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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Burton said that he knew the Walker family well, particularly Neal. He recalled one Saturday tooling around Belle Haven with Neal. “Mrs. Walker was really nice to us and invited us in for something to eat.” Burton said that he’d never stayed the night in Greenwich. Had he ever been to Geoff’s house? “Oh, yeah, probably three times,” he said. And his parents—had he ever met them? “I just met his dad one time in passing,” he said. “I never met his mom.” Then Burton related what it was like back in those days to spend time in Geoff’s house. “He had a lot of toys and stuff for us to mess around with,” he said. One day, alone in the house, Burton, Geoff, Adolph, and Tony engaged in a shaving cream battle. “I think he hit Tony with some shaving cream,” he recalled. “Geoff showed us how you could put an aerosol top on the shaving cream can and it would shoot out into a stream.” I recognized this trick from the Skakel family arsenal and deduced that it must be a Belle Haven stunt. “It must have been his father’s shaving cream obviously. There were many cases of it. I felt weird about it. The house looked like hell, you know. We weren’t purposefully spraying walls. Geoff didn’t care. He said somebody else would clean it up.” Next, Burton gave a detailed description of the inside of the Byrne home, which Margie and Neal Walker would subsequently confirm as accurate. “That house was really huge. They had two different kitchens and it was an old historical house. There was a servant’s kitchen, if I’m not mistaken. …” Burton continued, “The refrigerator had no handle. At the time, it was the coolest refrigerator I had ever seen.” Burton said he pulled at the door to no avail, before Geoff intervened laughing, “‘No, dummy, You just push the button.’”

  Burton’s memories were too intricate for someone unfamiliar with the house. Neal confirmed that the “Byrne had two kitchens and one of the first push-button door refrigerators.” “It was a space-age job,” Neal told me, “one with no visible handle on the door. It only opened with the push of a button.” Stephen also remembered the two kitchens and the push-button refrigerator. Margie vouched for the other details of the mansion, including the large array of toys and the lack of supervision. Margie said that her brother, Neal, spent a lot of time at Geoff’s house because it was “a little freer there. There wasn’t as much supervision.” She also recalled a secret tunnel that ran beneath the house that was accessible through an outside door. Tony told me he believed that Adolph and Burr had used the tunnel to access the basement when they hid and cleaned up after committing their crime. Garr corroborated the existence of the secret tunnel at Michael’s new trial hearing, testifying that the house was “enormous” and that if you were in one area of the house, it would be possible to be unaware that another person was in a different area.

  Neal told me another thing he remembered: back in that period he got a concerned phone call from Geoff’s mother. Geoff was off at school but Adolph was standing in front of her house, apparently waiting for him. “Geoff’s mom called me and said, ‘What’s the deal? Why is this guy hanging around? Could you ask him to not do that?’” Neal recalled. “So I think I talked to him and I talked to Tony and [Adolph] stopped hanging around.”

  Burton told me that he, Adolph, and Tony had attended a dance in Greenwich during that period. That confirmed Tony’s recollection of attending the Sacred Heart Dance on October 4 with the two friends from Manhattan where Adolph got so jealous of Martha.

  I asked Burton whether he ever had seen the Skakels’ house or eaten there. Burton responded: “The only time that I ever heard or thought of Michael, and I never met any of them, was when Tony pointed these guys out and Geoffrey said that one of them was nuts, and I said, ‘What do you mean nuts?’ He said, you know, it was Michael, and he said Michael was in a pretty serious fight at … Brunswick School and was expelled.” Prior to his expulsion, Michael had indeed had a fight with a boy named Steven Rugasse who had made fun of his mother after her death.

  I brought my findings to Santos, Seeley, and Colucci. Colucci next called Burton in Portland. Burton told him that he’d been in Belle Haven on the night of the murder, but couldn’t remember any specifics about when he went out or when he returned to the city. We’d hit pay dirt. Both suspects corroborated the most crucial part of the story. They clearly had been to Greenwich; knew Neal, Geoff, and Tony; and were well acquainted with the interior of Geoff’s home. Moreover, they both admitted being near the crime scene on the right day. Two days later, Colucci called Burton back. He wanted to set up a time to meet in person. Burton told him that wouldn’t be possible. Furthermore, Burton told him, after their conversation, he had consulted his calendar from 1975, and realized he’d misspoken. Like Adolph, he’d somehow located 28-year-old notes from when he was a teen and discovered he hadn’t in fact been in Belle Haven after all. Colucci sent Kris Steele out to Portland to track Burton down. Steele was unsuccessful.

  Both Adolph and Burton subsequently refused to respond to subpoenas to testify at depositions noticed by Michael’s lawyers. Both men invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. When Santos and Seeley deposed Tony Bryant under a subpoena on August 25, 2006, he also invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify.

  In November 2006, veteran private investigator Mike Udvardy and his employee Catherine Harkness drove into Manhattan from their East Hartford office. The pair staked out the entrance of The Washington Irving House, at 145 East 16th Street, a 19-story doorman building on a ritzy block in Gramercy. After some time, an elderly black woman emerged. She was over six feet tall and, despite her age and a lame leg, she walked so quickly with her cane that the pair chased her for a half block before running her to ground. “Barbara Bryant?” Udvardy called out, breathless. He asked her for a minute of her time. There on the street, she gave them 15. She opened up by venting her frustration that Tony had shared the secret story. Barbara Bryant complained “she didn’t know why he was discussing it at all.” She said she hadn’t talked to a soul about this in over 20 years. But she didn’t take her frustration out on the investigators; Harkness describes her as a “very friendly and gracious woman.” According to sworn testimony from both Udvardy and Harkness, Barbara Bryant confirmed everything that Tony had told Colucci and me. Tony had indeed been in Belle Haven on October 30, 1975, accompanied by Adolph Hasbrouck and Burton Tinsley, whom she knew only as “Adolph” and “Burr.” He’d told her earlier in the day that he was going to Greenwich with his two companions. She recalled that he returned the “night” of October 30, though she wasn’t sure exactly what time. Tony had told her back then that Adolph and Burton stayed overnight in Greenwich. Udvardy pulled out a copy of the November 1, 1975, article from the New York Times. She looked it over. Yes, she said, she’d read this specific article and discussed it with her son. And during that discussion, Tony had reiterated that Adolph and Burr had stayed the night in Belle Haven.

  After lawyers subpoenaed Barbara Bryant and her son to a videotaped deposition, she changed both her demeanor and her story. The Barbara Bryant that Udvardy and Harkness had interviewed on the street—sharp and friendly—appeared a different person than the woman reluctantly deposed by Seeley in a midtown Manhattan conference room on February 21, 2007. She still placed the three boys in Belle Haven on the day of the murder, but she now recalled that her son had returned home from Belle Haven while it was still light out, not at night as she had told the investigators. She couldn’t specifically recall a conversation in which she told Tony to keep his mouth shut about the incident. “It’s possible that it happened, but I don’t remember having it,” she said. She also did not recall telling her son that Adolph and Burr were dangerous and that he should distance himself from them, although she conceded that it was “possible” that she had conveyed that warning to Tony. In Barbara Bryant’s statements and deposition testimony, it was clear that she disapproved of Tony’s willingness to come forward with information about Martha’s murder. She clearly wished to downplay any possible involvement that he may have had with the crime.

  Tony,
when subpoenaed, pleaded the Fifth and asserted his right to avoid self-incrimination. Had I been his attorney, I certainly would have advised him to do this. Without any assurance of immunity from the prosecution, it would have been perilous for him to put himself with Martha in Belle Haven on murder night with a golf club in his hand. Adolph and Burton, now lawyered up, also pleaded the Fifth. That action suggests that there was some basis for Tony’s allegations. If they hadn’t been in Belle Haven that night, why not testify? In her videotaped testimony at Michael’s new trial hearing, Barbara Bryant was a changed woman. As Harkness observed on the stand, she looked comparatively “out of it.” She appeared heavily medicated, slurring her words and seeming confused. Bryant admitted that the publicity surrounding her son’s disclosures had made her “ill” and that she was taking several medications, including Vicodin.

  DURING MICHAEL’S new trial hearing, Benedict argued that Tony had only recently hatched his story, in order to help market Crawford’s Little Martha screenplay. Benedict dismissed Tony as a hustler parlaying a tenuous connection to Greenwich into a show business career. That characterization is not plausible; Little Martha is an altogether different plot scenario involving none of the characters in Tony’s tale. Furthermore, there is abundant evidence that Tony’s story is not recently hatched, including Adolph’s and Burton’s admissions and Barbara Bryant’s testimony. Tony’s old house mum, Esme Dick, also corroborated Tony’s chronicle. Esme Dick testified that Bryant had been alluding to his narrative for decades.

  Esme Dick, with whom Tony had lived for nearly three years while he attended Brunswick, testified at Michael’s new trial hearing that sometime after Martha’s murder but before the 1975–76 school year ended, Tony had dinner with her and her family. The conversation turned to suspects in the Martha Moxley murder, including the Skakel boys. Tony told Esme Dick that he knew the Skakels were not guilty. He told her that he was in Belle Haven on the night of the murder. Esme Dick assumed that the police had interviewed everyone who was in the neighborhood that evening, so she never informed the police of Tony’s statements. Esme Dick also testified that Tony was very upset after Michael’s trial and told her that Michael had been “wrongly convicted,” although he did not explain why he believed that to be the case.

  Unfortunately for Michael, the Court of Appeals largely bought Benedict’s explanation and Michael lost his petition for a new trial. Michael did, however, win one important convert. In his withering dissent, Judge Richard Palmer questioned Benedict’s speculative suggestion that Tony invented his elaborate story to enhance Crawford’s screenplay on which he hoped to collaborate. Justice Palmer pointed out that this speculative, and personally risky, enterprise would have required Tony to have begun fabricating his plot to market the screenplay three decades earlier. “The Majority Opinion requires that we believe that at age 14, Bryant was planting the seeds for a false story not to be revealed until more than one quarter of a century later.”

  Esme Dick was not alone in witnessing Tony grappling with his impulse to tell what he knew. Hearing Tony’s story jogged a memory in Michael. Not long after the murder, sometime between Thanksgiving 1975 and early 1976, Michael got an unanticipated phone call from Tony. Tony asked to come out to Belle Haven and meet Michael that weekend. “He got very mysterious like he wanted to tell me something.” Tony’s request puzzled him. Michael said, “We weren’t really close; I mean I liked him but he asked if he could come up and spend the night at my house. I was mystified but I said, ‘Sure,’ and skipped our family ski trip to Windham.” It was a Friday. The two boys had dinner at the Skakel house. “I had the feeling he had something critically important to tell me,” Michael recalls. “Then, during dessert, Tony seemed to change his mind about talking.”

  In February 2015, I was walking through the Charleston, South Carolina, airport to catch a connecting flight to the west coast. A tall, handsome black man with a big smile hailed me from a restaurant and then bolted out to greet me. He introduced himself as Tony Bryant. It was the first time we had met. We talked for so long that I nearly missed my flight. Just before I left him, I asked about that weekend he had gone up to Belle Haven to see Michael around Thanksgiving. He smiled again, “Yes, I went up there intending to tell him the story. I knew he was friends with Martha and I felt I needed to talk to someone. But then we started drinking and I got scared about talking and the moment passed.” According to Michael, the two boys decided to attend a dance at the Greenwich Country Club. It was a senior mixer for Brunswick and Greenwich County Day. “We smoked a joint and got hammered in the Club’s kitchen,” Michael recalls. “We broke some glasses, ate cake, and stole food and someone called the police. They chased me but I was a really fast runner when I was skinny. I jumped off the second-story balcony. And I ran home in my bare feet. And I never saw Tony again.” I asked Tony if he can confirm this recollection. “Your cousin has a good memory,” he told me, smiling.

  During my investigation, I spent considerable time reflecting about Geoff Byrne, the neglected yet beloved 11-year-old boy whose distinguishing virtue—an open, generous heart—had tripped him into an unspeakable nightmare. Adolph admitted to Colucci and Steele that he and Burton saw Geoff on the night of Martha’s murder. When two Hartford Courant reporters confronted Burton near his Portland, Oregon, home in December 2003 and asked him if he stayed at Geoff’s home on the night of the murder, he appeared “unnerved”: “I have no comment,” he said. “I don’t think I should be talking about this right now.” It’s reasonable to speculate that Adolph and Burr, after clubbing Martha, and then briefly regrouping in the McGuire garage, made their way to Byrne’s house, entering through the coal chute and then pressured Geoff to allow them to clean up. In her testimony at the habeas hearing, Margie described the Byrnes’ coal chute as a “place where the boys would go and drink beer or do things that they weren’t supposed to be doing.” Adolph told Colucci that he visited Geoff two days after the murder—probably to take his temperature and encourage him to keep his mouth shut.

  Meanwhile, Stephen began taking a fresh look at Geoff Byrne. Police first questioned the boy four or five days after Adolph says he visited Geoff for his post-murder consultation. Geoff gave police a spine-chilling account of his journey home from the Skakels after he escorted Helen to her door. “After he left Helen, and he was walking home by himself, he heard footsteps following him,” the report read. “When he stopped to listen the footsteps kept coming. He then started to run and ran all the way to his house. Geoff further stated the footsteps ran after him all the way home and that he did not look back to see who was following him.”

  After hearing Tony Bryant’s story, Stephen listened to the tape of Geoff’s interview with Officer Lunney. At minute 6:33 of the tape, after Geoff detailed the harrowing flight from his pursuer, Lunney asked the 11-year-old boy the same battery of questions that he was asking all the Belle Haven kids that he interviewed. Tony’s insights invested Geoff’s responses with new meaning. “Do you know for sure who hit her?” Lunney asked. There was a long pregnant silence. Several seconds pass. “Huh?” Geoff finally asks. Lunney repeated the question. Geoff finally speaks, his voice quavering as if he might cry. “No,” he said.

  LUNNEY: Anything else you want to tell us that maybe we haven’t asked you think it might help us in some way?

  BYRNE: [another pause] I can’t think of anything.

  LUNNEY: Have you pretty much been thinking about this for the past two weeks?

  BYRNE: Uh huh.

  LUNNEY: Nothing’s come into your mind …

  BYRNE: [cutting Lunney off] No.

  LUNNEY: You have no suspicion on anybody. Nothing that we …

  BYRNE: Not really anymore.

  LUNNEY: Not really anymore? What do you mean anymore?

  BYRNE: No, I don’t.

  And at that point, the interview ended abruptly. Stephen listened to those last minutes again and again—about 12 times in a row. Something about the exchange convinced S
tephen that Geoff knew more than he was saying. He also detected that Lunney suspected as much, but for some reason didn’t want to push the boy. Stephen told me his neck hairs stood up. He kept thinking about Geoff’s plaintive despair and his warning to Tony: “Some bad things happened with some bad guys. Tony … you gotta stay clear of them. They’re bad guys. They’re going to get you in trouble.”

  Then I discovered, in a yellowed clipping, more haunting words of affirmation from the tragic little boy. In October 1980, a Greenwich Time reporter interviewed Geoff for a story pegged to the crime’s fifth anniversary. The reporter asked Geoff what he thought about the theory that Tommy had done it. Even though he and Tommy hardly knew each other, Geoff was adamant. “He didn’t do it,” he said. “I know he didn’t do it. He’s not the sort of person who could have done such a thing.” Less than two months after the story ran, Geoff was dead. His defense of Tommy would be a final act of kindness.

  The evidence began to pile up. Martha’s diary corroborated many of Tony’s stories. She certainly knew him, and had hung around with Tony and Crawford Mills. On January 6, 1975, she wrote, “Margie invited me to a party—one of Neal’s friends, Tony.” Then, on January 11, she wrote, “Went to Tony’s party with Margie. Had a few cigs. He had a case of beer but we didn’t get around to it. Met Crawford somebody, Tony, and a few others.” Tony claimed that Adolph and Burr had met her at a block party on Greenwich Avenue in the fall. On September 21, she wrote, “Yesterday was the block party on Greenwich Ave. Me, Margie and Helen went shopping in Stamford all day and by the time Margie and I got down there it was 8:00. We found Jackie, Helen, Pam N., etc. and we all walked around. We finally ended up walking home at 11:30 w/ me, Margie, Helen, Jackie, Neal, Crawford, Michael, Tom and Geoff Byrne.” As previously noted, Bryant claimed that Adolph became particularly obsessed with Martha after attending a church mixer. Three weeks before her murder, Martha wrote about the Sacred Heart dance, when her dance partner “wouldn’t even let go.”