Skakel, Michael - Triumph by Jury - Vanity Fair
August 2002
Of all the crimes the author has reported on for Vanity Fair, the long-unsolved 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley resonated most deeply, not least for its echoes of his own daughter’s slaying and his bond with the victim’s mother, Dorthy. From the leaked document that convinced him of Michael Skakel’s guilt and revived the investigation to the telling behavior of Skakel and Kennedy relatives during the trial, the strange absence of Michael’s brother Tommy, and the jury’s emphatic verdict on June 7, the author devotes this month’s diary to an unexpected victory of justice over privilege.
by Dominick Dunne
Martha Moxley - 15 year old murder victim
Will wonders never cease? After three days of deliberation, the jury found Michael Skakel guilty of the murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley 27 years ago! During the month that I attended the Skakel-Moxley trial in Norwalk, Connecticut, I said to everyone who asked me to predict the outcome, and a great many people did, “Of course he’s guilty, but he’s going to walk.” I said it with a heavy heart, because I firmly believed that Michael Skakel had killed Martha Moxley.
I have been convinced of it for a long time, ever since a young man who had been temporarily employed by Sutton Associates, a private-detective firm hired by Rushton Skakel, Michael’s father, to divert attention from his son Tommy, for years the main suspect in the killing, contacted me three years ago and surreptitiously placed in my hands the resulting Sutton report. According to the report, Ken Littleton, the hapless tutor of some of the Skakel boys, who was spending the first night of his employment in the Skakel house when the murder occurred, was not a suspect. The young man who contacted me, about whom I have written before and who continues to wish to remain anonymous, pointed out the inconsistencies in Michael Skakel’s story. Unlike the Sutton detectives involved in the investigation, which cost a reported $750,000, the young man had never signed a confidentiality agreement, since he had been hired merely to write up the report, utilizing all the evidence and interviews gathered by the agency. “I came to the point of suddenly deciding it was Michael,” he told me. “I never thought Michael went to the Terriens’ that night. But no one was thinking of Michael.” He showed his “speculative report” to Jim Murphy, the head of the agency, who in turn showed it to Thomas Sheridan, the lawyer Rushton Skakel had hired shortly after the murder, whose niece, Margo Sheridan, grew up to marry Michael Skakel, bear him a son, and divorce him shortly before the murder trial started. Sheridan, after reading the report, called off the investigation. “The Skakels pulled the plug on Sutton,” the young man said.
The Moxley case has obsessed me since I first became interested in it, in 1991, after visiting Dorthy Moxley, the victim’s mother, in Annapolis, Maryland, where she had moved after the death of her husband. She told me on that first visit that she could not bear to look out her window at the Skakel house. “I didn’t know who did it, but I knew that in that house someone knew.”
Michael Skakel’s guilty verdict shocked me almost as much as O. J. Simpson’s not-guilty verdict had seven years before in Los Angeles. There were no fingerprints, no witnesses, no DNA—nothing, other than circumstantial evidence, on which to build a case. There is no doubt that Mickey Sherman, Skakel’s million-dollar defense attorney, dominated the courtroom throughout the trial. I thought he was a shoo-in to win an acquittal for his client. He made you believe that he actually enjoyed being in the company of Michael Skakel. Skakel is a 280-pound, florid, 41-year-old man with desperately unhappy eyes, shirts that are bursting at the seams, and two cheap suits that don’t fit.
All Mickey Sherman had to do was create a reasonable doubt, and it could well be argued that he did. But he lost the case, and no one was more stunned than Sherman himself, unless it was Michael Skakel, who is up for 10 years to life when he’s sentenced on July 19. After the jury had been polled individually, and all 12 members said “Guilty,” Skakel spoke for the only time at the trial. “I’d like to say something,” he said tersely, but he had become a convicted murderer once the jury foreman, Kevin Cambra, announced the verdict, and Judge John Kavanewsky quite rightly denied him that privilege with a very forceful “No, sir.” Then two deputies, on orders from the judge, put Skakel’s arms behind his back and handcuffed him, in front of his aunt Ann Skakel McCooey and his brothers, while his lawyers made meaningless gestures of comfort and the whole courtroom stared at him, transfixed by his humiliation. This trial has ruined a once proud family. Their besmirched name will outlive them all. But humiliation was not a new thing to Michael Skakel. Sometime after the murder, Rushton Skakel had sent him to the Elan School in Poland Springs, Maine, a correctional school for the troubled children of the rich, where the other students were allowed to spit in his face and pummel him. After Rushton’s wife died, he evaded parental responsibility, leaving his daughter and six sons unsupervised, in the hands of hired help. He was away on a hunting trip the night of the murder.
Even Mickey Sherman, the person who believes in the convicted killer most, made an embarrassing mistake when he said that the reason Michael had once jumped out of the family car, which the chauffeur was driving over the Triborough Bridge, in New York, and tried to commit suicide by leaping into the river was not because he had killed Martha, but because he had slept in one of his dead mother’s dresses and was ashamed. Later, Sherman had to amend the statement. Michael hadn’t slept in his dead mother’s dress, he had slept with it. One of the jurors later said to me, “If Michael had kept his mouth shut all these years, this trial would never have happened.”
The great surprise of the trial was the closing argument by Jonathan Benedict, whom I had stupidly criticized as being too laid-back New England. At one point the jurors had even sent a note to the judge requesting that the prosecutor speak more loudly, although his chair was the one nearest the jury box. Nevertheless, when Benedict stepped over to the table in front of the jury and looked them straight in the eyes, he became a man inspired. His summation was as brilliant as anything I have ever heard in a courtroom. He was like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s too bad the speech wasn’t televised, because it should be shown to law students. He was strong and solid, and he had total confidence in the veracity of his case. Benedict is one of those rare lawyers who are not looking for publicity. He described Martha as a pretty, flirtatious girl caught in the crossfire between two competing boys, Michael and Tommy. A week or so earlier, I had said to my country neighbor Chris Morano, one of the other prosecutors, “Why did you let them use that tape of Michael’s voice?” I thought that had been a mistake, because Skakel sounded very sweet and likable on it, but Chris replied only, “You’ll see.” And see I did with Benedict’s closing argument. Before Skakel had any idea he was going to be indicted for Martha Moxley’s murder, he had been planning to write a revenge memoir about his family and his cousins the Kennedys, entitled Dead Man Talking, with the subtitle The First Account by an Insider of the Avarice, Perversion, and Gangsterism of America’s Royal Family. Using the tape of Michael Skakel speaking to his ghostwriter, Richard Hoffman, and projecting some of his actual words on a screen, Benedict showed that Skakel couldn’t have known that his sister’s friend Andrea Shakespeare Renna had left the Skakel house on the night of the murder unless he was in the house at the time—when two of his brothers, Rushton junior and John, and his first cousin James Dowdle swore on the stand under oath he had been at the home of Dowdle’s mother, Georgeann Skakel Terrien. After Benedict’s summation, Mickey Sherman’s closing argument seemed superficial. It began, “He didn’t do it. He didn’t do it. He doesn’t know who did it. He wasn’t there when the crime was committed, and he never confessed.” But he had confessed. Benedict cited 11 confessions Michael had made over the years, in various forms. He called his behavior “consciousness of guilt.”
Sherman’s closing wasn’t special. It was the same thing he had said into every microphone he had passed in the last two years. He continued to cast suspicion on Ken Littleton, but it was too late for that. It was lightweight. Benedict’s summation had been heavyweight. And the jury picked up on that.
Imet with four of the jurors in Greenwich a few days after the verdict, and we appeared on Court TV with Catherine Crier acting as moderator. This was one of the few juries I had ever seen that were truly made up of the defendant’s peers. They were all educated and savvy. I never saw one of them snooze after lunch, as jurors so often do during trials. I happened to have lunch every day with several members of the press at the same restaurant where the jury ate, always together at one table. I couldn’t help but overhear them on occasion, and—obedient to the judge’s instructions—they never discussed the case. They would talk about their children, their trips, food—the sorts of things newly acquainted people talk about. They saved their deliberations for the jury room. They took their job seriously, were totally attentive to every witness, and noticed tiny details that were revealing. For instance, after James Dowdle said on the stand that Michael had been with him, watching Monty Python, at the time of the murder, Michael rose to give him a bear hug—just as he had when his father left the stand, even though he had written in his book proposal how much he hated his father—but Dowdle walked past him without speaking to him, let alone hugging him, as if his duty was now done and he didn’t want anything more to do with his cousin. One juror pointed out that two of Michael’s friends, Michael Meredith, the son of football great Don Meredith, and Andrew Pugh, Michael’s best friend when they were growing up, had stopped being his friends after he told them that he had been masturbating in a tree next to Martha’s house at the time of the murder. That led the jury to believe that he had probably told them more than that. Several of the jurors thought that Mickey Sherman had underestimated them. They were enraged that Sherman had said on-camera after the trial that they had delivered an emotional verdict, because they felt sorry for Mrs. Moxley. They were convinced that Michael Skakel had damned himself with his own words, by placing himself at the scene of the crime in taped conversations with the ghostwriter of his never-to-be-published memoir.
When the guilty verdict was announced by the foreman, there was an audible gasp from Mrs. Stephen Carroll, the recent widow of the retired detective Steve Carroll, who had been on the case from the beginning, had remained loyal and helpful to Dorthy Moxley after his retirement, and had always been a cooperative source on the facts of the case. Carroll was not afraid to criticize the inadequacies of the work of the Greenwich police at the time of the murder or the intimidation he felt the Skakel family had brought to bear. His comments frequently infuriated the Greenwich police, and he had not been seated at the hearings in Stamford. A few months ago, Dorthy Moxley and I attended a testimonial dinner in Carroll’s honor given by the Horseneck Republican Club in Greenwich. He died shortly thereafter. For Mrs. Carroll, the delivery of the verdict was a moment that honored her husband of 46 years.
Anyone who reads me on a regular basis knows how much I think of Dorthy Moxley. Her behavior over the years defines for me the meaning of the word “mother.” She never forgot for a moment how much she loved her daughter and missed her. I have never known her to be vindictive about the Skakel family, who had lied and lied to her since that terrible Mischief Night in 1975, when she kept phoning their house looking for her missing daughter. Georgeann Skakel Terrien also lied to Dorthy that night; in subsequent years Mrs. Terrien, an alcoholic who has since died, would often tell people that two Skakel brothers showed up on her doorstep that night, covered in blood. Rushton Skakel later even invited Dorthy and her late husband, David, up to the family’s country place in Windham, New York, for a weekend, to the very house where the Skakel boys had been whisked the day after the murder. In my mind that’s a form of lying, too. Dorthy Moxley simply wanted justice, and on June 7, in Norwalk, she got it. If you could have seen the look on her face. This lady has class. Never for a second did she gloat over the fate of Michael Skakel. She said simply, “This is Martha’s day.” No one called out “Congratulations!” to her. She wouldn’t have allowed that. She watched Michael being put into handcuffs. She was hugged by a lot of people. Then, with her devoted son, John, beside her, she walked out to face the phalanx of reporters and cameras, and everyone applauded.
That night I was on Larry King Live with Dorthy and John Moxley. In the makeup room before the show, I was in one chair, Dorthy was in another, and John was standing nearby. We were talking about the extraordinary events of the day when in walked Mickey Sherman. We were supposed to be on for the first 50 minutes of the show, and he for the last 10, from another studio so that there would be no overlap. Although Mickey Sherman and I are in adversarial positions, I’ve always liked him, so I said hello. It was an extremely uncomfortable moment. He and the Moxleys had never spoken. There had to have been bitter feelings. Dorthy kept looking straight into the makeup mirror. Mickey stepped forward, right up to her chair, and said, “As heartbroken as I am for my client, I would like to tell you how happy I am for you, Mrs. Moxley.” It was extremely gracious. Dorthy slowly turned her head toward him and said, “Tell your son, Mark, how much I have enjoyed meeting him.” Mark Sherman had been a member of his father’s legal team. On the air a few minutes later, Larry King asked Dorthy if she hated Michael Skakel. She said she didn’t. She put all the blame for the way Michael had turned out on Rushton Skakel, who had let his children run wild. Michael, she said, “admitted … that at 13 he was an alcoholic.” I’m sure the hypocrisy of the invitation to Windham—Rushton Skakel’s attempt to divert any suspicions the Moxleys may have had about his sons—must still gall her.
Michael Skakel’s confessions over the years were often oblique and evasive. “I was so drunk, I don’t know if I did it or not,” he allegedly once said to his father, and his father repeated it to Cissie Ix, his neighbor and his late wife’s best friend, who reported it under oath to the grand jury and then recanted it under oath at the murder trial. “Rush would never say anything like that about one of his children,” she said on the stand. “I must have put those words into his mouth by mistake.” The jurors I talked to didn’t believe her. Several years ago, Cissie Ix and her daughter, Helen, went to visit Dorthy Moxley in New Jersey, where she now lives, and asked her to drop the case, saying that the Skakels had suffered enough. Dorthy Moxley asked her, “Would you ask that if it were your daughter?” Dorthy and Cissie, once friends, never spoke again.
During the trial, when things appeared bleak for the prosecution, I had a call at Vanity Fair from a woman named Joanna Walker in Santa Barbara, California. When I called her back, she told me that she had been an intern at an alcohol-and-drug rehabilitation center called Anacapa by the Sea in Port Hueneme, California, north of Malibu, in 1997, when Michael Skakel was a patient there. According to Walker, Michael said then that he had been in Russia setting up alcohol-and-drug rehabs but had fallen off the wagon and ended up at Anacapa by the Sea. She said he was totally paranoid at the time, fearful that both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. were spying on him because of something he had done when he was a teenager. At some point she said to him, “Did you do it?,” and he replied, “Yes, and I’ve been running all my life.” She was not a counselor. She was acquiring enough hours to get her license. She told me she had made notes of what Skakel said during friendly conversations. She said that he could be charming, playing the unhappy brother who had had a bad childhood, but he could also be arrogant, as if he were above the therapists who were treating him. He gave off a sense of entitlement, although not a single member of his family came for family week. I immediately called Chris Morano and told him the story, and he called Frank Garr, the chief inspector on the case. Garr called me, and I gave him Joanna Walker’s number in California. She said she was willing to come forward if she were given police protection. It developed that there was a privacy issue, since Walker had been an employee at the facility, and that might come up on appeal. In the end she did not appear, and it turned out that Jonathan Benedict didn’t need her. Mickey Sherman, having first heard of this alleged confession to Walker from my comments on television, says, “We don’t buy it.”
Ioften have personal connections in the criminal and federal cases I cover for Vanity Fair, and this one was no exception. Rushton Skakel was several years ahead of me at Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, although I never knew him there. In 1950, I went to Ethel Skakel and Robert Kennedy’s wedding at the original Skakel mansion on Lake Avenue in Greenwich. It was a grand estate with fountains shooting jets of water high into the air. I went as the date of a friend who had been a classmate of Ethel’s at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, the fancy school for rich Catholic girls. It was a dazzling occasion, uniting two of the richest Catholic families in America. In Michael Skakel’s book proposal, he briefly mentions me because of my novel A Season in Purgatory, a fictional version of the Moxley murder which came out in 1993. During the trial, I had no interaction whatsoever with the large number of family members and friends who arrived each day to support Michael Skakel. But one day outside the courthouse a woman who identified herself only as a sister of Cissie Ix told me that she had read a book I wrote about my life, and then said, “I think it’s sad you cared so little for your wife and children.” I looked at her, astonished. She had hate in her voice and on her face. I couldn’t believe what she had said. “Imagine that you are making money on the sorrow you have caused the Skakel family,” she hissed, like a serpent. Naturally, she made no mention of the Moxley family’s sorrow.
Another day, Robert Kennedy Jr., who is often vitriolic about me in the press, once calling me the leader of a lynch mob against his family, made a token appearance in court, where he stayed for an hour or so, arriving late and attracting attention during Jonathan Benedict’s closing argument—a fact not lost on the jury. His aunt Ann Skakel McCooey took his arm as they left the courtroom for the lunch break, and said in a loud voice, as they passed me, “Jerk!” The next morning I was on the Today show, talking about the case with Katie Couric, and she said, “Somebody walked through the courtroom and called you a jerk?” So I got to tell the story on television.
Once, while waiting to go through the metal detector, I had a brief but pleasant exchange with Rushton Skakel Jr. about life in Bogotá, Colombia, where he lives. Another day, there was one of those jam-ups at the courtroom door, when everyone was trying to get in at the same time after a break, and I found that I had pushed in ahead of Julie Skakel, Michael’s sister. I turned to her and apologized, fully expecting to get the steely-eyed treatment that Michael gave me whenever our eyes met. But she wasn’t like that at all. She smiled pleasantly and said, “We haven’t met. I’m Julie Skakel.” “Of course, I know,” I replied. “I’m Dominick Dunne.” “I know,” she said, and then we went our separate ways into the courtroom. When she was on the stand being questioned by Jonathan Benedict, she gave an extraordinary picture of growing up in the Skakel family.
“During his teenage years, did your brother Michael have a turbulent relationship with your father?” asked Benedict.
“We all did,” Julie replied.
“Did Michael have a turbulent relationship with Thomas?”
“We all did,” she replied.
“Did Michael have a turbulent relationship with you?” Benedict asked.
“They all did,” she said of her six brothers.
Even now, they aren’t close. You could see that by the way they sat apart from one another in the courtroom.
The mystery figure of this trial was, without doubt, Tommy Skakel. For 20 years he had been the prime suspect, the one everybody said was the last person to be seen with Martha Moxley, roughhousing with her. Even though the Sutton report placed the blame on Michael, there remained a suggestion that Tommy may have helped move the body. There was a lingering rivalry between the two. Michael thought Martha was his girlfriend, although her diary indicated that she did not return his ardor. He also thought Tommy was moving into his territory with Martha. A member of the Terrien family once approached me at a book signing for A Season in Purgatory to tell me that two brothers did it, not one. He said, “I’ve kept my mouth shut about this case long enough.” But he would never talk to me again, no matter how hard I tried to make him. Tommy has been living in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and three daughters. At one time he was said to be marketing a golf club, a driver called “the Terminator,” named after the Arnold Schwarzenegger film, but ultimately good taste apparently prevailed and the project was abandoned. Although Tommy Skakel has to have pertinent information about the night of the murder, neither side called him as a witness. Emanuel “Manny” Margolis, his faithful lawyer of 25 years, attended the trial every day and took copious notes, which he doubtless relayed to Tommy. Then, toward the end of the trial, Tommy appeared in court for one day only. If he spoke to his brother Michael, I missed it. There was certainly no sign of affection between them. Manny Margolis said, “They are not close. I would not say they are close.” Jonathan Benedict described Tommy as Michael’s nemesis. How complicated their relationship must be. In contrast to his brother, Tommy has the look of a prep-school teacher, with horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket and khakis. His appearance in the courtroom was a token one, like his cousin Robert Kennedy Jr.’s. The only thing I heard him say the whole day was to Steve Dunleavy of the New York Post, whose reportage was vehemently pro-Skakel. Tommy said, taking his hand, “Hey, Steve, how are you? I appreciate what you’ve done.”
Tommy Skakel heard the verdict in Stockbridge, where he rents a carriage house on Main Street. The town police reportedly had to stage a lockdown at the school his daughters attend just to keep the media out. Friends said that Tommy had been glued to the television at a friend’s house during jury deliberations. A person who was with him when the verdict was reported said he totally lost control, bawling and shouting, “Oh God, no!”
Robert Kennedy Jr. said to reporter Lindsey Faber of Greenwich Time, “The tragedy of Martha Moxley’s death has just been compounded by the conviction of an innocent man. My cousin Michael is absolutely innocent.” And Mickey Sherman wasted no time in filing an appeal. So what? Whatever may happen in the future, nothing can ever change the fact that a jury of Michael Skakel’s peers found him guilty of murder.
This has been a long haul for a group of us who have kept hanging in there with Dorthy Moxley. She calls us her angels. There’s Len Levitt of Newsday, a reporter I admire, who finds time to go to his son’s baseball games. Len got into a loud scrap with Manny Margolis the day Tommy Skakel appeared in court. Since Tommy wouldn’t speak to any reporter but Steve Dunleavy, Len took on Margolis. “Why did he change his story?” he asked Manny. In 1975, Tommy had told the police he left Martha at 9:30 to write a school paper on Abraham Lincoln (no such paper had been assigned). When he was interviewed in the 90s by a detective from the Sutton agency, he said that he had later gone back outside for 15 or 20 minutes and mutually masturbated with Martha. Tommy then started to cry, and Margolis stopped the interview. In court, Len kept taunting Manny until he finally snapped back, “I don’t have to speak to you!” Len Levitt was right to press for answers to lingering questions. After the trial, Jonathan Benedict said that someone must have helped Michael. There had to have been a lot of blood, so what happened to the clothes? And I’m sure it took more than one person to drag Martha’s body 80 feet and put it under the tree in which Michael later said he masturbated.
Then there’s Frank Garr, with whom I’ve had a few troubles over the years, but whose dedication to the case was admirable. And there’s Tim Dumas, the writer of a book about the case called Greentown, who in 1993 interviewed me at my house in Connecticut about A Season in Purgatory for Greenwich Magazine.
I’ve already spoken about the young man who brought me the Sutton report; I consider him one of the heroes of the story. Possession of a copy of the report brought about an extraordinary change in the lives of two men, Mark Fuhrman, the disgraced detective from the O. J. Simpson trial, and me. Fuhrman had been ruined for lying about having said the n-word, while a man who I believed killed two people walked free. I was in court every time Fuhrman took the stand in the Simpson case, but I never met him until 1997, when the then literary agent Lucianne Goldberg arranged to bring us together at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. He came and stayed at my house in Connecticut, where I gave him the Sutton report, which ruffled a few feathers among my media friends, but I made the right choice. There were those who didn’t like Mark, but he had no fear of getting into people’s faces. Dorthy liked him from the start. He wrote a book called Murder in Greenwich, which presented Michael’s masturbation story. Believe me, his book had a lot to do with the calling of a grand jury after 25 years, and out of that came the indictment of Michael Skakel.
Did I have a vested interest in this case from the beginning, even before I went to Annapolis to meet Dorthy Moxley back in 1991? Yes, I did. My daughter, Dominique, and Martha Moxley were both attacked and killed by men they knew on October 30. Martha died in 1975, Dominique in 1982, but they were born only a year apart. The verdict in the Moxley case is the one I wanted for John Sweeney, my daughter’s killer, who has subsequently changed his name to John Moira, instead of the ludicrous slap-on-the-wrist sentence he received. He served only two and a half years, and after that I thought, I’m never going to let something like this happen again. After covering celebrity trials for Vanity Fair over the years, I have become so cynical that I simply assumed Michael Skakel would walk, as people of his class and wealth so often do. In the novel I wrote about the case, the character based on Michael did walk. But at the trial, justice prevailed. Here’s to you, Martha Moxley and Dominique Dunne, who got gypped out of your lives. I send you both my love.
Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.