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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  By mid-morning, the entire community was searching for Martha, as were Greenwich youth officers Dan Hickman and Millard Jones, who, starting at 9:45 a.m., spent an hour driving around Belle Haven vainly scouting the streets for Martha. Then, between 11:30 a.m. and 12 p.m., her friend, 15-year-old Sheila McGuire, found Martha’s body under a large pine tree in a wooded area on the backside of the Moxley property, 161 feet from the Moxley house. Hickman and Jones rushed over to the Moxley house where Sheila ran toward them. “She’s down there,” she sobbed, according to Jones’s police report. “Don’t make me go down there again. I think she was raped.” Martha was lying face down with her pants around her ankles. She had suffered multiple crushing blows to her head and impalings to her neck consistent with being stabbed by a broken golf club shaft. Police found remnants of the murder weapon, the blood-caked head of a Toney Penna six iron and an eight-inch section of its steel shaft on the circular driveway, and another shaft segment on the grassy lawn near two large pools of blood. Both Hickman and Jones remember the club handle with its “leatherette grip” protruding from Martha’s neck. Martha’s doctor also remembered seeing the handle at the crime scene. The three men were either mistaken or the police later lost that instrument.

  Subsequent investigation revealed that her killer or killers first assaulted Martha near her driveway, across largely unlit Walsh Lane from the Skakels’ backyard meadow (also known as “The Mead”). The murderer or murderers then dragged her approximately 80 feet in a zigzag pattern to a pine tree on the far end of the Moxley property. Henry Lee, the distinguished forensic scientist and former state chief criminologist, said that the erratic drag path suggested the assailant or assailants were unfamiliar with the neighborhood. Lee said the golf club probably had broken into pieces from the extraordinary force with which Martha had been struck. This powerful swing, according to Lee, propelled the head of the golf club, with a piece of its shaft, over 70 feet, from the location of the fatal assault to the center of the circular driveway where police subsequently discovered it. According to Lee, the assailant or assailants stabbed Martha’s neck with the broken shaft.

  In the hours following the discovery of Martha’s body, Greenwich Police canvassed the Belle Haven neighborhood questioning anyone who had been out the night before. At approximately 3:00 p.m., Detective Jim Lunney went to the Skakels’ home and interviewed all of the Skakel children except for Rush Jr., who had driven the Revcon bus to a Georgetown University Homecoming in Washington, DC, that morning, not knowing that Martha, whom he had never met, was dead. The children and Kenny Littleton told Detective Lunney that Rush Jr., John, and Michael all had gone to the Terrien/Dowdle home and that Tommy was the last person in the family to see Martha before she left for home.

  In the days and weeks following Martha’s murder, the police repeatedly interviewed the Skakel children, as well as their cousins, Jimmy and Georgeann Dowdle. In addition to John, Tommy would also take a polygraph exam administered by police.

  Martha’s friend Helen Ix has, for more than four decades, been unwavering in her opinion that Michael went to Sursum Corda with his brothers, and that only one Skakel brother remained behind at the house. “I think they all left with the exception of Tommy,” she testified under oath in 2002.

  Michael’s cousin Georgeann Dowdle also confirmed his account. She told police in November 1975 that Michael spent the evening at her home. At the 1998 grand jury hearing, she added that she was home with her “beau” when Rush Jr., John, Michael, and Jimmy arrived to watch Monty Python. Michael’s attorney, Mickey Sherman, never bothered identifying her “beau” as Westchester county psychologist and restauranteur Dennis Ossorio. Ossorio did testify at Michael’s 2012 habeas corpus hearing. The 72-year-old told the presiding judge, Thomas Bishop, that he distinctly remembers watching Monty Python with Michael that evening. Judge Bishop faulted Mickey Sherman for failing either to interview or call Ossorio, Michael’s only alibi witness who was not a member of the Skakel family. Ossorio had no motivation to cover up anything; Ossorio’s brief relationship with Georgeann Dowdle ended more than 40 years ago. Ossorio’s testimony at trial would have shattered prosecutor Benedict’s baseless theory: that Michael had never left his home and that his alibi was part of a disciplined, 30-year family conspiracy.

  On Saturday morning, November 1, the day after Sheila McGuire found Martha’s body, Kenny Littleton, according to his testimony at the 1998 grand jury proceedings, made the decision to take the boys up to the Skakels’ Catskill Mountains ski house in Windham, New York, to get them away from the morbid scene in Belle Haven, which was lousy with press, police, and curiosity seekers.

  Rucky sent a turkey to Mrs. Moxley and went over to give his condolences as Kenny and the three Skakel boys left on their two-hour drive to Windham. That trip, thanks to writer Mark Fuhrman, would become the centerpiece for a far-fetched conspiracy narrative that helped put Michael behind bars.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Prosecutor

  It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

  —Blackstone’s Formulation

  One of the bedrock fundamentals of trial strategy is to pick a “Theory of the Case” around which to organize your trial. Always pick a single unifying theory and then discard all evidence that is inconsistent with that theory.

  —Professor Irving Younger,

  The Ten Commandments of Cross-Examination

  Michael didn’t acknowledge me seated in the gallery of the Norwalk, Connecticut, courtroom on June 3, 2002, the day of closing arguments in his murder trial. We had been estranged for several years. Beginning in 1998, stress from the public focus on Michael as a murder suspect began to affect his worldview. Believing the Kennedy family was partly responsible for his predicament, Michael lashed out at my family and stopped speaking to me. On the two days I attended his court proceedings, he was cold and distant. (He resumed communicating with me only when I visited him in prison later, where, let’s face it, he had little choice.)

  The media played my appearance at Michael’s trial with predictable hyperbole: the Kennedy family operated like the Kremlin, and the Hyannis Port politburo had dispatched me to portray the impression of a supportive family. Many people asked me why I would publicly defend Michael—a cause unlikely to enhance my own credibility. I supported him, and continue to do so, not out of misguided family loyalty, but because I was—and am—certain he is innocent. Like nearly everyone else who knows him well, I love Michael. However, if he were guilty, I would have testified against him. He is not.

  I know my first cousin Michael Skakel as well as one person can know another. He helped me to get sober in 1983 and over the next 15 years, we attended hundreds of addiction-recovery meetings together. We spent many weeks on wilderness trips and many nights around campfires. In those contexts, and others, we have shared our deepest feelings and probed each other’s characters.

  Michael was also close to my younger brothers, David and Michael. With Michael Skakel’s support, my brother Michael got sober in 1994. After my brother Michael’s death in a skiing accident in 1997, life began to crumble for Michael Skakel. In 1998, Mark Fuhrman, striving for his own resurrection after being disgraced during the O.J. Simpson trial, published a book purporting to solve the Moxley murder by pinning it on Michael. There was talk that a grand jury might indict him.

  Michael’s teenage ordeal at the brutal drug treatment program in Maine left him severely afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The relentless public attacks naming Michael a murder suspect darkened his worldview and aggravated his PTSD. His paranoid suspicions about our family were a symptom. That paranoid impulse caused Michael to record a fateful series of interviews with author Richard Hoffman in 1998. Michael wanted to write his memoir as a kind of defensive shield against his perceived persecution by the Kennedys. He says that he never intended to publish it. Indeed, he had Hoffman sign three separate confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements to ensur
e the materials were not inadvertently released. Hoffman would later package Michael’s interviews as a yet-unseen and unapproved book proposal that Hoffman tentatively titled Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean. The unpublished transcript was a showcase of Michael’s signature honesty all mixed up with his wild paranoid ravings. Michael told Hoffman he believed the Kennedy family had a hand in his misfortune, including the growing clamor—triggered by Fuhrman—to make him the scapegoat in the Moxley murder. He thought the Kennedys were trying to silence him or punish him for Michael Kennedy’s death. The tapes were chock-full of this sort of delusion. Two years before Michael’s 2002 trial, Connecticut Police Officer Frank Garr illegally seized Michael’s tapes from Hoffman, and then illegally leaked them to the tabloids. I knew Michael was innocent and that his wild attacks on my family were a product of his daily emotional agony from a lifetime of abuse, so I showed up to support him. Every family has problems and challenges. Our family problems sell newspapers.

  Norwalk, Connecticut, where the trial was being held, was a media circus. The prosecution team had no evidence with which to convict Michael. Their default strategy, from the moment of his arraignment, was to present him to the public as a monster. The press was compliant. Michael’s trial became a national bear-baiting exhibition with every new cruelty applauded by the drooling media. Reporters lit off on frantic searches for gossipy tidbits that completed the characterization of Michael as an elitist who got away with murder. Michael’s first public appearance for his arraignment was a freezing day in January 2000. Fresh off a plane from Florida, he wore a zip-up yellow sweater under his cotton suit. The media decided that his sweater collar was an ascot—an accessory Michael wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing—and Michael became Thurston Howell III, a caricature of the effete, unaccountable wealthy. The prosecution fleshed out that portrait by repeatedly telling the jury that Michael was a “spoiled brat” and “a killer.” During the trial, media condemnation of Michael’s arrogance amplified because he appeared not to be paying attention as he cast his eyes downward toward the defense table. “My wrists were sore from writing ‘Object Mickey! All lies,’” Michael said. During difficult testimony, Michael looked down at the photos of his son, George, and his black lab, Neeta. It was his method for keeping his PTSD symptoms at bay.

  Despite the wretched damage to his public image, it still seemed impossible that Michael could be convicted. The case was a prosecutorial dog. The murder had occurred 27 years earlier. Until 23 years after Martha’s death, no branch of law enforcement had ever considered Michael a suspect. The prosecution acknowledged the many ways that State and Greenwich detectives botched the investigation. There were no eyewitnesses to Martha’s murder. No fingerprints, DNA, or other forensic evidence linked Michael to the crime; cops found only Martha’s blood at the scene. Her fingernails contained no biological material. The many hairs police recovered from her body didn’t match Michael’s.

  Without real evidence, the prosecution’s only path to conviction was a confession. Michael hadn’t confessed, but that didn’t stop Frank Garr, an outcast cop—now a State detective—nursing a single-minded hatred for the Skakel family, from ginning up three “witnesses” who claimed he had. A parade of felons, drug addicts, habitual liars, riffraff, and attention seekers looking for reward money or desperate for a part in a celebrity legal spectacle crowded the prosecution’s witness list. In the words of his partner, Len Levitt, Garr “had pursued, cajoled, harassed, and threatened” this muster of misfits and liars in order to recruit them to testify. Recorded transcripts of Garr’s conversations prove that he actively suborned perjury. The prosecution’s pack of scoundrels didn’t inspire much confidence in those who wanted to see Michael go to jail.

  The morning of May 17, the ninth day of the trial, just four days before the State rested its case, Dorthy Moxley, Martha’s 69-year-old mother, stood in the courthouse parking lot speaking to a battery of microphones and cameras. “We’re in the middle of the trial but it is still not too late to help,” she pleaded. “If you know anything, please call the State’s Attorney’s office in Bridgeport. I know there are many other people out there who know what happened—who heard Michael Skakel say he murdered Martha.” Since her husband, David’s, death of a heart attack in 1988, Mrs. Moxley had kept the case alive by periodic media appearances around the October 30 anniversary of her daughter’s murder. Understandably, she refused to hear the particulars of the crime, view crime scene photos, or dwell upon the details of her daughter’s violent death. But three notable people who had taken an interest in the case—Garr, Fuhrman, and gossip writer Dominick Dunne—had convinced Mrs. Moxley that the cops had finally found the right guy in Michael. “I am positive that he did this,” Mrs. Moxley told the cameras. This wasn’t exactly true. Garr, Fuhrman, and Dunne were positive, and Dorthy Moxley trusted them.

  Mickey Sherman, Michael’s flamboyant defense attorney, certainly didn’t think losing was a possibility. He assured Michael and his brothers over lunch each day at a local Tex-Mex restaurant, “I know what I’m doing. I have everything under control. There is no way in hell Michael will ever see the inside of a jail cell.” Those who weren’t paying close attention at that point—and, regrettably, I was in that camp—also assumed Mickey couldn’t lose. A middling first-year law student could have won the case. Dunne later told CNN’s Larry King that, after sitting through the trial, Michael’s guilty verdict shocked him as much as had O.J. Simpson’s not-guilty verdict seven years earlier.

  Prosecutor Jonathan Benedict was no picture of confidence, either. On May 21, 2002, the day he rested his case, Benedict stood on the back steps of the courthouse, during a recess, shoulder to shoulder with the prosecution’s reluctant final witness: Michael’s ghostwriter, Richard Hoffman. Benedict had subpoenaed Hoffman after Garr illegally seized the seven audiotapes of Michael’s interviews from Hoffman’s home in Massachusetts. Benedict and Hoffman looked down at the parking lot where Sherman giddily commanded the gaggle of reporters. The most perilous spot in Norwalk, in those days, was between Mickey Sherman and a microphone. “Well, it’s his case to lose,” Benedict sighed. “Benedict absolutely knew that he hadn’t made a case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Hoffman told me. “He knew that.”

  But Benedict had a trick up his sleeve: he was preparing to cross ethical, legal, and moral boundaries to avoid losing the biggest case of his career. The Moxley case had ended the career of his predecessor, Connecticut State’s Attorney Donald Browne. Until he stepped down in 1998, Browne had spent 23 years driving his detectives to build cases against the two reigning suspects: the Skakels’ tutor, Kenny Littleton, and Michael’s elder brother Tommy. In 1976, Browne’s investigators presented him with an arrest warrant for Tommy, but Browne, who knew the case intimately, didn’t think the application met legal standards for probable cause. He refused to sign. “I read it,” Browne told me some years ago, “and there was nothing in there, other than the fact that he was the last to see her alive and that he’d had some mental problems in the past.”

  For over a decade, the case remained dormant. Then, in 1991, Dunne’s rumormongering triggered a chain of events that would lead to Michael’s prosecution. That year, my cousin William Kennedy Smith was tried for rape in West Palm Beach, Florida, a period of great difficulty for my family. During the trial, which was every bit the media circus that Michael’s trial would be, Dunne reported the scurrilous libel that Will was in the Skakel’s Greenwich house the night of Martha Moxley’s murder. Dunne even published in Vanity Fair his concocted allegation that Connecticut State’s Attorney Browne had asked for a swab of Smith’s saliva to compare with DNA from the Moxley murder. Browne denied the Dunne rumor. Once again, police had recovered no DNA other than Martha’s from the scene.

  Dunne didn’t know at the time of Martha’s murder—and probably didn’t care—that, with the exception of my mother, Will Smith had never encountered a Skakel. In 1975, no Kennedy cousins outside of my immediate fam
ily had ever met my Skakel cousins. That libel was emblematic of Dunne’s journalistic career: dishy, delicious, and indifferent to the truth. Still, Dunne’s fabrications launched a media firestorm that reinvigorated the Moxley case. Dunne’s reliable business model was matching celebrities, guilty or otherwise, with notorious crimes. In 1993, Dunne published A Season in Purgatory, a fictionalized take on the Moxley case in which he modeled the killer of a Greenwich girl on my cousin John Kennedy Jr. On his press tour, however, Dunne loudly repeated that Tommy Skakel killed Martha Moxley, with the dead certainty of a man in the know. “There are country-club whispers of who the person is who did it,” he purred to a reporter. “Everybody” in Greenwich knew who was behind it. Dan Rather’s CBS Evening News ran a story about Dunne breathing life into a cold case. Dunne told the Boston Globe that pressure from the Kennedy family compelled police to let Tommy Skakel get away with murder. “I’ve said all along, I’ve said it on Jay Leno and Joan Rivers, that this is either a case of the most inept police work in history or of a rich and powerful family holding the police at bay.” Dunne’s public chastisements caused the Greenwich Time to publish a 5,000-word investigative article by then-Newsday reporter Len Levitt that had been gathering dust at his paper for eight years. Using hundreds of pages of police reports he’d accessed through the Freedom of Information Act, Levitt chronicled the Greenwich police’s catastrophic mismanagement of the murder investigation.

  Responding to the public outcry, Browne held a press conference on August 8, 1991, announcing that he had reopened the case, under the direction of the State’s chief investigator, Jack Solomon, and his deputy, none other than former Greenwich cop Frank Garr. Browne provided the number for a dedicated tip line. Dorthy Moxley announced her family’s promise of a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.