04/01/2002 - Updated 09:33 AM ET
Skakel trial starts this week
By Fred Bayles, USA TODAY
WINDHAM, N.Y. — In a few weeks, a 41-year-old man will face a jury for an infamous crime he's accused of committing as a teenager.
Douglas Healey, AP file
Michael Skakel, entering a Superior Court in Stamford, Conn.,on April 19, 2001.
Those around Michael Skakel want that jury to know that the man is nothing like the boy. But the question confronting the jury will be: Does that really matter?
Skakel, a cousin of the Kennedy family, faces trial this week in the gruesome 1975 slaying of 15-year-old Martha Moxley. Prosecutors say Skakel beat and stabbed his friend with a broken golf club. They paint a picture of Skakel, then 15, as an out-of-control teenager whose behavior was fueled by alcohol and drugs.
But the troubled teen isn't going on trial in Norwalk, Conn. And it's the adult that friends and family are rallying around, including members of the Kennedy family.
"The reason people are supporting him so strongly is because he is absolutely innocent of this crime," Robert Kennedy Jr. says. "It was a terrible, terrible tragedy of what happened to Martha Moxley, but another young life, Michael's, was destroyed, too."
Kennedy plans to attend the trial along with his mother, Ethel, and brothers Max and Douglas. Skakel's father is Ethel Kennedy's brother. The solidarity comes despite an ugly estrangement between the two sides of the family.
Like other friends and family, many of whom would speak with USA TODAY only off the record, Kennedy says the public image of Skakel is dated — a grainy snapshot of a troubled youth that reveals little about his adult life. Skakel overcame alcoholism and dyslexia more than a decade ago. He became a world-class skier. He helped others, including Kennedy, in their own fights for sobriety.
By all accounts, he is an attentive and caring father, now living in Windham, a tiny Catskills ski town where his family has long owned a home. If he is seen with anybody around town, it's his 3-year-old son. Skakel and his ex-wife, who lives nearby, share joint custody. Skakel declined to be interviewed for this story.
His lawyer, Mickey Sherman, says he hopes the jury, and the public, will consider Skakel's life as an adult when the trial begins. It is expected to last three to six weeks.
"There are two Michael Skakels," says Sherman, who was an assistant prosecutor in Greenwich when Moxley was killed. "People who now know Michael Skakel love him. The people who hate him are the people who know him only through the books and the speculation and the conjecture."
But even those among Skakel's supporters admit a certain darkness has returned to his personality since the charges were filed in January 2000. Angry fits of temper brought on by the case alienated those closest to him and ended his nine-year marriage. He has not worked for more than five years.
The Moxley family and writer Dominick Dunne, who wrote a fictionalized account of the murder, say Skakel's charm and charity are merely guile. They say whoever he is now has no relevance to the crime he is accused of committing when he was young.
"I didn't know Michael Skakel as a teenager, and I've had nothing to do with him since," says Dorothy Moxley, Martha's mother. "All I know is that a person must be responsible for their actions, and I want justice for Martha."
After more than 25 years, a jury will try to determine whether Skakel should be held responsible. The trial could also raise the question, to paraphrase poet William Wordsworth, "Is the child really father to the man?"
Early troubles
By his own admission, Skakel had a troubled childhood. Twelve years old when his mother died, Skakel said in a proposed biography that he was an alcoholic at 13.
By 15, he and his family were known throughout the gated Greenwich, Conn., community of Belle Haven as a wealthy family of seven children whose reputation for trouble had blossomed since the death of their mother, Ann.
Then came the slaying of Martha Moxley on Oct. 30, 1975.
Moxley was last seen leaving a party that night at the Skakels, who lived on the same street. The body of the blond, vivacious teenager was found under a cluster of trees near her home on Halloween morning. Her head was caved in, her throat impaled with the broken shaft of a golf club.
Since then, the crime has joined the JonBenet Ramsey killing and the O.J. Simpson murder trial as a fixture in the nation's tabloid culture. The subject of three books and a television miniseries, the case is expected to dominate the news when jury selection for Skakel's trial begins Tuesday.
Suspicion quickly fell on the Skakels, particularly after it was determined that the murder weapon came from the golf bag of Michael's dead mother. First, Tommy Skakel, Michael's older brother, was questioned. A tutor living with the Skakels came under scrutiny, too.
But as time passed, investigators turned to Michael.
Authorities learned that he had threatened to fling himself off New York's Triborough Bridge in 1976, telling his driver: "I've done something very bad. I've either got to kill myself or leave the country."
In 1978, when he was 17, Skakel led Windham police on a drunken 7-mile car chase that ended when he hit a tree. Soon after, he was sent to the Elan School in Poland Springs, Maine, a facility for problem children of the rich and famous.
It is there that he allegedly talked to classmates about the killing. Twenty years later, they repeated the conversations in Connecticut courtrooms. Some said Skakel confessed to killing Moxley. Others said he was uncertain of his culpability because his memory was fogged by the booze and pot he had consumed that night.
Those recollections are at the heart of the case and speak to the difficulty of prosecuting a 26-year-old slaying. Two of the potential Elan School witnesses have died. Gregory Coleman, who told a grand jury that Skakel had confessed to the crime, died last August of a drug overdose after admitting he was on heroin during his grand jury testimony. Joe Ricci, the head of Elan, who denied stories of Skakel's confession, died of cancer in January 2001.
After several legal steps, a judge said Skakel would face the charges as an adult. If convicted, he would face 10 to 60 years in prison.
Sobriety and schooling
During the years it took prosecutors to file charges, friends and family say Skakel turned his life around. He sought treatment at clinics in Minnesota and Maryland in the late 1970s and early 1980s. According to Sherman, Skakel took his last drink 18 years ago.
In the mid-1980s, Skakel discovered that he was dyslexic, a diagnosis that helped explain years of failure in school. He enrolled in a program for dyslexics at Curry College in Milton, Mass., and graduated in 1993.
"It was a huge step for him to go back to school," says Robert Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer who teaches at New York's Pace Law School.
During the '80s, Skakel and his Kennedy cousins grew closer through their shared love of the outdoors. Skakel was a talented skier who could twirl his 5-foot-11, 200-pound frame around the slopes like a ballerina. The Kennedys frequently visited the Skakel ski home in Windham.
Skakel also supported his cousins in their own struggle with substance abuse. Robert Jr. says he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with Skakel. He says his cousin also tried to help David Kennedy, who died of a drug overdose in 1984.
By 1990, Skakel had become a top-ranked speed skier on the U.S. World Cup team, competing in a sport where skiers hit speeds in excess of 100 mph on straight downhill runs. Bill Miller, a teammate of Skakel's, calls him an amazing athlete. "There was no ego, no temper," Miller recalls. "He was very disciplined. You don't do what he did after partying all night."
In 1991, Skakel married Margot Sheridan, an accomplished skier and professional golfer he met in Windham. The turnaround in his life seemed almost complete.
A family falling-out
What was lacking was a career. Through the two decades of his adult life, Skakel worked for just three years. Attempts at starting a sporting equipment business never got off the ground. Cousin Michael Kennedy offered him a spot on Sen. Edward Kennedy's 1994 re-election campaign.
Skakel took the job as an aide to Michael, the campaign's manager. After the election, he went to work with Michael at Citizens Energy, a Kennedy family energy business, with non-profit and for-profit components. They traveled together, including a visit to Cuba in 1996 that included a meeting with Fidel Castro. "They really loved each other," Robert Kennedy says.
Another scandal would break the relationship. In 1997, whispers about an affair between Michael Kennedy and his family's teenage babysitter became front-page news. There are different accounts of Skakel's involvement. Some suggest he tried to persuade his cousin to end the affair. Others cast him as an emissary who ran interference for his boss with the babysitter's family. Whatever his role, Skakel's appearance before prosecutors investigating statutory rape charges drove a wedge in the friendship. Prosecutors never charged Michael Kennedy, who died in a skiing accident Dec. 31, 1997.
Skakel had already left Citizens Energy with a severance package that Boston gossip columns put in the low six figures. He moved to the exclusive Hobe Sound, Fla., community where his father lived. His son, George, was born in 1998.
Trailed by suspicion
By then, Skakel had serious problems. Through the years, Vanity Fair writer Dunne had kept the Moxley case in the public eye. He offered his opinion against the Skakels before and after he fictionalized the case in his 1993 book, A Season in Purgatory.
Mark Fuhrman, a former Los Angeles police detective made famous by his role in the O.J. Simpson case, also weighed in with Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?, a 1998 book that named Michael Skakel as the murderer.
Pressured by the renewed publicity, officials convened a special grand jury in 1998 and indicted Skakel in January 2000. There is no statute of limitations for murder.
Kennedy is forthright about what he considers Dunne's exploitation of the murder.
"He has orchestrated the lynching of an innocent man," Kennedy says. "For seven years, Dominick Dunne proclaimed that he knew Tommy Skakel to be the murderer and nearly destroyed Tommy Skakel's life. Now, he says he's certain it was Michael. In every instance, he has always ignored stronger evidence against other suspects."
Dunne dismisses the criticism. "It was the recommendation of the grand jury that indicted Michael Skakel, not anything I did," he says.
Faced with the renewed case against him, Skakel began to turn inward. Friends talk of bursts of anger and tantrums that drove some away, including his wife.
Thomas Sheridan, a longtime Skakel family attorney and uncle to Skakel's ex-wife, says he's not surprised about recent reports of Skakel's bursts of temper. "It's obvious he's under a lot of stress. The only way he's going to get this horrible thing off his back is to get on with the trial," he says. "I'm convinced that it will end with him being judged innocent."
Among those Skakel has alienated are his Kennedy cousins. Soon after he became the center of public attention, a book proposal by Skakel and a Cambridge, Mass., author began making the rounds.
Titled Dead Man Walking, the proposal promised to dish the dirt on the Kennedys, from Michael's affair to unflattering portraits of others in the clan, including his aunt, Ethel. Whatever ties remained between Skakel and his cousins seemed severed.
Nevertheless, Ethel and her sons have announced plans to attend Skakel's trial as a show of support, similar to the family's attendance at the Palm Beach, Fla., rape trial of William Kennedy Smith in 1991.
"My family understands that Michael went through hell," Robert Kennedy Jr. says. "Being accused of this crime is a fear he has carried around since he was a little kid. It caused him to lash out and do things he won't do under normal circumstances."
Ethel Kennedy declined to be interviewed.
As his trial date approaches, Skakel's presence in Windham is barely noted. "He used to come in for a meal and hang around to chat and joke with the folks," says a restaurateur who asked not to be identified for fear of pushing Skakel further away. "These days, if he comes at all, it's for takeout, and he is here and gone in minutes."
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