Hello, Date Nine listeners.
I'm Keith Morrison and I'd like to introduce you to a brand new 12-part original podcast series called Dead Certain The Martha Moxley Murder, produced by NBC News Studios.
It's a story of privilege and secrets of a night that's haunted a town for half a century.
Whispers that turn to accusations.
Lies unraveled.
And just when you think you know the ending, another twist.
Here's a special preview of the first episode.
What do you know?
It's kind of an old-fashioned expression.
My dad often used it to express mild surprise.
Oh, look, there's a for sale sign on the neighbor's house.
What do you know?
Neil Diamond's coming to the Civic Center.
What do you know?
But before we begin this story, I want you to treat it as a serious question.
What do you know?
I mean, really know.
Is it possible that what you say you know is actually an opinion, something you just think?
And if you think something, what various forces worked on you to make you think that way?
And were those forces so effective in making you think something that somewhere along the way, you started believing that you didn't just think it, you knew it?
In 1975, a 15-year-old girl named Martha Moxley was murdered in Greenwich, Connecticut.
She was rich and beautiful and loved by all who knew her.
For decades.
Despite intense media scrutiny on the tragic murder in a wealthy, supposedly safe community, police failed to make an arrest.
Until the year 2000, when they took Martha's one-time neighbor, Michael Skakel, into custody.
He was 39 years old.
Back in 1975, he'd been 15, just like Martha.
He was wealthy, like her.
He was also a cousin of the Kennedys.
The media responded in predictable fashion.
Kennedy nephew Michael Skakel, now 39, charged with murdering his Greenwich, Connecticut neighbor Martha Moxley.
And a nephew of the late Robert Kennedy.
A teenage neighbor and friend of Martha Moxley related to the Kennedy clan.
The Kennedy name has lent this case tremendous notoriety.
I'm like a lot of people.
I have an appetite for lurid news, a good murder story, especially one involving famous names.
I watched the news.
I read the articles.
Of course Michael Skakel killed his next-door neighbor, Martha Moxley.
He beat her to death with a golf club on October 30, 1975, when they were both 15.
I knew it.
And if you followed the case like I did...
I bet you knew it, too.
In 2002, a jury convicted Skakel, and the judge threw the book at him.
It was nearly the maximum sentence possible 20 years to life for Kennedy nephew Michael Skakel, convicted of killing his Greenwich, Connecticut neighbor Martha Moxley back in 1975.
And then in 2013, a judge released Michael Skakel on appeal after he'd served 11 1⁄2 years in state prison.
For the media it was anything but an exoneration, but rather the kind of clever legal maneuver only accessible to the super wealthy, free on a technicality.
A famous New Yorker writer, Jeffrey Toobin, when tweeting about the case, appended the hashtag Rich People Justice.
I live in Westport, Connecticut, with my wife and two teenage boys.
It's just a handful of exits north of Greenwich on I-95.
A few summers ago, my then 15-year-old son Henry was doing an odd job for a woman in town helping to clean out her garage.
Henry said he told her that I was a journalist, researching the Martha Moxley case.
When she heard that, she immediately stopped what she was doing and said I know exactly what happened to Martha Moxley.
Michael Skakel murdered her.
She knew just like I knew.
And a lot of people who had important roles in the outcome of this case knew too.
Now I want to ask you a follow-up.
Says who?
My name is Andrew Goldman.
I've been a journalist for 30 years.
I got involved in this case in 2015, when current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Bobby Kennedy Jr, reached out asking if I was interested in ghostwriting his book about it.
He wanted me to help exonerate his cousin.
It was a great offer, except unlike Bobby, I didn't believe Michael Skakel was innocent.
At that particular moment, I really needed the work.
It was a moral quandary.
The Kennedy family has a long history of using the media to carry its water, sometimes to defend the indefensible.
Was I willing to be part of that machine?
I consulted my wife and my shrink.
I came up with moral justifications.
But today, when I think back to why I took it, my true motivation is obvious.
I think if I'm good at my job, it's because I'm curious.
A less charitable way to put it would be nosy.
I was way too fascinated with the Kennedys, with Michael Skakel and the Moxley murder, to turn down the opportunity to penetrate the case's inner circle.
The book was published in 2016.
But here's the thing.
Once I started researching this case, I couldn't stop.
I was no longer working for RFK and the book was done, but I wasn't.
I think it would be fair to say that this story has become an addiction for me.
If I can do justice to this unbelievable yarn, I suspect it'll become an addiction for you too.
I thought I understood the case.
It was a decades-long story about the powerful and the privileged seemingly getting away with murder.
But the deeper I dug, the more I came to question everything I thought I knew.
I discovered a much darker, more shocking tale than I ever could have guessed.
In this series, you'll be hearing from dozens of voices, some of whom may be familiar to you.
I'm Jeffrey Toobin.
My name is Amanda Knox.
My name is Mark Furman.
Linda Kenny-Bodden.
Dr. Henry Lee.
Oh, and one more person who's never before spoken to the media.
Can you tell me your name, say my name is, and why I might be interviewing you?
My name is Michael Skakel, and why am I being interviewed?
I mean, that's kind of a big question, isn't it?
From NBC News Studios and Highly Replaceable Productions.
This is Dead.
Certain, the Martha Moxley Program.
When I accepted the Skakel book gig, I did the first thing I do whenever I approach a story a deep dive on the subject.
I read the three books that had been written about the case.
I went back and read a bunch of trial coverage from newspapers, as well as the work of two of my heroes in journalism writing for the most esteemed high-profile publications in America.
My research confirmed everything I thought I knew about the case, and worse.
Writing for The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin reported that Skakel, driven mad from a romantic obsession, killed Moxley and incriminated himself by confessing to the crime repeatedly in the 27 years following the murder.
Toobin dismissed out of hand the idea that any of the others suspected of the crime over the years could have done it.
Dominic Dunn in Vanity Fair described how Skakel's family, rich and Kennedy-connected by marriage, used its wealth and influence to evade justice for decades.
He reported that a detective agency the Skakel patriarch hired in hopes of clearing the family name had reinvestigated the case and determined Michael Skakel to be the likely killer.
In 1998, Mark Furman, made famous by the O.J.
Simpson trial, authored a popular book that renewed interest in the case.
Furman wrote that immediately after the murder, Skakel's father had apparently hatched a conspiracy of silence within the family, shipping his kids off to their ski retreat so they could get their story straight.
Then he warehoused his son Michael in a treatment center where investigators couldn't get to him.
In the end, it was the rich kid's big mouth that undid him.
Even Skakel's multi-million dollar gold-plated defense couldn't save him from justice.
When Skakel successfully appealed his conviction, Toobin wrote that Skakel had finally found a judge who believed his story.
His freedom, he wrote, was about his privilege, not his innocence.
I didn't grow up with money.
I never went to sleepaway camp, never learned to play tennis golf, ski or even go on a family vacation.
It's true.
I have lived in Westport, a really nice town in Connecticut for the last decade.
But the ways of the country clubs and money elite remain a complete mystery to me.
I'm a stop and shop sale watcher living among a lot of if you have to ask, you can't afford it types.
To understand this murder, I'd have to learn about how the other half lived in Tony Greenwich.
In the 70s, if you wanted to get rich, you worked in New York City.
Likewise in the 70s if you worked in the city, were rich and had kids, you lived anywhere but New York City.
There were plenty of nice suburbs to stash your family, far from the crime-ridden, nearly bankrupt metropolis.
But Greenwich, Connecticut was the dream.
Its schools were among the best in the country, and it only took 25 minutes for the express into Grand Central.
Of all the towns on Connecticut's so-called Gold Coast, on the Long Island Sound, a Greenwich address had and continues to have the most cachet among the moneyed elite.
But like every creme, Greenwich had its creme de la creme.
And the creamiest cream was Belhaven, which on a map looks like a toe dipping into the Long Island Sound on the south tip of Greenwich.
Belhaven was built as a vacation colony in the late 19th century.
Grand white clabbered cottages with wraparound porches on which you could sip your sherry at sunset while listening to scratchy Brahms symphonies on the gramophone.
VIPs, captains of industry and a couple famous entertainers like Frank Gorshin, the riddler from the 60s Batman series, were typical of Belhaven's residents.
In the summer of 1974, a moving truck rolled up to the big White House at 38 Walsh Lane.
It had come 3,000 miles, all the way from Piedmont, California.
42-year-old David Moxley had been tapped by accounting giant Touche Ross to relocate from the West Coast to run its New York office.
The job and the house and the neighborhood were a big step up in the world for the Kansas native.
David and Dorothy Moxley's teenage kids, Martha and John, would live among the most privileged families in America.
That being said, at least for kids, Belhaven didn't feel all that stuffy.
My name is Sheila McGuire.
The back of my home looked at the back of Martha's home.
Sheila's a mom of two grown kids.
I interviewed her on her day off in the Newtown Connecticut Public Library near her home.
Like her friend and neighbor Martha, Sheila was also 15 in 1975, one of a big Catholic brood of seven girls.
Yeah, it was a charming time.
There was kick the can going on in the streets, flashlight tags.
We had special little codes.
We were putting little secret notes in trees.
We had secret calls for one another.
We rode bikes all over the place.
I've swum in almost every pool there and a couple of them in the middle of the night.
It just goes kind of the way it was.
You know, everyone was essentially safe.
Like most Belhaven kids, Sheila and her sisters were basically free range.
I think a lot of the parents were absentee at the time because it was just the way it was.
I mean the sound of music in Belhaven was clinking of ice and glasses, you know.
And 11-year-olds watching three-year-olds, you know, for 12 hours a day, you know.
Or nine-year-olds watching three-year-olds for 12 hours a day,
At the club, I mean, I think I babysat for three families at the same time when I was 11.
By the club, Sheila means the Belhaven Club.
It sat within a mile of each of the 120 or so houses in Belhaven.
It offered sailing lessons, tennis, and a huge dining room overlooking the Sound.
Homeowners were nearly assured membership, but they did need to be sponsored.
At a cocktail party not long after moving in the Moxleys met the recent widower who lived in the massive spread just around the corner on Otter Rock Drive, with a swimming pool and tennis courts and countless rowdy kids.
Rush Skakel was his name.
He was a rotund man jokey friendly goofy, the type to sometimes greet friends with belly bumps, and hardly gave off a corporate vibe, even though he was the chairman of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, one of the most valuable private companies in America.
Rush was remarkably solicitous to his new neighbor.
He seemed, and in fact was, the type to be a tad too eager to be liked by all.
Rush didn't hesitate to offer to sponsor David Moxley's membership of the club.
This gesture was typical.
Rush also invited the Moxleys to his family's private ski resort in Wyndham, New York and, almost certainly based on his usual habits, suggested the family should join him on the company plane to go see the Atlanta Braves play.
Rush was a part owner of the team.
But his social bona fides were even loftier.
He had friends in high places.
Despite the Skakels being a rock-ribbed Republican family Rush was close personal friends with Hugh Carey, the Democratic governor of New York.
And although Rush certainly wouldn't have mentioned it right away himself, everyone in Belhaven knew that back in 1950 Rush's older sister Ethel, had married Robert F Kennedy right there in town at St.
Mary's on Greenwich Avenue.
Rush had been an usher.
JFK, then a congressman from Boston, Bobby's best man.
Patriarch Joe Kennedy famously used his considerable riches to fund his family's political ambitions.
Some would even say he bought the White House for his son Jack.
But as rich as the Kennedys were, the Skakel fortune dwarfed that of the Kennedys.
The Skakels resided in a whole other financial universe, so much so that the scuttlebutt at the time was that Bobby had married the Skakel girl for her money.
Family's wealth and corporate affiliations might have been of interest to the parents of Belhaven, but this kind of social yardstick wasn't as relevant to their 15-year-old kids.
There was more immediate stuff to consider.
How's my hair look?
Does he like me?
Why is my complexion betraying me?
Who's got beer?
To both the boys and girls of Belhaven, Martha was different.
Less self-conscious than the other girls, a little more adventurous, like an emissary to frigid Connecticut from free and easy California.
You know, I think one of the things that really totally gets lost in a lot of this stuff is how absolutely awesome and wonderful Martha was.
That's Peter Kumarswamy.
His father was chief of cardiac surgery at both Greenwich and Stanford hospitals.
His mother was a prominent attorney and one of Martha's mom, Dorothy Moxley's closest friends.
He was known as Kumo back then and was 15 in 1975, just like Martha Moxley.
I remember I was sitting in a room with her and a bunch of other girls and everybody got up and left.
And she was very, very, very pretty.
And I remember her sitting across from me and just started talking to me.
And I was like oh my goodness, this girl is really really genuinely beautiful, interesting and a nice person.
And wow, she's really good, you know, just genuinely interested, not polluted enough to be fake.
Everyone I've spoken to agrees with this assessment.
Here's Sheila McGuire again.
Yeah, she was joy on legs.
I mean, she just was this blonde smile, very happy, very kind of flirtatious, but not in a not in like a sexual inappropriate way.
Just this like happy person, you know, just just darling.
She came from California.
She was like the Gidget, the surfer girl kind of thing.
We all loved her, you know, just just really special.
So girls liked her and boys really liked her.
The feeling that I get when I talk to guys who knew Martha, especially the ones who are a bit older than her, is that there is perhaps a reluctance to come out and just talk about how alluring she was.
Maybe that's because, even though she'd be 65 now, she'll always be stuck in time at 15 and forever off limits.
But back in the 70s, she may not have felt that way to her peers.
Martha's diary entries from 1975 portray what might today be called a burgeoning sex positivity.
Boy crazy was the phrase kids of my generation used.
She called the many boys she liked foxes, which she often scrawled in capital letters to emphasize her attraction and chronicled her hut makeout sessions.
She'd only had her braces off for a few months, but it's clear from her diary that many, many boys seemed to find her particularly fascinating.
In her diary, she was, as the saying goes, fighting them off and clearly enjoying the attention.
On October 30th 1975, Martha's diary entry centered on a boy who'd been writing her flirtatious notes.
These notes are too much, she wrote.
He was in bed dreaming of me last night.
I can hardly wait to see tomorrow's.
But tomorrow for Martha never came.
To hear the rest of this episode, just search for Dead Certain The Martha Moxley Murder, wherever you get your podcasts.
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New episodes drop every week.
