Conviction Read online

  “My brother would say to me, ‘Why don’t you just stop all this and move on?’ My sister-in-law said she didn’t want to hear about it anymore.”

  More than I ever realized, Dorthy was alone.

  I also realized she was coming to trust me and believed I was there to help her. What I brought her was hope.

  “It was that someone cared,” she said years later. “I was just so glad that someone was interested. It was so important to me because my family wouldn’t talk about it. When no one cares, you feel despair.

  “Until you came, no one encouraged me. Not the police. Not a soul. It wasn’t that you were going to solve Martha’s murder.” Dorthy couldn’t let herself even imagine that possibility any more than I could. “I didn’t want to hurt myself by thinking that,” she said. “But it was that you wanted to talk about Martha and I needed that.”

  Early on, I had informed her of Susan’s pregnancy. She never failed to ask about her condition. I was coming to view her not merely as the subject of a story or the victim of a horrible crime but as a friend.

  As a parent now, I knew that for her, Martha’s murder would never end. For her, the case would never be over. What Dorthy understood was that she had to learn to live with it. Without realizing it, I was helping her. She would call me her first angel.

  •

  David Moxley and I met at his office at Touche Ross. He was a large man with blonde hair like Martha’s. He never raised his voice or revealed emotion.

  What puzzled me was that he, a wealthy, influential executive, had remained silent all these years. Even now, he was reluctant to acknowledge meeting with me.

  “Please make it clear when you write your story,” he began, “that the initiative for this meeting did not come from us.”

  By this point I had learned, through the Greenwich police report, about the department’s subsequent attempts to focus on Tommy. In the fall of 1975, they somehow obtained Rushton’s written permission for Tommy’s medical, school, and psychological records. Only the Whitby School—which had been founded by Georgeann Terrien on the grounds of her estate and which Tommy attended from first through eighth grade—refused to comply.

  On January 20, 1976, Christopher Roosevelt, a Whitby board member, told the police he would not release the records without speaking to Rushton and to Tommy. According to the Greenwich police report, Roosevelt said that if Tommy were arrested, a battery of lawyers would claim he was temporarily insane.

  The following day, Rushton appeared at police headquarters with a letter addressed to Chief Baran, withdrawing his permission for Tommy’s records. It was only then that he realized Tommy was the prime suspect.

  The shock was apparently too much for him. An hour later, an ambulance was sent to the home of the Ixes, where he was visiting. Complaining of chest pains, Rushton was rushed to Greenwich Hospital. Doctors feared he’d suffered a heart attack. Instead, he spent two weeks in the High Watch Sanitorium after a drinking bout.

  On January 31, 1976, Keegan and Browne met with Rushton and Manny Margolis, a veteran criminal attorney Rushton had hired, seeking permission to test Tommy with sodium Pentothal, the so-called truth drug. Margolis refused. He would stonewall the police for the next twenty-six years.

  Two months later, on March 28, Rushton visited Dorthy. He told her he had come to put her mind at rest. His own doctors, he said, had tested Tommy and the results had proved negative: Tommy, said Rushton, had not murdered Martha.

  But on Margolis’s advice, he refused to show the test results to the police. It was this refusal that led Browne to announce to the Associated Press that a “particular family” had “clearly impeded” the police investigation.

  Now in David Moxley’s office, Moxley explained a piece of the investigation that had never made sense to me. I recalled Hale’s criticism of Browne for his lack of aggressiveness after the Skakels stonewalled the authorities. David Moxley told me what happened next. Unable to obtain the test results from the Skakels, the authorities turned to him.

  “I, in effect, brokered an agreement between Rush Skakel and the Greenwich police,” he said. “The Greenwich police initiated the idea. They felt I could do more with the Skakels than they.”

  The poor guy, I found myself thinking. Not only had he lost a daughter; the police had also asked him to do their job.

  The agreement turned out to be meaningless, even ridiculous. The criminal attorney the Moxleys had hired in turn hired a doctor. Through Margolis, the Skakels hired their own doctor. He supposedly shared the test results with the Moxleys’ doctor.

  “The agreement was constructed so that neither the police, the lawyers, nor I would see the results,” Moxley said. And none of them did.

  So that was it for the police investigation of Tommy. That was the end of the line, five months after the murder. It was also the end of my interview with David Moxley.

  As I turned to leave, he said to me, “In hindsight I would have pushed back. I would have gotten aggressive as hell. Within twenty-four hours I would have brought in outside detectives and outside attorneys. I would have offered a reward. There’d have been an uproar, I’ll tell you that.”

  My heart went out to him. For reasons I couldn’t explain, tears came to my eyes. Like Lunney, by the time he’d figured this out, it was too late.

  •

  Two months later, in February 1983, I entered the fourteen-story brown-brick maze called One Police Plaza, the headquarters of the New York City police department. Tony Insolia, who years before had opposed hiring me at Newsday, had asked me to open the police bureau for its new city edition, New York Newsday.

  New York Newsday was the brainchild of Dave Laventhol, who had risen from Newsday’s editor-in-chief to head all Times-Mirror’s East Coast newspapers. He appointed Tony to succeed him at Newsday. When he did, Don Forst left the paper, feeling he had been passed over.

  Soon after I began working in New York, Laventhol appointed Don as New York Newsday’s editor. In the company hierarchy, he reported to Tony on Long Island. Unfortunately, their rivalry came to mirror that of the two sister papers, contributing a decade later to New York Newsday’s demise.

  Its demise would impact on my investigation of the Moxley murder. I had kept both Don and Tony abreast of the case. Both encouraged me to continue with it while I covered the New York City police department for Newsday.

  My first problem at police headquarters was that New York Newsday didn’t circulate in Manhattan, so that no one in the department read my stories. No reporter can function this way, so I arranged with Newsday’s circulation department to have a few copies specially delivered.

  Meanwhile, the job of covering crime in New York City was all consuming. The crack epidemic was racing through the ghettos, and crime was exploding. Because I was New York Newsday’s only police reporter, I was writing three or four stories a day. One story flowed into the next. A Queens man was arrested for fatally stabbing his sister’s boyfriend. Five sanitation workers were charged with stealing cartons of old postage stamps off a conveyor belt in Coney Island. A Manhattan hotel porter shot and killed his manager in the hotel lobby, then shot the victim’s wife. In the porter’s room, police discovered the bodies of his wife and two others.

  A woman who’d joined the army and planned to attend officer candidate school was shot by her drug-dealing boyfriend. A forty-seven-year-year-old remedial teacher, alone in her classroom, was robbed at gunpoint. A pregnant nineteen-year-old woman was shot to death by a mugger. Her purse containing $5 was missing.

  A St. John’s basketball star who drove a cab at night was killed after he failed to see a flagman at an open drawbridge. A former CIA agent and his son were indicted for conspiring to murder two assistant United States attorneys. An off-duty cop shot a man on crutches who got into a fight with two teenagers who’d walked on wet cement outside his home.

  A New Jersey man drove his pickup truck onto Fifth Avenue in the middle of the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Spectator
s said he was laughing as he bore down on the marchers.

  Amidst this mayhem, I gathered the last strands of my Moxley story.

  From my office at police headquarters, I reached Christopher Roosevelt, the Whitby school attorney, who had refused to turn over Tommy’s medical records to the police in 1976. “I gave Mr. Skakel one piece of advice,” he said. “To get competent legal advice on this. I told him to put his emotions in the background and to best represent the child’s interest.”

  By phone, I also located Edward Hammond, the case’s first suspect. He was in Venezuela, working for Lloyd’s of London. His mother had died a year before and he had not been back to Greenwich since.

  “It used to be so enjoyable in Belle Haven,” he said. “But the way the police treated me changed one’s view and coloring.”

  “One question,” I said. “Why did your clothes have bloodstains that night?”

  “I cut myself in a household accident.”

  I asked him if I could use his name in my story. “No problem,” he said. “I suppose you’re using everyone else’s.”

  Then out of the blue, Julie’s friend Andrea Shakespeare, who’d been at the Skakels’ the night of the murder, agreed to talk to me. Her father was Frank Shakespeare, a top news executive at CBS, who would later become the ambassador to the Vatican. The police report said Andrea had been with the Skakel children at the Belle Haven Club, returned to their house, and then left at around 9:30. When Julie went to her car, she realized she’d left her keys inside. Andrea went to retrieve them and saw Tommy, who’d just come inside. Her story appeared to support Tommy’s alibi that he had left Martha at 9:30 and returned home.

  I wasn’t sure what she could add. Still, she was an insider, albeit a peripheral one, and worth pursuing.

  I met with her one night at a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue but she proved unhelpful. She insisted she be able to vet whatever I wrote about what she told me. When I told her that was out of the question, she said, “My father said you’d never agree.”

  I wrote her off as a spoiled rich brat, accustomed to having her own way, and forgot about her. Not until two decades later did I learn I’d misjudged her.

  •

  Three black hospital workers at a Veterans Administration hospital were attacked by whites in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. Four people died when a fire swept through adjoining tenements in Chinatown. A customer at a fast-food restaurant was shot to death by robbers who mistook him for the owner and demanded he open the cash register.

  A fourteen-year-old Queens boy shot his twelve-year-old brother with a gun found in a vacant lot. A manager at Cartier stole $100,000 in jewelry with her brother, a salesman at Tiffany’s. A ninety-two-year-old widow leaped to her death from her tenth-floor Park Avenue apartment, saying she could no longer live in pain.

  A Harlem drug kingpin was charged with six members of his “family” for conspiracy to distribute heroin. Federal officials raiding his house discovered $2 million in cash, two Mercedes-Benz automobiles in the driveway, two sawed-off shotguns, and twenty-eight fur coats.

  “Real fur?” asked the magistrate as they all entered not guilty pleas.

  I also found Tommy Skakel, then twenty-four years old and living on a horse farm across the Connecticut state line near Bedford, New York. Ken had assigned Kevin Donovan, a reporter at the Advocate, to work with me on these final interviews around Stamford. I took off a day from One Police Plaza and drove over with Kevin to see Tommy.

  We’d hoped our surprise visit might get Tommy talking. Kevin, who was close to Tommy’s age, rang the doorbell. I stood a few feet behind him. Tommy opened the door. He wore glasses and was balding—not at all what I had expected.

  Kevin began by asking what he had been doing over the years.

  “I haven’t spent too much time in Greenwich,” he said. “I wanted to get it out of the way and live my life and be myself. I would go to a restaurant and go shopping in Greenwich and people would talk about it. Like who the hell are those people to judge me? What gives them the right?”

  Kevin asked him about the night of Martha’s death and his “making out” with Martha, then falling down on top of her as Hale had described.

  “I don’t remember anything like that,” Tommy answered. “The last thing I remember is saying good-bye to her and going back into my house. I didn’t know her. Michael liked her. I didn’t.”

  With that, he closed the door. Kevin and I looked at each other. How could he not remember that? we asked ourselves. Neither of us gave a thought to what he had said about Michael.

  •

  My last stop on the Moxley story was Ottawa, Canada, where I had traced Ken Littleton through his alma mater, Williams College. The Greenwich police had lost track of him years before.

  After losing his teaching jobs in Connecticut, he began a downward spiral. Unable to obtain another teaching position, he began drinking and moved around the East Coast, from Williamstown, Massachusetts, to Saratoga Springs, New York, to Stowe, White River, and Manchester, Vermont.

  By 1982 he had moved to Florida and was homeless. He was arrested for a variety of crimes—trespassing, disorderly conduct, drunk driving, public intoxication, shoplifting. He was also in and out of hospitals. He began hallucinating. He believed he could cause a tornado or hurricane by flushing the toilet. He drank toilet water and collected JFK matchbooks.

  One night he telephoned David Moxley, leaving a message about “our mutual tragedy.” He offered to take sodium Pentothal to help him remember the events of that Halloween night.

  Another time, he climbed a sixteen-foot structure and gave President Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. When arrested, he identified himself to the police as “Kenny Kennedy, the black sheep of the Kennedy family.”

  When I found him, he was living with Mary Baker, his future wife and the mother of his two children. They had met in an alcoholic recovery program and returned to her home in Ottawa, to the house she had inherited from her father. At least financially, Littleton appeared to have caught a break, since he couldn’t find a job.

  He was even bigger than Lunney and showed no apparent sign of the depression and mental illness that was to wreck his life. Friendly, even eager to talk, his openness with others would cause him nothing but grief.

  With Mary at his side, he maintained his innocence, saying he had been railroaded by the Greenwich police. “I was fully cooperative with them through the end of school at Brunswick,” he said. “Even after I got in trouble in Nantucket, I was cooperative.”

  He told me how he had allowed the police to take him to be tested outside Hartford. “I was naïve. I didn’t see any harm,” he said. I recalled Keegan’s grin when he admitted tricking Littleton into taking the polygraph.

  They’d strapped him into the polygraph, Littleton said. A detective told him they would be right back to begin the test, then left him alone for twenty-five minutes. That was standard police procedure. Confessions come just before polygraphs are given because suspects mistakenly believe the lie detectors are infallible. Sure enough, when the detective returned, the first thing he said to Littleton was, “You murdered Martha Moxley.”

  “Then they brought me into another room where Keegan was waiting,” Littleton continued. “The detective said it to me again, ‘You murdered Martha Moxley.”

  “‘You know I didn’t,’” Littleton said he answered. “‘I know I didn’t. I’ll walk back to Greenwich if I have to.’

  “I never knew Martha Moxley,” he said to me. “I never saw Martha Moxley. I had nothing to do with her murder. And I didn’t think Tommy did either.

  “But,” he added intriguingly, “when they questioned me in 1976, I did give the police circumstantial evidence about someone else.”

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Michael. At fifteen, I would have termed him an alcoholic. I was afraid of him. I thought Tommy was a good kid but I was scared of Michael.”

  “Why was that?�
�� I asked.

  He related an incident in which he was playing golf with Michael and Jimmy Terrien at the Greenwich Country Club. Michael, he said, had been in a threesome ahead of him. When Littleton caught up to him, he saw that Michael had crushed the head of a chipmunk and put a tee through it like a crucifix.

  “At the next hole, there was a squirrel with its head crushed in. When we finished the hole, Michael came up to us with a crazed expression and told us how he had run down the animals.

  “Up in Windham he used to flush out pheasants from the bushes and shoot them. I saw him run one down before it could get into the air. Another time, he shot a hawk resting in a creek.”

  “But the police say Michael couldn’t have murdered Martha,” I told Littleton. “They say if the murder occurred at 10:00 P.M., he was at the Terriens’ and couldn’t have returned in time.”

  Littleton shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I told them.”

  He suggested I telephone his mother in Massachusetts because she might have something to add. I thought he meant about Michael. Instead, when I called, his mother said, “Our family is ruined over this. My son became an alcoholic. His brain was nothing. He couldn’t get a job. My husband and I were at each other’s throats over what we should do.” I was at a loss as to how to respond. “I’m so bitter,” she continued. “We were all so naïve. We’re poor people, my husband and I. We don’t have the money they do to protect ourselves. And they,” she said, referring to the Skakels, “they’re probably just going on living their lives as though nothing ever happened.”

  •

  I was now ready to put my story together. The focus was not on who had killed Martha Moxley. I didn’t know that and, I was convinced, neither did anyone else involved in the investigation.

  Rather, I would focus on how the Greenwich police had bungled the case—how their first instincts about the hitchhiker off the turnpike had been wrong; how they had wasted precious time on Hammond; how they’d discovered the matching golf clubs inside the Skakel house the day Martha’s body was found but failed to obtain a warrant to search it and had instead allowed Julie to search for them.