← Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaelyn Moore
Clues with Morgan Absher and Kaelyn Moore
The Martha Moxley Case: A Murder Hidden by Wealth and Influence
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Hey there, we're Sabrina d' Anarroga and Corinne Vian, hosts of Crimes of.
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Crimes of is a weekly true crime series with each season diving into a different theme, from unsolved murders to mysterious disappearances and the cases that haunt us most. And since it's Valentine's season, we are unpacking Crimes of Passion. When love turns into obsession, passion twists into paranoia, and jealousy drives people beyond the edge of reason.
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Crimes of is a Crime House original. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube new episodes every Tuesday.
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This is Crime House.
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It was the night before Halloween in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Connecticut when the body of a teen girl was discovered under a tree in her backyard.
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This case has everything from extreme wealth and privilege to teenagers testing the limits of what they could get away with and a potential cover up. Which is why today we're asking the question what really happened to Martha Moxley? Hi guys. Welcome back to clues, where we sneak past the crime scene tape to explore the key evidence behind some of the most gripping true crime cases.
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I'm Kayla Moore. I'll be the one digging into the timelines, the backstories and the court files released on these cases.
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And I'm your Internet sleuth Morgan Abshur. I'm the one who's diving into Reddit forums and anything else I can find online to pull out those lesser known details and see what just isn't adding up.
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Don't forget to share your thoughts on social Want ad free listening or early access? Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Also search and follow Crime House Daily Crime House's twice a day show that has unbelievable stories from the world of crime. All right, let's get into the case and the clues that defined it. A year from today, what would your.
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Dream private practice look like? Would you spend less time chasing claims or only working with clients who value your skill set? What if you had more time for yourself? Alma empowers you to confidently accept insurance backed by an all in one EHR that simplifies scheduling, documentation and day to day practice operations. Your dream practice is closer than you think. Learn more About Alma@helloalma.com GetStarted this message may be shocking to many millennials. If you are one, you might want to sit down.
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Right now.
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Loads of people are searching the following on depop Low rise Jeans, halter top, velour, tracksuit, puka shell, necklace, disc, belt. You likely place these in the dark of your closet in 2004, never to be seen again. But if you can find it in yourself to dust them off. There are a lot of people who will give you money for them. Sell on Depop where taste recognizes taste. This is a twisty one. It has been in the headlines for the past 50 years. It's got ties to the Kennedy family. It is. It's going to be a doozy for a lot of us today.
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And it's having a real resurgence recently. It is. We were just talking about. So we picked this case a while ago to do. And then as we were doing our research on it, NBC put out this podcast called Dead Certain, hosted by Andrew Goldman, I believe.
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Yeah.
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So I think there's one or two episodes out now, but by the time this airs, there might be the full 10 episode series. So if you guys even want even more of a deep dive, they're doing like really incredible original research on that show.
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Really, really interesting show. I know two episodes out right now. The third one comes out tomorrow and I'm like, oh my gosh. I'm just like, I'm waiting for it. Because he has access to like all the case files. He actually was a ghostwriter on RFK Jr. S book. And because of that, then RFK Jr's.
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Book about this case.
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About this case.
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Like, we're gonna get into the Kennedy connection here.
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We are getting into all of it. I mean, this is. Everything is so convoluted in this case. And like, I'm at the end, I'm sitting here and I'm like, which way is up, which way is down? Like, what timeline is true? Who's telling the truth? Who's lying?
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Yes.
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Was there a cover up? Like, it is crazy. But he has kind of this unprecedented access to these case files and presents a lot of new information. And I hope we present some new information to you guys today. But yeah, this is a big one.
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Right? And as a quick reminder, if you're watching this on YouTube, you're going to see some maps and images that are going to help visualize this case. And if you're listening, you're going to find those same assets on our clues Instagram. That's podcast on Instagram.
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And a warning before we begin, this episode does contain some pretty graphic descriptions of murder, violence, substance abuse and some sexual situations. So please listen with care.
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All right, so let's set the scene. The story starts the night before Halloween in 1975 in the quiet, wealthy enclave of Belhaven in Greenwich, Connecticut. Outside, kids were on Mischief Night, they called it. They were toilet papering trees. They were spraying shaving Cream all over the neighborhood. They were ringing doorbells and running away. And inside the Moxley house that night, the mood was very different from this chaos of the the neighborhood kids because 15 year old Martha Moxley had gone out hours earlier promising her mom, Dorothy that she wouldn't be out too late. Dorothy sat downstairs with the TV on, listening for the familiar sounds of the back door. But instead she heard dogs barking loudly somewhere out in the dark. She went to her window, looked out in the yard, but didn't see anything. Her husband was out of town, her son John was with his friends. So it was just Dorothy alone in this big, very quiet house, waiting. By 1:30 in the morning, her daughter Martha was still not home and panic finally took over. Dorothy woke John, who at that point had made it back home, and begged him to drive around the neighborhood looking for his sister. When he came back with nothing, she decided she was going to call some of Martha's friends. Helen, the girl that Martha had been with that night, told her that Martha had stayed behind with the family next door. That was the last time she saw her, was when she stayed behind with the family next door, the Skakels. So Dorothy decided she was going to call the Skakel house. No answer. So she called again and again and then she called other numbers and other parents, but no one had seen Martha. At 3:48 in the morning, Dorothy called the Greenwich police to report her daughter missing. And the next day, just after noon, her doorbell rings. Standing there at her door was one of Martha's classmates, 15 year old Sheila, and tears were streaming down her face. I found Martha, she said. She's there under the tree. Dorothy ran across her lawn towards a huge tree that was at the edge of her yard. And a girl was laying there, face down in the grass. And at first Dorothy didn't recognize her because her daughter Martha had blonde hair and this girl's hair looked red. It wasn't until Dorothy got closer that she realized the red was not hair dye, it was blood. And her daughter, Martha Moxley was dead underneath a tree that was exactly halfway between her home and the home of their neighbors, the Skakels, the richest family in the neighborhood. A family with six sons aged nine to 19, who were described by many in the neighborhood as being troubled the family that Martha was last seen with. But before we get any further into the story, let's take a moment to talk about who Martha was. So Martha was not a native of the Greenwich neighborhood that she was living in. She was actually born in Oakland, California on August 16, 1960, it was just her and her brother John, who was two years older than her. Her mother Dorothy was a stay at home mom and her dad was a managing partner of a global accounting firm. Martha was described as being a really down to earth girl who loved cats, frogs, sending letters to her friends and writing in her diary. Her brother John said, quote, martha was a person who had everything in the world going for her. She was friendly, she was athletic, she was talented, arts, the kind of kid you'd like to be around. One of her teachers even called her, quote, a ray of sunshine. In 1974, the Moxley's moved across the country from their home in California to Greenwich, Connecticut because David took a really big job offer. For those of you who don't know much about Greenwich, it's considered one of the wealthiest areas in America. And Bell Haven specifically where Martha lived, was one of the nicest sections of Greenwich. It was only an hour train ride into Manhattan. It was also the safest area, which is why her dad David wanted the family to live there. And Martha, by all accounts, really loved life in Belhaven. Within a year of moving there, she was the school's yearbook editor. She had a bunch of friends, she had excellent grades, she played field hockey and basketball. She was voted by her class, quote, girl with the best personality, which is just like the nicest thing you can be voted by your classmates.
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Absolutely amazing.
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And that kind of brings us back to the night of the crime. So at 6:30pm on the night of October 30, Martha was primed and ready to go out. She had a bunch of friends in the neighborhood and she was going to partake in this mischief night that they did every year. The night before Halloween, her mom Dorothy told her, don't stay out too late. And after she left, Martha met up with one of her good friends and neighbors, 15 year old Helen Ickes. So based on later interviews that would happen with all the neighborhood kids, this is the best timeline we have of the night. At around 7.30pm, Helen and Martha walked over to the Skakels house across the street. It was directly adjacent to Martha's. It was separated only by a small patch of woods. And The Skakels have seven children, six boys, one girl, the oldest being 19 years old, the youngest being nine. Helen and Martha though seem to like the two Skakel boys that were closest to their own age, 15 year old Michael and 17 year old Tommy. And they knew that the Skakel's dad, Rushton was not going to be around that night. He was out of town on a hunting trip. He was also a widower. His wife and the children's mother Anne had sadly passed away two years earlier of cancer. So Martha and Helen went to the Skagle house. But when they knocked on the door that night, no one answered. The gardener told them that the Skakel kids and their live in tutor who was a 23 year old man named Ken Littleton were eating at the Belhaven Club, this private yacht and social club down the street. They all finally caught up with each other at the Skagel house. Sometime around 9pm 15 year old Michael hung out with Martha, Helen and another neighborhood kid named Jeff Byrne. They hopped into the Skaggles, parked Lincoln Continental and they just listened to music and chatted. Michael would later go on to say that this was a quote moment of closeness between Martha and himself. That is until Michael's 17 year old brother Tommy slid into the seat next to her. Now Tommy was known around town as being the cute Skakel boy. And he had been flirting with Martha for over a month. At this point in a earlier journal entry that Martha had written, she wrote, quote, went driving in Tom's car and I was practically sitting on his lap. He kept putting his hands on my knee. And that night things weren't much different. Witnesses described Martha and Tommy as quote, pushing back and forth with sexual overtones. And then sometime around 9:30pm two other Skakel boys, 19 year old Rushton Jr. And 16 year old John came out of the house. They needed to take their 17 year old cousin Jimmy home. So Tommy, Martha, Helen and Jeff all got out of the car. But Michael went with the other group to Jimmy's house. Martha and Tommy seemed oblivious and they were engaged in what others called quote, flirtatious horseplay.
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And that flirtatious horseplay, very interesting. From one account, Tommy was like pushing Martha into the bushes. It was, it was quite odd.
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Seemed a little physical.
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A little?
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Yes. Like someone said that they were falling down together behind a fence near the Skakel pool. And this ended up making the other friends like Helen so uncomfortable. At around 9:30 or 10:00 clock, her and Jeff actually called it a night and just went home. They felt like they were intruding on the moment that the other two were having. And it's around this time that Martha's mom Dorothy heard a commotion. That's when she described the neighbor's dogs as barking wildly. So that caused her to look outside, but all she saw was darkness. She couldn't see what was making the dogs bark. At around 11pm she goes downstairs to turn off the news. And shortly after that's when Martha's brother John comes home. And Dorothy said she was worried that Martha wasn't back yet. I mean again, her curfew was 9:30pm that night. But he assured her that Martha probably wouldn't be much longer. So Dorothy stayed on the couch waiting up for Martha and at some point she fell asleep. When she wakes up at around 1:30 or 2:00am, Martha is still not home. And that's when she goes to John and asks him to go look for Martha. And when he returns and says that he doesn't find anything, Dorothy calls Helen Ick's house. Helen told her that when she left the Skakels place, Martha stayed behind with Tommy. So naturally Dorothy calls the Skakels. This is at around 2 in the morning and 18 year old Julie answers. According to Dorothy, Julie picked up and immediately sounded wide awake even though it was really late at night. Julie also put Tommy on the phone. He said that he and Martha said goodnight around 9:30pm and after that he went inside to study and complete some homework, assuming that she went straight home. But Dorothy wasn't buying this story. So she ended up calling the Skaggle house three or four more times that night. And during one of those calls, Julie recommended that Dorothy try their cousin Jimmy's house where Michael and her other brothers went. Sometime around that night she did. Jimmy's mom answered, but that was a dead end too. It didn't really provide any more information for them. After that, Dorothy made a few more panicked phone calls asking everyone in the area if they had seen Martha. But with no news, she called the Greenwich Police at 3:48 in the morning. At around 4 or 5am Police started searching for Martha behind sheds, pools, tennis courts. They found nothing. So by 8 in the morning, Dorothy went to the Skakels house alone. And that's when she sees 15 year old Michael. He's supposed to be in class because he goes to a nice private school in the area. But he answers the door and Dorothy reported that he looked, quote, hungover. And he told her that he hadn't seen Martha since last night. So Dorothy then asked if she could search the Skakels Winnebago. This was this RV that they had on the property where the kids would hang out pretty often. And there was no sign of Martha there. So all Dorothy could do is go home and wait for some updates. But by now news had spread that Martha was missing and a few neighbors were starting to help look. And that's when at around 12:15pm a 15 year old classmate of Martha's named Sheila rang the bell at the Moxley's back door and let her know that she had found Martha under that tree. And while no one in the area had said that they had seen anything specifically about who might have attacked Martha that night, there were a few clues on and around Martha's body that would maybe point in some direction.
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Today's episode is brought to you by alma. It can be challenging to find the right therapist. Someone that gets you, teaches you strategies that are actually going to work for you, for you and your needs. And it can sometimes be costly. Well, Alma is on a mission to change all that. They want to simplify access to high quality, affordable mental health care and they have over 20,000 diverse therapists and an easy to use platform. One thing I love about ALMA is that you can do consultations with a therapist. It's almost like an interview and you can make sure you guys match each other's vibes before you really jump in and get started. Their directory helps you find a therapist that takes your insurance and meets your specific needs with filters like Gender, race, Therapeutic approach, and more. And you're going to know exactly how much you're paying upfront with their free insurance, cost estimator, calculator we're entering a new year, so now is the perfect time to start addressing things you might want to work on. A year from today isn't that far away. Get started now@helloalma.com clues that's hello a l m a dot com clues. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. Nothing hits like home cooking, especially home cooking that is easy and fun to do with recipes you're actually excited about and are going to taste good. And my favorite part, ones that you didn't have to meal plan or go grocery shopping for yourself. HelloFresh really puts the joy back in home cooking, and that's coming from someone that doesn't even like to cook. But with HelloFresh, I feel like it's attainable for me. I don't forget ingredients at the store. I'm not running back 20 times just to cook one meal. And there's over a hundred recipes to choose from every week, including cuisines from around the world and meals that are going to help beat these winter blues. There's something for even the pickiest of eaters, and every meal I've tried from HelloFresh has tasted amazing. If you're ready to try it for yourself, go to hellofresh.comcluz10fm to get 10 free meals and a free Zwilling knife. A $144.99 value on your third box offer valid while supplies last. Free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. Police did not really know where to turn when beginning their investigation. I mean, this was such a violent crime that they assumed no one from this small, safe community could even be heinous enough to commit it. And there was an additional three extra security guards on duty that night because it was Mischief Night and none of them had noticed any strangers sneaking past the guarded gates. Now, one guard did see someone. He had provided a description of a man that he had seen slip between two houses across the street from the Skakels place at around 10pm but that was kind of all they had in terms of witnesses. So they really had to turn to the physical evidence. Again because this was such a vicious crime. There was a lot of blood. Which brings us to our first clue, the blood at the scene. Now I am going to get into some pretty graphic descriptions, so please skip ahead if you can't handle that today. As you mentioned, at first police couldn't even tell what color Martha's hair was when they found her because there was so much blood in it. But the blood wasn't just pooled around her head. When the police fanned out and really started searching the Moxley's yard, they found blood in a few different spots. There was blood in the grass about 100ft away. There was a large puddle there, about three to four feet wide. Then 40ft past that, by the Moxley's driveway, there was another pretty decent sized pool of blood. One detective that was on the scene describes it as a huge pool of blood. But when looking at crime scene photos, it's hard to tell how big it actually is. You don't see a huge pool. Like when you're thinking pool, you guys, I'm thinking like massive pile of blood.
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A lot of blood.
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To me, given we don't know how zoomed in it is on the photo, it doesn't look like a huge pool of blood.
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It looks like a drop.
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It looks like a bigger drop. Yeah. Please let me know what you would describe this as in the comments, but I just wanted to be very clear and you will see the image. So based on all of the blood patterns that detectives found, they thought that Martha must have been attacked from behind, within sight of her home, just at the front portion of her driveway. And then based on patterns in the grass they assumed that the killer then dragged Martha about 100ft to the base of this tree. It appeared that they had stopped at one point to roll Martha over and changed from pulling her by her upper body to then pulling her by her.
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Feet, which kind of makes me think it was someone that didn't have a lot of upper body strength because a 15 year old girl, she was maybe 100 pounds. Like she was small.
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Yeah. So then to have to switch because they couldn't handle the size of her. Yeah. And upon further investigation, when they really start looking at Martha, they, you know, they notice that there were red marks on her thighs, possibly bloody fingerprints or handprints. They were too smudged to identify or take a lift from. But these marks were visible because Martha's jeans and underwear were lowered around her knees. Now, I will note here that investigators were not able to find any DNA or other physical evidence to corroborate sexual assault. They did not find any semen. An ultraviolet light, black light did not show anything. So some sources in this case do believe that her pants and underwear could have come down from the result of being dragged. From the crime scene photos, it looks like the Moxley's yard was covered in long, shaggy grass as well as, like these brown leaves. I mean, it is fall, it's end of October. And so maybe all of this blood could have been hidden or camouflaged initially, which is why, you know, family like Dorothy and John and neighbors and police just walked by all of this. Yeah.
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Didn't see it when they were doing the big canvas of the neighborhood.
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Yeah. Like everyone at this point is kind of like, how did we miss this? She's so obviously right there. But.
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Yeah, because you would have had to walk down, which I think is important that you brought up the note about the pool of blood in the driveway. They would have walked down their driveway to go into the, the main road to start their search. And if it's only that one speck of blood, you would have missed it.
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Easy to miss. I mean, your head's up, you're scanning around, you're just anxious, panicked. It's understandable why they missed it there.
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Yeah.
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But I will say at this point, the police do not do a great job securing the crime scene. There is one source that observed a dog licking a pool of blood. That's a mark on our botched board there.
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Where's our botch marker?
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It's on my side.
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Oh, it's on your side.
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It's on my side.
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Morgan's the one.
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That's your Turn today. But that's not our only clue we get from this crime scene. One of the most telling items at the scene is our second clue. A Golf Club. 100ft from Martha's body, next to a large puddle of blood was an 11 inch piece of a golf club shaft partially hidden by leaves. Detectives found two more pieces by the driveway, a smaller section of the shaft that was about 8 inches long, and the head of the golf club. Police believed the killer knocked Martha unconscious with a single hit to the back of her head and then continued with even more violent strikes once she was on the ground. From one of the sources, they concluded that Martha was hit in the head nine to 10 times. And some of the strikes were so hard that they actually cracked her skull and pierced her brain. And whoever did this used so much force that it then broke the golf club and sent those different sections of the shaft flying. And from where investigators believed Martha was initially attacked, they noted that one of the shaft pieces flew about 58ft.
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Holy smokes.
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Yeah, 58ft. That's.
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Yeah, that's how hard she was hitting.
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So it was a very, very violent crime. And even more so when we get into the next few details here. So investigators believe this initial attack happened kind of near the start of the driveway. But then, as we mentioned, she was dragged under the tree. And at this point, a remaining piece of the shaft was used to stab Martha through the neck. This was such a violent, seemingly rage filled attack that when the person stabbed Martha with the shaft of this golf club, it actually dragged a lock of her hair through one side of her neck and out the other. I mean, obviously, you guys, this is just heinous. But what they didn't find amongst all these golf club pieces was the grip part of the club, the part that would have had maybe the killer's fingerprints. It wasn't anywhere to be found. When they did start looking at the golf club head, though, police did discover that this golf club was a Tony penna. In the 70s, this was a pretty exclusive brand. Very expensive.
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Yeah, it was Italian. I remember reading more about that.
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It's fancy.
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Really fancy brand.
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Yeah. So the police did think, like, this club had to belong to a wealthy Belhaven resident. And either the killer stole the club or the person who owned it had killed Martha. So police put out an APB for a set of clubs Pretty soon after they get a lead. Just hours, actually, after Martha was found, a Greenwich police detective was at the Skagel house and noticed some golf clubs in the hallway. Now, at this point, like Everyone in the neighborhood is cooperating. No one thinks it's them. So everyone is just like offering any information they can. So when Rushton, the Skakel family dad comes home early from his hunting trip, the next day he gives detectives permission to inspect the clubs. Like no search warrant needed. Guys take the clubs, check them out, and sure enough, these clubs were Tony Pena's. And each club actually had a label near the handle, that grip part that said Mrs. R.W. skakel. So the clubs belonged to their late mother, Ann.
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A
Also, they were the only Tony Pennas found in Belhaven. There was not a single other set of Tony Penna golf clubs in the entire neighborhood.
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B
No, none other sets found. And this set was missing a six iron. The same club found near Martha's body. Now there were a lot of employees that could have been going in and out of the Skakels house daily. So anyone could have taken the club. And the police chief didn't even think like, oh, this is the Skakels. Like his immediate thought was, ah, kids leave their toys out all the time. Anyone could have found it in the yard. And including a transient just kind of walking through. So police looked everywhere else besides the Skakels house for weeks. You know, we talk about a lot how important it is to get a jump on these cases. The first 48 is, you know, a common saying. And the detective kind of just said, you know, slow and steady wins the race on this one. Which I will say kind of feels botched given.
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A
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
It's right in front of you that.
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You find a bunch of Tony Pena golf clubs with a six iron missing and your first thought is, oh, a kid probably left it out in the yard. And it was taken by someone who doesn't belong to this very wealthy upscale.
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Community, very private community with multiple guard houses, patrolling guards. It's a little far fetched, but just.
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The idea that like no one here is capable of this. This must have been a barbarian.
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B
Yeah. Which I do think this was the first murder in this area in like decades.
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A
Right, right.
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B
But still, like it's right in front of you. It came from their house. Like, why are we not at least looking a little bit? And so they considered a few random suspects from outside the neighborhood before they even looked inwards. Those didn't pan out. So then they were kind of forced to look from within. One of their initial suspects was a neighbor of Martha's, Ed Hammond. He was a recent Yale graduate, was kind of known as being a little strange. And when police investigated him, they did retrieve a Pair of corduroy pants from his room that had, quote, blood stained left upper leg. There's also some weird things they took from his room, including a condom full of semen. It really kind of feels like a little bit of a red herring, because when a crime lab analysis comes back, it is not Martha Moxley's blood on that pant leg. He also passed a polygraph test, and so he was ultimately cleared as a suspect in this case.
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A
But one thing that they said early on was just because of the way that Martha's body was found, like, whoever had done this would have been soaked in blood that night. So they're just looking for anyone who has any sort of blood or, like, confirmed to have any blood on them.
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B
Anything. I mean, I will say, like, Ed Hammond's house was really close to the Moxley residence. Like, something that commonly gets pointed out in this case is like, Ed's window looked directly at the tree where Martha was found. So they were kind of grasping at straws to find any other lead they could follow that wasn't the Skakels early on. Yes, is how it seems. Right? Like, otherwise, what's the excuse for not really diving in? And so eventually, after all these dead ends, they have no choice but to look where the club came from. The Skakels. And they were a little apprehensive at first because on Halloween day when Martha was found, they had given alibis to the police. And so they were, you know, ruled out immediately. But when police kind of run out of ends to check out and attempt to interview Tommy and Michael again on November 1, less than 24 hours after Martha was found, they realized that both brothers had skipped town.
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A
So let's talk a little bit more about the Skakels and maybe why the local police did not want to look at that family as being potential perpetrators.
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B
I literally just got the chills.
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A
Well, the Skakels were very, very old Connecticut money. In the 1920s, Michael and Tommy's grandfather, George Skakel, founded the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation. It was a coal and aluminum company. By 1929, George was a multi, multi millionaire.
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B
Yeah, everyone talks about how, like, any deal he would touch would just make him millions. Yes, millions.
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Just absolutely really rich, powerful person.
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And this is 1929, like, millions at that point in time. I mean, I don't even know what the math is with inflation today.
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Yes. Well, because of this wealth and this power and this influence, the Skakels become friends with another high power east coast family. Maybe you've heard of them, the Kennedys. In 1950, actually, Michael and Tommy's aunt Ethel married John F. Kennedy's brother, Robert Kennedy.
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And the Skakels were so wealthy, you guys, like, it was kind of joked about in these circles that Robert Kennedy had actually married Ethel for her money. For her money, for her money.
- [30:55]
A
That's how much money the Skaggles had. And the Skakels were actually a lot like the Kennedys, and not in the sense that they went on to have big political careers, but in the sense that amongst all of this wealth and opulence, it seemed like a curse had been placed on the family and was following them around. Yeah, there's a lot of tragedy that happened in this family in like a very short amount of time. So in 1955, George Skakel, the grandfather who set up the whole business, dies in a plane crash and his kids go on to inherit the company along with millions of dollars. One of those children would actually also go on to die in a plane crash with their spouse and leave behind two orphan children. One of those orphans was this girl named Kathleen. She is, if we're looking at the family tree, the cousin of the Skakels that we've been talking about. And when she was out driving in her family's luxury vehicle when she was about 17 years old, a 7 year old girl fell out of the back seat and was killed when she hit the pavement. She actually was in a coma for a week and then died from her injuries afterwards. But of course, after this happened, there were no repercussions for Kathleen. There were never any repercussions for the Skakels. The accident was eventually blamed on the speed bumps in the road, not on the reckless driving of a 17 year old girl. Anyways, one of George Skakel's other children was Michael and Tommy's father, Rushton Skakel. He did not escape this curse, even though Rushton inherited all of this money from his father. After his untimely death, he buys this huge mansion in Belhaven. Rushton seemed to be dealing with some demons for a big majority of his life. It seems like he battles with alcohol addiction. And his wife Anne dies of cancer in 1973 after a years long battle with cancer. And after that, he becomes an absentee father to his seven children. That means the kids were pretty much left to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. So the Skakel house kind of becomes known in the area as being this party house where you could just drink alcohol, you could smoke cigarettes, you could listen to loud music because Russian was never home. I mean, we talk about it. That weekend he was on a hunting trip, Halloween weekend, and he left all. He had a nine year old at home, and he just leaves all the kids at home. I know he was not around that often. And it seems like this kind of absentee fatherhood has an impact on his children, especially Tommy and Michael. So let's talk about Tommy first. He was 17 years old when Martha was killed. His background is a little bit murky, but a court filing said that Tommy had suffered a traumatic brain injury when he was only four years old. According to his sister Julie, he actually fell on his head from a moving car, which eerily mimics the thing that Kathleen had gone through when the little girl fell out of her car.
- [33:47]
B
Yeah, he fractured his skull.
- [33:49]
A
And after the accident, he was a different person, as you often see with these, like, traumatic brain injury cases. So after this, Tommy would go on to have fits of rage. They would say he would break things. He would beat up his siblings, by some accounts, endlessly terrorized his siblings. This is coming from Michael. Michael reported that Tommy one time stuck a fork in his brother John's forehead during dinner, during an argument they were having. One of Tommy's nannies said he was, quote, the most disturbed child she had ever met. And Tommy, like a lot of the Skakels, also drank a lot starting in childhood. He admitted that the night of Martha's death, he had been drinking. For how troubled Tommy is described as being. There are other Skakel children that are described as being more disturbed and more troubled, and one of those is Michael. Michael admitted at one point, quote, I became a full blown daily drinking alcoholic by the time I was 13 years old. He allegedly would get into fights and bully other children. Some reports that we have do say that he killed small animals during fits of rage. And, I mean, both of these boys were some of the last people seen with Martha the night of her murder. However, on the day that her body was found, neither Michael nor Tommy were really considered a person of interest. All the police knew was that there was a killer on the loose in Greenwich. So then, less than 24 hours after Martha's body was found, both of those boys are on the run from police. It seems they're also with their 16 year old brother John, their cousin Jimmy, and their tutor Kennedy. They had packed up and driven over a hundred miles to their other house in upstate New York. However, just three days later, November 4th, Tommy was back in Greenwich to attend Martha's funeral. One of Martha's friends, Christy, recalled Tommy showing up later at a McDonald's where a bunch of kids were hanging out. She said, quote, I remember being really pissed, like, how dare you show up here? I mean, it's a small town. There's tons of rumors going around. Several people suspected that there's one of the Skakels had killed Martha. I mean, the family has a reputation in town, but the Greenwich police still did not interview any of them. They didn't even question the skakels officially until November 14th. That's two weeks after the murder, which.
- [36:15]
B
I mean, two weeks after you guys. Like, this is so botched by that point. You have two weeks to get rid of any potential evidence.
- [36:25]
A
Well, and we talked about it too. Like they said at the get at the jump, whoever did this would be soaked in blood. We have a certain amount of time to find the bloody clothing of the person who did this two weeks later. I mean, it's gone, it's in the laundry, it's thrown away. It's been burned.
- [36:40]
B
It's burned at the upstate place in New York. Allegedly. Apparently. Just a hunch.
- [36:44]
A
What were you doing in the place upstate? Like, taking evidence there. What was going on?
- [36:49]
B
Well, and it's interesting. Who went to upstate New York? Everyone basically involved that night.
- [36:54]
A
Like, yeah.
- [36:56]
B
So it's just. It's interesting and it's botched.
- [37:00]
A
So on November 14th, when they finally get interviewed, Rushton goes with Julie, Tommy, Michael, John, and their cousin Jimmy to the police station so that they can all give statements. Tommy told detectives that he last saw Martha at 9:30pm on the night before she was found dead. Then he went back inside of his house to go do his homework.
- [37:21]
B
Yeah, he gets really specific with investigators even. He's like, I went back inside, go find a book on Abraham Lincoln because I needed to do this paper for extra credit. It's very specific and detailed.
- [37:33]
A
Very specific and detailed. And Michael said that he went with his older brother to Jimmy's house the night of the murder and stayed until 10:30 or 11:00pm and then he went home and did not leave the house again that night. So seems like everyone in the situation has an alibi for that evening. But there's one person who stood out to police, someone who had just moved into the neighborhood literally the day that Martha was killed, and clearly would have had access to those golf clubs. And that was the Skakels tutor ken. Ken was 23 years old. He was a coach and a teacher at the Brunswick School, which was the private schools that the Skakels attended. Ken was described as being young, athletic, handsome, a recent graduate Of Williams. He had all of this stuff really going for him. We know that he told police that he and Tommy were inside the house watching TV together around 10pm that night. And 10pm is important because that's when the dogs in the neighborhood reportedly started going crazy. So that's kind of around the time that they think the attack might have happened. But when Ken took a lie detector test, he failed at least twice, Although the circumstances surrounding those tests and questions are a little bit unclear, and obviously we've covered on the show before that lie detector tests are not admissible in court. So take them with a grain of salt. Ken also, because he had just moved into the skakels that day, did not know Martha Moxley. And it was clear to investigators that whoever killed Martha knew her pretty well. In their minds, this was a crime of passion. The act was so savage, very impulsive, and part of it also seemed intimate. So with no clear motive, no connection to the victim, Greenwich police let Ken go.
- [39:22]
B
Meanwhile, Martha's voice seemed to be reaching out to police from beyond the grave. And that's our third clue. Martha's diary. Several days after the murder, police found it while searching her bedroom for any potential clues. And there was one passage that stood out. We mentioned it a little bit earlier. It was from September 12, 1975, about a month before her death. And Martha wrote, quote, went driving in Tom's car, and I was practically sitting on Tom's lap. He kept putting his hand on my knee. But this diary didn't just mention Tommy. A week later, on September 19, Martha wrote, quote, Michael was so totally out of it that he was being a real in his actions and words. He kept telling me that I was leading Tom on when I don't like him except as a friend. I said, well, how about you and Jackie? You keep telling me that you don't like her, and you're all over her. He doesn't understand that he can be nice to her without hanging all over her. Michael jumps to conclusions. I can't be friends with Tom. Just because I talk to him, it doesn't mean I like him. I really have to stop going over there. On October 4, 1975, a little over three weeks before her murder, Martha wrote, I went to a party. Tom s Was being an ass at the dance. He kept putting his arms around me and making moves. So Martha's uneasiness around the boys was pretty clear in all of these diary.
- [40:48]
A
Entries with both of them.
- [40:50]
B
Both of them. But the police couldn't arrest Michael or Tommy based on These diary entries alone?
- [40:57]
A
Yeah. And at this point, the police are figuring that both of those boys have alibis, so there's no point in making an arrest. Also, they have money, they have wealth, power, influence in the area. So at this point, there's no witnesses, there's no fingerprints on the club. There's no clear theories even on who could have taken the murder weapon. There's also not any foreign blood. There's no semen. There's no identifiable DNA. And scrapings from under Martha's fingernails, which makes sense if she was hit from behind. So because of this, the case really starts to cool off. Months go by. There's not any new breakthroughs or leads, and eventually, years go by. No arrests are made. There's no progress in this case. In spite of that, the Moxleys really tried to keep Martha's case alive. They offered rewards for anything that might bring her killer to justice. They did news and television segments on the case. They gave occasional updates wherever they could, but nothing moved it forward. And meanwhile, Rushton Skakel was getting tired of his family constantly being under the microscope. So he does something that changed the trajectory of the case and, of course, their lives forever.
- [42:17]
B
This episode is brought to you by Masterclass. I really want this year to be my year of learning and just kind of expanding my horizons, which is why I'm so excited about Masterclass. I've used it in the past when it came to redecorating my house and learning about interior design. This year, I'm going to try and be better about cooking. I don't like it, but I think it's because I don't understand it. So I'm gonna use Masterclass to make me a Top Chef somehow. If anyone can do it, Masterclass can. With Masterclass, you can learn from the best to become your best. You get unlimited access to over 200 classes that are taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs, and more. And there's everything. There's even courses to just teach you how to communicate better, be a better partner. Amy Poehler is teaching a class now, and there's plans that start at just $10 a month. And there's audio mode, so you can turn your commute or workout into your classroom. Masterclass really does allow you to fit these courses into your schedule. And there's thousands of short, easy to digest lessons so you can learn on your own, at your own pace. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership@masterclass.com clues. That's 15% off@masterclass.com clues masterclass.com clues do.
- [43:34]
A
You have $10,000 or more in credit card debt? Maybe you're even barely getting by by making minimum payments. With credit card debt hitting record highs, National Debt Relief offers real debt relief solutions for people struggling to keep up. These options may reduce a large portion of credit card debt for those who qualify. You don't need to declare bankruptcy and you may be able to pay back less than you owe regardless of your credit. National Debt Relief has already reduced the credit card debt for more than 550,000 consumers. So don't wait if you owe 10, 20, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card debt, you can now take advantage of this financial debt relief as the cost of living increases. To find out how much you could save, Visit National Debt Relief.com that's NationalDebtRelief.com People who didn't do what John of God wanted them to do, they usually disappeared. John of God was once Brazil's most famous spiritual healer.
- [44:35]
B
But in this limited series podcast, we uncover the darker truth behind his global empire of faith and fear. From exactly right and adonde Media, this.
- [44:47]
A
Is Two Faced John of God. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So In July of 1992, 17 years after Martha's death, Rushton hires a private investigative team called Sutton Associates. This part always kills me, Morgan, because your sons are not under investigation really anymore?
- [45:13]
B
No.
- [45:14]
A
Why are you hiring a private investigator into this case? The team was headed by a former FBI agent and Russian hoped that they would turn up additional suspects, not necessarily to solve the crime, but to deflect attention away from his family.
- [45:30]
B
It's almost giving. I don't know if anyone out there has seen scandal, but. But it's almost giving. Like Olivia Pope, where it's like we're going to investigate and see where our loose ends are and like get kind of get ahead just in case anything comes up so we can be more offensive and not so defensive.
- [45:45]
A
You know, honestly, I know that show is fiction, but I love that show so much. Maybe it is like a wealthy clientele thing where you're like, let me just get ahead of this. Like, I have the money. Let me just try to get ahead of this before anything else happens to my family.
- [45:56]
B
Yeah. Because at this point, you know, they're not suspects. The investigators had tried to have the state bring charges. The state said not enough there. It's all circumstantial. So like they were in the clear at this point. It was just kind of these rumors that still clung to them. And I mean, the newspaper of Greenwich had to put out like a thing being like, hey, enough with the rumors. Pipe down. This is just a young man at the heart of this. It's like it was just kind of a wildfire, but they weren't connected.
- [46:27]
A
Well, one thing that, like, in this case, that comes up a lot because we even talked about how the police were like, hey, can we investigate those clubs and Russian's, like, yeah, go do it. Rushton drives his children to the police station to do interviews. He is giving up so much information to the police. Like, he is overly cooperative. And these are teenagers to the point where even people who believe that one of his sons committed the crime were like, why would you do this to your kids? Like, why would you offer them up so freely to the police to just be interviewed and fingerprinted and lie detectored and all of this stuff?
- [47:00]
B
I mean, we've talked about truth serum in a past episode. Like, there's a couple different accounts that talk about how he was even giving his kids truth serum to like, get them to talk and do.
- [47:09]
A
And it's like, yeah, what? Yeah, he is very, very cooperative in this investigation.
- [47:14]
B
It's surprising.
- [47:15]
A
It is surprising. Very surprising is surprising. Now, the Sutton associates is who he hires to do this investigation. And they are known to not go easy on people, even their own clients, if it calls for it.
- [47:31]
B
And they definitely did not go easy on the Skakel family. They actually did the opposite of what Rushton was hoping for. Which is our fourth clue. The Sutton files. During this several years long and almost a million dollar investigation, this team went over the case and re interviewed witnesses very thoroughly. Their report kind of starts with this, like, really dramatic line, which is, quote, first and foremost, one, Tommy Skakel has lied to authorities about the night of October 30, 1975. Two, Michael Skakel has lied to authorities about the night of October 30, 1975. They immediately identified.
- [48:12]
A
Damn. They knew there's a problem here right off the bat.
- [48:15]
B
And at this point, Tommy and Michael are now in their early 30s. And it turns out they had lied to police about what happened that night of the murder. A lot, actually.
- [48:27]
A
Yeah. Marking the botchboard on that one because how did you not see that?
- [48:31]
B
Yeah, I mean, back in the day, these Sutton investigators found their news stories were explosive. Tommy admitted that he had not left Martha around 9:30pm like he had told the police. He says that they actually spent another 20 minutes engaging in a sexual encounter. And this is another quote from the report. No one can test that Tommy Skakel is the last person known to have seen Martha Moxley alive. Partly as a result of this ominous distinction, the second son of Rushton Skakel remains to this day a leading suspect, if not the leading suspect. But let's not forget about Michael here, because what he said to the Sutton team is also explosive. He still claimed that he went out to Jimmy's house that night, but now he confessed that after coming home at 11:30pm he didn't go to sleep right away. Instead, he snuck around Belhaven to spy on a woman that he said was always walking around her house naked. But when he discovered that that woman was dressed that night, he decided to go to Martha's yard. He said that he climbed a tree to see into Martha's third floor bedroom window and was tossing items at it to try to get her attention. Rocks, sticks, things like that. And he waited for Martha to come to the window, and when she didn't come to the window, he masturbated in the tree.
- [50:01]
A
Now, Morgan, I have a question for you.
- [50:04]
B
I'm scared.
- [50:05]
A
No, it's. It's. I promise it's not that bad. But do you think that he was confessing? Because this is like there was even a joke at the time, right? Jay Leno in one of his monologues says, why would you confess to doing that? It's less embarrassing to confess to the murder.
- [50:22]
B
I mean, that. That is quite the line.
- [50:24]
A
Yeah. So why would you like to confess that years later to the Sutton investigators? Do you think that it was because his dad hired the Sutton investigators that he figured, well, I can tell you anything because you're working for my family, so you're not going to use this against me?
- [50:37]
B
It is interesting why he would feel so comfortable. I mean, there's one source that I saw that basically kind of describes how the Sutton investigators even got them to admit this information. And essentially, the source said that investigators, they're allowed to lie. Like, we might not think about that, but like, these cops, investigators, like, they can lie. And so apparently, allegedly, they had lied to the boys and said, like, hey, the. The state has DNA. Like, how do you explain what happened with you that night if they have your DNA on her? And that's when they both offered up.
- [51:12]
A
These new stories that both had sexual components.
- [51:16]
B
That both had sexual components to be like, oh, well, if they're finding my DNA, it's because of this. And so this Sutton team, they eventually kind of get to this point where they're like, clearly these kids lied. We don't know if they're lying to us now. We don't know if they lied to the cops at the beginning. And this is the truth now. Like, we don't know, but clearly they're lying. Yeah, they were able to fake polygraphs. We can't tell you which is which. But, hey, Rushton, based on a report, you got big problems, buddy. And Michael's story wasn't adding up. Even like this did happen around the time of Martha's death. And pathologists, dog bark experts that they brought in even did believe that she died around 10pm and Michael was, like, placing himself near the location that night. Like, he would have walked right by Martha on his way home. There's more. And this kind of feels like the nail in the coffin for a lot of people because the Sutton associates do actually prepare a psychological profile of the killer, see if this rings any alarm bells for you guys out there. They say that the offender was likely between 14 and 18 years of age, lived within walking distance of the victim's residence, was in the same socioeconomic status as the victim, had regular interaction with the victim, would have exhibited strong sibling rivalry tendencies, would have experienced behavioral problems at school and at home, and was under the influence of drugs and or alcohol at the time of this crime.
- [52:49]
A
What's crazy is it's both Skakel boys that fit that exact profile.
- [52:54]
B
Both to a T. The report did look at another suspect, though. I mean, there were a lot of skeptics out there that were pointing their fingers pretty often at Ken Littleton, the family tutor. And even though he was ruled out during the initial investigation, his behavior following Martha's death was strange. Within a year of Martha's murder, Ken was actually fired by Rushton Skakel for allegedly drinking on the job. And the kids were all failing their classes. And from this point, his life just went off the rails. He began drinking, using drugs. In the summer of 1976, Ken was arrested for grand larceny, breaking and entering, and burglary. After this, his rap sheet grew with shoplifting, assault and battery, driving under the influence. And then there's like, this weird hair evidence that gets mentioned. Apparently, there were two hairs found on a sheet that police had used to wrap Martha's body in. Those hairs were microscopically similar to hair samples that were taken from Ken. But per, like some of our sources, no DNA was found in the hair which. That. I'm like, huh?
- [54:13]
A
Well, it was pre DNA. We had this In a heart starts pounding case, too, where you used to only be able to tell. We had talked about this in another case. You should only be able to. To test hair under a microscope and be like, does it look similar?
- [54:25]
B
You have to match, like, the thread bands, like, whatever in the hair.
- [54:29]
A
And if there wasn't a root to the hair, it's a lot harder to get the DNA off of it.
- [54:33]
B
Yeah, I just. I was like, of course. Of course there's no DNA found in the hair.
- [54:37]
A
Yeah.
- [54:38]
B
And eventually forensic evaluation also showed some dissimilarities in the hair samples and Ken's hair. So they eventually determined, like, hey, not Ken's hair. We don't know whose hair it is. Was the hair even from someone or was the hair on the sheet already to begin with?
- [54:53]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [54:54]
B
It's like, it could be a. It could be a mark. I don't know. And the Sutton report really does highlight polygraphs. You know, basically, at this point, everyone in Belhaven had been polygraphed. Like, they were polygraphing every kid. Like, it was almost like police. Like, their gold standard was polygraph, and they were gonna, like, let the polygraph, you know, really lead them through the case.
- [55:15]
A
Yeah.
- [55:16]
B
And the Sutton report makes a note quote. Just as the polygraph will let someone who are lying slip by, it can also falsely identify others who are not lying. Certain individuals, no matter what they say, will fail the polygraph. Such people are usually very nervous, unstable, or agitated. Littleton is all three.
- [55:37]
A
It gets talked about in Dead Certain, the NBC investigative podcast, where, before he takes the polygraph, Ken, who is starting at that point in his life to develop some severe mental health issues. They ask him what medicine he's on, and he is on some very heavy medicine for schizophrenia and his bipolar disorder and his. The delusions he's been having and the mania and all of that. And in the Sutton report, they're like, no one who is on this much medicine can reliably take a polygraph test because you just don't know how that is affecting their, like, physiological responses to these questions. Anyways, so it was like, just.
- [56:19]
B
Yeah, because that's. That's how polygraphs work, too. It's like your heart rate and, like, spikes and, like, things like that. So it's like, yeah, if you're heavily medicated, you're not. It's not accurate reading, and they're not accurate. You know, it's kind of pseudoscience, it seems. But, I mean, there's been interviews with Ken where, you know, he described his drug use. And this could be very triggering for those that have struggled with addiction. But Ken describes, like, shooting a massive amount of cocaine directly into his bloodstream and hallucinating like, a statue and carrying the statue. It's just. It's a really wild story. So, like, this. This guy was, like, really clearly struggling, and it kind of poses the question, like, did this begin as he was tutoring, or truly, did this start happening after because of maybe what happened when he was tutoring? Like, the questions really start coming about. But this full report was never made public, so we don't really know what final conclusions this investigation really came to. And when they showed, you know, their discovery to Rushton, all of these results, what they were gathering, Rushton ordered the team to abort the investigation entirely.
- [57:34]
A
Yeah. So by the time their investigation ends up wrapping up, it's been almost 20 years since Martha's death, and, you know, fortunately for the Skakels, all the detectives who were working on the report had signed confidentiality agreements. But there was one person who had been overlooked in all of this, and that was a freelance writer who transcribed the investigation out of a belief that justice was not being served and fear that money could potentially cover up the crime. In 1995, this transcriber leaked what they had written to reporters, and within months, excerpts from the Sutton files were published in Newsday. And that brought even more attention to Martha's case, but it ultimately didn't solve it.
- [58:20]
B
It did, however, put Michael back under a microscope, specifically because of the damning statements that he had made. Which brings us to our fifth clue. Details that were revealed after parts of the Sutton report became public. For example, in the spring of 1976, several months after the murder, Michael went to a barber shop in Greenwich. According to court documents, while the barber was preparing to cut his hair, Michael snapped, saying, quote, I'm going to kill him. Presumably about the barber, although it's not clear why. But his sister Julie was there and tried to calm him down, telling him to just, like, shut up, kind of get it together. But Michael responded, allegedly, quote, why not? I did it before then. A year after the murder in 1977, Michael's dad sent him to New York for an appointment. The family gardener drove him, and on the way, Michael had apparently said, quote, done something very bad, and he had to either kill himself or get out of the country. On the way back to Greenwich that day, the car stopped in traffic while they were on a bridge, and apparently Michael got out and ran to the railing like he was going to jump the gardener caught him, forced him back in the car, only for Michael to slip out to the other side and to the opposite railing of the bridge. The following year, things got even more intense. In March 1978, Michael nearly ran over a policeman, led cops on a chase into the mountains, and was then arrested for driving under the influence of. He was 17 or 18 at this time. The Skakel family attorney worked out a deal with police that charges would be dropped if Michael was kept under observation for six months. He was then sent to an institute in Maine called Elon School. And this was a place for troubled teens with emotional, behavioral, and drug abuse issues.
- [60:16]
A
It's kind of one of the most famous troubled teen schools in American history.
- [60:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, horrible, horrible, horrible, bad. I mean, if anyone watched the Paris Hilton documentary, like, you kind of look, learn about these, like, boarding camp schools and these camps where you send bad kids. And like, someone described it in a Reddit comment, I saw where it was a surreal nightmare psychological torture chamber that was sold to families as a behavior modification program.
- [60:45]
A
Yeah, they basically just abused the kids and make them worse and then send them back out into society. Yeah.
- [60:51]
B
I mean, you told me something crazy where that you saw, like, Reddit essentially, like, shut the school down eventually.
- [60:57]
A
Yeah. I mean, this is how I first heard about this case was I was researching the Elon School for something else. But, yeah, it was like, 2014, and a guy went on Reddit and was like, hey, I had this crazy experience at Elon School. Can anyone relate? And that eventually led to exposes being written in Time magazine and. And, like, enrollment really ramping down, like, tanking at the school. And eventually the school did shut down. But it. They say it started with that Reddit post.
- [61:22]
B
Yeah. And so clearly, a lot of these kids, these students were having bad experiences there. But supposedly Michael, while he was there, had told his classmates some wild details. One former student said Michael told her, quote, he had been drinking alcohol the night Martha was murdered. He couldn't remember what he had done, but he thought he was put in Elon for two reasons. To keep him away from the police and Spotlight, and because they thought he killed Martha. Michael told a different student there that he was getting away with murder because he was, quote, a Kennedy. And he allegedly told the same student that he had a crush on a girl who rejected him. So he, quote, drove her skull in with a golf club. However, this witness was later discounted. He was supposedly high on drugs when he testified. But all of these incriminating confessions, like, did not stop after Michael Left the Elon School. Years later, in the spring of 1997, 36 year old Michael was at a party where he allegedly told people that he was smoking pot and on LSD the night of the murder. When he learned Tommy had hooked up with Martha, he was so high and jealous that he hit her with the golf club. Some of these confessions were discounted later because they occurred while Michael was under the influence of. But there was one confession that like just couldn't be explained away and it was that Michael had planned to come out with an autobiography. One that was supposed to be titled, quote, Dead Man A Kennedy Cousin comes Clean. In June of 1998, Michael's agent apparently told publishers, quote, what he has to say will make international headlines. But before the book was finished, Michael's lawyer supposedly quashed it. Even so, the book proposal, a rough outline and a voice recording from Michael was leaked to the public in it, in this recording, Michael said, quote, I pulled my pants down, I masturbated for 30 seconds in the tree. And I remembered thinking, oh God, I hope nobody saw me. End quote. To be clear, in this recording, Michael did not admit to bludgeoning Martha in this book proposal. But it calls into question Michael's alibi and everything he told police about that night. Like he made himself look like a liar. There's no integrity there. So how can you believe even this story which factored into a huge, huge decision.
- [64:02]
A
Yeah, and you know, the Skakel family would later on say that it wasn't that whole quote that was being shared, it was like part of it that was taken out of context. So they thought that the part of the quote that really made headlines was oh my God, I hope nobody saw me. Insinuating that he was talking about the murder when really he was insinuating about masturbating in the tree. But whatever. Tomato, Tomato. So on June 17, 1998, Connecticut state prosecutors announced a grand jury were going to review the evidence to see if there was enough to fill finally file charges. Two years later on January 18, 2000, an arrest warrant was issued for 39 year old Michael Skakel. The next day he surrendered to the police and he was charged with first degree murder. He was released on a half million dollar bond. But at his arraignment on March 14, Michael went over to Martha's mom Dorothy and told her, quote, you've got the wrong guy. So on April 2, 2002, 41 year old Michael's trial began. It had opened been almost 27 years since Martha Moxley died in Their opening statements, the prosecution and the defense presented two totally different pictures of Michael. So the prosecution said that he was this wealthy, privileged teenager from the famous Kennedy family who brutally killed Martha after she rejected him. The motive? Jealousy and rage. And throughout the trial, the state called on numerous witnesses who could talk about the many confessions that Michael had made. They also leaned on the fact that his alibi had seemed to change over the years. And, you know, there was other really incriminating testimony that was shared at this trial, some of it coming from Ken Littleton, who was the tutor to the Skakels, because, you know, Ken comes forward and says that he witnessed Michael kill animals, small animals, in a fit of rage. He even said that one time he witnessed Michael kill, like, a squirrel or a chipmunk using a golf club, something like two weeks after Martha had died.
- [66:03]
B
Just a few weeks after.
- [66:05]
A
So that starts coming forward. It paints this really horrible picture of Michael. And then they also really lean on the fact that his alibi kept changing over the years.
- [66:13]
B
Yeah, and then we have the defense. The defense presented Michael as a troubled but innocent teen being blamed decades later. They argued that memories had faded, evidence was gone, and other suspects, including his brother and tutor Ken, were likely responsible. They tried to undermine the credibility of the prosecution's witnesses. They claimed Michael's secondhand confessions came from untrustworthy sources. And they highlighted that there was no real forensic evidence linking Michael to the crime scene. They argued that no evidence and no witnesses equals no case. But was it enough?
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A
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A
And breathe.
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A
The discount they gave me on my first order.
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- [67:59]
A
Well, during closing arguments, the prosecution played a voice recording that Michael had made while he was putting together his autobiography. The one where he says, oh, my God, I hope nobody saw me, which we already discussed, is not the full quote. They didn't include the context that he was masturbating about the sexual fantasy, none of that. So it seemed like Michael was confessing to the murder, not to being caught being in the tree. Meanwhile, the defense told jurors in their closing argument not to convict on hearsay and gossip from decades ago. The jury deliberated for four days, and then finally, they reached a verdict. On June 7, 2002, a jury found Michael Skakel guilty of murder. And two months later, on August 29, 2002, Michael was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. And after that, you know, the case really seemed closed.
- [68:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, at this point, Martha's family felt that justice was done. Her father had passed away in 1988, but her mom, Dorothy, described the verdict as a dream come true after 27 years of waiting for justice. But there was one Skakel family member that wasn't going to let this go.
- [69:16]
A
And that is Michael's cousin. Some of you may be familiar with him these days. RFK Jr he refused to accept this conviction.
- [69:25]
B
Yeah, and you guys, this is the same person, Wacko, that admitted to dumping a bear cub in Central Park. He's also been a big proponent of spreading a lot of misinformation in regards to health. The list kind of goes on and on with him. But, yeah, one in the same. RFK Jr.
- [69:47]
A
Although he did not have any experience in criminal law, he did want to do a real deep dive into Michael's case. So In January of 2003, the Atlantic Monthly published an opinion piece from RFK Jr called, quote, a miscarriage of justice. And in that article, he really lays out the issues he has with Michael's conviction and all the mistakes that were made along the way by the criminal justice system. And one big one was the fact that Connecticut prosecutor Jonathan Benedict played Michael's voice recording out of context because the jury didn't hear the part that was about masturbating in the tree, basically, which.
- [70:24]
B
I have a question for any lawyers that could be listening. Say Michael was your client in court, and you hear this recording being played, you know, in a snippet out of context. Couldn't you object to that? That's a question I would want to know for the lawyers. Like, as a lawyer, couldn't you be like, objection, your honor. Like, you're not playing the full thing like it's misleading. I don't know. I need lawyers to chime in. But that's one thing where I was.
- [70:45]
A
Like, that is curious.
- [70:46]
B
It is interesting that, you know, you say it wasn't out of context, but why didn't his team then, you know, object or say, hey, no, no, no, play the recording in full?
- [70:56]
A
Well, I'm curious if they didn't submit it as evidence on their end, if they don't have any control over to how the evidence is being perceived. But I am curious. It's a good phone. A lawyer. Yeah. And RFK jr's opinion piece later expanded into an entire book that he wrote about the case called quote, unquote, Framed why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Did Not Commit. And in it, he brings up another detail that police either missed or refused to take seriously. And that is that during Michael's trial, a former classmate of his contacted the police and Michael's legal team to say he knew exactly who killed Martha. And the man's name was Tony Bryant. Now, in 2003, Tony was interviewed by Michael's legal team and said that on the night Martha died, he and two of his friends from New York City went to Greenwich to hang out. Their names were Adolph Hasbrouck, who also went by Al and Burton Tinsley. According to Tony, Al was obsessed with Martha after meeting her during an earlier visit to Greenwich with Tony. And on October 30, during their train ride up, Al and Burton said that they wanted to, quote, go caveman on a girl that night. Tony said that meant hitting a woman over the head with a club, dragging her into the bushes, and sexually assaulting her. He said those caveman sticks that they were going to use were golf clubs the other two had found in the Skakels yard. But Tony claimed that he didn't see anything that night because he left at 9:20pm and went back to New York.
- [72:31]
B
Convenient.
- [72:32]
A
Very convenient. And when Tony caught up with his friends just a few days later, they supposedly admitted to him what they had done. There's obviously a couple of problems with Tony's testimony that he brings forward. Now, according to Leonard Levitt, who's a respected reporter and investigator, Tony was a completely unreliable witness. He says that because in 1993, Tony was convicted of armed robbery and home invasion in California. He was also allegedly fired by a Texas law firm after they learned that he hadn't in fact passed the bar exam, had just lied about it. And he also pled guilty to underreporting millions of dollars of income. So considering Tony's history, Len Levitt theorized that RFK Jr. Was using Tony to frame Al and Burton to get Michael Skaggle released.
- [73:22]
B
And a lot of Martha's friends think the same. In one 48 Hours interview I watched with some of her friends, like they really talk about Martha's diary and how she wrote everything. You know, every person she hung out with every night was basically mentioned in this diary. And this dance that Tony said his friends met Martha at, there was no mention. Martha put exactly who she danced with that night in her diary. And one of her friends that's interviewing with 48 hours was there. He danced with Martha basically all night. He said there were no strangers at this dance. And that would have been noticeable for people from this small community if couple kids from New York came down to this dance. Like he's, like this didn't happen.
- [74:01]
A
But this theory also plays into exactly what the police wanted to have had happened, which is that these vagrants and barbarians from the big city came to our nice little small wealthy town, stole the golf clubs and committed this crime.
- [74:15]
B
It's, it's like so funny because it's conveniently the story that police tried to go off at the beginning. Oh, kids leave their toys out all the time. And it's, it happens to be the same story that Tony comes forward and starts telling.
- [74:28]
A
Yeah.
- [74:28]
B
Like where did you, where'd you actually get this?
- [74:31]
A
Yeah. Did you read about that theory from the police? And then I don't know, I don't know. But it is very suspect. Yeah. Now Tony also refused to go on record with Connecticut authorities and his account could not be corroborated by any witnesses. And besides that, it was never explained how Alan Burton could have slipped past the two guard gates into Belhaven that night.
- [74:50]
B
Yeah. And I will say I plan a little bit deep diving on this section too because an hour train ride to hang out just like was so surprising to me. And after they took the train ride in, there wasn't really any public transportation to get around Greenwich either. And especially to get into the neighborhood. Like I looked. And a town wide minibus system was only in the planning stages at this time. Like this again you guys, 1975, like there wasn't established public transport. So how are these kids just walking around miles and miles to hang out? It just felt really unbelievable. Especially given the fact he wouldn't go on record with police.
- [75:32]
A
Yeah. And like given all of these weird and suspect things about this, you know, whole confession that comes forward. It does kick off a new examination into Michael's trial and his conviction as well. So in 2005, Michael's legal team petitioned for a new trial to happen. But In January of 2006, the state Supreme Court unanimously upheld Michael's murder conviction. They said he has to remain behind bars, but Michael's team was not going to give up that easily. And eventually they go to the Supreme Court. In 2013, after 11 years behind bars, they do grant him a new trial, saying that his defense attorney was, in fact, ineffective. He was freed, this time on a $1.2 million bond. But in 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed that decision. However, they still allowed him to stay out on bail. And that was until 2018, when they changed their minds again and ruled that Michael should have a new trial after all. Now, after more than 40 years, the state was ready for a new trial. Except then, in 2020, prosecutors announced that they would not retry Skakel after all. Instead, his conviction was formally vacated, and to this day, he remains free. Though I did read. So what's interesting about that is he can never be, like, fully cleared of the crime, basically, until there's another trial, but they're just never gonna do that. So it's always gonna kind of be on his record that he's still accused of doing this.
- [77:00]
B
Yeah. And per clips of him I've seen in an interview, he's doing one with this podcast that we've talked about as well. He's not very pleased by that.
- [77:10]
A
No, he's suing the state right now. Let's see. So the last thing that I saw, Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, Sue's lead investigator in Connecticut Town, years after his murder conviction was overturned. And this is the thing that also Rushton did, which it's a dumb thing to do, but ultimately it was good because it may have, like, had some more information come out where, like, you can't just sit quietly and be like, I'm not in jail, so I'm just not going to do anything to make myself look suspicious. Like, everyone in this family has to be like, no, I'm so innocent that I'm going to continue to pursue this until they can see how innocent I am. And then when they do that, more information comes out that's incriminating and makes them look bad.
- [77:49]
B
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of people on Reddit that love to talk about how, like, RFK Jr. Didn't write this book to really clear his cousin's name. Like, he was allegedly more Concerned with his name and it impacting his presidential run.
- [78:04]
A
Right, of course.
- [78:05]
B
That he wanted. So it's like, you know, like, that it wasn't this altruistic motive behind it, but, yeah, they were. They were very. Just kind of obsessed with fully clearing their name. And there's always so much weight on this with, like, the Kennedy connection and how, like, no one wants to be tarnished. But that kind of brings us to where we are today. I mean, whoever murdered Martha Moxley had up to 15 hours to cover his or her tracks before her body was found. 15 hours to dispose of the section of golf club, wash off the blood, dispose of any bloodied clothes, compose an alibi. So out of, like, everyone that we've talked about in this case, who could it be? Obviously, we know who the big players are. You have Michael saying he was in the tree outside of her house masturbating.
- [79:02]
A
I guess the theories would have been, so Michael saw that she was cozying up to Tommy. Who knows if they actually had that, like, sexual encounter, he said, and then would have followed her with the golf club down the street, committed the crime, left, but then also come back later and looked in her window. But wouldn't he already know that she was dead? That's the part that always trips me up about Michael being the one who did it.
- [79:28]
B
For me, I don't know what story to believe that these people are telling.
- [79:32]
A
Right, Right.
- [79:33]
B
I'm like, they're so clearly lying. I'm like, to me, I hear, oh, Michael went to his cousin's house to watch, you know, this show and the podcast Dead Certain, does, like, really get into the timeline? And he's like, you know, this investigator went so far as to look at what commercial was being played to corroborate the story. But to me, I'm like, you have this big family, this big machine. I mean, you look at the Kennedys and all of the. The conspiracies around the Kennedys, and, you know, what Ted Kennedy did with a car accident and fleeing the scene. Like, there's so much surrounding the families that it's like, how do we know that this whole one isn't lying? How do we know that Michael even went to his cousins to watch the show? Like, was the family protecting their own? Like, what story is real?
- [80:21]
A
It's just so hard for me to believe that the family was protecting their own. When Rushton allowed the police to come interview all the kids and look through all of the stuff in the house and look at the golf clubs, he just didn't seem to be covering anything up, which is so strange to me.
- [80:36]
B
Yeah. And I. From one source, I saw, like, you know, it's. It was very confusing. I believe it was, like, Rushton's sister that, like, finally stepped in and was like, hey, enough is enough. Like, you're not gonna cooperate with investigators anymore. Like, what you're doing and putting your kids through is crazy. Yeah. So, you know, it is really interesting, but I think absentee parent really disconnected from his children. I mean, so much that the gardener is driving your son to an appointment. I feel like he was probably in so much denial. Like, my kids could never have done this. That he was gonna go above and beyond to prove. Try to prove just that.
- [81:14]
A
Yeah.
- [81:15]
B
But it backfired. Like, it just. He didn't have a good grasp on what was really going on.
- [81:20]
A
Yeah. Didn't really know his family. Cause I guess the only, like, if it was Tommy, it would have had to be that she rejected an advance that he made, and he, I guess.
- [81:29]
B
Followed her back, which to me, and a lot of people online, like, they really point to Tommy kind of being the suspect. A lot of people hold out that, you know, it was actually Michael. But a lot of people look at Tommy, too. Like, based on Martha's diary entries, he was kind of pushing boundaries and something we haven't talked about. Martha had a boyfriend.
- [81:53]
A
Peter.
- [81:53]
B
Peter. Martha was dating this guy named Peter Zaluka. And then people point to, like, well, what about Peter? Maybe Peter went over there and saw Martha and Tommy and freaked out and got mad. I mean, there was one diary entry from September 12th where Martha wrote, I was driving again, and Tom put his arm around me. He kept doing stuff like that. Jesus, if Peter ever found out, I would be dead. So you have that. But Peter does have an alibi for that night. He was at home. His mom even confirms this. Apparently she asked Peter if he wanted to go take the car to Martha's even. But he didn't have a license and had smoked some pot earlier in the day. And he recalled feeling freaked out by the dark and the wind. So he stayed in watching the French Connection and just went to bed. He also shares this quote. Like, quote, I mean, if only I'd gotten in the car that night and illegally driven down to Belhaven, maybe Martha wouldn't be dead. Or maybe I'd be dead, too. Detectives did give him a polygraph back in 1975. I mean, again, they polygraphed everyone, and he was crossed off the list at that time. But, yeah, it's like Tommy. You know, a lot of people do hold out for Tommy being like he was the last one to see Martha and he willingly, freely admits it.
- [83:17]
A
But there's a couple of interesting timestamps in Tommy's story where he is confirmed to be watching TV with his family at 9:23, because there's one commercial break they all remember seeing and investigators have gone back and, you know, done the exact timeline and found out that he would have been seated in the house at 9:23 watching that commercial break. And then also at 10:20 he was watching TV with Ken the tutor. And no one really knows what happened to him in that like almost hour long break in between. But the idea that he went out, committed this like heinous murder and no one saw him with blood on him that night.
- [83:53]
B
And the window, like I know there's. In the Dead Certain podcast, it's mentioned that like Ken did a room check at 9:45 and didn't see Tommy, but then was back watching the end of the show with him. And it's like, could he have done, you know, what he did to Martha in 15 minutes? The timeline in this case is what really throws me for a loop because you have all of these players and they're close on a timeline, but yet just off enough to really confuse and like kind of bungle you.
- [84:22]
A
Yeah.
- [84:23]
B
And then this whole like 10:00pm window, everything happened at 10:00pm I mean, it's getting narrowed down because of a dog bark.
- [84:30]
A
Right.
- [84:30]
B
And a dog going nuts.
- [84:32]
A
Would the dog have gone nuts at something else?
- [84:34]
B
Can you trust a dog? Or is the dog barking at a raccoon? Like what? Yeah, like what are we really basing all of this off on? And the medical examiner didn't give a precise window of 10pm I believe it was like 10pm to 5am so.
- [84:50]
A
Right.
- [84:50]
B
Do we really know the timeline here and who's telling the truth on the timeline? Because everyone has proven themselves to be a liar.
- [84:59]
A
Everyone has lied throughout the entire investigation.
- [85:02]
B
So who do you believe?
- [85:03]
A
So is it Michael, is it Tommy, or is it Ken the tutor?
- [85:06]
B
Or is it option four, someone we don't know that magically slipped through guard gates and extra patrols and somehow escaped.
- [85:17]
A
Yeah.
- [85:18]
B
With a weapon that they found in a yard down the street?
- [85:21]
A
I don't know that we'll ever know, but hopefully. I mean, I'm excited for the rest of the podcast to come out for Dead Certain.
- [85:27]
B
I know, I'm like waiting for episode three to drop tomorrow.
- [85:29]
A
I know for some, like, just to get more information on this because there's so there's just a lot going on in this case. And with that, we'll talk about our Missing person of the week.
- [85:40]
B
Our Missing person case of the week is Joan Lee Hall. Joan has been missing since September 30, 1983. She went missing from Warrenton, Oregon. She would now be 59 years old. We do have an age progressed photo that you guys will see, but Joan was last seen at around 2pm on September 30, 1983, walking down Main street in Warrenton, Oregon. The last time Joan was seen, she was wearing a green hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, a blue jacket and white and maroon sneakers and was carrying a blue and white backpack and a brown purse. Joan's ears are pursed. Her nickname is Joanie. If you have any information about Joan's whereabouts, we ask you to contact the Clatsop County Sheriff's Office in Oregon at 1-503-325-2061. That is all we have for this episode of Clues Now.
- [86:33]
A
We want to hear from you guys.
- [86:35]
B
We really do.
- [86:36]
A
Yeah. Really, really. Thoughts, theories, anything we could have missed when we were re going through, like the facts of the case at the end.
- [86:44]
B
So much on this case.
- [86:46]
A
There's so, so much. And I'm very curious to hear what you guys think. Like, did the state of Connecticut get it right and actually convict the right person and then let them free or, you know, was it someone else?
- [86:58]
B
Yeah.
- [86:58]
A
Yeah.
- [86:59]
B
At Crime House, we really value your support. So again, yeah, share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review, follow and subscribe. Subscribe to Clues to help others discover our show. And we'll see you next week, guys.
- [87:13]
A
Bye. Bye.
- [87:18]
B
Meet Millie. Millie's the head of the household. She demands her dry food come with a side of wet food. Millie, Sitter from Rover totally gets Millie, which is best for everyone. Find a sitter who's a perfect match for your pet. Rover. We get your pet.
- [87:34]
A
Hey there. We're Sabrina d' Anarroga and Corinne Vien, hosts of Crimes of.
- [87:39]
B
Crimes of is a weekly true crime series with each season diving into a different theme, from unsolved murders to mysterious disappearances and the cases that haunt us most. And since it's Valentine season, we are unpacking Crimes of Passion. When love turns into obsession, passion twists into paranoia, and jealousy drives people beyond the edge of reason.
- [88:00]
A
Crimes of is a Crime House original. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube, new episodes every Tuesday.