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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Sherman denies that he ever told Julie to lie. “We would never have asked her to perjure herself,” he told me. “I just asked her to add two and two and come up with four, not five or seven.” He explained to me that the Skakels were difficult witnesses, refusing to testify even to obvious facts unless they had clear memories. He cited the example of Rush Jr., who clearly remembered Michael being at the Terrien/Dowdles’ but refused to testify that Michael was in the car that went to the house: 27 years later, he had no clear memory of who was in the car. John Skakel refused to testify about any of the events that night, because he had no independent memories of the details of the evening. John would agree only to testify that he told the truth to the police in 1975; the police report records his saying that Michael was in the car and at the Terrien/Dowdle house. “They were impossible to deal with,” Sherman told me. The children’s rigid Catholic scrupulousness might have worked against Michael: post-verdict interviews quoted jury members as saying they regarded the Skakels’ memory gaps not as the product of rigorous honesty but as obfuscation.

  By May 1998, Garr was reduced to answering questions about what the press was treating as Fuhrman’s investigation. He had been fully eclipsed. Judging by his actions, he must have, at that point, made the sinister calculation that the only way to recover the reins was to pretend the idea for Michael’s indictment was his own. He relaunched the case based almost entirely on Fuhrman’s repackaging of Sutton’s worst-case scenario. The same case that Garr had previously dismissed as Sutton’s “theories and speculation” was now courtroom ready. It was Garr’s job to prep Benedict. “I’m in the process of bringing the new State’s Attorney up to date, and once that’s completed we’ll sit down and make some decisions,” he told the Boston Herald on May 18. “A grand jury is certainly being discussed.”

  In June, it happened. Superior Court Judge George Thim agreed to hear this case constructed of strands of lies and innuendo, pasted together with the flop sweat of a cop fighting to regain possession of his career case. Garr would soon show himself to be capable of stooping to unspeakable lows to win. He was seriously wounded and embarrassed, though there was one small consolation: Benedict never did call Fuhrman to testify.

  Dunne’s objective since 1991 was to link the Martha Moxley murder to a “Kennedy cousin,” whether it was Will Smith, John Kennedy, Tommy Skakel, or Michael Skakel. Describing the day of Michael’s guilty verdict, Dunne crowed in Vanity Fair, “The whole courtroom stared at [Michael], transfixed by his humiliation. This trial has ruined a once proud family. Their besmirched name will outlive them all.” In Vanity Fair’s December issue Dunne made the wild claim (which he repeated on Larry King Live) that he had information from a mysterious source that four other Skakels were involved in cleaning up the crime scene with Michael. Dunne continued to make an industry out of the Moxley murder. He parlayed his role in the case into a new Court TV series he hosted: Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice.

  Fuhrman also did well: the USA Network in fall 2002 aired a highly fictionalized docudrama based on Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich, lionizing Fuhrman for his role in solving the Moxley murder. In perhaps the case’s biggest irony, Fuhrman, fresh from being played by a Law & Order actor and leading a media mob to unjustly convict Michael, wrote a book called The Murder Business: How the Media Turns Crime into Entertainment and Subverts Justice.

  Len Levitt and Frank Garr also parlayed Michael’s conviction into career gold. Rupert Murdoch’s star editor, Judith Regan, printed their book Conviction in 2004 after other publishers rebuffed the project—by then the fourth book on the Moxley murder. Levitt friend Bernard Kerick, another notoriously crooked cop, opened Regan’s door to Levit. (Two years later, public revulsion forced Murdock to fire Regan when she published O.J. Simpson’s “fictional account” of how he committed the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.)

  Dunne said he had “contempt for the behavior of the Skakel family” because they came from privilege and abused it. Fuhrman echoed him: “[The Skakels] lived a privileged existence” and they “frequently abused that privilege.” But the capacity to write, to publish, and to hold public attention are privileges that Dunne, Fuhrman, and Levitt abused. The media have duties, too.

  PART V

  The Witnesses

  CHAPTER 14

  The Model

  Loose tongues are worse than wicked hands.

  —Yiddish Proverb

  I do not know precisely when Garr began despising the Skakel family, but in 1998, just after Fuhrman announced that he had “solved the crime,” Garr began pursuing the Skakels with the relentlessness of the French inspector Javert in Les Miserables. Taking his cue from Fuhrman and Dunne, his former archenemies, Garr now took his sights off Kenny Littleton and locked them on Michael Skakel. To prepare for his new crusade, Garr read the most scurrilous literature he could about the Skakel and Kennedy families.

  His friend Levitt describes a rendezvous with Garr in his Bridgeport redoubt: “The small, windowless cubicle where he was sequestered … had a bookshelf that was empty, save for three books that indicated his resolve—some would say his obsession—with the Moxley case,” and, for that matter, with my family. The three books that Levitt saw were: A Season in Purgatory, Dunne’s novel; The Other Mrs. Kennedy, a similarly inaccurate vicious anti-Kennedy screed posing as a biography of my mother, Ethel Kennedy (the author of the cut-and-paste hatchet job was a National Enquirer hack named Jerry Oppenheimer); and Senator, a revenge project by Richard Burke, a former aide to my uncle Senator Edward Kennedy, who scribbled this diatribe during a cataclysmic mental breakdown that ended with his arrest by the FBI for shooting bullets into his own car, to feign an assassination attempt. Both of the latter were published by St. Martin’s Press, which is notoriously biased against the Kennedys and correspondingly light on fact-checking. Taken together, those three works of fiction meshed the Skakels and Kennedys into an ugly expression of the worst kind of entitlement, arrogance, and abuse of wealth and power. That twisted confection perfectly characterizes the bigoted vision of the Kennedys and Skakels that Garr would bring to the Moxley case. “I hate the Skakels,” he told Levitt. I can’t blame him. I would hate the Skakels and the Kennedys too if those three books composed my entire library.

  After gorging himself on this brand of vitriol, Garr still faced the problem of evidence. Following 20 years of investigation, police had no fingerprints, no DNA, no forensic evidence, no documents, and no witnesses linking Michael to the crime. There was a good deal of physical evidence, but none tied to Michael. The only way to win such a case is with a confession. Garr didn’t have one, so he needed to gin one up. He began trolling for witnesses who could flesh out the Dunne-Fuhrman speculations.

  As Garr’s devoted scribe, Levitt chronicles his friend’s far-flung quest for confession witnesses with unabashed admiration. He describes Garr “cajoling, threatening, harassing, and bringing witnesses to testify against Michael.” But first Garr needed someone to cajole, threaten, and harass.

  Garr deployed a farsighted ploy. Fishermen call it “chumming.” He discovered that false statements about Michael that his office leaked to the New York Post and supermarket tabloids triggered a cascade of tips to the State’s Attorney’s office. His fabricated New York Post story reporting concocted entries from Martha’s diary had already triggered a wave of tabloid frenzy, and once Dunne and Fuhrman successfully pegged Michael as a “Kennedy cousin,” every rotten tidbit about the Skakels was tuna to the scandal sheet sharks. Supermarket shoppers like the National Enquirer have long paid top dollar for Kennedy stories. “Checkbook journalism” incentivizes sources to fabricate slanders for cash. Following Michael’s indictment in January 2000, lurid, salacious, and often wildly inaccurate descriptions of the Moxley killing wallpapered most supermarket checkout lines. So there was already a feeding frenzy. Garr just needed to churn it. At this point, Garr was technically collecting evidence for the grand jury proceedings, which in
America are officially sealed; those who violate grand jury secrecy can be charged with criminal contempt. But in this case, stories were not hard to come by. Garr’s office was hemorrhaging.

  In December 1998, the doorbell rang at author Richard Hoffman’s North Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. Garr was at the door, with a colossal Massachusetts state trooper. Hoffman invited them in and Garr got right down to business: he wanted all the materials that Hoffman had acquired for the purpose of ghostwriting Michael’s memoir. Waving a piece of paper in Hoffman’s face, Garr said he had a subpoena and Hoffman must turn over the documents. Hoffman offered the men coffee. “Okay, Mr. Hoffman. We can do it the easy way, or we can do it the hard way,” Garr threatened. Hoffman was intimidated. “Why ‘the hard way’?” asked Hoffman. “I’d invited him in, offered him coffee.” Within 45 minutes Garr was gone, having seized Michael’s book proposal, all the tapes of his interviews, and various Skakel family ephemera, including personal letters and vacation photos that he promised to promptly return to their owners. Garr promised that Hoffman’s materials were safe with him; they were bound for a grand jury proceeding and therefore sealed by force of law.

  Garr was lying; he had no subpoena. The document he was waving was a Connecticut grand jury summons for Hoffman to appear. Garr had no legal right to any of the materials. Since Garr didn’t get Hoffman to sign a consent to seize the property, the whole operation was illegal—technically theft. (Despite numerous pleas, my cousins have been unable to recover many of their personal materials, including mail, tapes, and photos.)

  Two days later, Hoffman was shocked to read virtually identical articles in the Boston Herald, Greenwich Time, and New York Post quoting extensively from his book proposal. He called Garr. “What the fuck?” Hoffman complained. “You said this was a confidential grand jury investigation, and now it’s all over the newspapers and people are talking about it on television?” Garr answered disingenuously, “It’s a big office, Rich. You can’t keep track of everything, and people who know journalists get their hands on things.” Garr added, “I’m not about to put them all against a wall and try to find the leak.” Hoffman suspected Garr was lying. “It was a crock of crap,” Hoffman says. “Obviously this was part of his strategy to begin with.”

  Every Kennedy is painfully familiar with the attention seeker who fashions a chance encounter with a celebrity into a disparaging anecdote. With each embellishment, the story grows and puts down roots until it becomes part of the landscape of the storyteller’s personal history. Michael’s newfound notoriety made him a magnet for such characters.

  Geranne Ridge, at 34, was a ditzy, self-described “part-time model” and “function coordinator” from Braintree, Massachusetts. During a gossipy phone call in the fall of 1997, she told her equally whimsical friend, aspiring fashion photographer Matt Attanian, that Michael Skakel was at a party—that she alone remembers—in her South Boston apartment—which Michael never visited. The phantom party occurred on a spring night in 1997, a period during which her friend, Marissa Verrochi, who knew Michael, was crashing on Geranne’s pull-out couch. Geranne claims that she overheard Michael saying, “Ask me why I killed my neighbor.” That is the exact wording of a chin-to-ankle sign Michael was forced to carry for two months at Élan. Stories about that sign leaked by Garr, from the Hoffman transcripts, had been crack to the supermarket rags. Geranne’s recounting sounded suspiciously identical to the lurid and wildly inaccurate version of the Moxley murder recently featured in the National Enquirer, a periodical that Geranne acknowledged reading regularly. To her friend Attanian, on the other end of the line, Geranne’s report sounded like Michael had confessed to Ridge and a room full of Verrochi’s college friends.

  Like a bee pollinating flowers, Attanian, himself a busy gossip, shared the story with friends, neighbors, and strangers, one of whom worked for the Massachusetts State Police. Before Attanian knew it, Garr was on the phone pressuring Attanian to tape his friend. “If this was your little sister who got killed, wouldn’t you want someone like you to come forward?” Attanian recalled, with some bitterness, that the detective promised that if he taped Geranne Ridge, Garr wouldn’t ask for anything further. It was another lie: Garr and Benedict would later subpoena Attanian.

  Garr also visited Geranne at her family catering business to question her directly about the story, without revealing that his source was Attanian. Geranne had recited so many different versions of the yarn to so many people that she didn’t realize her photographer friend had dropped the dime. Following Garr’s interrogation, she called Attanian, who didn’t pick up. Geranne left a distraught message on his home answering machine: “Hey, it’s me,” she said. “I just left. Um it didn’t go very well at all.” Geranne unleashed a featherbrained account of the details of the interview. “[Garr] said to me at the end, ‘Geranne, you’re saying you’ve only been with Michael Skakel once. Why would three people tell me you were with him on three different occasions and he admitted to the murder of Martha Moxley? We’re talking about a very brutal case, a very tragic case. And I’ve worked on this for 20 years, and if it takes 20 more years I’m going to continue working this case.’ He was so fucking tough. I was shaking. Mom said I didn’t quiver or anything. I did a really good job I guess. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you in any other way.’ I said, ‘I’ve only met Michael for 30 minutes and um, you know, I was in and out of the conversation’ and Martha Moxley did come up and I said that, jokingly, he mentioned, you know, the murder. I said that, um, ‘you know it was mostly in jest and I really can’t help you anymore and I’m sorry.’” Her agonizing talkathon marched onward, inexorably, until Attanian probably wished his recorder would mercifully run out of tape. In listening to the recording, my consolation was the thought that Geranne’s gifts for obfuscation and empty-headed whining about the dull yet somehow dramatic details of her daily life must have driven Garr nearly insane.

  Garr’s notes confirm Ridge’s recollection except that Garr never mentions Geranne’s statement that Michael was joking about the murder. “Marissa Verocchi did stay in my apartment for three weeks,” she told Garr, according to a transcript of his interview, “and during that visit, which was pretty unpleasant for me considering I’m 34 and she was 21 and, you know, quite immature. And she had people in and out from B.U. and on one occasion Michael Skakel was there. He was only there for 45 minutes [she says this time] and there were about eight other people there and I was in and out of the room. But I really don’t know anything. You know what I mean? I wasn’t really privy to the conversation. I was in my bedroom kind of disgusted that she had so many people over and didn’t even ask.” Over and over Ridge reiterated to Garr that she wasn’t in the room and heard nothing of substance. “As far as hearing anything about the murder or anything like that, I really have to be honest with you,” she said. “I didn’t.” Repeatedly Garr pressed her. “That is not what I have been told,” he said. But Ridge didn’t falter. As she would later testify under oath, she was telling Garr the absolute truth. Regardless of whether Michael had stepped foot in her apartment, she’d heard nothing.

  Attanian called her back, confused. Geranne’s summary of her story to Garr on his answering machine was far more mundane than the tale she had previously told him. “I don’t think you should have lied,” Attanian scolded. “I didn’t really lie,” she replied. “I said, I only heard half the conversation. I said, you know, he told us about wearing the poster around his neck and um, you know, that he hit her with a golf club.” Geranne was freaked out. Who would have told cops about her gossiping? Was her phone bugged? “I shouldn’t even talk about it on the phone,” she told Attanian. “They’re not tapping your phone, Geranne,” said Attanian, who was recording the conversation.

  Ridge alternated between saying that she’d been in her room and heard virtually nothing and adding tantalizing new details that she’d never before shared.

  RIDGE: I didn’t say anything about masturbating in the tree or anything.<
br />
  ATTANIAN: What do you mean ‘masturbating in a tree’? You never talked about …

  RIDGE: You didn’t hear about that?

  ATTANIAN: No.

  RIDGE: Oh yeah, this is the real story. John Doe was watching this particular girl at her bedroom window, changing. And he was up in a tree, masturbating, ’cause he liked her. She went and had sex with his brother Tommy the same night while he was outside smoking pot and doing LSD and acid and really big-time drugs. After he found out that John Doe’s brother had sex with this girl, he got so violent and he was so screwed up, he did that to her.

  ATTANIAN: Wow. And he told you he did that?

  RIDGE: Yes. But I didn’t get into all of that detail … I didn’t lie, but I didn’t like, you know totally blow my mouth off either.

  In the midst of the conversation, Ridge received a call from her doctor, and promised Attanian she’d call him right back. Back on the line, she complained to Attanian that the doctor refused to prescribe any more Compazine, a strong antipsychotic medication she claimed had been prescribed for nausea. The doctor refused even after Ridge told her how stressed she was feeling due to her involvement in the Skakel case!

  ATTANIAN: You told her that?

  RIDGE: I’m pissed … I did tell her. I said, ‘Confidentially, I have been involved in this duh-duh-duh-duh case and …’