Peter’s explanation as to why he skipped Mischief Night is questionable. With no school on Friday, the 1975 Hell Night was billed as a blowout event for Greenwich teens. Peter knew his girl would be out making mischief and that she wanted to be with him. His mother had urged him to go see Martha and loaned him her car. So it’s surprising that he chose to spend the night with Mom. He told Dumas that “‘[i]t was creepy outside. The branches of the trees were tapping ominously on the windows. For once in my life I was scared I was like, ‘No, I’ll stay home and watch The French Connection. It’ll be fine. I’ll see her tomorrow.’” For a strapping 16-year-old with a reputation as a pot hound and a tough kid, fear of venturing out on Halloween Eve seems a labored explanation.
Abandonment and anger were running themes in Peter’s life. Like so many others affected by Martha’s death, his life took a nosedive after the murder: his mother evicted her wild boy, and she left for Santa Fe. His destructive shenanigans exhausted his father, who—according to consensus—disinherited Peter. Peter skipped college, married, and then divorced a local girl named Randi; they had two children. After working briefly as an options broker in San Francisco, he moved back to Greenwich and scraped by doing landscaping and woodworking. He sold homemade craft goods, including wooden neckties and hand-carved cummerbunds at local fairs, and built a fat rap sheet in the Fairfield County Courthouse. In 2003, for example, police arrested him for third-degree assault and criminal mischief, to which he pleaded guilty. The following year, police busted him for first-degree criminal trespass and criminal mischief. A court convicted him of the latter charge. Following that arrest, Peter moved to New Mexico. His 2009 mug shot is the picture of a desperado. Santa Fe police charged 49-year-old Ziluca with battery for assaulting his sister Gina, knocking her over a patio table and cutting her arms. He stayed in jail for three days; his sister didn’t press charges. The photo shows a rough character with long, greasy, graying hair. He would qualify as a scary guy in the grimiest dive bar. Mug shots are never flattering, but Ziluca’s hollow-eyed sneer was bracing. I’d only seen pictures of him as a handsome, clean-cut Greenwich teenager. Less than two years later, he’d be dead, overdosed on a cocktail of vodka, hydrocodone, and cocaine. At the time of his death he was with two females and his roommate, 42-year-old Zachary Smith. Smith was a frequent guest at the Santa Fe hoosegow: he’d had 27 encounters with the local police, and had once been interviewed at the scene of a homicide.
Peter was only a footnote at Michael’s trial. In the hands of a qualified defense lawyer, he would have provided the basis for a compelling third-party culpability defense, but Sherman never called him. “I saw Peter Ziluca this morning at the gas station,” Sherman told Michael one day during trial. “He sent his regards and told you to ‘hang in there.’ He said he knows you are innocent.” This is how Michael learned that Sherman represented Peter on his Connecticut criminal matters. Characteristically, Sherman never disclosed that conflict to Michael.
In fairness, Tommy Skakel had a different take on Peter than his brothers. Tommy never regarded him as a menacing, mean, tough guy. Tommy was friendly with Peter’s sister—“the most beautiful girl in Greenwich,” according to Tommy—and saw Peter as a shy, sweet, preppy kid with a kind and generous heart. Peter may have been just another nice kid driven off the rails by addiction but the case against him would have been far stronger than the case against Michael.
CHAPTER 7
The Gardener
We don’t know if we live or die, so we rape the women.
—Franz Wittine
During his 1978 to 1980 stay at Élan, the Maine reform school and drug rehabilitation facility, counselors and fellow inmates beat and tortured Michael almost daily in an effort to make him confess knowledge of Martha’s murder. No one at Élan believed that he had committed the murder, but the staff considered the accusations and throttlings therapeutic. Nevertheless, the ordeal excited Michael’s curiosity about the real culprit. His research convinced him it was Franz Wittine. Following his release from Élan, Michael arduously bird-dogged Wittine to an address in Germantown, New York. “I want you to know, that I know you killed Martha,” Michael told him. Wittine’s only reply: “I didn’t do it.” I recently asked Michael whether, in light of his own painful experience with false accusations, he feels remorse now about accusing Wittine. He replied, “Not in the least. Even if Franz had nothing to do with killing Martha … he molested my sister. I wish I’d punched him in the nose.”
Franz “Frank” Wittine was an odd duck. For decades he worked as Uncle George Skakel’s gardener and, after Uncle George and his wife, my Aunt Pat, died in 1966, Rucky hired Wittine and his wife, Paula, who helped clean the house. During the week the Wittines lived together in the Skakel basement and spent weekends at their upstate residence in Walden, New York. Wittine, who was 61 in 1975, was an ethnic German born in former Yugoslavia. He spoke with a thick Austrian accent, was compact and vain, and always slept with a hairnet. He and Paula kept separate beds. The Skakel kids were petrified of Paula, who commanded them to eat all of their food out of respect for starving people and beat them mercilessly when they did not. Rucky finally fired her six months before Martha’s murder for belting one of the kids, a prerogative he considered proprietary.
But for Rucky’s sustained alcoholic miasma, Wittine would not long have kept his job. Stephen remembers eating carrots with his brother David in the garden as they watched Franz and Paula load Skakel silverware into the bonnet of their Volkswagen Beetle. Young Stephen assumed it a Yugoslavian game. After the couple returned inside, Stephen retrieved the cutlery and buried it in the garden. The Wittines got caught rifling Skakel drawers so often it became a running joke among the older Skakel brood.
Wittine served under Hitler as a soldier during World War II and remained sentimental about the Third Reich. “Frank loved talking about the war with the children,” Stephen recalls. Julie and Michael both remember his oft-expressed nostalgia for despoiling women during his soldiering days. “Vee don’t know if vee live or vee die, so vee rape zee vimen.” He reminisced wistfully about wartime pillaging as he carpooled the boys to school. Michael remembers asking the Skakels’ cook, Ethel Jones, “Ethel, what is rape?” The question confounded her. Stephen remembers, “Ethel went bullshit. She said, ‘Who the devil told you that word?’”
Wittine didn’t entirely change his ways after the war. According to Julie, Wittine earned a reputation for sexual aggression among Belle Haven’s belles. Franz was physically powerful with a taste for young girls and a preference for blondes. Franz’s lascivious advances toward Julie’s girlfriends spooked them from visiting the Skakel house. Julie’s cousin Georgeann Dowdle confided that Frank had “attacked” her; Andrea told Julie that Wittine had cornered her and grabbed her breast the year before Martha’s murder. Julie says that Wittine was “sexually inappropriate” with her, though she declines to elaborate. Andrea and Julie went to the Greenwich Police following Wittine’s assaults. The desk sergeant advised them to forget about it. Stephen heard complaints that Wittine molested at least one other female cousin.
Martha apparently had her own run-in with Wittine. In the days following Martha’s murder, Cissie Ix spent hours in the Moxley home consoling Dorthy Moxley. One afternoon, Mrs. Moxley asked her, “Who’s Frank?” Ix was nonplussed; she knew no teenagers named Frank. “Because I’ve been reading Martha’s diary,” Mrs. Moxley continued, “and in it, she says she’s afraid of someone named Frank.” When Ix mentioned “Frank” to her daughter, Helen didn’t hesitate. “I knew immediately who ‘Frank’ was,” she says. “I thought, ‘That has to be Franz the gardener.’ We were all afraid of Frank. He was super-creepy.”
After Martha’s murder, Cissie Ix returned to an earlier memory of Franz Wittine. Anne Skakel was still alive at the time. “I remember one day I went over because Anne was going to give me some tomatoes from the garden,” she says. “As we were standing there watching, Franz drove the tractor over a golf clu
b that was lying on the lawn. Franz was infuriated. And Anne said, ‘Well Franz, the least you could do is pick up the club!’ And he said, ‘That will teach the boys not to leave clubs on the lawn.’”
On December 4, 1975, Wittine made a statement to Detective Lunney that police would cite to substantiate their theory that the Toney Penna murder weapon came from inside the Skakel house. He said that on October 29 he walked the entire Skakel property and saw no clubs lying on the lawn. He didn’t stop there. According to the police report, “He further stated that he could not remember finding any clubs on the grounds prior to this date.” Beyond Cissie Ix’s memory, anyone who had ever spent any time at the Skakel house knew this to be lavishly false. The lawn was a virtual sporting goods junkyard. Rucky maintained a chipping tee with two flags in the backyard to practice chip shots. I asked Peter Coomaraswamy if it’s plausible that clubs could have been arrayed about the Skakel property on October 30. “It wasn’t just plausible; it was a fact.” Did he specifically remember clubs lying around? “Absolutely!” he swears. Many other neighborhood kids, including Margie Walker and Michael’s Brunswick classmate, Tony Bryant, testified at various times that the yard was perpetually cluttered with clubs, rackets, bats, balls, and lacrosse sticks. Margie told the State’s chief detective, Jack Solomon, in April 1992, “There used to be all kinds of stuff lying around, you know, out by the pool area, golf clubs, tennis rackets, balls, all kinds of stuff.” Jackie Wetenhall also told police that there were always clubs left around the Skakel yard. Margie’s brother Neal Walker affirmed that description.
The question is, why was Wittine lying? Interestingly, he gave the police two other tantalizing items of misdirection, both seemingly intended to cast suspicion on Tommy. Wittine told investigators that Tommy often walked the neighborhood with a golf club. This was another fable: Rucky Skakel carried a golf club to fend off dogs on his daily walk to the beach, one of the reasons he kept a barrel of clubs at the mudroom door. “Tommy never walked the neighborhood, period. He drove,” says Michael. Wittine also said that on Mischief Night he heard Tommy walking up the staircase at 10:15 p.m. “Unless he was Superman, Franz would not have been able to hear those footsteps, much less identify their author,” observes Stephen. “The staircase was carpeted with deep pile a full story above Franz’s basement apartment.”
On November 17, the Greenwich Police first brought Franz Wittine down to the station to inquire about his Mischief Night activities. He said that at 8:45 p.m. he was upstairs in the kitchen watching TV when Kenny Littleton and the kids got home from the Belle Haven Club. Annoyed by the racket, he repaired to his basement lair at 9:00 p.m. and listened to the radio until 10:00 p.m. He then slept soundly. However, Michael went down the basement stairs around 8:45 p.m. to access the liquor cabinet next to Wittines’ room. The lights were off, which was unusual, and Franz wasn’t there. Franz claims he rose the next morning at 6:15 a.m. to let out Max, the Skakels’ Belgian shepherd. But, the Skakel siblings say that Max spent that night at the vet. Wittine said that at 8:15 a.m., Mrs. Moxley came over looking for Martha and asked him to check the Revcon motor home. According to the police report, “He related that he checked the camper earlier and no one was in the camper that time.” Why was he checking the camper earlier? The Skakels have no idea. But what mystified the family most was that Wittine abruptly quit his job and fled Greenwich shortly after the Moxley murder, abandoning a famously generous Great Lakes Carbon 20-year pension that would have vested in three months had he only stayed on the job.
On October 30, 1975, Wittine’s wife wasn’t staying in Belle Haven; his only alibi was himself. The back steps leading to his basement room allowed him to come and go without notice. “In most places,” observes Julie, “a self-confessed war criminal who’s inappropriate with young girls, lives in a basement, and says he was alone all night listening to his radio a couple hundred yards from the crime scene, and only yards from where the victim was last seen alive, would be high on police’s priority list in an open murder investigation.” But Wittine passed a polygraph and the Greenwich Police moved on. At that point, police were nipping at the heels of their latest suspect, Kenny Littleton. They never looked back at Wittine.
Julie still thinks Franz Wittine is a compelling suspect. She wonders whether Wittine might have witnessed Tommy’s assignation with Martha, then followed her home, toting a golf club. It would certainly explain his lie about the clubs on the lawn. Julie recalls his abusive aggression toward young girls and points out the ease of entry and exit; the staircase from his basement dwelling led directly up into the mudroom, allowing undetectable entry and egress. “He easily could have gone in and out and nobody would have known,” she says.
Three years after the murder, the Skakels’ Belle Haven neighbor, 46-year-old Gloria Sproul, told police she walked into the Colonial Inn in Old Greenwich and spotted Franz Wittine working there. She caught his eye and expected that they’d have a pleasant word or two; Wittine had spent weeks painting her house a few years earlier. He avoided her gaze. She found his behavior so strange, she called Lunney to tell him. Wittine made his final blitzkrieg to that great Reichstag in the sky, or elsewhere, dying in 1997 and leaving more questions than answers.
Finally, Mrs. Moxley also showed Martha’s diary entries describing Martha’s fear of “Frank” to Margie Walker and Jackie Wetenhall before handing it over to Connecticut prosecutors. Benedict kept Martha’s diary in his possession and used it at trial. However, when Michael’s team inspected the diary, all the pages about Martha’s fears of Franz Wittine were missing, presumably removed by Benedict or Garr.
CHAPTER 8
The Crush
Everyone knows that if you’ve got a brother, you’re going to fight.
—Liam Gallagher
After their mother’s death, the Skakel brood went feral, especially Michael and Tommy. Tommy had always been his parents’ favorite. Helen Ix remembers, “Tommy was the dapper Skakel brother. He was the suave one. He was the best dressed. He wore Gucci loafers, flew planes, and he was very good looking.” But following Anne’s passing, even Tommy felt the sting of his father’s unhinged despair. Julie says her father adopted an habitual lament: “I have three failures. You’re my number one and Michael’s number two and Tommy is number three.”
To those outside his immediate family, Uncle Rucky was a mensch, a church and community pillar, a generous and kind friend, the life of the party. I experienced him as a somewhat addled but genial bruin with a bald head and prodigious gut who always greeted me at his door with a belly bump and a jovial smile. At his first introduction to my then–brother-in-law, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo, Rucky bumped him forcibly enough to bounce Andrew from the front stoop. I loved spending time in Rucky’s library, a museum of natural history artifacts—including the giant skull of a loggerhead sea turtle he had found on his travels.
Rucky, a prudish Catholic, attended mass daily and despised pornography. He loved to dance, but unlike his brothers George and Jimmy, he was neither a bar drinker nor a ladies man. Even after Anne’s death, he was circumspect and restrained about dating. His best friend was Cissie Ix, a slim and curvy buttoned-down Greenwich matron, with sparkling eyes, a bright smile, and an appreciation for both Rucky’s spirit and charming quirks. Ix still lives in the house on Walsh Lane, adjacent to the Skakels’ former residence and across the street from the Moxleys. She tells me that almost every day until he moved to Florida in his dotage, Rucky visited an elderly shut-in, Mary Louise Harwood, who shared his loves for God and golf. When Harwood’s caretaker found herself without transport, Rucky bought her a car. He hosted regular meals for nursing home seniors and opened his pool each summer to special needs kids from a local camp. Like his brothers, he slept with an arsenal of loaded weapons beneath his bed. I never saw Rucky’s angry side, but before he quit drinking in 1977, violent rages were a defining feature of his relationship with his children. “Everyone thought he was just this really great, great guy, and part of hi
m was,” Julie says. “He was gregarious and extremely generous anonymously. He helped so many people buy homes and put their kids through college and never wanted repayment. But let me tell you, when that front door closed, it was a completely different story.”
My Uncle George’s death devastated his brother Rucky, the most sensitive of the elder generation’s three Skakel brothers. He idolized George, and relied on his judgment in business, politics, and personal affairs. Rucky flew out to Boise in the GLC Convair and then hiked up the Salmon River to retrieve George’s body from the wilderness crash site. According to Tommy, Rucky was never the same. “The experience shattered him and he never recovered.” Tommy recalls. “When he tried to talk about it, he would break down sobbing.” Rucky lost interest in everything—including his children. “After that,” remembers Tommy, “whenever we had a problem, he would tell us, ‘See Tom Sheridan.’” Rucky spent the next 31 undistinguished years as chairman of GLC. According to Stephen, his father never showed any interest in running the family company. “My father wanted to be a teacher,” he says. “He loved his books. He loved his crossword puzzles and the outdoors. I don’t think he ever really gave a shit about Great Lakes.” My mother concurs: “Unlike George, Rucky had no talent for business and was the first to admit it.”
Sheridan was Rucky’s longtime friend and confidant, as well as the Skakel family bursar and lawyer. Sheridan and Rucky’s relationship began in the late 1960s. Sheridan and his brother Bob bought a parcel known as the Cave Mountain in the depressed Northern Catskills in 1961 and converted the basin to a ski resort they dubbed the Windham Mountain Club. They cut the land into parcels. Rucky was one of the first buyers. The resort, from its inception, had languished on financial life support and, in 1981, the Pennsylvania-based resort company Snow Time rescued Sheridan from penury by buying the joint. Sheridan redirected his business genius toward managing Rucky’s legal and financial affairs. “He was a failed real estate lawyer from the Catskills,” says Stephen. “Dad made him the executive VP of the Great Lakes Carbon land business. It’s no wonder the company went belly-up.” After the leveraged buyout of Great Lakes in 1985, Sheridan went back to practicing law. “Tom had only a single client—Dad.” The Skakel children are unable to name another account that Sheridan had in the thirty years they knew him.
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 14