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  With no parental supervision, the Skakel home became a place of booze, drugs, and violence. Fights between the boys erupted daily.

  “They were vicious fights,” Pugh recalled. “The worst I saw occurred between Michael and his older brother Johnny outside in their driveway. It was a serious fist fight, punching in the face, lots of blood. I thought they would have killed each other. At one point Johnny grabbed Michael’s hair—he wore it long—and kneed him in the face.”

  Nor was the recklessness and lack of parental supervision confined to the immediate Skakel family. Their first cousins, John and Jimmy Terrien, also went unsupervised.

  In his autobiographical memoir, Michael described Jimmy, who was two years older than he, as “the captain of mayhem.” Michael added that he loved spending time at the Terriens’, as he did the night of Martha’s murder, because Terrien’s parents were alcoholics and left him and Jimmy alone.

  Describing the night of the murder, Michael would write that he tried to persuade Martha to come with him to his cousin’s house, which was in Greenwich’s back-country, perhaps ten miles from the Skakel home. At the Terriens’, Michael said, “You never had to worry about anything” —meaning, among other activities, drinking liquor and smoking pot.

  Terrien’s biological father, Jack Dowdle, had drunk himself to death the day Jimmy was born. Jimmy Terrien’s mother, Georgeann, was Rushton’s sister, and his stepfather George Terrien was Robert Kennedy’s University of Virginia law school roommate. Both Jimmy and his older brother John had troubled relationships with their stepfather. Years later George Terrien claimed to the police that his stepson John had beaten him up in a dispute over money after Georgeann’s death.

  Cissy Ix claimed that as a teenager, Jimmy Terrien appeared to be entirely on his own. Having left one school, he appeared before the priest at another, St. Mary’s, and told him he wanted to attend it.

  “Where are your parents?” the priest, Father Gay, asked him.

  “I’ll handle it on my own,” Terrien answered.

  Of the seven Skakel children, Michael and Tommy seemed the most troubled. Both were two years behind in school and missed classes for weeks on end. Their problems had surfaced long before their mother died. Psychiatrist Stanley Lesse—who after Martha’s murder secretly tested Tommy and interviewed the other Skakel children—described both boys as “exceptionally difficult children who suffered from remarkably similar behavior disorders.”

  In 1971, four years before the murder, both had been sent to a psychologist, Dr. Ellen Blumingdale, because of temper tantrums and constant battles with each other. At the time, Tommy was twelve, Michael, ten.

  Some years later, Sheridan (paraphrasing Blumingdale’s assessment) wrote in a report by private investigators hired by the Skakels: “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.” The investigators quoted Sheridan as noting he had been “informed by Mr. Skakel that Julie is frightened to death of Michael and that Michael suffers from enuresis [bed-wetting] and has engaged in some transsexual behavior.”

  Doctors believed Tommy’s difficulties stemmed from an accident at age four, when he was thrown from a car and suffered head injuries. He was unconscious for ten hours and remained in Greenwich Hospital for two weeks.

  A neurologist who treated him at the time noted that his personality had changed and that he’d throw temper tantrums and have violent outbursts. “He would rant and rave . . . and on one occasion put his fist through a door,” neurologist Dr. Walter Camp was cited in the private investigator’s reports as having written. “On another occasion, he was said to have pulled a telephone out of the wall.”

  His eldest brother, Rush Jr., told Lesse: “Mom had no control over Tom. If he got mad, there was nothing she could do about it. At times I think Tom brought Mother to tears.”

  Lesse, whose report was also cited by the investigators, wrote that Tommy “was responsive only to a man who was large in size,” adding that when Rushton was away, the family often threatened to call his friend Robert Phelps, a towering ex-marine, to make him behave.

  Michael was described as even more out of control, although people also noted his unsparing generosity. When the elderly visited from the nursing home, it was Michael who welcomed them. When Cissy’s father visited, Michael spent hours with him.

  “He insisted they play golf together,” she recalled. “When my father protested that he wasn’t very good, Michael said it didn’t matter, that he would take him to the Greenwich Country Club, where his parents belonged, and give him tips.”

  Perhaps because Anne Skakel was so burdened caring for her brood of older children, Michael was raised by the housekeeper Margaret Sweeney, who was known as Nanny. He became devoted to her, and she to him.

  When his brothers spilled milk, he would not allow her to clean it up, Cissy said. “I’ll do that, Nanny,” he would say. In a sad and touching gesture when she died, she left her small home to him.

  In his unpublished autobiographical memoir, titled “The Obvious,” which was changed to “Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean,” Michael described his childhood: “Family servants, private boats and planes, a private ski area in Windham, N.Y. Our own baseball team [the Atlanta Braves, which the Skakels partially owned]. Meeting Hank Aaron . . . Jean Claude Killy presides over my sister’s birthday party in Windham. Touring NASA with Sen. John Glenn.”

  But he also described his despair, self-loathing, and terror of his father. Michael’s first cousin, Bobby Kennedy Jr., would write in Atlantic Monthly magazine that Rushton often hit Michael and on a hunting trip fired a gun in his direction. To escape his father, Kennedy wrote, Michael sometimes slept in a closet.

  Michael’s memoir also described how at age ten he brought home a cache of Playboy magazines. When Rushton came upon him reading them, he began choking Michael, slamming him against a wall and shouting, “You little slime.”

  “I think that was the moment when rage took root in me,” Michael wrote. “I hated him. And because I was his son and felt he hated me, I hated us both.”

  Alcoholism. Violence. Neglect. Abuse. Repeated injuries, his memoir continued. “Hiding in my closet, looking for safety, needing the darkness and the quiet.”

  He also recounted the family’s return in their plane from RFK’s memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in 1968 when he was eight, although he misstated the date as 1969. “My father insists over the pilot’s objections that we fly back from Washington in a thunderstorm…. While praying silently I hear my mother saying in a frightened voice that this is how my grandparents and later my uncle George died.”

  In school, he had difficulty reading, which decades later would be diagnosed as dyslexia. “The shame,” he wrote. “It’s obvious I’m stupid. My father’s lectures become spankings, become beatings. My brother Tommy follows suit, bullying and terrorizing me with my father’s tacit consent.”

  Then, his mother became ill. “I learn my mother is dying. We pray in vain for her recovery. Relics are brought from all over the world.”

  Rushton couldn’t cope with bad news and as Anne lingered, he made the children say the rosary each afternoon at her bedside with a priest, praying for a miracle. He was in such denial, said Cissy, he never discussed her illness with them and restricted their visits to her in the hospital.

  Nor, apparently, did they discuss Anne’s illness with each other. Cissy recalled an incident at the country club when Anne played in a tennis tournament and lost in the finals. Afterwards, she broke down in tears. Rushton had never seen her cry before and thought it was because she had lost the match. But that was not the reason. Anne later told Cissy she had missed a number of lobs
and realized she’d lost her peripheral vision. That meant the cancer had gotten behind her eyes into her brain.

  In a letter of support for Michael at his sentencing, Tommy offered a moving look at life in the Skakel household during their mother’s illness.

  “When our mother was ill, we had a series of masses called novenas,” he wrote. “Mass was once a day, every day for a week, dedicated to our mother. We had countless novenas over the last two years of her life. I remember the priests telling us that we must pray for our mother to get well and if we didn’t, then she would die.”

  Tommy’s letter also described a visit to his mother’s hospital bedside in her final months. “When entering her hospital room, mother would say, ‘It’s so nice to see you,’ and upon reaching her bedside we’d look into her lifeless eyes always trying to comprehend the words, ‘It’s so nice to see you’ from something that was so contrary to our vibrant, caring mother. She no longer resembled the mother I once new [sic], the eternal athlete. I could have lifted her off the bed with one hand.”

  More than his siblings, Michael suffered tremendous guilt when his mother died. “Just after my twelfth birthday,” he wrote in his memoir “she dies and to my frightened, guilty mind it is obvious that I killed her.”

  “I killed her, I killed her,” Cissy recalled his saying. She became so concerned she told Rushton that Michael needed to see a psychiatrist. Rushton’s response, she said, was, “Psychiatrists don’t believe in God.”

  He changed his mind, however, when he visited Michael’s bedroom and discovered him dressed in women’s clothing.

  Susan Wallington Quinlan, a psychiatrist, whose report was also cited by the private investigators, diagnosed him as suffering from a “depression possibly of psychotic proportions.”

  “The core of the depression is the feeling of being helpless, of being buffeted and brutalized by external forces,” she wrote. “There is also great fury inside him focused primarily in hatred for his father. This anger is very frightening and he has inadequate defenses to deal with it.” She told Rushton she considered him “a menace to himself and others.”

  By then Michael had failed out of half a dozen schools. In his memoir, he describes himself as “my family’s scapegoat, ashamed of what I took to be my stupidity, wondering if I was crazy.”

  He took to going out alone at night, peeping into neighbors’ windows. There was an older woman he regularly spied upon, watching her in varying states of undress.

  Even before his mother died, he was using downers, pot, cocaine, and LSD. By age 13, the year after her death, he wrote, “I became a full-blown, daily-drinking alcoholic.”

  Rushton kept his liquor—cases of vodka and Old Grand Dad—in a cabinet in the basement. “There was a lock on it,” said Andy Pugh. “Michael would take a hammer and screwdriver and remove the hinges.”

  One night, he and Pugh were in Field Point Park with their skateboards. Michael had a bottle of Old Grand Dad. It was about 5:00 P.M., cold and dark, and they built a fire under a tree. There was a steep hill on the edge of the park. Michael rode down it on his skateboard. Drunk, he crashed and hit the back of his head. There was so much blood that Pugh took him inside a neighbor’s house to be treated.

  Pugh and Michael regularly used a shed on the Skakel property as a clubhouse until Pugh said, Michael set it on fire. They had slingshots and shot at squirrels. Michael also shot Pugh’s dog with a pellet gun. “It wouldn’t go into Michael’s yard so I knew it was him.”

  Michael also shot his gun at people, said Pugh. “He’d count to ten and give you a chance to run away. He thought it was funny.”

  One day Pugh discovered Michael inside the darkened shed, where the gardener kept lawn equipment. “Michael said ‘Shh, shh.’ He was grinning, with a demonic look in his eye. I didn’t know what he was doing.”

  Then Pugh noticed a burlap bag on the ground filled with leaves that the gardener had raked. Michael lifted it up, revealing four or five dead birds that had been shot. On the driveway Pugh saw a trail of bread-crumbs Michael had spread to lure them to their death. As Michael showed this to him, he began to laugh.

  This was a year before Martha Moxley was murdered.

  “Then,” said Cissy, “the sadness came and it never went away.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Doing Things by the Rules

  GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT

  1982

  The Moxleys knew none of this. They knew nothing of what lurked next door.

  “We felt comfortable in Greenwich the day we moved in,” Dorthy said in our first meeting. “People were so kind to us. The kids loved the schools. The Ixes welcomed us with open arms. I saw Cissy every day.”

  Both Martha and John thrived at Greenwich High, where John made the football team and Martha played piano and violin. “She was bright, attractive, and confident,” Dorthy said. “She and John made friends so easily. It was all so very positive.”

  Even after Martha’s murder, she and her husband continued to socialize with Rushton and the Ixes.

  “The day of Martha’s funeral, Rush sent over a ham,” Dorthy said. She gratefully accepted what she thought was his generosity. Later, Tommy offered John a summer job with the Atlanta Braves. “At the beginning Cissy couldn’t have been nicer,” said Dorthy. “After Martha’s funeral, the adults all came back to our house. Cissy had all the kids over to hers.”

  Not long afterward, when the police began focusing on Tommy, Dorthy said she recalled walking down her hallway with Cissy. “Cissy said, ‘Tommy is such a sweet child. I can’t believe he could have done such a thing but I’d give you Michael in a heartbeat.’” For years Dorthy wondered whether Cissy was protecting Tommy or whether she knew something about Michael she wasn’t sharing.

  During our first meeting, I asked Dorthy about the Greenwich police and their apparent bungling of the investigation. I was taken aback by her response.

  “The police have been good to us,” she said. “I have nothing but praise for them. They have been compassionate and kind. I feel they have been loyal to us.”

  “The newspapers mention a cover-up,” I said gently.

  “Oh, you know, you do hear those rumors,” she answered. “But I know it wasn’t Keegan. I know it wasn’t Lunney.” I knew both those names from the newspapers. Thomas Keegan, Baran’s successor as Greenwich police chief, had supervised the investigation into Martha’s murder as captain of detectives. James Lunney had been one of the case’s two lead detectives.

  I was astonished that Dorthy and her husband still accepted what the Greenwich police told them. In seven years, the police had failed to make an arrest. But they had succeeded in convincing the Moxleys to keep silent.

  Then, as an afterthought, Dorthy said, “My husband and I are not the kind of people to make noise, to protest. After Martha died and no one was arrested, we accepted what the Greenwich police told us, that they were doing everything they could. We accepted it because we believe in the system. That’s the kind of people we are. Doing things by the rules through proper channels is what we have always known.

  “But,” she said, “maybe in retrospect, we should not have remained silent. Maybe when the rumors started and nothing happened we should have done something. But frankly, we didn’t know what we could do.”

  She had been speaking to me for two hours beneath that portrait of Martha. During the entire time, she had not stopped crying.

  There was something cleansing about her tears, both for her and, surprisingly, for me.

  •

  My interview had apparently gone well enough that Dorthy gave me the names of two people to contact. She was torn, I sensed, about cooperating with me because her husband disapproved.

  I viewed that portrait of Martha on their living room wall as symbolic of their differences. Dorthy said David had buried his grief inside himself. Martha’s death was so painful he could never speak of it. Yet Martha’s portrait so dominated their apartment, how could he forget? Maybe
that’s what Dorthy had intended.

  She needed to talk about Martha, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. My appearance had opened the floodgates.

  Dorthy suggested I call Marilyn Robertson, a family friend whose husband worked at Touche Ross with David. Not long before the murder, Marilyn told me, she and her husband attended a party at the Moxleys’. Martha met them at the door and took Marilyn’s fur wrap. At that moment, David Moxley asked Martha to bring him a cigar. Moments later Martha reappeared, wearing the fur wrap and holding an unlit cigar between her teeth.

  I form a portrait of Martha: poised, confident, provocative.

  Dorthy also suggested I contact Martha’s friend Christy Kalan. Christy showed me a letter Martha had written her shortly before she was murdered.

  “I met Rob Somebody,” it began. “[He’s really cute and supposedly he has a crush on me.] He walked me home the other day. Last Thursday they had a swim team dinner and Helen decided to go. We walked in and got thrown in! . . . Then we were also playing water polo against the life guards. And this guy named Ross, he wasn’t too bad, kept telling Helen and me how good we were [as we almost drowned . . . ] He was really nice…. Guess who called me and asked me to go to the movies Friday? . . .”

  From that letter, I see another dimension in my portrait of Martha. She is boy crazy. Not necessarily teasing or vampish. Just fifteen-year-old boy crazy.

  Martha kept a diary that the police would seize and release only at Michael’s trial two decades later. It would reveal her as a prototypical, albeit privileged, American teenager.

  “Dear Diary,” she wrote on December 31, 1974, shortly after moving to Greenwich, nine months before she was murdered, “today is the last day of ’74. Boo Hoo. ’74 has been one of the best years of my life…. LOVED IT! The parties and the people were so fun! Well, hope ’75 is as good. Today, I played paddle tennis for the first time. I guess I wasn’t too bad. We went to the Keydel’s house for dinner. We ate at about 11:00, maybe even 12:00, drank French champagne and gin but didn’t get drunk!”