Michael Skakel

About Michael Skakel

Michael C. Skakel (born September 19, 1960) was convicted in 2002 of the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, his fifteen-year-old neighbor in Greenwich, Connecticut. Skakel's father is the brother of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's widow, Ethel.

Martha Moxley was found dead on October 31, 1975 on her family's property in Greenwich, Connecticut, after having been bludgeoned with a golf club, a 6-iron soon determined to belong to the Skakels. Initially, the murder remained unsolved, though a cloud of suspicion hung over the Skakel home. Kenneth Littleton, who had started working as a live-in tutor for the Skakel family only hours before the murder, also became a prime suspect. When William Kennedy Smith was tried for rape in 1991, information surfaced that he knew more about the Moxley case, resulting in renewed investigation of the then cold case. In 1993 author Dominick Dunne, father of murdered actress Dominique Dunne, published A Season in Purgatory, a fictional story loosely based on the murder of Martha Moxley. Mark Fuhrman's 1998 book Murder in Greenwich named Skakel as the murderer and pointed out numerous mistakes the police had made in investigating the crime. During the years before the Dunne and Fuhrman books, work had been done by Greenwich Police detective Frank Garr and police reporter Leonard Levitt, that named Michael as the killer.

In June 1998 a rarely invoked one-man Grand Jury was convened, and after 18 months (in June 2000) Michael Skakel was indicted for the murder of Martha Moxley. In a highly publicized trial, Skakel was convicted for the murder of Martha Moxley on June 7, 2002, and received a sentence of 20 years to life in prison. Skakel's alibi was that at the time of the murder he was at his cousin's house. The jury also heard part of a taped book proposal, in which Skakel admitted to masturbating in a tree that night, but not to killing Moxley. Prosecutors took words from this proposal and overlaid them on graphic images of Martha Moxley's dead body in a computerized presentation shown to jurors during closing arguments. Skakel's defense insists that his words were taken out of context.