Conviction Read online

  Dedication

  To S, J, and M—as always.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  PART I

  1. East Coast O.J.

  2. My Second Half

  3. “Then, the Sadness Came”

  4. Doing Things by the Rules

  5. “I Believe I Know Who Killed Martha Moxley but I Cannot Prove It”

  6. The Case File

  7. Our Mutual Tragedy

  8. Poisoning the Well

  PART II

  9. “They Didn’t Bungle, Botch, or ‘Tread Lightly’”

  10. Leads, Lies, and Jeans

  11. In Love with the Poly

  PART III

  12. The Caller

  13. Sitting on a Bombshell

  14. The Lion and the Crocodile

  15. The Confession

  16. “The Truth Remains the Same but a Lie Always Changes”

  PART IV

  17. The Stars and the Hacks

  18. “Nobody Will Believe You”

  19. The Face of the Killer

  PART V

  20. Moment of Triumph

  21. “I’m a Kennedy. I’m Going to Get Away with Murder”

  22. “Frank Garr Is the Reason We Are All Here”

  23. “It’s Michael. It Can’t Be Anyone Else. It’s Him”

  24. “You and I Will Still Be There”

  List of Names

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Leonard Levitt

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  During the more than twenty years I was involved in the Martha Moxley murder investigation, people asked me why I hadn’t written a book about the case, which I probably know as well as anyone. My answer was that I felt I couldn’t write a book without knowing the ending.

  This proved to be both a strength and a weakness. The strength was that when I decided to write the book, I knew it would be the complete story, the real deal. The weakness was that during those twenty years, three other books about the case were written. After Michael Skakel’s indictment in 2000, I presented my proposal but I was unable to interest a publisher. All those I approached told me the same thing: I offered little about the case that hadn’t already been written.

  Then, after Michael was convicted in June 2002, Joe Pisani, the editor of the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time, asked me to write an article about what the conviction meant to me personally after all this time. As I wrote, I realized what had been lacking in my proposal of two years before. As Judith Regan said to me when I told her of the book I wanted to write: “This is your story. You are not merely retelling the events of Martha Moxley’s murder, of the investigation, or how Michael was convicted. This is the story of your unique role, with your insights and your voice.”

  Indeed, it is the story of my struggle to do my job as a reporter when the editor who hired me refused to run my story about the case. It is the story of my relationship with Dorthy Moxley and how over twenty years we developed a bond that will last our lifetimes. Finally, it is the story of my relationship with Frank Garr, who, more than any other person, was responsible for Michael’s arrest and whose struggles with his bosses came to mirror mine.

  At our lowest ebb, we made a pact to tell our story. Here it is.

  Introduction

  I couldn’t let go of it.

  I wouldn’t let go of it.

  The editor who hired me stopped taking my calls.

  The publisher told me the story would never appear—not just in Connecticut but in any other newspaper the company owned, including New York Newsday, where I worked.

  The story was the murder of Martha Moxley. At age fifteen on Halloween eve, 1975, she had been beaten to death with a golf club after leaving the home of her teenage neighbors, Tommy and Michael Skakel. The Skakels were heir to the Great Lakes Carbon fortune and related to the Kennedys. Tommy and Michael’s aunt—their father Rushton’s sister Ethel—was the widow of the late Senator Robert Kennedy.

  Tommy was the last person seen with Martha. The day her body was found, the police discovered two clubs that matched the murder weapon inside the Skakel house. Yet no one was ever arrested. My story, which took me two years to prepare, described how the Greenwich police had bungled the investigation.

  But the Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate newspapers refused to print it. When they did, nearly a decade later in 1991, after I had badgered, pressured, and embarrassed them, the Connecticut authorities announced they were restarting their investigation.

  Again, it went nowhere. It wasn’t merely the newspapers that had failed. So had Connecticut’s criminal justice system. For two decades it appeared that money, power, and influence had trumped justice.

  People say I’m like a dog with my teeth in someone’s ankle when I’m on a story. But pursuing the Moxley murder required more than tenacity or even courage. It required stealth, guile, and, most important, patience.

  I did not solve Martha’s murder. What I did was prevent the Skakel family from getting away with it. I was that unexpected force that created enough of a stir to keep the case alive until someone smarter than me appeared and put it all together.

  No, that person was not the notorious former Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman, whose claim of solving the murder was trumpeted by the national media. Nor was it the celebrity writer Dominick Dunne, whose claims the media also accepted. Rather, the person who solved the Moxley murder was an unheralded local detective named Frank Garr, who pursued his investigation for eleven years and whose work and life became intertwined with mine.

  I had battled the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time and later Newsday, which balked at publishing a second round of my stories. Frank battled his bosses at the Fairfield County state’s attorney’s office, which had taken jurisdiction of the case from the Greenwich police. My bosses were willful. His were blind. My actions ensured me lasting enemies within the Times-Mirror media conglomerate, which had owned both Connecticut papers and Newsday. Frank’s led to his ridicule and ostracism within Connecticut’s criminal justice system.

  Both of us found ourselves underdogs and outcasts and naturally formed a bond. We were an odd couple, a detective and a newspaper reporter. It was like the lion lying down not with a lamb but with a crocodile. Except that as we grew closer, I wasn’t sure which of us was which.

  Nearly thirty years after Martha’s murder, Frank and I are still haunted by questions of who might have helped Michael the night of the murder, or afterward, by keeping quiet something they’d seen or heard. We will probably never find out, and because of the statute of limitations, no one will ever be prosecuted. Still, it is enough for us to know that for a story that could never really have a happy ending, the Moxley family has finally found a measure of peace.

  Martha Moxley at age ten.

  CHAPTER ONE

  East Coast O.J.

  NORWALK, CONNECTICUT

  June 2002

  I never thought Michael would be convicted.

  I only hoped for Frank’s sake the jury would deliberate longer than the few hours it had in the O. J. Simpson case. That way Frank wouldn’t be embarrassed.

  This was East Coast O.J., involving one of America’s richest families with a bloodline to the Kennedys, and the case was all Frank’s. He had found all the witnesses. Many hadn’t wanted to testify. Frank Garr, they related, had pursued, cajoled, harassed, or threatened them.

  Walking about the courtroom in his black pinstriped suit with his air of professional gravitas, Frank reminded me of an undertaker. His hair—all white and formerly worn in a ponytail—curled up the bac
k of his neck. While working as a narcotics detective two decades before, he had taken an acting course in Manhattan. Like all actors, there was a touch of vanity to his appearance.

  As Michael’s trial begins, Frank is fifty-seven years old, a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Greenwich, Connecticut, police department. For the past seven years, he has been an inspector with the Fairfield County state’s attorney’s office. He has investigated the Moxley murder for eleven years and come to know it like no one else. He understands Michael better than Michael’s own family and probably better than his numerous psychiatrists.

  Frank also knows the Skakel family. Despite the image of forthrightness and generosity they present to the world, Frank says they have no morals or conscience. He calls them habitual liars and says their loyalty is only to each other.

  Frank has no more regard for their friends, neighbors, and attorneys—even their family priest. All of them, he says, knew about Michael but looked away.

  “Genetic hedonism: the desire for immediate pleasure or instant gratification.” That was the term for the Skakels coined by one of those psychiatrists, Dr. Stanley Lesse. He had been hired by Rushton Skakel Sr. the year after the murder when Rushton realized his son Tommy was a suspect.

  But “genetic hedonism” falls short of describing them. Tom Sheridan, the Skakel family lawyer, would later offer his own term for them— “histrionic sociopaths.”

  “Their interest is only self-interest,” Sheridan says. “They lack empathy for anyone but themselves.” And after the Skakels turned against him—as they did to virtually everyone they used to protect them in the Moxley case—Sheridan added, “And if you disagree with them, you are their enemy.”

  And here they all are, the Skakels and their supporters, filling the far right section of the courtroom in a calculated display of familial unity. They are a clannish crowd, unbowed and unrepentant. Both inside and outside the courtroom, they speak only to each other. They dress casually as only the rich can, in khaki pants, sports jackets, and loafers. The youngest brother Stephen wears alligator cowboy boots. They begin every morning with smiles and handshakes. Every afternoon they lunch together at the Ash Creek Saloon a few blocks away.

  Rush Jr., the eldest of the seven children, has flown in from Bogota, Colombia. David, the second youngest, has come from Oregon. Their cousin, Bobby Kennedy Jr., appears unannounced late in the trial. He’d attended Michael’s first court hearing in nearby Stamford two years before but has not been seen since.

  Tommy—Michael’s older brother, boyhood rival, and tormentor—also turns up, if only for a day. He is in his mid-forties now, balding and wearing glasses. Like Michael, he has admitted lying to the police about his whereabouts the night of the murder.

  The family matriarch is Ann McCooey, Michael’s aunt, Rushton’s sister, known as Big Ann. A stout woman with bleached blonde hair, Big Ann sits in the same seat in the first row every day of the trial, next to her daughter, whose name is also Ann. During the trial, Michael is said to be staying with Big Ann, as his wife Margo—Tom Sheridan’s niece—has begun divorce proceedings. The strain from his murder charge has been too much for them.

  And there at the center is Michael. Now forty-one years old, portly and blowzy with thinning hair and a florid face, he does not or cannot close his shirt’s top button beneath his tie. Each morning before testimony begins, he stands in the courtroom well, accepting his family’s chucks of support, chatting with his lawyers and his bodyguard, a huge, bald black man. The bodyguard is not merely Michael’s protector. He is his silencer. Michael can’t keep his mouth shut.

  Two years before at his first court appearance in Stamford, he had lurched from the defense table and made for Martha’s mother Dorthy, seated in the first row of spectators. His voice loud enough to make the six o’clock news and even the next day’s New York Times, he had blurted, “Dorthy, I feel your pain. But you’ve got the wrong guy.”

  She had turned to me in tears. Michael had sounded so aggressive, so arrogant. He’d presumed he could address her by her first name, as though they were equals. After twenty years, I still called her Mrs. Moxley.

  During a break in that day’s testimony, Frank caught my eye. “Did you notice Michael staring at me?” he asked. “Watch him when we go back. He tries to stare me down.”

  Better than anyone, Frank knows Michael can’t control himself. He’s blabbed about Martha’s murder for years, releasing thoughts that weighed upon him, like steam escaping from a pressure cooker. Indeed, it was Michael’s own words—confided to friends, then to private investigators, and to the ghostwriter of his unpublished autobiography—that led to his arrest.

  I am one of nearly 100 reporters who have covered every day of Michael’s month-long trial here in Norwalk. Unseen by the rest of them, a second drama is occurring.

  I notice that Frank does not sit at the table with the prosecution team. Instead, each day, he places himself a few feet apart, in a wooden chair by the railing. This is his personal statement of disgust against his own office, which for years ignored the case, then at the eleventh hour pandered to Mark Fuhrman.

  In his book Murder in Greenwich, published in 1998 (New York: HarperCollins), Fuhrman named Michael as Martha’s probable killer, then claimed he had solved the murder. Frank had named Michael as Martha’s killer in 1992, the year after he began investigating it.

  “Only I couldn’t say it aloud then,” Frank has told me more than once. “I am working for a guy who wouldn’t even listen to me so there was no sense talking.”

  I am the only person inside the courtroom who has supported Frank through his eleven-year ordeal. Even Dorthy Moxley has doubted him, although she has maintained a diplomat’s silence. Each time I see her, I marvel at how different she is from the woman I met twenty years before. Then, she was the mousy housewife whose husband made the decisions. She says his premature death allowed her to take charge.

  Now, passersby stop her on the street. People recognize her in restaurants. Strangers ask for her autograph. Much of this is due to Fuhrman and Dominick Dunne. Grant them that. They made Martha’s murder a national story.

  Dorthy has steeled herself so that she can sit in the courtroom and hear the details of her daughter’s murder. Still, some details remain too difficult to bear. When pictures of the crime scene are introduced, she escapes to the state’s office in the courthouse basement.

  She is also the consummate hostess, balancing the case’s rival interests and personalities. She has been given the courtroom’s first three rows of the center section and sits in the first with her son John, his wife Kara, and friends and relatives who have come in from around the country.

  Her first courtroom crisis involves Fuhrman. Having pled no contest to charges of perjury in the O. J. Simpson trial for denying he’d used the word “nigger,” ABC hired him for the Moxley trial but his “nigger” remark infuriated the network’s black journalists and it dropped him. Court TV picked him up but it was too late for him to obtain press credentials.

  Dorthy rescued him. She knew what he was and what he was doing. She understood he was using Martha’s murder to achieve a kind of redemption. But she refused to criticize him. More than once she has said, “I will not abandon Mark.”

  So she invites him to sit with her. Because she fears angering Frank, she asks my advice. I tell her to place Fuhrman in the third row, so there will be a space between Fuhrman and herself. Instead, she compromises, and allows him to sit behind her in the second.

  She even befriends one of the Skakels. Late in the trial, she tells me she struck up a conversation in the ladies’ room with Michael’s aunt Ann McCooey, “Big Ann.” “I blame this all on Rush,” Dorthy says to Big Ann of her brother. Big Ann agrees. “Yes, he fell apart when his wife died.”

  “I’ll pray for you,” says Dorthy.

  “And I’ll pray for you,” Big Ann answers, though when the verdict comes, she runs from the courtroom in tears.

  There is another man
in the courtroom who maintains he solved the Moxley murder—Dominick Dunne. Seventy-six years old, short, stocky, and smiling like a cherub, his passion is celebrity murder. Like Frank and me, he has been around the Moxley case for over a decade. Despite his age, he has lost none of his verve. He sits with reporters young enough to be his grandchildren, charming them—as he had me a decade before—with his informality and apparent lack of pretension. “Just call me Dominick,” he says to them.

  Like me, neither Fuhrman nor Dominick believes Michael will be convicted. Fuhrman has even prepared Dorthy for an acquittal. Merely bringing him to trial after twenty-seven years, he has told her, is victory enough.

  Only Frank believes. He professes total confidence in his witnesses. “They are all telling the truth,” he says. “The jury will see this.”

  As in the O.J. case, where the jury acquitted after only a few hours, I fear a quick verdict means not guilty. So when the jury gets the case on a Tuesday morning, I pray they will remain out the rest of the day.

  My prayer is answered. Tuesday passes with no decision. Thank God, I find myself thinking. Thank God for Frank.

  Again on Wednesday, the jury deliberates through the day. Again, there is no decision. But now the momentum is shifting. Michael and his family can’t understand what is happening.

  The announcement comes at eleven o’clock Friday morning—the jury has reached a verdict. I slip into the second row behind Dorthy. Seeing me, she touches my hand and smiles. Our twenty years together have brought us to this moment.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My Second Half

  LONG ISLAND

  January 1982

  My involvement in the Moxley case began two decades before with a phone call from my friend Ken Brief. Ken and I worked together at Newsday on Long Island. His wife was a publicist for Viking Press, which had recently published a book I’d written about another murder.

  I knew Ken was bored at Newsday. He was the national editor and there wasn’t much national news on Long Island. When Times-Mirror, Newsday’s parent company, bought two small papers in Connecticut, the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time, I urged him to apply for the editor’s job. Sure enough, he was hired.