Conviction Page 3

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Then, the Sadness Came”

  STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT

  1982

  When Ken Brief called me about the Moxley case in 1982, I had left Newsday. By then I had married Susan, the younger sister of my best friend at Dartmouth. She, too, had been in the Peace Corps, and our romance went something like this: Susan told me she’d decided to marry me because she loved my book about Africa. I told Susan I’d wanted to marry her since I first saw her as a high school sophomore wearing braces. Susan said she never wore braces.

  When Ken called, we had just returned from Tanzania, where, with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for the Humanities, I had set out to find the students from my Peace Corps days of fifteen years before. I did find many of them. But the country was such a mess they were broken and dispirited, their dream of the better life I’d help foster, shattered. My grant money spent, unemployed, and Susan pregnant after repeated miscarriages, I told her I thought Ken’s offer to investigate the Moxley murder sounded pretty good.

  He sent me a packet of news clips so I could familiarize myself with the case, but they contained scant information. Martha had last been seen with seventeen-year-old Tommy Skakel outside his house in the Belle Haven section of Greenwich, Connecticut, around 9:30 P.M. on October 30, 1975. In Greenwich, Halloween Eve was known as Mischief Night, where kids played pranks. Within weeks Tommy became the prime suspect.

  The Greenwich police, however, did not immediately focus on him. Instead, they initially pursued the theory that a transient, perhaps a hitchhiker off the Connecticut Turnpike, had eluded the two manned patrols at Belle Haven’s entrance, then attacked Martha as she walked home. I was struck by a remark of Greenwich police chief Stephen Baran on November 2, two days after her body was discovered, which seemed to support the transient theory.

  “Kids are always leaving bicycles, tennis rackets, and golf clubs outdoors, after playing with them on the lawn,” he said.

  It was a bizarre suggestion: A hitchhiker had wandered in off the turnpike, picked up a golf club lying on the ground, then for no apparent reason beaten Martha to death. I wondered whether Baran had said this to deflect attention from the Skakels.

  A second clip also drew my attention. In March 1976, five months after the murder, Fairfield County State’s Attorney Donald Browne told the Associated Press that “a particular family” had “clearly impeded” the police investigation. Although Browne refused to identify them, he was obviously referring to the Skakels.

  There was a third clip I noted, dated June 24, 1977, from the New York Times. It reported that the Greenwich police believed they had traced the murder weapon to a set of golf clubs belonging to the Skakels. By then, however, the case had taken a twist. The summer after the murder, Ken Littleton had been arrested for a series of burglaries in Nantucket, Massachusetts. A Williams College graduate on an athletic scholarship, Littleton had taught science at the tony Brunswick school that Tommy and Michael attended. Rushton Skakel had hired him as a live-in tutor for his sons. His first night at the Skakels had been October 30, 1975—Mischief Night.

  Questioned by Connecticut authorities after his arrest, Littleton failed a lie detector test and became the second known suspect after Tommy. By the time I arrived, Littleton had long since left Greenwich. So had Tommy. The Moxley murder investigation was dead. Short of a confession, Browne told the Associated Press in March 1976, a solution seemed unlikely.

  “So what do you think?” Ken Brief asked.

  “Ken,” I answered, “it looks like someone has gotten away with murder.”

  •

  While at Time, I’d learned how treacherous it was to enter into the middle of an investigation. The victim then had been my boss, Frank McCulloch.

  At the time, Life magazine was preparing to excerpt a book on Howard Hughes by Clifford Irving. The book was based on what Irving claimed were exclusive interviews he’d had with Hughes. Irving convinced Life’s editors not to contact Hughes, warning they might spook him into reneging on the project. The editors accepted his claims until the publication date approached and Hughes began telephoning McCulloch, saying Irving had never interviewed him.

  Life’s editors—who had until then ignored McCulloch—now sought his help. Never having met Irving but knowing the mercurial Hughes, he surmised that Hughes had at the last minute developed second thoughts.

  That was the only time since I’d known him that McCulloch was wrong. Because he had been kept out at the start and not been permitted to interview Irving, he came to the wrong conclusion. At least in this case, Hughes was telling the truth. Irving had pulled a gigantic hoax on Life magazine.

  Now here I was entering the Moxley case seven years after it had occurred. Go slowly, I told myself. Take nothing for granted. Rely on your instincts. Do not become personally involved. And form no alliances with sources.

  Ken gave me a desk in the city room of the Stamford Advocate. The room was open and bright. The reporters were young. Most were in their twenties and afraid to approach me.

  I didn’t know anyone in Greenwich and began by calling people likely to talk to me. The first was Martha’s father, David Moxley. He headed the New York office of the international accounting firm Touche Ross. But he refused to see me. I didn’t get it. The police investigation had died years ago. I was perhaps the only person who could help him.

  Ken’s publisher, Jay Shaw, said he would contact a friend of his, a neighbor of the Moxleys and Skakels. Jay was a knock-around guy who’d come up from the garment district. As much as Ken, he had pushed for the story. But Jay was too rough for the suits at Times-Mirror. Within the year, he was gone.

  His friend was Bob Ix, the president of the Stamford-based Cadbury-Schweppes corporation. Ix and his wife Cissy lived adjacent to the Skakels in Belle Haven, on a piece of property Rushton had sold them. Their daughter Helen was Martha’s age and had been with her the night she was killed. But Ix, too, refused to see me. He said the Greenwich police had asked everyone to keep silent so as not jeopardize the investigation.

  I knew what that was about. By now I knew enough to recognize that the last thing the Greenwich police wanted was a reporter coming around asking why after seven years no one had been arrested.

  That meant I had no choice but to call Martha’s mother, Dorthy. In the beginning I had hoped to avoid her. I dreaded weepy mothers. At least, I told myself, the murder had occurred seven years ago. I wasn’t yet a parent and didn’t understand you could live a thousand years and never get over the death of your child.

  Although Dorthy agreed to see me, she was wary. “Why, seven years later,” she asked, “is a newspaper interested in Martha?”

  I didn’t want to say, “Because the police let the murderer get away.” That would have produced tears and I didn’t want to deal with a teary mother, not at the beginning.

  Never lie, McCulloch had taught. Instead, I told her the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time had asked me to take a fresh look at the case. This may not have been the full truth but it wasn’t a lie.

  Still, I found myself wondering why she, like her husband—wealthy, educated, and presumably sophisticated people—failed to recognize that seven years later, with the police investigation dead, I was their last chance.

  We met at their apartment in New York City, where the Moxleys had moved a year after the murder. More recently, they had moved into the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side. John F. Kennedy had stayed at the Carlyle when he visited the city as President. I wonder if the Moxleys knew that or cared.

  I placed Dorthy Moxley in her late forties or early fifties, maybe ten years older than me. She seemed fragile and bewildered like a frightened bird. I had the sense she was barely holding herself together.

  She began describing her problems decorating. Perhaps she wanted to put me at ease. Perhaps she wanted to hide her feelings. My presence was obviously upsetting her.

  She led me into the living room. There, a portra
it of Martha, with long blonde hair, freckles, and hazel eyes, filled an entire wall. This is probably what she’d looked like the last year of her life.

  “No, no,” Dorthy said, as though speaking to herself, shaking her head to hold back tears. “I want to talk about Martha. I want to talk about my daughter. People in Greenwich don’t talk to us about Martha anymore, as though they are protecting us, as though we never had a daughter, as though she never lived.”

  She began telling me how she and her husband, with Martha and their older son John, had moved to Greenwich from Piedmont, California, the year before the murder. They’d bought a large, dilapidated house on two acres at 58 Walsh Lane across from the Ixes in Greenwich’s Belle Haven section on Long Island Sound, where gothic-like mansions lined Field Point Road with lawns that ran on and on.

  Besides the Ixes, the Moxleys’ neighbors included the entertainer Victor Borge, Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker, and Rushton Skakel. Rushton lived diagonally across Walsh Lane at 71 Otter Rock Drive with his seven children—six boys and a girl—each, except the last, born nine months apart— “stepping stones,” as Cissy Ix called them. The previous few years had been tragic for the Skakels. In 1973, Rushton’s wife Anne had died a slow, agonizing death from cancer. She was forty-two.

  Though he barely knew the Moxleys, Rushton sponsored them at the local Belle Haven Club on the Sound. He also sponsored David Moxley at the University Club in Manhattan. Such generosity to strangers was characteristic of him. A benefactor of the Catholic church, he volunteered at the nearby Hill House nursing home and allowed groups of the elderly to tour his house and remain for dinner. In the summer, he opened his swimming pool to a camp for the mentally retarded.

  Friends and family said he did not know how to say no. “Mi casa es su casa [My house is your house],” appeared to be his unspoken directive, his friend Victor Ziminsky would say of him at his funeral. At the family ski lodge on Windham Mountain in upstate New York, which had been developed by Rushton’s attorney friend Tom Sheridan and where the family skied each weekend in the winter, he insisted visitors warm themselves in his ski boots.

  While fishing in Long Island Sound, he threw bluefish he caught to the drawbridge attendants. Years later when he and his second wife Anna Mae moved to Hobe Sound in Florida, he gave away twenty-dollar bills after church. His family tried to deter him from driving through the town’s poorer sections for fear he would give away whatever money he carried.

  To Sheridan, his friend “Rucky,” as he called Rushton, was “the most loyal person in the world. The person I’d most want to be stranded with on a desert island.”

  “Why is that?” I asked him.

  “He’d never take advantage of you,” Sheridan answered. “He’d never double-cross you.”

  As generous as Rushton appeared, he and his family remained separate and apart from everyone, including their wealthy Belle Haven neighbors. “We knew about them as Kennedys,” said Andy Pugh, Michael’s best friend as a teenager and a key prosecution witness against him.

  “You understood very quickly they were different from you, that they were superior,” said Pugh, whose family had moved to Belle Haven from what he called the “regular” part of Greenwich after his father, a Justice Department lawyer under Attorney General Ramsey Clark, relocated to New York. “It wasn’t just their money but the authority with which they used it.”

  Pugh and Michael were inseparable and played together every day after school. “Once you were his friend he would take care of you,” Pugh said. “Michael was charismatic, generous, and welcoming, almost maniacally so. He had a driver take us to stores in town. They had charge accounts everywhere. Michael would say, ‘Pick out something,’ like a mitt. I thought it was incredible.”

  The Skakel money had come from Rushton’s father, George Skakel Sr., who after World War I founded the Great Lakes Coal and Coke Company in Chicago with two partners and $1,000 between them. According to Jerry Oppenheimer’s The Other Mrs. Kennedy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), a biography of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, George Skakel’s genius lay in exploiting the coal companies’ sandlike waste-product residue, known as “fines.” Mine owners, Oppenheimer wrote, dumped it in rivers but George Skakel purchased the “fines” for a nickel a ton. Some years later, when coal strikes swept the country and the waste-product residue was in demand, Great Lakes Coal and Coke had cornered the market.

  Later, as his company expanded, Skakel did the same thing with the oil refineries’ waste by-product, the petroleum coke residue, which he sold to utilities and to steel and aluminum companies. The money, Sheridan explained, financed his purchase of hop-cars, which Skakel sent into the refineries to load the petroleum coke and transport it, so that he invested none of his own money. By the late 1940s, he headed what was believed to be the largest privately held company in America after Ford Motor Company.

  During the depression, George moved his business to New York City and resettled his family—his wife Ann Brannack, who’d been his former secretary and was known as Big Ann, and their seven children. First, they moved to a Catholic community in Larchmont, New York, then to Lake Avenue in WASPy back-country Greenwich. It was an area of woods, lakes, and estates, where the Skakels were disdained both as Catholics and as nouveaux riches.

  Life on Lake Avenue for the Skakels was chaotic and booze-filled, the parents away for weeks or months, the children unsupervised, managed by friends, servants, and a coterie of priests and nuns, a pattern that would repeat itself during the next generation.

  None of George Sr.’s children showed any of his business acumen. When he and Big Ann died in a company plane that crashed over Kansas City in the 1950s, his eldest sons, George Jr. and Jimmy, took over the business and, according to people familiar with the company, ran it into the ground.

  At one point, Robert Kennedy—angered because the two were appropriating company perks denied to his wife, the Skakels’ sister, Ethel—made a run at the business with his brother-in-law, Steve Smith, infuriating George Jr. and Jimmy, and widening a rift between Ethel and her Skakel siblings.

  Ten years after his father was killed, George Jr. died in a plane crash while elk hunting in Idaho. Robert Kennedy served as a pallbearer. Six months after Martha’s murder, when Rushton discovered Tommy was a suspect, Ethel rushed secretly to Belle Haven to comfort him. Yet her estrangement from the family never healed. She attended not a day of Michael’s trial.

  In fact, Sheridan pointed out, the relationship between the Skakels and the Kennedys was never as cozy as it has been portrayed. Rushton was a Goldwater Republican. And all the Skakels despised Robert Kennedy.

  Rushton joined Great Lakes Carbon, as the company had been renamed, in the sales department, which required little business acumen but plenty of entertaining for oil refinery executives. “He was a born salesman,” Sheridan said of Rushton, whom he had known since their college days after World War II.

  “His job was giving parties and playing golf. He excelled at entertaining. He had contacts with all the major oil companies and was also a winer and diner of oil company executives. No one could do it better.”

  Right after the war, the family purchased an old DC-3 and refurbished it as the company plane. Rushton was always offering key oil executives rides on it.

  At his funeral, his friend Ziminsky told of a ride on the family plane. He and Rushton were playing gin rummy when, twenty minutes out of Miami, Ziminsky noticed the left prop had cut out. He pointed this out to Rushton, who put down his hand, ambled forward to the pilot, then made three stops, engaging in conversation with the plane’s other guests.

  Returning to his seat, he told Ziminsky not to worry. He had discussed the situation with the pilot. Although the plane had two engines, it needed only one to land. Rushton then picked up his cards and announced he was knocking with three points.

  Besides their money, something else separated the Skakels from their Belle Haven neighbors. It was alcoholism, which ravaged every branch
of their family.

  “There was booze everywhere,” Pugh recalled. “Periodically, Rushton would try to stop drinking. Periodically, Cissy Ix would clean out the house to straighten him up.”

  Once, Pugh said, “Rushton came to my house looking for a drink. He sat on the couch, begging my mother for one. When she refused, he began to cry.”

  Anne Skakel had been the family disciplinarian, and without her, Rushton seemed lost—especially as a parent. Executives at Great Lakes Carbon asked Sheridan, who supervised Rushton’s personal finances, to keep an eye on him because he was neglecting the children.

  Both Sheridan and Cissy Ix realized Rucky knew nothing about being a father. He seemed unable to communicate with his children. Instead, he indulged their every whim. He gave them golf, tennis, and squash lessons. He denied them nothing but he couldn’t talk to them.

  His generosity to strangers belied his rigidity toward his children. He had a temper that bordered on self-destructiveness. Once while visiting the Atlanta Braves, of which the Skakels were part owners, he became so agitated trying to open a door, he kicked it and broke his foot.

  “I never saw him touch anyone when he became angered,” Cissy recalled. “He might put his hand through a window but he would never touch anyone.”

  Often away on business or on sporting or hunting trips, Rushton left the care of his children to the cook, Ethel Jones; an elderly housekeeper, Margaret Sweeney, who owned a small house nearby but lived with the Skakels; a governess whom Cissy helped secure; the coterie of priests and nuns; and a live-in tutor Rushton hired each fall.

  “He had children that he never should have had,” said Sheridan. “It was a sad, sad scene. Rucky was in trouble. I didn’t know how deeply. The more I looked, I viewed them as a very sick family.”

  Years later, Cissy would recall the first Father’s Day after Anne had died. “None of the children gave him a Father’s Day present,” she remembered. “None of them had even thought of it.” She took aside Tommy, who she said was something of a painter, and had him draw a picture for his father. Cissy had it framed and placed it in the den.