In Conviction, Levitt writes that, following this call, he tried to get the story confirmed. Murphy stopped returning his calls. Sheridan, however, invited him out to lunch at the New York Athletic Club. Levitt writes that over lunch he told Sheridan that he had heard that Tommy had admitted that he was with Martha later than he’d originally let on. “Oh, so you know about the mutual masturbation?” Sheridan replied. “The what?” Levitt writes, “Poor Sheridan. He had just blurted out something I hadn’t known.” As soon as he returned to the office, Levitt called Murphy to get confirmation so he could print a story based on the revelations. Murphy was appalled at what Sheridan had done. “First of all, I was surprised he had that meeting with Len and I didn’t know about it,” Murphy says. “He should have spoken to me about it first. Sheridan just gave up everything to him.”
On a Saturday in July 1995, Levitt writes that The Caller visited him at his house and presented him with the mother lode of the work that Murphy and his Sutton colleagues had done in their four years laboring on the case. From his briefcase, The Caller not only passed Levitt a copy of the Academy Group’s report, he also provided him with Sutton’s summation reports on both Tommy and Michael. After reading Levitt’s account of The Caller, Murphy narrows the leaker down to two suspects. “The only people who had access to all that information would have been Jamie Bryan and Tommy Sheridan,” he says.
Jamie Bryan is a character Murphy wishes he’d never met. “Jamie proved himself to be deceptive and manipulative,” Murphy said. Although he is a minor character in this tragedy, Bryan played a pivotal role in putting Michael in prison. “Given the damage his actions caused, he’s a kid whose neck I wouldn’t mind getting my hands around,” says Murphy.
The Sutton files occupied thousands of pages, filling two file cabinets in Sheridan’s home office. At Sheridan’s request the company assembled draft “portfolios” that made hypothetical cases against Tommy and Michael Skakel, Kenny Littleton, and John Moxley. These portfolios construct a prosecutor’s best case against each one, or a “worst case scenario.” The one on Michael was titled “Michael Skakel, A Purposefully Prejudicial Analysis of Michael Skakel and His Testimony.” In 2005, Sheridan told me why he had asked Sutton to create a blueprint for prosecuting his client. “My old man told me to always ask for the worst case. That way you know you’re not being bullshitted.” The explanation was lame. The original purpose of the Sutton investigation was purportedly to clear the boys. Now Sheridan was instructing Sutton to deliberately make the strongest case against each of them. That was beyond crazy. It was malicious.
Murphy and Willis Krebs, the retired NYPD detective working for Sutton Associates, told me separately that they believed Michael Skakel was innocent. However, in order to comply with Sheridan’s request for a worst-case scenario, Murphy realized he needed a fresh set of eyes to review and consolidate the information; Sheridan wanted Sutton to marshal all the evidence in a manner that cast Michael and Tommy in the worst possible light, and write it up coherently. Murphy asked his cousin, a textbook editor, to do the job. She was too busy, but her friend’s son, Jamie Bryan, had just graduated from the University of Virginia with an English degree. Bryan was an ambitious 22-year-old kid with dreams of being a professional writer. He provided samples of surprisingly strong analytical writing, so Murphy hired him at $75.00 an hour—billed to Rucky, of course—and gave him a desk in Sheridan’s office. In a disastrous oversight, neither Murphy nor Sheridan had Bryan sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Bryan’s primary assignment was to create Sheridan’s worst-case scenarios, “outlining the strongest case against each suspect.” Murphy and Sheridan told Bryan to massage all the evidence that a prosecutor might use to make the most plausible case against the Skakel brothers and two other suspects. What species of madman conceived this caper? Certainly not someone interested in exculpating the boys. Only a malicious bastard with a perverse mission of keeping Rucky Skakel on tenterhooks. Bryan was to assume Michael was guilty and to marshal all the evidence according to its most damning interpretation. Bryan labeled his reports “Purposely Prejudicial Analysis,” because in them he made wild leaps in logic in order to make even the most innocuous evidence seem darkly sinister, according to Sheridan’s orders. If there were ever any good reason to draft such an analysis, it would yield the kind of report that should have been safeguarded with CIA Top Secret–level controls, under lock and key at all times. Instead, it was sitting on the hard drive of a 22-year-old, with no NDA.
By 1995, Sheridan’s profligacy had finally tapped out Rucky, who was forced to unload his Windham ski house and sell the family house in Belle Haven. He and Anna Mae, his second wife, moved into a small condominium in Loblolly in Hobe Sound, Florida, in March of that year. Poor management, bad luck, and horrendous lawyers had conspired to obliterate one of America’s great family fortunes in a generation. Rucky’s family had hit rock bottom only to learn there was a trap door to a subbasin and they were still in free-fall.
In March of that year Tommy’s lawyer, Manny Margolis, shut down the Sutton investigation. It had been an unusual lapse for Margolis to allow Sutton to question his client and he was understandingly alarmed by the interview where Tommy changed his story. Margolis thought that the boys’ unfiltered chatter to the Sutton flatfoots might feed the ambitions of those police investigators who seemed determined to pin the murder on Tommy. Margolis was a seasoned defense lawyer who had kept Tommy from speaking for 27 years. Margolis had opposed the Sutton project from the outset and had allowed Tommy’s participation only reluctantly (Tommy was still the only Skakel represented by counsel as of 1995). Margolis is dead now and one can only speculate that his judgment was skewed by his faith that Sheridan had the best interests of the Skakels at heart. It was a grave blunder. By March of 1995, Margolis saw that nothing good could come of these reports—and Sheridan’s unhelpful contributions to them—and ordered the enterprise aborted.
Murphy broke the news to Jamie Bryan that Sutton’s investigation was shutting down. Bryan was beside himself to learn that the mission—his gravy train—was over. “We’re so close to finishing!” he pleaded. “How can they shut it down?” Murphy told him there was no more money to continue, and he was dropping by his Manhattan apartment to pick up all the material. “Is this everything?” Murphy asked as Bryan handed over his masterpiece. “Yeah, that’s all of it,” Bryan lied.
The following year, Bryan strolled into Patroon, a stuffy Midtown restaurant, underdressed in a t-shirt and jeans, to meet a man who regularly lunched there: Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne. “He was 24, but could easily have passed for 17,” Dunne wrote of Bryan. During lunch, Bryan turned over copies of his “worst-case” files to Dunne. Why? Bryan didn’t return about a dozen of my calls and emails, but all the evidence points to Bryan’s ambition for a glitzy career. When Murphy confronted the young writer with his deceit, Bryan explained that he wanted a job at Vanity Fair and gave the reports to Dunne as writing samples. Author Tim Dumas reported that Bryan wanted Dunne to arrange for space in Vanity Fair for Bryan to write a story pinning the Moxley murder on Michael. Dunne instead screwed Bryan by sending his reports off to Mark Fuhrman. Bryan’s worst-case scenario provided the entire architecture for the State’s case against Michael. Rucky had spent over a million dollars to get his son falsely charged with murder.
The question remains: Who was the man Levitt labeled “The Caller,” who in July 1995 hand-delivered the same documents to Levitt’s home? Under oath, Levitt has steadfastly protected his source. Levitt told me that “it never occurred to me” that Sheridan’s clandestine transfers of confidential information “violated attorney–client privilege.” If, as I suspect, Tom Sheridan was The Caller, then his secret relationship with Levitt not only violated his ethical obligation to his client, it represents a breathtaking act of treachery toward his best friend and lifelong patron. It’s noteworthy that Levitt’s book consistently paints Sheridan in a flattering light. Levitt erroneously rep
orts that in 1995, Sheridan got one look at the Sutton reports, realized how inculpatory they were to the Skakels, and immediately took action by firing Sutton Associates. Murphy adamantly disputes this account. “It was Manny [Margolis] who told us to stop the investigation,” Murphy says.
In December 1995—with the pilfered Sutton reports from “The Caller” in his hands—Levitt reported in Newsday that anonymous sources had informed him that both Tommy and Michael had spoken to private investigators hired by the Skakel family and had elaborated on their whereabouts the night of the murder.
Frank Garr and the Connecticut State’s Attorney’s office publicly called for a full disclosure of Sutton’s findings—to no avail. When pieces of the report began to leak, Margolis demanded that all copies of the report and all underlying evidence be turned over to him. Significantly, Margolis insisted that all of the documents be immediately transported from Sheridan’s office to his own.
On January 25, 1996, Margolis wrote Sheridan a blistering letter that the Skakel children found in their legal files. “As an experienced member of the bar you are certainly well aware of the gravity of the present situation as well as the extreme seriousness with which any future breach of confidentiality and/or lawyer–
client privilege will be viewed by the Skakel family.” Less than three months later, in March, Margolis felt the need to reiterate this point in another letter. “I am advised that Leonard Levitt has been poking his reporter’s nose,” Margolis wrote. “I must remind you of my earlier admonition to have no dealings with Levitt or any other media representative concerning this matter.”
Later that year, Levitt broke the news that Dunne had leaked the Sutton reports. Before printing the story, Levitt called Murphy, inquiring whether he had engaged a young writer named Jamie Bryan. The name was obviously new to Levitt. “He didn’t acknowledge that he’d ever heard the name Jamie Bryan before,” Murphy recalls. When Levitt wrote the story, he named Bryan as Dunne’s source. He almost certainly would not have done that had Bryan been his own informant. He has steadfastly protected The Caller. It’s easy to see what Bryan thought Dunne had to offer, but an aging Newsday reporter held no key to a glamorous career.
Assuming that Tom Sheridan was his source, Levitt has much explaining to do. If Sheridan was The Caller, then Levitt got played by his source in a manipulative scheme to put an innocent man in jail. Levitt needs to reckon with the moral and ethical implications of his actions. He can claim he didn’t see through Sheridan, but if Sheridan leaked reports that were overflowing with incriminating innuendos about Michael, sourced to Sheridan, Levitt was on notice that he should have been skeptical about Sheridan’s motivations. Remember that Sheridan was violating his ethical obligation by betraying the confidence of his client. If Sheridan was The Caller, then he recruited Levitt as a co-conspirator in a classic frame job to railroad a blameless man. Levitt’s participation in this scheme cost Michael more than a decade of his life.
Thanks to the years of abuse at Élan, after he graduated in 1980, Michael himself began to wonder if there was something to the allegations against him. “They got me so turned around at Élan,” he said. “Then I came home and flunked out of college because I couldn’t read no matter how hard I tried. I’d never heard of dyslexia. I thought, ‘There’s something wrong with my brain.’” Michael began to question, for the first time, his own memory of the night of Martha’s murder. “I’m like, ‘Holy fuck, maybe I did have a blackout or something. Maybe I’m blocking something out in my head. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe that’s why I was failing in school.’ It was a terrifying thought.” According to Richard Ofshe, what Michael experienced is a phenomenon called “persuaded false confession.” If a person is put under enough pressure—usually by police, but in this case, by therapeutic tactics—he can begin to believe that he’s guilty even if he had no recollection of committing a crime. “They’re stripped of the confidence that they have in their memory and then bombarded with false information supposedly linking them to the crime,” he explained. “It’s a well-established, well-accepted phenomenon. If someone’s accused of having done something over and over and over again and there are claims that they did it but their memory is impaired, it’s not a stretch to understand why someone could say ‘I might have done it. I could have done it, but I was drunk and therefore I don’t know.’”
Michael, at that time a broken reed, made the fateful decision to tell Sheridan and Rucky that though he thought he didn’t kill Martha, he still wanted to submit to a sodium amytal test to make doubly sure about his activities that night. Sheridan brought him to the office of psychiatrist Dr. Stanley Lesse, who had performed the same test on Tommy back in 1976. Monsignor William McCormack, soon to be auxiliary bishop of New York, was present during Michael’s questioning. After Michael woke from the test, Lesse sat down with him. “You definitely had nothing to do with this crime,” he told Michael. The episode, however, would come back to haunt him. During a November 20, 1997, interview, Garr reported that Cissie Ix repeated a story that she claimed that Rucky had told her in the period after Michael returned from Élan. “According to Mrs. Ix,” the report read, “Michael told his father he had been drinking on the night in question, had blacked out, and may have murdered Martha.” Cissie disavowed this statement at Michael’s trial saying, “I put words in Rucky’s mouth.” Nevertheless, Garr felt that he had found his Holy Grail. He considered Cissy Ix’s hearsay to be a watershed moment in the case—as close as he would ever get to hearing Rucky blame his own son. Levitt emailed me that this Cissie Ix revelation was for him the linchpin evidence that convinced him of Michael’s guilt. “Apparently someone in the family knew something and believed he killed Martha,” he emailed me. “I think that person was Rushton.” Sheridan’s efforts to punish Michael had finally come to fruition.
Cissie Ix, for her part, told me she has no recollection of saying virtually any of the things that Garr attributed to her in the report. “I don’t remember [Rucky] ever for a moment thinking Michael had anything to do with it,” she says. “[Rucky’s] only concern in that regard was Tommy. What Garr wrote in that report is simply untrue.”
After Rucky relocated to Loblolly, Sheridan was a regular visitor. The visits were not social; by this point, Rucky’s frontal lobe dementia was advanced. His psychiatrist, Alvin Rosen, would testify that Rucky had turned into a child. He would greet women by rubbing noses with them. He would take food off the plate of strangers at restaurants. He’d gotten into the odd habit of mooning his neighbor. “He cannot recall the names of three items after a five minute period,” Rosen wrote in a 2002 letter. “He is somewhat paranoid, frequently checking doors and windows, to make sure they are locked. His ability to think in abstract terms is impaired, often resorting to silly neologisms, sticking his tongue out, or making grotesque faces at the other person. His behavior in my office during our sessions is often like a small child. He has several times given money to strangers but is unable to explain why.”
“I came to love him during those last years,” Michael recalls, “but he was cuckoo for Coco Puffs. Occasionally he would say something coherent and people would think, ‘Oh, he seems okay.’ But they didn’t know that I just changed his diapers and ran a bath for him, then had to go in and turn it off, and stay with him to make sure he didn’t drown. In the end, the only thing working in his head was a shit-weasel playing a ukulele and dancing circles on a hamster wheel.”
Tommy remembers visiting his father at this point. “He was regularly getting lost on walks; his short-term memory was so compromised that he would spend four hours reading the front page of the New York Times because he couldn’t remember anything he’d just read.” It was during this period that Tommy remembers Sheridan putting paper after paper in front of his father to sign. Tommy trusted Sheridan back then. When Rucky died in 2003, Tommy revised his opinion after learning that, for some unaccountable reason, Sheridan had allowed his father’s substantial life insurance policy to lapse a year
before his death. “I now think that Tom framed Michael,” Tommy tells me. “He was incredibly unscrupulous.”
In the 1990s Sheridan repeatedly sabotaged Michael’s efforts to find work and start a business. In 1993, at Sheridan’s invitation, Michael and his friend Will Vinci submitted a business plan to Sheridan and a request for $10,000. Vinci, an American speed-skiing legend, had bunked with Michael when Michael was on the speed-ski circuit. Will was married and Michael was sober. According to Vinci, “We were the only guys who didn’t drink or party, so it was a good fit. We became very close friends. We had deep conversations. He opened his soul. That’s why I knew he was innocent when everything went down later.”
Vinci, a successful businessman who had already made himself a millionaire in his twenties, wanted to launch a ski business with Michael. Michael needed $10,000 for the venture, which Vinci would match. Sheridan had always told the Skakel boys, “I manage your dad’s money. Whenever any of you want to start a business, just get me a business plan and I’ll see you get financing.” When Michael showed Sheridan the business plan and asked for the $10,000, Sheridan encouraged Michael, “Sure thing. No problem, Michael. I’ll get it done.” Michael adds, “He said he just wanted to talk to my business partner to button things up.” Michael gave Sheridan Vinci’s phone number. A few hours later, Michael received a call from a shaken Vinci: “That guy is not your friend and he is no friend of your family.” Sheridan had urged Vinci not to go into business with Michael. Vinci recalled to me, “Sheridan told me that Michael was a drug addict and potential murderer and the whole family was dysfunctional.” Vinci continued, “I came to believe that Sheridan was a very sleazy man. He was supposed to be the family comptroller, but he behaved as though the family money belonged to him. He was very disparaging toward Michael and open in his contempt for the entire Skakel family.” Vinci would go to on to found and operate a string of highly successful North Face ski shops across New England. Sheridan similarly killed financing for Michael’s plan to start a sports marketing business with Japan’s top ski champion, Naga Kusumi.
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 24