A Crime In The Clan

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Today the Elan School in Poland Spring, Maine, is just that--a school. But in the years from 1978 to 1980, it was something else--an exclusive drug and alcohol clinic for children of the rich and famous. This was where Michael Skakel, 19, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy's and a son of wealth and privilege, spent two years drying out. And according to a book proposal circulated briefly last year by the now 39-year-old Skakel and writer Richard Hoffman, Elan was the scene of a flamboyant--and possibly fateful--therapy. Those who have seen the proposal for Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean say that in it Skakel describes being made to wear a sign around his neck. It read: I AM AN ARROGANT RICH BRAT. CONFRONT ME ON WHY I KILLED MY FRIEND MARTHA.

The book proposal was eventually withdrawn. But the document circulated, and last week, 25 years after the bludgeoning of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn., Michael Skakel was confronted with a vengeance. He was indicted for her murder. Police showed up to arrest Skakel at the half-million-dollar Florida home he shares with his golf-pro wife and child, but he was already on a plane north. He turned himself in to Connecticut police, pleaded not guilty and was released on $500,000 bail.

Once an accomplished speed skier, Skakel is amiable, a faithful member of Alcoholics Anonymous and an increasingly devout Catholic. He worked as a driver in Ted Kennedy's re-election campaign in 1994, then took a similar job with cousin Michael Kennedy's nonprofit Citizens Energy Corp. In 1997, however, Skakel talked to police about his cousin's affair with a 15-year-old babysitter. (Michael died in a 1997 skiing accident.) Soon after, Skakel moved from Massachusetts into the Florida house owned by his father in an expensive gated community. Still, Robert Kennedy Jr. told the New York Times last week that Skakel "is as honest as daylight...a genuinely good and decent soul."

He may yet defeat a prosecution hobbled by cold trails, conflicting testimony, changed laws and a quarter-century of sloppy detective work. And last week's drama notwithstanding, there may be no earthly penalty sufficient for whoever left a 15-year-old girl lying in her own blood.

Martha Moxley's mother Dorthy last saw her daughter alive on Halloween Eve 1975. Martha wore a blue parka and was skipping out the door of the sumptuous house the family had settled into just the year before, joining a group that included two across-the-lane neighbors, Thomas Skakel, 17, and his 15-year-old brother Michael. If the Moxleys were well off, the Skakels were Greenwich royalty. Rushton Skakel was chairman of Great Lakes Carbon, one of the world's largest privately held companies. In a union of money, power and more money, Skakel's sister Ethel had married Bobby Kennedy in 1950, making Rushton's seven children Kennedy cousins. Martha Moxley, pretty, vivacious and popular, became part of their crowd. (Later Dorthy found a diary entry in which Martha recounted fending off Tommy's attempts to "get to first and second base.") It was Halloween Eve, and Martha, though officially grounded for an earlier infraction, begged her mother to let her go out for pranks. Dorthy gave in.

Martha never returned. Friends later testified to seeing her and Tommy "making out" near the Skakel home at 9:30 p.m. At 10, Dorthy heard dogs barking and a commotion outside. Martha's body was found at noon the next day under a tree in the Moxley yard. She lay in a 3-ft. pool of blood; her head had been bludgeoned some 14 times with a blunt instrument, and the sharp, broken shaft of that instrument, a Toney Penna 6-iron golf club, had been driven into her throat.

Toney Penna golf clubs were rare, but Tommy and Michael's mother, who had recently died of cancer, had left behind a set. However, that fact did not provoke the Greenwich police to take extraordinary measures. They had not investigated a murder in 46 years. They initially left Martha's body unattended, and a dog defiled some of the evidence. They allowed a funeral director to remove the corpse before a medical examiner arrived, preventing an exact assessment of the time of death. They never obtained a warrant to search the Skakel home. And conflicts of interest abounded. It was (and is) the custom in Greenwich for off-duty policemen to work as bodyguards or chauffeurs for wealthy residents. "In retrospect, we probably treated the Skakels differently," a cop later admitted to author Timothy Dumas. "We did a little soft shoe, proceeded cautiously so as not to offend anyone."

At first the Skakels cooperated with police. Tommy told them he was home by 9:30 and writing a paper on Abraham Lincoln. Michael, who said he had been visiting cousins in the latter part of the evening, was not a suspect. Kenneth Littleton, then 23, a tutor for the boys, was suspected briefly and gave testimony. But within a year, the Skakels stopped cooperating. No charges were filed, and the case languished for 16 years.

Then it began intertwining with several other notorious crimes of the 20th century. In 1991, during the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, a rumor in the press section placed Smith at the Skakel home on the night of the murder in Connecticut that most people had forgotten. The lead proved false but attracted the attention of author Dominick Dunne, an omnipresent analyst of the O.J. Simpson trial and a specialist in high-society true crime; his own daughter was murdered at a young age. Dunne wrote a thinly veiled novelization of the Moxley case, A Season in Purgatory, which became a best seller and a TV movie. Adding to the furor was a factual account, Greentown, by Greenwich resident Dumas, who related unsavory stories of a young Tommy trying to strangle a fellow prep-school student and Michael "whacking the heads off of squirrels"--with a golf club. The Kennedy Smith rumor resulted in a suggestion by Connecticut medical examiner (and later O.J.-trial expert witness) Dr. Henry Lee that the Moxley case be reopened. This seems to have provoked Rushton Skakel into hiring a detective agency, Sutton Associates, to clear his family name.

That was probably a mistake. Thomas and Michael altered their testimony drastically when they talked to Sutton. Rather than studying at 9:30, Thomas said, he and Martha had engaged in mutual masturbation for 20 minutes before she left. Michael now recalled climbing a tree outside Martha's window later that night, throwing pebbles at the pane and eventually masturbating among the boughs. He claimed that he'd heard noises in the Moxley bushes and had thrown a rock at them before running home.

The changes in testimony were explosive, and a Sutton employee leaked them to Len Levitt of Newsday, which ran a story in 1995, and to Dunne. Levitt also reported that interviews with a criminal-profiling group discounted the possibility that Littleton, who had just begun his tutoring job, had killed Martha. The savagery of the deadly blows suggested it was the work of someone who knew her.

Dunne handed his information over to a new friend--Mark Fuhrman of O.J. Simpson-trial fame. Fuhrman had just written a book about the trial and was seeking a possible sequel. (His agent was Linda Tripp's pal Lucianne Goldberg.) With the Sutton material in hand, he headed up to Connecticut and, despite being "harassed" by the police, published his own investigation as Murder in Greenwich in June 1998. Fuhrman believes that testimony from the tutor throws into doubt Michael's original alibi and that his new story is "a concoction that puts him at the scene of the crime, at the time of the crime, without committing it." It appears to have put Skakel in legal jeopardy.

A month after Murder in Greenwich came out, Connecticut impaneled Judge George Thim as its one-man grand jury with the power to compel testimony on the Moxley case. Although prosecutors cannot comment on the decision, it may have been influenced not only by the Sutton leaks but also by another unusual break. After seeing an episode about the case on TV's Unsolved Mysteries, several alumni of the Elan School called to say that between 1978 and 1980 Skakel admitted involvement in Moxley's killing. Three of them were among the 40 witnesses Thim called. Their testimony presumably buttressed the passage in Skakel's book proposal, which Fuhrman says he passed on to authorities.

"Michael Skakel is innocent," says his attorney Mickey Sherman. "He was innocent 24 years ago. He is innocent today." Sherman is a frequent talking head on Court TV and enjoys the sweeping statement. But his follow-up comment, "The evidence was not strong enough 25 years ago, let alone today," has some teeth. Even Fuhrman believes the case will have to move forward "absent forensic evidence." The Sutton report, while intriguing, seems like a better argument for reopening the case than clinching it. And the credibility of Skakel's former "classmates" at Elan is being questioned. Joseph Ricci, who owned the rehab center, has told TIME that the notion of Michael's confession "is just preposterous. I was there, and I would know." The facility had only 100 patients, and if Michael had confessed, "two things would have happened. Everybody in the facility would have known and talked about it. And we would have called our lawyers to figure out our obligations. Neither happened."

Even if the prosecution can make a damning case, it may not be able to touch Skakel. Since the alleged crime was committed when he was a minor, the case resides in Connecticut juvenile court. Under today's state law, a capital case involving a 15- year-old would automatically be remanded to an adult court. But 1975 law required probable cause for that to happen. If the case stays in juvenile court, Skakel would probably draw no jail time even if convicted. (The model in 1975 was juvenile rehabilitation.) If the case is remanded, Sherman has the right to appeal, a process that could take years.

All of that, for now, is immaterial to Dorthy Moxley. "I was a zombie for years after the murder," she says, sitting in her Chatham, N.J., den. She left the advocacy of Martha's case to her husband David. When he died in 1988, she asked friends if she could take up the cause, but they told her "there was no hope." She refused to believe them. After the Kennedy Smith trial revived the issue, she talked to any journalist who would listen. She regards Dunne, Dumas and Fuhrman as "my team of angels" and praises Greenwich cop turned state criminal investigator Frank Garr, who she says "never gave up on the case." For years, she says, she thought Thomas Skakel killed her daughter. "But the Sutton report changed everything. Now everything fits." Eventually, she is positive, everyone else will understand how it fits too. She has learned how to wait.

--Reported by Edward Barnes/Greenwich, Lisa McLaughlin/New York, Tim Padgett/Miami and Tom Witkowski/Boston

With reporting by Edward Barnes/Greenwich, Lisa McLaughlin/New York, Tim Padgett/Miami and Tom Witkowski/Boston