← Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley Murder
Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley Murder
Mischief Night
00:50:58
On Halloween 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley’s brutally beaten body is found steps from her home. The town of Greenwich, Connecticut is rocked by the murder.
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- [00:00]
Andrew Goldman
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- [00:32]
Sheila McGuire
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- [00:59]
Andrew Goldman
What do you know? It's kind of an old fashioned expression. My dad often used it to express mild surprise. Oh, look, there's a for sale sign on the neighbor's house. What do you know? Neil Diamond's coming to the civic center. What do you know? But before we begin this story, I want you to treat it as a serious question. What do you know? I mean, really. No. Is it possible that what you say you know is actually an opinion? Something you just think? And if you think something, what various forces worked on you to make you think that way? And were those forces so effective in making you think something that somewhere along the way you started believing that you didn't just think it, you knew it. In 1975, a 15 year old girl named Martha Moxley was murdered in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was rich and beautiful and loved by all who knew her for decades. Despite intense media scrutiny on the tragic murder in a wealthy, supposedly safe community, police failed to make an arrest until the year 2000 when they took Martha's one time neighbor, Michael Skakel into custody. He was 39 years old. Back in 1975, he'd been 15. Just like Martha, he was wealthy. Like her, he was also a cousin of the Kennedys. The media responded in predictable fashion. Kennedy nephew Michael Skakel, now 39, charged with murdering his Greenwich, Connecticut neighbor of the late Robert Kennedy. A teenage neighbor and friend of Martha.
- [02:40]
Sheila McGuire
Moxley related to the Kennedy name has lent this case tremendous notoriety.
- [02:45]
Andrew Goldman
I'm like a lot of people, I have an appetite for lurid news. A good murder story, especially one involving famous names. I watched the news, I read the articles, of course. Michael Skakel killed his next door neighbor, Martha Moxley. He beat her to death with a golf club on October 30th, 1975, when they were both 15. I knew it. And if you followed the case like I did, I bet you knew it, too. In 2002, a jury convicted Skakel, and the judge threw the book at him. It was nearly the maximum sentence possible, 20 years to life, for Kennedy nephew Michael Skakel, convicted of killing his Greenwich, Connecticut neighbor Martha MOXLEY back in 1975. And then in 2013, a judge released Michael Skakel on appeal after he'd served 11 and a half years in state prison. For the media, it was anything but an exoneration, but rather the kind of clever legal maneuver only accessible to the super wealthy, free on a technicality. A famous New Yorker writer, Jeffrey Toobin, when tweeting about the case, appended the hashtag rich people justice. I live in Westport, Connecticut with my wife and two teenage boys. It's just a handful of exits north of greenwich on i95. A few summers ago, my then 15 year old son Henry was doing an odd job for a woman in town, helping to clean out her garage. Henry said he told her that I was a journalist researching the Martha Moxley case. When she heard that, she immediately stopped what she was doing and said, I know exactly what happened to Martha Moxley. Michael Skakel murdered her. She knew just like I knew. And a lot of people who had important roles in the outcome of this case knew too. At the start of this episode, I asked you to consider a question. What do you know? Now I want to ask you a follow up. Says who? My name is Andrew Goldman. I've been a journalist for 30 years. I got involved in this case in 2015 when current Secretary of Health and Human services Bobby Kennedy Jr. Reached out asking if I was interested in ghostwriting his book about it. He wanted me to help exonerate his cousin. It was a great offer, except unlike Bobby, I didn't believe Michael Skakel was innocent. At that particular moment, I really needed the work. It was a moral quandary. The Kennedy family has a long history of using the media to carry its water, sometimes to defend the indefensible. Was I willing to be part of that machine? I consulted my wife and my shrink. I came up with moral justifications. But today, when I think back to why I took it, my true motivation is obvious. I think if I'm good at my job, it's because I'm curious. A less charitable way to put it would be nosy. I was way too fascinated with the Kennedys, with Michael Skakel and the Moxley murder, to turn down the opportunity to penetrate the case's inner circle. The book was published in 2016. But here's the thing. Once I started researching this case, I couldn't stop. I was no longer working for rfk and the book was done, but I wasn't. I think it would be fair to say that this story has become an addiction for me. If I can do justice to this unbelievable yarn, I suspect it'll become an addiction for you, too. I thought I understood the case. It was a decades long story about the powerful and the privileged seemingly getting away with murder. But the deeper I dug, the more I came to question everything I thought I knew. I discovered a much darker, more shocking tale than I ever could have guessed. In this series, you'll be hearing from dozens of voices, some of whom may be familiar to you. I'm Jeffrey Toobin.
- [06:58]
Sheila McGuire
My name is Amanda Knox.
- [07:00]
Andrew Goldman
My name is Mark Fuhrman. Glenda. Kenny Baden. Dr. Henry Lee. Oh, and one more person who's never before spoken to the media. Can you tell me your name? Say my name is and why I might be interviewing you? My name is Michael Skakel. And why am I being interviewed? I mean, that's kind of a big question, isn't it? From NBC News studios and highly replaceable productions, this is dead certain. The Martha Moxley murder. When I accepted the Skakel book gig, I did the first thing I do whenever I approach a story, a deep dive on the subject. I read the three books that had been written about the case. I went back and read a bunch of trial coverage from newspapers, as well as the work of two of my heroes in journalism, writing for the most esteemed high profile publications in America. My research confirmed everything I thought I knew about the case and worse. Writing for the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin reported that Skakel, driven mad from a romantic obsession, killed Moxley and incriminated himself by confessing to the crime repeatedly. In the 27 years following the murder, Toobin dismissed out of hand the idea that any of the others suspected of the crime over the years could have done it. Dominic Dunne in Vanity Fair described how Skakel's family, rich and Kennedy, connected by marriage, used its wealth and influence to evade justice for decades. He reported that a detective agency the Skakel patriarch hired in hopes of clearing the family name had reinvestigated the case and determined Michael Skakel to be the likely killer. In 1998, Mark Fuhrman, made famous by the O.J. simpson trial, authored a popular book that renewed interest in the case. Fuhrman wrote that immediately after the murder. Skakel's father had apparently hatched a conspiracy of silence within the family, shipping his kids off to their ski retreat so they could get their stories straight. Then he warehoused his son Michael in a treatment center where investigators couldn't get to him. In the end, it was the rich kid's big mouth that undid him. Even Skakel's multi million dollar gold plated defense couldn't save him from justice. When Skakel successfully appealed his conviction, Toobin wrote that Skakel had finally found a judge who believed his story. His freedom, he wrote, was about his privilege, not his innocence. I didn't grow up with money. I never went to sleepaway camp, never learned to play tennis, golf, ski or even go on a family vacation. It's true, I have lived in Westport, a really nice town in Connecticut for the last decade. But the ways of the country clubs and money elite remain a complete mystery to me. I'm a stop and shop sale watcher, living among a lot of if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Types of to understand this murder, I'd have to learn about how the other half lived in tony Greenwich. In the 70s, if you wanted to get rich, you worked in New York City. Likewise in the 70s if you worked in the city, were rich and had kids, you lived anywhere but New York City. There were plenty of nice suburbs to stash your family far from the crime ridden, nearly bankrupt metropolis. But Greenwich, Connecticut was the dream. Its schools were among the best in the country and it only took 25 minutes for the express into Grand Central. Of all the towns on Connecticut's so called Gold coast on the Long Island Sound, a Greenwich address had and continues to have the most cachet among the moneyed elite. But like every creme, Greenwich had its creme de la creme and the creamiest creme was Belhaven, which on a map looks like a toe dipping into the Long Island Sound. On the south tip of Greenwich, Belhaven was built as a vacation colony in the late 19th century. Grand White clapboard cottages with wraparound porches on which you could sip your sherry at sunset while listening to scratchy Brahms symphonies on the gramophone. VIPs, captains of industry and a couple famous entertainers like Frank Gorshin, the riddler from the 60s Batman series were typical of Belhaven's residents. In the summer of 1974, a moving truck rolled up to the big white house at 38 Walsh Lane. It had come 3,000 miles all the way from Piedmont, California. 42 year old David Moxley had Been tapped by accounting giant Touche Ross to relocate from the west coast to run its New York office. The job and the house and the neighborhood were a big step up in the world for the Kansas native. David and Dorothy Moxley's teenage kids, Martha and John, would live among the most privileged families in America. That being said, at least for kids, Belhaven didn't feel all that stuffy.
- [11:55]
Sheila McGuire
My name is Sheila McGuire. The back of my home looked at the back of Martha's home.
- [12:00]
Andrew Goldman
Sheila's a mom of two grown kids. I interviewed her on her day off in the Newtown, Connecticut public library near her home. Like her friend and neighbor Martha, sheila was also 15 in 1975, one of a big Catholic brood of seven girls.
- [12:16]
Sheila McGuire
Yeah, it was a charming time. There was kick the can going on in the streets, flashlight tags. We had special little codes. We were putting little secret notes in trees. We had secret calls for one another. We rode bikes all over the place. I've swum in almost every pool there, and a couple of them in the middle of the night. It just goes kind of the way it was, you know, everyone was essentially safe.
- [12:39]
Andrew Goldman
Like most Belhaven kids, Sheila and her sisters were basically free range.
- [12:43]
Sheila McGuire
I think a lot of the parents were absentee at the time because it was just the way it was. I mean, the sound of music in Belhaven was clinking of ice and glasses, you know, and 11 year olds watching 3 year olds, you know, for 12 hours a day, you know, or 9 year olds watching 3 year olds for 12 hours a day at the club. I mean, I think I babysat for three families at the same time when.
- [13:02]
Andrew Goldman
I was 11 by the club, Sheila means the Belhaven Club. It sat within a mile of each of the 120 or so houses in Belhaven. It offered sailing lessons, tennis, and a huge dining room overlooking the sound. Homeowners were nearly assured membership, but they didn't need to be sponsored at a cocktail party. Not long after moving in, the Moxleys met the recent widower, who lived in the massive spread just around the corner on Otter Rock Drive, with a swimming pool and tennis courts and countless rowdy kids. Rush Skakel was his name. He was a rotund man, jokey, friendly, goofy, the type to sometimes greet friends with belly bumps and hardly gave off a corporate vibe. Even though he was the chairman of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, one of the most valuable private companies in America, Rush was remarkably solicitous to his new neighbor. He seemed, and in fact was the type to be a tad too eager to be liked by All. Rush didn't hesitate to offer to sponsor David Moxley's membership at the club. This gesture was still typical. Rush also invited the Moxleys to his family's private ski resort in Wyndham, New York, and almost certainly based on his usual habits, suggested the family should join him on the company plane to go see the Atlanta Braves play. Rush was a part owner of the team, but his social bona fides were even loftier. He had friends in high places, despite the Skakels being a rock ribbed Republican family. Rush was close personal friends with Hugh Carey, the Democratic governor of New York. And although Rush certainly wouldn't have mentioned it right away himself, everyone in Belhaven knew that back in 1950, Rush's older sister Ethel had married Robert F. Kennedy right there in town at St. Mary's on Greenwich Avenue. Rush had been an usher JFK, then a congressman from Boston. Bobby's best man, patriarch Joe Kennedy, famously used his considerable riches to fund his family's political ambitions. Some would even say he bought the White House for his son Jack. But as rich as the Kennedys were, the Skakel fortune dwarfed that of the Kennedys. The Skakels resided in a whole other financial universe, so much so that the scuttlebutt at the time was that Bobby had married the Skakel girl for her money. A family's wealth and corporate affiliations might have been of interest to the parents of Belhaven, but this kind of social yardstick wasn't as relevant to their 15 year old kids. There was more immediate stuff to consider. How's my hair look? Does he like me? Why is my complexion betraying me? Who's got beer? To both the boys and girls of Belhaven, Martha was different. Less self conscious than the other girls, a little more adventurous, like an emissary to frigid Connecticut from free and easy California. You know, I think one of the things that really totally gets lost in a lot of this stuff is how absolutely awesome and wonderful Martha was. That's Peter Kumbhraswamy. His father was chief of cardiac surgery at both Greenwich and Stanford hospitals. His mother was a prominent attorney and one of Martha's mom Dorothy Moxley's closest friends. He was known as Kumo back then and was 15 in 1975. Just like Martha Moxley. I was, remember I was sitting in a room with her and a bunch of other girls and everybody got up and left and she was very, very, very pretty. And I remember her sitting across from me and just started talking to me and I was like, oh, my goodness. This girl is really, really genuinely interesting and a nice person. And wow, she's really good. You know, just genuinely interested. Not polluted enough to be fake. Everyone I've spoken to agrees with this assessment. Here's Sheila McGuire again.
- [16:55]
Sheila McGuire
Yeah, she was joy on legs. I mean, she just was this blonde smile, very happy, very kind of flirtatious, but not in a. Not in like a sexual inappropriate way. Just this, like, happy person, you know, just darling. She came from California. She was like the Gidget, the surfer girl kind of thing. We all loved her, you know, just. Just really special.
- [17:18]
Andrew Goldman
So girls liked her and boys really liked her. The feeling that I get when I talk to guys who knew Martha, especially the ones who were a bit older than her, is that there is perhaps a reluctance to come out and just talk about how alluring she was. Maybe that's because even though she'd be 65 now, she'll always be stuck in time at 15 and forever off limits. But back in the 70s, she may not have felt that way to her peers. Martha's diary entries from 1975 portray what might today be called a burgeoning sex positivity. Boy crazy was the phrase kids of my generation used. She called the many boys she liked foxes, which she often scrawled in capital letters to emphasize her attraction and chronicled her hut makeout sessions. She'd only had her braces off for a few months, but it's clear from her diary that many, many boys seemed to find her particularly fascinating. In her diary, she was, as the saying goes, fighting them off and clearly enjoying the attention. On October 30, 1975, Martha's diary entry centered on a boy who'd been writing her flirtatious notes. These notes are too much, she wrote. He was in bed dreaming of me last night. I can hardly wait to see tomorrow's. But tomorrow for Martha never came.
- [18:50]
Sheila McGuire
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- [19:08]
Andrew Goldman
Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug Limu. Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty. Liberty Savings Fairy Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. You've worked hard to build your business. SimpliSafe helps you protect it with SimpliSafe for Business. AI powered cameras watch over your entry points and instantly alert live monitoring agents. They can deter intruders before they get inside. It's protection built for growing companies. 24. 7 monitoring, no contracts and a 60 day money back guarantee. Simply to get 60% off your new system, go to SimpliSafe.com podcast that's SimpliSafe.com podcast for 60% off. There's no safe like SimpliSafe October 30, 1975 it was just before 6pm and starting to get dark. Martha ate a grilled cheese sandwich in her kitchen. She said goodbye to her mom and headed out to roam the neighborhood with a bunch of other Belhaven kids. It was Mischief Night, the unofficial holiday the night before Halloween.
- [20:26]
Sheila McGuire
We called it Doorbell Night, but a lot of people called it Mischief Night.
- [20:31]
Andrew Goldman
That's Martha's friend and neighbor Helen Icks, who was also 15 and there that evening. One editorial note I'm gonna refer to everyone in this podcast by the last names they went by in 1975. Yeah, it was a big deal.
- [20:44]
Sheila McGuire
Yeah, the whole neighborhood was out and basically it was pretty innocent. I mean, we, you know, we had shaving cream and toilet paper and we'd throw it in the trees and it would be, you know, that was it. So it was kind of just a little bit of innocent, I guess. Benign vandalism.
- [21:00]
Andrew Goldman
I don't know. Benign enough though. Everyone was always scared to death of getting hit with anything foamy because of the stories of kids losing all their hair after getting smacked in the head with Nair. But this was probably just an urban legend. It was cold that Thursday. It would go down to 32 degrees, so Martha wore layers. She put on her blue parka over a black and yellow striped rugby shirt with a turtleneck underneath. Between 6:30 and just before 9, she hung out with a variety of Belhaven kids, but she seemed especially eager to see her neighbors, the Skakels, before finally rendezvousing with them at their house. She and Helen Nick stopped by The Skakels at 71 Otter Rock 2 separate times. Both times the Skakels live in. Gardener Franz Wittin told the girls that they were still out to dinner. Maybe Martha had a thing for one of the brothers, or maybe she was just looking for a warm place to hang out, like the Revcon, a motorhome that was usually parked at the side of the Skakel house. Martha's journal entries from that fall mentioned doing the usual in the Revcon, which was mostly smoking cigarettes, sometimes drinking beer, sometimes smoking weed while listening to tunes. The Revcon's heat cranked. The Revcon was basically a dive bar on wheels that didn't cart. As Martha bided her time, the Skakel kids were sizing up their new minder a half mile away at the Belhaven Club. Their father, Rush Skakel Sr. Was away that night on an annual hunting trip 175 miles north in the Adirondacks. Even though the family had an elderly live in nanny as well as a full time cook, Rush believed the kids needed some more adult oversight. Following his wife's death two years earlier. Rush Rush's heavy drinking increased and his children became yet another problem to throw money at. He hired burly 23 year old Kenneth Littleton, a science teacher and football coach at Brunswick, the private school most of the skakel kids attended. October 30th would be his first night sleeping at the house. Auspicious timing. At the Belhaven Club, all the guys were in jackets and ties per the club dinner dress code. This is the point in the story where you're going to start hearing a lot of names. Keeping track of the seven Skakel kids was a challenge for their own father. So don't worry too much about remembering them all at this point. We'll keep tabs on them for you and bring you back to meet many of them more intimately as the series goes on. In addition to Ken Littleton at the Belhaven Club, There were all seven Skakel kids. Rush Jr. 19, home for the weekend from Dartmouth. Julie, the only Skakel girl, 18. Tommy 17, John 16 and Michael, 15 plus David, 12 and Steven the baby, 9. Kumo, the one time Belhaven teen who you met earlier, knew all the siblings that the kids in that family being so different. All right. Steven, scrawny, freaking pain in the ass. David, super nice, gentle kid. Okay. Michael, more like Steven, pain in the ass, hyper, you know, crazy, kooky, super animated. John, totally mellow, nice guy. Okay. Julie, didn't know her much. Worked on her car a lot. Okay. Generous, normal girl. Tommy. Tommy was different. He was quiet, he was super strong and a big guy and he just, he had a presence. But he never really seemed like one of the gang, you know what I mean? Two other teens joined the Skakel kids and their tutor that night, Julie Skakel's best friend Andrea, Andy Shakespeare, as well as the Skakel's first cousin, Jimmy Tarrien, aged 16 and 17 respectively. Both also lived in Greenwich, but outside of Belhaven and both would need rides home after dinner, a detail that will have great significance to the story. Several of the rowdy party of 10 were served alcohol at the club, including ken Littleton and 15 year old Michael. Littleton didn't flinch when Michael ordered a rum punch. Michael, like his father and his grandfather and every generation of Skakel back to the mid-1800s and probably all the way back to the invention of distillation, was at 15, already a serious alcoholic. The Skakels arrived home just before 9 and mostly gathered on the Glaston sun porch of the house. Not long after returning tutor Ken Littleton disappeared to Russian seniors room on the second floor where he'd be spending the night. Martha arrived a couple of minutes later along with Helen Icks and another Belhaven kid, Jeffrey Byrne, who at 11 seemed like a child next to the teenagers. There's a lot of names here, but again, don't worry about keeping them straight. Martha's our focus. Just do your best to follow her. Martha and her posse saw the Skakel crew on the sun porch. Michael opened the door, but rather than usher the new visitors back to the sun porch, he led them instead to the driveway. Michael invited the three kids to sit in his father's maroon Lincoln Continental to smoke and listen to tunes. The Skakel kids called the limo sized car the Lovemobile because it was obvious that their father intended to use the car as rich guy plumage to attract women. He'd even had a $5,000 Lalique Crystal Eagle installed to replace the hood ornament with a tiny light to illuminate it from below. Michael and Martha sat in front, Jeff Byrne and Helenix in back. A couple minutes later, Tommy Skakel came out, ostensibly to get a tape from the car, and squeezed into the front bench seat next to Martha. Okay, the time is 9:30am date is November 15, 1975. That's Detective Jim Lunney. He interviewed Michael, Julie and Tommy Skakel shortly after Martha was found and then brought each of the seven siblings, except for Rush, who was back at Dartmouth, to the police station on November 15 to get their stories on tape. On the night in question, which is the night before Halloween. Again, go through what you remember on a particular night in reference to Martha Monson. All the kids told the same story. They ate dinner at the Belhaven Club and returned home about nine.
- [27:33]
Sheila McGuire
My family and I had gone out to dinner at Belhaven Club. We returned about 9. After dinner at the Belhaven Club, I came home.
- [27:44]
Andrew Goldman
We came back from eating dinner at the Belhaven Club and We got back back at the house about 9 o' clock and we all went into the porch area looked like back in watch tv back Allen on the sun porch, then out to the Love Mobile. Nobody deviated from this account. Here's Michael, then Tommy.
- [28:07]
Sheila McGuire
I saw Martha, Helen and Jeffrey Burns the door so I flagged him over the other way.
- [28:14]
Andrew Goldman
So we went in one side of.
- [28:15]
Sheila McGuire
The house and out the other and went in dad's car and listened to.
- [28:22]
Andrew Goldman
Music for a little while and Martha was in the car with my brother Michael trying to see and Jeffrey Burns and the next one backseat and then I got in the front seat and talked for a while. The Lovemobile party was short lived. Probably enough time for two smokes tops. In fact by 9:30 the Lincoln was gone from the driveway altogether. Rush Skakel Jr. Was behind the wheel driving Jimmy Terry and home across town to his family's massive estate in the so called Greenwich backcountry. In the many interviews that the police conducted in the months following the crime, several teens, John Michael and Tommy Skakel, Jeff Byrne, Helen Nicks and Jimmy Tarrien all remembered seeing Martha alive between 9:15 and 9:30 standing at the back of the Skakel house by a pachysandra patch at the end of the driveway. But none recalled seeing her. After 9:30 the party dispersed. Everyone said their goodbyes and went their separate ways. Martha never made it home. The walk from the back of the Skakels house to Martha's front door is about 200 yards. Two minutes for the average walker before digging into the case. I imagined Martha's walk home that night to be a long journey akin to Red Riding Hood's trip through the forest. I watch her to experience how close to home she was and how long it should have taken her to get there. From the end of the Skakel driveway, Martha presumably would have walked the length of the back of the Skakel house on the leaf covered lawn. Then coming to the southern end of the home she'd pass between the pool and the sun porch. Teeming with kids a half hour ago, but now empty. She'd exit the Skakel property between a couple of the pine trees lining the lot. Rush Skakel liked buying live Christmas trees, then adding them to this row along Walsh Lane. Now through the trees she's onto Walsh Lane, Hurst Street. From there it's a straight shot. She'd cross the street at a southeast diagonal onto her paved driveway, then onto her front lawn and pad through the grass straight to her front door. Easy. Obviously it didn't go that way. At 3:48 in the morning on Halloween 1975, Martha's mother, Dorothy Moxley called the Greenwich, Connecticut Police Department and reported that Martha had not come home the night before. The missing persons report begins at the above time and date. Dorothy Moxley, Walsh Lane, Greenwich, reported their 15 year old daughter was missing. Car number 51 dispatched. Upon arrival at the scene, the undersigned was met by the complainant who stated that her daughter Martha Moxley was expected home at 9:30pm October 30, 1975. Mrs. Moxley further stated that Martha had gone out with a girlfriend and two young children to visit friends in the area. Cops encountered a mother sick with worry when Martha missed her curfew by several hours. Dorothy Moxley started calling Martha's friends some more than once and well into the pre dawn hours. But all she was able to glean was that Martha had been at the skakel house until 9:30 and no one had seen her since. Greenwich cops meanwhile, set out with flashlights and scoured the dark wooded lanes of Belhaven, as well as known teen hangouts Growing Grass island and Bruce Park. The cops checked back in with Dorothy Moxley at 6:30. She'd still heard nothing. Just after 8:30, Dorothy Moxley walked over to the Skakel house and rang the doorbell. She knew that Martha drank beer and she also knew that the kids would often party in the Revcon. Had Martha perhaps passed out in the mobile home? Michael answered the door in bare feet, a T shirt and jeans. She'd never met him before. He looked both scrawny and hungover to her. Michael told her that he didn't know where Martha was. The Skakels live in Gardner. Franz Wittin checked the Revcon and reported back that it was empty. As the morning wore on, Belhaven mothers started pouring into the Moxley home to show their support. David Moxley was out of town on business. They didn't want her to feel alone. Local teens meanwhile, formed their own ad hoc search parties. One of those teens was Martha's friend Sheila McGuire, who you'll recall babysat all those kids at the Belhaven Club when she was 11. She set out at about noon.
- [32:51]
Sheila McGuire
So my mom in the middle of the night had come and woken me up to say, Mrs. Moxley's on the line, Martha's missing. Do you know where she is? And I said no, I went out with David last night. I don't know. But you know, we were kids, we would like have little party areas and forts. So I thought maybe she was at one of the forts. So I got dressed, ready to go, went out my back door, went through the little gate into her backyard. So it's this archway, beautiful, wooden, like snow white gate. And walk through. Martha's home is here to the right. So I'm like walking around the bushes and stuff, saying, martha, just trying to find what I can. And I look over to the right.
- [33:35]
Andrew Goldman
Something catches Sheila's eye. It's sticking out from under a tall pine tree on the corner of the Moxley's yard.
- [33:41]
Sheila McGuire
And I see this, this long thing. And it looked like one of those kind of flesh colored egg crate, foamy mattress things. And so I approached it, you know, didn't think twice about it. And I'm standing over it and all of a sudden it's like, like, like your body is. And your mind are like trying not to process what's there. And I am like soaked in tears as this horrific scene is at my feet. And I am calling her. I am afraid to touch her. And I raced to the front door and was like scratching and banging, like, let me in. And so all these women came over and they wanted me to bring one of the women down to her so that when the police came, the woman could take the police there so that I didn't have to go back. And so I brought one of the mothers down to Martha and she lifted up a bow to look at her and she was very disturbed. So they call my mom, she comes and gets me. And she said, they asked me to bring you home. And she said, they said they found Martha. And I said, yes. And she said, where is she? And. And I said, she's right there.
- [35:16]
Andrew Goldman
Martha was face down. Her puffy blue parka was bunched up over her head. Her striped black and yellow rugby shirt was still on, but her blue corduroy jeans and flowered underwear were both down and bunched around her calves. Martha was a blonde, but owing to the amount of blood caked in her hair, it would have been impossible to tell.
- [35:57]
Sheila McGuire
Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too. I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and power powerful storytelling. Set in my home state of Maine and the Greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people.
- [36:20]
Andrew Goldman
At the heart of these cases to.
- [36:22]
Sheila McGuire
Light Listen to Dark down east, wherever you get your podcasts. What are you doing in a meeting?
- [36:27]
Andrew Goldman
That could have been an email.
- [36:29]
Sheila McGuire
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- [37:15]
Andrew Goldman
On November 4, 1975, five days after Martha's body was discovered beneath a pine tree in Belhaven, Martha's family and friends from Greenwich High, who'd been excused from class for the day, gathered at First Lutheran Church to attend her funeral. A local reporter stood in the parking lot, keeping a respectable distance. It was a sad day in Greenwich, a day when people stood outside a church and talked quietly. They talked about violence, which it turns out, can even find its way into the suburbs, and about the waste of a young, promising life. Reverend Richard Manus read a eulogy written by Martha's classmates. Martha Moxley loved life each day her friends found her trustworthy and honest. Martha once said, at my funeral, I want everyone to be happy and to remember all the good times that we had. A small funeral procession drove off to Putnam Cemetery for a private burial service. Many of the other mourners stood around the church for a long time, some crying, some just thinking, all of them trying to make some sense out of something that makes no sense at all. When I started looking at this case in 2015, close to 40 years after Martha's death, I had one advantage over all who had covered it previously. After Michael Skakel successfully appealed his conviction in 2013, his entire case file became a matter of public record. No one who had written the books and articles I'd read had access to all that was sitting in dozens of boxes in Rockville Superior Court, an hour and a half drive north of my home in Westport. One fall morning, I drove up Route 91 to the courthouse, a red brick building that occupies an entire block of the small town 20 minutes north of Hartford. I parked in a mostly empty garage around the corner and stepped through the metal detectors, then walked into the first floor clerk's office. I always remember it pouring rain that morning, and whenever I've thought about that month, I spent there digging through those boxes. It seemed like every day it rained. But as it turns out, Hartford's weather from late October to late November 2015 had been heavy rain. Only one day, but not my first day there. Then sprinkles on three others. It had been a relatively dry month in fact. Memory can be tricky. This will become a theme. A very bored looking young clerk wheeled box after box into a spartan evidence room. I'd walked in off the street, filled out a form, presented no impressive credentials. I could hardly believe what they turned over to me. Every artifact associated with the case. Records of polygraphs never before seen, police interview transcripts, handwritten notes, diagrams, police sketches, psychological profiles of suspects. Naturally, there was a ton of paper, dozens of file boxes. There were thousands of pages of police Reports numbered from 1 to 1806, from October 31, 1975 to June 29, 1999. Among the trial exhibits I discovered a thick stack of photos. There were eight by tens, the color garishly saturated, as pictures from the seventies often are. There were crime scene photos of Martha as she looked when Sheila gazed down upon what she thought was a mattress under the boughs of a tall pine tree. And right alongside those photos were those taken during the autopsy the following day. Here's the photo of the top of Martha's head shaved, showing three horrible gashes, each about 5 inches long, allowing a view inside her skull to what looks like brain matter. The photo frames her entire face. There's a U shaped gash on her forehead where the face of the club hit her and a ghastly 4 inch gaping wound above her left eye which is shut. Her right eye is open a bit and downcast as though sad. Her eyelashes remain perfect, youthful and beautiful like a cartoon fawn's. But one of those photos stayed with me every more than any other because I wasn't even sure what I was looking at. It was a close up view of the left side of Martha's face. She's still wearing her silver hoop earring. Her ear is flaming red and the outer ring of the ear has a chunk missing as though she'd been hit hard on the side of the head with something solid, maybe the golf club or shaft. But right below her jaw is a circular wound and out of that wound hangs what looks like a 3 inch long piece of brown cable about the diameter of a sweatshirt drawstring. It was, I would learn after reading autopsy reports, a tight blood caked bundle of Martha's hair that had passed through one side of her throat and emerged out the other. I felt queasy. I had a flash to Sheila McGuire as a teenage girl stumbling upon this horrifying scene.
- [41:53]
Sheila McGuire
This was horrific. Somebody was capable, and somebody did that. Disgusting like crazy. And I just found her, and I was destroyed.
- [42:08]
Andrew Goldman
The crime, I'd learned, would inspire in many a tireless desire for vengeance. Looking at these photos then and looking at them again now, I totally understood why these injuries weren't the result of a momentary, horrible mistake made in the heat of a moment. These injuries required someone to have hit this girl over and over and over and over and over and over again, and then to have grabbed a sharpened shaft and ram it into her neck with the kind of force that went in one side of her throat and out the other. The crime went beyond violence. It suggested derangement, the work of a psychopath. Just a couple minutes after Sheila's discovery, the first cops arrived. Two juvenile officers who were already in Belhaven searching for Martha. It was immediately obvious that Greenwich PD was wholly unprepared. Controlling traffic flow on Greenwich Avenue downtown on busy Saturdays covered murder outmatched. There hadn't been a murder in town in 20 years. The Department didn't even possess crime scene tape to secure the area. David Moxley made it back from his Atlanta business trip as soon as he could on Halloween. Shortly after he got home, he received a phone call from his deputy at Touche Ross. This man. Well, the name is John McCrate. I've been a management consultant in public practice since 1968. McCrate was calling to offer his help and expertise finding Martha's killer. Though devastated and in shock, Moxley told McCrate he was looking out the window and didn't think that was necessary. He said, the place is crawling with cops, and so we don't. We don't need any help. I said, great, but David, they're not going to be able to solve it. McCrae, new law enforcement. Well, his first major consulting assignment at Touch Ross had been to help the mayor of Detroit restructured the police department following the riot of 1967, in which 23 black residents were shot and killed by authorities and thousands of buildings burned and destroyed. He'd spent hundreds of hours at crime scenes with cops. McCrate was immediately skeptical of the Greenwich PD. Small departments don't have homicides. They don't know how to solve homicides. It's very hard, very hard to do. And even though they had a lot of cops on the grounds, including state police, there was a lot of things that they didn't know how to do. The body stayed at the crime scene from noon until dark. The Cops having lit the property with klieg lights. According to police reports, Elliot Gross, the Connecticut medical examiner, was otherwise occupied. So he never visited the crime scene and didn't get around to performing the autopsy until noon on November 1st. A full 24 hours after Martha's body was discovered, possibly 36 hours since she was attacked, a dog was seen licking a pool of Martha's blood. The cops did their best to scour the area on the lawn around where the body was found. One spotted the bloody head of a six iron golf club lying nearby in the leaves. The murder weapon. They determined its brand, Tony Penna. In the vicinity, they found two pieces of the broken shaft, one 8 inches and the other 12 inches. But the club handle was nowhere to be found. So the club had been split into probably four pieces with one missing. Police found two 18 inch wide pools of blood. They noticed a trail of flattened grass 86ft long, suggesting that the killer had either killed or incapacitated Martha, then dragged her away from Walsh Lane to a more hidden spot in the property under the tree, where Sheila would eventually find her.
- [45:50]
Sheila McGuire
A lot of those things, you know, really were devastating for me. For years I had dreams of like golf clubs coming through my window. I couldn't go buy a pile of leaves. I mean, I was messed up for a long time.
- [46:03]
Andrew Goldman
On Halloween, precisely 24 hours after Martha had finished her grilled cheese and set out, Detective Jim Lunney showed up at the Skakel house. While canvassing the neighborhood for clues. Rush had yet to make it back from his hunting trip. Lunny was walking through the back hallway right by the door that leads out to the sky. Skakel driveway. When he looked down and spied a storage bin full of golf clubs. He picked up a four iron and examined it on its head in red, a tp just like the one on the murder weapon. It was a Tony Penna. But this iron, unlike the murder weapon, had its handle intact, clear as day. On the leatherette handle was a custom label. It read, Mrs. R.W. skakel, Greenwich CC as in Greenwich Country Club. The dead mother's four iron from it would turn out the only set of Tony Pennas ever found in Belhaven. I met Michael Skakel on October 23, 2015, in his younger brother's living room, just a few miles from my house. He was wearing a bulky GPS tracker on his ankle while he waited to hear when and if Connecticut would retry him. Jeffrey Toobin once pronounced Skakel guilty as hell on Twitter. And that morning I was right there with him when I shook hands with Skakel. I had two thoughts. He might have been the strongest person I'd ever encountered. Probably 300 pounds, but solid, muscular, with the strength of a bull. I experienced an uncomfortable, unsettling sensation, like a small jolt of electricity. In my career as a journalist, I'd met a lot of famous people, but I'd never before shaken the hand of a convicted murderer. I remember thinking, my palm is touching the very palm that swung the golf club that night and killed that poor girl. A few days later, when I drove up to Rockville Superior Court for that first time, I saw a jumbo ziplock bag sticking out of a box. I pulled it out. I could hardly believe what I was holding. It was the golf club head, the famous Tony Penna 6 iron that killed Martha. With a big red teepee embossed on the club fetch place. I pulled it from the bag, held it, hefted it, ran my finger over the edge of the broken shaft. I couldn't imagine how hard you'd have to hit a person to cause the stainless steel club to snap where it did. Poor Tony Penna is one of the lesser victims of this horrible story. Italian immigrant wins a bunch of PGA events in the first half of the 20th century. But it's the golf clubby design that killed a 15 year old girl. That's the only reason his name might still ring a bell. Poking out of another box were the shoes Martha wore the night she died. There were boat shoes, leather topsiders. I remember my sisters both wore them in the seventies. I looked closer. There was a name written in marker on the inside of the flat white sole. Unmistakably a boy's first name. Tom. That was strange. Martha had a boyfriend when she died. His name was Peter. So why did Martha, or even someone else write Tom on her shoe? And when? And what would Peter have thought if he'd seen another boy's name written on his girlfriend's shoe? I filed it away. And then I made another discovery, which I shared with Sheila McGuire. Have you ever seen the police report that mentions Theresa Tirado?
- [49:19]
Sheila McGuire
No.
- [49:22]
Andrew Goldman
In 1975, Teresa Tirado was 47 years old. She worked as a maid in a house in Belhaven. She showed up in a police report dated November 6, 1975, six days after Martha's death. One important fact about the case. There had been copious amounts of blood at the scene of Martha's murder, but a conspicuous lack of it found anywhere else. Whoever killed Martha Moxley would have been covered in blood. Nobody's ever Disputed this. Yet no blood was ever located anywhere besides the crime scene. At least that's what I'd thought, because no one had ever reported otherwise. The Thursday after the murder, with the help of a Spanish language interpreter, police interviewed Tirado, who believed she had information that might have been important to the case. Tirado reported seeing smears of blood, as if from three fingers, inside a house she was cleaning in Belhaven a four hours before Martha's body was found. The blood's potential significance only occurred to her the next day once she learned the news of the murder. Teresa Tirada was not the Skakels housekeeper. The house where she found the blood was not a house Michael Skakel had ever been inside. It was a house that Martha knew, one she'd been inside the day she died. Police knew about that blood. Journalists did, too. But Teresa Tirado and those bloody fingerprints were nowhere to be found in the books, dozens of television shows, or thousands of articles about the case. Why? This is one of the great mysteries of the case, and we'll come back to it, but we have a lot of ground to cover. First, Martha had a best friend in 1975. Her name was Margie Walker. Margie's father, Mort Walker, created the comic strip Beetle Bailey set on an army base, as well as High and Lois, based on his family life in Greenwich. I'd worked in the media my entire professional career. The deeper I got into the Moxley case, the more I found myself experiencing the kind of revelation that Margie had at 15 in the days following her best friend's murder.
- [51:24]
Sheila McGuire
I can tell you that this whole event made me like a lifelong skeptic of media and authority. I mean, from. From day one, the. The very first newspaper article said, well, that's not right. Well, that's wrong. You know, that couldn't possibly be. You know, just feeling like there were authority figures, whether they were policemen, detectives, media that nobody can get it right. You know, there are errors, and people are too quick to believe what they read, what they hear, you know, hearsay.
- [52:11]
Andrew Goldman
What you're going to hear in the rest of the season is the result of almost 10 years of research and endless interviews and what I believe will be a full, true, authoritative story of the Martha Moxley case. Trust me, it's a doozy. A lot of stories have a big twist at the end. To me, this story felt like Lombard street, that famous twisty road in San Francisco, just one hairpin turn after another. Buckle up. We're about to go on a hell of a ride. Next time on Dead Certain the Martha Moxley murder. Some 15 Greenwich detectives questioned hundreds of people and searched the murder site thoroughly. A lot of it was do you know who did it? That's a perfectly to me normal thing to ask a bunch of kids in a situation like this.
- [53:01]
Sheila McGuire
I think so many people had a crush on Tommy. He was a good looking guy in the Gucci shoes.
- [53:06]
Andrew Goldman
He doesn't stutter, no stammering, nothing. Very calm, cool and corrective. There's so many things that are starting to come out now from NBC News studios and highly replaceable productions. Dead Certain the Martha Moxley Murder is written, reported, executive produced and hosted by me, Andrew Goldman. Alexa Danner is executive producer and head of audio at NBC News Studios. Megan Shiels and Rob Heath are producers. Nora Patel is our story editor. Fact checking by Simone Buteau. Production assistance by Brendan Wiesel. Sound design by Rick Kwan and Mark Yoshizumi. Original music by John Estes. Bryson Barnes is our technical director. Amanda Moore is our production manager and Marissa Riley is the director of production. Liz Cole is president of NBC News Studios Foreign.
- [54:15]
Sheila McGuire
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