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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  “Martha is embarrassed and sickened by the confrontation,” Fuhrman writes. “The two brothers seem to be fighting over a toy. As they exchange vicious threats, Martha slips out the back door.” Fuhrman has Michael, furious at the jilting, grabbing a golf club and pursuing Martha. He beats her to death, and drags her under the tree. “To most people this would be a horror, but to him this is a conquest,” Fuhrman writes. “He pulls her pants and panties down below her knees … masturbates while staring at Martha’s ravaged body. Once he ejaculates, he runs back to his house” to organize the 30-year cover-up.

  Having dispensed with the sleuthing, Fuhrman picks up his psychiatrist’s pipe and pad. Michael’s “psychological profile reveals a severely disturbed youth with violent tendencies,” he diagnoses. Hmmmm. Who is he really talking about here? In the 1980s, Fuhrman attempted to earn disability pay from the LAPD by claiming to be mentally unbalanced and homicidal. “I have this urge to kill people, which upsets me,” he told a police psychiatrist. Fuhrman admitted that he got into altercations nearly every day of his life and confessed that he needed to be “violent to exist.”

  And the long-touted role of the Kennedy family in the cover-up? Only more speculation. For example, Fuhrman surmises about what the police might have discovered had they subpoenaed Rucky’s phone records for Halloween. “It would have been interesting to see if any of the phone calls had been made to Ethel or Ted Kennedy, or Stephen [Steve] Smith, the Kennedy family fixer,” he wrote. “If the phone calls occurred before 12:30 p.m., then someone in the house knew something had happened before Martha’s body was discovered.”

  The phone records probably would have been a lot less interesting than Fuhrman imagines. First of all, Rucky wasn’t home; he was in the Adirondack wilderness. But so much for detective work! Second, Fuhrman’s idea that Rucky would call my uncles Teddy Kennedy or Steve Smith or my mother to enlist their help in covering up a murder demonstrates that Fuhrman might be just as dense as he is racist. Quite apart from loathing each other’s politics, there was no social discourse between the Skakel and Kennedy families. Neither Teddy nor Steve, I imagine, would have recognized Rucky in a crowd; they hadn’t spent any time in each other’s presence since my parents’ wedding 25 years before, aside from Uncle George’s 1965 funeral. Uncle Steve’s interaction with Rucky was mainly through lawyers, and Steve’s regard for the Skakels was particularly severe. His role in managing my mother’s finances had pitted him in a pitched battle with the two surviving Skakel brothers since my father’s death in 1968. He was annoyed at them for squandering the company’s once-immense value, mismanaging its assets, and monopolizing its resources—all to my mother’s detriment. For seven years he had fought with them, perennially threatening litigation. The brothers, in turn, were furious at his efforts to wrest control of GLC from them. Steve Smith would have been the last person that Rucky Skakel would turn to in a jam—and particularly if he were trying to conceal a crime. My father had already taught Rucky that the Kennedys placed principle before family loyalty when, as attorney general, he prosecuted Rucky and his business partners for thin antitrust violations. Steve would have called the FBI if he’d ever gotten wind of any kind of crime—let alone murder—perpetrated by the Skakel or, for that matter, the Kennedy family.

  Murder in Greenwich was as much a work of fiction as was A Season in Purgatory. Levitt told me that Fuhrman “based his conclusions about Michael on intuition rather than fact.” Nevertheless, the book got Fuhrman on television talking about something besides his perjury conviction and racism.

  Garr dismissed Fuhrman’s bestseller to the New York Daily News as a cut-and-paste rewrite of old newspaper stories and police files. The Greenwich Police said that Fuhrman’s work was “riddled with inaccuracies and contains no new information.” Nevertheless, the book lit a fire beneath Connecticut law-enforcement officials, and made Michael their new target.

  Fuhrman’s book came out in May 1998. Four months later in his own book, former Greenwich News editor Tim Dumas speculated darkly and baselessly that Browne may have been “paid off” to take a dive on the Moxley case. In April, under increasing public pressure to make an arrest he wasn’t ready to make, State’s Attorney Browne abruptly retired. Solomon stepped down soon thereafter, leaving Garr as the senior investigator in Connecticut. Garr was now in charge of the Moxley case. Although Solomon, who was lead investigator on the homicide for 20 years, would not speak to me about the case, a source close to him who wishes to remain unnamed told me in November 2002, “Jack believes that your cousin did not commit the murder. He is absolutely sick and beside himself because he believes an innocent man is in the can. But Jack is a cop through and through, and he will not make any public statement that might embarrass his law-enforcement colleagues.”

  By May, Fuhrman was still jawboning on the talk-show circuit, shilling his book, patting his own back for solving the case, and telling the press that the only way Connecticut authorities could save face would be to call a grand jury. “I’ve given them an outline,” he boasted on CNN on May 16, 1998. “This book is an outline of a homicide investigation and it’s definitely an outline to do a grand jury, the people that you need to call, the questions you need to ask, and the way that the case probably went down.” He told anybody who’d listen that if a grand jury were to be called, the world had one guy to thank. “I’m going to take credit for it, along with the Moxley family,” he told USA Today. He said he’d rescued an investigation that had been thoroughly bungled, most notably by Garr.

  On June 17, 1998, one month after the publication of Fuhrman’s book, Browne’s successor, the new State’s Attorney, Jonathan Benedict, convened a one-man grand jury consisting of Judge George Thim, sitting, according to grand jury witness Richard Hoffman, “at a collapsible plastic table from Staples” in Bridgeport. That would be the State’s first step in its $25 million effort to imprison Michael Skakel.

  A banner on the paperback version of the book advertises Murder in Greenwich as “the book that spawned the Connecticut Grand Jury investigation.” “I firmly believe,” Dunne wrote in the October 2000 issue of Vanity Fair, “Murder in Greenwich, for which I wrote the introduction, is what caused a grand jury to be called after 25 years.”

  Levitt’s description of his friend Garr during these months is of an emasculated man raging at the gelding Fuhrman was giving him. Garr’s new boss, Benedict, was obviously monitoring the press closely and paying more attention to Fuhrman than to the detective in charge of the case. In the midst of this racking humiliation, Garr learned that his nemesis, Dunne, had befriended his new boss, Benedict, and introduced Michael’s prosecutors to Garr’s tormentor, Fuhrman.

  Garr was incensed that Benedict sent two of his assistants, Chris Morano and Dominick Galluzzo, to meet repeatedly with Fuhrman in Manhattan. “I am telling Benedict that Fuhrman is the most notorious liar in America,” Garr told Levitt. “I am hearing that Fuhrman is pushing to get himself called as a witness before the grand jury and that Morano and Galluzzo are helping him. I’m telling myself it will be over my dead body.” Garr’s rage approached apoplexy when he learned that Morano had become friends with his Hadlyme, Connecticut, neighbor and Garr’s bête noire: Dominick Dunne. Levitt tried to soothe Garr by telling him the important thing was that a grand jury was finally being called. But Garr and Levitt both knew the truth: Dunne and Fuhrman had swept into town and stolen their case. By Levitt’s own admission, the jealousy and humiliation they both experienced became nearly unbearable. “At our lowest ebb, we resolved to tell our story,” Levitt wrote. This was the moment Garr and Levitt struck a deal to write a book that would once again make the Moxley case their own. They agreed to a 50/50 split. Garr now had a vested interest in the case being salable. While Garr had a legal responsibility to practice blind justice, the book deal with Levitt gave him a financial incentive to make sure that a “Kennedy cousin” was on the gibbet.

  After indicting Michael, Benedict was legally bound by the US
Supreme Court’s Brady decision to turn over any information that might exculpate Michael. The Brady law requires prosecutors to keep an “open file”; any evidence collected by police must be available to the defense during the discovery period preceding the trial. Garr, on the stand during Michael’s new trial appeal, acknowledged his legal obligation, “basically that everything is available to the defense.” Three sources had reported that Garr was working on a book. So Michael’s lawyer specifically asked prosecutors if any book deals existed that might prejudice investigators against Michael. Benedict was adamant that no such book deals existed. Garr, who, in addition to his role as evidence manager, was a key witness for the prosecution, never revealed his conflicts to Michael’s lawyers or to the Court. His bosses in the police and prosecutor’s office apparently knew of his covert deal and urged him to keep it quiet.

  There were additional political pressures that narrowed Garr’s and Benedict’s focus on Michael. Right up until the publication of his book, Fuhrman claimed that both the Greenwich Police and Garr still considered Kenny Littleton a prime suspect. Why, then, did they give him immunity just a couple months later? Benedict and Garr must have concluded that a prosecution of Littleton—especially if it failed, and any prosecution 23 years after the crime stood small chance of success—would not end the public debate over their competence and integrity. The loss would instead inflame Fuhrman and Dunne, who had already accused the police of giving the Skakels a pass by making Littleton the fall guy. The only way to still the criticism was to prosecute a Skakel. To clear Tommy, as Benedict explained to Judge Kavanewsky, they would need Littleton to testify in support of his French Connection alibi. The case against Michael was weak, but by indicting a Skakel, investigators could at least quiet Fuhrman’s charges that they were sycophants and cowards. Dunne had already sent signals that he would be satisfied short of a conviction, so long as Connecticut indicted Michael. “I just want to see this guy indicted. I just want to see this guy with handcuffs on,” he told Burden of Proof.

  According to Fuhrman, members of Benedict’s staff told him that they planned to use Murder in Greenwich as the blueprint for the prosecution. In fact, the State followed the book practically line by line. Adopting Fuhrman’s theory, the State argued that Michael fabricated the masturbation story during his Sutton interrogation in 1993, after Sutton detectives told him that forensic expert Henry Lee was about to conduct DNA testing (which was not available in 1975) on evidence from the crime scene. According to Fuhrman, Michael concocted his masturbation story to inoculate himself against the possibility that police would find his semen on Martha’s body.

  There are numerous problems with Fuhrman’s theory. First, the tree in which Michael said he had attempted to masturbate was a football field’s length in distance from the tree where Martha’s body was found. Second, Michael said he did not masturbate to orgasm. The story would therefore not account for his semen on or near Martha’s body. Third, Michael did not invent the story in the early 1990s for his Sutton interview; he has been telling it consistently for at least 23 years. Michael told the story to his aunt Mary Ellen Reynolds in 1979; to his psychiatrists, Stanley Lesse and Hyman Weitzen; to Monsignor (later auxiliary Bishop) William McCormack in 1980; and to many friends before the 1990s. I heard him tell it several times, beginning in 1983. The prosecution’s own witness Michael Meredith testified that he heard the story from Michael in 1987, long before DNA was widely used in criminal cases, while staying at the Skakel home. Michael’s explanation for his failure to tell the story to the police in the first instance—adolescent embarrassment and fear of a puritanical and wrathful father—is plausible. As Jay Leno suggested, referring to the Skakel trial, many people would prefer to be found guilty of murder than be suspected of masturbating in a tree: “I would rather confess to murder. Wouldn’t you?” Leno quipped. Characteristically, Michael’s lawyer, Mickey Sherman, never defended Michael against the accusation of recent fabrication. I told Sherman several times during the trial that I would testify about Michael’s pre-Sutton recounting, but he never called me, or any other witness, to rebut Benedict’s claim.

  Taking his cue from Fuhrman, Benedict argued that Michael had killed Martha in a drunken, jealous rage after seeing his older brother kiss her. But Michael says, and other Skakels agree, that he was a virgin with crushes on a family friend, Francie, and his platonic “girlfriend,” Jackie Wetenhall. “Martha was cute,” he told me when I visited him in prison in September 2002, “but every girl was cute to me.” Michael says that he was unaware of any romance between Martha and his brother. “I never knew about Tom and Martha,” he told me during the same prison visit, “until I heard it on TV in 1998.” This claim is tenable. None of the Skakels ever saw the Sutton reports, which first reported Tommy’s romance with Martha. Sheridan, for obvious reasons, prevented the Skakels from reading the report, which he kept under lock and key in his office. Nor did the Skakels discuss Martha’s murder among themselves. Because of his dyslexia, Michael doesn’t read much. He has still never read my article in The Atlantic defending him. He steers clear of news reports about the murder. “I don’t want to spend my life in the fetal position,” he explains.

  Benedict would also ape Fuhrman’s scam for moving back Martha’s long-established 10:00 p.m. time of death in order to get around Michael’s alibi. To support a later time of death, Fuhrman quotes renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who had only limited access to the case file in 1998. Fuhrman suggests that Baden believed the time of death could have been as late as 1:00 a.m. Baden told me that he was surprised to learn of Fuhrman’s assertion. “I’m sure I told Fuhrman that I thought the time of death was about 10:00 p.m.,” he says. “If he didn’t put it in the book that means he didn’t agree with it. I wouldn’t have gone as far as 1:00 a.m.” At my request, Baden reexamined the more complete autopsy notes available from the case file. He noticed in the notes a fluid in the stomach that Connecticut’s medical examiner Wayne Carver had testified in Michael’s trial was possibly blood that had drained from her throat wound down into the stomach. “That’s not blood,” he tells me. “It’s described by Gross as black fluid. Blood resembles coffee grounds in the stomach. It’s coffee or Coca-Cola.” Baden says that since Martha was last seen at 9:50 p.m., and that the stomach absorbs fluids quickly, in about 30 minutes, he can now provide a more exact estimate of when Martha died. “I think 10:00 or 10:15 or so would be a very appropriate time of death,” he says. Referring to Fuhrman, he adds, “The police are not trained to determine time of death. The medical examiner is.”

  Fuhrman’s story, and the prosecution’s theory, supposed that Michael killed Martha in a jealous rage toward his “nemesis,” brother Tommy. Their hypothesis required that 15-year-old ADHD-afflicted Michael (admittedly drunk and stoned) demonstrate the sangfroid of a criminal mastermind: murdering her savagely, and then having the clarity to clean himself up, dispose of the murder weapon, and take an active role in maintaining a conspiracy that remained drum-tight for nearly 30 years.

  The theory of an intricately organized Skakel conspiracy is comical to anyone who knows the family; neither Fuhrman nor Dunne did. Some members of the Skakel clan may be impulsive and even reckless. Several Skakels made a series of disastrous decisions about how to handle this case. But none of them is a murderer or conspirator. They are deeply religious and lack the moral bankruptcy to carry personal loyalty to the level of depravity—much less the organizational discipline and the cohesiveness to either form or perpetuate such a conspiracy.

  I have spoken to all the Skakels about the murder, and they are as confused as various investigators have been over the years about who committed the crime. I have heard different Skakels speculate about the possible guilt of a diverse list of suspects. (Interestingly, most of them told me they have long believed that the strongest evidence points to former Skakel gardener Franz Wittine.) All of the Skakels want to see Martha’s killer in jail. None of them ever imagined that Michael
would be charged with, much less convicted of, the crime.

  But none of them would lie to protect Michael. Even when Sherman instructed Julie to lie under oath about her memories of that evening, she refused with the full support of her brothers. At the trial, Andrea Shakespeare (Renna) testified that the night of the murder, before being driven home by Julie after dinner, she was “under the impression” that Michael was still in the Skakel house after the older boys had left for the Terrien/Dowdle home—highly ambiguous and uncertain testimony that nonetheless gave jurors room to doubt Michael’s alibi. According to Julie and Stephen, on the morning that Julie was to testify at Michael’s trial, Sherman assembled the two of them; Sherman’s legal assistant, Jason Throne; and his son, Mark Sherman, who is also a lawyer, at Julie’s home. Sherman told Julie, “You have to say that you remember that the boys were still at the house when you took Andrea home.” Julie replied, “I can’t. That’s not true.” Sherman admonished her, “You have to. It’s the only way.” Julie again refused. Stephen later found her weeping outside the courthouse. According to Stephen, she was devastated by the prospect that her refusal to lie might put Michael in jail. Stephen told me that he found Sherman’s young assistant, Throne, and begged him to get Sherman to back off. “I told him, ‘You can’t do this. She’s going to have a nervous breakdown.’”