A Crime In The Clan

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

    The book proposal was eventually withdrawn.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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