Halloween is a night of pretend horror, but there was nothing fictional about the murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley, who was stabbed and beaten to death with a golf club on October 30, 1975.
Her body was discovered in the backyard of her family home in Greenwich, Connecticut on Halloween morning. Moxley had attended a Halloween party the previous night at her neighbor’s the Skakel’s house, where police later found a set of golf clubs that matched the murder weapon. The case remained cold for 25 years until new evidence implicated Michael Skakel- who was also 15 in 1975. Skakel was convicted of her murder in 2002 and was sentenced to serve 20 years to life. 11 years into that sentence he was freed on bail because a judge determined he had received ineffective counsel during the trial. This left the question, did Skakel really murder Martha Moxley?
Skakel’s cousin Robert Kennedy Jr. believes he is not, and in his new book, Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit, he makes the case for why Skakel is innocent. He joined radio hosts Jim Braude and Margery Eagan to provide some insight into the new book, and the old murder.
According to Kennedy, it was originally Michael’s older brother Tommy Skakel who was a suspect, as he was the last person to see Moxley alive. Tommy had been making out with Moxley in the bushes that night just before her curfew. Michael, on the other hand, was eleven miles away, watching T.V. with other family members, according to several eyewitnesses.
Tommy Skakel was just one of many suspects throughout the investigation, but it was only a quarter of a century later that his brother joined the list. Michael Skakel became a suspect after disgraced LAPD detective, Michel Fuhrman-who had no direct involvement in the investigation, and yes, is the same Fuhrman from the O.J. Simpson Trial. - wrote what Kennedy described as a “quickie book” claiming to solve the cold case of Moxley’s murder. In this book, he identified Michael Skakel as the killer.
Detective Frank Garr took the theory and ran with it. According to Kennedy, Garr was unable to find physical evidence, so he moved on to perjury. Kennedy said he was “able to concoct two perjured confessions, supposed confessions from Michael.” Later one of these witnesses died of a heroin overdose. One of them was also offered a hundred-thousand-dollar reward, and given two days to think about it before he claimed that Michael Skakel had in fact confessed to murdering Martha Moxley.
Kennedy offered this alternative theory to what really happened to Martha Moxley: Adolf Hasbrouck and Burton Tinsley, two kids from lower Manhattan, went into Greenwich that night with the express intention of finding a girl to rape. Not only were they planning to attack someone, the boys found golf clubs in town near the site of the murder, and (according to a witness) planned to include these clubs in their assault.
To hear more from Robert Kennedy, tune in to Boston Public Radio above
