When Kennedy’s cousin Michael Skakel was found guilty of the murder of Martha Moxley in 2002, it had been more than 25 years since her body was found under a tree on Moxley’s property. She had been killed with a hammer.
When Martha didn’t come home from a night out in the neighborhood the night before Halloween in 1975, her mother, Dorthy, called the police and Martha’s friends.
The next day, Moxley’s body was found behind a tree in her family’s backyard. Although her underwear and pants were pulled down, she had not been sexually abused.
They found pieces of a broken six-iron golf club near the body. The stick found in Skakel’s home was used to beat and stab her, according to an autopsy.
Where is Michael Skakel? Is he alive?
Michael Skakel is still alive. He paid $1.2 million bail to get out of jail and has been free ever since.
On the other hand, someone said on Twitter: “Speaking of which, I just watched (for the third time) the three part series on the murder of Martha Moxley on the Oxygen channel. After almost 50 years in prison, the killer or killers are free. Creepy.”
NBC News says Kennedy’s cousin Michael Skakel was not given a second trial for the murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley, whose body was found in Connecticut 45 years ago. She had been killed by a blunt object.
According to NBC Connecticut, Attorney General Richard Colangelo Jr. told a judge in October 2020 that there was insufficient forensic and eyewitness evidence to establish Skakel’s innocence beyond a reasonable doubt.
The subsidiary says 17 of the 50 witnesses who testified in the case have already died. That includes the key witness, who said Skakel admitted to killing the man in 1975.
Michael Skakel’s net worth as of 2022
Since he has used his family’s money to fight his conviction, Michael’s estimated net worth as of 2022 could be less than $1 million.
According to the New York Times, “very few criminal defendants can hope for a marshal.” The costs of contesting a conviction “were well into the millions” and “family funds are depleted.”
The money belonged to George Skakel, a tycoon and grandfather of Michael Skakel. George and his wife Ann died in a plane crash in 1957.
In 2007, when the grandparents’ endowment ended, Michael received “the same $383,000 as his siblings from the grandparents’ endowment.”
What was Brother Tommy Skakel’s fate?
Tommy Skakel was a suspect because he was the last person to see Martha alive. However, he had an alibi and the Greenwich Police Department did not have enough evidence to arrest him.
When Tommy’s brother Michael Skakel was arrested in 2000 for killing Martha after rumors surfaced that he had confessed to the crime, the story made headlines around the world.
Michael Skakel was 41 years old when he went to court in June 2002. The main thing the state was trying to prove was that Michael killed Martha in a drunken rage because he was jealous of how close she was to Tommy.
His prison sentence in the murder of Martha Moxley
In 2002, Skakel, niece of Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, was found guilty of Moxley’s murder and sentenced to 20 to life in prison. Because his trial attorney made mistakes, he got a new trial in 2013 after eleven years and many failed appeals.
Michael Skakel received good news when the Connecticut Attorney said they would not be trying him again in October 2020 because they could not prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
So, 46 years after the death of Martha Moxley, the case is still unsolved and her childhood friends don’t believe her killer will ever be found. That is, unless someone decides to come forward and spill a secret they may have been keeping all along.
Michael C. Skakel, born September 19, 1960, was found guilty of killing his 15-year-old neighbor Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1975. He was found guilty in 2002. He was sentenced to 20 years to life imprisonment, and he’s still there. Skakel is the nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, wife of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
early years
Michael Skakel was one of the six children born to Rushton and Anne Reynolds Skakel. The family lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, in the Belle Haven neighborhood. When Skakel’s mother died of brain cancer in 1973, he became an alcoholic and struggled at school. Later, his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote that Skakel was “a sensitive little child, the runt in the litter whose tough and sometimes violent alcoholic father ignored and abused him.” He also struggled with reading for many years, but didn’t find out why until he was 26.
In 1978, Skakel was pulled over in New York for drunk driving. Skakel’s family sent him to Elan School in Poland Spring, Maine to get help for his alcoholism so he wouldn’t get in trouble with the law. After two years he dropped out of school. He spent most of the 1980s racing the national speed ski circuit.
He graduated from Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts in 1993, then worked as a driver for Ted Kennedy’s 1994 campaign to remain in office. Later that year he worked for his cousin, Michael Kennedy, as director of international programs at Citizens Energy Corporation.
Is charged with murder
On October 31, 1975, Martha Moxley’s body was found on her family’s land in Greenwich, Connecticut. She had been hit in the head with a 6 iron golf club that was soon revealed to belong to the Skakels.
At first the murder went unsolved, but the Skakels’ home was surrounded by a cloud of suspicion. Ken Littleton was also one of the likeliest suspects. When William Kennedy Smith was tried for rape in 1991, it turned out he knew more about the Moxley case, so the “cold case” was re-examined.
In 1993, Dominick Dunne, whose actress daughter Dominique Dunne was killed, wrote a story called A Season in Purgatory. It was loosely based on the murder of Martha Moxley. Mark Fuhrman’s 1998 book Murder in Greenwich named Skakel the killer and pointed out the many mistakes police made in investigating the crime.
Before Dunne and Fuhrman’s books came out, Greenwich Police detective Frank Garr and police reporter Leonard Levitt had conducted investigations that pointed to Michael as the killer.
In June 1998, a one-man grand jury was convened, which doesn’t happen very often. After 18 months, in June 2000, Michael Skakel was charged with killing Martha Moxley. Skakel was found guilty of killing Martha Moxley on June 7, 2002 after a very public trial. He was sentenced to 20 years of life imprisonment. Skakel’s alibi was that he was at his cousin’s house at the time of the murder.
The jury also heard part of a recorded book proposal in which Skakel admitted to masturbating in a tree that night but did not kill Moxley. During closing arguments, prosecutors used words from this proposal and superimposed them on graphic images of Martha Moxley’s dead body in a computer presentation. People defending Skakel say his words were taken out of context.
In January 2003, Skakel’s cousin, attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wrote a controversial article entitled “A Miscarriage of Justice” for The Atlantic Monthly. He said Skakel’s charges “were caused by angry media and an innocent man is now in prison.”
He argues that there is more evidence that Ken Littleton, who was 23 and was living with the Skakel family at the time, killed Moxley. He also says that Dominick Dunne was the one pursuing Skakel.
Appeals and procedures following a conviction
Skakel is still fighting his sentence. In November 2003, Skakel appealed to the Connecticut Supreme Court. He said the trial court made a mistake because the case should have gone to the juvenile court instead of the high court. He also said that the charges against him were no longer valid because the statute of limitations had expired.
However, on January 12, 2006, the Connecticut Supreme Court disagreed with Skakel’s arguments and upheld his conviction. After that, Skakel hired attorney and former United States Attorney General Theodore Olson. On July 12, 2006, Olson filed a writ petition in the United States Supreme Court on behalf of Skakel. The Supreme Court dismissed the case on November 13, 2006.
Since then, Skakel has entered its first round of post-sentencing proceedings. He began with an application for a review and a request for a new trial in the Connecticut court, which tried his case first. Gitano “Tony” Bryant, the cousin of Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant and Skakel’s former classmate at the private Brunswick School in Greenwich, Connecticut, was developed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
In an August 2003 videotaped interview with Skakel private investigator Vito Colucci, Bryant said that one of his friends, who was with him the night Moxley was killed, wanted to make her “caveman,” meaning, to enforce by force. Bryant says he has never told anyone because his mother told him that if he was black he would be held responsible for the unsolved murder and he believed her.
In April 2007, this evidence was one of many things to be shown during a two-week hearing. In September 2007, Skakel’s attorneys requested a new trial in a petition based in part on Bryant’s allegations. Officially, prosecutors said Bryant may have made up the story to sell a play about the case.
Skakel’s new defense team also hired a full-time investigative team that works around the clock to look at old and new information, most notably a book written about the Elan school in preparation for the hearing. They said that nobody but Gregory Coleman, who had gone to Elan school with Skakel, ever told anyone about Skakel’s confession, not even the author of the book.
On October 25, 2007, a superior court judge denied the request for a new trial because Bryant’s testimony was not credible and there was no evidence that the prosecutor did anything wrong in the first trial. Skakel’s attorney appealed to the Connecticut Supreme Court to try to change that decision. On March 26, 2009, that appeal was heard by a panel of five judges of the State Supreme Court. On April 12, 2010, the panel rejected Skakel’s appeal by a score of 4-1. On August 29, 2002, Skakel was sentenced.
Skakel is still incarcerated at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution in Suffield, Connecticut. He will be paroled in April 2013.