Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel talks publicly for the first time about the Martha Moxley killing
It is, in many ways, a quintessentially American unsolved murder mystery.
The victim was a rich and beautiful teenage girl found beaten to death with a golf club in a ritzy and supposedly safe Connecticut suburb. There was national news media frenzy followed by a stymied police investigation. And at the center of it all, there was murder suspect Michael Skakel, who also happens to be related to the fabled Kennedy family.
Eventually, there would be celebrity cameos from another high-profile murder investigation in this unfolding drama.
But 50 years after the 15-year-old was found dead beneath a tree in the backyard of her family home, there still is no definitive answer to the question: Who killed Martha Moxley?
Now, for the first time since his conviction in the killing of Moxley was overturned in 2013, Skakel is speaking at length about the death in Greenwich that sent him to prison for more than 11 years.
“Um, my name is Michael Skakel and why am I being interviewed?” he asks veteran journalist Andrew Goldman in “Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley Murder,” NBC News Studios’ new podcast that makes its debut Tuesday. “I mean, that’s kind of a big question, isn’t it?”
On several occasions, Skakel and his brother Stephen Skakel were interviewed at the modest rental home they share in Norwalk, Connecticut, which is a far cry from the mansion in which they grew up.
“For the first half of the 20th century, the Skakels were incalculably rich robber baron rich, a kind of wealth we now associate with the Koch brothers. Certainly richer than the Kennedys,” Goldman said. “Not so anymore.”
The first five episodes of the podcast delve into the history of the murder case that transfixed the country after Moxley was found dead Oct. 31, 1975, setting off a hunt for her killer that continues to this day.
Goldman is not new to the Moxley case; he ghostwrote “Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit,” a 2016 bestseller by Skakel’s cousin, now-Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After finishing his work on the book, Goldman continued to reinvestigate the case on his own for nearly a decade.
But Goldman, in the podcast, admits he wasn’t initially sold on the idea of Skakel being innocent.
“When I first met him back in 2015, to be honest, being in the same room with him made me physically uncomfortable,” Goldman says. “The media coverage of the case had convinced me I was shaking a murderer’s hand.”
Skakel is the fifth of seven children born to Rushton and Anne Skakel, who were fabulously wealthy and ultraconservative Catholics. They were the nieces and nephews of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy. The Skakel children lost their mother to cancer in 1972 and their father struggled with alcoholism.
The family lived across the street from the Moxleys in a Tudor-style mansion.
Moxley was last seen alive Oct. 30, 1975, when she was hanging out with a group of friends that included then 15-year-old Skakel and his older brother Thomas Skakel on Mischief Night, which is the night before Halloween when children roam the neighborhood and pull pranks such as ringing doorbells and toilet-papering trees and yards.
Described by friends as “joy on legs,” the vivacious teen was found dead the next day in the brush on her family’s property with her pants and underwear pulled down.
An autopsy revealed Moxley had not been sexually assaulted, but had been bludgeoned and stabbed in the neck with a broken six-iron golf club that was traced back to the Skakel home.
Skakel wasn’t the first person police suspected of killing Moxley. Thomas Skakel landed on investigators’ radar well before him because he was seen flirting with her before she died. Later, police focused on the Skakel children’s live-in tutor, Kenneth Littleton. Neither were charged with a crime.
Skakel said in the podcast that his life was a horror show before Moxley died.
Skakel said his father beat him at age 9 when he found him with some Playboy magazines and often beat him for no reason at all.
“He was about as Orthodox Catholic as it got,” Skakel said of his father. “I just never knew when it was going to happen. I didn’t know why it happened.”
During Skakel’s sentencing hearing in 2002, his lawyer submitted 90 letters from people close to him that included details of abuse he allegedly suffered at the hands of his father.
Skakel said his mother was cold and left most of the child-rearing to the household help. When he broke his neck at age 4, he said, his mother barely visited him during his two-month stay in the hospital.
“She wasn’t really touchy-feely,” he said.
When his mother got sick, Skakel said his father blamed him.
“If you only did better in school, your mother wouldn’t have to be in the hospital,” Skakel recalled his father telling him. “And I remember just going, ‘Oh, my God, I wanted to die. I just wanted to die’.”
Skakel said he was around 12 years old when his mother died. And like his father, he sought solace in drinking. He was sent away to a private school in Maine after he was caught driving under the influence at age 17. He said he was subjected to beatings from his classmates at Elan School. The school, which aimed to help troubled teens, closed down in 2011.
“They literally picked me up over their head and carried me downstairs like I was a crash test dummy,” Skakel said of one beating. “And when I was probably 10 feet from the stage, they threw me. And I thought I broke my, my back on the stage.”
Skakel made it through reform school and rebuilt his life. He stopped drinking in 1982, got married in 1991 and later had a son. He earned a college degree in 1993 and competed on the international speed skiing circuit.
Meanwhile, the long-stalled Moxley investigation was revived after another Skakel relative, William Kennedy Smith, was tried and acquitted in 1991 for an unrelated rape. Amid the tabloid frenzy of that case, an unfounded rumor emerged that he had been at the Skakel home on the night that Moxley died.
The speculation around Smith went nowhere, but the media attention breathed new life into the stalled Moxley case. And that prompted Skakel’s father to fund a private investigation aimed at clearing the family name.
That move backfired. The end result was a report that was leaked to the media, casting doubt on the alibis of Thomas and Michael Skakel.
Among the revelations was Michael Skakel’s admission that on the night of the murder, he climbed a tree by Moxley’s house and tossed pebbles at her window. When she didn’t come out, he masturbated while sitting in the tree.
Pressure to reinvestigate the Moxley killing ratcheted up further in 1993 when author Dominick Dunne published a novel called “A Season in Purgatory” based on the Moxley murder. That was followed five years later by “Murder in Greenwich,” which was written by disgraced O.J. Simpson detective Mark Fuhrman and which named Michael Skakel as Moxley’s likely murderer.
Two years later, on March 14, 2000, Skakel, 39, was arrested after investigators secured testimony from two former classmates at the Elan School who claimed he confessed to killing Moxley.
Skakel was arraigned on a murder charge in juvenile court because he was 15 at the time of the crime. The case was later moved to regular court. He said his lawyer, Mickey Sherman, promised him that he’d never see the inside of a courtroom.
But two years later, Skakel was convicted of killing Moxley and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. He was released in 2013 after his conviction was overturned.
The judge ruled that Skakel had been denied a fair trial because, among other things, Sherman had failed to contact a witness who could have provided his client with an alibi. And in 2020, the state dropped the case against Skakel saying it would not be able to prove the case against him beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Mickey Sherman basically proved to be the anti-Nostradamus,” Goldman says in the podcast. “Every one of his predictions turned out to be dead wrong.”
