Conviction Read online

  I was also sensing the contempt many Greenwich residents felt toward the police. Many cops like Carroll worked second jobs as drivers, taking people to the airports. Others worked as bartenders at private parties. Some Greenwich residents viewed the police as servants.

  Carroll said detectives had scoured Belle Haven in the days following Martha’s murder, asking residents about neighbors with tempers or drinking problems. No one apparently told them about the Skakels. Cissy Ix, who knew all of it, said the police never asked.

  Years later, after the grand jury was called and prosecutors attempted to reexamine the crime scene, Susan Henze, who had purchased the Skakel home on Otter Rock Drive refused to let Frank Garr on her property. “I hold you personally responsible for bringing this all back and bringing it out in the newspapers,” she screamed at him, rushing outside where he and the prosecution team had assembled.

  And the contempt was returned in kind. The day Martha’s body was found, Lunney said to another detective about the Moxley’s Belle Haven neighbors: “It seemed that no one wore a watch. No one could tell you where he was or what he was doing at any particular time that night. You would have thought a dog had been run over. That was about the level of concern we were getting from people.”

  As for Frank, he bit his tongue when Henze rushed out to upbraid him. “I never said what I wanted to,” he told me. “I never said what I felt I should have. I never said to her, ‘How would you have felt if it were your own daughter who had been murdered?’”

  •

  Next, I sought an interview with Fairfield County State’s Attorney Donald Browne in Bridgeport. He refused to see me. Repeated phone calls to his office didn’t soften him up, so I called Dorthy.

  She and her husband had hired their own criminal attorney as a liaison with the authorities. God only knows what the Moxleys were paying him. And for what? God only knows what they expected from him. To me, this was a further indication that they didn’t know who to turn to for help.

  Nonetheless, he did call Browne. Reluctantly, Browne consented to see me. He was one of Connecticut’s five appointed state’s attorneys, a career prosecutor, middle-aged, of medium height with a saturnine expression. He offered only the briefest responses to my questions. Unlike Keegan, he showed no interest in impressing me.

  Still on the cover-up track, I began by asking whether Jack Solomon, Browne’s chief investigator, had prevented the Greenwich police from obtaining a search warrant, as Lunney had suggested.

  “It was Greenwich’s investigation,” Browne answered. “We only advise. Unless it’s an organized crime investigation, we don’t supervise.”

  “Why did you reject the Greenwich police’s attempt to obtain a warrant to search the Skakel house?” I asked. Browne said he couldn’t remember.

  “Probably too much time had elapsed,” he said. He seemed disinterested in what I regarded as a key facet of the case. How could he not remember?

  But as I came to learn, what Browne said was probably true. It was not until Hale suggested the search warrant to the Greenwich police that they requested it of Browne. That had been six months after the murder.

  Unlike Browne, his boss—the chief state’s attorney Austin McGuigan—seemed eager to speak to me. Whereas Browne was cautious, McGuigan was brash. The first thing he said was that he didn’t trust cops—a bizarre opinion from the state’s chief law enforcement official.

  What McGuigan said he did trust—what he said Browne trusted—was the polygraph, the lie detector test, what he called “the box.”

  “The fact is Tommy Skakel passed the box and Littleton failed,” McGuigan said.

  I recalled Hale’s saying there could be numerous reasons for failing the polygraph but McGuigan appeared to have no doubts about the test’s reliability.

  “Does that mean you think Littleton murdered Martha?” I asked.

  That would be going too far, he said. “Failing the box means Littleton had ‘guilty knowledge’ of the murder,” McGuigan said. “If you know who did it and you refuse to say, you flunk the box.”

  “What indications are there that Littleton had knowledge of the murder?” I persisted.

  “The indication,” said McGuigan, “is that he flunked the box.”

  The rift between the Greenwich police and the state’s attorney’s office ran deeper than Browne’s refusal to grant the search warrant. It sounded like the two agencies disagreed about who had killed Martha Moxley.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Case File

  I was now so troubled about how the investigation had been conducted that I felt we had no choice but to take the next step. The cover-up theory wasn’t holding up. Rather, it seemed that in the beginning of the investigation, the police had instinctively shied away from the Skakels.

  Dorthy Moxley knew her daughter had gone to their house the night she was murdered. She repeatedly called them during the night, even speaking with Tommy. Yet the police hadn’t focused on him until they found the golf clubs inside their house, presumably at some later date. They had wasted the crucial first forty-eight hours investigating Hammond, other neighbors, and the imaginary hitchhiker.

  Meanwhile, Browne and Solomon seemed to have relied exclusively on the polygraph. Never having investigated a homicide, the Greenwich police had gone along, polygraphing everyone they could.

  Yet these were merely my hunches. I lacked documentation. I needed to see the Greenwich department’s case file, which Keegan refused to show me. The only way to get it was to make a formal complaint with the state’s Freedom of Information Commission.

  I knew Keegan and Browne would oppose us. Although seven years had passed since the murder and no detective was even assigned to it anymore, I knew what both agencies would claim. They’d argue that the file’s release would harm a future prosecution. I’d been around long enough to know what their real reason was. It was to hide their mistakes—or worse.

  While I respected cops individually for their courage and their loyalty, I’d come to distrust police departments as institutions. A decade before, during the Knapp Commission hearings in New York City, I’d seen how loyalty to an institution could lead to cover-up and corruption.

  During those hearings, I learned how important it was for the police to be scrutinized and why police departments fear a reporter more than a reporter fears the police. I understood how much trouble a reporter can cause a police department. By obtaining that file, I’d be causing lots of trouble.

  Ken couldn’t have been more supportive. “This is great,” he said. “What better way to serve the community?” As the local newspaper, he said, we had a responsibility to inform readers about an unsolved crime and to hold the police department accountable in explaining why an investigation has produced no arrest.

  Once again he contacted Imbriaco, the paper’s lawyer, this time to write to Browne, explaining the newspaper’s position.

  “Considering your…statements to the effect that you are not optimistic about solving the Moxley murder…any news article which might arise out of the [newspapers’] investigation of this crime might actually help in the arrest of a suspect,” he wrote. “It is also clear that given the history of the state’s investigation of this matter there is absolutely no concrete prospect of any individual being prosecuted for this crime.”

  In mid-July, Keegan telephoned Ken to dissuade him from filing our complaint. “I have the impression that Keegan was intent on convincing me that he has nothing to hide or cover up and that he is serious about pursuing this case,” Ken wrote in a memo. “I told him our only interest was informing our readers of what had transpired since the murder in 1975 and laying out for them what we had learned.”

  Some months later, Keegan wrote Ken again, asking that before we published our story, he be able to vet it.

  “I have been informed that prior to publication of the article on the murder of Martha Moxley, attorneys employed by your newspaper will review and/or edit the article to reduce or e
liminate the likelihood of civil action against Mr. Leonard Levitt or the newspaper,” he wrote.

  Keegan requested that he and Lunney be afforded what he termed “the same courtesy.”

  I knew what Keegan was worried about: his having said to me he had told the Moxleys that Tommy had killed Martha but that he couldn’t prove it. Perhaps in the past, he had been able to pressure the Greenwich Time, which had not had the resources to counter them before Times-Mirror purchased it. But no longer. He was now dealing with Times-Mirror, one of the nation’s most powerful media conglomerates.

  “The freedom of the press embraces within it a newspaper’s right to publish in a society free from the constraining influences of government or of other third parties who seek to limit that which a newspaper has the constitutional right to publish,” Ken wrote back to him.

  “To grant your request would, in my opinion, establish a most dangerous precedent not only because it would represent the creation of a constitutionally objectionable relationship between government and the press but also because of the adverse affect such an action would have on the credibility of the Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate as responsible newspapers in this community. …”

  Five months later, on December 9, 1982, in a small room in the state’s capitol in Hartford, our Freedom of Information complaint was heard before a lone Connecticut FOI commissioner. Keegan appeared to testify, resplendent in full police regalia with all his medals. I testified for the newspapers.

  The following month, the commissioner made his recommendation to the state’s five-member panel. He had sided with us. Seven years had passed since the murder. The Moxley investigation was dormant, he ruled.

  He ordered Keegan to release 400 pages of documents and provide an inventory for those he maintained were confidential.

  We had won.

  •

  The file detailed a pattern of missteps, worse than I had imagined.

  Not only had the police searched for an unknown hitchhiker, but they’d wasted the crucial first forty-eight hours focusing on the Moxleys’ next door neighbor, an innocent man. The file did not explain what had piqued their interest in Hammond, although it did state he had had blood on his clothing from a household accident. He was asked to accompany the officers to police headquarters to provide a statement and to leave several items of clothing he said he’d worn the night of the murder.

  “Mr. Hammond also gave freely and voluntarily the above items…” the report read. “Fingerprint samples, fingernail scrapings and hair samples [were taken] from head.”

  I noted that Hammond’s “free and voluntary cooperation” contrasted with what his mother had told me—that the police had violated her son’s rights and hauled him off to headquarters.

  But when it came to the Skakels, the police sounded deferential.

  At 3:00 P.M. the day Martha’s body was found, Keegan instructed Lunney and his partner to interview members of the Skakel family.

  “Interviewed Julie Skakel, age 18,” wrote Lunney, “and she related the following: she and her family and friends—brothers Rushton [age nineteen], Thomas [age seventeen], John [age sixteen], Michael [age fifteen], David [age twelve] and Steven [age nine], cousin James Terrien, [Julie’s friend] Andrea Shakespeare and a house guest Ken Littleton had returned to the house at approximately 9 P.M. on 10/30/75 after having dinner at the Belle Haven Beach Club.

  “Miss Skakel stated that her father Rushton is presently away and Mr. Littleton was at the house to keep an eye on the family.”

  I pictured Lunney questioning “Miss Skakel” and the other Skakel children. I was sure he was on his best behavior, not grabbing any of them as he supposedly did his narcotics suspects—or me.

  Apparently, nothing the Skakels told him raised suspicion because later that afternoon, the police were back at Hammond’s, interviewing his mother Marianna. Over the next two weeks, detectives interviewed Hammond’s neighbors, college and prep school roommates, and teachers at Yale and the Columbia Business School.

  Amidst these interviews, I found what I was searching for. It was just a four-line entry but one that said it all: “5:30 P.M.—October 30, 1975—Dets. Brosko and Lunney,” it was captioned. I noted that the date was incorrect. The writer obviously meant October 31, the day Martha’s body was discovered.

  “At about 5:45,” the entry began, “the investigators had an occasion to be in Rushton Skakel’s home…and observed the following described golf club located in a storage bin in a room located on the north side of the house, first floor.”

  I had wondered at exactly what point in the investigation the Greenwich police had found the matching clubs and began focusing on Tommy. I had assumed it had been days or weeks after the murder.

  Now I saw that Lunney had discovered the first matching club the afternoon Martha’s body was found!

  Yet no warning bell had gone off, indicating the killer had come from the Skakel house or that the reason that the piece of shaft with Anne Skakel’s name was missing was because the killer did not want attention drawn to the Skakels.

  Nothing in the file indicated that Lunney or Brosko had immediately reinterviewed the Skakel children, Littleton, Andrea Shakespeare, or anybody else at the Skakel house the night of the murder, separately and more closely, or taken written statements from them.

  Instead, the next entry read, “At this time Mr. Rushton Skakel was away on a hunting trip in Vermont and the investigators were unable to obtain permissions to remove the golf club from his home.”

  So the police had just left it there. Just as they had left everyone in the Skakel home alone while they searched for a transient and questioned Hammond.

  Not until two days later did Lunney return for it.

  The next entry in the file, dated 10:00 A.M., November 2, read: “Since the golf club, which was still at the Skakel home, was similar to the one that caused the death of Martha Moxley, the investigators proceeded to the Skakel home in an attempt to obtain the golf club.

  “The investigators met Mr. Rushton Skakel [who had cut short his hunting trip] and informed him of this investigation and asked Mr. Skakel if we could take possession of the golf club which was still in his home.

  “Mr. Skakel further related that the aforementioned golf club was the possession of his wife, who passed away several years ago. [He agreed to let them take the club.]

  “Mr. Skakel added he then gave the whole set of clubs to his daughter Julie.

  “Interviewed Julie and she related that she last used the set of golf clubs this past summer.

  “Julie made a quick search of the house and was unable to locate the set of clubs.

  “Mr. Skakel and Julie advised the investigators that they would make a thorough search of the house in an attempt to locate the golf clubs and advise the department of their findings.”

  So, there it was. They had wasted two days—the crucial forty-eight hours—searching for a transient and browbeating Hammond while the killer was someone under their noses at the Skakels’.

  Not only had they failed to confiscate the club immediately, they hadn’t sought a warrant to immediately search the house for the missing shaft/handle or for the bloody clothes and shoes the killer had worn.

  There was Lunney—the tough guy with his lowlife narcotics suspects—standing before Rushton and Julie, asking them to search the house for him.

  By the time he realized what had happened, it was too late.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Our Mutual Tragedy

  NEW YORK CITY

  1982–1984

  I was standing in the corridor outside the maternity ward at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island. It was a Saturday night, the week before Christmas, 1982.

  Susan’s obstetrician had just told me they could not stop her contractions. She was in her thirty-first week of pregnancy and had been rushed to the hospital the night before. The obstetrician had attempted a drug to slow the contractions and gain a precious few more weeks. W
hen twenty-four hours later the contractions had not abated, he said he felt there was no other course but to deliver by cesarean section.

  And so our daughter Jennifer was born nine weeks early at three and a half pounds—not a bad weight for a preemie, as the obstetrician pointed out. She spent her first few days in a neonatal ward incubator with tubes protruding from her, next to babies with spina bifida or holes in their hearts, at whose sides their grieving parents sat silently for hours. We were the fortunate ones. Jennifer was healthy. She was merely small.

  A nurse taught me how to lift the incubator’s bottom flap so that I could reach in and touch her. As I brushed my hand against her tiny fist, she grabbed my finger.

  Yet so involved was I in the Moxley story that the following afternoon I left her and Susan to interview David Moxley. Dorthy had finally persuaded him to see me.

  I had kept her abreast of my investigation, from my discovery of Hale’s report to our Freedom of Information lawsuit. We spoke every couple of weeks and lunched in the city every few months. The Moxleys had moved to the River House, to a grand apartment on the East River, and we would go around the corner to a restaurant she liked on First Avenue.

  The change of scenery from the Carlyle hadn’t helped her state of mind, however. When we’d meet, she seemed listless, resigned, almost in a state of depression.

  “This is your old friend, Len Levitt,” I would say whenever I called her, seeking to boost her spirits.

  Not only did her husband refuse to discuss the murder with her, she said. He even refused to talk about Martha. Ditto her son John.