The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
—Malcom X
On October 30, 1975, someone killed 15-year-old Martha Moxley outside her home in the swanky Belle Haven section of Greenwich, Connecticut. Martha was friend and next-door neighbor to my cousin, Michael Skakel, who celebrated his 15th birthday five weeks earlier. At the time of Martha’s murder, Michael was eleven miles away with five eyewitnesses. Prior to 1998, no police agency had ever considered Michael a suspect in Martha’s murder.
Twenty-seven years after Martha’s death, the State of Connecticut spent some $25 million to convict Michael Skakel of murdering Martha. At Michael’s criminal trial, the State offered no physical or forensic evidence, no fingerprints or DNA, no eyewitness testimony linking Michael to the murder. Indeed, bungling police investigators had lost many items of physical evidence that might have exculpated Michael, including a bloodied section of the golf club used as a murder weapon; vaginal and anal swabs and slides from the victim made by the Connecticut medical examiner; blood-stained, size-13 Keds sneakers; the bloody pants of a large adult male, shown by police to witnesses following the crime; several hairs removed from Martha’s body; and beer cans taken from the crime scene. With no evidence linking Michael to the killing, the State tried him based on the perjured testimony of three confession witnesses suborned by a crooked and malevolent cop obsessed with winning his career case. Despite Michael’s ironclad alibi, and the State’s obvious evidentiary defects, a Connecticut court, nevertheless, convicted him of Martha’s murder in 2002 after a six-week jury trial. The trial court judge, John F. Kavanewsky Jr., sentenced Michael to a term of 20 years to life in prison.
Because of the dearth of evidence against him and his airtight alibi, a number of people had to commit selfish, malicious, or illegal acts in order to convict Michael, who found himself in a confluence where the pooled ambitions of several unscrupulous men and women intersected to sweep him away. Among these scoundrels were a craven family bursar and lawyer, Tom Sheridan, who leaked selective lies to incriminate Michael, a boy whose legal troubles represented to Sheridan a permanent gravy train; Dominick “Nick” Dunne, a nationally published gossip columnist who minted his long campaign against the Skakel family into lucrative books, TV shows, and the celebrity he craved; Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced LA policeman, convicted perjurer, and racist, who wrote a shoddy and inaccurate account of the Moxley murder, pointing the finger at Michael in an effort to rehabilitate his own damaged reputation; Frank Garr, a morally corrupt Greenwich Police officer who rescued his failing career by cajoling, harassing, intimidating, and tampering with witnesses, and suborning perjury to gin up a case against Michael, whose family he despised; Jonathan Benedict, an unscrupulous prosecutor with elastic ethics, who put ambition ahead of truth and justice, and who illegally concealed exculpatory evidence to win Michael’s conviction; and Len Levitt, Garr’s sidekick and dupe, a starstruck local reporter who penned a secret deal with Garr to split the proceeds of a book and any subsequent movie deals arising out of their efforts to convict Michael. Following their own selfish agendas, these men meshed together a net of lies that would ensnare Michael and put him behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.
Michael compounded his problems by hiring Mickey Sherman, a slick but incompetent, dissolute, and pathologically narcissistic wannabe television lawyer. Sherman, who described himself as a “media whore,” drank, gambled, and luxury-binged away the $2.2 million that Michael’s friends and family had scraped together to finance his defense.
A cyclone of media malpractice consolidated the perfect storm of greed and ambition that ended in Michael’s imprisonment. His conviction was a failure of the legal system. It was also a failure of the press. The prevailing news story crafted by Dunne, Fuhrman, and a conniving prosecutor—of the spoiled rich “Kennedy cousin” using political power and connections to get away with murder—was flypaper to the national media that parlayed the narrative into a cottage industry. In a classic and corrupt loop, the media vultures hungry for ratings egged on Connecticut prosecutors to file scurrilous murder charges against Michael. The 18 satellite trucks and almost 55 reporters attending Michael’s trial signified a journalistic obsession with the case that was 10 miles wide and an inch deep. With 401 reporters certified to cover the case, only one, Leslie Stahl, bothered to look beneath the flimsy veneer at the myriad facts undermining the prosecutor’s frail parable. A new breed of TV lawyers, led by CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin and HLN’s Nancy Grace and Beth Karas, stoked the pitchfork brigade and officiated over Michael’s press lynching. The media lemming stampede was evidence of a broken system that sacrificed Michael on the altar of ratings and revenue, and compounded the tragedy of Martha Moxley’s death with the conviction of an innocent man.
Sympathy for Mrs. Dorthy Moxley, Martha’s mother, and the narrative of the Kennedy kid who got away with murder, were ferociously embraced by press, police, and prosecutor. It swayed Connecticut’s judicial system, which obligingly dismantled the imposing legal barriers to wrongfully jail Michael for his implausible role in a 27-year-old crime. The courts, which are meant to safeguard individual rights against the volatile tides of public passions, instead capitulated to the mob. The judicial system shamefully bent its own rules and overturned longstanding black-letter precedent regarding its ironclad five-year statute of limitations on non-capital murder in the State of Connecticut.
I am going to show that Michael Skakel did not and could not have killed Martha Moxley; how and why he got framed for the crime; who did the framing; and how they accomplished it. I’m also going to show how I tracked down the likely killers, phantoms who moved in and out of Greenwich like shadows, and whose presence was detected by neither police nor press during 30 years of flawed investigations. Despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt, Connecticut prosecutors and police still refuse to investigate them. Today, those men walk free, as entrenched, ego-bound police and prosecutors stick to their guns and refuse to acknowledge their mistake.
Michael is my cousin, and it would be natural for a reader to suspect I’m in the tank for him. For this reason, I will methodically lay out the overwhelming evidence that supports Michael’s innocence. I mean to be painfully honest in telling this story, even relating things that some members of my family will find difficult to read. I will share personal stories and memories that I would otherwise never discuss. I do this because Michael’s freedom, reputation, and constitutional rights are more important than the privacy I sacrifice by recounting these anecdotes.
There are broader issues, as well, that need airing, including the abuse of police and prosecutorial power and the role of the media in our democracy. Michael’s ordeal is a parable about how mercilessly the flames of passion and prejudice consume even the most privileged individual when democracy’s firewalls—police, prosecutors, the justice system, the press—give way to the clamoring of the mob. The inferno that devoured Michael is no anomaly. It feeds every day on the economically disadvantaged and minorities. Only visibility distinguished Michael. Mostly the casualties of their broken institutions are the invisible and discarded—people living in ghettos and fringe communities, from Ferguson to Baltimore.
Michael has spent 11½ years in jail. In October 2013, after a successful habeas corpus appeal, a courageous appellant court judge, Thomas Bishop, ordered Michael released from prison based on his claim that his lawyer was so monumentally incompetent that Michael did not receive a fair trial. When Fairfield County prosecutors appealed Judge Bishop’s 128-page ruling in favor of Michael to the Connecticut Supreme Court, I hired a private investigator, Larry Holifield, and began working on this book. As of this writing, Judge Bishop’s ruling in Michael’s favor is on appeal by prosecutors to a six-judge panel of the Connecticut Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court decides against Michael, he will return to prison to serve out his sentence. If the justices rule in his favor, the new Fairfield County prosecutor will decide whether to retry Michael for the Moxley murder. Michael would then face a new trial.
I know that Michael Skakel is innocent. I expect that anyone who reads this book will be similarly convinced, and, if I’ve done my job in writing it, they will also finally understand how the players and events conspired to jail him. Finally, if prosecutors have the courage to acknowledge their mistake, I will have provided police a blueprint to finally indict, try, and convict Martha’s true killers.
This is the story of two crimes: the murder of Martha Moxley and the wrongful imprisonment of my cousin Michael Skakel.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Mt. Kisco, New York