Framed – Robert F. Kennedy, 2016 ★

Right Ta-Ta, Wrong Ho-Ho

It played at the time like some diabolical cup-and-ball trick. Everyone giving it more than a passing glance thought they had the answer, only to be surprised a quarter-century later when that answer was officially revealed as something else.

To quote John Candy in JFK: “You got the right ta-ta, but the wrong ho-ho.”

Such an outcome is bound to leave doubts. And when the crime is murder, and the accused related to the most famous political family in the United States, count on someone being there to foster them. Enter Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose new book directs a bright, probing light at the case against his cousin, Michael Skakel, in the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, Skakel’s 15-year-old Greenwich, Connecticut neighbor.

The result is an occasionally compelling, often off-putting, thoroughly misleading attempt at demonstrating that those of us who grew up thinking Michael didn’t do it were right after all. In Kennedy’s telling, there were plenty of people with the means and motive to whack young Martha with a golf club on the evening of October 30, 1975. Just don’t think any of them happened to be named “Skakel.”

“I am going to show that Michael Skakel did not and could not have killed Martha Moxley; how and why he got framed for the crime; who did the framing; and how they accomplished it,” Kennedy writes in his introduction. “I’m also going to show how I tracked down the likely killers, phantoms who moved in and out of Greenwich like shadows, and whose presence was detected by neither police nor press during 30 years of flawed investigations.”

Does Robert Jr. actually accomplish this? Not really. Not that he’s serious about the “likely killers” part, who are tacked on at the end of the book as a kind of spurious afterthought best forgotten.

The real purpose of Kennedy’s is transparent; sowing seeds of doubt that will lead to his cousin Michael being freed in an ongoing appeal process by writing emotively of Michael’s life struggles and throwing plenty of shade on anyone who stands in his way.

The case was messy from the start. When Martha’s corpse was found under a tree near her house on Halloween morning, 1975, it wasn’t long before the crime scene was trampled by police and others. To this day, as Kennedy points out, there’s a mystery about whether the grip of the golf club used to slay her was found sticking from Martha’s body, lying near her body, or missing entirely.

The body showed clear signs of a sexual motive, but this too was bungled. “Connecticut’s medical examiner, Dr. Elliot Gross, took vaginal and anal swabs and slides and sent them to the Department of Health, run by Dr. Abraham Stolman,” Kennedy writes. “Both the swabs and slides disappeared. No one looked at the swabs to determine if they contained DNA material, including Y-chromosome (male) DNA.”

There was no trouble finding suspects. If anything, there were too many, a “parade,” as Kennedy puts it.

First there was a neighbor, who drank too much, collected porn, and had blood stains on his sweater. For a long time, police zeroed in on another suspect, Kenneth Littleton, a teacher at Michael’s school who had arrived at the Skakel residence the night of Martha’s murder to be a live-in tutor. The neighbor proved innocent, and Littleton’s motive was always hazy at best, but for a long time they sucked away at law enforcement’s attention.

There were others, too. The most readable part of Framed is a section that delves into several of the most prominent: Martha’s tough boyfriend; the Skakel’s aging Nazi gardener; even the victim’s brother.

“Had some Moxley aunt married into the Kennedy family, [state prosecutor] Jonathan Benedict could have brought a far more convincing case against Martha Moxley’s brother, John, than his confused and wobbly prosecution of Michael Skakel,” Kennedy writes. To this end, Kennedy points out some discrepancies in John’s testimony about where he was the night of the crime and a red stain in the Moxley basement reportedly observed by a maid. It’s thin gruel, Kennedy seems to realize; still he plays it up as long as he can.

The only suspects Kennedy dismisses entirely are Michael Skakel and his older brother, Tommy, for decades the main suspect. Tommy was the last person seen with Martha; he initially claimed he had just exchanged good-nights with the girl outside his home, then admitted to horseplay when two witnesses testified they saw Tommy shove Martha down.

“Tommy didn’t kill Martha, and his alibi is nearly as solid as Michael’s, but it’s understandable why he became the patsy,” Kennedy writes. “Probably as a result of the suspicion that shadowed him since age 17, Tommy is guarded, enigmatic, and opaque, and therefore less sympathetic than his transparent, cringingly open-hearted and garrulous younger brother.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. stands before his maternal cousin, Michael Skakel. Image from http://www.wsj.com/articles/robert-f-kennedy-jr-claims-in-book-that-skakel-cousin-was-framed-for-murder-1468286051

The more Kennedy writes, the clearer his mission becomes. The Skakels were a decent, law-abiding, ultra-Catholic family – albeit with substance-abuse problems triggered by tragedy – who found in the exclusive shoreline neighborhood of Belle Haven an Ice Storm-like environment of loose mores and drug use. Time and again, he offers the Skakels as victims as much as poor Martha.

Maybe a little more as victims. In the cause of unflinching truth, Kennedy takes on the victim herself and her mother, Dorthy, whose lonely quest for justice eventually found purchase in Michael’s January 2000 arrest. Martha is portrayed as a sexually adventurous girl whose willingness to experiment with a number of boys brought her dangerous attention. Dorthy is described as possibly drunk the night of her daughter’s murder, and easily misled by fame-hungry investigators who want to score a Kennedy scalp, even if one only related by marriage.

It’s an icky way to write a book, made worse by Kennedy’s predilection for sliming everyone who had a hand in the prosecution. His scorched-earth approach lessens an already compromised case study; exposing his motives as being as base as those he claims directed others.

Ironically, Framed also runs counter to Michael’s own case as it presently exists before Connecticut Superior Court. That case, as advanced by Michael’s counsel, Hubert Santos, and unmentioned in Kennedy’s book, is that the state erred by not going after the most obvious suspect: Brother Tommy.

I find Kennedy’s book easier to accept in its focus on exonerating Michael, though there are issues Kennedy skirts past. For a long time, Michael was overlooked as a suspect because it was said he went with other members of his family to watch a broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus at a relative’s house 11 miles away. This took him away from the scene of the crime at a time demonstrated to have likely been when Martha was murdered.

There are things about this alibi that don’t pass the smell test. Like, why would Michael and the other Skakels, whom Kennedy acknowledges were drinking that night, travel so far merely to see a TV show they could have just as easily have seen at home?

Because all the exculpatory witnesses were said to be relatives of Michael’s, with a vested interest in keeping him out of jail, this alibi was dismissed in the verdict delivered against him in 2002. [Kennedy claims and names another witness, never called.] Plus, the prosecution suggested, maybe the time given for Martha’s murder was a bit off, like maybe by several hours. This would give Michael time to get back to the Skakel house and kill Martha.

The key reason for finding Michael guilty was testimony offered by the defendant himself that placed him outside Martha’s house at the night of her murder, climbing a tree to throw pebbles at what he believed was her window while attempting to masturbate.

This confession proved too high a hurdle to clear. Kennedy tries, in a way lamer than his cousin’s courting technique: “Those who know him understand that Michael is incapable of keeping anything to himself…He immediately felt foolish, and guilty, and it dawned on him that someone in the house might spy him ‘playing pocket pool.’ The thought filled him with horror so he clambered down and sprinted home.”

The episode certainly made him look bad, as Kennedy acknowledges. At the time he told this story to private investigators hired by his father Rushton (heir to a carbon fortune and brother of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s mother), the state of the DNA evidence was not known, and it was believed Michael was trying to construct an alibi as to why his semen might have been near Martha’s body. [No semen was ever identified at the crime scene.]

That this story ever came out is another major bone of contention for Kennedy, something which gives his book its title. He lays the blame at a Skakel family attorney, Thomas Sheridan, for launching a private investigation that collected Michael’s testimony and eventually got leaked. Kennedy suggests this was done deliberately by Sheridan.

Back in 1978, after Michael was arrested for driving under the influence of quaaludes, Sheridan sent the long-troubled teenager away to a psychiatric institution in Maine, the Élan School. Michael correctly suspected Sheridan of fleecing his father; Kennedy says this was Sheridan’s way of ridding himself of “a particularly nettlesome gnat.”

“Sheridan was a sociopath with a vendetta against Michael, and Michael’s confinement at Élan would indulge his sadistic streak,” Kennedy explains. Élan, he adds, was a vicious place; Michael would get much abuse there that centered on his supposed killing of Martha. Witnesses from the institution would step forward decades later to tell of what were painted by prosecutors as Michael’s confessions.

And what about Tommy? His alibi suggests a reason for why Martha’s body was found with her panties pulled down, if perhaps not why he killed her. His story, as Kennedy relates it, was after they met up that night, the two wandered off behind a shed, whereupon the “lovebirds” as Kennedy calls them, engaged in some foreplay. After redressing, the two split up. Tommy then returned to the Skakel house.

“The Skakels never got a break from the police,” Kennedy claims, but his own book suggests otherwise. His account reveals in its margins how the police trod very carefully around the Skakels. Tommy for example was interviewed and polygraphed but somehow never was pushed to fess up about sex with Martha, not until that private investigation his father paid for two decades later. Embarrassment was the reason, Kennedy says, as Rushton was a staunch Catholic.

Why would Tommy kill Martha, if they did in fact have sex as he claimed? Kennedy notes Martha’s autopsy, for all its mistakes, did reveal something important: An intact hymen. Could a sexually charged teenaged boy, particularly one with the anger issues Kennedy ascribes to Tommy, have reacted with rage if a girl worked up his sexual appetite only to finally say no?

Needless to say, this is not an avenue Framed pursues. Kennedy has other fish to fry. There are investigators to discredit, prosecutors to defame, and so many others to attack. Late in the book, he lays out a case against a pair he claims are his prime suspects, two youths who wandered in from New York City with a thirst for rape so unquenchable they chanted about it all night. That the suspects themselves won’t go along with Kennedy’s story, and the witnesses he calls upon fail to confirm it for the record, doesn’t stop him from pushing his point that these are the “likely killers” he promised to expose in his introduction.

Other than this hearsay and some nebulous quotes from Martha’s diary, there’s nothing here. Kennedy seems to be daring his “killers” to sue him, knowing well it’s nearly impossible to prove a negative in court, hoping someone in the Connecticut judiciary catches his Hail Mary pass and provides the margin of difference to exonerate Michael.

Kennedy’s blistering tone also takes in Mickey Sherman, Michael’s first defense attorney, whom he dubs “the Clown.” Sherman does come across in Kennedy’s account as a weak defender, but Kennedy foregoes mention of a key encumbrance for Sherman’s defense, one Santos is apparently not hobbled by now: Sherman was trying to clear Michael without implicating Tommy. Sherman instead went after Littleton, a slim reed given the guy only showed up in the neighborhood the night of the murder and had a credible alibi.

Late in the book, Kennedy also takes on the witnesses used by the prosecution to incriminate Michael. One is Geranne Ridge, whom Kennedy describes as a “ditsy, self-described ‘part-time model’” who related a confession she said Michael had made to her. Kennedy describes hearing a recording made of her testimony by one of his book’s chief bugbears, state investigator Frank Garr, who was “nursing a single-minded hatred for the Skakel family.”

“In listening to the recording, my consolation was the thought that Geranne’s gifts for obfuscation and empty-headed whining about the dull yet somehow dramatic details of her daily life must have driven Garr nearly insane,” Kennedy writes.

Right there I felt I came to the heart of everything I hated about this book, that pong of entitlement registering contempt of anyone who stands in the way of a Kennedy, or a Kennedy’s cousin. Never mind that dead girl, her grieving mother, or anyone else not born within that circle of privilege. To Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., we don’t count.

I’ve never bought Michael Skakel as guilty of killing Martha Moxley. Somehow Kennedy actually made me feel bad about that.