Garr told Higgins that he would call him back in a few days. “Obviously, you want to think about it,” Garr told him. “You probably want to talk to somebody about it, but the bottom line is, that there is more, and we got to get it out.”
It’s challenging to contrive any interpretation of these words other than that Garr was suborning perjury. If Michael had indeed confessed that night, Higgins had much to gain and nothing to lose from reporting it to Garr in their first conversation. He was not implicating himself in any crime and he stood to make $100,000. So why not spill? The only reason could possibly be, as he told Garr over and over, Michael had made no confession.
On its face, Higgins’s story was obviously contrived. The only four details that Higgins distinctly recollected Michael telling him were all inaccurate. There had been no “party” on October 30. There was nothing resembling “woods” on the Skakel property. There was no golf bag laden with clubs. The Skakel clubs were scattered on the lawn or collected in a barrel near the mudroom door. Most damning, the Otter Rock Drive house had no garage. The property once had a three-car garage, but in 1969, following his wife’s cancer diagnosis, Rucky retro-fitted the building as a nursing suite. In reality, Higgins concocted the entire Élan conversation. The conversation, Michael says, never happened. Furthermore, Higgins was a notorious bully and one of Michael’s primary tormentors. He was the last person to whom Michael would confide.
“The idea of me confiding in John Higgins, when we were on Night Owl duty together, is insane. Higgins was a Night Owl; I was not. I never had a single conversation with him. Higgins was a sadist. He would relish kicking people when they were down. He was always the one hitting the hardest in the boxing ring. He loved inflicting pain. The only time I spoke to him the entire time I was there was when I asked the mob he was leading to stop killing me. He and Coleman and Harry Kranick, and two others, stuffed my head in a toilet, trying to drown me. Then they banged my head against a steel bed frame repeatedly until they knocked me unconscious. Then, they dropped me on the stage where I slept for the next six days. I wasn’t allowed to speak at all. They threatened to kill me if I spoke. I had to piss in my pants because I couldn’t ask to go to the bathroom. I wouldn’t talk to him. I never spoke to him. I hated him. He tortured me. It made me sick when they rehabilitated him during the trial. It was all lies. I was utterly powerless.”
“Higgins was a total psycho,” Kim Freehill told me. “He was very, very sadistic, a twisted guy that would do anything to cover his ass and be in Joe Ricci’s good graces.” Higgins testified that, on the night of the supposed confession, one of his duties was to report to Ricci anything that happened on his watch. Information was currency at Élan. Extracting personal dirt from inmates to expose vulnerabilities was a richly incentivized feature of its predatory culture. Ricci awarded inmates with status and privilege when they successfully mined secrets. “Higgins was someone who would do anything to gain points with Ricci,” says Kim. “He would not have long withheld this information.”
The claims by Higgins and by Greg Coleman that Michael had confessed while at Élan and that they then kept his secret are, according to other Élan witnesses, incredible. Referring to Higgins’s and to Coleman’s testimony, Élan’s Joe Ricci, as I’ve said before, told Time magazine that, “The notion of Michael’s confession is just preposterous. I was there, and I would know.” The facility had only a hundred students, and if Michael had confessed, “two things would have happened,” Ricci said. “Everybody in the facility would have known and talked about it. And we would have called our lawyers to figure out our obligations. Neither happened.” Unfortunately for Michael, Ricci died immediately before the trial, so the jury never heard his testimony. Ricci did talk to the press outside Michael’s pre-trial privilege hearing using almost the same language.
Alice Dunne, a counselor at Élan during Michael’s residence, scoffed at the idea that Michael would have shared personal thoughts with Higgins, who wielded a baseball bat during Night Owl duty. “I don’t think Higgins would have been someone he would have confided in,” she said. Higgins “had a reputation for not being truthful.” Another Élan inmate, Sarah Peterson, recalled that Higgins “seemed to really like making Mike Skakel’s life miserable.”
So that weekend, Garr gave Higgins the time to consider the minuscule risk of a perjury charge against the $100,000 in reward money.
Garr called Higgins’s wife over the weekend. There are no records of what Garr said or promised her. On Monday, Higgins and Garr spoke again. Higgins had suddenly experienced a change of heart. He told Garr that he’d just been informed that, because of some persistent shoulder problems, he could no longer work as an auto mechanic. “I’m pretty much shit out of luck as far as being a mechanic goes,” he told Garr. “Basically, I don’t have a job anymore.” Garr offered encouragement, a winking reference perhaps to the hundred grand. “You gotta make some plans,” he told Higgins. After several more minutes of buttering him up, Higgins gave Garr what he needed.
HIGGINS: Well, at the end of the conversation Michael was just obviously destroyed and he was just sitting there crying and he was probably crying for five minutes or so, and then he said that he killed her. He said, “I killed her.”
Higgins was regurgitating the precise lie that Garr had fed him three days earlier.
GARR: What did you say?
HIGGINS: I don’t think I said anything to him, and he just, I mean, that was the only words he said about it. He said, “I killed her,” and ya know, I probably gave the guy a hug.
Garr told Levitt that the hug was what convinced him that Higgins was telling the truth. “You don’t make up a detail like that,” Garr lied, admiring Higgins’s embroidery. Despite Garr’s best prodding, over the next hour Higgins refused to gild the lily. “I sense there might be a little bit more that maybe isn’t coming,” Garr said. “There must be more to the conversation, even fragmented as they may be, there had to be more, to link them all together.” But, all Garr’s pointed coaching could not persuade Higgins to further garnish his perjury.
Higgins refused to sign a formal statement, take a polygraph, or allow the police to tape his phone calls with Garr, but Garr recorded him anyway and used the tape to force him to testify at the trial. Higgins later admitted lying to Garr about Michael’s confession. When Garr told Higgins that he had him on tape, Higgins went ballistic. However, faced with the subpoena that Garr had promised would never come, he testified against Michael. Fellow prosecution witness Alice Dunne recalls seeing Higgins and the five other Élan witnesses at the hotel where Garr had stowed them all in Norwalk. “We’d hang out there and we couldn’t leave,” she said. During their conversations, the People magazine article and the reward money were the group’s persistent preoccupation. After Higgins testified, Michael and Stephen and their group spotted Higgins running down the street away from the courthouse.
Following the trial, Garr, Higgins, and Chuck Siegan had a falling out. At Michael’s habeas corpus hearing in 2013, Siegan testified that Higgins and he were close friends and business partners for a decade following their discharge from Élan. The two had had “hundreds of conversations,” many of which centered on their experiences at Élan. Higgins, he said, had never mentioned Michael’s confession. Higgins’s recollection only kicked in when Harry Kranick told him of the reward money. Higgins, Siegan testified, was “not a very truthful person.” Eight months after Siegan’s testimony, Higgins died, at 50, in his sleep. He lived just long enough to collect $10,000, his paltry share of Dorthy Moxley’s bounty.
CHAPTER 16
The Junkie
Lying is a medical feature of addiction.
—Bill Teutenberg, Certified Addiction Counselor
Frank Garr’s proudest recruit was a mendacious rogue named Greg Coleman. Coleman guarded Michael after his third escape attempt from Élan. In September 1998, Coleman told the one-man grand jury that Michael had introduced himself to Coleman by saying, “I’m goi
ng to get away with murder and I’m a Kennedy.” It’s hard for me to decide which is less plausible: the spontaneous homicide confession, or the notion of Michael Skakel boasting “I’m a Kennedy.” Predictably, this doubly improbable statement became tabloid fodder and poisoned public sentiment against Michael. Coleman’s recollection is similar to a National Enquirer headline shortly after Michael’s arrest, which quoted Michael as telling fellow Élan inmate Harry Kranick, “I killed that chick … it got me excited.” Kranick emphatically denied that he ever heard Michael Skakel make this or any of the similarly sensational statements attributed to him by the media; otherwise Garr would certainly have made him testify. Judging by his behavior, Coleman himself never expected to testify.
Coleman waited 23 years to report Michael’s extraordinary confession. Then one Sunday afternoon in 1998, 37-year-old Coleman made an anonymous call to a local NBC affiliate. He was either at home alone with his wife, or in the seedy Rochester, New York, motel room, the doghouse he occupied when his wife evicted him for some behavior attendant to his heroin addiction. It’s difficult to peg down the slippery details because every time Coleman opened his mouth, either to police or on the stand, the particulars changed. Watching MSNBC, Coleman caught a segment featuring Mark Fuhrman updating the Moxley investigation. High on heroin and crack, as he would admit later, Coleman called Channel 10 with new information about Michael Skakel. “The first words he ever said to me were, ‘I’m going to get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy.’” The station notified the Connecticut Police after tracking Coleman through caller ID.
To his fellow inmates, Coleman was as repugnant a low-life scoundrel as ever attended Élan. “Scumbag” is the word Alice Dunne uses to describe him. In 1978, Coleman, age 16, arrived at Élan to dodge jail time for a Rochester burglary. His hefty size and merciless fists quickly made him a Ricci favorite. Coleman led the mob stomping of Kim Freehill that nearly killed her, his blows causing her to lose control of her bladder and bowels before a helicopter medevaced her out of Élan. “He was a very sick guy,” Kim tells me. “A total degenerate drug addict. The only reason he even got involved in saying anything at all was for money for heroin.” After Élan, he did hard time in Attica and bids in diverse mental institutions.
During a lifetime of malevolence, violence, and relentless addiction that he fed by lying, larceny, and thieving, Coleman did win one fan: Frank Garr. Garr understood that Coleman was an unrepentant drug fiend, universally despised and mistrusted by those who knew him. Virtually anyone close to Coleman became the victim of his endless chicanery. But Garr, nevertheless, trusted him. “He was a great big teddy bear of a guy with enormous problems, but he was one of the most believable guys I ever talked to,” Garr told Levitt. “He was sick, physically and probably mentally because he had this monkey on his back. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth.” Among addiction treatment professionals, lying is a universally recognized element of the pathology of addiction. “All addicts lie,” says Bill Teutenberg, an ex-addict and 30-year veteran addiction counselor at the Caron Foundation. In the beginning, addicts lie because they have to, but it becomes ingrained in their behavior. “They lie when they’re happy, and when they’re sad; when they’re high, and when they’re jonesing. They lie because it’s daylight saving time. They lie just to stay in practice. Chronic habitual dishonesty is so much a feature of the disease that effective treatment of addiction always begins with teaching the discipline of rigorous honesty.”
In his paean to Coleman’s decency, Garr curiously failed to mention to Levitt the name John Regan Jr. Not long after Coleman’s television interview, Regan, a Rochester attorney, got a call from the Connecticut prosecutor’s office, seeking contact information for Coleman. If the caller was not Garr, it was someone working closely with him. As attorney for Coleman’s wealthy parents, Jack and Mary, Regan found himself frequently bailing Coleman out of hot water. “Why are you looking for him?” Regan asked, assuming that Coleman was in another jam. The caller said he was intending to use Coleman as a witness before the grand jury seeking to charge Michael with murder. Regan was incredulous. “You’re not seriously considering using Gregory on a grand jury to accuse someone of murder?” he asked. Regan told the caller a little bit about his personal experience with Coleman. “It would be fair to say that no one in their right mind, knowing Gregory, would put the slightest confidence in his contentions concerning the supposed admissions of Michael Skakel,” Regan wrote in a 2008 sworn affidavit. “Gregory was known to his family and me as an incorrigible drug addict who had served time in prison. During the time I was active in representing the Coleman family … I formed the opinion that Gregory regularly engaged in dishonest, deceitful, and criminal behavior in order to obtain money from his father.” The caller professed to be unconcerned. “We got plenty of other evidence,” he told Regan. “We’re going to get this guy.”
In the meantime, Vito Colucci, Mickey Sherman’s primary investigator, was doing his own reconnaissance on the prosecution’s star witness. Rochester area cops knew Coleman well. Colucci tracked down Inspector Paul Kaseman of the Ogden Police Department. “Are you sure this guy is going to be one of the main witnesses?” asked an astonished Kaseman. “He has zero credibility,” Kaseman said showing Coleman’s long rap sheet to Colucci. The last time Kaseman had seen Coleman, his abscessed dope-fiend arms were oozing from pustulated lesions. Major Mark Gerbino, then head of the Rochester Police Department’s homicide division, told Colucci he was absolutely dumbfounded that any prosecutor would put a lowlife like Coleman on the stand, especially as a star witness in a murder case.
Coleman made it, just barely, to the grand jury. An hour before taking the stand, he mainlined all the heroin in his hotel room. “I didn’t have enough,” he testified afterward. “I went into the hearing, sick from withdrawal and pneumonia.” Still, Coleman looked better than usual, thanks to a new suit, courtesy of Garr. He wore a graying Van Dyke beard and a fresh short haircut. By the following year, at a hearing to determine if Michael would be tried as a juvenile (he was 15 when Martha was murdered), Coleman weighed 340 pounds. He was incarcerated at the time and had made two requests to Connecticut authorities for cash and a reduced sentence in return for his testimony. Benedict had sprung the bloated addict from Rochester’s Monroe Correctional Facility, where he was serving eight months for criminal mischief after breaking into his estranged wife’s house. Benedict put him up in style, with room service and pay-per-view.
Coleman told Benedict’s one-man grand juror, George Thim, that Michael was a chatterbox, regularly dishing up murder confessions, in group therapy, and at Élan’s crowded dinner tables. He’d confessed five or six times—“at least!” But at Michael’s probable cause hearing the following year, Coleman swore that Michael confessed just twice, and only to him personally. “That was my recollection at the time.” He brushed aside the discrepancy, explaining that he had shot heroin an hour before his grand jury testimony.
Coleman explained that his memory for detail was impaired by his 25-bag-a-day heroin habit. Coleman boasted that he’d been one of Élan’s “head gorillas.” Michael’s confession, he swore, had followed his first escape, in November 1978, just a month after arriving at Élan. Ricci had assigned Coleman to guard Michael with a baseball bat on the stage near the dining room of Élan Building #3. It was in the wee hours of the night that Michael confided in him. “I made the comment to Mr. Skakel, ‘Boy, this guy can get away with murder,’” Coleman testified, referring to Ricci. “And he said, ‘I am going to get away with murder because I’m a Kennedy.’ And he went into telling me how he made advances to this girl where he lives and she spurned his advances and he drove her skull in with a golf club … in the woods.” Coleman testified that he’d seen two TV shows about the crime, including the tabloid show A Current Affair, yet he still couldn’t manage to get the details of the crime or crime scene right. Coleman swore that Michael told him he had killed Martha with a driver. “He made t
he comment that two days later he had gone back and masturbated on the body,” Coleman testified. “That’s what he told me.” In fact the golf club that killed Martha was an iron, and the police removed Martha’s body the next day.
The circumstances of the confession—while Michael was being guarded by a giant troll with a bad temper and a baseball bat—should have left the jury skeptical. “Coleman was saying that when I was in the corner, I was talking,” Michael says. “We were not allowed to talk. If you even moved your head, you’d get punched in the face. You peed in your pants because they wouldn’t let you go to the bathroom.”
Furthermore, what Coleman said had happened, simply did not happen. The “I’m a Kennedy” line is an inconceivable utterance. “That’s so not anything that ever came out of Michael Skakel’s mouth,” Alice Dunne says. “It makes the hair on my neck stand up to say it because he never, ever played that card. He just didn’t. And I don’t think anybody there even knew it until that general meeting when it became obvious. Michael was never walking around there like he was more special than anyone.”
At Michael’s reasonable cause hearing in Stamford, on June 20, 2000, Coleman was a mess. On the stand, he had trouble identifying Michael, even though he was sitting right in front of him. He was sweating and twitching, and he seemed unable to take his eyes off the clock, a symptom he attributed to heroin withdrawal. Garr had put him up at a Howard Johnson’s off the interstate in Darien, guarded by a brace of state troopers. He was to testify again the following day. The troopers called Garr and told him that their star witness was in trouble, pallid, sweating, and dopesick. Garr rushed over and found Coleman splayed on the bed. “I am dying,” Coleman shouted. “I have to cop. You are either going to get me drugs or I’m going back to Rochester.” Garr threw him in his car and began a desperate search to get his witness high. Their odyssey ended at Greenwich Hospital, which propped him up with enough methadone to last him through his next morning’s testimony.
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 30