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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Dispirited Greenwich Police, confident of his guilt, continued to make Tommy’s life miserable. When Lunney crossed paths with Tommy on a Greenwich street, he’d yell at him, “You sonofbitch, if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to nail you for murder.” Tommy recently told me how traumatic that period was for him. A couple years after the murder, as Tommy drove Andrea to her prom at Sacred Heart, he noticed that they were being followed. Wearing his tuxedo for the special night, Tommy helped begowned Andrea from the car and walked her toward the dance. Lunney rushed up upon them out of the darkness, blocking the couple and fixing Tommy with a menacing glare. “How does it feel to be dating a murderer?” he snarled at Andrea.

  Gradually, the police moved on to other suspects, but Tommy was never free of suspicion. It was baked into local lore that Tommy had killed Martha and that the Skakels had paid the police to look the other way. Tommy was the Greenwich boogeyman. Following Martha’s funeral, Tommy hugged Dorthy Moxley. “I should have walked her home; she might still be here,” he said crying. Mrs. Moxley hugged him back. A few years later, before she moved on to Michael, Mrs. Moxley told Dumas, “I might have been hugging my daughter’s murderer.”

  In May 1989 Tommy married a beautiful, brilliant woman named Anne Gillman, a designer for Banana Republic. The couple moved to Massachusetts and ran a bed and breakfast in the Berkshires, while raising two wonderful girls and trying their hand at a variety of business ventures. But suspicions and public opprobrium toward Tommy continue to dog the couple to this day.

  DOMINICK DUNNE would later brag that it was his relentless campaign after the publication of his novel that prompted Rucky to hire Sutton Associates—a move that eventually doomed Michael. In the spring of 1993 at Tom Sheridan’s urging, Rucky, who was already suffering from the frontal-lobe dementia that would eventually kill him, hired Sutton Associates, a private-investigation firm founded by Jim Murphy. A cabal of former law-enforcement superstars from the FBI and the New York Police Department staffed Sutton. Sheridan convinced Rucky that the original police investigation had been bungled, to Tommy’s detriment, and that hiring Sutton would be the best way to find the real murderers and clear the family name.

  Rucky was convinced of Tommy’s innocence and believed that an open-ended investigation might finally lift the cloud of guilt from Tommy. By the time the investigation was terminated in 1995, Rucky had paid Sutton upwards of a million dollars.

  Rucky’s introduction to Sutton came from Sheridan via Dick McCarthy, who was Jim Murphy’s fellow former FBI agent colleague. McCarthy, then in his mid-60s, operated a one-man private investigation firm. McCarthy knew Sheridan from the New York Athletic Club. Sheridan had, over several years, inveigled himself into the position as Skakel family crisis troubleshooter, as well as family money manager. From that sinecure, Sheridan would make his own fortune while managing the decline of the Skakels’.

  It would be years before all the Skakel brood recognized Sheridan for what he was: a cunning, deadly parasite. His ecological niche was in large gaps of executive control over the Skakels’ business and family affairs opened by Rucky’s myriad incapacities. Like other parasites, Sheridan would eventually turn on and deplete his host with near-lethal effect. For Sheridan, Rucky’s angst at the cloud of suspicion that followed his family after Martha’s murder had the aroma of opportunity.

  Over lunch, Sheridan told private eye McCarthy his idea for a new gold-plated investigation that would find the real killer. McCarthy said that his own firm was too small for the job but suggested that Sutton Associates could help Rucky solve the case. The two cronies agreed that McCarthy would be part of the package. In the summer of 1991, Sheridan and Rucky had lunch at the Belle Haven Club with Sutton’s president, Jim Murphy. Rucky was clear about what he needed: resolution. Rucky never intended his money to buy a whitewash.

  Jim Murphy is a straight arrow, an ordained deacon in the Catholic church, who spends his vacations on relief missions to impoverished communities in the Dominican Republican. Murphy says that Rucky genuinely wanted to know the truth. “While Rushton Skakel thoroughly believed his children were innocent, we were told that wherever the chips fall, they, the Skakel family, want to know the truth. I remember very clearly his perspective was that, if we were able to identify who committed this crime, and it if it turned out to be one of his boys, that he would go forward with that and let that information be known to the DA,” says Murphy. “Part of the thinking was that he wanted to satisfy Mrs. Moxley because she needed some closure on this. The Skakel family recognized Mrs. Moxley’s pain and have instructed that any information that develops which contributes to the solution of Martha Moxley’s homicide is to be immediately shared with Connecticut authorities, even if the culprit was one of his boys. Since there hadn’t been any similar activity that had taken place with either of the boys since that time, I think the rehabilitation issue would have been an easy one to justify. If we found that one of the boys had done it, they might have done some time in jail, but it would have been minimal if the Skakels themselves came forward and admitted a role rather than them being the subject of a law enforcement investigation.”

  Both Murphy and Sheridan—who acted as the liaison between Sutton and the Skakel family—told me that they were certain Rucky would have turned any of his children over to the police if he believed them guilty.

  When he founded his firm, Murphy had been adamant about two things: he was not going to take divorce cases (he had contempt for the private dicks who make their living snapping pictures of cheating spouses), and he would not snoop for criminal defense lawyers, muddying the reputations of trial witnesses. “I don’t do criminal defense work because I don’t want to be on the opposite end of the people I worked with for so many years,” he says. “It’s just not what I do.” From Rucky, he got assurances that he was being hired to follow the evidence wherever it led, not to extricate a rich family from trouble. “I believed him,” Murphy says. “I wouldn’t have taken on the investigation otherwise.”

  All the members of the Skakel family agreed to talk to Sutton detectives about their memories of that night. It was the first time that most of them had discussed the Moxley murder at any length, publicly or privately, since their original police interviews. Several of them, including John and Julie, underwent hypnosis and sodium pentothal testing. Sutton interviewed hundreds of people, including Kenny Littleton and John Moxley.

  Both Tommy and Michael told Sutton detectives details they had not disclosed to the police in 1975. Tommy, for example, described his sexual encounter with Martha on the rear lawn of the Skakel property. Michael told about his late-night pocket pool in the tree outside John Moxley’s bedroom.

  Murphy believes that Michael is innocent, ironic because a report written by Sutton Associates would convert Michael from a footnote in the Martha Moxley murder drama to its central protagonist. Murphy feels guilty about his firm’s role in Michael’s predicament. “I’ve felt a real sense of obligation to Michael for what happened here,” he says. “It was my documents that were ultimately responsible for what happened to Michael. It’s wrong.”

  Almost from the outset, Murphy suspected Tommy as the culprit. In the summer of 1992, Sutton investigators Dick McCarthy and Willis “Billy” Krebs, a mountainous six foot, seven inch former NYPD lieutenant, interviewed Tommy in Manny Margolis’s office. For 15 years, Tommy had stuck to the tale that he bid farewell to Martha from the back door at 9:30 p.m. Within hours of the murder, Tommy repeated that story twice, first to Julie, then to Mrs. Moxley directly. He told the same tale to police repeatedly in separate interviews. An “unnamed source” (for reasons that will soon become evident, I believe this informant to be Rucky’s treacherous “friend” Tom Sheridan) told Len Levitt that before the Sutton interview, Krebs gave Tommy a warning: Henry Lee was going to start testing Martha’s clothes for DNA, a scientific process that, at the time of the initial investigation, hadn’t been available. “So if there’s any reason to believe th
ey’ll find any of your DNA,” Krebs warned him gravely, “better tell us the truth now.” I was unable to locate Krebs after interviewing him in 2002, but this scenario sounds plausible to Murphy. “I don’t doubt that Billy would have said that,” he says. “There’s a lot of things you say to someone you think may be guilty of a serious crime to get them to be completely honest with you.”

  During the Sutton interview, Tommy divulged his previously untold story, that he hadn’t actually said goodbye to Martha at 9:30 p.m. She’d waited for him outside while he fetched the station wagon keys for Andrea. The two teenagers then rendezvoused in a spot behind the backyard shed. There, concealed from the view of those inside the house, they made out and then mutually masturbated to orgasm. The assignation lasted about 20 minutes. Krebs couldn’t believe it. Tommy was now placing himself with Martha a few minutes from the time Zock began his plaintive baying less than 50 yards from the Moxley driveway where the killer first struck Martha. Furthermore, he admitted to having pulled down Martha’s pants and panties—exactly how she was found.

  Why, Krebs and McCarthy asked themselves, if Tommy did not already know Martha was dead, would he lie to Julie and Mrs. Moxley on the night of the murder about what time they’d said goodbye? The two gumshoes detected acute discomfort from Tommy’s attorney, Manny Margolis, as Tommy described these new details in the interview room. The tryst was clearly news to Margolis. “Manny never would have let us talk to Tommy if he had any idea he was going to say that,” Murphy says.

  Smelling blood, Krebs bore down on Tommy, squeezing him for particulars. Tommy remembered Martha’s jeans had a button fly. “What else, Tom?” Krebs demanded. Tommy, 35 and a father of two at the time of this interview, looked like he was about to cry. McCarthy stepped in, suggesting a break. Predictably, Margolis never let his client return to the room with Sutton investigators. “I’m going to kill Dick McCarthy,” Krebs told Murphy when he returned to the Sutton offices. “Billy was really upset,” says Murphy. “Billy Krebs was by far one of the finest interviewers and knowledgeable detectives that I’ve ever met. In Billy’s mind, he had Tommy right there; he could have pushed him a little bit more and gotten a confession out of him or at the very least come up with more inconsistencies.”

  When I recently asked Tommy whether Murphy had it right, he laughed. I anticipated his explanation about why he waited so long to tell the full story: Rucky’s severe attitude toward sex. Tommy was his father’s favorite son. “I loved my father and didn’t want to lose his respect,” Tommy says. “My father was the most important person in my life. He was a staunch Catholic with strict views about premarital sex. I was frightened of disappointing him.” He added that he was, like Michael, physically scared of his father. “Bobby, you understand this,” he says. “If Dad knew that you were experimenting with sex, your life was over. You were going right to hell. So for me to even tell the police that I was fooling around, that would have gotten back to Dad and I just couldn’t let that happen.” This, he says, was the reason he invented the Abraham Lincoln report, to conceal his sexual rendezvous with Martha. “Dad considered fooling around with a girl a mortal sin,” he told me. “He thought my soul would be damned to hell for eternity. And it would have made him violent. I just didn’t want my father to know what I’d been up to.” He says he was emotional because the “big Goliath”—Krebs, presumably—“was kind of a bastard.” He says he wasn’t close to confessing anything. “Confess to what?” Tommy protests. “I wasn’t going to admit to something I didn’t do. I had just had enough of holding that sexual encounter in for all those years. But I figured if Dad finds it out at that point I don’t care. It was too much.”

  After he and Martha completed their business, Tommy recalled, “Martha said she really had to get home. She had a hard 9:30 curfew,” Tommy continued. “We straightened out our clothes and she just kind of skipped across our front yard toward Walsh Lane.” His last sight of her was disappearing into the darkness near the chipping tee just short of the apple trees.

  Murphy finds it hard to believe that the sexual liaison happened in the backyard. Tommy says that with the lights on in the house, they were invisible to anybody inside. But Murphy, who shared Rucky’s orthodox Catholicism, considered it unlikely that a nice girl like Martha would consent to sex in the shrubbery. Based on his own experience, Murphy speculated that Martha wouldn’t like to make love in the bushes. “I don’t think there was any way that Martha was going to lay down in the backyard and make out,” he says. “He could have taken her into the camper,” he suggests. “He could have brought her in the house. They’re not going to have their moment of ecstasy lying down in the backyard.” My own view is that teenagers, particularly during that era of stricter sexual mores and parental scrutiny, were generally happy for a roll in the bracken.

  Michael hasn’t spoken to Tommy in more than 20 years. Despite his strong AA program, Michael still can’t seem to relinquish the heavy baggage of Tommy’s childhood bullying. I can’t blame him. The bullying that spawned Michael’s PTSD must have seemed to him a long blur of chaotic and arbitrary violence that began with his father, continued with Tommy, and culminated at Élan.

  Michael is philosophical about his brother as a suspect. “If Tommy did do this,” he says, “he should go to jail. I’m sick and tired of paying for whoever did this.” But Tommy killing Martha just doesn’t compute with him. Michael says, “Tommy wasn’t like that. Tommy could get laid whenever he wanted to. He had an easier time with girls than anyone in Greenwich. He had girls chasing him. And for all his faults, Tommy is a gentleman—that’s his shtick. It’s constitutional for him. It’s not an act. He would never, ever hit a girl.” Tommy says essentially the same thing about Michael. “No,” Tommy told me. “Other than one incident at Brunswick in eighth grade, Michael never had a fight. It’s inconceivable that Michael would have hurt Martha.”

  Stephen Skakel who housed Michael in his modest rental home in suburban Connecticut following Michael’s release from prison, is about as kind and gentle a man as I know. He has devoted his life to an intense brand of service, managing relief efforts for aid organizations in dangerous war zones. His profession requires him to regularly risk his life and welfare on expeditions to the ravaged battlefields of Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Congo, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He helped manage the initial relief at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center bombing. He has spent all his free time for 15 years coordinating Michael’s appeals. That effort has nearly bankrupted him. He flashes a very rare moment of irritation when I ask whether there would be any scenario in which he’d want to shield a killer in the family. “If I knew who did this, I’d let them rot in jail forever,” he says. “I don’t give a shit if they are family. I pissed away 15 years on this. Rush’s kids are in college. I’ve only seen them three or four times in the last 15 years. I’ve only seen my brother Johnny’s kids four or five times as well. That’s 15 years I’ll never get back.”

  Stephen’s opinion aside, by 1998 Garr and his sidekick, Len Levitt, had eliminated Tommy as a suspect. In their view, Tommy had a perfect alibi: Andrea had accepted car keys from Tommy in the Skakel kitchen at 9:15 p.m. and Tommy was seated in his father’s bedroom, calmly watching The French Connection at 10:15 p.m. There was no way, Levitt explained in his book, Conviction, that Tommy could have murdered Martha, cleaned up the blood, and changed his clothes during that short interval. “What 17-year-old boy would volunteer to adults that he’d just engaged in mutual masturbation with a girl?” Garr asked Levitt, “Especially if, just after she left him, that girl was murdered?” Garr continues, “Say the murder occurs around the time the dogs are barking. I don’t believe Tommy could have killed her, moved her body, discarded the murder weapon, cleaned himself up, and sat watching television with his tutor a few minutes later. No 17-year-old kid could have pulled that off.”

  Garr asked further, “And you know the strangest indication that Tommy is innocent? It’s Littleton’s statement that he had notic
ed nothing unusual when Tommy entered his room after ten o’clock to watch television.”

  When Levitt told Krebs about Garr’s logic, Krebs conceded, “He has a point.”

  “If you accept that, how can you say that Tommy did it?” I asked Krebs in 2002.

  “I can’t,” Krebs answered.

  Benedict concurred. “Tom doesn’t fit,” Benedict told jurors during Michael’s trial. “Tom just doesn’t fit. After parting with the victim in the driveway, he was answering the front door for Andrea [Shakespeare] Renna, an independent witness. Shortly after that, he was watching The French Connection with Ken Littleton, who, for Tom Skakel, is an independent witness. And later on, when oldest brother Rushton came home … Tom was fast asleep.” Benedict, in his closing during the trial, continued, “To conclude that Thomas Skakel or Ken Littleton murdered Martha Moxley, you would have to pretty much conclude they were in cahoots with one another. That simply doesn’t make sense. The bottom line is, if either of those two people committed this gruesome, horrible, bloody crime and managed so effectively to cover their tracks, he has committed the perfect crime and I submit that’s just not possible in this case.”

  Despite the conviction of police and prosecutor that Tommy’s alibi cleared him as a potential culprit, a cloud of suspicion lingered over the entire Skakel clan. The rumors and slander injured every member of the Skakel family. Rush Jr. moved to Bogotá in 1995 to shield his children from the publicity. David and Johnny moved to the Pacific Northwest and Julie to Florida. Tommy moved to the Berkshires but has never succeeded in finding sunshine away from suspicion. The shadow of Martha’s murder eclipsed his life since age 17.

  “It really cast a shadow over my life,” he told me. “I’ve lived as a pariah since Martha’s death. Since November 1975, my life went into a tailspin and it has never recovered. I have not had a decent night’s sleep since then and my health has suffered greatly. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve had to learn to filter out the constant public disgust I encounter every day, the furtive glances, the hostile stares, the disapproving expressions, the shaking heads and the whispers. I’ve been under assault for 40 years. I can’t list my phone number, because I don’t want my daughters picking up crank calls. It’s diminished everything I do. My family, my relationships, my career are all truncated. My phone calls go unreturned; my business deals evaporate.”