Chapter 1: What is the introduction to the Martha Moxley case?
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.
Chapter 2: What happened to Martha Moxley in 1975?
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.
Chapter 3: Who is Michael Skakel and what is his connection to the case?
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 30th, 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.
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Chapter 4: How did the media portray the Moxley murder case?
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.
Chapter 5: What challenges did investigators face in solving the case?
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.
Chapter 6: How did Michael Skakel's trial unfold?
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.
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Chapter 7: What were the implications of Skakel's conviction and subsequent appeal?
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.
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Chapter 8: What can listeners expect from the full series on the Moxley case?
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.
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