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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  10. Sherman blew his summation. Considering Sherman’s swashbuckling carriage and brassy self-promotion as a master of the drama and stagecraft of litigation, his closing arguments were a slow-motion train wreck. He began with an artless appeal to the jury’s sympathy, using implausible imagery more appropriate coming from an underfunded public defender representing an indigent client than a highly paid lawyer for a family the jury perceived as multimillionaires. “We didn’t have the high-tech delivery. You don’t see the big fancy jury expert sitting at our table,” Sherman said. “It’s somewhat low key. It is me and three kids, and you can see we haven’t given you any boutique defenses. We didn’t bring in one expert. There is no memory expert; there is no dog expert.”

  Sherman’s principal visual aid was a chart explaining the concept of reasonable doubt, the centerpiece foundation argument upon which every criminal defense lawyer in Anglo-American history has built their defense. Unfortunately, Sherman’s offered a color-coded chart to calculate the percentage at which doubt becomes reasonable. A more experienced defense lawyer would have known that courts often frown upon—and routinely disallow—diagrams purporting to explain the concept of reasonable doubt. Judge Kavanewsky ruled the chart improper. Sherman was so rattled by the rejection that he neglected to make the reasonable doubt argument at all. It’s astonishing. During his entire summation, Sherman never used the words “reasonable doubt.”

  The defense theory was that Kenny Littleton, not Michael, killed Martha. But Sherman seemed tentative, at best. Here was all the fire he could muster: “I am not here to say, you know, here is the guy who did it,” he told the jury. “I am not here to persuade you that that’s the guy.” Sherman then soft-sold the fact that police found a hair microscopically similar to Littleton’s at the crime scene: “Does that mean Ken Littleton did it?” he asked. “Damned if I know!” At the habeas corpus hearing, Bridgeport attorney Michael FitzPatrick, who himself had tried three death penalty cases, testified that he’d never seen anything like it. “Mr. Sherman did more damage to his client’s defense than any piece of evidence that the prosecution presented,” FitzPatrick told the appellate court. “These statements destroyed his third-party culpability defense. This is one of the poorest summations I have seen in my entire career.”

  Though Sherman suggested that there was some folksy gain in avoiding extravagances like expert witnesses and jury consultants, there’s a more plausible explanation for his bare-bones strategy: Sherman would have had to deduct expert fees from his own paycheck. Up until December 2001, Sherman billed Rucky for his own hours and expenses, and for the hours of anyone else hired to work the case. Four months before trial, with the cost of Michael’s defense spiraling out of control and the Skakels running aground financially, Sherman agreed to revisit the fee structure. In a letter to Michael dated December 5, 2001, Sherman proposed a much simpler payment plan. “My proposal to you is that I shall no longer bill you by the hour or for any legal fees, disbursements, or expenses or cost relating to your defense,” he wrote. “I will accept a lump sum of $450,000, which I believe is a fair sum.” He promised that the Skakels would not be nickeled and dimed any longer. This fee would cover everything he’d need to mount Michael’s defense: experts, lawyers, investigators, expenses, everything. Rucky sold the Windham house to pay Sherman’s bill. Rather than deposit that sum in the Skakel’s client account, Sherman dumped it straight into the firm’s operating account—essentially his own checking account.

  He did not use the money to hire Ofshe or Loftus. Loftus charges $500 per hour for her time, plus travel expenses. Had Sherman done so, Michael may have kept his freedom and watched his son grow up. The month Sherman got his big check, he paid $54,000 cash for two new Jeeps for his grown children. They toured Greenwich in these trophy cars bought with Skakel money. Stephen has an encyclopedic knowledge of the case, but he didn’t know this fact. A couple days after I shared it, he admitted it nearly caused him to drive his fist through a wall. Sherman promised to provide monthly statements on how he spent the $450,000, but he never provided the Skakels with any accounting. Following the trial, with Michael in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, news items reported that the Skakels were stiffing attorneys who had worked for Michael’s defense. Sherman wasn’t paying his subordinates or subcontractors. Stephen wanted to throttle Sherman. He had to personally locate the court stenographer’s house, show up on her doorstep, and drop off a check to obtain the trial transcripts Michael’s appeals team desperately needed. Sherman had shafted her as well.

  AT 10:30 a.m. on June 7, 2002, in Norwalk, after three days deliberating, jurors announced they had reached a verdict. As they filed in, the jurymen averted their eyes from Michael, looking instead toward Dorthy Moxley. “In file number FST CR00-135792 T., State of Connecticut v. Michael Skakel, what say you, Mr. Foreperson, is he guilty or not guilty of the crime of murder?” Kavanewsky asked. “Guilty,” the foreman replied. A marshal cuffed Michael. Michael’s brother David reached out to touch him. The marshal pushed him away. When Kavanewsky asked the lawyers if they had anything to say before he dismissed the jurors, Michael spoke up. “I’d like to say something,” he said. “No sir!” Kavanewsky barked. In the time it took for jurors to read the verdict, Michael had become the most despised category of people in our society—a convicted murderer. As Garr, Benedict, and the Moxleys celebrated, Sherman addressed the cameras in front of the courthouse. “This is certainly the most upsetting verdict I have ever had or will ever have in my life,” he declared. “But I will tell you that as long as there is a breath in my body, this case is not over as far as I’m concerned.” By then, Michael was already en route to the prison, where they stripped him naked upon arrival for a cavity search. “What must Georgie be thinking?” was all Michael could think about. “I was supposed to be home hours ago to feed him.” He would see his son, George, then 3, only a handful of times over the next 11½ years.

  That night, Sherman and Benedict joined Dunne and Dorthy and John Moxley on Larry King Live for a cloying display of mutual admiration. It was a sickening kind of theater, both men pretending that Benedict had won the case fair and square on its merits. At least some of them knew the truth: Sherman had simply blown it through sheer incompetence. By then the Skakels understood what Sherman was: a colossal fraud. King asked Benedict to assess Sherman’s courtroom performance. “Mickey gave an excellent argument, did a tremendous job confronting each and every witness,” Benedict said. “I just don’t think he had the evidence to pull off an acquittal.” Later, King asked if Sherman thought that Benedict’s closing won the case. “I don’t know that the prosecutor’s close won this,” Sherman said. “And I think Jon doesn’t believe that either. I think he did a hell of a job and I was the first one to shake his hand when he gave that argument. I agree with Jon Benedict when he says, it’s evidence that wins it, and the people’s perception of evidence. It’s not the arguments themselves.” Sherman offered a predictable response when King asked him what he and Michael had spoken about following the verdict. “Michael being Michael was very consoling to me,” Sherman said. “I was a wreck. Still am a wreck. And Michael was saying, ‘Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay.’”

  During Michael’s first weeks in prison, Sherman came to see him twice. “I screwed up on the jury selection,” he told Michael. “Next time we’ll pick a better jury.” On his first visit, he gave interviews in front of Newtown’s Garner Correctional Institute to reporters, whom someone had alerted. The prison guards made it painfully clear to Michael that they were angry at Sherman’s showboating antics. Sherman’s second visit only came after Michael’s siblings called him and asked him why he hadn’t gone back; Newtown was only an hour away from Greenwich. After that visit, Michael never saw Sherman again during his 11½ years behind bars.

  Two months after the verdict, Sherman stared mournfully from Fairfield County’s newsstands; his full-length portrait graced Greenwich magazine’s cover. Sherman posed on a beach on Lo
ng Island Sound, wearing a black suit with a navy blue T-shirt underneath, a funereal token to Don Johnson’s Miami Vice look. “Skakel Verdict Haunts His Lawyer Mickey Sherman” read the headline. Mickey offered no real mea culpa. All of his powers as an attorney, he said, couldn’t overcome the perception that Michael was a “spoiled brat”; his conviction had been a fait accompli from the moment Michael wore the “ascot” to his arraignment. In Sherman’s 2008 memoir, he barely mentioned Michael’s case, but he did get back cover blurbs from Dunne and Nancy Grace, the two most vocal members of the pitchfork brigade.

  In March 2011, Sherman reported to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Otisville, New York, to begin serving a one year and one day sentence on charges of tax evasion. He’d failed to pay $420,710 in taxes for 2001 and 2002, the years the Skakels were paying him. He’d had years of warnings before being sent away; the IRS had been trying, and failing, to collect taxes from Sherman since 1997. Rather than pay what he owed, he spent more than $20,000 a year on dues and expenses at Stamford’s Rockrimmon Country Club. He paid $120,000 annually to finance his ex-wife’s mortgage on their Stamford mansion. In just the year 2000, he paid almost $100,000 for her American Express bill. He heeded none of the many IRS warnings to curb his spending. According to a government sentencing memo, Sherman’s tax attorney “told the revenue officer that there was a better chance of a Martian landing than getting the defendant Sherman to make estimated tax payments.” Three years before Sherman pleaded guilty, he watched his partner Joe Richichi fork over $1.4 million in back taxes and penalties to the IRS and receive his own 16-month tax evasion prison sentence. (Richichi died of cancer in 2014.) Richichi’s prison bid didn’t scare Sherman straight. “How can an experienced criminal defense lawyer, who some might consider to be reasonably intelligent, have screwed myself up so bad?” Sherman asked a reporter shortly after his release from prison. “I ask the same question every night at about four in the morning. I don’t have an answer.”

  The Skakel family gave Mickey Sherman the gift for which every defense lawyer yearns: a career case representing a genuinely innocent paying client. They paid him $2.2 million to save Michael Skakel from unjust imprisonment—and a half million dollars more to his subcontracted lawyers. Sherman squandered that fortune and sacrificed Michael on the altar of his ego.

  PART VII

  The Ghosts

  CHAPTER 21

  The Killers?

  I know what happened to your cousin. He got screwed. He really did.

  I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

  —Tony Bryant

  The three-page single-spaced letter rolled out of The Atlantic’s office fax machine early in 2003, not long after the magazine published my article about Michael’s trial. My editor forwarded it to me. The writer opened with a provocative line. “Unless I’ve been lied to, the jury got it all wrong.”

  I’m accustomed to receiving letters from strangers. Over the past 60 years, I’ve received many thousands. Most of them come from admirers of my family. Occasionally I get hate mail, even death threats, often from people with emotional disabilities. I’m familiar with the tiny script, the wobbly letters, the stories about secret cousins and dark conspiracies. The fax from Crawford “Tres” Mills had none of these qualities. I couldn’t assume his story was true, but its writer appeared solid and sane.

  “I went to school with Michael Skakel,” Crawford wrote. “I think we met when I was 13 and didn’t see much of him after Martha Moxley was killed the next year.” Crawford’s prose was florid, but his references were all legitimate and verifiable. Crawford identified himself as a classmate of Michael Skakel at Brunswick. He recounted that two years earlier following Michael’s arrest and while his trial was pending, Crawford’s friend Tony Bryant confided in him that he had been in Belle Haven on Mischief Night in 1975. Tony claims he was with two chums from a Manhattan public high school who, that evening, murdered Martha Moxley.

  “Tony’s full name is Gitano Bryant,” Mills wrote. “More than one Bryant has had successful fields in the NBA. Tony’s brother Wallace played for the Mavericks. His cousin Kobe plays for the L.A. Lakers.”

  During his Brunswick years, Mills had met the men whom Tony fingered as the killers. He knew them only as “Adolph” and “Burr.” Both of them subsequently confessed to Tony their roles in killing Martha. Except for his mother, Tony told no one the secret for 27 years. But Michael’s indictment prompted Tony to recount his tale to Crawford. Tony wanted Crawford to take the information about Adolph and Burr to the police, but he begged Crawford not to identify him as the source. Tony was married with four young children and was living in Florida, where he was president of a tobacco company. Tony felt he needed to keep a low profile to protect his family and his business. Having brought the two murderers to Greenwich in 1975, Tony, who is African American, feared becoming a suspect himself. He had shared what he knew of the events of October 1975 with his mother soon after Martha’s murder. She was particularly fearful that Tony’s skin color would make him an attractive target for law enforcement.

  After reading Crawford’s letter, I picked up the phone. My call took him by surprise. “So, you got my fax?” With his permission, I recorded our conversation. Crawford said he had told this tale to Mickey Sherman, Jonathan Benedict, Frank Garr, Dorthy Moxley, and many others prior to Michael’s trial. No one was interested. Over the next several weeks, I would track down and talk to Tony Bryant and the two men he said were Martha’s killers. I confirmed and corroborated Crawford’s story and became convinced along the way that Adolph and Burr murdered Martha Moxley. I turned the information over to Michael’s new lawyers, who included it as the gravamen of their motion for a new trial. At least one judge was also persuaded by the evidence, which triggered a chain of events that helped lead to Michael’s release on a habeas corpus petition 11½ years after his conviction. Crawford ultimately testified at Michael’s new trial hearing, at which I also testified. The evidence against Adolph and Burr is far more compelling than any evidence the state had against Michael or any other suspect. In my opinion, that evidence suggests that the two men are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet, state officials are still focused on keeping Michael in prison, instead of catching the real killers.

  TONY BRYANT attended Brunswick from 1972 until 1975, where he became best friends with Crawford Mills. The third member of their trio was another Brunswick classmate, Neal Walker, who was Michael Skakel’s Belle Haven neighbor, son of Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker and brother to Martha Moxley’s friend Margie Walker.

  Years after the murder, Tony graduated from the University of Houston and the University of Tennessee Law School, and then moved to Los Angeles and worked briefly in the entertainment industry. Tony wrote several screenplays, including one that aired on television. The two Greenwich boys stayed in touch with Tony after college. They saw him periodically for dinner in New York and at parties in Connecticut. They chatted by phone on birthdays and holidays.

  In the late 1980s, Crawford began writing a screenplay called Little Martha based on the Moxley murder. Crawford told me that he crafted fictional composite characters to make a statement about the town of Greenwich. Although he did not identify any of his protagonists by their real names, the script “pointed the finger” at Tommy and Kenny Littleton as the likely culprits. Tony called Crawford two weeks after the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attacks to check up on his East Coast friend, who lived two blocks from Ground Zero. During that conversation, Crawford told Tony about his screenplay. Tony offered to read the script, telling his friend he “had some experience in the industry.” Crawford sent him his latest version.

  Just after Christmas 2001, Tony finished reading the screenplay and called Crawford to discuss it. During that conversation, Tony told Crawford that none of the Skakels had been involved in Martha’s killing. Tony explained that he had been at the murder scene that night and he knew that Adolph and Burr had killed Martha. By this time, Connect
icut had indicted Michael. His trial was four months away.

  Crawford recalled Adolph and Burr from a Greenwich block party in September 1975. Both of the boys were unusually big, muscular, and tall. Crawford described Adolph to me as “psychotic.” Crawford was stunned by Tony’s revelation and abandoned any thought of working with Tony on the screenplay. The wrong man was about to go on trial. Crawford told Tony that they needed to go to the police with the story. Tony agreed—he wanted the truth revealed—but he feared being implicated. “Keep my name out of this,” he begged Crawford. “Promise me.” The second he hung up, Crawford called his father for advice. Following his dad’s recommendation, Crawford called Michael’s attorney. In reciting Tony’s story to Sherman, Crawford withheld only Tony’s name. He did tell Sherman, however, that Tony was “black and at Brunswick.” Armed with that information, a minimally curious defense attorney could have quickly tracked down Tony; only two African Americans attended Brunswick in 1975. Sherman was noncommittal. At that moment, he was preening in the spotlight of the impending legal battle. Following Crawford’s phone call, Sherman coyly asked Michael if he “knew a Crawford Mills.” Michael replied that Mills was a Brunswick classmate, and asked why. Sherman’s response was dismissive. “Oh, he’s just another guy trying to capitalize on the Moxley murder … he’s got some crazy—you know, crazy play—Little Martha or something.” Sherman never disclosed Crawford’s allegation, and never again mentioned Crawford to Michael.

  With no action from Sherman, Crawford turned to Garr and Benedict. Neither seemed eager to hear evidence that might exculpate Michael Skakel on the eve of their high-profile trial. Crawford sent three letters to the prosecutor with the same information he had given Sherman. He told me that he called Benedict over a dozen times. “He wasn’t interested,” Crawford said. “He told me the story didn’t match up with witness statements.” Unless Crawford revealed Tony’s name, Benedict intended to do nothing. Crawford then told Benedict that his informant was one of only two African Americans who attended Brunswick in 1975. Crawford suggested that Benedict would only need to look at a yearbook to learn his name. But Benedict displayed no interest in undertaking new investigative work. Crawford wrote letters to Mrs. Moxley and received no response. He enlisted Neal’s sister, Margie, to write to Dorthy Moxley, but Margie fared no better. Crawford had hit an impenetrable barrier. He couldn’t understand why no one was interested. “Mrs. Moxley had been screaming for 20 years for someone to come forward with information, but now she didn’t want to hear from me,” Crawford said. “No one was interested.”