Episode Transcript
The below text transcription was is intended for audience reference and search purposes. Because it is generated automatically by computer, please forgive mis-translations, spelling and the lack of really any structured grammar.
It was a place where violent crimes didn’t happen greenwich connecticut one of the most upscale suburbs in the united states but on halloween of a violent crime would place the town of greenwich in the spotlight on that fateful halloween the brutal murder of a year old girl would horrify a community and lead to the investigation and prosecution of a man from a very famous family
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This is episode 29 the Martha Moxley story
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hi Amy hi Megan good to see you good to see you how are you today i’m fabulous how are you oh fabulous that’s that’s definitely trending in a better direction than last time now i’m good this november is women in crime’s first year anniversary can you believe it i cannot believe how fast that went the only reason why we’ve made it this far megan is because we have such amazing listeners and supporters we are so blessed with our audience thank you all so much for your support your case suggestions it’s kind of weird to ask for presents for our birthday but it would really mean a lot to us if you could show your appreciation for the show by either telling your friends about us or by leaving us a review or both or both and if you promise since we can’t give you all cake we’ll promise to release an extra two episodes this month in celebration that’s right we are releasing a new episode each week for our birthday month we’ve had a lot of requests to post more shows and with your support we might be able to do just that speaking of support for the show now it’s time to mention our supporters by name all right first i want to give a big thank you to jennifer thomas from minnesota thank you jennifer we’d also like to say thank you to a true lady from georgia kimberly white and finally we’d love to say thank you to someone with a very cool name oceana from stevens point wisconsin i think that’s the coolest i think it’s such a cool name no matter how you support us we are super grateful to you it really does help us keep up the quality content of the show if you’d like to support the show you can go to patreon or our website womenincrimepodcast.com where you can see links there you can also find the links in our show notes and now let’s get into the case of martha moxley have you heard of the martha moxley case i think everyone’s heard the name i cannot tell you that i know the details of the case though i am really interested to get into this with you a couple of our supporters have actually asked us about which crimes or which cases stay with us and i cannot believe i forgot about this case because this one stuck with me for a really long time and one of the books i even read on this i remember reading the book and then i couldn’t sleep for four nights after i was so terrified so scared i’ll give you an insight a little bit maybe as to why i felt that way but before we get there let’s talk about martha moxley martha was a young vibrant year old girl who lived with her parents dorothy and david and her older brother john who was very close in age to martha and whom she was reportedly very close the family had recently moved to greenwich connecticut from california and that was you know i believe they moved the year before in . they lived in the private gated community of belhaven located in the town of greenwich where it seemed by all appearances that they would be very safe you know grange connecticut correct i used to be a nanny in greenwich connecticut are you kidding me oh i didn’t know that okay so gorgeous area it’s beautiful and it’s i mean it’s it’s widely considered you know one of like i said earlier one of the most upscale communities in the country martha was a sophomore at the time and aside from her obvious physical beauty she was reported to be bubbly friendly likeable she was voted by her classmates as having the best personality which you can actually see when you look in her pictures and i encourage everyone to look at some of the pictures of her martha was a good student and she was someone who participated in school activities having just tried out for the cheerleading squad she was a nice outgoing girl who had a lot of friends and seemed happy to be doing all the things that teenage girls typically do in martha’s group of friends and living adjacent to their property in the community of belhaven were year old tommy skakel and his younger brother year old michael skakel i’ve heard those names okay well then i don’t need to ask you who are the skakels you’ve heard them but for people who don’t know them let’s give a little background tommy and michael’s father rushton skakel was a very prominent businessman but he’s also famous for being the brother of ethel kennedy and you know ethel kennedy was married to robert f kennedy it’s often been said that the skakels had the money but the kennedys had the power and that’s how these two you know kind of dynasty royal families and i shouldn’t say royal but these are these kind of two iconic families merge together the skakel home however was not reportedly the most loving or stable home rushton skakel was an alcoholic and there were tensions between many of the seven skakel siblings and their father and each other according to one of the skakel children so she had said i think julie was the only girl that each each sibling had attention with the father and with each other and it just wasn’t a happy vibe in their home and the situation substantially worsened when ann skakel rushton’s wife passed away from cancer in when all the children were quite young wow yeah after that russian was gone a lot leaving these kids mostly unsupervised not surprisingly they start to get in trouble with the police nothing too major but rushton had formed this relationship with the police and would get them out of trouble but the boy’s relationship with each other was also reportedly a problem tommy was older he was handsome he was popular he was athletic he seemingly had it all right whereas michael was kind of smaller described as more puny not anymore but he was living almost in his older brother’s shadow all the time and apparently there were some very physical altercations between the two who fought very often i don’t think that this is i’m not sure it’s totally atypical of sibling rivalry but according to some sources it was really knock down drag out kind of fights and this relationship and these altercations would play a role later on in the criminal case that we’re going to discuss so just keep that in mind so we have martha moxley and we have the skakels tommy and michael skakel let’s get to the night of the crime this was the night before halloween and it was mischief night so do you know what mischief night was that’s when you spray that not spray paint uh what’s it called shaving cream yeah houses toilet paper yes the most fun night of the year i love toilet paper in people’s houses i thought it was fun too right you bring the eggs remember yes of course although i always hated the eggs because they hurt yeah why would you throw an egg yeah that was a waste of food martha’s father was away and she had asked her mom to go out martha’s mother is dorothy moxley and dorothy would become a really big advocate for martha later on so keep her in mind she had asked her to go out but martha was grounded for staying out late one night the week before it was small petty stuff but also martha was kind of unrelenting like please please please you know how that goes amy mm-hmm i feel bad because dorothy said no but she eventually relented and said yes dorothy had said that okay but you have to be home by p.m because i believe this was a school night as well martha leaves the house for mischief night she’s got her eggs she’s got her shaving cream and she leaves along with her other friends and they go over to the skakel’s house because the skakels are having a party which is not uncommon remember there’s seven of them they’re alone all the time rotating people in and out russian’s gone a lot on business on this particular occasion uh russian skakel was on a hunting trip but i just don’t think he was you know a present father around p.m michael uh michael skakel and martha were hanging out martha was friends with both tommy and michael so tommy and michael are kind of in the same crew you know they’re brothers but they have their own friends martha’s in with both of them she’s sort of in between their ages too so she’s hanging out with michael and some other kids but then tommy joins in and takes over some of the attention from martha i’ll get to it later on but martha describes her relationship with both michael and tommy a little bit in her diary entries which they would later on use in the investigation at that point some people were going to another kid’s house to watch a movie and michael was one of them and he asked martha do you want to go but martha and tommy both decide not to go were any of them romantically involved at this point it’s uncle clear not really but later on descriptions nothing that you can verify let’s put it that way all right so martha and tommy at like nine something they’re last seen you know staying behind and i think you know it’s it’s implicated that they were hanging out with each other and that’s why they decided to stay behind by midnight when martha isn’t home dorothy starts making calls and finds out that martha was last seen with michael that’s what people remember so she calls the skakel house but she’s told by another sibling and i believe it was julie because i believe julie is the only female sibling that martha left her house at . and remember they live right next door or adjacent to each other so dorothy moxley starts freaking out because if at night at midnight she left you know she should have been home by now so she calls the police and from what i’ve read the police did start doing some searching around the neighborhood but they couldn’t find martha by the next day i mean you know the next morning the next afternoon dorothy’s frantic she has neighbors coming in people helping she’s gone over i believe to see the skakels and i think she reported in one of her interviews she said something like michael skakel answered the door you know he looked a mess hung over he basically told the same story you know last time i saw her and dorothy left and so there are neighbors coming in from all different parts of the lawn so moxley’s lived on about two two and a half acres but you could cross through as neighbors you can cross through some of the trees the one of the neighbors coming to visit dorothy through the yard discovers martha’s body on her own property and she’s lying face down she’s at the edge of the property though so i just want you to understand because people go like how did dorothy not know that well if it’s two acres and she’s on the edge and you know she’s not thinking she’s on her own property the injuries to martha were substantial her skull had been crushed from behind and she had stab wounds to her neck it was so bad and i mean really when they say bludgeon it was so bad that they couldn’t tell what color hair she had because there was so much blood and she remember had like very long blonde hair for people who don’t know her jeans and underwear were also pulled down to her ankles so we have some you know that tells us there might be some indications of a sexual assault they call the police greenwich officers arrive shortly after to process the scene but here’s the problem things go awry right from the start because greenwich officers when do you think the last time they had dealt with a homicide was probably never never none of the investigators and a lot of them involved in this case had ever processed a homicide because homicides again don’t happen there don’t happen in greenwich things start going wrong i’ll tell you what they found i’ll tell you what they didn’t find and i’ll tell you how they kind of blundered the scene they find the head of a six iron golf club a very bloody golf club on martha’s property and i think they realize obviously this is going to be you know the weapon nearby they also find another piece of the golf club that’s covered in blood but do you know what that tells you you get the indication they find one piece in one area and one piece in another whoever used the golf club hit her with such force that they wow okay everywhere so you’re getting it okay right i know i should have been i could have been a little clearer on that one that’s okay but they didn’t find the handle or at least nobody said they found the handle until years later when one of the first responding officers would tell a very famous investigator who i’ll introduce in a little bit that he actually did see the handle but hold on to that and i’ll get there i promise but so right now yes we see a very bloody golf club you can already tell this is kind of a rage full situation or there’s such force a matching set of golf clubs was found in the nearby shed of the skakel’s home and guess what was missing the six club why were they even at the skaggles are you gonna get there right now you know what happened is that they were searching the area and their properties touched and i think it was like the the clubs were there it was kind of an open site it wasn’t like they went and searched but they found it quick it wasn’t like they got a search warrant to search not at all they just found it as they were surveying and they were very quick to put the pieces together very quickly very quickly they were able to it also the the golf clubs were engraved um with anne’s name so they were able to establish immediately that this golf club was the missing one and that belonged to the skakels martha’s body was removed from the scene later on but the scene was not preserved and what i mean is that several people had moved her body in several different directions and just take it or before forensic processing was done so too many people first of all on the scene they let every investigator on they’re not coordinating it off you know you have to preserve the scene for friends i’m assuming the mother was touching the body or i would i don’t think she did but i think there were just so many investigators and what happened was also they first came there was two police officers first responded and they were supposed to you know guard the body stay with it but one of them went off to because i think he may have even seen the the golf part of the golf handle and another one went back to make a call or do something so basically they both left her unattended when they came back there’s a dog running around her body so i mean you’ve got a dog you’ve got too many people moving the body too many people touching it they’re not preserving it you know her body’s not staying intact so they likely lost a lot of vital forensic evidence or tainted it at the very least the dog was licking blood in the area which is terrible right but it’s also now you’re tainting it with dog saliva the police talked initially to michael skakel he said he saw martha last around when he was leaving the house and he said he went off he watched a movie he came home around and went to bed seems consistent with you know what he had said before or what you know people had seen him go off and watch a movie or he was supposedly going to interview tommy skakel next and he said also yes martha left at and after she left he says he watched tv with their new tutor a new live-in tutor whose name was ken littleton and eventually he worked he says i watched some tv with him and then eventually i worked on a paper for school about abraham lincoln who has a live-in tutor oh i’ll get to that in a second it’s it’s like yeah uh tommy took two lie detector tests one of which was inconclusive and the second of which he passed but interestingly no teacher of tommy skakels ever gave such an assignment as working on abraham lincoln because they went to his school and they’re like let’s let’s see not one of his teachers gave that any time and that i’m sorry but can you remind me because i keep getting the two boys confused which one was the older one tommy and who was she left with she stayed back when yeah she stayed back with tom gotcha michael was the younger one he left he went to the movie yes so even though tommy lied this is interesting right his first test is inconclusive he lied about the paper but he still passed his polygraph it’s not easy to prioritize yourself when there’s a lot on your plate but investing in your mental health has long-term benefits and with talkspace it can actually be affordable talkspace online therapy is here to give you that support because we all need it right now match with a licensed therapist from the comfort of your device and reach out whenever something’s on your mind you’ll hear back daily five days a week megan i really like this app it’s super user friendly and automatically when you sign up for a talk space they match you with an agent who not only walks you through how talkspace works they help you connect with the right therapist and from the app you can have live video sessions you can also track your progress which is pretty cool so you can set goals and see how you’re progressing so it keeps you accountable there’s also exercises that help you alleviate stress improve your coping skills there’s just a lot to do on the app it’s not just an app that you just go there to talk to your therapist there’s a lot of tools that can help you as well wow so they’re helping you with like your lifestyle in general yeah it’s about your therapy journey the bottom line is we all need someone to talk to talkspace wants to give us the support we deserve at a price we can afford as a listener of this podcast you get off your first month on talkspace to match with your perfect therapist go to talkspace.com or download the app make sure to use the code women and crime to get off your first month and show your support for the show that’s women a-n-d crime and talkspace.com megan usually the highlight of my week is getting my green chef box but this week it was getting my green chef box and then facetiming with you oh my gosh we both got so excited yes what was your favorite recipe this week well before i tell you that i want to say how cute james and alan looked in their aprons cooking us our green chef while we chatted on facetime with our glass of wine and hands exactly i had the most delicious pork chop with garlic mashed potatoes and shaved brussels sprouts that sounds like perfection yes my house smelled delicious for three days i mean i’m also excited because the recipes are now gearing up for fall so the next meal we’re making tomorrow night we’re making the beef and butternut squash chili combo and this looks like heaven on a cold night yeah that sounds amazing green chef is a usda certified organic company that makes eating well easy and affordable with plans to fit every kind of lifestyle and you can set your plan to meet your dietary needs meal plans include paleo plant powered keto and balanced living ingredients come pre-measured perfectly portioned and mostly prepped everything is hand-picked and delivered right to your door green chef’s expert chefs design flavorful recipes for your lifestyle that go way beyond ordinary substitutions go to greenchef.com women and use code women to get eighty dollars off across four boxes including free shipping on your first box greenchef.com women and use code women to get eighty dollars off across four boxes including free shipping on your first box i always find it interesting because there are so many cases that i know i could name probably five offhand where people have either passed or failed polygraphs and later on it was shown that the police were that’s why they’re not admissible in court i know i know very reliable i know and they can be really helpful in first establishing like a direction but what also happens is if someone fails a polygraph then it’s like the tunnel vision comes in and because they’re not reliable that’s the problem with polygraphs even though they can be a useful tool and i know that it’s improving uh we just have to keep that in mind but police did not secure a search warrant for the skakel home even though they knew the golf club belonged to them rather so they they couldn’t have done i think ever they were really bashed for that but i listened to a legal commentator who said look they couldn’t have gotten the search warrant like carb launch for the whole house and just search what they would have had it was a limited scope search warrant looking for this missing piece of the golf club the handle get this okay instead of getting a search warrant for that the police asked the skakels for a consensual like would they agree okay skate will say yes but they ask julie skakel a sibling can you search the house for this piece of evidence they didn’t even do it themselves no so they how old was julie at years old oh my god but you have have you ever heard of such a ridiculous they have a member of the family of possible suspects asking to go through and will you report evidence that why is that because they wouldn’t consent to them coming in i have no they i have no idea why they did this it’s really unclear at this point so you can see from the beginning of the investigation they’re botching a lot here they look at tommy they look at michael but they also investigate ken littleton new tutor to the boys year old ken littleton actually moved in the day of martha’s murder thinking he scored a great job with the skakels what happened is essentially that the kids weren’t doing well in school tommy was an athlete i don’t know what michael was doing but michael has also you know had addiction issues at that point so rushton’s like here’s what i’m gonna do i’m gonna like kill two birds with one stone i’m gonna hire a tutor he’s a little older to live in and supervise them and then tutor them also that’s bizarre it’s bizarre but i mean it’s almost like the nanny tutor you know i’ve heard of it before and he’s he basically i think said ken littleton said he was paid like four a week and free room and board in this beautiful home so he was like why this is a great gig for me you know well until things quickly change ken was questioned by the police and he told them that he’d watch television uh the french connection series premiere that night was on and yeah no never mind i thought i thought you were saying love connection remember that show connection uh it was a police show i think okay but but there was specifically that there was a car chase scene and he said tommy was actually watching with me and tommy had also said i was watching some tv with the tutor but littleton failed two polygraph tests right off the bat he fails them littleton came under a cloud of suspicion really for years and really deteriorated under the pressure whether or not it was because he was lying or just because he was in the spotlight you know being thought of as a suspect in a famous crime he became a very heavy alcoholic who suffered several breakdowns and attempted suicide he also sustained several arrests for a variety of crimes usually related to his heavy drinking over the course of several years and i read like from some of the people like an ex-girlfriend of his that he also would become very upset around martha’s anniversary and he was very emotional he was also paranoid he had a lot of these things so whether or not it’s because you know he had some involvement or just because he was a suspect and this time brings up all of those things we don’t really know so regardless ken littleton cooperates with the police and at some point again in the early s he took two more polygraph tests both of which he failed again how do we look at this again are they reliable we’re talking about four polygraph tests i read somewhere else someone said five polygraphs he’s taken a number you could say that he was an alcoholic he was mentally unstable did not handle stress well he actually said that it was he took those polygraphs at the end of very stressful sessions he said that his life was ruined after this in the end the police did not go forward with ken he has always denied any involvement in martha’s murder saying that he had never even met the girl before that night and he had absolutely no motive to kill her he moved in he was grateful for this job he said this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to his life and ruined him as well all right so we’ve got three suspects now remember that’s the s between and there’s like no movement on this case whatsoever wow they don’t have they didn’t have dna nope they just don’t have and they do a rape kit on her it’s a really good question so what they said was that there was no evidence of sexual assault even though initially you think because her her pants are pulled down and whatnot it looks like that they couldn’t find any obvious trauma or any obvious sexual assault one of the investigators uh is going to come up with a theory on that but for the substantial period of time you have a a really just a lull they can’t do anything people are you know critical and speculate that it’s you know because it was rushed and skakel and the cops were afraid and they were friends with him and they they even say that like rushton paid some of the cops like to do security and other things so i’m not sure if that part is true just so you know but here’s how we get a renewed interest in the skakels and in this case in william kennedy smith went on trial for rape putting the family and the moxley case in the spotlight again do you remember this trial yep okay so what happened well it was suggested quickly that maybe william kennedy was the one who raped and killed or just killed martha moxley why was he even there no so that’s the point right they go they go like oh this guy’s in the you know maybe he was connected to this because he’s a kennedy it became like just this rumor and they were able to disprove it pretty quickly but it put the focus back on this case like why we’ve got kennedy’s and skakels and kennedy curse exactly right so people are interested again and the investigation starts moving again but ironically it was rushed in skakel’s investigators who provided a lot of the damning information that would come out so rushton hired sutton associates in because he was looking to clear tommy’s name and put an end to this the way he felt this has been hanging over us for this long now we’re back in the spotlight again unfortunately this plan backfired because what the sutton associates would reveal is that tommy and michael both completely changed their alibis for the night years later i have a question if you’re hired by so they were they’re a private firm that were hired they’re private to do independent work so is there not a conflict of interest to report things that are not in favor of your client i mean good for them i think that’s great but they were very reputable but of course we would argue the same thing like well it’s kind of like you know hiring an actor and you’re paying them they’re going to find you’d hope they’re finding more things more favorable but that was not the case here in their investigative report they say tommy lied to the police and now his new story is not that he said goodbye to martha at but that actually it was closer to and that they engaged in some sexual activities with each other which he described as mutual masturbation of each other yeah a little good old-fashioned fun but this is okay tommy’s changed his story and it’s a little strange but michael changes his story and this is where things just get weird so michael says yes he came home after the movie but he was out roaming the neighborhood and he wound up outside martha’s bedroom because there’s a tree somewhat here so he says that he climbed the tree and was throwing rocks at her window he he had a a thing for martha yeah so he’s he’s throwing rocks she never answers so instead of climbing back down the tree or and going home um what he does is that he masturbates in the tree to martha why would he tell anyone that there’s a theory on why he made up this story if it’s true or if it’s not true there’s theories as to why he would say that but this is again bizarre and every you know everything i watch every documentary or show i watch people like this is now a bizarre you know thing um so he says you don’t admit to doing something like that if you do it no bizarre it was theorized that possibly that he came up with this bizarre story with help to try to explain why they might find dna because while they didn’t have a lot of dna they had some but if he was masturbating to her bedroom she wouldn’t be there anyway you’re absolutely right the crime scene though was nearby it was also martha’s body had been dragged she was and i’ll tell you the theory when we get to the theory like she wasn’t just hit in the spot and died it looked like her body was dragged thirty so he’s saying if you find my semen anywhere on the property this might be why exactly wow that’s the theory other theory is that maybe that was just the truth and he’s too embarrassed to say it okay so you you have some shocking revelations here then in dominic dunn becomes involved do you know who dominic dunn is remember you covered dominique done his daughter done yes right so we covered his daughter dominic dunn remember after the murder of his daughter became involved in very high profile cases where he thought celebrities or famous people or rich people were getting away with crimes so dunn gets involved and he reaches out to mark furman do you remember mark fuhrman of course i remember mark furman okay disgraced o.j simpson detective but dunn and furman had formed a relationship during the o.j simpson trial and dominic regarded him as a good investigator as a strong investigator even if he was you know purger and racist um so don reaches out to furman and he asks him to look at the case and investigate this over again he says look this thing was botched so will you do it furman does a lot i mean he does his own investigation he looks at the sutton reports he really goes over it thoroughly and he concludes after his investigation that he knows who committed the crime and he says the person who did it is michael skakel the younger brother here’s what he comes up with furman theorized that michael was enraged by martha’s involvement with tommy and that michael likely walked in on something going on with the two of them when he came back in a fit of rage uh furman says that he probably chased after martha yelling at her or you know trying to get in with her and that martha was likely like whatever and leaving and going home she’s on her way on the path and then because it’s a a weapon of opportunity he grabs the golf club and chases behind her and he just starts hitting her and he just keeps hitting her full of rage anger he’s also he’s definitely been drinking and i don’t know if he was using other drugs you know so in the state and this rage fold state he bludgeons her but then it looks like he may have returned later so those bludgeons may not have killed her because she was later on there was some time between stabbed in the neck with that golf handle now remember the golf handle that no one could find furman says that he talked to the first responder one of the two police officers who first responded and that police officer says i saw that golf handle i saw it lodged in her neck and then later on i never saw it again the person who originally saw her body did they corroborate she didn’t get that close to see that she just saw her lying face down so that responder said i’m positive i saw that but i never saw it again it never came into evidence again why wouldn’t they was he never interviewed the first time around like why would that not have come up that’s a really good question and that’s maybe one of the deficiencies of this yeah furman then theorizes and i’m not sure that i go with this but possibly that michael may have pulled down her pants and masturbated over her as well afterwards they found no evidence of that no evidence of that but i think there’s you know what’s the explanation for why her pants are down although maybe someone was also trying to make it look like i was gonna say exactly same thing yeah i’m not sure that i bought maybe somebody was going to assault her then they got scared they ran off i was thinking that too i don’t think i buy uh furman’s last part of that does he have anything to back that up any evidence no to support that no not from what i not from what i saw yeah he also theorized though that tommy and or ken littleton must have known that something happened due to the sheer amount of blood that michael would have had on him he said look he would have come back covered from heads they think he was they were covering for him yeah furman thinks that someone why would can cover for him well i don’t think ken littleton was he more likely tommy um he says it’s possible also because michael was so little and the body was dragged so could he have dragged he could have dragged it just to be clear he was pounds and so was martha okay her body was dragged that looked about feet but not for nothing when i when i went through a physical test yeah i when i was pounds i dragged pound dummy three you know feet so remember adrenaline gives people super strength it does i don’t know that you would say anything about ken littleton perhaps tommy was involved i have absolutely no please tell me this is solved you’ll hear where we’re going with this furman wrote a book called murder and greenwich that’s the book that i read published in laying out all the evidence and all of his conclusions and this fueled the investigation again there had been a prosecutor for a while who didn’t think the evidence was there to go after michael skakel but the new prosecutor felt differently and on january th michael skakel was indicted for the murder of martha moxley years after wow where was he then still in connecticut but was he like living a normal life or he was also no he had a really rough go of it he had a long history of substance abuse his life was in and out of rehab facilities so things were not good the curse of you know the kennedys applied to the skakels in may michael skakel goes on trial for the murder of martha moxley evidence of michael’s confessions to the crime were admitted at trial as well as the journal of martha moxley in which she discussed her relationship with the skakels i’m going to talk about both pieces here in her diary she said that tom had been making advances on her he kind of put the leg he put his hand on his leg and what not and she said that she didn’t reciprocate that she really just wanted to be friends with him to be honest she had a boyfriend at the time too they looked at him as a suspect quickly quickly cleared they looked at other people but so in her diary she’s saying like i want to be friends with them but i don’t really you know want to do anything she discussed michael acting like an [ __ ] to her she said he leads her friend on when he doesn’t even like her friend she said that michael had said a couple other things to her in instances where he was drunk and acted you know kind of like a jerk to her this is all hearsay but it does provide a little insight to her feelings about them and the complications of these teenage relationships you see in this like tommy’s kind of like making a move but you know and she actually says at the end i should probably stop going over to their house which is so sad i know it is sad michael skakel’s own words though these confessions that we’re talking about well this would hurt him at trial so his bizarre you know that change story uh on the night of martha’s murder he discussed it with an author when he was writing or working on his own book and he gave the story again about like the masturbating outside um her window and there were some other details that were just inconsistent so they use his words like now he’s changing his story but they’re also presenting several witnesses who claim that they heard michael confess to killing martha in some shape or form though i have to tell you none of these witnesses would testify i heard him say i killed martha moxley it always had different variations of something bad that i did i hurt someone once and these witnesses would also be controversial because a few of them were from the elon school have you ever heard of the elon school this was in maine and it was a reform school for use with substance abuse and behavioral issues and michael went there at some point he did russian put him in that school at some point because he was out of control so he had two witnesses who came forth and said absolutely he confessed to doing this but they also both have their own addiction issues so you have to also consider even if they’re honest the reliability factor here were they incentivized at all they weren’t incentivized no from what i know all right however the defense comes and they present their own witnesses from the elon school who claim that michael skakel was beaten he was forced to fight other students in makeshift boxing rings he was forced to wear a written sign that urged other students to confront him about being a murderer he was essentially like subjected to torture which other students said was very common of the elon school they were abusive and they used abusive tactics so they’re you know talking about these troubling allegations so but what would be the purpose of that just to say that he was troubled and harassed like how does that speak to the issue at hand well they’re saying that if he did confess it’s because these these people forced him to they’re beating him they’re saying you’re a murderer say it it’s like you know almost like that scared straight tactic okay so that really kind of taints that that testimony as well and just so you know the elon school closed in after years of these types of abuse allegations dating back to the s so i don’t know how much credence you want to give this but it wasn’t up to us it was up to the jury and at the end of the day after their deliberations on june the jury found michael skakel guilty of the murder of martha moxley he was sentenced to years to life in prison but that is not the end of this story i’m assuming you’ll get to it but tommy and ken were never tommy was not charged with any crime and neither was ken littleton in fact ken littleton was given some type of immunity to testify against michael he had said that michael just displayed disturbing behavior and i’m like how do you know that yeah that’s not really right anyway we’re not at the end he served years in prison but he appealed and while he lost his initial appeals he won an appeal in on the grounds that his lawyer mickey sherman provided ineffective counsel wow i know very rare we’ve talked about directly here why he didn’t utilize witnesses to support michael’s alibi and he didn’t point to other suspects such as the most obvious suspect in this case tommy his brother i’m assuming he was a very well-known attorney since they had money yes he was in his conviction michael’s conviction was reinstated by the connecticut supreme court but get this in the same court the connecticut supreme court reversed itself and vacated michael’s conviction on grounds of ineffective assistance well those were the original grounds there was a really odd situation i read that happened like a new one judge had retired and a new judge took his place and this new judge who they said should be the one who should be deciding ruled in favor of reversing the decision which is a very rare event extremely rare that means immediate release this means that michael was freed from prison and he is technically innocent because they vacated his conviction so he can be tried again but i doubt he ever will they’ve talked about like trying him again it’s it’s so hard the evidence wasn’t strong then it’s harder isn’t it getting away from the time i don’t think so but you know it was a very hard road for dorothy moxley and also for her son john unfortunately martha’s father david died of a heart attack at age . but dorothy and john had been advocates they did every media appearance they said it every day of trial you know she really wanted justice for her daughter and they really believe that michael skakel is guilty this is not exactly the end of the story though how is that possible i know i just have a i just have a little bit more enter robert kennedy jr i’m not sure if you know him but he’s also a lawyer and he writes this book framed okay and he’s he’s writing this about his cousin michael skakel so robert kennedy says that i have new information that’s going to show that there are killers that are walking free and i know who they are i can tell you exactly who they are he says that a young prominent male named tony bryant who was cousin of the late kobe bryant who lived in greenwich who had also come from a very prominent family he moved to new york but he would still bring his friends back to greenwich where he used to live so he would still come in back and hang out with people tony says that on that halloween night that he brought his two friends to greenwich and that he hung out with them for a little while but left them eventually and that these two allegedly committed the murder and confessed to him so tony bryant says that his friends confessed to this that’s correct these two are adolf hasbrook and bert tinsley and according to bryant they were drunk and violent and talked about going caveman on some woman and that hasbrook had seen martha before and he describes him being obsessed with her beautiful blonde hair tony said that he told his mother this at the time and that his mother said that you shouldn’t tell anyone this is gonna look really bad you’re a black male here you’re gonna be the one they’re gonna pin this crime on you need to keep your mouth closed let me keep going tony would tell the story again under oath and none of this information can be verified though in fact authorities can’t even verify that they were in greenwich on the night of halloween and in skakel’s appeal the judge on skakel’s appeal noted that bryant had a trail of deceit that would have tainted any testimony he would give in his credibility bryant changed the story a couple times and he didn’t want to testify and then he also over the years had a number of run-ins with the law so uh and he lied about passing a bar exam to get a job his credibility would have been substantially problematic and they just couldn’t verify this information even though robert kennedy says they did say to someone you know i do we do know that they were there now you had asked about dna while there wasn’t much dna apparently there were two hairs found on martha’s body and one was from an african-american male and i don’t know if it’s found on her body or near her body and here’s the problem i mean what we’ve already said that crime scene was there she was also at a party that night there could have been something there that she was talking to because the hair was found there but we we both know that’s not exact dna even though dna is exact the transference of dna or reasons why a hair might appear on someone there’s any number of explanations so robert kennedy says the prosecution of michael skakel was a mixture of ineptitude and corruption they made a ton of mistakes he said that mark furman branded him and dominic dunn branded him just so they could write books and kind of you know for their own purposes kennedy makes a point of discussing the skakel’s cooperation with the police and the fact that they were suspects from the very beginning contrary to what dominic dunn and some other critics thought kennedy also points out i already went over this point so i won’t spend time on it but that michael skakel was very small at the time and he couldn’t have hit that hard he couldn’t have dragged her body none of these points actually resonate with me his theories have been met with criticism especially since this information was available and reported in but neither the defense nor the prosecution believed it was credible and if it had any weight to it at all you know the defense would have looked into it i thought so but that was one of the reasons mickey sherman was also looked at as being or doing an inept job is that he ignored this got it he took a lot of criticism i have to say he was one of those when i read mickey sherman did a pretty good job on cross-examination and you know with the elon witnesses but he sort of dropped the ball on a couple of these things they’re right i mean in all in all honesty he should have thrown tommy scakel under the bus or ken littleton he should have pointed yeah there’s good evidence to show you have two other suspects so i actually believe that he did have some form of ineffective counsel does tommy and michael have a relationship throughout all this so it’s a good question i read that in the courtroom it was a very weird feel because you have the moxies on one side and they seem like a united front then you have the kennedy’s skakels on the other side and they come in and out some people once in a while one of the reporters who wrote on this case said they maybe saw tommy and michael once together exchange a brief kind of they said it seemed very cold like the the feel on the side of the skaggles was that somebody would show up once in a while to be there but there wasn’t this united strong family front which seems to fit with what we’ve learned so as of today the only person that served time was michael skakel served years and i likely think that he will not be retried it’s hard to tell after i reviewed this i had i’d always believed that michael skagle was responsible and though i certainly can’t be certain and i do see doubt i do see reasonable doubt i still do believe that michael skakel is the perpetrator in this crime i was gonna ask you the court of public opinion is that he’s guilty you would say court of public opinion majority is that he’s guilty or that tommy skakel is guilty or they were in it together okay just another saga in the kennedy story but i bring it back to martha and i sincerely hope that the truth is revealed one day because without really without the truth she doesn’t get the justice she deserves does martha’s family believe it he’s guilty so at least they might feel like there was closure because he spent some time they believed that he was guilty and they described having to go through this for over years and you know the ups and the downs were were just so hard for them but they do believe the right person has been named and at least punished to some degree okay well thank you megan that was a fascinating case it really was an interesting case and one that stuck with me probably because i had read the book around the time i wasn’t that much older than martha and i remember have feeling that carefree like i walk through the yard i’m going home i identified with her and then i thought wow how naive we had you know i had been about what could possibly happen to me and i think that’s why it scared me yeah all right thank you everyone thanks so much for bringing us a great case this week and now it’s time for some listener questions what do we have this week megan oceana from stevens point wisconsin wants to know what is or was the most difficult part of being or becoming a criminologist i’ll let you go first on that amy honestly megan writing my dissertation was so difficult for me it felt like it was never gonna end and the dissertation defense itself was quite frightening i still have nightmares about it i have to agree i would love to be original but i’m going to say the dissertation process was so painful for me i had so many revisions i had a committee that disagreed on certain items i had a very hard dissertation defense and it was interesting because one of the professors who mentored me said oh you know if you think the dissertation’s hard like it’s going to be much harder out there this is the easy part disagree completely researching on my own after that has been a much more enjoyable process for me and less stressful i do have to say something else that’s very difficult i just got a very mean rejection letter for an article i submitted to a journal so that hurt a little bit too yeah that is uh part of the process as well as we’re going through the peer review we do get rejection letters i don’t take them as hard as amy obviously but i mean at some point i’m kind of getting used to all the rejection but it still hurts no it is it’s a it’s part of the process but it’s sometimes a challenging one yes it’s usually constructive criticism that reviewers give so it just helps you become a better writer and researcher but it still stings that’s true and as far as the dissertation goes you should also probably know that when you start with a cohort in your phd you start with whether it’s people people about half those people will make it and half won’t and the reason why is the dissertation usually people complete the door the coursework but then you get to the dissertation and it’s daunting and that’s where people sort of just drop off like flies i know i almost dropped off i almost i almost dropped off as well yep so i’m proud that we didn’t well good thing we because then we wouldn’t be sitting here right now on that note thank you so much for listening today we’ll catch you next time on women in crime
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sources for today’s episode come from the stanford advocate the hartford current the american justice episode the martha moxley case the associated press and interviews with robert kennedy