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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  A couple days later, Lunney dropped by to see Tommy’s attorney, Manny Margolis, in his Stamford office. He asked to re-interview the Skakel kids. It was good news: the cops had a new suspect. Margolis offered to conduct interviews from questions provided by the police.

  In the meantime, Meerbergen, apprised of his client’s disastrous polygraph, battened the hatches. Would Littleton submit to another polygraph? No. How about a sodium pentothal exam? Not a chance. Greenwich Police’s Captain Keegan ordered a deep investigation on Kenny Littleton.

  Back at Brunswick and away from Meerbergen’s nettlesome scrutiny, Carroll and Lunney accosted Littleton, pressuring him to take another polygraph. When he refused, the officers told Brunswick Headmaster Norman Pederson about Littleton’s Nantucket crime spree, and Littleton was fired. Littleton landed another teaching gig a few miles away, up the road at the St. Luke’s School in New Canaan. Within an hour of learning of Littleton’s new position, Carroll and Lunney appeared in the office of Headmaster Richard Whitcomb with a lowdown on Littleton’s summer escapades. Kenny lost that job, too. He was a hot potato.

  The detectives rifled through Littleton’s college records in Willamstown, Massachusetts. Sitting in Littleton’s parents’ house in Belmont, they watched the blood drain from Ann and Wayne Littleton’s faces as they explained that their son had flunked his polygraph. They visited Littleton’s pediatrician and some old Belmont Hill teachers. Then, in November, Carroll and Lunney took the Hyannis ferry to Nantucket. They crisscrossed the island talking to cops and Littleton’s former landlords, boss, and girlfriends, and the woman who awoke in bed beneath a nude Kenny Littleton.

  In Williamstown the investigators encountered their first evidence that Littleton may have killed again. Police Chief Joseph Zoito suggested that a local unsolved murder bore similarities to the Moxley homicide. On Halloween 1976, a trapper discovered the body of a 17-year-old white girl named Rocky Krizack in a ravine 20 miles from town—dead from a blow to the head and strangulation. Investigators felt that the motivation was sexual but, as in Moxley’s case, she had not been raped. Littleton had spent a lot of time that fall hanging around his alma mater, especially during football season. No arrest was ever made for the murder.

  Solomon persuaded the Nantucket Police to offer a deal: if Littleton would agree to a sodium amytal interview about the Moxley murder, Nantucket prosecutors would knock his burglary charges down to a misdemeanor. Littleton refused and plead guilty to the felonies. His decision was consequential. The plea ended his teaching and coaching career. In explaining his crime wave to the Barnstable judge, Littleton said, “When I drink, I flip out.” In May 1977, a Nantucket court handed him a 7- to 10-year suspended sentence and five years’ probation. He complained that the case had been “rigged by Connecticut investigators … Lunney and Carroll,” and confessed that he feared that “the Greenwich Police were going to take me back to Connecticut and shoot me in the head.”

  Solomon was convinced that Littleton had murdered Martha Moxley, but his team lacked the hard evidence needed for a winning prosecution. The many other plausible suspects would give Littleton’s defense attorneys ample opportunity to introduce reasonable doubt and sway a jury toward acquittal. The Connecticut police believed that only a confession would win them a conviction. Solomon and Browne resisted the temptation to arrest their murder suspect just to appease public demand for resolution. And so the Moxley murder investigation petered out. It became a “cold file.”

  In 1982 Littleton moved to Florida, where he lived as a street person. Florida police arrested him for a parade of crimes, including trespassing, disorderly conduct, drunk driving, public intoxication, and shoplifting. He drank a case of beer a day and often blacked out. He once chucked a large rock through a car windshield.

  Littleton worked as a stripper for most of 1982, in Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. In north Florida, he met his future wife, Canadian Mary Baker, a fellow alcoholic, in recovery. His stripper gigs dried up as he ballooned to 260 pounds in the mid-1980s. The couple moved to Ontario and married in Ottawa on April 27, 1983. In Canada, Littleton was unable to work, owing to instability and alcoholism. He and Baker played golf and lived off her inheritance. In a 1991 interview with Connecticut police, Baker described Littleton as “going nuts” during that period. Baker said that he liked pornography and would often visit strip bars. In June 1983 his arm was mangled during a knife fight in Hull, Quebec. That autumn Canadian police arrested him for disruptive conduct near the Canadian Parliament. Soon afterward, the couple moved back to Littleton’s hometown of Belmont.

  In 1984, during a manic period, Littleton serially called former Attorney General Ed Meese. In February of that year, he started railing about the Moxley murder, and then telephoned Martha’s father, David Moxley, asking Moxley for money to undergo sodium pentothal testing, offering to give the bereaved father copies of the tapes. Kenny said he thought the testing would give him “peace of mind” and perhaps help him to remember things that happened the night of the murder. He told Moxley that Martha’s murder was their “mutual tragedy.” Despite his offer to David Moxley, Littleton never took the sodium pentothal test, although, according to his wife, he remained obsessed by the idea.

  By 1984, according to Baker, Littleton had begun identifying himself again as “Kenneth Kennedy, the black sheep of the Kennedy family.” He told the police that the Kennedys bedeviled him, saying they intended to frame him for the Moxley murder. He believed that he could cause a tornado or a hurricane by flushing the toilet. He ate money, drank toilet water, left golf clubs at synagogues, and collected JFK matchbooks. He was often sick from drinking and occasionally suffered delirium tremens. Baker said that while on a trip through Connecticut in February 1984, Littleton told her that he saw pink elephants and believed that he had magical powers. He was in and out of psychiatric facilities over subsequent years, often arriving in police cars. In November 1984, Belmont cops picked up Baker and her and Littleton’s infant child walking the street at 1:30 a.m. on a 35-degree night. A drunken Littleton had locked them out of the house. Belmont police arrested him and found his knife collection. Baker explained that Littleton had carried a knife in his sock ever since his stabbing in Canada. He later described that incident to Michael’s grand jury as an attempted hit by the Skakel family.

  In April 1985, following another alcohol-induced mental breakdown, Kenny Littleton was admitted to Charles River Hospital. In 1986 he became active in an alcoholism-recovery group, but he slipped repeatedly. The vivid hallucinations and expansive delusions of manic depression plagued him. In October 1988 he was back in Williamstown, attending sporting events, playing golf, and stalking the Williams rugby team. According to police reports, Littleton told security officers at Williams that he was a reformed alcoholic and that drinking and drugs had destroyed his life.

  In 1989, Kenny Littleton appeared at the Williams “Old Farts” alumni rugby game where he cornered a young dean and religion professor, William Darrow, to pitch his services as a drug and alcohol counselor to the team. His nightmarish experiences, he argued, could scare the team straight. Darrow told police that Littleton was “nuts, and scared him to death.” The hour he spent with Littleton was one of “the most frightening experiences of his life.” He recounted that he had “feared for his safety” as Littleton explained the Moxley murder and the Kennedy family’s plots to silence him. Darrow later described Littleton to the police as “big … and extremely angry.” Police reports quoted him as saying that Littleton had started talking about the Moxley murder and “became very intense.”

  His family found Littleton no less harrowing. Littleton sometimes threatened to kill his wife. He would become particularly depressed, Baker told the police, around Halloween, the anniversary of Martha’s murder. In October 1989 Baker threw him out and separated from him. In May 1990 he tossed hot coffee on her and tried to force his way into her house. Littleton moved in with a manic-depressive stripper named Kimberly in Boston’s Combat
Zone. He aspired to return to erotic dancing and join Kimberly in her act. Baker divorced Littleton on July 12, 1990.

  By August 1991, when Dunne’s shenanigans prompted Connecticut law-enforcement authorities to reopen the Moxley case, Kenny Littleton was still a prime suspect. He had recently been institutionalized for manic depression and paranoid delusions at McLean Hospital in Belmont. Solomon, Garr, and Detroit homicide detectives, whom the Greenwich police had brought in to help support the investigation (Detroit, at that time the nation’s murder capital, was renowned for the cutting-edge expertise of its homicide bureau), all believed that Littleton might be responsible for a string of unsolved killings of young women in Massachusetts, Florida, Maine, New York, and Canada. On September 23, 1991, Garr went to Ottawa to examine the police files on three young women who had disappeared during a 23-day period in 1988. None of the bodies were ever found. Garr’s report concluded, “All three women were last seen in the same vicinity … within close proximity to where Ken Littleton had resided.”

  FRANK GARR was new on the Martha Moxley case. His bosses at the Greenwich Police Department assigned him, in 1994, to the State’s Attorney’s Bridgeport office to work under Jack Solomon to solve the stone-cold homicide. Garr would be the architect of Michael Skakel’s wrongful conviction a decade later.

  According to Levitt’s book, Garr spent his early years just over the New York boundary from Greenwich in gritty, blue-collar Port Chester, where his father, Tony, ran an Italian restaurant. Garr, whose paternal grandfather had changed the family name from Carino, moved his family over the Connecticut border in the early 1970s, paying $62,000 for a place in Glenville, Greenwich’s most modest neighborhood.

  After an unhappy period selling insurance post–high school, Garr did a tour in Vietnam, and then returned to Greenwich, where in 1967, at age 22, he became a police patrolman. His first assignment was directing traffic on Greenwich Avenue, the town’s chichi main drag where boutiques and restaurants catered to Greenwich tycoons and trophy wives. Like many Greenwich cops, he made ends meet by moonlighting for the town’s fat cats, providing private airport shuttle service and bartending at events. He worked security at Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford’s parties in the back country. When their kids, Cody and Cassidy, were born in Greenwich Hospital, Garr was there to keep the media away. Garr was painfully aware of his place at the bottom of the Greenwich food chain. “I drove. We all drove,” he told Levitt. “Did I like it? No. But if my son needed a $350 pair of ice skates each year for hockey, I had to work extra for it.” Garr’s resentments toward the Greenwich swells may have fed the seething hatred he later espoused toward the Skakel family. He told Levitt that he experienced anti-Italian bigotry on the force. When he grew a mustache, he overheard a superior say under his breath, “That’s all we need, another guinea with a mustache.” The story may be apocryphal. As we shall see, Garr had a grifter’s contempt for the truth and Levitt was his willing pigeon.

  In any case, Garr dealt with the snobs by getting up in their grills. Garr presented himself as an iconoclast, an outsider. While the other Greenwich cops were clean cut, Garr concealed the chip on his shoulder with his long, irreverent ponytail, which he wore like an extended middle finger to the elite, straight-laced, and notoriously insular Greenwich constabulary. Writer Richard Hoffman, who was forced by subpoena to help in Garr’s office before Michael’s trial, recounted, “He had a 100-percent Frank Sinatra–themed office,” Hoffman said. “He had a six CD–changer playing nothing but Frank Sinatra and he had one of those novelty phones on his desk with Frank Sinatra with his head cocked a certain way leaning against a lamppost. So I’m listening to ‘Strangers in the Night’ and trying to read.”

  Garr had Hollywood daydreams. He got a headshot and took acting lessons in Manhattan at the Weist-Barron School, hoping to find a TV gig. He established the town’s first drug unit and went undercover for drug-buying stings.

  His bosses plucked Garr from the Greenwich police force to work as an investigator in the office of then–Fairfield County State’s Attorney Donald Browne, under Connecticut law-enforcement legend Jack Solomon. The two were yin and yang. While Garr was a rebel, Solomon, then pushing 60, was a by-the-book cop’s cop with a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit. Mary Baker told Levitt that Solomon reminded her of John Wayne, “but wearing a brown polyester suit with a bad tie instead of cowboy duds.” Solomon had worked the Moxley case from the beginning, back when Garr was still working dispatch. Garr brought his resentment to his new job. He told Levitt that the Moxley murder—by now a 15-year-old cold case—was the booby prize. He had ended up on the Moxley detail because his fellow officers despised him and they wanted him out of Greenwich. The case was 15 years old and hadn’t been solved. His new Bridgeport office was the dead-end gulag for an unwanted exile; more punishment than opportunity. Levitt describes a 1997 visit to Garr’s seedy Bridgeport digs. At that time, Garr saw himself as a laughingstock, disdained by his fellow officers and boss who regarded him, for reasons Levitt never explains, with acute moral revulsion: “The stillness in the office was unnerving. The phone didn’t ring. No clerks or secretaries bustled in or out. Frank was out of the flow of the office’s daily activity, estranged from his law enforcement colleagues. ‘No one comes in here to speak to me,’ he said. ‘I walk down the hall, people see me coming and make a sign of the cross, as though to ward me off. I’m the office joke. A royal pain in the ass to everyone.’”

  Garr had an easily bruised ego and especially despised his boss, Solomon, who, he felt, disrespected him. “He never considered me an equal,” Garr whined to Levitt, who says that the mention of Solomon’s name made Garr apoplectic. “Get him started and he could rant. ‘You know Jack’s problem? He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. He thinks everyone else is stupid. He’s in love with the polygraph and with his image and can’t admit when he’s wrong.’” Garr apparently felt Solomon had poisoned their boss, Donald Browne, against him.

  For Levitt, who also despised his boss and felt underappreciated, it was love at first sight. Levitt shared with Garr his own travails working at Long Island Newsday, a failing newspaper, where his editor neither trusted him nor valued his work. After all, the paper sat on his article about the Moxley murder for eight years. Now the lonely reporter and the friendless cop had found each other. Levitt describes a blossoming romance between the two wallflowers, “We seemed to enjoy ourselves so much that we arranged a lunch at a pub in Greenwich. Another evening we met for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Stamford. Here we were, two grown men with wives and children, now spending an increasing amount of time together. At each meeting, we’d talk for hours. Our coming together, a reporter and a detective, seemed so unnatural, I said to Frank, ‘Jesus, if anyone noticed what was going on between us, they might think we’re gay.’ ‘Who gives a fuck?’ he answered. ‘We’ve developed a friendship. It’s the truth.’” Levitt was a star-struck groupie happy to play crime-fighting Robin to Garr’s Batman. Levitt would later describe Garr as “my mirror image, whose struggles and personality I saw reflected in my own.” The centerpiece of their odd bromance would become their crusade to nail Michael Skakel for a crime he didn’t commit.

  Dunne’s William Kennedy Smith rumor tripped the wire that ultimately brought Garr into the Skakels’ lives and made him their scourge. Dunne’s baseless story that Will had been in Greenwich at the time of the Moxley murder provoked renewed media hysteria around the case. The Greenwich Time finally printed Levitt’s magnum opus attacking the Connecticut police. In response to the onslaught, Browne held a press conference on August 8, 1991, announcing that he had reopened the investigation under the direction of Solomon, with Garr as his deputy. Browne provided the number for a dedicated tip line; Mrs. Moxley announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

  Kenny Littleton had made an impression on Solomon 14 years earlier when he rejected Nantucket’s offer of a reduced sentence in exchange for allowing Solomon to question him under t
ruth serum. Shortly afterward, Littleton blew off Solomon and the Greenwich police during a phone interview. “I never want to see you fucking guys again,” Littleton told the cops. “I’ll talk to you on the phone, but you fucking cocksuckers are not going to bother me anymore! Stay out of my life and leave me alone!”

  As the investigation reopened, Littleton was Solomon’s favorite suspect by a mile. Solomon concurred with Sutton detective Jim Murphy as to Littleton’s motive. “He [Kenny Littleton] was drinking,” he’d tell Garr. “His horns came out.” Tommy had passed the polygraph. Solomon had been in Bethany when Littleton failed. Tommy had stayed out of trouble since 1975; Littleton was a walking crime wave. Solomon saw Littleton’s reference to the murder as “our mutual tragedy” to be a sideways confession offered up to David Moxley.

  In late September 1991, Solomon and Garr appeared at Mary Baker’s house in Ottawa to report that they suspected Littleton was a serial killer. She told the police that Littleton “had frequently and compulsively” made incriminating statements about the Moxley murder. From the time she met Littleton, in 1982, he had been obsessed and paranoid about the case, describing the incident as “a monkey on his back.” Littleton had speculated to many that “maybe some wickedness took him over for five minutes.” She said that Littleton was plagued with “a nagging doubt, because he’s not a well man, and [because of] the fact it was not resolved.”

  Baker began calling Garr regularly to recount the intimate details of her ex-husband’s private meanderings: his pornography tastes, hospital stays, family relationships, and his abiding obsession with the murder. Baker carried a heavy burden. She told the investigators that, when she was 13, her own mother was murdered. She complained about Littleton’s relationship in Florida with a fellow male stripper with whom he sought out free meals and slept in a truck behind a “possibly gay hotel.” Baker said that during one of Littleton’s various hospital stays, he approached a 15-year-old female fellow patient, in the presence of the girl’s mother, and requested oral sex. “It’ll do you good to suck me off.” Littleton had described to Baker his taste in women as “the younger the better.”