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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  In promoting A Season in Purgatory, Dunne renewed his needling. “There are only two possible reasons” the murder remained unsolved; he pulled out his well-worn theme to the Chicago Tribune, saying, “Either the police are totally inept, or, somehow, power and money have played a part in covering up.” Such statements continued to rankle law-enforcement officials. After Dunne’s book tour, Garr led several members of the Moxley investigation team on a visit to Dunne’s home in Hadlyme, Connecticut, bearing gifts: a State Police plaque, a T-shirt, and a mug. They begged him to stop criticizing their work. Dunne agreed to a truce.

  In an adult version of the children’s game “Telephone,” Dunne regularly called Mrs. Moxley during this period to share the kind of reckless gossip that would finally catch up with him in the Condit case. Moxley, in turn, phoned Garr to share Dunne’s revelations. Garr then transcribed Dunne’s scuttlebutt into police reports. “The Skakels went to their home in Windham, New York, to ski, and buried the clothes,” Garr wrote in a May 1993 police report detailing his conversation with Mrs. Moxley. “Andrea Shakespeare is close to someone in the Vatican” read a tidbit in the same report. (Indeed, her father, Frank Shakespeare, went from being head of CBS Television to Ronald Reagan’s appointee as Ambassador to the Holy See. In Dunne’s world this might have been evidence that Martha was taken out by papal assassins.) “Dunne informed her that he had received information from one Paul Terrien, Essex, Connecticut, who informed him that the murder involved a conspiracy,” Garr reported. Paul Terrien, who lived a few miles from Dunne, was the estranged brother of Michael’s deceased step-uncle, George Terrien. Prior to his death in 1992, George Terrien had regarded his brother as a deranged oddball. George cut off all contact with Paul a decade before Martha’s murder and disowned Paul in his will. No one in Rucky Skakel’s family has ever met or talked to Paul Terrien.

  In May 1996 Dunne’s miniseries A Season in Purgatory aired, and Dunne pummeled Tommy in yet another media onslaught. That month he escorted Mrs. Moxley to a press conference to announce that she was raising the reward for information about her daughter’s killer from $50,000 to $100,000.

  After obtaining the Sutton files from Bryan, Dunne passed the “worst case” portfolios on to Mrs. Moxley. Saying he had landed documents that would crack the case wide open, Dunne swore Dorthy Moxley to secrecy. Too excited to keep mum, Mrs. Moxley shared this news with Garr. The detective, irate, called Dunne. First Levitt had gotten these documents (probably from Tom Sheridan) and now Dunne had them, while the detective assigned to the case was still in the dark. Dunne agreed to give Garr a copy. Garr, however, was underwhelmed. “There was nothing in it,” Garr told Levitt of the Sutton report, which Dunne had regarded as game-changing. “It was all theories and speculation.” Garr explained to Mrs. Moxley at the time that the Sutton files were just speculative “scenarios.”

  As the months went by with no Skakel arrested, Dunne grew antsy, and then bitter at Garr’s insouciance. In the meantime, Levitt published a story about Dunne having the reports and named Bryan as the leaker. Apoplectic at Levitt for unveiling his informant, Dunne fired off a vitriolic fax to the Newsday ink slinger. “After you heard from Dorthy Moxley that I had a copy of the Sutton report, you called your friend at Sutton Associates to tell him that a young man working for him had given a copy of the report to me,” Dunne wrote. “The young man had performed a decent act and your call to his boss put him into a state of abject fear for which I felt a responsibility.” Then he turned his sights on Garr. “I gave a copy to Frank Garr. That was a total waste of time.” Levitt’s unveiling of Bryan as Dunne’s source had edged the gossip toward DEFCON 1 on the hissy-fit scale. Of Garr’s proposed book, Dunne wrote, “Only my innate good manners kept me from saying, ‘On what? On how you couldn’t solve the case for over 20 years?’” Practically spitting venom, Dunne hinted presciently at his suspicion. “Or maybe he was planning on using the Sutton Report as his plot. Over and out with Frank.” Levitt shared the fax with Garr, whose head nearly exploded as he read it.

  And so began a juvenile contest of wills between two men who both swore, to anyone who listened, that they only had Dorthy Moxley’s interests at heart. After a conversation with his old friend Lucianne Goldberg, Dunne hatched a fiendish plot that would torpedo his two new archenemies, Levitt and Garr. He gave the Sutton files to Mark Fuhrman.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Perjurer

  The Liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

  —George Bernard Shaw

  On October 3, 1996, 44-year-old Mark Fuhrman avoided a jail sentence by pleading no contest to his felony perjury during O.J. Simpson’s trial. The court sentenced him to three years of monitored probation. Fuhrman had lied under oath when he told Simpson’s “Dream Team” lawyer F. Lee Bailey that he had not uttered the word “nigger” in the past 10 years. The defense produced Fuhrman’s audiotaped interviews with screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny. “Nigger,” as it turned out, was one of his most cherished expressions. He used the slur 41 times in the tapes, in such contexts as “These niggers, they run like rabbits.” He explained how he would often plant evidence on uppity “niggers” to send them to jail. While still with the Los Angeles Police Department, Fuhrman told a psychiatrist that he left the Marine Corps because of his disgust with the laziness of “Mexicans and niggers.” The Simpson verdict was, in part, largely an expression by the majority-black jury of its revulsion for Fuhrman, who embodied the notorious institutional culture of violent racism within the LAPD. Fuhrman’s virulent bigotry cost the State of California the most high-profile double murder case in its history.

  Fuhrman’s guilty plea ended his career as a detective. “It is important to understand that, as a result of these charges, this plea and this sentence, Mark Fuhrman is now a convicted felon and will forever be branded a liar,” California’s Attorney General Dan Lungren told the press at the time. “By pleading to a felony, Mr. Fuhrman will never be a police officer in the State of California again. He is also now the ultimate impeachable witness—a convicted perjurer.” Fuhrman is a liar, a racist, and a bully. It’s a great irony that he disgraced himself for his pivotal role in letting Simpson escape justice and then rehabilitated himself by helping to put an innocent man in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

  Following his sentence, Fuhrman moved to Coeur d’Alene, just outside of Hayden Lake, Idaho, a notorious mecca for white supremacist militias. He works for Fox News as its “forensic and crime scene expert,” but his principal function these days seems to be acting as an antidote to the Black Lives Matter movement. When police abuse and racial killings are in the news, from Baltimore to Ferguson, Missouri, to Columbia Junction, Fox summons Fuhrman in his tailored suit and “in your face” attitude to explain why police brutality is justified.

  I happened to catch Fuhrman on Fox News’s Hannity not long ago, defending a South Carolina police officer who brutally grabbed a black 16-year-old student by the neck, violently body-slammed her, and dragged her across the floor of a classroom by her leg. During the previous 24 hours, that video had horrified the nation. No one defended the police officer. Then came Fuhrman. “I’ll tell you why it’s not excessive …” Fuhrman began, true to form. Fuhrman’s unrepentant racism is red meat to a certain segment of the Fox audience who experience civil rights for black Americans as a social demotion. Fuhrman’s resurrection proves that, with the correct political alignment, even the most deplorable scoundrels can get a second act on Fox.

  In search of a Torquemada to torment the Greenwich Police, Dominick Dunne summoned Fuhrman, whom, Dunne oddly claimed, he had come to admire during the Simpson trial. Fuhrman’s reinvention began in earnest in 1997 with his O.J. Simpson book Murder in Brentwood, which made him a best-selling author. Now, Fuhrman was looking for an unsolved crime to write about. When Fuhrman answered the phone, Dunne said, “Hey, Mark, I’ve got just the one for you, and I have a private detective repo
rt that’s going to knock you on your ass.” Dunne provided Fuhrman with the Sutton report—which became the CliffsNotes version of Fuhrman’s book Murder in Greenwich. According to Fuhrman, Dunne also gave him the inspiration to write it. Fuhrman reported that he and Dunne discussed the Moxley case intensely at a Four Seasons lunch in 1997. Dunne hosted a cocktail party for Fuhrman to introduce him to Connecticut law-enforcement officials.

  Before Fuhrman launched into the real Moxley case, he immersed himself in Dunne’s novel A Season in Purgatory. “While it was an entertaining read, the book also angered me,” he wrote. “Money, power, celebrity, deceit, corruption. It was the Simpson case all over again.” Fuhrman was indignant about a case that Dunne had invented. (“I changed the murder weapon to a baseball bat,” Dunne wrote of his process. “I also … gave some Kennedy touches to the Skakels, whom I called the Bradleys. I threw in some of my own Irish Catholic family too. All of this was for libel reasons.”) Fuhrman’s own gift for blending fact with fiction allowed him to craft the Sutton report into a compelling parable invoking Dunne’s favorite theme of wealth corrupting the justice system.

  To sell the book, Fuhrman partnered with another infamous figure from the 1990s, literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who first introduced him to Dunne. (The two men saw each other across the courtroom, but never met during the Simpson trial.) Goldberg was the wizard of right-wing conspiratorial fiction packaged as political exposé: she convinced White House executive assistant Linda Tripp to secretly tape-record lurid conversations about President Bill Clinton with Tripp’s “friend,” White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky described to Tripp the details of her occasional sexual favors for the president. Goldberg had previously encouraged Tripp to author a book exposing Clinton as the murderer of his aide Vince Foster. Goldberg planned to market her prospective author as “the woman who served Vince Foster his last hamburger.” Before triggering the Clinton impeachment saga, she represented Fuhrman in his Blame-a-Kennedy-Cousin book deal.

  Following Fuhrman’s 1998 publication of Murder in Greenwich, Dunne complained of the continuing public disquiet with the disgraced detective’s racism and corruption: “Although Fuhrman’s extraordinary work on the Moxley–Skakel case has brought about redemption in his life, there will always be some who can never forgive him.”

  As previously noted, Dunne wrote the foreword to Murder in Greenwich, an unsheathed tirade of naked malice against Frank Garr. “I gave a copy of the files to a detective who had been working on the Moxley case from almost the night of the murder,” he wrote. “Time went by. Nothing happened. I began to think that nothing was ever going to happen. Then along came Mark Fuhrman, whom I grew to admire after the fiasco of the Simpson trial. … Say what you want, the guy is a great detective.” The message was clear: due to the incompetence of the Connecticut cops, Dunne had no choice but to bring in a real homicide detective to solve the case. Dunne was incorrect about Fuhrman being a great detective. Everyone already knew Fuhrman was a bigot, a perjurer, and a thug; but it turned out, he was a sorry detective as well.

  The book is a 283-page jeremiad against the Greenwich Police, who, Fuhrman says in his book, angered him by treating him as a pariah. Fuhrman castigates Greenwich cops as “servants of the rich and powerful.” Echoing Dunne, he wrote, “Someone killed Martha Moxley and got away with it. And the reason he got away with it was that the Greenwich Police Department … didn’t have the courage to go after him.”

  Murder in Greenwich was a quickie, dime-store crime thriller, with an aphorism about wealth and power. Its villain is the “spoiled rich brat” Michael Skakel. The literary enterprise cost Fuhrman and his ghostwriter only three months. In his acknowledgments, Fuhrman thanked his family for tolerating his “stress of doing two books in less than one year.” The Sutton report and Dunne’s fanciful inventions were Fuhrman’s principal feedstock.

  The Connecticut investigators, Lunney, Brosko, Solomon, and Keegan, and State’s Attorney Browne, all refused to meet with Fuhrman. Only Steve Carroll spoke to the disgraced cop. Carroll pointed the finger at Tommy and told Fuhrman that, after reading the Sutton report, he and Garr had specifically dismissed the idea of Michael as a suspect because of Michael’s rock-solid alibi. “He just wasn’t there,” Fuhrman wrote of Carroll and Garr’s conviction. When Fuhrman called Garr to ask for help, Garr rebuffed him. “Well I don’t think I could do that. To tell you the truth I’ve been thinking about writing a book about the case.” Fuhrman interpreted Garr’s reticence as evidence of an organized police conspiracy to perpetuate the Kennedy–Skakel police cover-up. “I wondered what they were afraid of,” he wrote. “I sensed something else was behind Frank’s refusal to work with me. Something was starting to smell.” Fuhrman is either extraordinarily thick or was being purposely obtuse about why cops wouldn’t be happy to help him, given his racist, felonious background. Fuhrman took his revenge by sniping at Garr throughout his book. Invective against the detective is his pervasive theme. He wrote that Dunne had given the Sutton reports to Garr. “Yet apparently Frank had talked to hardly any of the people I interviewed whose names I got from the files. And none of the leads I followed showed any of Garr’s tracks.”

  After years of accusing Tommy Skakel of the crime, Dunne followed Fuhrman’s lead, and, without missing a step, he turned his sights on Michael. Dunne explained that an anonymous tip by a mysterious woman had caused him to reassess his original accusations against Tommy. “I felt that this woman, whose name I did not write in my notebook—at her request—and which I subsequently forgot, knew more than she was telling me. But I liked her. I trusted her,” Dunne said. “As she was leaving she said, ‘It wasn’t Tommy.’ She repeated it. Up till then, Tommy Skakel had been the major suspect in the case. I was convinced that he had done it, and had said so on television. Her words haunted me.” That clue finally gave Dunne mental clarity about the case. “I firmly believe that Michael Skakel killed Martha Moxley,” he declared on Good Morning America in March 1999. On the CNN program Burden of Proof, when asked whether he believed that Michael Skakel did it, he replied, “That is what I absolutely, firmly believe.” He made no apology to Tommy for the years of tormenting accusations. To ease his own shift from Tommy to Michael as the designated murderer, Dunne simply made them partners in the crime. In January 2000 Dunne told ABC News, “I firmly believe Michael Skakel killed Martha Moxley and that Tommy Skakel may have helped him move the body.”

  Fuhrman acknowledges in Murder in Greenwich that the Moxley murder attracted him because it reminded him of the Simpson case: “Money, power, celebrity, deceit, corruption.” On the day he began investigating the crime, he repeated this formulation to Greenwich police officers when they asked him about his interest in the case. Fuhrman had clearly decided before he began his investigation that the killer must be a wealthy, powerful celebrity who had corrupted the police. Fuhrman exposes this bias by explaining his reasons for rejecting Kenny Littleton as a suspect, which he says he did “early on”: “Littleton had no money, no powerful family behind him, no clout. If Littleton had murdered Martha Moxley, he would not have gotten away with it.” Being neither rich nor famous, by Fuhrman’s reasoning, Littleton couldn’t be guilty. Fuhrman might find comfort in this view, which conveniently exonerates him from his central culpability in the disastrous O.J. Simpson acquittal: if Simpson got off because he was rich, then it was not because the prosecution’s principal witness was exposed as a perjurer, who bragged about planting false evidence on blacks.

  Ignoring the fact that Kenny had changed his alibi five times, Fuhrman boldly concluded, “While other suspects have had trouble with their alibis, Littleton has always stuck to the same story.” He explained Littleton’s failure to pass five lie-detector tests over a period of 16 years by arguing, “If Littleton is a paranoid, psychotic, bipolar alcoholic, then how could [Greenwich Police] expect him to pass any kind of polygraph?”

  Curiously, Fuhrman makes a much stronger case against Tommy than he does agains
t Michael. Fuhrman was directly tracking the Sutton report—which was far more damning to Tommy; the Sutton authors believed that Tommy was guilty and Michael was innocent—but then, Fuhrman pivots abruptly near his book’s conclusion and declares Michael the killer.

  I have my own theory as to why Fuhrman chose to blame Michael for the murder: Michael made good copy. As Fuhrman himself acknowledged, nobody would buy a book about Kenny Littleton. Kenny wasn’t related to anyone famous. No suspect other than a Skakel was bankable. And no Skakel but Michael met Fuhrman’s requisites. Tommy was old news. Dunne had already gone down that road. Fuhrman never could have claimed that he had solved the case by rolling out an old retread. The world would not have paid any attention to another book fingering Tommy, who had been the cops’ favorite suspect for 15 years. It wouldn’t make sense for Fuhrman to write about how badly the police had bungled their investigation if he agreed that they’d identified the correct suspect early in the investigation. For a successful book that would restore Fuhrman as a credible detective, he required a different Skakel to take the rap, one for whom he alone could take credit. Fuhrman needed a spectacular victory to overshadow his disgrace. “While his brother Thomas was a suspect from day one, Michael Skakel has avoided scrutiny and suspicion,” Fuhrman began the chapter in which he “solved” the 23-year-old case he’d studied for all of three months. Michael had pulled the short straw.

  In his book, Fuhrman introduced and diagrammed all the major elements that Benedict and Garr would subsequently adopt to convict Michael. In order to maneuver around Michael’s alibi, Fuhrman moved Martha’s time of death to 11:30 p.m. He did this simply by disregarding the professional forensics report and ignoring the barking dogs, the curfew, and Martha’s screaming. Voila! Martha was murdered at 11:30 p.m. after Michael’s return from Sursum Corda. Fuhrman invented the motive: Michael’s supposed jealousy toward his brother Tommy. This was the problem that befuddled Benedict: how would Michael have learned about Tommy kissing Martha if he left for Sursum Corda before the flirtation began? Benedict solved this puzzle by offering the jury the option that Michael never went to Sursum Corda. Fuhrman gave himself more flexibility for flights of imaginative fancy: in order to provide Michael with a motive, he clears out the Skakel homestead to make a honeymoon retreat for Tommy and Martha. Fuhrman extended the couple’s 20-minute, back-of-the-toolshed make-out session into a two-hour marathon love fest that moved into the Skakel house. When Michael discovers the blissful sweethearts upon his return from Sursum Corda, he screams at Tommy for stealing his girlfriend.