” At Michael’s trial, she testified that the racket was so unusual and disturbing that she stopped painting and ventured to the window to look outside. Unable to penetrate the darkness, she turned on an outside porch light. After a few seconds, she switched off the light, fearing that whoever was there might see Martha’s bike on the porch and steal it.

  Helen Ix testified in 2002 that, after arriving home at 9:30 p.m., she telephoned a couple of friends. At approximately 9:45 p.m., her Australian shepherd, Zock, began to bark “incessantly.” Three days after the murder, Helen told police that Zock barked until approximately 10:15 p.m. The barking became so loud and annoying that Helen put down the telephone receiver to retrieve her dog. She found Zock at the end of her driveway, “frozen” by the edge of the road, baying in the direction of the Moxleys’ driveway. Helen testified that she never had seen her dog so agitated and that he was “scared” and barking “violently.” Although Zock always came to her when she called him, Helen said that on this occasion, he refused. After a while, she gave up and went back inside. The dog barked continuously for about 25 minutes, until the family’s housekeeper went out and horsed him in. In April 1976, the Greenwich Police Department interviewed Dr. Edward Fleischli, a Pound Ridge, New York, vet, who stated, “All indications given suggest the Ix dog witnessed part and/or all of the murder.” Helen agrees. “I firmly believe the murder happened when the dog was barking,” she told me in March 2016. “Zock was always very obedient, but he was going nuts, barking excessively. He was at the edge of the Moxleys’ property
barking his head off. I called and called and called him and he wouldn’t come in.”

  David Skakel, who was 12 years old in 1975, testified in 2002 that Zock’s barking was so “distressed and prolonged” that he got out of bed and opened a window to see what was going on. His bedroom overlooked his family’s backyard with views of both the Ixes’ and Moxleys’ properties. He could not see the dog in the darkness, but he said he could tell from the direction of its barking that the Australian shepherd was positioned near the road at the end of Ixes’ driveway. David recently told me that Zock always barked when there were people or cars passing. But that night the barking was much closer than usual. “Zock was yelping and howling. The sound was agitated and forlorn. I had never heard it bark like that before.” On cross-examination, prosecutor Jonathan Benedict mocked David for his “ridiculous” claim that he could tell where the dog was from 100 yards away, but David says, “The foliage on either side of Walsh Lane acted as a kind of sound corridor and I could tell that Zock’s barking was not coming from over the hill the way it usually did. He never barked like that before. It was incessant.” All over Belle Haven the dogs were barking madly. One of the Moxleys’ neighbors, Cynthia Bjork, told police in 1976 she heard her springer spaniel barking wildly beginning around 9:30 p.m. At 9:50 p.m., it dashed over toward the Moxley property. The day Martha’s body was discovered, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Gorman, who lived one house north of the Moxleys on Walsh Lane, reported hearing multiple dogs barking. Kenny Littleton testified in 2002 that at 10:00 p.m. the Skakels’ elderly Irish housekeeper, Margaret “Nanny” Sweeney, asked him to go outside and investigate the “fracas.” Kenny divulged to his wife, in a 1992 conversation surreptitiously recorded by police, that he also heard dogs barking when he went outside.

  John Moxley, Martha’s 17-year-old brother, told police on November 5, 1975, that, when he arrived home between 11:00 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., his mother told him Martha had not returned and that she was “a little worried about her.” John testified in 2002 that he reassured his mother that it was Mischief Night, and that Martha probably was out having fun and would be home soon. After watching the evening news, John went upstairs to bed. His mother fell asleep on the sofa in front of the television.

  After Monty Python ended at 10:30 p.m., Rush Jr., John, and Michael stayed at the Terriens’ for “maybe 15, 20 minutes,” according to Rush Jr.’s 2002 testimony, and then returned home to Belle Haven. John testified that the Skakel brothers left Sursum Corda at “about 11:00, maybe a few minutes later.” The trip home had been a signature Skakel undertaking. Michael recently told me that Rush was drunk and had to pull over for a time in Glennville, Connecticut, unable to drive. Following a group consultation, 16-year-old John, who was somewhat less poached, drove the Lincoln. Under hypnosis in 1993, John confirmed that Rush “gave up the wheel” to him. “I think he said it was better if I drive,” John told the interviewer. In the spring of 1976, Rush Jr. told psychiatrist Dr. Stanley Lesse, hired by the family to evaluate Tommy, that the brothers arrived back home in Belle Haven between 11:30 and 11:45 p.m. Martha had been dead for well over an hour. At Michael’s trial, Rush Jr., John, Jimmy, and Georgeann Dowdle all gave similar accounts of their activities on the night of the murder to those that they had given to police in 1975. John, Jimmy, and Rush Jr. all maintained from the first time they were questioned that they all left with Michael for Sursum Corda at 9:30 p.m., when Martha was still alive, and returned around 11:20 p.m. As mentioned, the police felt that polygraph test that John passed in December 1975 covered all four boys.

  Julie was in her bedroom at the top of the stairs when her brothers rolled in. She testified at Michael’s trial that she heard noises downstairs at 11:30, a memory that jibed with a 1993 interview under hypnosis. “I did have a TV in my room; maybe I was watching the news. I definitely got up out of my bed, opened my door,” she said under hypnosis. “The noises were downstairs, but I don’t think I went any further than the top of the steps and then I went back in my room.” Recently, she elaborated on her memories. “They made such a racket that I came out of my bedroom,” she told me in May 2016. Michael was making his usual commotion. “He was off the charts hyperactive and he was always bouncing off the walls. He never stopped. It was bedlam—laughing, shouting, and slamming doors. He made his own singular pandemonium.” As John and Rush Jr. stumbled into their rooms to retire, she could still hear Michael running around downstairs creating his customary din. Michael briefly came upstairs to the landing near Julie’s door. “I saw Andrea was gone and everyone was in bed,” he told me recently. Still high on pot and alcohol, he decided to go back outside for a walk, a detail he first disclosed to investigators in 1993, but which he’d told me and many other witnesses beginning a decade earlier, long before police considered him a suspect.

  Under hypnosis in 1993, John corroborated Michael’s account to an investigator, recalling that he heard someone either entering or exiting the house at this time. “It was changing to 11:33 on the clock radio,” John told the interviewer. “Something going on in the mudroom.” John reported hearing “the sound of the back door.” Julie told me in 2016 that she also distinctly recalls hearing Michael’s departure. “I heard him whip the French door open with a loud bang as he left the house.” Michael’s notion was to peep through the windows of a live-in Spanish housekeeper who occupied a cottage on Walsh Lane. She sometimes obliged Belle Haven teens and amused herself by strolling about nude with the shades cracked. (Michael has told me this story since the early 1980s.) Disappointed to find her house dark, with the curtains drawn, Michael turned for home. Then the thought struck him that he would seek out Martha Moxley. “Martha likes me. Maybe she’ll give me a kiss,” Michael told Richard Hoffman in 1997. He was already on Walsh Lane, 100 yards north of the Moxley house. “I was drunk and the booze made me bold.” At the Moxley house, Michael saw a light and climbed a tree next to a front bedroom he guessed was Martha’s. He tossed pebbles to get her attention, calling, “Martha! Martha!” There was no response. It was only in 1992 that Michael would learn from investigators hired by the Skakel family that the room was not Martha’s. It belonged to her brother, John, who was at that moment, watching TV in the living room with his mother. Michael repeated to Hoffman a story I’d heard many times over the years: he made a half-hearted attempt to masturbate in the tree before reconsidering the project. Thinking to himself, “What if someone spots me?” he scurried down. On his way home, he sensed a presence in the dark bushes near the Moxleys’ driveway. He yelled and threw stones in the direction. “Come out of there, and I’ll kick your ass!” Michael shouted with what he now describes as “He-Man bravado.” He explained to me, “I was always scared of the dark and something that night made me scared shitless. I ran home from street light to street light.” The downstairs doors were bolted, so he climbed through his bedroom window at about 12:15 a.m. He had been out for about 40 minutes. Julie, still awake, was surprised to hear him back so soon. In 1975 Michael omitted this midnight escapade when he talked to the police. Embarrassed and frightened of his father’s wrath, Michael told police he stayed in bed after returning from Sursum Corda. “At that point in my life,” Michael reflects now, “I’d rather have had my fingernails yanked out with pliers than admit I was up in a tree spanking the monkey.”

  Largely owing to the retelling of this story by disgraced Los Angeles police officer—now writer—Mark Fuhrman, it would later become a common assumption that Michael had admitted masturbating in the tree below which Martha’s body was discovered. In fact, the two trees are on opposite sides of the Moxley house, nearly 300 feet apart. But Michael’s accusers deliberately conflated them. (In 2015 Michael won an apology and a monetary settlement of an unknown amount from persistent critic Nancy Grace, for erroneously reporting DNA evidence linked Michael to Martha’s murder; in fact no DNA was recovered from either Martha’s body or the crime scene that linked Michael to the crime.)

  According to her 2002 trial testimony, a
t approximately 1:30 a.m., Dorthy Moxley woke up to discover that Martha had still not returned. She roused her son to hunt for his sister, and began calling her daughter’s friends, including Helen Ix and Julie Skakel. At Mrs. Moxley’s request, Julie woke Tommy. He told Julie that he’d bid goodbye to Martha at the back door at 9:30 p.m. and hadn’t seen her since. After phoning various friends and neighbors, Mrs. Moxley rang the Skakel house again and asked Julie to bring Tommy to the phone. Tommy repeated his story. Then, at 3:00 a.m., with still no sign of Martha, Mrs. Moxley telephoned the Skakels a third time. At some point during this period, Mrs. Moxley asked her son, John, to drive his car around the neighborhood to search for Martha. A Greenwich Police report shows that at 3:48 a.m., she called the police a second time to report Martha missing. The October 31, 1975, police report states that Dorthy Moxley expected Martha home “at 9:30 p.m.” for her curfew and that Martha “had never been late like this before.”

  At about 8:30 a.m., according to her 2002 trial testimony, Mrs. Moxley walked to the Skakel house. Martha and her friends sometimes socialized in the Revcon motor home parked in the Skakels’ driveway, and Mrs. Moxley hoped that maybe Martha had fallen asleep there. Though Mrs. Moxley testified that Michael answered the door, Michael has long said it was actually the Skakels’ cook, Ethel Jones, who answered the door and brought Mrs. Moxley to Michael’s bedroom and awoke him. Mrs. Moxley testified that Michael, barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt, appeared “hung over.” Michael says that he had slept in the same clothes he had worn the night before to Sursum Corda. Michael told Mrs. Moxley that he didn’t know where Martha was. At Mrs. Moxley’s request, Franz Wittine checked the Revcon motor home and Michael scoured the house and the barn behind the tennis court.