Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his cousin Michael Skakel was framed for the murder of Martha Moxley
By Stephanie Sy
As Michael Skakel’s fate lies in legal limbo, his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has written a whodunit tome with the aim of clearing him of Martha Moxley’s 1975 murder — “Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit.”
Martha Moxley, 15, was bludgeoned to death with a golf club in an affluent Greenwich, Conn., neighborhood. No one was charged with her murder until 2002, when Michael Skakel, Moxley’s neighbor, who was also 15 at the time of the murder, was tried and convicted of the crime.
In an interview with Yahoo News, Kennedy said Skakel’s association with the Kennedy clan drew journalists covering the case into a “seductive narrative … that this was a Kennedy kid who had gotten away with murder.” Kennedy takes pains to say the Skakels not only were separate and distant from the Kennedy family, but had entirely opposing (conservative) politics.
“They considered any connection with the family to be a kind of social demotion,” Kennedy said.
In the explosive book, the former prosecutor Kennedy faults the media, the police, the prosecutor’s office, and even employees of the Skakels, whom he claims manipulated the facts of the case for their own personal and financial gain. In 2003 Kennedy wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly that claimed Michael Skakel was wrongly convicted. His new book expands on his own investigation. He includes interviews with witnesses, including members of the Skakel family, to build a case that there were other, more plausible murder suspects linked to Moxley than his cousin Michael, including Michael’s own brother, Tommy Skakel. Ultimately, though, both Skakel brothers are cleared in Kennedy’s telling of events. In the last chapter of the book, he names and implicates two men outside the Skakel family — men that have never been questioned by police.
In a statement to Yahoo News, the Connecticut Division of Criminal Justice said, “It is important for the public to know that these very same allegations have been thoroughly vetted in legal proceedings and found to be baseless. … Mr. Kennedy, whether as an author or through other means, has presented no valid or new information that in any way undermines the jury’s rightful verdict in this case.”
The book and the questions it renews about the Moxley murder are timely. A judge ruled in 2013 that Skakel’s lawyer did not provide an adequate defense, and Skakel was released after serving 11 years of a 20-years-to-life sentence. But he is not in the clear. Prosecutors have appealed to the Connecticut Supreme Court to reinstate Skakel’s conviction.
Kennedy said people should not blindly accept the version of events he proffers but should decide for themselves after reading the book.
“What I’m asking people to do is to look at the facts, which was never done,” he said. “That was one of the big pitfalls of this case — that people accepted the orthodoxy and nobody looked at these basic facts.”