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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Dear Michael,

  I want to thank you for your kindness and true selflessness in assisting me and my family during our time of need. Your actions were far above the call of duty. It took my wife about two seconds to figure out who you were after she read your full name. I wish you had told me. Nothing would have changed in regard to how I would have treated you. …

  I do not know why you stopped to help us. I do not know why my prayer of “God, please send just the right person to help us” was answered by Him sending you. But what I do know is that God meant for you and my family to come in contact through our misfortune.

  Thank you again, from the bottom of my heart.

  In God’s precious grace

  PART II

  The Suspects

  CHAPTER 4

  The Neighbor

  Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

  —Unknown

  Before they decided it was Tommy, and decades before targeting Michael, the bungling Greenwich Police identified a parade of other compelling suspects in the Moxley murder.

  Within hours of finding Martha’s body, cops fingered W. Edward Hammond as the likely culprit. Hammond, a 26-year-old Yale graduate and army veteran, lived next door to Martha with his widowed mother at 48 Walsh Lane. His bedroom window faced the spruce tree that shadowed Martha’s body. The meandering drag trail suggested Martha’s killer initially hauled her body toward the Hammond house, then abruptly tacked toward the pine tree. The police surmised that Hammond may have killed Martha and briefly considered bringing the body home before panic and dogs prompted him to reconsider.

  Martha’s body was still lying beneath a sheet in the grass when detectives Joe McGlynn and Steve Carroll began canvassing the neighborhood. When they rang Ed Hammond’s doorbell, they had already pegged him as a spooky loner. Neighbors said he’d been drunk since his father’s death two years earlier. The concrete was already hardening on Martha’s 10:00 p.m. time of death, and Hammond had no alibi. He claimed he’d been home alone, watching The French Connection on television, while his mother was at the Belle Haven Club for a late dinner. While searching Hammond’s bedroom, police hit the jackpot. “We thought, ‘Oh man, this is him,’” Officer Steven Carroll told author Timothy Dumas in 2001. “There were all kinds of skin magazines. And this was sick: he would masturbate in condoms, then put the condoms back in his closet. Joe and I were like, ‘Let’s get somebody down here right now.’” By mid-afternoon, the officers were manhandling Hammond into a squad car as neighbors and press ogled. Confident that they were on to something, the cops returned for Hammond’s Mischief Night attire. McGlynn recorded his incriminating wardrobe:

  1. One pair men’s beige-colored corduroy pants. Blood-stained left upper leg

  2. One men’s knitted sweater, color red. Unknown type stains on chest area

  3. One pair men’s brown leather topsider shoes. Moccasin type boat shoe

  4. One blue men’s shirt, size 17–34 “Alexander” bearing unknown stains on front of shirt

  The police had found red knit fabric on Martha’s body that was similar to the material of Hammond’s blood-stained red sweater.

  The Belle Haven rumor factory would become a painful scourge for each Moxley murder suspect in turn, and it took only moments for Belle Haven’s minutemen to grab their pitchforks for the Hammond lynching. At 10:00 p.m. that evening, cops got a call from Cynthia Bjork, the platinum blonde who had moved into a home behind the Hammonds five months before. The Bjorks’ springer spaniel was one of several Belle Haven canines that yelped, bawled, and bayed at the time of the murder. It then dashed over toward the crime scene at 9:50 p.m. After watching police haul Hammond downtown, Cynthia Bjork couldn’t wait until morning to give the cops the lowdown. Hammond, she said, according to police reports, “Always appeared to her as [ … ], a little odd, and a heavy drinker.” Hammond had stopped by once when her husband, Bob, was out of the house, with “a very strong odor of alcohol on his breath,” asking to borrow a saw. Moreover, Hammond had declined a tennis invitation from her husband claiming his little finger hurt. “Mrs. Bjork could not recall any off-color remarks or sexual advances made by Hammond at this time,” although he once chatted about sunbathing. Another time, Hammond called asking to borrow a bottle of Scotch for a party, but never picked it up. The morning after Martha’s murder, the Bjorks awoke to discover “a sweet smelling puddle of fluid … that smelled like shaving lotion … at the base of the main stairs.” Since a cellar window in the Bjork home had been left open, the Bjorks felt that Hammond might be the culprit. Greenwich Police recorded these tips and then rushed off to interview Hammond’s Yale professors and his college roommates. As a precaution, they called the FBI to check on Hammond’s passport to assess his flight risk. Moxley family friend Jean Walker told police that she felt Hammond staring at her from his window when she stood by Martha’s body moments after Sheila McGuire reported her grim discovery. Walker accused Hammond of burglarizing his own sister’s house and reported that girls had been murdered at Columbia and Yale when Hammond was enrolled in those schools.

  Mayo Lane resident James Proctor, former Belle Haven Association police commissioner, confirmed that Hammond “seemed strange in his actions” and “doesn’t socialize.” Another Walsh Lane neighbor, Jean Wold, reported that Hammond had appeared at her front door at 9:30 a.m., six months before, behaving strangely. According to the police report, “He wanted to see her dog, which she had recently purchased.” Neighbors reported that Hammond had been at a cocktail party at the Moxleys on October 25; they seemed to recall him talking to Martha.

  Hammond confirmed the police’s worst suspicions when he refused their request to take a polygraph. He declined to talk, except through an attorney. Such behavior caused the police to devote much of their investigatory manpower to Hammond in the weeks following Martha’s murder. But then the case collapsed. On November 2, the Department of Health determined the blood on Hammond’s sweater to be type O, which Hammond said was his type, and attributed to a nosebleed. (Oddly, during Michael’s appeals, prosecutors produced Hammond’s army records showing Hammond’s blood type to be A.) He finally consented to take a polygraph. The first one, on November 13, was “inconclusive.” Hammond blamed his subpar performance on his recent ingestion of Antabuse, a drug used to treat alcoholism. Veteran homicide investigators later criticized Greenwich Police for their blind faith in the Delphic powers of polygraphs. That fault was Hammond’s good fortune. A week later, he passed the test and Greenwich Police scratched him from their suspect list. “I thought they were hoping that I was a convenient suspect,” Hammond told an interviewer decades later. “And if they could wrap it up quickly, that would be great.” The police’s near-exclusive focus on Hammond during this period may have allowed evidence to vanish, memories to fade, alibis to consolidate, and the trail to go cold on the true killer.

  Beginning in 1993 Dominick Dunne began widely broadcasting his toxic canard that “the Skakel family conspired in 1975 to thwart the police investigation.” Dunne chastised the Greenwich Police “for its reluctance to challenge the power and wealth of the Skakel family.” In 2000, Dunne said on CNN, “The Skakels were able to hold off the police all these years. … If this was a family of lesser stature, that simply would not have happened.” Benedict, as I’ve shown, rested his case on his ability to beguile the jury into believing this conspiracy was real. However, even a shallow dive into the case file reveals a more mundane story: a police force out of its depth. Fuhrman, Dunne, and I disagreed on almost everything about this case; but we did all agree that the police fumbled it badly. “The Greenwich Police Department,” wrote forensic criminalist Henry Lee, “was quite simply, overmatched by the complexity of this homicide investigation.” Even Newsday reporter Len Levitt, who would become a cheerleader for Michael’s persecution, told the Hartford Courant, “There was no cover-up. There was a screw-up.”

  From the moment searchers discover
ed Martha’s body, Greenwich cops had to fight the widely held public perception that the 147-member force was unqualified to crack a serious crime. On November 2, 1975, the New York Times reported derisively that the Greenwich PD “have not had a murder to investigate in nearly 30 years, and are normally more accustomed to investigating traffic accidents and burglaries.” Such ridicule undoubtedly rankled the force’s senior brass. They could have handed Martha’s murder investigation off to the State Police, which had extensive experience with capital crimes. Instead, they dug in to prove the naysayers wrong. “It was all ego,” Sutton Associates’ Jim Murphy said later. “It’s all that inside fighting that takes place between police station chiefs.”

  Murphy started his career in the 1960s with the NYPD, and then spent 15 years in the FBI. In 1972, Murphy was the G-man who drove bank robbers John Wojtowicz and Sal Naturale and their hostages from the Gravesend, Brooklyn, Chase Manhattan Bank they had robbed to JFK Airport. The two bandits demanded a plane ride out of the country. (In Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon, based on the case, Al Pacino played the Wojtowicz character and John Cazale played Naturale.) In the backseat, Naturale held a shotgun to Murphy’s head during the ride. At JFK, Murphy swiveled to snatch the shotgun then fatally shot Naturale with a pistol that his comrades had hidden beneath the floor mat, and the crisis ended. Before founding Sutton in 1990, Murphy led the Bureau’s Eastern District of New York office, where his team conducted multiple murder investigations. He clearly has the background to state: “The Greenwich Police never should have handled the investigation. They don’t do homicide investigations. They should have called in the State Police, someone that had experience in doing homicides. Had someone else conducted it there would have been more thorough searches done at the very beginning that would have picked up other pieces of evidence.”

  As the case grew colder, cops found themselves increasingly acting as a clearinghouse for Belle Haven’s dirty laundry and the wild speculation of its abundant busybodies. Detective Steve Carroll would characterize their targets as “people with drinking problems and violent tempers, oddballs or loners, a lesbian couple, a retarded girl.”

  On November 6, 1975, Upper East Side, New York, psychiatrist Jane Wetenhall, the mother of Martha’s friend Jackie, tearfully told Carroll that her husband, John, might be the killer. John was an unemployed alcoholic living as a hermit in the family attic. He hadn’t appeared, even for meals, in five years. “Wetenhall related that there were several sets of golf clubs in the house at this time and this department was perfectly welcome to look at same.” After questioning John Wetenhall in his lofty lair, Carroll scratched him from the suspect list.

  Carroll’s dispatch of the Wetenhall investigation was not typical of other witnesses. As with Ed Hammond’s girly magazines, the Greenwich Police continued to treat minor indiscretions as prima facie evidence of involvement with the murder. The Greenwich homicide team spent precious days vetting and polygraphing a female Field Point Drive resident, now a Connecticut State trooper, whose villainy was smoking pot. Suspecting a connection to the murder, police dispatched teams of technicians to tap Belle Haven residents’ phone lines to trap a prank caller.

  Meanwhile, the police often left legitimate leads uninvestigated. For example, the police never investigated a spooky murder-night drama reported by Sheila McGuire, the teenage neighbor who found Martha’s body. Sheila recounted the chilling tale to my investigator, Larry Holifield, saying that she drew only blank stares when she repeated the story multiple times to Greenwich Detectives Jim Lunney and Steve Carroll. The Greenwich officers didn’t even write it down. The night of her friend’s murder, Sheila was out on a blind date with a local boy named David, with whom Martha had set her up. David dropped off Sheila at the bottom of her long driveway on Field Point Drive at around 11:00 p.m. and drove off before Sheila got inside. When Sheila reached the locked front door, she realized she didn’t have a key. As she knocked on the door, she heard a loud banging from the unattached garage; it was the entry door slamming. Someone was inside. She describes the incident as the most frightening moment of her life. In a panic, she dove into her father’s parked car, locked the doors, and hid on the floor. After an hour, she bolted from the car, and her sister opened the front door, allowing her to rush into the house. The McGuire property was directly adjacent to the Moxleys’ property. Their garage was the first structure that a murderer would have encountered fleeing the crime scene south away from Walsh Lane.

  On October 31, the morning after the murder, police investigators released the Bjorks’ spaniel, hoping it would find the murderer’s scent. The dog had barked forlornly at 9:50 p.m. and then dashed over toward the murder scene. That morning the dog led police to the McGuires’ house. Pound Ridge, New York, vet Dr. Edward Fleischli told police that the dog had witnessed the murder and was trying to follow the scent. Police never inspected the garage or dusted for fingerprints.

  The Greenwich Police were only interested to know if Sheila had tried marijuana, which she admitted. Police pulled Sheila out of class once, and another time woke her at 2:00 a.m. to sweat her into confessing she was dealing weed. She withstood those withering interrogations, but police gravely informed her parents of their daughter’s illicit toking, while critical leads evaporated like smoke.

  Lack of curiosity and overconfidence in the polygraph were not the Greenwich force’s only problems. Shoddy crime scene management and substandard collection protocols for forensic evidence also hobbled the inquisition. The Greenwich Police possessed no yellow tape to cordon off the crime scene. “We were all standing around, looking over at the body covered up with a sheet,” recalls Peter Coomaraswamy, Michael’s friend and neighbor. “We couldn’t believe there was anybody underneath it, because we were all like, ‘Why would they leave someone’s body underneath a sheet all afternoon?’” Millard Jones, the first officer to respond when Sheila found Martha’s body, watched that afternoon as a neighborhood dog licked the blood trail in the Moxley’s grass. Jones’s partner, Dan Hickman, was petting the dog. Neither officer had experience or training in crime scene management or evidence collection. Sheila says that Officer Hickman was so distraught that she found herself comforting him. She was only 15.

  Dozens of cops would trample the crime scene by 5:30 p.m. that night, when the coroner staff finally removed Martha’s body. Police misidentified, mislabeled, or lost critical evidence, including a bloody pair of pants with a 36-inch waist and a bloody pair of size 13 high-top Keds sneakers that police showed to Helen Ix. Police also lost a golf ball found beside Martha’s body and beer cans collected from the murder scene that may well have borne the killers’ fingerprints. State criminalist Dr. Henry Lee testified at Michael’s trial that police found “many hairs” on Martha’s body. “We found a lot of hairs.” Evidently, police lost all but a few. Lee complained that the police failure to make out laboratory worksheets made it impossible to determine what work had been done and what became of the evidence.

  Connecticut’s medical examiner, Dr. Elliot Gross, took vaginal and anal swabs and slides and sent them to the Department of Health, run by Dr. Abraham Stolman. Both the swabs and slides disappeared. No one looked at the swabs to determine if they contained DNA material, including Y-chromosome (male) DNA.

  Both Hickman and Jones remembered seeing a golf club handle protruding from Martha’s neck when they first arrived on the scene. Jones recalled, “You could see the leatherette or vinyl grip (of the handle), and my wife swears that’s what I told her when I came home that night.” Dr. Richard Danehower, Martha’s personal physician, also saw a shiny golf club handle lying next to Martha’s body. Police never logged the handle, which also soon disappeared. At trial, Mickey Sherman exhibited monumental incompetence—even for him—by allowing Benedict to persuasively argue that Michael Skakel had disposed of the handle to conceal his mother’s name on the grip.

  Such police fumbles are normally gold for criminal defense attorneys. Any competent barrist
er could have minted the mishandled evidence into an acquittal. And for good reason: lost evidence deprives the accused of a fair chance to defend himself. DNA analysis of those lost vaginal and anal swabs and slides could have cleared Michael; both Michael and Tommy Skakel freely offered to provide their DNA samples to investigators. But Sherman didn’t know how to capitalize on the blunder. “Mickey Sherman wouldn’t know how to make hay, if he were sitting on a hay bale,” observes Michael.

  In December 1975, Greenwich Police decided that they’d finally identified the real killer. As had been the case with Ed Hammond, everybody in Greenwich seemed to have an anecdote connecting themselves to the suspect du jour, and all of them suddenly became certain of Tommy Skakel’s guilt. Dan FitzPatrick, an attorney who in 1985 married Martha’s friend Helen Ix, witnessed this odd phenomenon firsthand. “I didn’t become familiar with the case until the early 1980s, but for many years, at every social engagement I attended where the topic came up, people would say they knew that Tommy did it,” FitzPatrick says. “Then, when Michael became a suspect, the same people claimed—with the same level of certainty—that Michael definitely did it. I was flabbergasted that no one acknowledged the irony of this flip-flop. If that’s not evidence of the presence of reasonable doubt, I don’t know what is.”