The Murder of Martha Moxley

Hello and welcome to The Secret Sits, today I am going to take you on a journey through one of the most talked about true crime cases in Connecticut’s history.  And I will tell you now; it is quite a ride.  So, sit back, relax and learn about the Murder of Martha Moxley.

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#MarthaMoxley #MischiefNight #TommySkakel #MichaelSkakel #BelleHaven #KenLittleton #Greenwich #DominickDunne #MarkFuhrman #TimothyDumas #ElanSchool #WilliamKennedySmith #EthelKennedy #RobertFKennedy #AlbertvilleFrance #MargotSheridan #SCOTUS #KobeBryant #TonyBryant #TrueCrime

Transcript

Hello and welcome to The Secret Sits, today I am going to take you on a journey through one of the most talked about true crime cases in Connecticut’s history.  And I will tell you now; it is quite a ride.  So, sit back, relax and learn about the Murder of Martha Moxley.

Mischief Night is an informal holiday when people of all ages, but predominantly adolescents, engage in pranks, jokes and parties.  You may have also heard of this referred to as Devil’s Night, depending on where you live.  Mischief Night is also celebrated at different times of the year depending on where you live, for example in Connecticut where our story today takes place, Mischief Night is held on October 30th, the night before Halloween, but in other countries it takes place in May.

Our story today begins on October 30th, 1975, Martha Elizabeth Moxley, was 15-years-old and living in Greenwich, Connecticut and she left her home that evening to celebrate Mischief Night with her friends.  The kids in this area typically celebrated by TPing neighbor’s houses, playing ding-dong ditch and other innocuous pranks, I mean this is the 1970’s we are talking about and this is an extremely wealthy neighborhood as well. Truly bad things typically did not happen here. This exclusive neighborhood of Belle Haven was a gated community with security guards, who had been doubled on this evening incase the hijinks got out of hand.

From accounts given by Martha’s friends, Martha spent the evening flirting with Thomas Skakel, Thomas, had a younger brother, who, like Martha was 15-years-old, Thomas was just two years older at 17.  During the course of their evening, spent together, Martha grew affectionate towards the boy and may have even kissed him.  The last time that Martha’s friends saw her on this night was around 9:30PM as the two flirtatious youngsters disappeared behind the fence to the Skakel’s backyard and pool area. At approximately 9:45pm, Martha left the Skakel home, she lived just 150 yards away, a short walk across an expansive backyard. 

Martha’s father, David, was away on a business trip and only her mother remained at home.  Her mother, called Dorthy noticed that Martha had not arrived home when expected, but she was not overly concerned, until she awoke at 02:00am to find that Martha was still not home.  Now Dorthy was worried and she began to call all of Martha’s friends to try and locate the girl.  But no one knew where Martha was.  Dorthy contacted the police and a search of the neighborhood ensued.  At around 12 noon on October 31st, a 15-year-old friend and classmate of Martha’s named Sheila McGuire found Martha’s lifeless body in a clump of bushes on the Moxley property. 

The girl, once young and full of life lay dead on the ground, her pants and underwear pulled down and pieces of a broken six-iron golf club laid near her body.

Martha Moxley was just five feet, five inches tall, she weighed 120 pounds and had long naturally blond hair.  She had been well like by her classmates at the Greenwich High School.  Her classmates got together and composed a eulogy which would be read at Martha’s funeral.  One of the Moxley’s family friends, Rosemary Mein said, “A year after arriving she was sports editor of the yearbook, voted girl with the best personality, had gained scholastic honors and had won letters for field hockey and basketball.”  This was a girl with ambition and drive, and she was going places in life.

 Martha’s mother Dorthy remembers her precious daughter as chatty, to say the least, Dorthy said, “Martha would come home from school and she would come into the kitchen where I was and she would talk and talk and talk, oh my God, she told me everything that went on.

This particular area of Connecticut, called Belle Haven, juts out into the Long Island Sound.  Like I said, it is an expensive area of the country.  House prices around Greenwich, today average around 2.7 million dollars, but in this specific sub-division house prices average 6.3 million dollars.  This was a neighborhood for influential families, families with a lot of financial assets and families with a lot of connections.  Martha’s father David was the head of the New York office of the accounting company, Touche, Ross and Company

 An autopsy was performed and found that Martha had NOT been sexually assaulted, but she had been bludgeoned with the golf club and then, after it had broken, she was stabbed with the instrument. 

Thomas Skakel had been the last person seen with Martha on the night she was murdered.  So, quite obviously, he quickly became the prime suspect in the case.  His father actively prevented access to the boy’s school records and his medical records.  You see, both Thomas, who went by Tommy, as all guys in the 70’s did and his little brother Michael had both had emotional issues, which had led to outbursts and they also were not doing well on their academic route either.

Another suspect popped up in the form of Kenneth Littleton, he was a science teacher and he had just begun working for the Skakel family as a live-in tutor for the boys, and I do mean he had just begun working there, in fact he had only arrived a few hours prior to the murder.  So here was a young man that no one knew very well, he shows up and just a few hours later a murder happens in this rich suburban hamlet. Ken, as he liked to be called, said that at the time of the murder, he was watching “The French Connection” on television and that Tommy had joined him for a while, after leaving Martha to walk home.

Ken was not immediately a suspect, but during the summer after the murder, his behavior suddenly became erratic and he was arrested for burglary and larceny in Nantucket.  Because of this, the Greenwich police began to look at him as a suspect.  But a group of ex-FBI agents who ran a company called the Academy Group made a criminal profile of the killer in the Martha Moxley case and they said that it was not Ken.  They claimed that the offender was an unsophisticated teenage male…other characteristics include low self-esteem and explosive temperament…was likely enraged by rejection, and inflicted a stab would to Martha’s neck to ensure her death.

Ken claimed that the change in his behavior was due to the trauma of being harassed by the local police.  Ken also believed that the police were relentless toward him because of the powerful Skakels family, who wielded enough influence to manipulate the police into doing their bidding.

But no matter how many suspects there seemed to be, no one was charged with this crime and it remained unsolved.  This unsolved case did not stop writers from publishing several books about the murders though.  Dominick Dunne wrote a fictional version of the case in a book titled “Season in Purgatory” which was released in 1993. You may remember the name Dominick Dunne from our episode on The Poltergeist Movie Curse, as he is the father of murdered actress Dominic Dunne. Mark Fuhrman wrote a nonfiction account called “Murder in Greenwich” this book came to print in 1998 and finally Timothy Dumas wrote a nonfiction book titled “A Wealth of Evil”, this book hit store shelves in 1999.

The case continued to be investigated and over the years both Tommy and Michael Skakel seemed to significantly change their stories about the night of the murder.  Michael made claims that he had been acting as a Peeping Tom on the night of the murder and had masturbated while up in a tree beside the Moxley property sometime between 11:30 and 12:30 that night.  After the murder of Martha Moxley, Michael was sent away to attend the Elan School in Poland Spring, Maine.  The Elan School was a private boarding school which specializes in children with mental health and substance abuse problems.  While attending this school it is rumored, by two students, that Michael, during a group therapy session, confessed to the murder of Martha Moxley. One of these students named, Gregory Coleman testified that Michael was given special privileges and that Michael had bragged, “I’m going to get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy”.  The school’s owner denies this actually happened.

Around this same time, Ken Littleton, who had began abusing alcohol, moved to Canada and starting hanging out with Mary Baker, who also had an alcohol abuse problem.  In 1984, Mary, claimed that Ken had begun identifying himself as Kenneth Kennedy and believed that he could cause a tornado by flushing a toilet.  He ate money, drank toilet water, stole golf carts and left them at synagogues and collected JFK matchbooks.  Littleton’s father said that the Greenwich police department had hounded and ruined his son, but the police chief, Thomas G Keegan denied these accusations.

In the early 1980’s a crime writer named Leonard Levitt was hired by the Greenwich Time and The Advocate to investigate the murder of Martha Moxley.  The piece Levitt wrote ended up being shelved and it was not published until 1991.  But when it came out it helped to relaunch the police investigation into the murder.

Now 1991 and a man named William Kennedy Smith, who was 30-years-old at the time, was in a bar called Au Bar in Palm Beach, Florida.  He was at this bar with his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy and his cousin Patrick J. Kennedy.  While at this bar, Smith met Patricia Bowman.  The two eventually went to the nearby Kennedy house and went for a walk along the beach.  Bowman then claimed that Smith violently raped her.  She called two friends at 04:00am to come and pick her up from the house and they took her to a rape crisis center.  She did present signs of rape including sperm in her vagina and sever pain and bruising, typically associated with rape.  Smith claimed that the two had engaged in intercourse, but it had all been consensual.  Three more women came forward with allegations of being raped by Smith as well, but the trial judge excluded their testimony because the pattern of rape behavior reported was not similar enough to Bowman’s rape claims.  Smith was then acquitted on all charges.

Now why is this case important to the Martha Moxley murder case?  Because after this trial a rumor surfaced that William Kennedy Smith had been at the Skakel house on the night of Martha Moxley’s murder and there was an insinuation that he may have been involved.  This rumor was found to be untrue, but it resulted in a new eye-opening investigation into the now cold case of Martha Moxley.

A private detective agency called The Sutton Associates were hired by Rushton Skakel and they conducted their own investigation.  They compiled everything into a report, which would become know as the Sutton Report.  This report was eventually leaked to the media and in it, the detectives claim that both Thomas and Michael altered their stories about their activities the night of the murder.  Also in the report is a section about Tommy Skakel which reads: “Dr Gramont has presented a series of objective findings which are somewhat alarming.  While Dr. Gramont by no means suggest Tommy is a raging monster on the verge of violent episodes, the diagnosis is still very telling it presents a great deal of insight into possible emotional and psychological disabilities that could have contributed to destructive behavior, and from which Tommy may still suffer to this day.”

When Mark Fuhrman’s book “Murder in Greenwich” came out in 1998, he named Michael Skakel as the assailant who perpetrated the murder.  He also points out many mistakes the police made during their initial investigation.

Now June of 1998 and 23 years after Martha Moxley had her last day on earth, something that I have never heard of before happened.  The prosecutor for the Martha Moxley case requested a one-man grand jury.  Judge George N. Thim was selected as the lone juror and he spent the next 18 months sifting through transcripts and interviewing witnesses to determine if there was, in fact, enough evidence to bring Michael Skakel up on murder charges.  When Thim released his report, the superior court judge recommended the arrest of Michael Skakel for the slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley.  In Connecticut, under provisions in the state law, a prosecutor can request this one-man grand jury when all other investigative procedures have failed.  This is rarely used; it has actually only been done 7 times between 1985 and 1997.

In January of 2000, an arrest warrant was issued for Michael Skakel.  Michael surrendered to authorities that day and then he was released on $500,000 bail.  There were arguments made as to whether Michael should be tried as juvenile or an adult.  Considering he was a juvenile at the time of the murder, it was decided that he would be arraigned in juvenal court.  On January 31st, 2001, Judge Maureen Dennis ruled that Michael Skakel should be tried as an adult and ordered the case to be transferred to the Superior Court.

The trial began on Tuesday May 7th 2002 in Norwalk, Connecticut.  Michael Skakel was represented by his attorney Michael Sherman.  Michael’s alibi was that he was at his cousin’s house at the time of the murder.  During the course of the trial, the jury heard part of the taped book proposal when Michael Skakel said he was in the tree on the Moxley property, masturbating.  In this book proposal, Michael never admitted to murdering Martha. 

The trial ended on June 7th, 2002 and Michael Skakel was found guilty of the murder of Martha Moxley.  He was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison and he was remanded to the Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown, Connecticut.  But this is far from the end of this case, actually this is where it gets, kind of interesting.

If you are familiar with this case, I am sure by now, you may be yelling at me through however you are listening to this podcast and telling me to explain more about Michael Skakel’s family.  So here we go.

Michael Christopher Skakel is the fifth of seven children, born to Rushton Walter Skakel and Anne Reynolds.  Rushton (and no offense if this is your name, but you can not be named Rushton and not be a millionaire), Rushton’s sister is Ethel Kennedy, you know, widow of the famous United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy.  Michael’s grandfather George was the founder of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, which was one of the largest and wealthiest privately held coal corporations in the US.

After his mother's death from brain cancer in 1973, Skakel began abusing alcohol.  He was a poor student and reportedly flunked out of a dozen schools. He also struggled for years with dyslexia, which went undiagnosed until he was aged 26. Skakel's cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., later wrote that he was a "small sensitive child – the runt of the litter with a harsh and occasionally violent alcoholic father who both ignored and abused him." According to neighbors and family friends, the Skakel children were given unlimited amounts of money and were largely unsupervised.

In 1978, Skakel was arrested for drunk driving in New York State. To avoid criminal charges, his family sent him to the Élan School in Poland, Maine, where he purportedly received treatment for alcoholism. He ran away from the school twice before leaving after two years. Skakel later attended Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts and earned a bachelor's degree in English. During the 1980s, he attended several drug rehabilitation facilities before finally becoming sober in his twenties. Skakel also pursued a career as a professional athlete; he competed on the international speed skiing circuit and tried out for the speed skiing demonstration team that appeared at the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. In 1991, Skakel married professional golfer Margot Sheridan, with whom he has one child. Sheridan filed for divorce shortly after Skakel was arrested for Moxley's murder in January 2000. Their divorce was finalized in 2001.

In January 2003, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote a controversial article in The Atlantic Monthly, entitled "A Miscarriage of Justice," insisting that Skakel's indictment "was triggered by an inflamed media, and that an innocent man is now in prison." Kennedy argued that there was more evidence suggesting that Kenneth Littleton, the Skakel family's live-in tutor, had killed Moxley. He also called Dominick Dunne the "driving force" behind Skakel's prosecution. In July 2016, Kennedy released a book defending Skakel entitled Framed.

Michael Skakel desperately fought his conviction and in November of 2003, his appeal went to the Connecticut Supreme Court.  The prime arguments Skakel’s defense team were making for this appeal were based on the opinion that he should have been tried in juvenile court and that the statute of limitations had expired there was also a claim of prosecutorial misconduct.  The Connecticut Supreme Court rejected his claims and re-affirmed Michael Skakel’s conviction.  After this attempt failed, Michael Skakel retained a new attorney, Theodore Olson, who once served as the US Solicitor General under former President George W Bush.  Olson filed a writ of certiorari on Skakel’s behalf to the US Supreme Court.  This essentially means, he asked the US Supreme Court to simply review the case.  On November 13th, 2006, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Not one to give up, Skakel hired new attorneys in 2007.  These new attorneys filed a petition for habeas corpus and filed motions for a new trial.  Their petition gave an alternate theory about what had happened to Martha Moxley, all those years ago.  And let me tell you, this new theory is explosive.  Skakel’s defense team claimed the following, Gitano “Tony” Bryant who’s cousin was Kobe Bryant, yes, that Kobe Bryant, was a former classmate of Michael Skakel.  In a videotaped interview from 2003, Bryant stated that on the night of Martha Moxley’s murder, he and some friends were out and one of his companions stated that he wanted to rape Martha.  Bryant also stated that he had not come forward earlier because his mother had warned him, that as a black man, if he provided information, they would pin the murder on him.  I will say, she was probably not wrong.

Because of this new explosive evidence, a two-week hearing took place in April of 2007.  The court allowed the presentation of this hearsay evidence and in September of that same year, Skakel’s attorney’s file a petition for a new trial based on this new evidence.  The prosecutor’s office’s formal response to this was that they believed Bryant fabricated the story he told to try and drum up some buzz for a play he was writing about the murder. 

On October 25th, 2007, a Superior Court Judge denied the request for a new trial stating that he found Bryant’s testimony was not credible and that there had been no proven evidence of prosecutorial misconduct during the original trial.  This decision was then appealed to the state supreme court, where on April 12th, 2010 a 5-judge panel declined the appeal in a 4 to 1 decision. 

Still unwilling to accept the multiple court rulings against him, Skakel next appeals his sentence based on ineffective counsel, this would be against his original attorney Michael Sherman.  At a hearing in April 2013, Michael Skakel testified that Sherman chose to bask in the lime light and attempted to obtain celebrity status by representing him, and Skakel maintains that he did not focus on the actual defense of his case.  Sherman did testify in his own defense during this hearing and he maintained that he did focus on the case and still believes that Michael Skakel was innocent.

On January 24th, 2012, Skakel and his attorneys argued for a reduction in his sentence, they maintained the claim that he should have been tried in juvenile court.  Once again, his hopes were dashed, when the court denied his bid for a sentence reduction.  

And then, almost out of nowhere, on October 23rd, 2013, Michael Skakel was granted a new trial by Connecticut judge Thomas A Bishop, Judge Bishop ruled that Sherman, had in fact, failed to adequately represent Skakel when he was convicted.  In his ruling, Bishop wrote that defense in such a case requires attention to detail, an energetic investigation and a coherent plan of defense, stating:

"Trial counsel's failures in each of these areas of representation were significant and, ultimately, fatal to a constitutionally adequate defense ... As a consequence of trial counsel's failures as stated, the state procured a judgment of conviction that lacks reliability." 

On November 21, 2013, Skakel was released on a $1.2 million bond along with other conditions: he was to be monitored with a GPS device; could have no contact with Martha Moxley's family; he must periodically check in over the phone; and would not be allowed to leave the state of Connecticut unless granted permission, although he had since relocated to Westchester County, New York.

Then, in December 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated Skakel's murder conviction with a 4–3 majority decision, writing that his conviction was the result of "overwhelming" evidence presented by prosecutors and that his legal representation had been adequate. 

In January 2018, prosecutors asked the Connecticut Supreme Court to revoke Skakel's bail and to return him to prison to resume serving his sentence. However, on May 4, the Connecticut Supreme Court vacated Skakel's conviction and ordered a new trial. The court ruled that Sherman had "rendered ineffective assistance" when he failed to contact an alibi witness whose name had been provided by Skakel and that as a result, Skakel was deprived of a fair trial. State prosecutors in Stamford had the power to call for a new trial against Skakel.

On October 30, 2020, chief state's attorney Richard Colangelo informed the Superior Court that Skakel would not be retried.

And that is, sadly, where this case ends.45 Years after Martha Moxley had a fun night out, celebrating Mischief Night with her friends and then was murdered.  45 years later and there is still no resounding justice for this victim. And maybe there never will be.  I’m John Dodson and this has been, The Secret Sits.  We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits, in the middle and knows.  Audio Eng. by Gabriel Dodson.  Logo artwork, provided by Tony Ley.