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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  PART III

  The Victims

  CHAPTER 10

  Martha and Michael

  Sugar and spice, and everything nice. That’s what little girls are made of.

  —Nursery Rhyme

  Despite his murder conviction, none of Martha’s closest friends—not Helen, Margie, Jackie, or Sheila—believe that Michael Skakel had anything to do with her death. The State’s flimsy, fabricated, circumstantial case had more holes than Albert Hall. In order to convict him, prosecutors had to make Michael a fiend in the jury’s eyes and in the public’s imagination. That task called for a marketing job that could paint Michael as a callous, entitled, homicidal brute. Fuhrman, Dunne, and Garr bewitched the elderly Dorthy Moxley to censure Michael even though she steadfastly refused to look at any evidence. Garr even deployed Martha herself to point an accusing finger from the grave.

  On January 23, 2000, four days after Michael surrendered to Greenwich Police, a long article in the Sunday New York Post previewed the drumbeat of libelous chicanery that would soon make Michael a figure of public loathing. Two years earlier the prosecutor had commandeered Martha Moxley’s diary as evidence. Now someone in the State’s Attorney’s office, presumably Garr, began selectively leaking its contents to the press. The choice to give the story to Rupert Murdoch’s down-market tabloid was shrewd. Murdoch, a right-wing media mogul, had made the Kennedys his primary target ever since he began buying US media properties in the 1970s. In 1994, my uncle Senator Edward Kennedy orchestrated a legislative maneuver that forced the Australian tabloid publisher to obey the law and to sell his beloved Boston Herald, escalating the fight. Mad as an Australian hornet, Murdoch was ever angling for new opportunities to malign my family. Garr, who shared the media mogul’s over-the-top antipathy toward the Kennedys (and Skakels) proved himself a prodigious leaker. The New York Post reported, “In a chilling diary entry, Moxley herself—whose battered corpse was found under a tree behind her home on Oct. 30, 1975—wrote that she liked Tommy but feared Michael.” Fuhrman described an almost identical passage from the diary in his book. Martha’s fear-filled jottings put meat on the prosecution’s bare-bones theory that Martha was entangled in a jealous sibling feud, and Michael, unhinged by envy, had killed her in a green-eyed fury. In his summation, Benedict made much of Martha’s journal: “We learned [from the diary] that Michael was infatuated with Martha,” and that Martha’s daybook described “[t]he jealousy between Tom and Michael over her.”

  None of this was true, not even a little bit. Benedict, as usual, was misstating the evidence. Sherman, as usual, was snoozing. Michael makes only a handful of cameos in Martha’s diary, and never as a courtier. In that respect, he is practically unique. With her baby fat shed and her enchanting smile freshly liberated from braces the previous summer, Martha was swarming with suitors. Seemingly, every teenage boy in Greenwich made a crush-struck foray at Martha, even as she dated 16-year-old bad boy Peter Ziluca. “I think Tom Kovacs likes me now,” Martha wrote in November 1974. “I walked into 3rd period and he started calling me Legs.” The following month, she wrote, “Ralph Cavello likes me. Maybe not, but I’m pretty sure Tom K does.” Six months later, a whole new cast of boys appeared. “I think Rob likes me,” she wrote in July 1975. “He’s only 12, but he’s cute. David Howard called again to ask me out to another movie for tomorrow night or Thurs night boy did I come up with excuses! I really don’t want to go out with him!”

  Martha, a daily diarist, scrupulously cataloged her impressive intake of beer, liquor, and pot. “I got so stoned 1st block today … I put a tea bag in the cup then put coffee in it,” she wrote on October 9, 1975. “I could not stop laughing!”

  Michael became friends with the buoyant Californian blonde soon after she moved to Greenwich. She was relishing her new power to beguile, but she had lost none of her tomboy charm. She loved catching frogs and candle-lighting worms in the darkness after a storm. “She liked to have fun; she was mischievous, too, like me,” Michael recalls. “She used to come over all the time after school. We’d smoke cigarettes, smoke pot, drink beer, be kids. We didn’t have a garage so we’d hang out in the big Revcon bus that was parked at the side of the house.” Martha carefully cataloged her suitors, indexing appealing boys as “foxes,” and the rest as “pervs” or “queers.” In the course of a year, over two dozen boys asked Martha out. Martha faithfully gazetted the boys she kissed and the elite who made it to third base. Michael was not in either group.

  The only entry suggesting anything less than amicable between Martha and Michael occurred September 17, 1975, following a large gathering of kids at the Skakel house. Tommy was there, as was Jackie, who confirmed to me that, at the time of Martha’s murder, Jackie and Michael shared mutual crushes on each other. As usual, there was drinking and weed. “Michael was so totally out of it that he was being a real asshole in his actions and his words,” Martha wrote. “He kept telling me that I was leading Tom on when I don’t like him (except as a friend) & I said, well, how about you and Jackie? You keep telling me that you don’t like her & you’re all over her. He doesn’t understand that he can be nice to her without hanging all over her. Michael jumps to conclusions. Just because I talk to [Tommy], it doesn’t mean I like him. I really have to stop going over there. Then since Michael was being such an ass they all started fighting because he was being such a big He-Man. He kept calling Tom & John fags they were ready to have a fist fight so I said, ‘come on Jackie let’s go.’”

  Benedict suggested the entry showed that Martha sensed danger at the Skakel house. But there is no peril in her musing, only the unfiltered reveries of a 15-year-old girl. True, she described Michael acting the “ass” that day, but Martha’s journal spares no one. Elsewhere she refers to her mother as “a royal BITCH.” Several people “bug the shit out of me,” and she logs a lengthy inventory of “pervs” and “queers,” with whom she happily shares her day. Martha’s vow to “stop going over” doesn’t stick; two days later, she returns. “We went to Skakel’s,” she wrote. “We had such a good time.”

  Martha does profile certain boys who seem unhealthily obsessed with her. “Bob S. is still the world’s biggest pervert,” she wrote on November 11, 1974. “He and Tim want me to go see The Trial of Billy Jack on Sat. What excuse can I use to get out of it?” Martha turned down Bob’s invitation. “Boy did he get pissed at me!” she wrote. “He went wild. … Bob pleaded with me to go out with him. He waited for me after school and tripped me and practically attacked me!” Two weeks later, “Bob” was still nursing his wounds. “Peter and Tony called and so did Tim to tell me Bob is still pissed at me,” she wrote on December 1, 1974. “Wowie zowie!”

  Martha sometimes appears reckless in exploring her newfound sexuality, particularly with older men. She accepted rides in a Maserati Bora and a Ferrari Dino from “Chris,” the salesman at the local Grand Prix Limited sports car dealership. She dodged a stalker during a shopping jaunt on Greenwich Avenue with a girlfriend in March 1975. “We went into Rogers & when we came out there was this guy staring at us,” she wrote. “So we did not think much about it. We went to Woolworths’ and he followed us & stared at us again so we went in & he watched us through the window. Then we went up to Ann Taylors and we didn’t notice but he followed us. So we were looking at the shoes & he was staring at us through the window. Then he watched us through the door & then he left … we thought, so we left & he was up by Gengrelly’s [sic] so we crossed the street & so did he. … He was CREEPY!”

  The Greenwich of Martha’s diary was a parent’s nightmare of menacing gargoyles and looming sexual peril, but not from Michael. Michael, like seemingly every other teenaged boy in Greenwich, held a torch for Martha, but it was puppy love. “You know, Martha was a touchy, feely kind of girl, a friendly girl, like a California girl,” he told me. “She was the kind of girl that you could talk to. I mean, as a kid I wanted a friend and she was friendly. You know what I mean? She was nonjudgmental. Everyone in my life seemed to be j
udgmental, including me of myself, and this was one of the few people in the world who wasn’t judgmental.”

  Unlike Tommy, and many of the other boys who were courting Martha, Michael was a virgin. Sherman’s long tally of professional malpractice includes his failure to show the jurors a photo of Michael from the time Martha was murdered. Julie describes Michael as “a runt with peach fuzz under his arms and a cute, beardless baby face.” His growth spurt didn’t launch until he was 16, the year after the murder.

  A photo of Michael playing tennis less than one month after the murder captures the absurdity of the State’s contentions; Michael obviously lacked the strength to inflict the kind of terrible damage evident in the autopsy photos or summon the savagery to shatter a golf club into three pieces and then drag Martha’s body 78 feet. “We do know there’s a lot of strength involved, okay,” Henry Lee told Tim Dumas in 1997. “Because it is a brutal, brutal murder and you need a lot of strength.” Dr. Don Mallard, a physician who knew Michael and who examined Martha’s body, told Mrs. Victor Ziminsky, a Skakel family friend, that it was “impossible” that Michael could have wielded a golf club with the savagery or the strength needed to shatter the shaft and drive it through Martha’s body. Mallard, who has since died, said it was equally unlikely that Michael could then drag Martha, who matched him in weight, to the tree some 78 feet from where she was first attacked. “Whoever killed Martha should have sufficient amount of bloodstain, and maybe other biological fluid,” Dr. Henry Lee observed. In 1995, Lee told Stephen, “I know your brother didn’t do it.” Michael’s photo shows a kid barely sophisticated enough to make it to school on time, let alone murder a girl while drunk and high, clean himself up, conceal the evidence, and then face Dorthy Moxley in his bedroom at 9:00 a.m. Michael does not now, nor has he ever, possessed the kind of executive control—much less the criminal mastermind skills—required for such a sophisticated operation.

  Michael’s childhood friends remark that he remained unchanged after the murder and they didn’t notice any signs that he might be carrying the burden of the crime. “I can tell you that Michael did not withdraw afterwards,” his friend Peter Coomaraswamy comments. “I actually became closer with Michael afterwards. He was appropriately upset by Martha’s murder.” Peter stood next to Michael by the Skakel pool the afternoon that Sheila discovered Martha’s body. As news media flooded the neighborhood, the two boys studied the blue sheet displaying the shape of their friend’s lifeless body. “We were all stunned,” he says. “None of us could believe it.” Peter remembers that, as they stood forlornly near Walsh Lane, a female news reporter shoved a microphone in Michael’s face. “Are you Michael Skakel?” she asked. Michael nodded. “I heard your mother was a steak choke victim.” She was confusing Michael’s mother, Anne, who died of cancer in 1973, with his Aunt Pat Skakel who choked to death in 1967. Michael burst into tears. “This poor kid turns around and we both walked back to his house,” Peter says. “I still remember that, years later. I just can’t believe that the Michael I remember from that day was a guy that killed his next door neighbor with a golf club.” Jackie concurs that Michael’s demeanor didn’t change following the murder. “He was always the same,” she says. She adds, “The fact that he was willing to discuss the case with the reporters in the neighborhood didn’t seem consistent with a kid trying to hide anything.”

  Their mutual friends didn’t think Michael killed Martha. He was never a suspect for 15 years. There were far better suspects to put on trial, even among his siblings.

  “You can’t rule anyone out,” says criminal defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden. “The only person they should have ruled out was Michael, but he was the only one who was ruled in.”

  So why did Michael go to jail for eleven and a half years for this crime? Why is he today facing the prospect of being sent back to prison or being retried for the murder? Like so many human tragedies, Michael’s ordeal began with avarice, specifically the greed of a crooked lawyer. This man’s villainy caused Michael to miss his son George’s childhood.

  PART IV

  The Frame

  CHAPTER 11

  The Caller

  Gossip and Lies Are the Handmaidens of Treachery

  —New England Proverb

  On Sunday, March 5, 1978, 17-year-old Michael found himself in a tight spot. Just before dawn that day, New York state troopers arrested him in Windham, New York, and charged him with a laundry list of crimes, including unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle, speeding, failure to comply with a police officer, and DUI. He was more than mildly worried. He would have been frantic if he had known that these misdeeds would lead to two years of imprisonment and torture in rural Maine and, much later, to a 20-years-to-life sentence for a murder he didn’t commit.

  The evening before had started out so promising. Michael spent the day skiing with his brother Rush Jr. and some of Rush’s Dartmouth friends. When the group lit out that night for Klondike, a disco 10 miles south in Hunter, New York, Michael made the fateful decision to stay home alone. An hour after his comrades left, Michael answered the ringing doorbell to find an angel, Debbie Diehl, a model in her twenties whose family owned a nearby ski lodge. “Where is everybody?” she asked. “At the Klondike,” Michael answered, enchanted. “How old are you?” she asked. “Twenty-one,” Michael lied. “You want to go try to find them?” she asked. “Sure.” Michael didn’t mention that he’d swallowed two “Disco Biscuits”—714 Quaaludes—given to him by one of Rush’s college buddies. They hopped in Tommy’s brand-new Jeep Cherokee Chief. It was snowing.

  Michael had never taken Quaaludes before and was skeptical about their potential. “Somebody had just given me acid and we took it and it didn’t do anything so I just assumed the same thing would happen with this.” While traversing the Catskills back roads on Route 296, Michael noticed that the wintery mountain landscape had morphed into a pulsating pudding of inky blackness. His legs turned to rubber. “I was really, really high,” he says. “Like higher than I’d ever been.” Unsurprisingly, they couldn’t find the night club. “Well, let’s go back to your place,” Diehl said. “Excellent!” thought Michael. His driving was sufficiently erratic to win the attention of a roadside trooper who stepped out from tending to a car accident to signal Michael to pull over. Michael ignored the gesture. A minute later, the patrol car’s takedown lights appeared in his rearview mirror. He punched the gas. “Why don’t you just stop?” Diehl pleaded. “I don’t have a license,” he explained. “My father will kill me.” Michael succeeded in outrunning the cruiser, but at the Windham town line he found a waiting roadblock. The police report states that Michael “attempted to run down the police officer.” Michael objects, “That’s not true. I just drove the Jeep around the roadblock.” A mile down the road, he crashed into a telephone pole, totaling the vehicle. “Thank God she was okay,” he says. “I cut the back of my head open.” The police put him in a marked car. “They started taking me to the police station to do a sobriety test and I somehow got the back door open and rolled out of the car at like 30 miles an hour.” The police recaptured Michael and, since he was a minor, drove him home after he refused a breathalyzer. Back in Greenwich, Rucky referred the police inquiries to his family lawyer, Tom Sheridan

  Hobbled by grief and drink, Rucky had by now abdicated any responsibilities for his kids. Despite his role as chairman of a large, multinational company, he was non compos mentis. “When my mother died, he should have just jumped in the coffin with her because he gave up on life totally,” Michael says. “He just didn’t give a fuck after that.” As a kid, Michael never received the attention he badly needed. “I think he definitely would have been categorized as ADHD,” Julie says. “At one point he had been on Ritalin. I remember that because it was the first time that I had ever heard of a kid being on medication like that. He was funny, he was loud, but he was like a Ping-Pong ball, just all over the place.”

  Michael is also severely dyslexic. As the parent of a learning-challen
ged kid, I echo the experts’ assessment: learning differences often manifest as petulance and bad behavior. Michael says, “There’s no question at all” that his heavy drug and alcohol abuse was self-medication for his ADHD and learning disabilities. “I would see a 6 as a 9 and a B as a D,” he says. “If I knew I had a learning disability back then, it would have been a completely different world for me. My father called me ‘stupid.’ He told me, ‘You are here to make everyone else look good.’”

  Doctors wouldn’t diagnose Michael’s dyslexia until 1985, when he was 25 years old and three years sober. Up until then, he was just misunderstood to be stupid and disrespectful. After Michael’s mother got sick, Rucky beat him, blaming his academic shortcomings for his mother’s misery. As mentioned, Michael carried a burden of guilt for praying that God would relieve his mother’s agony by taking her to heaven. In the year after her death, he said “I killed her” and “It’s my fault she’s dead” so many times that Cissie Ix told Rucky that he needed to get Michael professional help. By age 13, Michael was an alcoholic.

  One episode that preceded his expulsion from Brunswick School nicely sums up his academic career. “I remember this math teacher saying, ‘What’s the answer to this calculus problem?’ Everybody raised their hand but me. I’m in the back of the class, my head on the desk and the guy is like, ‘Why don’t we hear from the illustrious Mr. Skakel?’ I said, ‘Look, I don’t understand this stuff. Why don’t you get off my back?’ The guy said, ‘What are you, stupid?’ and everybody started laughing. I said, ‘Why don’t you fuck yourself?’ The guy said, ‘What did you just say?’ I asked, ‘What are you, deaf?’” Brunswick expelled him in the spring of 1975.