Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel won’t be retried in 1975 killing, prosecutor says

STAMFORD, Conn. — For nearly half a century, Martha Moxley’s murder fed the tabloids: A 15-year old girl is clubbed to death outside her home in a posh, Greenwich community. A teenage boy across the street, a relative of the famous Kennedy family, is a suspect. Decades of legal battles follow, with glimpses of country club life and dark questions about influence, money and justice.

But the final twist, in a case that has been full of them, may have occurred Friday, exactly 45 years from the day Moxley was killed.

Chief State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo told a Superior Court judge Friday morning he has decided not to retry Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, whose 2002 conviction for murdering Moxley was reversed two years ago by the state Supreme Court. Colangelo said the passage of time and, in particular, the death of prosecution witnesses, has left the state unable to proceed.

“I believe the state cannot prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, therefore the state is going to enter a nolle,” Colangelo, who was 9 years old at the time of the murder, told Superior Court Judge Gary White during a short, scripted hearing.

The nolle will result in dismissal of the murder charge against Skakel in 13 months. In practical terms, it means a notorious murder that generated books, movies, television shows and tens of thousands of newspaper and magazine articles probably will remain unsolved.

After reviewing the voluminous case file — the investigation generated thousands of police reports and it was before the state’s high court five times — Colangelo said he identified 51 potential prosecution witnesses, but found out 17 had died since the original trial. A search for new evidence turned up empty, he said. Throughout the process Colangelo said he stayed in touch with the Moxley family and “have tried my best to keep them informed of my findings and what my decision is.

John Moxley, Martha’s brother, briefly thanked the police investigators and judicial officials who pressed the case for decades.

Martha’s mother, 88-year-old Dorthy Moxley, did not attend. She had pressed authorities for answers since 3:48 a.m. on Oct. 31, 1975, when she telephoned the Greenwich police to report that her daughter had missed curfew after roaming among the landscaped homes in the gated Belle Haven neighborhood with friends on the night before Halloween — “Mischief Night” for the Belle Haven teens.

Recently, Dorthy Moxley has said she believes Skakel is guilty, but is satisfied with the efforts of police and prosecutors.

Skakel’s lawyer, Stephen Segar, told the judge his client had nothing to say during the brief hearing. Outside the courthouse, Skakel remained silent while Segar told a small group of reporters that Skakel is innocent and never should have been prosecuted.

“This is a day for justice for a lot of reasons,” Segar said. “One of them is that you have an innocent man. And I have said many many times I was looking forward to the day when we would walk out of a court room and this case was behind Michael. And that’s what happened today. We are glad the result is what it is. And he is happy that it’s over.”

Segar said that Skakel wants to resume his life and, should he decide he would like to speak about the outcome with the Moxleys, he will do so in private.

One of Martha Moxley’s teenaged girlfriends discovered her body, partially hidden beneath a tall evergreen on the Moxley property, at about noon on Halloween in 1975. She had been beaten so savagely with a golf club belonging to a set in the Skakel house that the club snapped and the killer used a jagged piece to stab her through the neck

The Greenwich police began an investigation, but it twisted and turned and never seemed to make solid progress for decades. Early on, Dorthy Moxley and her husband, a senior officer in a global consulting firm, employed private investigators to redirect local police and prosecutors, in part out of concern that they had become dependent for leads on one of the targets, the Skakel family.

Successive teams of investigators have always believed the answer to who killed Martha Moxley could be found in the Skakel household. They first focused on Skakel’s brother, Thomas, and then the family tutor, Kenneth Littleton, before targeting and ultimately convicting Skakel.

Skakel has always insisted he had nothing to do with the crime. He arrived in court amid snow flurries with a dozen or so friends, family and lawyers. He is now the white-haired, 60-year-old father of a college student.

He has complained in court in recent years that he is broke. But at the time of the crime, his family’s oil and mineral business was one of the nation’s most valuable privately held companies. He was part of the sprawling Kennedy family because his father’s sister, Ethel, married Robert F. Kennedy. At age 15, he was competing with his brother Tom for Martha’s affections. He also was a regular drug user and incipient alcoholic.

On the evening of the murder, Skakel dined at the Belle Haven club with his five siblings, a cousin and Littleton. Skakel later said that, even at age 15, he was drinking heavily at dinner. After dinner, the Skakel kids joined up with Martha and some of the children with whom she had been out roaming on Mischief Night. Martha is believed to have died around 9 p.m.

Because of a new state law prohibiting disclosure of the names of juveniles charged with violent felonies, the state’s decision to drop the Skakel prosecution might have happened without notice.

Skakel was the subject of the most widely reported prosecution in state history. But because he was 15 at the time of the crime, all records and proceedings in his case have been sealed for the last year by the new law. There was no public notice of Friday’s hearing and Skakel had to waive his right to confidentiality during a closed juvenile hearing before the parties could move to an open courtroom elsewhere in the building and put the nolle on the record.

Skakel spent 11 years in prison following his conviction. He was released on bail in 2013 after his appellate lawyer, Hubert J. Santos, persuaded a judge during an extended habeas corpus trial that Skakel had been convicted because his trial lawyer, Mickey Sherman, presented the jury with an inexplicably deficient defense.

Habeas Judge Thomas Bishop concluded that Sherman “was in a myriad of ways ineffective.” Bishop identified 10 significant holes in the trial defense and said three of them, by themselves, were sufficient to require a new trial.

Lawyers who have followed the notorious case have said Bishop’s comprehensive decision could serve as a road map for a new Skakel defense team, had the state decided to retry the case. Plugging the gaps in the first defense would likely lead to an acquittal the second time around, the lawyers said.

Among other things, a new defense team would likely present Skakel’s brother, Thomas, to a jury as a murder suspect. During the first trial, Sherman chose not to do so, even though he knew that Greenwich police detectives were so persuaded of Thomas Skakel’s guilt in the late 1970s and early ’80s that they applied for a warrant for his arrest. The chief prosecutor at the time in Fairfield County refused to sign the warrant. As a result, the investigation languished — until law enforcement turned to Michael Skakel.

After repeated questioning, Thomas Skakel, who was subject to fits of rage, eventually admitted he and Martha had a sexual encounter minutes before and close to where she was killed.

The warrant for Thomas’ arrest was not provided to Sherman until well into Skakel’s trial. Jurors at the trial also did not hear about the sexual encounter.

Defense lawyers at a new trial would certainly remedy what the state Supreme Court has called Sherman’s “inexcusable failure” to call an alibi witness — even though prosecutors had alerted Sherman to the witness before the trial.

The witness told Santos long after Skakel had been imprisoned that, had Sherman called him, he would have testified that Skakel was a half hour away from Belle Haven, watching television at a cousin’s back country Greenwich estate before, during and after the brief period in which forensic experts believe Martha was killed.

A new defense also would use evidence Santos developed that discredited a key prosecution witness — one of those who has since died — who said Skakel confessed to killing Moxley while the two were incarcerated at a now-discredited, private rehabilitation institution for troubled teens in Maine.

As it turned out, among other things, the witness, Gregory Coleman, was a drug addict who admitted injecting heroin before one court appearance and suffering from withdrawal symptoms during another. The jury also never heard that Coleman’s family lawyer warned the Skakel prosecutors against using him as a witness, describing him as an incorrigible addict, always broke, in danger of losing his home and certainly interested in the reward in the Moxley investigation. Part of that reward went to Coleman’s ex-wife after his death.

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