Conviction Page 6

  “But the Greenwich police don’t focus on Tommy immediately. They don’t get a warrant to search the Skakel house for the killer’s bloody clothes and shoes. Instead, they were looking at other people like Hammond, who had no connection to the case. Why was that?”

  I half-expected—I half-hoped—Hale would blurt out, “Because there was a cover-up.” Instead, he said, “Because when it came to the Skakels the Greenwich police were treading lightly.”

  Hale then turned to the police’s use of the lie detector test. “They attempted to give polygraphs to virtually everyone they questioned,” he said. “They even tried to test Dorthy Moxley.” Dorthy hadn’t mentioned that. Later, she would tell me she had been too nervous to take one.

  “I tried to tell the Greenwich police many times that a polygraph is not an investigative tool,” Hale continued, “that for it to be effective, investigators must know the suspect and his reactions. A polygraph is just short of voodoo. I’ve seen them cause a lot of harm in homicide investigations if they are not properly given.”

  “What do you mean by ‘not properly given’?” I asked.

  “If, say, they gave the polygraph too soon, too early in the case, before the police knew the details, before they knew the proper questions to ask.” As I found out, that was precisely what had occurred.

  I asked Hale about Tommy’s having passed the polygraph, as the police had said, as he had written in his report.

  “I heard the tapes of that [Tommy’s] test,” Hale said. “Professionally it did not clear anyone of anything.”

  I then asked about Littleton, who became a suspect after he failed a lie detector test. Hale said there could be many reasons for his failing, including fear, nervousness, and improper questioning by the person giving the test. “There’s a difference between asking, ‘Do you know something about the case?’” he said, “and ‘Did you kill Martha Moxley?’”

  Hale was no less critical of State’s Attorney Browne, accusing him of “a lack of aggressiveness”: “Browne tells the Associated Press a Greenwich family—who everyone knows is the Skakels—was not cooperating and what happens? Nothing.

  “So what does Browne do next? Does he hold a news conference and embarrass the Skakels again? Does he pressure them to cooperate? No, he did nothing.

  “I’ve investigated over 1,000 homicides,” Hale continued. “I believe the Moxley case is solvable, even at this late date. What the Greenwich police must do now is to question each suspect’s friends—their wives, ex-wives, and girlfriends—to determine if such behavior—not necessarily killings but violent behavior—is repeated. It will not be easy. It will take time and money and manpower, but it can be done.”

  “Keep on with your investigation,” Hale urged me. “It might prod the Connecticut authorities into restarting theirs.

  “I feel strongly about the Moxley case,” he said. “Years later, it still haunts me. Whoever killed Martha Moxley should never have been allowed to get away with it. That is why I am saying these things to a newspaper reporter.”

  He was passing me the torch.

  CHAPTER FIVE

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

  GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT

  June 1982

  Two weeks later, I was at Greenwich police headquarters, seated across a table from Chief Thomas Keegan and Detective Jim Lunney. I had just begun to interview them. I had asked Lunney, a bull of a man, over six feet and 200 pounds, what he had been doing since leaving the Moxley case.

  “Narcotics,” Lunney answered. Then, swift and sudden as a cobra, he leaned forward and grabbed the front of my shirt. His strength took my breath away. For a second, I was inches from his face. “You wanted to know what I’ve been doing?” he said, releasing me. “This is how we question narcotics suspects.”

  Keegan did a double-take, then tried to turn Lunney’s move into a joke. I said nothing, struggling to regain my composure. Was Lunney a goon, I wondered, or a nut?

  I wondered whether he and Keegan planned this routine beforehand. “There’s this reporter coming around, asking questions about the Moxley case,” I imagined them saying. “Let’s show him how we do things.”

  I had never covered a small-town police department. Even on Long Island, the Nassau and Suffolk County departments each had several thousand officers and covered a population of two million people.

  With a population of 60,000, Greenwich had only 150 cops. They shared the town’s superior attitude, regarding themselves as a notch above the surrounding departments, even though their most visible work was standing in uniform along Greenwich Avenue—an East Coast version of Hollywood’s Rodeo Drive—sometimes in white pith helmets, directing traffic.

  Martha’s murder had been Greenwich’s first homicide in twenty years. It was telling that Keegan’s predecessor Stephen Baran, the chief at the time, had played no role in investigating it. The reason Keegan gave was that Baran’s expertise was in traffic control.

  I didn’t know what to make of Keegan, a graduate of Greenwich High School and the Marines, who smoked cigarettes from a long holder, was known to his officers as “the major,” and was said to be as comfortable around the town’s highest elected official, First Select-woman Rebecca Breed—whose family had come on the Mayflower—as he was with his cops.

  “I’m not closing the book on this,” Keegan said to me. “I have every intention of bringing this case to trial.”

  Maybe he thought all reporters were gullible. By now, in 1982, an arrest seemed out of the question. But I was unprepared for what he said next.

  “I believe I know who killed Martha Moxley, but I cannot prove it.” Was Keegan serious? Why was he telling me this? Was he trying to impress me by showing he was on top of the case even though it remained unsolved?

  “I assume you mean Tommy Skakel,” I said nonchalantly, as though I were accustomed to police chiefs I’d just met revealing their cases’ secrets.

  Keegan nodded, although I noted that he never uttered Tommy’s name.

  “I told this to the Moxleys,” he added. Referring to Dorthy, he said, “As a mother, she has a right to know what people close to the investigation feel. I waited a long time to tell them. They are haunted by this.”

  Dorthy later confirmed what Keegan had said. “It was in the living room of our apartment.” I was shocked when he told me. Not by whom he identified, but that he actually said it.”

  I also noted that Dorthy had never volunteered this information to me. Her silence on the subject until I asked her directly only confirmed her wariness of me and her loyalty to Keegan and the Greenwich police. I was someone who could help her. Instead, she and her husband continued to rely on people who had failed them seven years before. I didn’t get it. No, they didn’t get it. They were lost. How lost, I still didn’t appreciate.

  Keegan refused to provide evidence of his suspicions about Tommy, but Lunney chimed in. “Tommy told us he left Martha to write a school report on Abraham Lincoln. But when we checked with Tommy’s teachers at the Brunswick School, none of them had assigned it.”

  I, too, had interviewed Tommy’s teachers at Brunswick. Barbara Train, chairwoman of the history department, told me the police had questioned her about the supposed report. “I told them I hadn’t assigned it. I checked with other teachers and none of them had either.”

  She added that her stepfather, Desmond Fitzgerald, had worked for the CIA and that individual responsibility had been his credo. Fitzgerald’s name was familiar, although I had to look him up to learn the specifics. He was a top agency official involved in covert activities in Vietnam and Cuba.

  Referring to the Skakels, she said, “Their money and connections have gotten them out of all their difficulties so that they lack personal responsibility.”

  I then asked Keegan when Tommy had become a suspect. Hale’s report said it had been when police discovered the matching golf clubs inside the Skakel home. I was becoming increasingly curious abou
t exactly when that was.

  Keegan, however, deflected my question. “We looked at a lesbian couple, a mentally retarded girl, several residents with tempers or drinking problems that had attracted police attention,” he said. “There was no shortage of suspects, I’ll tell you that.”

  Because of what Dorthy had told me about Michael, I asked whether he was ever a suspect. Keegan assured me Michael had been investigated and discounted. Michael, he explained, had driven with his brothers at 9:15 P.M. to their cousin Jimmy Terrien’s home in back-country Greenwich. That was a fifteen- to twenty-minute drive from the Skakels. If Martha had been murdered around 10:00 P.M., Michael could not have returned in time to have killed her.

  I then asked Keegan about Littleton.

  “His burglary arrest in Nantucket cried out for attention,” Keegan said. He explained that he had focused on Littleton’s initial statement about Tommy. Littleton said he had been unpacking while watching The French Connection on television when Tommy entered shortly after ten. Littleton said he had noticed nothing unusual about him.

  “We felt Littleton was protecting Tommy,” Keegan said. “We felt he knew something he wasn’t telling us.” He paused. “Did Littleton know something? Did Littleton see something?” Keegan paused again. “Did Littleton participate?”

  I decided Keegan was a performer, a showman. When he retired a few years later and moved to South Carolina, he was elected to the state legislature. I pictured the Connecticut Yankee sitting back in his chair in the legislature, blowing smoke rings from his cigarette holder.

  When Littleton returned to Greenwich that fall and resumed teaching at the Brunswick School, Keegan said he persuaded him to take a lie detector test. “I told him I believed he was innocent and wanted him to clear himself,” Keegan said, grinning. He paused again. “Littleton failed. And he failed badly.”

  Still, Littleton refused to cooperate. “I won’t help you build a case against Tommy,” he had said to them. So Keegan sent Lunney and his partner, Steve Carroll, over to Brunswick to have a chat with its headmaster. Littleton was fired.

  He landed a job at St. Luke’s in neighboring New Canaan. Keegan sent Lunney and Carroll over there. Littleton was fired again.

  In June 1977, Keegan sent Lunney and Carroll to Nantucket for Littleton’s sentencing on the Nantucket burglary. Their plan was to have Massachusetts prosecutors allow him to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and receive a suspended sentence that would allow him to continue teaching. In return, Littleton would cooperate in the Moxley investigation.

  But Littleton refused the deal.

  “We told him we’d do everything in our power to help him with his burglary case if he agreed to cooperate with us,” Keegan said. “We said we would speak in his behalf and help in any legal way we could in return for his cooperation. We are at a loss to explain why he refused.

  “Personally,” he added, “I don’t think he had anything to do with the murder but that he may know something about it.” He turned and grinned at Lunney. “But Jim disagrees.”

  Lunney began to say he believed Littleton may have participated with Tommy. As he spoke, Keegan began pumping his arm up and down in an obscene gesture, indicating Lunney didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Two jerks, I found myself thinking as I left the office. Two rubes. Keegan, the front man, was Mr. Personality. Lunney, the workhorse, was an ox.

  I was sure they viewed me equally disdainfully, as someone to be gotten in and out of their office as quickly as possible, hopefully never to return. But it was one thing to be an oaf. It was another to be corrupt. I wasn’t sure if or where the two came together.

  •

  Ken was so excited by Keegan’s identification of Tommy as Martha’s killer that he wanted me to return with a hidden tape recorder and have Keegan repeat it. I refused. If we, through the newspaper, were presenting ourselves as shining the light of discovery into the crevices of an unsolved murder, then our actions had to be in the open. Ken reluctantly agreed. As it turned out, Keegan probably realized he’d gone too far and was never as expansive again.

  I began my second interview with him and Lunney by exploring the possibility of a cover-up. I asked Keegan why, after discovering the matching golf clubs, he hadn’t obtained a warrant to search the Skakel house for the clothing and shoes Tommy wore the night of the murder to test for traces of Martha’s blood or clothing fiber.

  Keegan answered that Rushton Skakel had signed a Consent to Search form, allowing the police to look inside the house informally without a warrant. “The Skakels were completely cooperative at the beginning,” Keegan said. “They gave us carte blanche.”

  Lunney added, “We were afraid that if we had asked him [Rushton] to conduct a formal search he might have said ‘Get out!’ and we would lose what access we had.”

  Then, Lunney offered a second reason. “The ultimate decision came from State’s Attorney Browne’s office,” he said. “They determined the feasibility. We relied on advice from Browne’s chief investigator, Jack Solomon. He was with us from the get-go. He was with us every step of the way.”

  This was the first time I had heard Solomon’s name, but it would not be the last.

  I relayed Keegan’s and Lunney’s explanations about the search warrant to Hale. “There should have been a thorough, formal search of the Skakel house,” Hale said. “If Rushton Skakel was as cooperative as the Greenwich police say, why not go and do it immediately? Then, if he refused, they could have asked the state’s attorney for a search warrant.”

  He reiterated what he had told me in Detroit: When it came to the Skakels, the Greenwich police were treading lightly.

  •

  Still pursuing the cover-up angle, I sought out Lunney’s former partner, Steve Carroll. He had recently retired and was willing to talk.

  Soft-spoken and articulate, Carroll had a craggy face and wavy gray hair. Unlike most Greenwich cops, he lived in town and had raised his children there. His two sons had graduated from Greenwich High and the Naval Academy at Annapolis. On the surface, he seemed more patrician than police officer.

  “The initial investigation was disorganized,” Carroll said. “Individual teams of detectives began canvassing the neighborhood. Everyone was out to make a collar.”

  Carroll explained how the police had begun by pursuing the transient theory. Then, they had looked at Belle Haven neighbors. “People with drinking problems and violent tempers, oddballs or loners, a lesbian couple, a retarded girl.”

  Repeating what Keegan had told me, he said, “There was no shortage of suspects.” Apparently, no one had alerted them to the Skakels.

  “We were too willing to believe Tommy,” he said. “The questioning that first night was too casual, too informal, not thorough enough. One of the detectives who questioned him liked kids and was overly friendly and did not press Tommy on details. For example, we never satisfactorily determined what clothing he wore that night so we could test it for blood stains.”

  There it was again—the failure to obtain a search warrant for Tommy’s clothes.

  “Maybe it was the Skakel money,” Carroll said. “Maybe it was their position. Maybe I was subconsciously intimidated. But we eliminated rather than zeroing in.”

  Law enforcement is a macho business. I had never heard a cop speak so candidly of his own and his department’s failings. In certain law enforcement circles, talking this frankly to a reporter was regarded not merely as weakness but as disloyalty.

  Yet here was Carroll bearing all. I could only conclude he was wracked with guilt over his failure to have made an arrest. But as I replayed his conversation in my mind, I realized his words reflected contrition, not cover-up.

  •

  I also met Stephen Baran, who had recently retired as chief after twenty years. His wife Nancy was a newspaper reporter in Bridgeport. She’d learned I was knocking around Greenwich and was concerned for her husband’s reputation. She invited me to lunch at their house on the edge of B
elle Haven.

  Their house, which was either on or next to the estate of the Van Munchings—the family that owned Heineken beer—had become the subject of gossip following the Moxley murder. How could Baran afford to live in Belle Haven on a police chief’s salary? people whispered. Was the purchase of his house somehow connected to a cover-up of the Moxley case?

  As it turned out, there was nothing untoward about Baran’s purchase. He had bought the property from the Van Munchings’ neighbor, Alice P. Thayer, a widow in her nineties who had outlived her money and subdivided, Nancy Baran explained to me two decades later after her husband had died.

  “We were one of the lucky ones who bid,” she said. “It was Steve’s dream when he retired to build a house of his own. We put it up ourselves with friends and relatives.”

  With a trace of bitterness, she added, “I am certain the speculation contributed to my husband’s early death.”

  But the problem in Greenwich wasn’t Baran’s integrity, or Keegan’s, for that matter. Rather, it was the cozy relationship between the Greenwich police and the town’s wealthiest residents.

  A police chief from a nearby city put it this way: Crimes involving Greenwich’s more prominent citizens were sometimes ignored because detectives did not know how much freedom they would be allowed before a call was made to higher-ups to stop them. Because of this, he said, there was an undercurrent of resentment.

  Baran had been chief at the time of another death involving the Skakels. In 1966, Rushton’s niece—his brother George’s seventeen-year-old daughter Kathleen, known as Kick—had driven her convertible over a speed-bump in the back-country. A six-year-old neighbor, Hopey O’Brien, seated on the rear fender was thrown to her death. Kick was never charged.

  According to Jerry Oppenheimer’s The Other Mrs. Kennedy, Baran investigated the case as a traffic fatality but never interviewed Hopey’s siblings, who had been with her in the car. He subsequently told the Greenwich Time he did not believe negligence was involved.

  It seemed to me the Greenwich police had investigated the Moxley murder as they had the death of Hopey O’Brien. Instinctively, they had shied away from the Skakels. Instead, they had sought the transient off the turnpike. I recalled Baran’s quote the day after the murder, which seemed to justify that theory: “Kids are always leaving bicycles, tennis rackets, and golf clubs outdoors, after playing with them on the lawn.” Again, I asked myself when the police had discovered the matching club inside the Skakel home—the clue that made Tommy a suspect.