Conviction Read online

  The following month, she wrote: “I got my braces off today!! I am so glad! I am so sick of basketball practice. I can’t stand it. Beth is too much to handle too! She is a bragger and she cheats on tests—some of them. I also can’t stand sitting with Sue and Christine in bio. It took me 5 or 10 minutes to open my locker after lunch with Buddy, Peter, Danny and Tom all attacking me at the same time. It’s kinda fun but I sure am late to O’Brien’s class a lot. My teeth feel so queer!”

  At another point, she wrote: “Alan found out who both Mei and I like and he told Mark. Jeff wasn’t at school today. But Alan has a big mouth so Jeff will probably find out.”

  Another entry read: “I was waiting for the late bus and Danny and Bob and Joe threw my geometry book into the boys’ locker room. So I ended up in the boys’ locker room. Then they were carrying me around the locker room. I got a full tour.”

  She also reported going to “first base” and “second base” with boys and even “third base” but never “all the way.”

  “I was sitting in this bean bag with Peter,” she wrote, “and he bit my nose so I bit him back. Then he bit off all my fingernails and he bit my nose a few more times. Then we were just making out. We had such a good time.”

  And there was this: “I am writing sloppy because I am drunk. I had 2½ screwdrivers, 1½ Baccardi and Cokes and an aspirin. Then Alan came over for about 3½ hours and I got really drunk. I dropped a butter dish, ate a Pop-Tart. We called Peter…. I made an ass of myself in front of Giff. Me and Christy took a walk without our coats. It’s about 10 degrees outside. Alan sat on me a long time.”

  After a doctor’s appointment on her fifteenth birthday on August 16, 1975, she wrote, “I weigh 115 and I am in perfect health.” Three days later, she reported trying marijuana and meeting the Skakels for the first time. Friends threw her into the Skakel pool.

  On September 1, her first day at Greenwich High, she reported she went pool-hopping at night with Michael, Tommy, and David Skakel. On September 7, she visited the Skakels again. Five days later, she went driving with Tommy in his car. When Martha leaned over to steer the car, she wrote that she was “practically sitting in his lap” and that he “kept putting his hand on my knee.”

  On September 15, she and her friend Jackie Wetenhall visited the Skakels again and “as usual” sat in their mobile home parked in the driveway. On September 17, Michael “was so totally out of it that he was being a real asshole,” accusing her of leading Tommy on. Michael and Tommy then started a fight, and she told Jackie they should leave.

  She returned to the Skakels on September 21 and hung out with Tommy, who was drinking. She also saw him and Michael at a dance on October 4 and wrote that she bumped into Michael on October 10. It was one of her last entries. Three weeks later she was dead.

  •

  Dorthy also suggested I speak to John McCreight, who worked at Touche Ross with David Moxley. Waiting for him in Touche Ross’s midtown office, I thought how bizarre this was: I am interviewing David Moxley’s colleague while David Moxley refuses to see me.

  McCreight was in his mid to late forties, short and balding, and as wary of me as Dorthy had been. At the time of Martha’s murder, he said, he had been consulting for Detroit’s Mayor Roman Gribs to improve the city police department’s response time. Detroit was then the country’s murder capital, with the highest per capita homicide rate. Yet McCreight had somehow arranged for Detroit’s homicide chief, Gerald Hale, to take a week off to come to Connecticut six months after the murder and help the Greenwich police in their murder investigation. If that wasn’t influence in high places, I didn’t know what was.

  “The Greenwich police were extremely receptive to Hale,” McCreight began. “They were not at all defensive.” McCreight was a pro. He wanted everything to be nice. He wanted everyone to make nice. He did not want to insult or upset the Greenwich police. He wanted to make Hale’s involvement seem like a natural, normal law enforcement event. But it was hardly that. Recruiting Hale meant McCreight knew something had gone terribly wrong.

  “Did Hale write a report of his visit?” I asked.

  McCreight paused. Perhaps he had not anticipated the question. Perhaps he had thought I’d give him the once-over-lightly. That was the phrase New York City police chief Sidney Cooper had used a decade before when I’d interviewed him for Time about the Knapp Commission, which in the early 1970s investigated a department corruption scandal.

  “Your questions are once-over-lightly,” said Cooper, who headed the Internal Affairs Department. I’d never forgotten that. I was a kid then, just beginning to understand police. The chief was telling me I didn’t know the subject well enough to ask the right questions.

  But that was then and this was now. Now I knew what to look for. I knew what to ask. If Hale had written a report, was there something in it never before made public?

  McCreight was a cautious man. I watched him, weighing his response.

  “Yes,” he finally answered.

  So there was a report. Perhaps this is why Dorthy had pointed me to McCreight. Perhaps this was why David Moxley had allowed McCreight to talk to me. Perhaps David Moxley wanted me to know about the report. Or perhaps I was giving him too much credit.

  McCreight and I met twice more before he agreed to show the report to me, and only with stipulations. The first was that I could not quote it in my story. The second was that I could reveal its content only to my editor. Third, that the newspapers’ lawyers draft a letter confirming our agreement.

  “I don’t want there to be any ‘misunderstandings,’” he said. McCreight apparently knew newspaper reporters.

  Years later he would explain why he had given me Hale’s report. “You were the only engine for the next leg of the trip,” he said elliptically. “Your newspaper was the only road open. And there was something else. I felt I could trust you.”

  Ken was thrilled. My obtaining Hale’s report vindicated his decision to pursue the Moxley story. He called Jim Imbriaco, a Times-Mirror attorney in New York, to draft McCreight’s confirmation letter.

  And I was right. Hale’s report—written on May 10, 1976, six months after Martha’s murder—did provide information never before made public. It detailed specific mistakes in the police investigation.

  The report began with Martha’s walk to the Skakel house with Cissy’s daughter Helen and two other friends, Jackie Wetenhall and Geoffrey Byrne, around 9:00 P.M. on Halloween Eve—Mischief Night. Michael was standing outside. He and Martha settled into the front seat of his father’s maroon Lincoln, parked in the driveway, while Helen and Geoff sat in the back. The Skakel boys referred to the Lincoln as the “lust mobile” or “love mobile.” According to Michael’s memoir, Rushton had bought it after Anne had died. He had a machine shop remove the Lincoln logo and replaced it with a $5,000 Lalique eagle head with a light underneath.

  A few minutes after nine, Tommy emerged from the house and plunked himself down in the front seat on the other side of Martha. Around 9:15, two Skakel brothers—Rush Jr., nineteen, and John, sixteen—appeared with their cousin, Jimmy Terrien. Hale’s report said that Rush, John, Michael, and Terrien drove off to Terrien’s home in the back-country. This left Martha, Helen, Byrne, and Tommy outside the Skakel house.

  So far, there was nothing in the report I didn’t know. Everything so far had been in the newspapers. But the next sentences changed that.

  “Jeff [sic] and Helen stated that it appeared as if Martha and Thomas were ‘making out.’ This, after careful questioning, consisted of Martha pushing Thomas and Thomas pushing Martha. At one point, Thomas pushed Martha down and either fell or got down on her….”

  There it was, the sexual undercurrent between them now out in the open. It made me think of a question Dorthy had asked aloud at her apartment: “Did Martha say something? Did she do something to provoke it?”

  I had ignored her question, thinking she meant nothing specific. Now I wondered whether Dorthy had sensed her daughter’s s
exuality. The fur wrap across her shoulder, the cigar between her teeth. I couldn’t get that picture of Martha out of my mind. Not that it mattered or rather not that it should have. Not that there was any relevancy to it. Even if Martha were a tease or promiscuous—and there was no indication she was either—she was only fifteen. Even if the killer had misread her signals, only a deranged person would have murdered her for flirting.

  Hale’s report said that Helen and Byrne left for home shortly afterward. Five minutes or so later, around 9:30, Tommy told the police he also went home. He said he last saw Martha walking across his back lawn toward her house.

  Her path would have been across the Skakel backyard to Walsh Lane and then into her driveway. It was there that the killer first attacked her with the golf club, the report noted. She broke free and ran. He chased her forty feet down to the edge of her property under a weeping willow tree, began swinging the golf club at her. Full strokes. Again and again and again. Ten to twelve blows, all to her head. So savage was the beating that the golf club shattered in the attack. Then, with one of the broken pieces, the killer stabbed her through the neck.

  Dorthy awoke after midnight. Realizing Martha was not home, she called the Skakels first about 1:15, and again after 3:00. She reached Julie. Julie awakened Tommy and put him on the phone. Tommy said he’d last seen Martha at 9:30 when she walked across his back lawn toward her home.

  Julie got back on the phone and said her cousin Jimmy Terrien might know something. Dorthy called there. His mother Georgeann answered and said she would look for him. Minutes later she called back and told Dorthy that Jimmy was not home. Later, Terrien would tell the police he was with a married woman, whose name he would reveal only under subpoena. Questioned by the police, the woman denied Terrien had been with her.

  A passing schoolgirl found Martha’s body at 12:45 P.M. the next day under a clump of pine trees at the edge of the Moxley property. She was lying on her stomach, her blue jeans and underpants pulled down, exposing her buttocks and legs to the knees. She had not been raped. The killer either had been interrupted or was physically unable.

  Inside her pocket police discovered a pumpkin-shaped Halloween party invitation. It was from a friend, Nadine Imus, the daughter of radio talk show host Don Imus.

  A small amount of blood had been found in her driveway, indicating the first attack had occurred there. Two large pools were found in the shadow of the weeping willow tree, showing where the killer beat her mercilessly. A drag path of blood from the two large pools through high grass ended under the pine tree where her body lay.

  Hale’s report described the murder weapon as a #6 Tony Pena iron. Three pieces of the club—its head and two pieces of the shaft—were found nearby. The grip—the handle and a small part of the shaft—were missing.

  Hale next focused on the time of death. Although the medical examiner estimated it occurred between 9:30 P.M. on the night of October 30 and 5:30 A.M. the following morning, the Greenwich police had narrowed it to shortly before 10:00 P.M.

  “The Ix dog and another neighbor’s dog went wild at about this time and began barking violently and both were facing toward the area of the weeping willow tree,” Hale wrote.

  The report also noted there had been a suspect before Tommy, whose name had never surfaced. “A Mr. Edward Hammond 27/W of 48 Walsh Lane was the main initial suspect but has been eliminated since,” Hale wrote.

  A Yale graduate and student at the Columbia Business School, Hammond lived with his mother next door to the Moxleys. The report didn’t explain how or why the police had focused on him. But Hammond’s mother Marianne later said to me, “He happened to be home alone the night of the murder. The police wouldn’t believe him. They gave him a very hard time. They searched our house without a warrant. They never read him his rights. They just hauled him off to the police station.”

  Hale’s report also did not explain when or why Hammond was dropped as a suspect. But David Moxley felt convinced enough of his innocence that a year after the murder he recommended Touche Ross hire him in its San Francisco office.

  The report then turned to Tommy.

  “Thomas Skakel became a suspect after the investigators found two Tony Penna [sic] golf clubs in the Skakel home which were identical to the murder weapon. These had been part of a complete set, which had belonged to Thomas’s deceased mother Anne.”

  That was something else I hadn’t known. The New York Times story of June 24, 1977, said the police “now believe they have traced the golf club used in the murder to a collection belonging to the Skakels.” But the story hadn’t said why.

  My journalistic antenna was wiggling. Something wasn’t right here. Why had the police told the Times they “believed” the clubs came from the Skakel house when it was they themselves who had discovered them? I found myself wondering exactly when the police had made this discovery. Hale’s report didn’t say.

  “The officer,” Hale’s report continued, “confiscated one of these clubs with a Consent to Search form signed by Mr. Rushton Skakel.” . . . The confiscated club was a 4 iron. It had a label on the shaft just down from where the grip ends with Thomas’s mother’s name on it. “The label would be located on the part of the murder weapon which is missing,” the report read.

  So that was why the club’s grip had not been found at the crime scene with the other pieces. Anne Skakel’s name on the grip was obviously why the killer had kept or hidden it.

  This was a major discovery, another indication the killer was a Skakel. Who but a family member would have cared if the grip with Anne Skakel’s name were discovered at the crime scene? And all this time the police had been searching for a transient. What had they been thinking?

  The report then discussed Tommy’s whereabouts after he left Martha at 9:30.

  “Kenneth Littleton stated that Thomas came into the den of the Skakel home where Mr. Littleton was watching television at about 10:30 P.M. Littleton did not notice anything unusual about Thomas at that time,” Hale wrote.

  “Thomas accounted for his whereabouts by stating that after he left Martha, he went to his room and wrote a report that he had to have for school. However, a check revealed that there was no such report.”

  So Tommy appeared to have lied to the police.

  He was subsequently given two polygraph tests by the Connecticut state police. The first “could not be read because Thomas was all washed out and tired. The second resulted in a finding that he was truthful.”

  But, Hale added intriguingly, “The validity of this test is in question.”

  Hale noted Tommy’s skull fracture at age four and his history of violence. “[H]e would become violent frequently and quite suddenly.

  “He would jump up from the table, begin to throw things about, turn over beds, pull phones from the wall or threaten siblings. He would not lose consciousness and the episodes varied from 15–20 minutes to as long as 2–3 hours. His father was able to control him but only physically. There is evidence that these rage reactions continue to this day.”

  During one of these recent incidents, “Thomas slashed a picture of himself in the groin area. A witness that works for the Skakel family also stated that Thomas has been seen going for walks carrying a golf club.”

  Hale’s report also noted that the police did not immediately confiscate the clothing or shoes Tommy wore the night of the murder so they could be tested for Martha’s blood or clothing fibers. Why not? Could their failure to do so have spawned the rumors of a cover-up?

  “Search warrants for clothing, shoes and other golf clubs have been denied by the State’s Attorney Mr. Donald Browne,” Hale added with no further explanation.

  I wondered why. Had there been a dispute between the Greenwich police, who had sought the warrant, and state’s attorney Browne, who had refused it? If so, did the rumors of a cover-up refer to him?

  •

  My next move was obvious. I had to speak to Hale. And not by phone. I had to go to Detroit.

 
; His report had made the Greenwich Police Department’s case against Tommy. Not only had he been the last person seen with Martha; their meeting had been charged with a sexual undercurrent that suggested motive. In addition, he had a history of violence. And he had apparently lied to the police.

  Ken didn’t question the trip’s expense, usually a concern at a small paper. “When do you want to go?” was all he said.

  It was at 1300 Beaubien Street that I had begun as a police reporter. More than a decade had passed since then. In that time, I had come to know something of police. I knew some of the qualities that differentiated detectives from uniformed officers, homicide detectives in particular because murder is considered “the ultimate.” I understood the importance of the first forty-eight hours of a homicide investigation—the time before suspects can concoct their stories and call their lawyers.

  The homicide detective in the Charles Friedgood case, Tommy Palladino, had insisted on taking Friedgood’s written statement the afternoon he reported his wife’s death. In it, Friedgood maintained he had examined his wife and concluded she died of a stroke. It was a blind alley from which he could not escape after an autopsy determined she’d been injected with massive doses of Demerol.

  I had called McCreight to smooth the way with Hale. Without his intercession, there was no way Hale would have seen me. His office was two floors above the press room where I had cut my teeth as a reporter, calling chiefs in outlying townships. The building on Beaubien Street hadn’t changed. What had changed was me. There would be no once-over-lightlies. Now, I knew what I was doing.

  Hale was a burly man in his late fifties, nearing retirement. Perhaps that was why he spoke so candidly. First, he set the scene. “Martha is with Tommy Skakel, the last person to see her alive,” he began. “They’re making out. Helen Ix and Geoff Byrne are so embarrassed they felt they had to leave.