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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Rucky entrusted Sheridan with a wide-ranging portfolio. He was bursar, money manager, crisis coordinator, family lawyer, and consigliere. Rucky considered him his loyal friend and sounding board. While Sheridan did not have Rucky’s wealth, the two men were, in other ways, mirror images: They were ardent Catholics born within a year of one another. They liked to hunt and they were both drunks. Sheridan’s capacity to function while blasted gave him ever-increasing power over his client’s affairs.

  When doctors diagnosed his wife, Anne, with aggressive melanoma in 1968, Rucky took refuge in alcohol and religious zealotry. His drinking, always excessive, degenerated. He started each day with a liquid lunch: Canadian Club on the rocks with milk. As Anne’s prognosis bleakened, Rucky’s moods darkened and a manic religious fervor possessed him. He spent wantonly on ancient Christian relics. Heirloom shipments arrived daily from the Holy Land and Rucky supervised his household in ritualistic prayer over ancient bits of cloth or bone shards, hoping to cure Anne’s inoperable cancer. Rucky presided severely over the seven children as they knelt away painful hours on marble floors at St. Mary’s Church, reciting two customized novenas for Anne during double daily prayer sessions, one in the morning and another after school. “Oh my God, it was a nightmare,” Julie told me, laughing. “But the afternoon one became a little more fun after Michael, an altar boy, discovered the tabernacle and wine locker in the vestibule. So before mass started, we would grab handfuls of hosts and drink the sherry. It made the prayer marathons bearable.”

  As is the case with fundamentalism in all denominations, the gravest sins in Rucky’s brand of Catholicism were sexual, and his strictures became more rigid, his chastisements more draconian as Anne’s cancer metastasized. Michael feels that his father was trying to stem the spread of Anne’s cancer through the imposition of strict sexual mores. At age 10, Michael took a memorable beating after Rucky discovered his collection of Playboy magazines pilfered from a cache he and his neighborhood chums discovered at the Belle Haven Club. Rucky throttled him, alternating between violently kicking him and slamming him against the wall while repeatedly screaming, “You little slime!” According to Michael, “Sex was the worst sin—even thinking about it. Dad expected Julie to dress no more provocatively than a nun to preserve her from provoking erotic thoughts in strangers.”

  Rucky tried to shield the children from the awful sight of their mother as the advancing brain cancer blinded her and drove her mad. He moved Anne to Greenwich Hospital and forbade the children from visiting her during the eight months preceding her death. By the end, they prayed that she would die, and when she did, corrosive guilt about those prayers plagued Michael, Tommy, and Julie for years.

  The cancer that killed Anne turned Rucky mean, and Michael became the target of his anger. Severe dyslexia had always made Michael a terrible student. But after Anne got sick, Michael’s academic failures became a reliable trigger for Uncle Rucky’s fury. “I hadn’t seen my father in two or three weeks, because he was on a business trip to Japan,” Michael told me. “I couldn’t wait to see him. When he got home, he came straight up to my room. I sat up in bed, and he looked at me and said, ‘You make me sick. If you only did better in school, your mom could come home from the hospital.’ It makes me feel like throwing up just repeating it right now.”

  One Sunday in March 1973, the Skakel kids returned from the family’s ski house aboard the Revcon bus that Rucky had purchased to shuttle them on weekend trips to the Catskills. Seeing the line of cars in front of the house, they knew their mother had died. Rucky climbed aboard to tell his kids he expected a Spartan farewell: “You know what happened. If you need to cry, go to your rooms.” Then he stepped off the bus and disappeared into the house. “Dad wasn’t very good at communicating, particularly about conflict,” David remembers. Anne Skakel’s name was never spoken again in the house. “[Rucky] had seen so much death in his life,” Cissie Ix explains. “First his parents; and his brother-in-law, John Dowdle; then his brother George; then right after, George’s wife, Pat; then Ethel’s husband, Bobby. There was just so much sadness around that family.”

  Julie recalls, “Once my mother was gone, everything just went to hell.” Rucky’s drinking spiraled out of control. “Dad was useless after that,” Tommy told me. “He crawled into a bottle of bourbon every day. So he was a complete mess.” At the urging of one priest or another, he would periodically check himself into Greenwich Hospital to dry out. Cissie Ix, like clockwork, would scour the house for bottles. Drinking and despair hatched in Rucky a terrible temper. Michael remembers being airborne or smashing against walls on many occasions during Rucky’s tantrums. The little boy slept in closets to avoid nocturnal violence should his restless father wander past his bedroom in a nepenthe haze.

  As the surrogate mother, Julie, at 16, answered for the behavior of her increasingly rowdy brothers. “Because he had put me in charge, every time the boys would do something he would look at me,” Julie says. “I got so scared coming home from school every day. I knew that he had three loaded handguns under his mattress and I knew he’d be drunk. There were two doors I had to go through to get to his bedroom, and I never knew going through them if I was going to be blown away. He was such a nasty alcoholic.” Rucky terrorized the boys, but discipline was intermittent and arbitrary. Helen remembers meals of cold SpaghettiOs from a can in the Skakel yard. Between bites, the boys would light M-80s as their elderly Irish caretaker, Nanny Sweeney, smiled through the smoke, calling out “Good show!” But then, in a fit of anger, Rucky burned Julie when he caught her playing with matches, and thrashed Michael with a hairbrush. His parenting philosophy included prophylactic tannings. “A couple days a week, he used to have the cook hold me in the kitchen and he’d spank the shit out of me,” Michael recounts. “I have no idea why.”

  Michael felt himself buffeted between his father’s and Tommy’s volcanic rages. “Tommy was like milk on a hot stove,” Michael recalls. “One moment everything looks perfectly calm and benign. And the next moment the stove had disappeared beneath a flood of boiling milk,” Belle Haven neighbor Neal Walker, Margie’s brother, told me. “There was something not quite right about him.”

  There was a medical explanation. When he was 4 years old, Tommy struck his head in a tumble from the back of the family’s 1963 Lincoln. Before that, he and Julie had been exceptionally close. “As little kids we were like best buddies,” she says. “We were Irish twins; we did everything together.” The accident happened on Field Point Road in Belle Haven on their ride home from nursery school. “We had a driver, and of course in those days there were no seatbelts,” Julie says. “I’m sitting on the right-hand side of the car near the door. Tommy and I were just fooling around and the next second I knew he wasn’t there. He was gone. He fell out of the car. I was so in shock that it took me a little while to tell the driver that Tommy’s not here anymore, but I remember by the time he stopped, I vaguely remember seeing a body on the ground. Oh my God, I still blame myself for it.” Even though he was only 4, Tommy remembers the accident. “I remember looking down at myself on the side of the road and then looking down at myself in the operating room,” he says. “Those are the only two things I remember. And then after that I remember I had to wear a helmet for about a year.” Tommy had suffered a linear skull fracture; he was unconscious for a day and in Greenwich Hospital for weeks. The curiously nicknamed James “Bunny” Marr, the Skakel family’s driver at the time, told the police he wasn’t sure who had opened the suicide door.

  Tommy was never the same. Marr said that in the years after the accident, Tommy suffered “fits of anger that would come and go quickly. In the midst of these, Tommy would sometimes destroy his own stuff.” He endured agonizing stomach cramps and major memory troubles afterward. “Tommy,” he said, had stints “when he would just stare into space for long periods of time and not really remember anything.” Julie recalls the change less sympathetically. “He turned mean,” she says. “And he had a problem with tel
ling the truth.” Julie remembers fielding various queries at school from kids who’d gotten one story or another from Tommy. “People would come up to me and say, ‘You have a professional racecar track in your backyard?’” she says. “And I’d be like, ‘What? Ah, no.’ A lot of stuff like that.” Tommy recalls having serious health issues afterward, but can’t recall specifics. “I guess it was so painful I just kind of put it out of my mind,” he says.

  Tommy always fought with Michael, two years his junior, but after Anne’s death, he began terrorizing his younger brother, pummeling him fiercely. It went beyond your typical Irish family junior gangsterism, and Michael feels that Rucky tacitly condoned Tommy’s violence. Julie shares this assessment. “Absolutely,” she says. “He let Tommy do his dirty work.” By October 30, 1975, Tommy, 17, and Michael, 15, despised each other.

  DOMINICK DUNNE continually accused the Skakel family of using its power and Kennedy connections to intimidate the Greenwich Police “to protect one of their own.” In 1991 Dunne wrote in Vanity Fair, “It is thought in the community and elsewhere that Kennedy influence was brought to bear.” In 1996, he told a UPI reporter, “The [Skakel] family is so powerful that since the first night the police have never been able to question family members.”

  The rare reporters who investigated Dunne’s charges found them false. Newsday reporter Len Levitt, who penned the most thorough journalistic treatment of the Moxley case, concluded that, although inept work by a police department that had not investigated a homicide for decades may have let the killer go free, this had nothing to do with intimidation by the Skakels. In an exhaustive 1997 article in the Hartford Courant, Joel Lang concluded that Dunne’s accusations “probably sprang more from bias than fact.” John Elvin, who in 1999 wrote a comprehensive investigative piece on the murder for the magazine Insight on the News, described the Skakels as “cooperative—somewhat bizarrely … even participating in the search for evidence and serving coffee and snacks to the cops.” Greenwich Detective Steve Carroll, one of the first officers on the scene, told the New York Daily News that Rucky “was so cooperative and there was the feeling that no one there could have done it.”

  In the aftermath of Martha’s death, everyone in the Skakel house spoke to police investigators freely and without counsel. According to Lunney, “Rushton Skakel had previously stated that anything that the investigators wished to do would be agreeable to him.” All the Skakels, including Michael, indicated their willingness to take polygraph tests, and at least two family members, Tommy and John, did take them. In the months after the murder, Tommy submitted to multiple interviews and two lie-detector tests; Rucky gave detectives permission to take hair samples from Tommy and to obtain his school, medical, and psychological records. With the family’s consent, the police drained the Skakels’ pool, took soil samples from their yard, and searched garbage from the house regularly.

  Both Dunne and, later, his friend and protégé Mark Fuhrman complained that the Greenwich Police didn’t even dare to obtain a search warrant for the Skakel residence. “Someone bowed to influence,” Dunne declared in the 1991 Vanity Fair article. But Rucky gave the police a signed consent-to-search form and full access to the house, and allowed investigators to examine it whenever they chose. Carroll and his colleague Jim Lunney conducted several thorough searches. “It was an open house—he’d never even go with us,” Carroll told Fuhrman. Rucky even gave the police keys to both his Belle Haven residence and the ski house in Windham, New York. Carroll explained to the Hartford Courant, “People criticize us for not getting search warrants. But the Skakels’ attitude was, ‘Oh, yes, help yourself.’” He explained to Fuhrman, “We never thought there was any reason to get a search warrant, because we had already been through the house. Up one side, down the other.”

  Contrary to Dunne’s assertions, the Skakels never got a break from the police, who began focusing on Tommy while they were investigating 26-year-old neighbor Ed Hammond. Because Tommy was the last person known to have seen Martha alive, police interrogated him with no adult present for nearly six hours at police headquarters the day that Martha’s body was discovered. Detectives Lunney and Ted Brosko first interviewed Tommy and his siblings in the Skakel house on October 31 at 3:00 p.m., at almost the exact time their colleagues McGlynn and Carroll were across Walsh Lane, marveling at Ed Hammond’s porn archives. Benedict adopted the fiction of the Skakel family being untouchable from Fuhrman’s book as the prosecution’s sentinel narrative during Michael’s trial. Benedict would later parrot Fuhrman’s claim that in the hours following Sheila’s discovery of Martha’s body, the Skakel house was crawling with “dozens” of lawyers. Actually, at 3:00 p.m. when Lunney and Brosko arrived at the Skakel household, there wasn’t a single attorney present. They found only Ginny Fitzgerald, a neighbor and friend of Anne Skakel. Later that afternoon at 5:00 p.m., Great Lakes Corporation attorney Jim McKenzie did show up but promptly left at 9:00 p.m. when Rucky arrived home from his Adirondack hunting trip. Rucky, who considered the Moxleys to be friends (even sponsoring David Moxley at the Belle Haven Club), was in shock from the news and came racing back to Belle Haven. One might assume that Rucky was savvy enough to have ordered a company attorney to monitor his home as press and police flooded Belle Haven. But Julie had summoned the GLC lawyer at Fitzgerald’s prompting. “Ginny was concerned and at one point she said, ‘Julie, you need to call a lawyer,’” Julie told me. “So I called Great Lakes Carbon. I wanted to speak to Joe Donovan because he was the head attorney and we knew each other pretty well, but he was out of town. But Jim McKenzie was available so I told Jim, ‘Look, this is what’s going on, I need an attorney here.’”

  Before McKenzie arrived, Officers Lunney and Brosko took statements from Julie and Michael, as well as Julie’s friend Andrea and tutor Kenny Littleton.

  Michael told the detectives that at 9:10 p.m., shortly after returning from the Belle Haven Club, he let Martha, Geoff, and Helen in through the back door of the house. The four of them went out the side door onto the driveway to smoke and listen to music in the Lincoln. The police report includes nothing more from Michael.

  Julie was next up. She told the detectives that she and Andrea came out of the house at 9:30 p.m. and got into the station wagon so that she could drive Andrea home. Julie said she saw Tommy going inside the house via the side door. She realized that she’d forgotten the keys to the wagon and sent Andrea back to the front door to fetch them. And then Lunney included this: “While she was waiting, [Julie] observed a shadow of a person, no other description, running in front of her house. She stated the shadow was running in a crouched position, crossed the driveway, and disappeared into the wooded area adjacent to the front of the house. Julie stated that she believed the shadow was a person out for ‘Halloween.’”

  Detectives interviewed Andrea, but the report only includes her corroboration of Julie’s “shadow” sighting: “Shakespeare stated that when she exited the car to get the keys she also heard what sounded like someone running in the area adjacent to the front of the house.” A couple days later, the girls would tell the police that, while standing in the kitchen, just before leaving the house for the car, “They observed a figure … pass by the window.” The police report added, “During this time of occurrence all members and guests of the Skakel household were accounted for.” In other words, the runner was not a Skakel. I believe that the large and dark figure dashing through the darkness in a crouched run was Martha’s killer. But the two girls’ memories about that apparition would fade into the mist until three decades later when they finally emerged as consequential observations during my own journey to track down Martha’s killers.

  When the police took a statement from Kenny Littleton, “he related that when he returned from dinner, he went to Mr. Skakel’s room to watch television. He stated that he watched a movie, The French Connection, and during this time he neither heard nor observed anything suspicious.” A quiet night with the boob tube was the Alpha and Omega from Kenn
y—for the time being.

  According to Julie, when GLC attorney Jim McKenzie arrived at the house, the police stopped their interviews and left. On the way out, however, the two officers shanghaied Tommy at the front door and put him in the back of their cruiser. “I went down to the police station by myself,” Tommy recalls. “And I remember them doing this good cop, bad cop crap and I’m like, ‘Come on guys, really? This is just ridiculous.’ I told them everything I knew up to the point where we were fooling around, and then they brought me home.” According to Greenwich PD’s report of the interview, Tommy told detectives that at about 9:15 p.m., he went outside to get a tape from the car then joined the others. At 9:25 p.m., Tommy said that Rush Jr., John, and Jimmy came out of the house and told the group they’d have to vacate the vehicle because Rush had to take Jimmy home to Sursum Corda. Tommy, Martha, Helen, and Geoff got out of the car. Michael kept his seat as Rush, John, and Jimmy climbed in. Just after Rush backed the Lincoln from the driveway, Helen and Geoff started toward their homes through the backyard, leaving Tommy and Martha talking by the side door near the driveway. Tommy said he and Martha continued talking by the door, and said their goodbyes about five minutes later. He told police that he watched Martha walk homeward through the Skakel yard, while, in reality, he had arranged to rendezvous with her behind the Skakel toolshed. Tommy went back into the house through the side door, and heard Kenny struggling with the broken front door. He and Stephen helped Kenny wrench open the troublesome door to find Andrea asking for the station wagon keys. The detectives ended Tommy’s interview when he got to the point where they handed Andrea the car keys. The Greenwich cops were already focused on Ed Hammond and didn’t appear interested in learning how the last person to see Martha spent the balance of his evening.