How Two Kennedy Cousins Changed Their Story About a Sex Crime

Welcome to the second installment of the mystery of Martha Moxley’s murder, a Beast Files series for Beast Inside members only.

Martha Moxley’s murder case had gone stone-cold for 15 years.

Then came the arrest of another Kennedy cousin, William Kennedy Smith, for rape in Palm Beach. There was no truth to a rumor that he had been at the Skakel house on the night of the Moxley murder. But even a whiff of the Kennedy name was enough to trigger the interest of such tabloids as the New York Post, which subsequently interviewed the tireless reporter Len Levitt.

If the local papers, as well as law enforcement, were too cautious back at the time of the Moxley murder, just a hint—however unfounded—of some kind of Kennedy cover-up now spurred action.

A month later, the Greenwich Time and the Stamford Advocate decided to run the Levitt story they had been sitting on for nine years. A month after that, the same prosecutor who had declined to convene a grand jury 15 years before decided to take a fresh look.

“Fla. Case Revives Probe of Kennedy Kin in 75 Sex Slay,” the New York Post announced.

The new lead investigators into the murder were Frank Garr of the Greenwich Police and Jack Solomon of the Fairfield County state’s attorney’s office. Solomon became convinced that the killer was not Tommy Skakel, but the family tutor, Ken Littleton.

The summer after the murder, Littleton had derailed as a result of mounting mental problems exacerbated by substance abuse. He ended up getting arrested for burglary in Nantucket, a development that caused the Greenwich police to reappraise him as a possible suspect when he returned to his teaching job at the Brunswick School in the fall. Police convinced him to take a lie detector test about the Moxley murder. He failed, though most detectives took this as, at most, an indicator of complicity after the fact. A private investigator would wonder if Littleton was simply one of those individuals who throw off the polygraph.

“Such people are usually very nervous, unstable or agitated,” the investigators’ report would suggest. “Littleton is all three.”

In the police interview, Littleton told the detectives that he did not believe Tommy could have committed the murder around 10 p.m. and seemed so at ease when he came in the watch The French Connection not a half hour later. Littleton also said that Michael Skakel had unnerved him when they went golfing sometime after the killing. He said Michael had bludgeoned several small animals with a golf club.

“Littleton discusses an incident on a golf course, following the murder, in which Michael bashed a chipmunk’s head in with a golf club and ‘crucified’ it with golf tees on the 17th hole, and then bashed in the head of a squirrel and stuffed it in the 18th hole,” the prosecutors later said in court papers. “Even more disturbing is Littleton’s description of Michael the day after Moxley’s body is found, engaging in what he calls ‘the indiscriminate killing of small living objects’… Littleton states that ‘Michael just went nuts.’”

Police had a word with the Brunswick School and Littleton was fired. He got another teaching job in New Canaan, but police caused him to be fired there as well. He spun off into an increasingly troubled life, seemingly unhinged by being under unrelenting suspicion in a case linked to the Kennedys in the collective consciousness. He announced that he was Kenny Kennedy, black sheep of the Kennedys, and he clambered atop a 16-story building to deliver President Kennedy’s famous “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” speech.

After Littleton was married and then divorced, Solomon convinced his prime suspect’s ex-wife to feign interest in reconciliation. Solomon bugged the hotel room as she followed a script provided by Solomon. She asked Littleton about the murder, seeking to make him believe that he had confessed to her during an alcoholic blackout that he had stabbed Moxley through the neck.

Solomon hoped to record an actual confession, but what he got was Littleton responding, “I said that? No, I didn’t do it. I wasn’t anywhere near the murder site.”

At one point, Solomon reportedly met with Skakel lawyer Tom Sheridan at the family home and said that Littleton was “our man” and close to being indicted. Popular suspicion still fell largely on Tommy, and Sheridan is said to have suggested to Rushton Skakel Sr. that he commission his own investigation to clear his son and the family name. Sheridan knew a retired FBI agent named Richard McCarthy, who recommended Sutton Associates. Sutton is run by retired FBI supervising agent Jim Murphy of Dog Day Afternoon fame, who is highly regarded in the law enforcement community.

Rushton Sr. is said to have told Murphy that in the immediate aftermath of the murder he had not known what to think, but now he was convinced that his sons were innocent. He pledged that he would nevertheless seek an appropriate legal resolution if Sutton determined otherwise.

As part of the investigation, Michael and Tommy were each questioned by retired NYPD Lt. Willis Krebs and then retired FBI agent McCarthy. Michael was first, in August of 1992 at Sheridan’s home in upstate New York. McCarthy began with a bluff, falsely informing Michael that famed forensic pathologist Henry Lee had announced that he would be exhuming Martha Moxley with the hope of recovering DNA evidence that would not have been possible to test at the time of the killing.

The story that 32-year-old Michael told was very different from what he had told police immediately after the murder. He now allowed that he had slipped back out of his house after returning from watching Monty Python. He said he had ended up climbing a tree outside what he thought was Martha’s window and briefly masturbated before returning to his house and climbing in through his bedroom window.

The lead police investigator would later note that the tree Michael described could not likely have supported even his then-modest weight. The investigator would figure that Michael’s new story was a fiction designed to account for any of his DNA being found on the scene as well as for any eyewitnesses who may have seen him.

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others would later convincingly insist that Michael had been telling this very different version for years.

Tommy, on the other hand, had been sticking to his initial account. Then, nearly two decades after the murder, 13 months after Michael was questioned and immediately after he himself was warned that Lee was seeking new DNA evidence, Tommy changed his story.

The way 36-year-old Tommy now told it to Krebs and McCarthy in his lawyer’s office, he had gone with Martha into his backyard after the others drove off to see Monty Python. Tommy said they there had a 20-minute sexual encounter in which he opened her pants and they brought each other to orgasm.

The Sutton investigators noted that a teenage Tommy had managed to pass two lie detector tests in those early days while telling what he now admitted to be a lie.

“It would seem his capacity for deception is formidable,” the Sutton report suggests.

In the midst of this new account, Tommy broke down. Krebs’ long experience with the NYPD told him that Tommy was right at the brink of confession or at the very least saying something of great importance. A case dating back 18 years seemed moments away from being solved. And Tommy’s lawyer could not intervene without brazenly violating Rushton Sr.’s agreement with Sutton.

But McCarthy’s years in counterintelligence had oriented him more toward nurturing assets than getting suspects to give it up. He suggested that Tommy take a break.

With that, the critical instant passed. Tommy’s lawyer saw an opportunity to call it a day. The Sutton investigators would continue to suspect that Tommy had been about to confess. But they found reason at least to consider that either brother could conceivably be the killer.

“These two acrimonious brothers share a unique category of suspicion,” the investigators concluded. “It is not altogether clear why such information was volunteered now, after so long, and indeed, why it was volunteered at all.”

The investigators cited a memo from the other Skakel lawyer, Tom Sheridan, reporting that psychological examinations showed, “Both boys are impulsive personalities. Both have very poor ego development and a bad self-image. Both are sexually immature and blocked emotionally. Both have an alcohol and possibly drug problems. Both are very likable and outstanding athletes. Both are lost, personally disorganized, and have no life plan. Their only point of departure is in the fact that Tommy feels loved by his family and Michael does not.”

When Sutton reported its initial findings to Rushton Skakel, he told the firm its services were no longer needed. Word that Tommy and Michael had changed their stories reached reporter Len Levitt, and the news once again revived interest in the case. Frank Garr, the Greenwich detective, convinced the TV show Unsolved Mysteries to air an episode on the murder.

Tips triggered by the show led Garr to Michael’s time at Elan, a behavioral modification center for teens in Poland Spring, Maine. Michael had been consigned there at 17 in exchange for an adjournment contemplating dismissal of charges that as an unlicensed driver he led police in Windham, New York, on a wild and drunken car chase that ended with him crashing into a telephone pole.

The owner of Elan had once lived near Greenwich and knew of the Moxley case. The punishments to which Michael was subjected at Elan included wearing a 4-foot dunce cap and a chin-to-ankle sign reading, “Ask Me Why I Killed My Neighbor.” Two former residents now told Garr they had heard Michael confess to murdering Moxley. One, an unreformed junkie named Gregory Coleman, was the witness who would quote Skakel as saying he would get away with killing Martha because “I’m a Kennedy.”

Along with the former Elan residents, Garr also spoke to Larry Zicarelli, a former Skakel family chauffeur and groundskeeper. Zicarelli recalled driving Michael from Greenwich to his psychiatrist in Manhattan in 1976. Michael had leapt from the car after they encountered traffic on the Triborough Bridge, which would years later be renamed after his uncle, Robert F. Kennedy.

“I’ve done something very bad. I’m in a lot of trouble. I’ve either got to kill myself or leave the country,” Michael supposedly shouted before the chauffeur pulled him off one of the bridge’s spans.

As recounted in Levitt’s book Conviction, what finally decided it for Garr was something he first came upon in the case folder in 1992—a report that sanitation workers had found a black plastic bag at the curb outside the Skakel house a week after the murder. The bag had contained a pair of Tretorn sneakers and blue jeans with stains that tested negative for blood by the technology available at the time to the FBI crime lab. The jeans and the sneakers had since disappeared, but the Greenwich police had retained a single blonde hair that had been found on the jeans. Garr had it tested by the newer technology; it belonged to Martha Moxley.

In the initial reports, Garr read that Rushton Sr. had told the detectives that the jeans belonged to another boy with whom Michael had exchanged clothing, thus explaining a laundry mark reading “Matthai-B.”

Garr began contacting every Matthai in the country. He eventually spoke to a New Jersey cardiologist who had gone to summer camp and remembered giving his jeans to Michael Skakel. Garr now called the camp in question and confirmed that Michael had gone there.

Garr was barred from talking to Michael directly, but relayed a query about the jeans through the Skakel family lawyer, Sheridan. The lawyer reported that Michael insisted he had never been to summer camp.

There remained the question of why Michael would tell such a lie all these years later. Garr would tell Levitt that this was when he became convinced Michael was the killer. The question was whether he could prove it to the satisfaction of the state’s attorney.

In the meantime, literary agent Lucianne Goldberg—who would subsequently become known for advising her friend Linda Tripp to secretly record Monica Lewinsky speaking of her affair with President Clinton— telephoned the writer Dominick Dunne. Goldberg told him that her client, former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman, was looking for a new book project. Dunne suggested the Martha Moxley case, reasoning that Fuhrman would be sure to generate considerable media attention, because of the detective’s notoriety for having perjured himself during the O.J. Simpson trial about his use of racial epithets.

Dunne is said to have given Furman a copy of three hypothetical scenarios that Sutton commissioned a young freelance writer to prepare regarding each of the leading suspects: Tommy, Michael, and the tutor, Littleton. The scenarios drew upon everything Sutton had gathered and were intended to help the investigators see what they still needed to determine. The writer had leaked it all to Dunne, apparently with the hope of kickstarting a career at Vanity Fair or in the movie business.

Fuhrman appeared to have taken the scenario regarding Michael in particular as more than hypothetical. Fuhrman also appeared to have embraced a speculative memo by the Skakel lawyer, Sheridan, that is cited in a Greenwich police report.

“A Tom Sheridan memo of 6/6/78 stated that it was possible Michael could have committed the murder and doesn’t know it and possibly someone else, i.e., Tommy, could have hidden the body,” the report says.

As publication of A Murder in Greenwich neared, the advance word was that Fuhrman would point to Michael as the killer. Garr is said to have pushed the prosecutor Donald Browne to convene a grand jury prior to publication lest it appear it was done in response to Fuhrman’s book. Browne was already planning to leave office and he handed the case to his successor, Jonathan Benedict, who was reviewing the particulars when the book came out.

“The state of Connecticut should immediately convene a grand jury investigation into the 1975 murder of 15-year-old Greenwich resident Martha Moxley, according to former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, whose book on his own investigation of the unsolved homicide hits bookstands today,” Greenwich Time reported on May 13, 1998.

A month after publication and 23 years after the murder, a one-judge grand jury was indeed convened. Fuhrman was widely credited. Garr was still faced with the problem of proving what he had concluded six years before—that Michael was the true killer.

Since that day when he threatened to jump from the bridge, Michael had gone on to Elan and then to Curry College, which has a program for students with learning disabilities. He became one of the top speed skiers in the country, making the U.S. national team. An Oregon newspaper described his effort in a 1993 competition on Mount Hood:

“American Michael Skakel set the day’s best time of 107.6 mph, before he crashed in an explosion of flying skis and poles that surprisingly left him with only scrapes and burns.”

Michael had given up drink and drugs when he was 21, and by all accounts had stayed sober and active in the AA program. His success in this regard had led to him actually becoming close with two Kennedy cousins who had their own struggles with addiction, Douglas and Robert Jr. Douglas died of an overdose despite Michael’s efforts. But Robert Jr. went clean and credited Michael with helping to make that possible.

Michael had subsequently gone to work as a driver for a third cousin, Michael Kennedy, who was managing Sen. Edward Kennedy’s reelection campaign. Michael Kennedy caused a scandal when it became known that he had begun an affair with his children’s 14-year-old babysitter. Some of the Kennedys blamed Michael Skakel for the affair becoming known because he had urged the babysitter to see a therapist and because he had agreed to testify before the grand jury investigating whether to indict Michael Kennedy for statutory rape. The case is said to have been dropped after the babysitter’s family told authorities it would not be cooperating. Michael Kennedy was then killed in a skiing accident.

Garr now learned that a bitter and unemployed Michael Skakel had subsequently teamed up with a ghostwriter to sell a book of his own and get back at his famous cousins while pleading his innocence in the Moxley murder as well as making some money. Garr went to see the ghostwriter and convinced him to turn over a box of Michael’s audiotaped reminiscences as well as a 37-page written proposal for a book that was originally to be called The Obvious, and then renamed the more marketable Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean.

“The first account by an insider of the avarice, perversion, and gangsterism of ‘America’s Royal Family,’” the proposal announced.

The book would tell “the truth about William Kennedy Smith’s Florida rape case: he did it” and recount how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposedly told Skakel that their cousin was guilty and “his acquittal was the result of Kennedy power.” There would also be revelations of “the incontrovertible truth about Michael Kennedy’s statutory rape of his children’s babysitter and his attempt to destroy her when the word got out.” And there would be not just “Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s admission that he cheated while at The University of Virginia Law School,” but “his attempt to get Tim Collins, a supporter of Senator Kennedy, to lie about Michael Kennedy’s transgression and to say instead that I, Michael Skakel, had been sleeping with the young girl.” The book would say that the Kennedys even planted an newspaper article that “purported to have the inside scoop on Michael Skakel, a suspect in an old, unsolved murder and a chauffeur for the Kennedy family, who was trying to extort a quarter million dollars from them by fabricating a story about Michael and the family babysitter.”

And, suggesting that this was just the Kennedy way of doing things going back three generations, the memoir would reveal a “family secret” that “my mother’s father, an attorney, was betrayed, slandered and vilified, in almost precisely the same way, by Joseph P. Kennedy long before I was born.”

“My maternal grandfather, a monogamous family man, found that he had unwittingly become dangerous by declining to take part in an orgy arranged by the Kennedy patriarch,” the proposal said. “Within days, he was smeared in the press, slandered in an instance of character assassination very much like the one I suffered at the Kennedy family’s hands, and typical of tactics I saw employed again and again before my own fall from favor.”

But there was one family member who made the book unsellable, that being Michael Skakel himself. The proposal presented him at first as an interesting, even sympathetic character. There was a description of his childhood in “the exclusive world of Belle Haven.”

“The family servants. Private boats and planes. Our own private ski area in Windham, New York. Our own baseball team: The Atlanta Braves. Meeting Hank Aaron. Genteel racism. Jean Claude Killy presides over my sister’s birthday party at Windham. The Florida compound at Longboat Key. Touring NASA with John Glenn.”

There was also a dark side such as could make a best-seller.

“First indications of the high price of unreality. Alcoholism. Violence. Neglect. Abuse. Repeated injuries. Hiding in my closet, looking for safety, needing the darkness and quiet.”

And personal troubles with which many could identify, or at least feel sympathy.

“My early schooling. Reading difficulties. Severe dyslexia that would not be accurately diagnosed until I was 26. Shame… It was obvious I’m stupid.”

And an abusive dad.

“My father’s lectures become spankings become beatings. My brother Tommy follows suit, bullying and terrorizing me with my father’s tacit consent. I continue to fail in school.”

And tragedy, though introduced in an odd fashion.

“My friends and I, age 10, discover a cache of Playboy magazines. I struggle to understand sex. A neighbor tries to rape me, and I get away. Shame. My father discovers my friends and me with the magazines, and I learn my mother is dying.”

And hope against hope, the family’s Catholic faith challenged.

“We pray, in vain, for her recovery. Relics are brought from all over the world.”

And a heart-wrenching day just after his 12th birthday.

“All the way home we’d been rough-housing on the bus my father bought for us to go back and forth from Greenwich to Windham. My brother Rushton Jr. drove while we threw sneakers at one another, fought and mooned other cars out the windows. As we came through the gate we saw cars parked all along both sides of the drive. Here and there people were walking across the lawn. We were suddenly silent. We slowed in front of the house, and before we’d come to a full stop there was a banging on the door. Rush pulled the lever, the door hissed open, and my father stepped up into the bus and faced us. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know what happened. She’s dead.’ Then he turned and got off the bus. We all just sat there in the dark.”

And guilt.

“I knew what had happened. No one else. It was between me and God. I had tried not to think the terrible thoughts that kept intruding as the rosary droned on and our singsong prayers wafted up with the incense, but I couldn’t help it. I chased them away by pinching my beads harder and concentrating on the words of the prayers, ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen,’ but they kept coming back. I’m sick of going to church after dinner every night. This is stupid. It’s obvious my mom is going to die. And after a while, the thought, the wish, the prayer that rose and had reached God’s ears: I want my mother to die so things will change. I had killed my mother.”

But the talk of “my frightened guilty mind” became disquieting as the very next chapter of the outline, “Murder Most Foul,” discussed another death. The proposal promised to address, “My relationship with Martha. Why I lied to investigators. Where I really was and what I really did. The investigation’s continuing impact on my family. The personal and psychological consequences of that evening include the necessity for ongoing therapy, continuing painful suspicion by the community, estrangement from several of my siblings, and a public vulnerability that has allowed others, particularly the Kennedy family, and now Mark Fuhrman to cast me as the scapegoat whenever it suits their purposes.”

In describing the night, the proposal began with what seemed to be an attempt to suggest the tutor was the killer. Michael says he was in his house, drinking in the kitchen when he told Littleton that he thought Martha was very pretty. Michael quotes the Littleton as saying, “Yeah, she’s hot,” even though the tutor had likely never seen her. Michael says that he told Littleton, “You should meet this girl,” adding, “She’s a schmoke,” apparently meaning loose.

Michael says that he only then looked out the window to see Martha and her friends. He describes sitting with her in his father’s “lustmobile” and says he sought to convince her to come to his cousin’s house with him.

“I really liked her,” Michael says in the proposal. “I wanted to kiss her. I wanted her to be my girlfriend, but I was going slow, being careful. The truth is that with Martha I felt a little shy. I thought that maybe if we spent the evening together at my cousin’s something romantic might develop between us. Maybe we could hang out there if she wanted. She seemed to like me. I told her there was a new English show that was supposed to be hilarious.”

By his account, Martha told him her mother had set a curfew and she had to be home by 9. He said she agreed to meet him the following night and he had said, ‘Yeah, we’ll trash the town, tomorrow night. We’ll go egg the cop booth.’”

Michael says that as they parted Martha touched him on the shoulder and said, “Tomorrow night, though. OK… We’ll go nuts and trash this town.”

The proposal goes on, “Tomorrow night, she’d said. She’d touched me. It was a promise. I nearly swooned with joy… To try to get a kiss then would have ruined everything. Tomorrow night, I thought. Tomorrow night I’ll kiss her.”

But Halloween eve, not Halloween itself was supposed to be Mischief Night, the night for egging the private security booth at the entrance of Belle Harbor and otherwise trashing the town. The proposal does not explain why none of the Skakels seem to have engaged in mischief on a night that the proposal says was “better” than Halloween, which itself was “better than Christmas, better than New Year’s, better than the Fourth of July.”

The proposal says that Michael then rode off, waving to Martha as she stood by the back door with her friends and his brother Tommy. Michael says he watched Monty Python with his other brothers and non-Kennedy cousin. He reports that he “smoked a lot of pot and drank some more,” reporting he always enjoyed being at this house because “my father couldn’t get at me, and my brother Tommy couldn’t give me a hard time either; it wasn’t his turf.”

“I felt safe there,” the proposal says.

Michael describes going into his older cousin, Johnny’s, room.

“He had a king-size bed with two life-size statues of palace guards, the Beefeaters, on either side. There were three big TV sets stacked on top of one another, and a movie screen that dropped down. In one corner was an old upright honky-tonk piano like the ones I’d seen in Westerns, but the front had been replaced by Plexiglas so you could see the hammers hit the strings. God, I wished I could have brought Martha here, I thought.”

He considered just staying there overnight.

“But how would I get back the next day? And the next day would become tomorrow night and I would see Martha. I roused myself.”

Michael says he rode home with his brothers, the first driver, Rushton Jr., being so drunk he fell asleep, the second driver, Johnny, being underage. They arrived home high and intoxicated, but by this account nobody spoke of going out on Mischief Night.

Michael recalls that the lights were out in the house and that his sister’s bedroom door was closed. He says that he got something to eat on the kitchen and then went to bed, but was too restless to sleep.

“I was keyed up, nervous and horny. After a little while longer, still unable to fall asleep, I kicked off the covers and decided, ‘Fuck it. I’m going back out.’”

Michael reports that he had often ventured out at night as a peeping tom, spying on an older woman who walked around in the buff.

“It wasn’t sexual,” Michael says of the spying. “I just wanted to be loved. I just wanted somebody to hold me. I was looking for a mom.”

Michael goes on, saying, “But it was dark outside, and I’m scared of the dark,” not explaining how he could have had such a phobia and still have made such forays in the past.

“I just ran to that lady’s house and it was like spying in her window… hoping to see her naked… And I was kind of drunk and I couldn’t get it up.”

He says he told himself that what he really should do was go get a kiss from Martha. He credits alcohol with emboldening him to act on the impulse.

“So I went over to their [the Moxleys’] house. I ran up the front [porch] stairs. They have huge front stairs. And I remember climbing up, seeing the light was on like the second or third floor. They had these huge cedar trees, pine trees, right at the front door and I remember climbing up ’em, like way up there…”

Michael continues, “And I think I threw rocks or sticks at the window and I was yelling her name and I find out later on that wasn’t her window, that was her brother’s window. I’m a little out of my mind because I am drunk or high. I pulled my pants down. I masturbated for thirty seconds in the tree and I said, ‘This is crazy. If they catch me, they’re going to think I’m nuts.’ A moment of clarity came into my head and I climbed down the tree. They had a half-oval driveway and I started—it would be a direct route from their front door to our house.”

The oval being where Martha was first attacked.

“I started to cut through the oval but it’s really dark and when I started walking through, something in me said ‘Don’t go in the dark over there.’ But I went under the streetlight and I remember yelling, ‘Who’s in there?’ and chucking rocks, saying, ‘Come on motherfucker, I’ll kick your ass.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God. I hope to God nobody saw me jerking off.’”

The tape here offers an explanation should anybody say they saw him at the murder scene or heard a commotion. Michael says on the tape that he then remembers running home and going to sleep. He recalls then being awakened by Martha’s mother asking if he had seen her. He says that he was seized by a sudden panic that they had seen him the night before. He then describes the midday scene on the Moxley property.

“Police cars were going down Walsh Lane and they found Martha. And like the second place where I was yelling in, that’s where they said she was hit and dragged all the way back there. And I’m thinking, ‘My God, if I tell anybody that I was out that night they’re gonna say I did it.’”


That is exactly what the grand jury said.

Keep bingeing this Beast Files series—preferably with a flashlight under the covers. Up next... Michael goes on trial for the murder of Martha Moxley.