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

by Robert F. Kennedy

  In September 2003, the news of Tony’s allegation broke. Both Benedict and Garr steadfastly refused to interview Adolph Hasbrouck, who lived just a few minutes from their office. (Neither Garr nor Benedict would agree to talk to me about him, or anything else.) Santos and Seeley announced they would be seeking a new trial based on the new information that Tony had provided. Tony became the story. News trucks surrounded his Florida home and put him in the merciless media crosshairs. “It was really rough on him,” Neal told me. “For a while we were all getting calls but I think the press were hardest on him. They staked out his house and harassed him.”

  Over seven days in April 2007, Michael’s attorneys presented their case for a new trial. Benedict turned the proceedings into a referendum on Tony’s credibility. Tony, like many witnesses in criminal trials, was not blemish free. Leading up to the hearing I learned that, in 2003, the government cited his tobacco company for underreporting how much product the company was importing and levied a substantial fine. In 1993, Tony pleaded no contest to charges of being an accessory to felony larceny. The previous year, when questioned about an armed robbery that took place in Beverly Hills, Tony had claimed he’d been kidnapped. He had lied, apparently, and served six months of home monitoring. And in the late 1980s, he was hired as an attorney in Texas; subsequently, he was fired after his firm learned he hadn’t passed the bar.

  On April 17, 2007, in Stamford Superior Court, I was the first witness to take the stand. “Were you aware that Gitano Bryant in the State of California in 1993 was convicted of the crime of conspiracy to commit robbery which was a felony in that state?” Benedict asked me, during his cross-examination. “No,” I replied. I found his tactic ironic. Tony looked like an altar boy in comparison to the prosecution’s star witness, Greg Coleman, who had a long rap sheet and testified to the grand jury high on heroin.

  The most compelling reason for doubting Tony’s story is the argument that two six-foot black kids—Tony and Adolph—would not have escaped notice in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1975. Of course, the best counterargument—

  and it’s pretty dispositive—is that all three boys have admitted—against self-interest—that they were there. Neal believes that Dori Byrne and other Belle Havenites have blinkered memories when it comes to African Americans. He says that despite claims by contemporary Greenwich residents describing their town as lily white, there were plenty of blacks there. “All the neighbors have said, ‘We would have seen black kids in the neighborhood; black kids would stick out like sore thumbs,’ but Tony had been visiting me for a while, and he had a girlfriend in the neighborhood,” Sheila said; she confirmed that her sister Andrea, who passed away in 2008, had dated Tony. Helen recalls that her close friend Janet Tyner, who lived on Oak Ridge Street, in a less-affluent part of Greenwich, “was over at my house all the time.” Belle Haven residents routinely employed African Americans as live-in domestic help; William and Larry Jones lived with their mom, Ethel Jones, at the Skakel house. Larry was 17 when Martha died. Rucky’s handyman, Wade Evans, an African American furloughed from prison by Grandpa George, is not mentioned in any police reports and was never questioned. Police also neglected to question Tony, who gives a detailed description of his Belle Haven meanderings that night.

  None of the former Belle Haven teens we spoke to specifically recall seeing Tony that day. But could we really expect anyone to recall faces from a night 32 years before, especially when seemingly every kid and adult in the neighborhood was either drunk, high, or both? “The whole town, both adults and kids at the time, were pretty out of control,” Margie told me. Plus, Tony admitted that he and his friends—delinquents on a crime spree—were making vigorous efforts to avoid detection as they stole beer, smoked pot, and committed assorted acts of vandalism. He said they ducked behind trees and stone walls to dodge passing cars, hid in “spots the parents couldn’t see,” and that the boys would “scatter and run” when any adult got “a bit close.”

  The mission on Mischief Night was to commit mischief and not get caught. The M.O., even among Belle Haven kids, was avoiding detection. Anyhow, to what end would Tony lie to his mother about being in Belle Haven with Adolph and Burton? These guys also remember being there that day. They clearly had been to Geoff Byrne’s house.

  Santos asked Detective Lunney on the stand if Greenwich Police ever questioned Belle Haven residents about black kids in relation to Martha’s murder. “No, sir,” Lunney testified. But I recalled stumbling across a piece of evidence while researching my 2003 article for The Atlantic. Back then, long before I ever talked with Tony, the mysterious tidbit had little significance. It was a taped interview unearthed by Santos and Seeley with Margie from late 1975. For some mysterious reason, Lunney himself pointedly grilled Margie and another neighbor and friend of Martha’s, Lisa Rader, about the possibility that Martha had a run-in with “colored boys.” “Has she ever mentioned having lunch at the Greenwich High School with any colored boys?” Lunney asked Walker. “Ever mention … maybe some colored boys became annoying?” It’s difficult to conceive that question as random. Something made Lunney, the chief investigator, believe that African American teens might have been involved in Martha’s murder.

  Possibly it was the forensic evidence from the crime scene. Tony’s story would seem to have forensic corroboration, in the forms of two human hairs found by police on a forensic sheet used by police to cover Martha’s body. The FBI forensic crime lab identified the first hair as “possessing negroid characteristics” and the other “possibly” having an Asian DNA profile. Adolph is African American and Tony described Burton as mixed race, possibly part Asian or American Indian. Police investigators assigned so much importance to those hairs that they extracted comparative hair samples from the only two African Americans males known to be living in Belle Haven. The FBI crime lab in Washington found that the “negroid” hair matched neither Greenwich Police Officer Daniel Hickman, nor the son of the Skakels’ cook, Larry Jones, who lived adjacent to the crime scene. (Larry’s older brother William was away in the military.) The police were apparently looking for a possible explanation for the presence of that hair. Investigators never identified the contributor of either of the hairs. In February 1976, Greenwich Police briefly investigated Darryl Brooks, a 19-year-old black man from nearby New Rochelle, who had been arrested a year before, suspected of murdering a young girl with a golf club.

  If the Greenwich Police had been comprehensive in their search, they might have discovered the presence of Tony, Adolph, and Burr in Belle Haven that night. Police long maintained that they chronicled every second of Martha’s evening, who she was with, and her whereabouts. During Michael’s 2007 appeal this was the bulwark against Tony’s version of the evening. If the police didn’t hear about Tony and his hooligan friends visiting Belle Haven, how could it have happened? In fact, there were many Belle Haven kids out that night, whom police never bothered to question. Among them is Maria Coomaraswamy, who spent part of Mischief Night with Martha. Coomaraswamy left the Moukad house with Martha, Jackie, Helen, and Geoff shortly after 7:30 p.m., and walked north beside Martha until they parted company at the Coomaraswamy home. Maria watched as Martha and her comrades headed toward the Skakels. Until Seeley and Santos reached out to her in 2015, police had never approached or interviewed this girl who’d been out in Belle Haven and with the victim several hours preceding her murder. As another example of the pervious police investigation, Detective Lunney testified during Michael’s 2007 petition for a new trial that none of the teenagers that he interviewed reported seeing Carl Wold, who was walking his dog from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., or another neighbor, Mrs. McBride, who walked her dog from 9:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. The Greenwich Police dragnet seemingly captured only a tiny fraction of Belle Haven’s Mischief Night activities.

  MARTHA’S MURDER is the centerpiece of a tragic parable with powerful moral lessons about the hazards of orthodoxy, the susceptibility of journalists to the seductive gravities of the mob, the corrosi
ve power of gossip, the abuse of police and prosecutorial power, and personal lessons about courage, perseverance, and grief.

  The parade of awful tragedies that proceeded from Martha’s murder seems to never end. If Michael remains free, Crawford Mills will be one of the unsung heroes of this horrible drama. Crawford never stopped pushing to broadcast Tony’s story. After the failure of Michael’s petition for a new trial, Crawford’s life crumbled. Having lost his CBS job following Dorthy Moxley’s greenroom episode, and with no recommendation from his old boss, Crawford was unable to find work in New York City. He began to fear what his testimony had wrought. “He felt like he was being followed or somebody was standing outside of his apartment at all hours,” Neal told me. “I don’t know if that’s paranoia or actually somebody was there, but whichever, things got worse and worse for him. Things just went downhill for him.” He moved to rural Litchfield County in Connecticut. On October 6, 2008, he took his own life, shooting himself in the head with a shotgun he’d borrowed from his landlord.

  Crawford’s death, in particular, made me stop and think about Dominick Dunne and the Moxley family and about how each one of us bears ultimate responsibility for what we do with our grief. I was fortunate to have good paradigms.

  On the day that Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, no one doubted that Oswald had murdered my Uncle Jack. I was a 9-year-old boy watching my parents, shattered by tragedy, and expecting then to be satisfied that the author of their agony had suffered just punishment. I was wrong. My parents and their Kennedy siblings gained no satisfaction from Oswald’s death; instead the murder only deepened their grief for their brother and for our country.

  After my father’s death, I watched my mother and Uncle Teddy—my father’s last living brother—plea to the judge to allow his alleged killer, Sirhan Sirhan, to escape the death penalty. My mother taught us that, while our grief would never get smaller, our job was to build ourselves bigger around it; vengeance would only diminish us and widen the reverberations of misery.

  The deaths of Crawford and Byrne, Tommy’s ostracism, and Michael’s imprisonment were all part of the spreading ripples of misery from Martha’s tragic murder.

  I sympathize deeply with Dorthy Moxley. I have seen up-close the agony of a mother’s grief over the loss of her child. My mother lost her husband to murder and two of her sons to violent, untimely deaths in the bosom of their youth. I was with her when my father died. I stood beside her 29 years later as my little brother Michael died in her arms.

  My mother told us that we needed to let go of our impulse for revenge and allow the cycle of violence to end with our family. This, she said, was the lesson of the New Testament, which swapped the savage eye-for-an-eye tribalism of the Old Testament for the ethical mandate that we turn the other cheek. But forgiveness wasn’t just ethics. It was salutary. Revenge and resentments, my mother said, are corrosive. Indulging them is like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die. By opposing the death penalty for Sirhan, we diluted those poisonous passions.

  And what if, God forbid, the object of our revenge turns out to be innocent? For several decades, my father’s close friend Paul Schrade, who took one of Sirhan’s bullets, has argued that Sirhan Sirhan did not fire the shot that killed my father. Recent forensic evidence supports him. How would we have felt now, if our family had demanded his execution?

  As someone who has seen two family members, Michael Skakel and my former brother-in-law Paul Hill, convicted of murders they didn’t commit, I know how reluctantly the State reverses course on a conviction. No matter how strong the evidence of a defendant’s innocence, governments only reluctantly relinquish their grip on a convicted man. Paul Hill was convicted of another “notorious” crime—the IRA’s 1974 Guilford pub bombing. The frame that ensnared Paul and three other men was the subject of the 1993 film In the Name of the Father starring Daniel Day-Lewis. In 1991, the British courts overruled his conviction, declaring his coerced confession “improper,” and freed Paul, who had by then served 16 years in 38 British prisons. In 1993, Paul met my sister Courtney, a human rights activist, at a congressional hearing on US/

  Ireland relations chaired by my brother Congressman Joseph Kennedy. They later married.

  In Paul Hill’s case, prosecutors knew beyond any doubt that Paul was innocent and had been wrongly convicted after he served only seven years in jail. Among the abundant evidence pointing to his innocence were the voluntary confessions of the elite IRA murder squad that actually committed the Guilford pub bombing, for which he was unjustly imprisoned. Despite that evidence, government prosecutors waited another decade to free Paul. The instinct of certain prosecutors is to dig in and never admit they made an error. This dynamic will be particularly disastrous in the Moxley murder, for which we now know, beyond a reasonable doubt, who actually committed the crime. The State’s intransigence and stubbornness are allowing the real killers to go free.

  WE ALL have a duty to see that our efforts to heal from grief do not compound the tragedy and punish the innocent. Neither Dominick Dunne nor Dorthy Moxley took that precaution. Mrs. Moxley rhas steadfastly efused to look at exculpatory evidence. She pointed the finger first at Tommy. Her intransigence cost Crawford his job and contributed greatly to Michael’s unlawful conviction. We all understand when a grieving family lashes out erratically, and we forgive as best we can. The job of prosecutors, press, police, and the judiciary is to cool those passions. None of those checks and balances worked in this case. It’s time to reverse the injustice.

  EPILOGUE

  The bedrock of our democracy is the rule of law applied by an independent judiciary immune to the gusting winds of popular sentiment.

  —Caroline Kennedy

  On June 7, 2002, following a month-long trial, the jury convicted Michael of murdering Martha Moxley. Trial Judge John F. Kavanewsky Jr. sentenced him to 20 years to life in prison. I visited Michael periodically in jail. In conformance with Stephen’s and Michael’s requests, I will not write in detail about the various horrors that Michael encountered during his 11½ year prison bid. Both brothers are understandably fearful that the Connecticut Supreme Court could, any day, send Michael back to prison. Anything he says about guards, gangs, or other inmates, still in the Connecticut Department of Correction system, could return to haunt him with lethal effect.

  Sometimes when I visited Michael, his eyes would tear up. “Get me out of this place,” he would whisper. He not only missed his son, George, but all the children who gave his soul sustenance. One day he told me, “I called my brother Johnny’s house. His 4-year-old daughter picked up the phone. I only had 12 minutes on the phone and this kid always used up 90 percent of my allocation. She said; ‘Hi Uncle Michael. You should have seen the dog, Danny. He was running around chasing a squirrel all day then he ran over and there was a rabbit. …’ Oh my God. That felt like I was taking in the last little bit of oxygen before my soul died. Do you understand that?”

  Michael’s conviction shocked his family and friends and galvanized them into supporting his appeal. With Linda Kenney Baden’s help and Stephen’s leadership, the Skakels retained a pair of first-class criminal lawyers, Hubert Santos and Hope Seeley, from Hartford, Connecticut.

  Hope and Hubie filed a direct appeal of Michael’s criminal court conviction to the Connecticut Supreme Court in November 2003. They made the argument that Mickey Sherman should have made at the outset: Michael’s trial violated Connecticut’s 1975-era five-year statute of limitations governing non-capital murder. Connecticut abolished the statute in 1976, but Santos and Seeley contended that the 1975 statute should still apply; Connecticut’s Supreme Court had repeatedly held that the five-year statute applied for murders committed in 1975, even when the State indicted defendants after its repeal. In order to uphold the trial court verdict against Michael, the Supreme Court would have to reverse its own long-standing, black-letter precedent.

  Furthermore, the court would have to override another long-standing precedent
by allowing prosecutors to try Michael in criminal court, even though existing law required that Michael be tried as a juvenile, since he had just turned 15 when the murder occurred. The maximum prison term for a juvenile under this statute was five years.

  In addition, Santos and Seeley appealed the verdict as tainted by Judge Kavanewsky’s strange ruling allowing the jury to view copies of the National Enquirer, the Star, and other supermarket tabloids, containing inflammatory, salacious, and patently erroneous articles about Michael Skakel and about the Kennedy family. The articles were irrelevant, immaterial, and horrendously prejudicial.

  Courts are meant to be bulwarks against the vicissitudes of public prejudice and passions, but even the most courageous and impartial jurist can feel the storm of popular opinion and occasionally hold up a finger to feel the direction of the breeze. The orgy of media malpractice that fed the public’s revulsion of Michael also annealed judicial reluctance to release him—even in the face of black-letter law and precedent. In an opinion written by Justice Richard Palmer, the Connecticut Supreme Court ploughed down its own ironbound legal precedent, rejected every appeal, and affirmed Michael’s conviction on January 24, 2006.

  On August 29, 2005, Michael had filed a second appeal. Michael’s lawyers asserted that newly discovered evidence (including Tony Bryant’s revelations) as well as a pattern of misconduct and nondisclosure by the prosecutors and police warranted a new trial. Santos and Seeley returned to the trial court for a hearing to show evidence that they had uncovered since taking over Michael’s representation. The court needed to determine whether the newly discovered evidence, had it been shown to the jury at trial, might have resulted in a different jury verdict. If so, Michael would be entitled to a new trial. The new evidence included three witnesses discovered post-conviction who directly contradicted the testimony of the State’s key witness, Greg Coleman, regarding Michael’s alleged confession to murder.