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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Michael believes Sheridan was undermining his other career efforts as well. Michael got his New York real estate license in 1994. He recalls, “I pounded the pavement for work in sports management or commercial real estate, which I had done successfully in Boston. I had a lot of promising interviews, but I never got a call back. Sheridan was always intensely interested in my progress. Where was I applying? Who had interviewed me? There were so many promising interviews, but after talking to Tom Sheridan, I’d never get a call back. In hindsight, I believe he was calling my prospective employers to undermine my prospects.”

  Sheridan’s vandalism against Michael extended through his trial. Sheridan, who had made himself archivist for the Skakel children’s lifetime medical records and clothing sizes, refused to hand over records pertaining to the critical issue of Michael’s physical size in October 1975. According to Stephen, “Tommy Sheridan slow-walked us. We kept pleading with him to send the information from his files. He kept promising and promising and then, just before the trial, he went dark. We never got the records.”

  His lifetime smoking habit finally caught up to Sheridan. He died of emphysema in 2008. Not long before his demise, Stephen spied him at a gas station in Windham wheeling an oxygen tank. A lit cigarette was perched in his mouth. Just before the trial, rendered nearly broke by years of poor financial management and the staggering costs of Michael’s defense, the Skakel family informed Sheridan that they no longer required his services. Stephen terminated his monthly retainer. Sheridan was incensed. Shortly after she took on his appeal, Michael’s new attorney, Hope Seeley, reached out to Sheridan on some matter. She related to the family his shocking words to her. “Michael is finally where he belongs,” Sheridan told her.

  Sheridan waxed philosophical along the same lines to Levitt, saying, “Going to prison is probably the best thing that could have happened to Michael. It might do him a world of good. Things happen in this life. It might be the making of him. I do feel badly. A sick person has been wrongly accused. But I think that it’s for his own good that this happened. He is not the first person to be wrongly accused. He’ll probably do a lot of good work in there as a counselor for other inmates and their addiction problems. He is very good at that.”

  In the acknowledgement section of his book, Levitt praises “the unnamed source who provided me with the Sutton report. The world should know how important you were to solving this case.”

  In 2004, the year after Rucky’s children buried their father, Sheridan offered his repayment to the man who supported him for 30 years and who considered him his best friend. Sheridan openly abandoned any pretense of complying with his professional ethical obligations of lawyer-client privilege and granted Levitt yet another interview for his book. To the author, he repeated one of the whoppers that he had fed to Sutton years before, but with some added gore that would earn Levitt a handful of headlines for his book. He told Levitt that while on a visit to Élan shortly after Michael’s arrival, a counselor told him and Skakel family priest, Father Mark Connolly, that during his intake, Michael admitted that on the night of the murder he was covered in blood. In a 1979 memo to Sutton detectives, Sheridan recounted the same story, but omitted any mention of blood. He did, however, recite the name of the counselor to whom Michael had supposedly confessed some role in the murder: “Bennison.” Years later, the story finally reached Daniel Bennison, a one-time resident and staff member at Élan who had indeed processed Michael’s intake. Bennison publicly repudiated Sheridan’s lie in a web posting. “I never contacted or was contacted by Father Mark Connolly or Sheridan,” he wrote. “I never advised them on anything. Guys, I don’t know who came out with this story that I advised Connolly and Sheridan but it just isn’t true.”

  Levitt’s final question for Sheridan was about his niece, Margot Sheridan, who had married Michael and was then divorcing him.

  “Knowing what you did about Michael,” Levitt asked, “did you warn her about him?”

  When Sheridan said he hadn’t, Levitt asked, “Why not?”

  “Lawyer-client privilege,” Sheridan answered. “I stared an extra second, waiting for him to smile at what I assumed was a joke,” Levitt recounts. “He did not.”

  In an assessment my cousins found stunningly ironic, Sheridan told Levitt that the entire Skakel clan were “histrionic sociopaths.” He explained, “Their interest is only self-interest. … They lack empathy for anyone but themselves.”

  Various Skakel family members struggle with problems including alcoholism. However, they are not sociopaths. To the contrary, they all have guilt-ridden consciences, heavy moral ballast, and deep wells of empathy. Sheridan manipulated them and made a calculated, cynical lifetime effort to strip his best friend and benefactor of his wealth and injure his children. That is the profile of a sociopath.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Gossip

  Gossiping and lying go hand in hand.

  —Russian proverb

  There’s a scene at the beginning of the appalling 2002 television adaptation of Murder in Greenwich where Mark Fuhrman, played by the actor Christopher Meloni, in a risible toupee, arrives in Greenwich to research his book on the Moxley murder. “If the Kennedys weren’t connected to this, there wouldn’t even be a book,” Fuhrman growls to his ghostwriter. Those might have been the only true words spoken in that horrendous film. There would be no books, no made-for-television films, no national media coverage, had, say, Kenny Littleton rather than a “Kennedy cousin” been on trial for the murder. Dominick Dunne was the alchemist who poured the Kennedys into the Moxley murder tragedy and minted gold.

  Dunne, who successfully transformed his lifelong fascination with celebrity and wealth into a career as a gossip and a novelist, had personal reasons for his attraction to this case. John Sweeney, a Wolfgang Puck restaurant chef, served less than three years in prison for strangling Dunne’s daughter in 1982. “I was so outraged about our justice system,” Dunne told a reporter in 1996, “that everything I’ve written since has dealt with that system—how people with money and power get different verdicts than other people.”

  Dunne’s brief career as a Hollywood producer faltered as a result of his alcoholism and drug addiction. At his lowest ebb, Dunne famously sold his West Highland Terrier for $300 to buy cocaine. He fled Hollywood in 1979. Three years later, Dunne’s only daughter, Dominique, a gifted 22-year-old actress who’d just made her film debut in Poltergeist, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Dunne attributed the killer’s short sentence to the fact that the jury never heard about Sweeney’s violent history with women. Tina Brown, then the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, encouraged Dunne to keep a journal during the trial, and in 1984 Brown published a feature based on his notes, headlined “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer.” The acclaimed piece gave Dunne new life as Vanity Fair’s crime columnist. Dunne built his career on linking notorious murders to powerful people, including John and Patsy Ramsey, Claus von Bulow, and O.J. Simpson. That successful formula gave Dunne his own measure of celebrity and wealth.

  By the time Dunne covered O.J. Simpson’s 1995 trial, he may have been the second most-recognizable person in the courtroom after the defendant. Dunne was a small man, with a thick white mane. He toddled about Los Angeles County Superior Court in tailored suits and natty Turnbull & Asser shirts and ties. His trademark round glasses and scowl lent him the aspect of a dyspeptic owl. Judge Ito, presiding over the Simpson trial, angered reporters by favoring the similarly bereaved Dunne with a seat among the victims’ families.

  In the Simpson trial, Dunne had a clearly guilty defendant to rail against. But in subsequent trials, his highly speculative, gossipy barbs started to get him in trouble. In a succession of wildly reckless reporting, Dunne erroneously blamed innocent, un-indicted people for murders, and for using power or money to thwart their accusers. Even after a court convicted deranged nurse Ted Maher of murdering his boss (and my friend) billionaire banker Edmond Safra in 1999, Dunne
continued to speak of a massive cover-up orchestrated by Safra’s widow, Lily. “One day, the whole story is going to get out,” he assured a reporter, conspiratorially. “I’m so afraid of what I’m saying. I’m going to end up in prison.”

  The Chandra Levy case was Dunne’s Waterloo. In 2001, the raven-haired, 24-year-old intern vanished during a jog in the Washington, DC, Rock Creek Park. Speculation quickly centered on California Congressman Gary Condit, with whom she’d had an affair. While police made no arrests, Dunne appeared on Larry King Live and other talk shows spouting fanciful hunches about Condit’s role in the crime. Dunne deployed a signature reporting gimmick in his Vanity Fair stories. He would write that mysterious strangers approached him on the street to impart jaw-dropping scoops about his stories, and then disappear without sharing their names. These apparitions were hard to fact-check.

  Seven months after Levy’s death, Dunne proclaimed that he’d solved the case. A source Dunne called “The Horse Whisperer” told Dunne that, while attending a sex party in a Middle Eastern embassy, Condit complained to his hosts that Levy had become “a clinger” and was threatening to “go public.” At Condit’s request, assassins from Dubai murdered Levy then dropped her body in the Atlantic. Alternatively, Condit’s friends in the Hell’s Angels whacked Levy. “She’d gotten on the back of a motorcycle,” Dunne said, never to be heard from again. After Dunne repeated these whoppers on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, Condit filed an $11 million defamation suit. Condit’s case outed Dunne’s “Horse Whisperer” as Monty Roberts. Time magazine had debunked Roberts’s memoir, The Man Who Listens to Horses, as rank fraud in 1998, three years before Levy’s disappearance. The Condit scandal exposed Dunne as a flimflammer and his journalistic reputation suffered. He became a joke. By his own admission, the case shattered Dunne; he settled with Condit in 2005, and died of bladder cancer in 2009, a broken man. In 2010, another man, Ingmar Guandique, who had been convicted of assaulting two other women in Rock Creek Park around the time Levy disappeared, was convicted of Levy’s murder. During the Dunne-led media lynching of Condit, Washington, DC, Police neglected abundant evidence against Guandique, the real perpetrator—another painful parallel to Michael Skakel’s case.

  But all that came later. When Dominick Dunne launched his crusade against my family, he still had both credibility and cachet.

  In researching this book, I came across a semi-hysterical diatribe that Dunne lofted against me in the pages of New York magazine, after The Atlantic, in 2003, published my prize-winning article about Michael’s trial. I’d been critical of Dunne. “I don’t give a fuck about what that little shit has to say,” he responded. (I’m six foot one and weigh 190 pounds.) “That fucking asshole,” Dunne continued. “This pompous, pompous, POMPOUS man. I don’t care what he has to say. He’s not a person that I have any feeling or respect for.”

  When I noticed Dunne walking toward me on a Manhattan street in 2003, I turned toward him hoping to chat. Seeing me, he swiveled and dashed away with impressive speed. I don’t know the source of Dunne’s profound love–hate relationship with my family. His friends say that he nursed a grudge against my grandfather Joseph Kennedy for snubbing his father at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. Dunne claimed that when he worked as a producer on The Howdy Doody Show, Dunne witnessed Grandpa Joe speaking dismissively to his son-in-law Peter Lawford, the Rat Pack actor whom Dunne admired, and never forgave him. It was not a grudge that my Uncle Peter assumed. Lawford, with whom I was close, loved my grandfather until the end of his life. In either case, neither of these incidents provides a plausible basis for a lifetime peeve. But Dunne was renowned for his snits with friends. Minor slights blossomed into malignancy. His friend Lucianne Goldberg had her own theory. “Nick [Dominick Dunne] identified with the Kennedys,” Goldberg told New York magazine. “It’s not political; he doesn’t care about politics. But the Kennedys were glamorous, and the Dunnes weren’t. And Nick loves glamour. The Kennedys are taken seriously, and, until recently, Nick wasn’t.”

  Dunne told the New York Times, “Ever since I was a kid I wanted a famous person’s life.” The Times observed that covering notorious crimes like the Moxley case gave Dunne the opportunity to indulge “his fascination with celebrities and high society” and “his vengeful streak.” Dunne would boast on Larry King Live, the week after Michael’s conviction, that the case, along with his coverage of previous high-profile crimes, had made him a celebrity. He told King that his new status afforded him front-row seats in the courthouse and acknowledgment from judges and accolades on the street for a job well done, which he said, were what he most enjoyed. “All the people who dumped me years before were now giving dinner parties for me. And I went,” he told the Times.

  Dunne’s efforts to connect a Kennedy relative to the Moxley murder formed a decade-long fixation and a profitable enterprise. “The Kennedys,” he said “are the greatest soap opera in American history.” Michael would get caught in the crosshairs where Dunne’s ambitions intersected with his obsessions.

  In the fall of 1991, while covering William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial in Palm Beach for Vanity Fair, Dunne repeated a specious report that Connecticut State’s Attorney Donald Browne had requested forensic evidence from Will Smith. Dunne wrote, “Though there have been reports that Willy Smith was a guest of the Skakels [the night of Martha Moxley’s murder] no evidence links him to the case.” He also wrote that Browne denied the story. Not until two years later did Dunne admit that his absurd rumor was false.

  Dunne knew almost nothing about the Moxley murder in 1991. Yet in his initial articles about the Moxley case, his default was already set: Dunne would enlarge the catchy theme that “either the [Moxley] investigation was thoroughly botched or someone bowed to influence” into a best-selling novel, a TV miniseries, and a cascade of articles for Vanity Fair. In his novel A Season in Purgatory (1993), a thinly veiled John F. Kennedy Jr. murders his young neighbor in Greenwich and gets away with it because of family power. At the time, Dunne was sure that Tommy had killed Martha, and never lost an opportunity to point that out during an extensive national book tour, including appearances on programs such as Hard Copy and the CBS Evening News with Connie Chung, and also interviews with Jay Leno and Joan Rivers. I and the Skakel family members watched in horror as Dunne publicly accused Tommy of having committed the crime. “I was convinced that [Tommy] had done it,” he later explained in Vanity Fair, “and had said so on television.”

  As Dunne liked to say, his book, and the miniseries that followed, dramatically raised the public profile of the unsolved murder. New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith reported in 1993 that the Greenwich Police felt that Dunne had put their department on the spot. Dunne’s efforts to tie Will Smith to the Moxley murder prompted the Greenwich Time and the (Stamford) Advocate to publish Len Levitt’s article detailing the sorry performance of the local police. According to Garr and Browne, the publicity generated by Dunne during the Smith trial prompted the State to reopen the Moxley investigation.

  If it didn’t turn out that a Kennedy cousin had committed the crime, the story would be worthless to Dunne. Dunne ignored the strong evidence against Kenny Littleton; in his many articles and interviews about the case he never mentioned Littleton’s five failed polygraphs, his shifting alibis, his call to David Moxley, his statement to the police psychiatrist about whether he could have committed the crime, the physical evidence of hair similarities, Littleton’s history of sexual misconduct, and his capacity to deliver the blows. Dunne suggested that Littleton’s alcoholism and his criminal activity were the result of stress from unfair accusation, which he blamed on the Skakels. (It mattered little to Dunne that the Skakels never publicly blamed Kenny Littleton for the crime.)

  In his Vanity Fair article on the murder, Dunne offered a purged and abbreviated inventory of Littleton’s criminal and mental-health history and then concluded, “But there is one thing I’m sure he didn’t do: he did not kill Martha Moxley.” No Skakel ever benefited
from the same presumption of innocence in Dunne’s writings.

  Dunne’s M.O. never varied. He began by evoking his daughter’s death in a soft-touch approach to the victim’s family. Once his nose was under the tent, Dunne launched into reckless accusations; damning denunciation of the accused; anonymous tips; facts bent to fit his theories; and his reliable old chestnut: accusing power and wealth of evading justice.

  Soon after Will Smith’s acquittal, in December 1991, Dunne wrote to Dorthy Moxley, recounting his own daughter’s murder and asking to meet her. Dunne’s invocation of their terrible shared tragedies appealed to Mrs. Moxley’s trust, and they forged a friendship. “My only motivation in this has been Mrs. Moxley,” Dunne said of his interest in the case in 2003. “No one understands the pain she’s experienced like I do.” Dunne wrote in Vanity Fair, “I swore to her that I would help her get justice for her daughter.” Mrs. Moxley, who had previously been as judicious as everyone else, now became certain that a Skakel had committed the crime. She acknowledged that her theories about Skakel involvement were influenced by Dunne. She has steadfastly refused to examine the evidence herself and has relied instead on assessments by Dunne, Fuhrman, Garr, and Levitt—all men with mercenary agendas.