November 10, 2025 • 46 mins
On October 31, 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley’s body was found under a tree in her family’s backyard in a wealthy enclave of Greenwich, CT. Nearly 25 years later, after countless false starts, someone was finally charged with Moxley’s murder: Michael Skakel, a former neighbor and classmate of Martha’s — and Bobby Kennedy’s nephew. The story only gets weirder from there. And with new revelations coming to light just last week, it’s still not over.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
I'm George Severis and I'm Julia Claire and this is
United States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination
with the Kennedy Dynasty. Every week we go into one
aspect of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking
about the murder of Martha Moxley. But before we do,
I do want to address one thing, which is listeners
of the podcast might have noticed that it's been just
(00:30):
me over the last couple of weeks, but we have
an announcement for the future of the show, which is
that Julia is officially joining as my second co host.
Wow Wow, And Julia, we've already been through your Someone
call it clinical obsession with the Kennedy's. Of course, in
some medical textbooks, being Catholic and from Boston actually counts
as an illness.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
That's right, ben Itch. You know we're working hard to
add it to the DSM.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
That's right. For listeners to the podcast, you might remember
Julia as the guest in the movie episode we did
about the frankly pretty bad movie Bobby from two thousand
and six a couple of weeks ago, and I did
mention that Julia has a oft revisited biography of Bobby
Kennedy in her home that I actually saw in real
(01:15):
life recently when I went over to discuss some business.
What I also saw is a at least one commemorative plate
or dish of some sort with the Kennedys on it.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
That's right. I can't take credit for that one. The
Bobby biography is mine, but all of the commemorative plates
and letters and things like that are my husband's. His
grandfather had some sort of weird connection to the Kennedy's
and so we have all these like official White House
stationery letters. Also, my husband's grandmother loved anything that was
(01:48):
extremely tacky, so we do have a pretty life sized
tapestry of JFK that is hidden away from public view.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And you did correct me if I'm wrong. You got
married in the Jackie ping Chanelle's suit when JA.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah, yeah, And I just thought that that was appropriate
for my.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Big day, of course, and it was a beautiful day
for it was a beautiful wedding. Well, it's nice that
we're starting in such a lighthearted, joking mood because this
week's topic is a real laugh riot.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
It's not a good one.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
It's really not a good one. We should just come
right out and say this is a slightly strange episode
because we wanted to do this topic, and we wanted
it to be Julia's first topic that we do together
because it is a really you know, not to use
true crime depraved language, but it's a real juicy one.
It is a really genuinely interesting case that has so
(02:41):
many open questions. It feels very true crimey. It really
combines all the things that we are fascinated by the Kennedys,
and it also is a topic that somehow neither of
us had ever come across, which is sort of crazy
to me.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
No, and you know what, I mentioned to my mom
that we were going to be talking about this and
I had never heard of it, and she was like,
oh my god, well I remember reading about that in
the Boston Globe. It felt like there was always like
a new story about it. So it was clearly something
that was national news just missed us because we're famously young.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
So on the one hand, it is super interesting again
because it's this true crime story that we hadn't heard
of that has so many elements of Kennedy history, and
so we were like, okay, great, we have a great
research doc prepared by our wonderful researchers. We watched the
forty eight hours special on it that was released a
few years ago. The last sort of big update on
the case was around twenty twenty, which we'll talk about later,
(03:41):
and we thought we had all the facts and we
were ready to record, and then literally today, on the
day of this recording, you can't make the.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Stuff November fourth, twenty member fourth.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
To give everyone a pick behind the curtain. Today, an
NBC News podcast about the case premieres in which Michael Skagel,
who is the person that was arrested for this murder
that we'll talk about soon, and the person who was
later freed, is breaking his silence for the first time
in this podcast that seeks to exonerate him. So we
(04:12):
are reacting to all of this live. I had just
listened to it an hour ago, but we're still processing
what that means for this topic. And I think inevitably,
after the podcast is over and there's inevitably a whole
other cycle of media coverage, we will hopefully revisit this
topic again and talk about how our views on it
(04:33):
have changed.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Right and honestly, even without this development from literally today,
both George and I were commiserating over the fact that
this case is so layered and there's so many moving
parts and so many characters that even without this most
recent breaking news, I think we would have a hard
(04:56):
time knowing which way was up in this case.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, it's a really difficult one. And it is such
a really perfect combination of a sort of bungled investigation
that a police department that was not necessarily equipped for
something this major ended up conducting pieces of evidence that
arose later on, pieces of evidence that were ignored just
this year. Time that passed between when it happened and
(05:21):
when someone was convicted and when that person was freed,
it has legitimately lasted for decades or actally years years today.
Years today.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
November fourth is the fifty year anniversary since Martha's funeral,
so she was buried today fifty years ago. With that,
I think that we should just get into the nuts
and volts of what happened completely.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
So, Julia, do you want to kick us off and
walk me through just the basic facts of this case.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Okay? So, Martha Moxley was a fifteen year old girl
who moved with her family to Belle Haven, an enclave
of Greenwich, Connecticut in the year nineteen seventy five from California.
She lived across the street from the Scalles. And George,
(06:12):
can you tell us a little bit about the Scalles.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yeah, So the Scalles are the Kennedy connection. As you said,
Martha Moxley's family had just moved to this Greenwich enclave.
It is the richest enclave of an already incredibly wealthy town.
Greenwich is like where the wealthy people from New York
City moved when they had kids in the seventies. So
the Scakeles lived right across the street from the Moxleys.
(06:37):
And the Scakeles were an incredibly wealthy family that is
related to the Kennedy's by marriage. So Rush Scakele, who
is the patriarch of the Greenwich Scahles, was the brother
of Ethel, who married Bobby Kennedy. So Bobby Kennedy, who
we've discussed before in this podcast, of course, most importantly
the subject of the two thousand and six movie Bobby.
(06:58):
Bobby Kennedy and his wife Ethel are of course the
parents of RFK Junior, who everyone knows now and all
his other siblings, and it should be noted that while
the Kennedy connection, of course gave us Scalhles some prestige
in this town, they were actually way wealthier than the Kennedy's,
and there was a running joke among the Kennedy community
(07:18):
that the Kennedy's actually married into the Scalholes for the money.
So these weren't social climbers that married into the Kennedys
because they wanted to be American royalty. So Rush Skagle's
family business, Great Lakes Carbon, was one of the largest
private companies in the US, and he and his wife
Anne had seven children, six boys and one girl. As
(07:39):
Julia writes in our research stock Yikes. But unfortunately Anne
had passed away recently, so Rush was raising his kids
on his own. And actually this will come back later,
but there was a live in tutor that had actually
just moved into the house I believe that day, the
day of the murder, who had moved into because Rush
(08:01):
felt like he needed more adult supervision in the home
where he lived with all his children. So that's the Scalicles.
Two of the Scale children, it should be noted, or
Tommy and Michael Skakel. They are the ones that later
on will be suspects in this case. So that's a
very preliminary cast of characters. Obviously, other people are gonna
present themselves. But we have the Moxley's, we have the Scaliclls.
(08:24):
Martha Moxley's fifteen years old. Tommy and Michael Skakele are
around her age. One of them is her exact age,
one of them is two years older.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Michael is fifteen, Tommy is seventeen.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
There you go, and to situate ourselves. It is October thirtieth,
nineteen seventy five, which is the evening before Halloween, obviously,
and kids are up to no good. They're going around,
they're teepeeing homes. And then Julia walk us through what
happens the night.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Of October thirty is nineteen seventy five. Martha Moxley was
out with some friends in a group including Tommy and
Michael Scalicell and they were the two people with whom
she was last seen alive at around nine thirty PM.
And that's pretty much the very last of what we
(09:13):
know for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Yeah, so a bunch of kids congregated in the Scalele
home and they congregated around the porch. Then at some
point they moved to the dad's car, which was this
very fancy, rich car that he allegedly, you know, used
to pick up women. And they were there for a
brief period of time. Then they went back, and then
by all counts, the last time everyone agrees they saw
(09:38):
Martha was around nine thirty. And it's important to note
that her journey from the Scales back to her house
would have taken her like two minutes. She wasn't going
into some dark forest between one location and the other.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
They literally lived right across the street from one another. So,
long story short, Martha doesn't come home, and Martha's mother
begins to worry, and so she's calling around to her friends.
She actually goes to the Scay Goals knocks on their door.
The door is opened by fifteen year old Michael, who
Martha's mother alleges looks a little hungover, a little disoriented,
(10:18):
and says he hasn't seen her. Search begins and Martha
is found under a tree in the Moxley backyard and
she is almost unrecognizable.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, she has discovered. This was actually something that they
described in gruesome detail in Venue NBC News podcast, because
they interviewed this woman. I was about to say girl,
but of course now she is much older. But at
the time, this fifteen year old girl named Sheila, and
this is something that is clearly the single most traumatic
experience of her life. She's walking around and she looks down.
(10:52):
She sees a blue puffy material thinks it's some kind
of like mattress or something. It is Martha's puffer that
she's wearing. And Martha's body is found bludgeoned to death
with a golf club, like very psychotically violent. This is
not something that could be an accident or self defense
or anything like that. It is the golf club itself
(11:13):
had been broken into three pieces. One of the pieces
had been stabbed into the back of her neck. Famously,
there was so much blood that the police couldn't tell
what color her hair was. There was so much blood.
And then Martha's pants and underwear were pulled down, but
investigators found no signs of sexual assault. And apparently, according
to forensic evidence, she had been killed near the driveway
(11:34):
and the murderer dragged her body eighty feet to the
base of a tree where she was found and just
to go back to the scalhol connection. Not only did
this happen on her way back from the scalholes. But
very quickly it became clear that the golf club that
was used was discovered to be clearly part of a
set that belonged to and scalole.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
That's right. One of our researchers noted in the documents
that despite the fact that it was immediately identified as
part of the set belonging to a scale, that Greenwich
police never sought or obtained a warrant to search the
scale home, which is crazy. And we'll get into more
of how the Greenwich police mungled this. But Greenwich is
(12:17):
a town where virtually no crime happens, So to say
that this shocked this extremely insular, wealthy community is the
understatement of the century. But the Greenwich police were clearly
ill equipped to handle this case. There had only been
three murders in Greenwich in twenty five years, and from
(12:40):
the beginning it was I think a foundational mistake is
obviously not searching the scale home. But from the beginning
it was clear that they were just out of their depth.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, and the one sort of fact that I found
out actually in this new podcast is that apparently the
police didn't even have enough crime scene tape when this happened,
I mean they were there to catch people that were
speeding on the street everyone, So a while, this wasn't
a police force that was equipped to deal with a
violent murder case. And at the same time, they did
(13:12):
their job. In the years that followed, they ended up
questioning and estimated five hundred people. It went on for years,
but somehow no suspects were named, no arrests were made,
and no grand juries were convened. Later on, years later,
someone would say that internally their prime suspect was Tommy Scicel,
(13:33):
but he was, but that was never made public and
he was never arrested.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
So, as we said, Tommy was seventeen, Michael was fifteen,
and Martha has several entries in her diary that are
read in the forty eight hour special in which she
explicitly says that Tommy is making passes at her, pulling
her onto his lap, putting his hands onto her knees,
(13:59):
stuff like that. It's clear that they had some sort
of physical relationship with varying degrees of consent, and there's
also alliations and different people remember certain things that Michael
said about Michael also being enamored with Martha and wishing
that she would be his girlfriend. And Tommy and Michael,
(14:21):
as two brothers that close in age, often extremely competitive
about everything, and both of them, based on varying accounts,
had a temper, and that was another thing that was
not investigated too thoroughly, basically the history of violent outbursts
by both boys. And another thing that is important to
(14:45):
note about Michael is his mother died when he was
twelve in nineteen seventy two, and there are different accounts
that say that basically he had a drinking problem beginning
at age thirteen, and he would later go to reform
school after getting a at age seventeen. So this was
a very chaotic, troubled, extremely wealthy family, which I think
(15:09):
is like a really important piece of this whole thing,
that this was just a deeply chaotic house which had
no mother, a legendly a kind of distant and simultaneously violent.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Father, and there were substance abuse issues just like this
is a pattern in many pockets of the Kennedy family.
And we will get to RFK Junior later, but one
of the ways that RFK Junior, who is the Scagell's
first cousin. One of the ways that he and Michael
scaqlebonded is that they both got sober around the same
time man supported each other through their sobriety process. We're
(15:43):
going to take a short break, stay with.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Us, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
It should also be noted that during his time as
a troubled teen, according to a couple of sources, Michael
Skaigel confessed is maybe too strong of a word, but
almost like in a provocative way, would either brag about
being able to get away with murder or allude to
that night in provocative ways. And so there are many
classmates of his that said that he made incriminating statements
(16:25):
during group therapy sessions while they were all in school together.
So that is also something that sort of people have
had to deal with over the years. That said, the narrative,
from what I understand from Michael's perspective, has just been
like I was a troubled teen, I was an addict,
I was even under the influence while some of this
(16:45):
stuff was happening, and I finally in my twenties and thirties,
turned my life around and became an upstanding member of
society and I should not be held accountable for crazy
things I said when I was in school. Right.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
So, going back to the night of there were really
two to three initial suspects in this murder case. When
they were questioned by police, Tommy and Michael each explained
where they were at the time of Martha's murder, and
both of them said that they were hanging out with
Martha outside of their house at nine pm. Michael originally
(17:18):
told police that he left Tommy and Martha at nine
thirty PM and went to his cousin's house to watch
TV until eleven thirty and then came home. Tommy told
police that Martha left his house soon after. Michael so
also around nine thirty and that was the last time
he saw her. Both of them ended up changing their
stories after that. Also, there's something in the forty eight
(17:39):
Hours documentary that said that Tommy claimed that he went
inside and wrote a paper about Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Well, you know who among us. It's a really amazing
way to relieve stress, to just write a quick paper
about Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
But there was also one other suspect, George, can you
tell us a little bit about.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Right, So we alluded to him earlier. We said that
literally the night of the murder, there was a live
in tutor that had moved into the Scayhole household because
again the father Rush Scaycole, wanted another adult figure in
his children's life. So that man's name is Kenneth Littleton
and he was twenty four years old. He was a
(18:15):
twenty four year old science teacher at a Greenwich private
school called Brunswick School, and the night of the murder
he moved into the Scalgell household to be a parental
teacher figure there. So he wasn't a prime suspect in
the murder case for more than a year. And then
the Greenwich police learned that he had been arrested in
Nantucket in the summer of nineteen seventy six, six months
(18:37):
after the murder, and he got drunk at least three
separate times and stole things. Who was found guilty of
larsity and handed a suspended sentence and five years of probation.
The point is this is someone who had a history
of alarming behavior and he was there, yes, but.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
It could be it's not necessarily a history. It was
like it seems like perhaps citing incident was the Martha
Moxley murder. And then that was one of the big questions,
was like, was he racked with guilt or was he
just so traumatized by this event? And you know, goes
without saying that petty larceny and drunken disorderly conduct is
(19:16):
a horse of a different color than murder. But yes,
he has remained a kind of looming figure in the
case for fifty years.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, as you're saying, it seems somehow emblematic of his
guilt that his life sort of goes off the rails
after the murder happens, and he is eventually fired from
the Brunswick school. He's able to get a job at
another private school. Then he was fired from that school
after Gratich police showed up to question him. But all
that aside, Kenneth Littleton was never arrested or charged with Martha's.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Murder, and neither was anyone else.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Now there was anyone else for twenty five years. So
that's it. There were these three suspects that at various
given times seemed guilty. We had Tommy Skaegel, we had
Michael Skagel, and we had Kenneth Telittleton, no one was arrested,
people lose interest in the case, and twenty years go.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
By, And it should be noted that the family patriarch
agreed to work with the Greenwich Police, but about six
months into the case stopped answering your questions and stopped
cooperating with them.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
So basically now we're just fast tracking to two thousand
and one, that's the next time that there were any
major updates on this case. The Moxley parents did not
get any sort of closure or any sort of useful
information about who killed their daughter. It was just this
tragedy that happened in this otherwise wealthy, charming enclave.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So before we get to that, we have to make
a pit stop in the nineteen nineties, because in nineteen
ninety two nineteen ninety three, there's still no answers about
the Martha Moxley case, and Rush Skeaykele, the family patriarch,
decides to hire his own investigative firm to reopen and
reinvestigate the case privately, and the results of this investigation
(21:02):
become known as the Sutton Report. So Tommy and Michael
both sat for testimony in the Cuttain Report. Again, they
just thought that it was like an internal family investigation,
but both Tommy and Michael had their stories had changed.
Tommy now said that Martha didn't go home when Michael
left at nine point thirty. Tommy admitted that he and
Martha engaged in a sexual act and that Martha went
(21:25):
home around ten PM. Michael said that he went to
his cousin's house to watch a movie, which was part
of his initial statement, but he came home around eleven PM.
He said that he then went outside at midnight, climbed
a tree outside of Martha's window and masturbated, and then
investigators checked that out and alleged that there was no
tree that matched Michael's description outside of her bedroom window.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
It's one of those updates that only makes it more
confusing because it doesn't actually incriminate either of them, but
it does at least prove they lied to the police
at some point, whether it was their first alibi or
their second alibi. But also it's just strange behavior on
all sides. At the end of the day, these are
all teenagers. Their behavior on a drunken night the night
(22:12):
before Halloween, regardless of whether it ended in murder or not,
is going to be strange. I mean, these are rowdy,
rich kids who want to be adventurous, who want to
be naughty and who are.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
You know, they're essentially feral, Yes, they're essentially fair, and
they're also the popular kids.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
They are the kids that are the ones getting into
trouble and they know that at any given point their
parents are going to bail them out. It's an archetype
we're all very familiar with from teen movies.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Right, and the Scale Goals Again, it really can't be
overstated how wealthy of the Scale Goals were. Like this
is like Koch Brothers level money of that era. They
don't have that much money anymore, but they were extremely
wealthy and powerful at this time.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So fast forward to two thousand and one. Basically what
happens is through a kind of like renewed true crime
craze and with the legacy of the OJ Simpson case
in court TV and in a renewed interest in true crime.
Basically the case, which is a classic old case, gains
traction again in the public imagination. And the two things
that help with that are two books that are written.
(23:13):
So first we have this Dominic Doune fiction book that
is clearly heavily inspired by the case, and for listeners
of the podcast, you might remember Dominic Dunn is a
long time Kennedy enthusiast. People might remember in the episode
we did on the William Kennedy Smith trial he wrote
a very long and comprehensive profile of the William Kennedy
(23:36):
Smith accuser, who at the time believed to be credible.
And so he is someone who has always been very
fascinated by the mechanations of the Kennedy family and by
the corruption they're in and by the ways they are
able to bend the justice system to their whims. So
that book, which is called A Season in Purgatory, is
sort of a fictional account of the Moxley case. It
(23:57):
ended up becoming a TV mini series and it got
a lot of people talking about the case again. The
second book, which was not build as fiction and was
a bit more problematic, was a book written by none
other than Mark Furman. Julia, do you want to remind
maybe some of our younger listeners who Mark Furman is.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
For those of us who are extremely young, as George
and I are, Mark Furman was the disgraced former LAPD
officer who was very much at the center of the
OJ Simpson case.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yes, so his testimony against Simpson was largely discredited after
it was revealed that Furman was a true just literally speaking,
a racist. He denied under oath that he regularly used
the N word and that it was charged with perjury,
and his closing statement even the prosecution called him a
bad cop. I mean, this is someone who is an
(24:47):
archetype of a racist.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Cop, like admitted to a reporter, admitted bragged about extra
judicial violence against black people.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right. And after leaving the police force, he became the
very classic like fixture of trash TV. He went on
TV as an expert on the OJ case. He wrote
a book called Murder in Brentwood about the OJ murders,
and he then developed this second career as a author
of popular airport nonfiction books about unsolved murders. So a
(25:18):
huge run for him was this Martha Moxley murder. He
wrote the book Murder in Greenwich Who killed Martha Moxley
in June of nineteen ninety eight, and in the book,
Furman concluded that Michael Skekell was most likely Martha's killer,
saying he was spinning into a jealous rage after seeing
Tommy and Martha making out. So this brings us to
Michael Skekell actually being tried for murder. So this is
(25:42):
January twentieth, two thousand, This is nearly twenty five years
after Martha's murder. Michael Skekell is charged with murder.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Based on the findings of the Sutton Report, and then
Greenwich hired a one person grand jury investigator to review
all the new abvidae and then he was brought to trial.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
It should be noted there is no new physical evidence
connecting Michael to the murder. This is just the evidence
that we had before. A sort of funny justice system
quirk is that initially he was going to be tried
as a juvenile, even though he was thirty nine years old,
because he was a minor when the crime originally took place.
But then a federal judge ordered for him to be
tried as an adult, and so obviously conviction as an
(26:25):
adult for a murder could carry a maximum of a
life sentence. So there's no new physical evidence. However, the
judge is clearly out for Michael. He even specifically instructs
the jurors that they are allowed to convict on the
basis of circumstantial evidence, and then after only four days
of deliberation, the jury returns a guilty verdict. This was
(26:46):
stunning for Skygell and his team. He delivered this crazy
ten minute final statement where he quotes Bible verses and
compares his arrests to the trials of Jesus. It was
classic Kennedy se and there were other Kennedys that were
there at the trial, including Ethel Kennedy an RFK junior.
Ethel sends a letter praising Michael for his mental toughness, fortitude, courage,
(27:08):
and tenacity, but it's just not enough. He was sentenced
to twenty years to life, which was five years short
of the maximum sentence.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
So that's the last we hear of this case for
over ten years, and after eleven years in prison, Michael
was released in twenty thirteen when a Connecticut judge ordered
a retrial of his two thousand and one conviction. So
the reason for this was a fewfold Scale's defense lawyer
(27:37):
in the two thousand and one conviction. The judge determined
that Michael Skegele's defense lawyer, Michael Sherman, had failed Michael
Skekell on multiple levels. Sherman failed to call a witness
named Dennis Osario, who would have backed Skegele's alibi that
he was at his cousin's house at the time of
the murder. The defense attorney failed to rebut the testimonies
(28:00):
of scacals classmates from his reform school. And that's another
thing about the trial is that basically a centerpiece of
the original two thousand and one conviction was that one
of Michael's classmates at Elon, which was a reform school,
said that Michael had bragged or made specific references to
(28:20):
getting away with murder and bragging about the murder and
specifically mentioned something about the golf club. And it wasn't
just him, it was nine other classmates who also testified
to that effect. However, their testimonies were called into question
because being that it was a reform school, many of
(28:41):
the kids who are now adults had substance abuse problems,
and the main witness that they had from Elan ended
up dying of a heroin overdose. So there were lots
of people who thought that his testimony was shaky at best.
So the defense attorney Sherman also selected a journy who
was not only a police officer, but a friend of
(29:03):
the lead investigator on the Greenwich Police Force, and he
failed to make a coherent closing argument. So Michael Skaigel
ended up being freed on one point two million dollars
bail and ordered not to leave the state of Connecticut
until the retrial, and then the Supreme Court of Connecticut
ended up deciding not to retry him.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
This is a lot of information to take in, but
basically what people need to know before we get into
the more wild parts of this case is that the
murder happened in nineteen seventy five, Michael Skeegel was convicted
in two thousand and one. He was in jail for
eleven and a half years. Then in twenty thirteen a
judge ordered a retrial, then he was freed on bail.
(29:48):
Then in twenty sixteen he went back to jail, and
then after that he was finally released again in twenty eighteen.
There was going to be another retrial, but interest had
waned in the case so far. Finally, in twenty twenty,
after the pandemic began, to give you a sense of
just how recent this is, Michael skekell was officially declared
a freeman.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Forty five years to the day after the murder.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
We're going to take a short break, stay with.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Us, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
So those are the facts of the case. But one
of the elements of this that we haven't really touched
upon is the RFK Junior connection. RFK Junior has been
a longtime supporter of his cousin. Again r is Michael
Skikele's first cousin. He has maintained that Michael has been
innocent this whole time. In two thousand and two, right
after his conviction, RFK wrote a fifteen thousand word piece
(30:51):
in The Atlantic refuting the case against Skekell. He talked
about his moral character, he talked about how deep their
relationship of friendship was, he talked about how they helped
each other become sober. And then in the Atlantic article,
RFK Junior also proposed a variety of alternative theories as
to who committed the murder.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
So, as George said, in this twenty and two Atlantic piece,
RFK Junior completely refutes the idea that Michael Skagull is guilty.
He proposes an alternative theory into Kenneth Littleton and then,
following the publication of that piece, as so often happens
with cold cases, RFK Junior received a lot of tips,
(31:32):
and one of those tips was telling him to get
in touch with this man named Tony Bryant, who, in
another insane twist of fate, happens to be the cousin
of Kobe Bryant. And Tony Bryant was allegedly a classmate
of Martha Moxley and the Scaygirl Boys, who alleged that
he was there the night that Martha Moxley was murdered,
(31:55):
and that he brought two of his friends from the
Bronx into Greenwich and that bragged about killing her. The
problem with that story is manifold, but it is worth
mentioning that two edit three of those kids now adults
were black men. So there's no evidence that has ever
put Tony Bryant or the two men that he alleges
(32:16):
were there that night in Greenwich on the night of
Martha Moxley's murder. It's also highly unlikely that two large
black boys would be able to go around a place
like Greenwich completely unnoticed.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, and not have any eyewitnesses. I mean again, I
know we said that they were not the most competent
police force, but they did interview an estimated five hundred people,
and no one mentioned two boys that would look out
of place in a predominantly white Connecticut suburb.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
And we really don't think that in nineteen seventy five
era Greenwich police would not have just stopped two black
boys on the streets of Greenwich. Anyways, it strains credulity
for sure.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Really, it really does has do many things that our
Kidjuter has said twenty sixteen when that came out. So
RFK Junior writes this Atlantic piece, then starts getting various tips,
then starts forming his own other theories. Cut to twenty sixteen,
right in time for Michael's retrial, he publishes a full
length book. So RFK Junior publishes a full book called Framed.
(33:19):
Why Michael Skagle spent over a decade in prison for
a murder he didn't commit?
Speaker 2 (33:24):
And it is it should be noted that not only
is Michael Skeagle on the cover of this book, but
RFK Junior himself is also on the cover of this book,
which doesn't make any sense. I mean, it makes sense
in that he wanted to kind of lend the Kennedy
Gravitas to project, and the book became a national bestseller.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Became a national bestseller, it caused quite a stir. As
you might remember twenty sixteen, A bunch of other stuff
was happening around that time too, So somehow we did
miss hit.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
I it did get lost in the shuffle. I don't
know how.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
I don't remember the book making that much of a stir,
but surely in the Kennedy enthusiast true crime communities it
was a big deal. And again it accuses the two
Bronx teens, who both obviously denied the allegations. It also
brings the tutor back up as another alternative theory. And
I believe that rf K Junior published the book because
(34:13):
he wanted to help his cousin, and it had the
opposite effect. I mean, it was widely discredited. The Connecticut
State Division of Criminal Justice released a statement in response
to the book, calling his claims inflammatory and accusing the
book of presenting no valid or new information. That's a
direct quote. So it really did not do what RFK
hoped it would do. And as we said, Skagull did
(34:35):
end up going back to jail, only of course, to
be released two years later.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
So I've done a lot of research about RFK Junior
over the years, and I found so many similarities between
the way that he writes and speaks about the Michael
Scagell trial to the way that he writes and speaks
about everything else. It's very fly by the seat of
his parents. When he was being interviewed for a documentary
(35:00):
for his work with Riverkeeper, his own sister was like,
you need to fact check everything he says because he
will sound like he is the smartest person in the room.
He sounds very authoritative when he speaks, but he just
makes stuff up. And I think we saw a clip
of that actually in the forty eight Hours documentary where
RFK Junior was originally interviewed by the forty eight Hours
(35:21):
team maybe fifteen or so years ago about this case,
and then was interviewed again in twenty twenty, and he
ended up walking out of the interview when he was
asked if he had any regrets about accusing these two
Bronx teens with no evidence, and then he got up
and went to walk out and said there's plenty of
evidence and of course gave no sources or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, and he has this sort of vibe of just
asking questions about everything. I mean, it's the same way
he talks about public health. Now, even with this book,
it's not necessarily that he presented a point by point
case for a specific theory. It's more that he wanted
to muddy the WAW And I do think he believes
this firmly, that his cousin is innocent, and so he's
(36:04):
just grasping against straws to come up with a variety
of other theories. Obviously, if there was another theory, it
would exist somewhere, but there just isn't and it is
one of those like weird cases where the answers are
not quite easy to come by. But yes, I think
that the book didn't help either side. But I do
want to say just to bring it to present day.
(36:25):
I mean, as we said, Michael Skaigle was released in
twenty twenty, and he is free. And as we talked
about in the beginning of this episode, it is this
insane coincidence that we are recording on the day when
it has been announced that in this new podcast he
is finally breaking his silence. So I started listening to
the first episode of this new podcast. It is produced
(36:46):
by NBCUS, obviously a reputable news source. It is called
Dead Certain the Martha Moxley Murder, and it is hosted
by Andrew Goldman. So I start listening, I'm like two,
three or four minutes in. It's very well produced. I'm
ready to learn more about the case, and the host
drops the most insane bomb I can think of, which
is he starts talking about how in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen,
(37:09):
he was approached by RFK Junior to ghostwrit this Michael
Scaple book. And so I'm thinking this story is going
to end with him saying no to the ghostwriting offer,
but then developing his own independent interest in this case.
But in fact, he did ghostright the book. So this
new podcast, the Podcast that seeks to Exonerate Michael Skekell,
(37:31):
is produced by NBC used and hosted by the literal
journalist who ghost wrote the RFK Junior book that sought
to exonerate Michael Skekell at this point almost ten years ago.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, it's a real doozy. I don't know, I'm excited
to listen to that show. But this is one of
those examples that we talked about at the beginning, where
everything just keeps getting muddier and muddier. Every new piece
of information that is introduced into this case makes it
less clear, not more. Yes, i don't know how you
feel about this, but I've gone on a real journey
(38:03):
and I think where I've ultimately come out is I
don't know, but I do think Michael or Tommy have
the motive. Are They're the only people in this case
with motive in my reading of it. I mean, again,
it is absolutely insane that GRWCH police did not search
the Scahall house and there were just like a million
(38:24):
missed opportunities. But the idea that it was hoodlums who
came in from New York City, yes, is crazy to me.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
And to be honest, I don't know if this podcast
is ultimately making that argument. I mean, I have no
way of knowing. It to twelve part series and only
one episode has come out. But one thing that I
did find intriguing is that there is new evidence that
has been released since all the other books have been
written about this case. So the value add of this
(38:55):
podcast is that they have new information that they're working
with that has not been reported before. So as much
as I am listening with a critical I And of
course I don't inherently trust the guy that ghost wrote
the RFK book that was then widely discredited.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
It seems like he's a reputable journalist.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
He's a reputable journalist. And as much as what can
I say, I still have some trust in mainstream media.
I still believe that NBC News would not just give
any house a podcast to rewrite the history on a
settled case.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
I also trust NBC News. I'm also a shill for
the mainstream media. I love them, and I give them
a little kiss every day.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Yes, every day we wake up and we say thank
God for Jake Tapper and all the rest of the
gangs such work. I'm looking forward to our listeners never
understanding when we're joking it when we're not showking. If
there's one place where kind of deadpad humor works, it's
on a history podcast about topics that are right famously
(39:55):
difficult to form opinions about. I mean, we had no
way of knowing when we planned this episode that it
would truly coincide with a Bobshell investigation that included the
first interview with the actual convicted or exonerated at this point,
but with a formally convicted murder of the case itself.
But I don't know. I'm thinking, you know, it really
(40:17):
is one of those news stories that I could convince
myself either way, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yeah,
and I think the only thing that is convincing to
me is that there's some sort of evidence that has
been hidden. I don't think based on the facts that
I have, reading the research that was given to us,
and reading the articles that have already been written, I
(40:37):
don't think based on those facts I could draw any
conclusion that makes sense. But you know, I would not
be surprised if somehow some huge part of the story
has been hidden all these years. I mean, one small
thing that was mentioned in the first episode of this
show is that there was a ton of blood on
the crime scene, but then no blood was found anywhere else.
(40:58):
It was as though the person that did it cleaned
up everything but the actual crime scene itself. Yeah, it's
just this very strange thing. There was an allusion to Obviously,
this show is doing the true crime thing of edding
every episode on a Cliffhagger, but they alluded to the
fact that blood was found in a different house in
the neighborhood, but that the police never followed up with it.
(41:18):
They said the potentially Martha had had a boyfriend that
is not part of the official narrative during this time
which she's potentially hooking up with tomby scicole, she also
had a boyfriend that could have been upset. I mean,
there was just all this stuff that has not been
part of the official narrative, right.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
But that's so funny because in the forty eight hour
special they go pretty in depth into Martha's diary, and
she doesn't mention a boyfriend, but she does mention Tommy
and Michael, and she mentions Tommy in a romantic sense
and how he had all of these advances on her,
not all of which were welcome. But she also mentions
Michael's drinking. She said that they were at a dance
(41:56):
or something like that, and that Michael was loaded and
being an asshole. And it's clear, based on a few
different things, that he was in some way jealous of
Tommy's relationship with Martha. So I think that if she
did have a boyfriend, maybe it was a secret, But
I don't know that it would have been a secret
from her diary.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Well, yes, that's the thing. You hear that and you're like, wow,
that's the key that unlocks it a little. But then,
of course again you have to remind yourself, well, this
is being reported by the person who wrote this other book.
It's just it's very confusing, I mean.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
And also the fact that the case is now fifty
years old.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Right exactly. I mean, I have to say, so far,
I'm impressed with the number of people from the community
that they are interviewing. I mean, just the fact that
they have the woman that found the body on record
and she's describing that experience. They have a lot of
other neighbors that are discussing what Martha was like as
a young girl. But it is impressive that they were
able to get all these people. And it is one
(42:52):
of those things where the clock is ticking. I mean,
fifty years is already way too long, but this is
Michael Skeigel's last chance to prove his innocence, right. And
another thing, I know I've now mentioned this many times,
but it really is important to note the sheer violence
of the act. This is something that would happen in
a horror movie. I mean, there is a graphic description
of how they found the body in the podcast, and
(43:14):
one visual that has really stayed with me is that
one of the blows that she took the golf club
went through her neck, and so there is literally a
strand of her hair that went through that hole and
came out the other side of her neck. I mean,
that is the level of violence we're talking about. And
so obviously, yes, I could see Michael as a troubled
(43:35):
teen with substance abuse issues and a difficult home life
committing an act of violence, But something like pushing someone
off a cliff or something is different than this kind of.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Playing someone with a six iron so hard that the
shaft of it shatters exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Yeah, I mean it's this catch twenty two, right, because
if that is what happened, then he is the literal
psychopath and you can't trust anything he says in this series,
you know what I mean, Someone who is able to
commit that level of violence is I'm sure also able
to lie with a straight face about it.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah. This is one of those cases that I think
will be cold forever until all parties involved are dead.
I honestly was thinking even when the case was going
on in the early two thousands, how credible are everyone's memories,
then my memory is barely credible for things I did
last week totally.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
I mean, I really think, and this is something that
I've discovered with so many of these Kennedy related cases,
especially the more salacious ones that we've talked about, is
every case like this is so dependent on the time
in which it is being covered by the media. Like
the fact that this was happening in two thousand and
two thousand and one. People have such strong memories at
(44:52):
the time of the oj Simpson trial of other kind
of like salacious live stream trials. You know, for example,
the Johnny Depp case could only have gone the way
it went in a media environment that was dominated by TikTok,
that was dominated by these sort of like very strange
forces on each side. I mean, who knows if the
(45:12):
same exact thing, with the same exact actions had happened
in I don't know, twenty ten or nineteen thirty five,
if it would have gone the same way. Right, So anyway,
that's where we're at. This is a very non traditional
episode because we really both are still working through how
we feel about this case, and as Julia keeps saying,
we highly recommend the forty eight hours special about it.
(45:33):
It's all available on YouTube, and I have to say
so far, I am cautiously recommending this new NBC podcast
that's we listen. It's called Dead Certain the Martha Moxley Murder.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Andrew Goldman, Come on the show.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Andrew Goldman, We would love to have you on the show.
I think even if the podcast is a complete bust,
I think there is certainly new information that they are
somehow bringing to light. So it's an open topic here
in the United States of Kennedy. We're going to talk
about it again. If you have any tips, please, said
the mid Thank you for bearing with us as we're
thinking about this in real time. But that is this
(46:09):
week's episode.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
United States of Kennedy is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all Things
Kennedy every week
I'm George Severis and I'm Julia Claire and this is
United States of Kennedy, a podcast about our cultural fascination
with the Kennedy Dynasty. Every week we go into one
aspect of the Kennedy story, and today we are talking
about the murder of Martha Moxley. But before we do,
I do want to address one thing, which is listeners
of the podcast might have noticed that it's been just
(00:30):
me over the last couple of weeks, but we have
an announcement for the future of the show, which is
that Julia is officially joining as my second co host.
Wow Wow, And Julia, we've already been through your Someone
call it clinical obsession with the Kennedy's. Of course, in
some medical textbooks, being Catholic and from Boston actually counts
as an illness.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
That's right, ben Itch. You know we're working hard to
add it to the DSM.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
That's right. For listeners to the podcast, you might remember
Julia as the guest in the movie episode we did
about the frankly pretty bad movie Bobby from two thousand
and six a couple of weeks ago, and I did
mention that Julia has a oft revisited biography of Bobby
Kennedy in her home that I actually saw in real
(01:15):
life recently when I went over to discuss some business.
What I also saw is a at least one commemorative plate
or dish of some sort with the Kennedys on it.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
That's right. I can't take credit for that one. The
Bobby biography is mine, but all of the commemorative plates
and letters and things like that are my husband's. His
grandfather had some sort of weird connection to the Kennedy's
and so we have all these like official White House
stationery letters. Also, my husband's grandmother loved anything that was
(01:48):
extremely tacky, so we do have a pretty life sized
tapestry of JFK that is hidden away from public view.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And you did correct me if I'm wrong. You got
married in the Jackie ping Chanelle's suit when JA.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Yeah, yeah, And I just thought that that was appropriate
for my.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Big day, of course, and it was a beautiful day
for it was a beautiful wedding. Well, it's nice that
we're starting in such a lighthearted, joking mood because this
week's topic is a real laugh riot.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
It's not a good one.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
It's really not a good one. We should just come
right out and say this is a slightly strange episode
because we wanted to do this topic, and we wanted
it to be Julia's first topic that we do together
because it is a really you know, not to use
true crime depraved language, but it's a real juicy one.
It is a really genuinely interesting case that has so
(02:41):
many open questions. It feels very true crimey. It really
combines all the things that we are fascinated by the Kennedys,
and it also is a topic that somehow neither of
us had ever come across, which is sort of crazy
to me.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
No, and you know what, I mentioned to my mom
that we were going to be talking about this and
I had never heard of it, and she was like,
oh my god, well I remember reading about that in
the Boston Globe. It felt like there was always like
a new story about it. So it was clearly something
that was national news just missed us because we're famously young.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
So on the one hand, it is super interesting again
because it's this true crime story that we hadn't heard
of that has so many elements of Kennedy history, and
so we were like, okay, great, we have a great
research doc prepared by our wonderful researchers. We watched the
forty eight hours special on it that was released a
few years ago. The last sort of big update on
the case was around twenty twenty, which we'll talk about later,
(03:41):
and we thought we had all the facts and we
were ready to record, and then literally today, on the
day of this recording, you can't make the.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Stuff November fourth, twenty member fourth.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
To give everyone a pick behind the curtain. Today, an
NBC News podcast about the case premieres in which Michael Skagel,
who is the person that was arrested for this murder
that we'll talk about soon, and the person who was
later freed, is breaking his silence for the first time
in this podcast that seeks to exonerate him. So we
(04:12):
are reacting to all of this live. I had just
listened to it an hour ago, but we're still processing
what that means for this topic. And I think inevitably,
after the podcast is over and there's inevitably a whole
other cycle of media coverage, we will hopefully revisit this
topic again and talk about how our views on it
(04:33):
have changed.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Right and honestly, even without this development from literally today,
both George and I were commiserating over the fact that
this case is so layered and there's so many moving
parts and so many characters that even without this most
recent breaking news, I think we would have a hard
(04:56):
time knowing which way was up in this case.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, it's a really difficult one. And it is such
a really perfect combination of a sort of bungled investigation
that a police department that was not necessarily equipped for
something this major ended up conducting pieces of evidence that
arose later on, pieces of evidence that were ignored just
this year. Time that passed between when it happened and
(05:21):
when someone was convicted and when that person was freed,
it has legitimately lasted for decades or actally years years today.
Years today.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
November fourth is the fifty year anniversary since Martha's funeral,
so she was buried today fifty years ago. With that,
I think that we should just get into the nuts
and volts of what happened completely.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
So, Julia, do you want to kick us off and
walk me through just the basic facts of this case.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Okay? So, Martha Moxley was a fifteen year old girl
who moved with her family to Belle Haven, an enclave
of Greenwich, Connecticut in the year nineteen seventy five from California.
She lived across the street from the Scalles. And George,
(06:12):
can you tell us a little bit about the Scalles.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yeah, So the Scalles are the Kennedy connection. As you said,
Martha Moxley's family had just moved to this Greenwich enclave.
It is the richest enclave of an already incredibly wealthy town.
Greenwich is like where the wealthy people from New York
City moved when they had kids in the seventies. So
the Scakeles lived right across the street from the Moxleys.
(06:37):
And the Scakeles were an incredibly wealthy family that is
related to the Kennedy's by marriage. So Rush Scakele, who
is the patriarch of the Greenwich Scahles, was the brother
of Ethel, who married Bobby Kennedy. So Bobby Kennedy, who
we've discussed before in this podcast, of course, most importantly
the subject of the two thousand and six movie Bobby.
(06:58):
Bobby Kennedy and his wife Ethel are of course the
parents of RFK Junior, who everyone knows now and all
his other siblings, and it should be noted that while
the Kennedy connection, of course gave us Scalhles some prestige
in this town, they were actually way wealthier than the Kennedy's,
and there was a running joke among the Kennedy community
(07:18):
that the Kennedy's actually married into the Scalholes for the money.
So these weren't social climbers that married into the Kennedys
because they wanted to be American royalty. So Rush Skagle's
family business, Great Lakes Carbon, was one of the largest
private companies in the US, and he and his wife
Anne had seven children, six boys and one girl. As
(07:39):
Julia writes in our research stock Yikes. But unfortunately Anne
had passed away recently, so Rush was raising his kids
on his own. And actually this will come back later,
but there was a live in tutor that had actually
just moved into the house I believe that day, the
day of the murder, who had moved into because Rush
(08:01):
felt like he needed more adult supervision in the home
where he lived with all his children. So that's the Scalicles.
Two of the Scale children, it should be noted, or
Tommy and Michael Skakel. They are the ones that later
on will be suspects in this case. So that's a
very preliminary cast of characters. Obviously, other people are gonna
present themselves. But we have the Moxley's, we have the Scaliclls.
(08:24):
Martha Moxley's fifteen years old. Tommy and Michael Skakele are
around her age. One of them is her exact age,
one of them is two years older.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Michael is fifteen, Tommy is seventeen.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
There you go, and to situate ourselves. It is October thirtieth,
nineteen seventy five, which is the evening before Halloween, obviously,
and kids are up to no good. They're going around,
they're teepeeing homes. And then Julia walk us through what
happens the night.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Of October thirty is nineteen seventy five. Martha Moxley was
out with some friends in a group including Tommy and
Michael Scalicell and they were the two people with whom
she was last seen alive at around nine thirty PM.
And that's pretty much the very last of what we
(09:13):
know for sure.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Yeah, so a bunch of kids congregated in the Scalele
home and they congregated around the porch. Then at some
point they moved to the dad's car, which was this
very fancy, rich car that he allegedly, you know, used
to pick up women. And they were there for a
brief period of time. Then they went back, and then
by all counts, the last time everyone agrees they saw
(09:38):
Martha was around nine thirty. And it's important to note
that her journey from the Scales back to her house
would have taken her like two minutes. She wasn't going
into some dark forest between one location and the other.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
They literally lived right across the street from one another. So,
long story short, Martha doesn't come home, and Martha's mother
begins to worry, and so she's calling around to her friends.
She actually goes to the Scay Goals knocks on their door.
The door is opened by fifteen year old Michael, who
Martha's mother alleges looks a little hungover, a little disoriented,
(10:18):
and says he hasn't seen her. Search begins and Martha
is found under a tree in the Moxley backyard and
she is almost unrecognizable.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, she has discovered. This was actually something that they
described in gruesome detail in Venue NBC News podcast, because
they interviewed this woman. I was about to say girl,
but of course now she is much older. But at
the time, this fifteen year old girl named Sheila, and
this is something that is clearly the single most traumatic
experience of her life. She's walking around and she looks down.
(10:52):
She sees a blue puffy material thinks it's some kind
of like mattress or something. It is Martha's puffer that
she's wearing. And Martha's body is found bludgeoned to death
with a golf club, like very psychotically violent. This is
not something that could be an accident or self defense
or anything like that. It is the golf club itself
(11:13):
had been broken into three pieces. One of the pieces
had been stabbed into the back of her neck. Famously,
there was so much blood that the police couldn't tell
what color her hair was. There was so much blood.
And then Martha's pants and underwear were pulled down, but
investigators found no signs of sexual assault. And apparently, according
to forensic evidence, she had been killed near the driveway
(11:34):
and the murderer dragged her body eighty feet to the
base of a tree where she was found and just
to go back to the scalhol connection. Not only did
this happen on her way back from the scalholes. But
very quickly it became clear that the golf club that
was used was discovered to be clearly part of a
set that belonged to and scalole.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
That's right. One of our researchers noted in the documents
that despite the fact that it was immediately identified as
part of the set belonging to a scale, that Greenwich
police never sought or obtained a warrant to search the
scale home, which is crazy. And we'll get into more
of how the Greenwich police mungled this. But Greenwich is
(12:17):
a town where virtually no crime happens, So to say
that this shocked this extremely insular, wealthy community is the
understatement of the century. But the Greenwich police were clearly
ill equipped to handle this case. There had only been
three murders in Greenwich in twenty five years, and from
(12:40):
the beginning it was I think a foundational mistake is
obviously not searching the scale home. But from the beginning
it was clear that they were just out of their depth.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, and the one sort of fact that I found
out actually in this new podcast is that apparently the
police didn't even have enough crime scene tape when this happened,
I mean they were there to catch people that were
speeding on the street everyone, So a while, this wasn't
a police force that was equipped to deal with a
violent murder case. And at the same time, they did
(13:12):
their job. In the years that followed, they ended up
questioning and estimated five hundred people. It went on for years,
but somehow no suspects were named, no arrests were made,
and no grand juries were convened. Later on, years later,
someone would say that internally their prime suspect was Tommy Scicel,
(13:33):
but he was, but that was never made public and
he was never arrested.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
So, as we said, Tommy was seventeen, Michael was fifteen,
and Martha has several entries in her diary that are
read in the forty eight hour special in which she
explicitly says that Tommy is making passes at her, pulling
her onto his lap, putting his hands onto her knees,
(13:59):
stuff like that. It's clear that they had some sort
of physical relationship with varying degrees of consent, and there's
also alliations and different people remember certain things that Michael
said about Michael also being enamored with Martha and wishing
that she would be his girlfriend. And Tommy and Michael,
(14:21):
as two brothers that close in age, often extremely competitive
about everything, and both of them, based on varying accounts,
had a temper, and that was another thing that was
not investigated too thoroughly, basically the history of violent outbursts
by both boys. And another thing that is important to
(14:45):
note about Michael is his mother died when he was
twelve in nineteen seventy two, and there are different accounts
that say that basically he had a drinking problem beginning
at age thirteen, and he would later go to reform
school after getting a at age seventeen. So this was
a very chaotic, troubled, extremely wealthy family, which I think
(15:09):
is like a really important piece of this whole thing,
that this was just a deeply chaotic house which had
no mother, a legendly a kind of distant and simultaneously violent.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Father, and there were substance abuse issues just like this
is a pattern in many pockets of the Kennedy family.
And we will get to RFK Junior later, but one
of the ways that RFK Junior, who is the Scagell's
first cousin. One of the ways that he and Michael
scaqlebonded is that they both got sober around the same
time man supported each other through their sobriety process. We're
(15:43):
going to take a short break, stay with.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Us, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
It should also be noted that during his time as
a troubled teen, according to a couple of sources, Michael
Skaigel confessed is maybe too strong of a word, but
almost like in a provocative way, would either brag about
being able to get away with murder or allude to
that night in provocative ways. And so there are many
classmates of his that said that he made incriminating statements
(16:25):
during group therapy sessions while they were all in school together.
So that is also something that sort of people have
had to deal with over the years. That said, the narrative,
from what I understand from Michael's perspective, has just been
like I was a troubled teen, I was an addict,
I was even under the influence while some of this
(16:45):
stuff was happening, and I finally in my twenties and thirties,
turned my life around and became an upstanding member of
society and I should not be held accountable for crazy
things I said when I was in school. Right.
Speaker 2 (16:57):
So, going back to the night of there were really
two to three initial suspects in this murder case. When
they were questioned by police, Tommy and Michael each explained
where they were at the time of Martha's murder, and
both of them said that they were hanging out with
Martha outside of their house at nine pm. Michael originally
(17:18):
told police that he left Tommy and Martha at nine
thirty PM and went to his cousin's house to watch
TV until eleven thirty and then came home. Tommy told
police that Martha left his house soon after. Michael so
also around nine thirty and that was the last time
he saw her. Both of them ended up changing their
stories after that. Also, there's something in the forty eight
(17:39):
Hours documentary that said that Tommy claimed that he went
inside and wrote a paper about Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Well, you know who among us. It's a really amazing
way to relieve stress, to just write a quick paper
about Abraham Lincoln.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
But there was also one other suspect, George, can you
tell us a little bit about.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Right, So we alluded to him earlier. We said that
literally the night of the murder, there was a live
in tutor that had moved into the Scayhole household because
again the father Rush Scaycole, wanted another adult figure in
his children's life. So that man's name is Kenneth Littleton
and he was twenty four years old. He was a
(18:15):
twenty four year old science teacher at a Greenwich private
school called Brunswick School, and the night of the murder
he moved into the Scalgell household to be a parental
teacher figure there. So he wasn't a prime suspect in
the murder case for more than a year. And then
the Greenwich police learned that he had been arrested in
Nantucket in the summer of nineteen seventy six, six months
(18:37):
after the murder, and he got drunk at least three
separate times and stole things. Who was found guilty of
larsity and handed a suspended sentence and five years of probation.
The point is this is someone who had a history
of alarming behavior and he was there, yes, but.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
It could be it's not necessarily a history. It was
like it seems like perhaps citing incident was the Martha
Moxley murder. And then that was one of the big questions,
was like, was he racked with guilt or was he
just so traumatized by this event? And you know, goes
without saying that petty larceny and drunken disorderly conduct is
(19:16):
a horse of a different color than murder. But yes,
he has remained a kind of looming figure in the
case for fifty years.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
Yeah, as you're saying, it seems somehow emblematic of his
guilt that his life sort of goes off the rails
after the murder happens, and he is eventually fired from
the Brunswick school. He's able to get a job at
another private school. Then he was fired from that school
after Gratich police showed up to question him. But all
that aside, Kenneth Littleton was never arrested or charged with Martha's.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
Murder, and neither was anyone else.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Now there was anyone else for twenty five years. So
that's it. There were these three suspects that at various
given times seemed guilty. We had Tommy Skaegel, we had
Michael Skagel, and we had Kenneth Telittleton, no one was arrested,
people lose interest in the case, and twenty years go.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
By, And it should be noted that the family patriarch
agreed to work with the Greenwich Police, but about six
months into the case stopped answering your questions and stopped
cooperating with them.
Speaker 1 (20:20):
So basically now we're just fast tracking to two thousand
and one, that's the next time that there were any
major updates on this case. The Moxley parents did not
get any sort of closure or any sort of useful
information about who killed their daughter. It was just this
tragedy that happened in this otherwise wealthy, charming enclave.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So before we get to that, we have to make
a pit stop in the nineteen nineties, because in nineteen
ninety two nineteen ninety three, there's still no answers about
the Martha Moxley case, and Rush Skeaykele, the family patriarch,
decides to hire his own investigative firm to reopen and
reinvestigate the case privately, and the results of this investigation
(21:02):
become known as the Sutton Report. So Tommy and Michael
both sat for testimony in the Cuttain Report. Again, they
just thought that it was like an internal family investigation,
but both Tommy and Michael had their stories had changed.
Tommy now said that Martha didn't go home when Michael
left at nine point thirty. Tommy admitted that he and
Martha engaged in a sexual act and that Martha went
(21:25):
home around ten PM. Michael said that he went to
his cousin's house to watch a movie, which was part
of his initial statement, but he came home around eleven PM.
He said that he then went outside at midnight, climbed
a tree outside of Martha's window and masturbated, and then
investigators checked that out and alleged that there was no
tree that matched Michael's description outside of her bedroom window.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
It's one of those updates that only makes it more
confusing because it doesn't actually incriminate either of them, but
it does at least prove they lied to the police
at some point, whether it was their first alibi or
their second alibi. But also it's just strange behavior on
all sides. At the end of the day, these are
all teenagers. Their behavior on a drunken night the night
(22:12):
before Halloween, regardless of whether it ended in murder or not,
is going to be strange. I mean, these are rowdy,
rich kids who want to be adventurous, who want to
be naughty and who are.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
You know, they're essentially feral, Yes, they're essentially fair, and
they're also the popular kids.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
They are the kids that are the ones getting into
trouble and they know that at any given point their
parents are going to bail them out. It's an archetype
we're all very familiar with from teen movies.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Right, and the Scale Goals Again, it really can't be
overstated how wealthy of the Scale Goals were. Like this
is like Koch Brothers level money of that era. They
don't have that much money anymore, but they were extremely
wealthy and powerful at this time.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
So fast forward to two thousand and one. Basically what
happens is through a kind of like renewed true crime
craze and with the legacy of the OJ Simpson case
in court TV and in a renewed interest in true crime.
Basically the case, which is a classic old case, gains
traction again in the public imagination. And the two things
that help with that are two books that are written.
(23:13):
So first we have this Dominic Doune fiction book that
is clearly heavily inspired by the case, and for listeners
of the podcast, you might remember Dominic Dunn is a
long time Kennedy enthusiast. People might remember in the episode
we did on the William Kennedy Smith trial he wrote
a very long and comprehensive profile of the William Kennedy
(23:36):
Smith accuser, who at the time believed to be credible.
And so he is someone who has always been very
fascinated by the mechanations of the Kennedy family and by
the corruption they're in and by the ways they are
able to bend the justice system to their whims. So
that book, which is called A Season in Purgatory, is
sort of a fictional account of the Moxley case. It
(23:57):
ended up becoming a TV mini series and it got
a lot of people talking about the case again. The
second book, which was not build as fiction and was
a bit more problematic, was a book written by none
other than Mark Furman. Julia, do you want to remind
maybe some of our younger listeners who Mark Furman is.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
For those of us who are extremely young, as George
and I are, Mark Furman was the disgraced former LAPD
officer who was very much at the center of the
OJ Simpson case.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yes, so his testimony against Simpson was largely discredited after
it was revealed that Furman was a true just literally speaking,
a racist. He denied under oath that he regularly used
the N word and that it was charged with perjury,
and his closing statement even the prosecution called him a
bad cop. I mean, this is someone who is an
(24:47):
archetype of a racist.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Cop, like admitted to a reporter, admitted bragged about extra
judicial violence against black people.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right. And after leaving the police force, he became the
very classic like fixture of trash TV. He went on
TV as an expert on the OJ case. He wrote
a book called Murder in Brentwood about the OJ murders,
and he then developed this second career as a author
of popular airport nonfiction books about unsolved murders. So a
(25:18):
huge run for him was this Martha Moxley murder. He
wrote the book Murder in Greenwich Who killed Martha Moxley
in June of nineteen ninety eight, and in the book,
Furman concluded that Michael Skekell was most likely Martha's killer,
saying he was spinning into a jealous rage after seeing
Tommy and Martha making out. So this brings us to
Michael Skekell actually being tried for murder. So this is
(25:42):
January twentieth, two thousand, This is nearly twenty five years
after Martha's murder. Michael Skekell is charged with murder.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Based on the findings of the Sutton Report, and then
Greenwich hired a one person grand jury investigator to review
all the new abvidae and then he was brought to trial.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
It should be noted there is no new physical evidence
connecting Michael to the murder. This is just the evidence
that we had before. A sort of funny justice system
quirk is that initially he was going to be tried
as a juvenile, even though he was thirty nine years old,
because he was a minor when the crime originally took place.
But then a federal judge ordered for him to be
tried as an adult, and so obviously conviction as an
(26:25):
adult for a murder could carry a maximum of a
life sentence. So there's no new physical evidence. However, the
judge is clearly out for Michael. He even specifically instructs
the jurors that they are allowed to convict on the
basis of circumstantial evidence, and then after only four days
of deliberation, the jury returns a guilty verdict. This was
(26:46):
stunning for Skygell and his team. He delivered this crazy
ten minute final statement where he quotes Bible verses and
compares his arrests to the trials of Jesus. It was
classic Kennedy se and there were other Kennedys that were
there at the trial, including Ethel Kennedy an RFK junior.
Ethel sends a letter praising Michael for his mental toughness, fortitude, courage,
(27:08):
and tenacity, but it's just not enough. He was sentenced
to twenty years to life, which was five years short
of the maximum sentence.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
So that's the last we hear of this case for
over ten years, and after eleven years in prison, Michael
was released in twenty thirteen when a Connecticut judge ordered
a retrial of his two thousand and one conviction. So
the reason for this was a fewfold Scale's defense lawyer
(27:37):
in the two thousand and one conviction. The judge determined
that Michael Skegele's defense lawyer, Michael Sherman, had failed Michael
Skekell on multiple levels. Sherman failed to call a witness
named Dennis Osario, who would have backed Skegele's alibi that
he was at his cousin's house at the time of
the murder. The defense attorney failed to rebut the testimonies
(28:00):
of scacals classmates from his reform school. And that's another
thing about the trial is that basically a centerpiece of
the original two thousand and one conviction was that one
of Michael's classmates at Elon, which was a reform school,
said that Michael had bragged or made specific references to
(28:20):
getting away with murder and bragging about the murder and
specifically mentioned something about the golf club. And it wasn't
just him, it was nine other classmates who also testified
to that effect. However, their testimonies were called into question
because being that it was a reform school, many of
(28:41):
the kids who are now adults had substance abuse problems,
and the main witness that they had from Elan ended
up dying of a heroin overdose. So there were lots
of people who thought that his testimony was shaky at best.
So the defense attorney Sherman also selected a journy who
was not only a police officer, but a friend of
(29:03):
the lead investigator on the Greenwich Police Force, and he
failed to make a coherent closing argument. So Michael Skaigel
ended up being freed on one point two million dollars
bail and ordered not to leave the state of Connecticut
until the retrial, and then the Supreme Court of Connecticut
ended up deciding not to retry him.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
This is a lot of information to take in, but
basically what people need to know before we get into
the more wild parts of this case is that the
murder happened in nineteen seventy five, Michael Skeegel was convicted
in two thousand and one. He was in jail for
eleven and a half years. Then in twenty thirteen a
judge ordered a retrial, then he was freed on bail.
(29:48):
Then in twenty sixteen he went back to jail, and
then after that he was finally released again in twenty eighteen.
There was going to be another retrial, but interest had
waned in the case so far. Finally, in twenty twenty,
after the pandemic began, to give you a sense of
just how recent this is, Michael skekell was officially declared
a freeman.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Forty five years to the day after the murder.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
We're going to take a short break, stay with.
Speaker 3 (30:12):
Us, and we're back with United States of Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
So those are the facts of the case. But one
of the elements of this that we haven't really touched
upon is the RFK Junior connection. RFK Junior has been
a longtime supporter of his cousin. Again r is Michael
Skikele's first cousin. He has maintained that Michael has been
innocent this whole time. In two thousand and two, right
after his conviction, RFK wrote a fifteen thousand word piece
(30:51):
in The Atlantic refuting the case against Skekell. He talked
about his moral character, he talked about how deep their
relationship of friendship was, he talked about how they helped
each other become sober. And then in the Atlantic article,
RFK Junior also proposed a variety of alternative theories as
to who committed the murder.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
So, as George said, in this twenty and two Atlantic piece,
RFK Junior completely refutes the idea that Michael Skagull is guilty.
He proposes an alternative theory into Kenneth Littleton and then,
following the publication of that piece, as so often happens
with cold cases, RFK Junior received a lot of tips,
(31:32):
and one of those tips was telling him to get
in touch with this man named Tony Bryant, who, in
another insane twist of fate, happens to be the cousin
of Kobe Bryant. And Tony Bryant was allegedly a classmate
of Martha Moxley and the Scaygirl Boys, who alleged that
he was there the night that Martha Moxley was murdered,
(31:55):
and that he brought two of his friends from the
Bronx into Greenwich and that bragged about killing her. The
problem with that story is manifold, but it is worth
mentioning that two edit three of those kids now adults
were black men. So there's no evidence that has ever
put Tony Bryant or the two men that he alleges
(32:16):
were there that night in Greenwich on the night of
Martha Moxley's murder. It's also highly unlikely that two large
black boys would be able to go around a place
like Greenwich completely unnoticed.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Yeah, and not have any eyewitnesses. I mean again, I
know we said that they were not the most competent
police force, but they did interview an estimated five hundred people,
and no one mentioned two boys that would look out
of place in a predominantly white Connecticut suburb.
Speaker 2 (32:45):
And we really don't think that in nineteen seventy five
era Greenwich police would not have just stopped two black
boys on the streets of Greenwich. Anyways, it strains credulity
for sure.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Really, it really does has do many things that our
Kidjuter has said twenty sixteen when that came out. So
RFK Junior writes this Atlantic piece, then starts getting various tips,
then starts forming his own other theories. Cut to twenty sixteen,
right in time for Michael's retrial, he publishes a full
length book. So RFK Junior publishes a full book called Framed.
(33:19):
Why Michael Skagle spent over a decade in prison for
a murder he didn't commit?
Speaker 2 (33:24):
And it is it should be noted that not only
is Michael Skeagle on the cover of this book, but
RFK Junior himself is also on the cover of this book,
which doesn't make any sense. I mean, it makes sense
in that he wanted to kind of lend the Kennedy
Gravitas to project, and the book became a national bestseller.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Became a national bestseller, it caused quite a stir. As
you might remember twenty sixteen, A bunch of other stuff
was happening around that time too, So somehow we did
miss hit.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
I it did get lost in the shuffle. I don't
know how.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
I don't remember the book making that much of a stir,
but surely in the Kennedy enthusiast true crime communities it
was a big deal. And again it accuses the two
Bronx teens, who both obviously denied the allegations. It also
brings the tutor back up as another alternative theory. And
I believe that rf K Junior published the book because
(34:13):
he wanted to help his cousin, and it had the
opposite effect. I mean, it was widely discredited. The Connecticut
State Division of Criminal Justice released a statement in response
to the book, calling his claims inflammatory and accusing the
book of presenting no valid or new information. That's a
direct quote. So it really did not do what RFK
hoped it would do. And as we said, Skagull did
(34:35):
end up going back to jail, only of course, to
be released two years later.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
So I've done a lot of research about RFK Junior
over the years, and I found so many similarities between
the way that he writes and speaks about the Michael
Scagell trial to the way that he writes and speaks
about everything else. It's very fly by the seat of
his parents. When he was being interviewed for a documentary
(35:00):
for his work with Riverkeeper, his own sister was like,
you need to fact check everything he says because he
will sound like he is the smartest person in the room.
He sounds very authoritative when he speaks, but he just
makes stuff up. And I think we saw a clip
of that actually in the forty eight Hours documentary where
RFK Junior was originally interviewed by the forty eight Hours
(35:21):
team maybe fifteen or so years ago about this case,
and then was interviewed again in twenty twenty, and he
ended up walking out of the interview when he was
asked if he had any regrets about accusing these two
Bronx teens with no evidence, and then he got up
and went to walk out and said there's plenty of
evidence and of course gave no sources or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, and he has this sort of vibe of just
asking questions about everything. I mean, it's the same way
he talks about public health. Now, even with this book,
it's not necessarily that he presented a point by point
case for a specific theory. It's more that he wanted
to muddy the WAW And I do think he believes
this firmly, that his cousin is innocent, and so he's
(36:04):
just grasping against straws to come up with a variety
of other theories. Obviously, if there was another theory, it
would exist somewhere, but there just isn't and it is
one of those like weird cases where the answers are
not quite easy to come by. But yes, I think
that the book didn't help either side. But I do
want to say just to bring it to present day.
(36:25):
I mean, as we said, Michael Skaigle was released in
twenty twenty, and he is free. And as we talked
about in the beginning of this episode, it is this
insane coincidence that we are recording on the day when
it has been announced that in this new podcast he
is finally breaking his silence. So I started listening to
the first episode of this new podcast. It is produced
(36:46):
by NBCUS, obviously a reputable news source. It is called
Dead Certain the Martha Moxley Murder, and it is hosted
by Andrew Goldman. So I start listening, I'm like two,
three or four minutes in. It's very well produced. I'm
ready to learn more about the case, and the host
drops the most insane bomb I can think of, which
is he starts talking about how in twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen,
(37:09):
he was approached by RFK Junior to ghostwrit this Michael
Scaple book. And so I'm thinking this story is going
to end with him saying no to the ghostwriting offer,
but then developing his own independent interest in this case.
But in fact, he did ghostright the book. So this
new podcast, the Podcast that seeks to Exonerate Michael Skekell,
(37:31):
is produced by NBC used and hosted by the literal
journalist who ghost wrote the RFK Junior book that sought
to exonerate Michael Skekell at this point almost ten years ago.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, it's a real doozy. I don't know, I'm excited
to listen to that show. But this is one of
those examples that we talked about at the beginning, where
everything just keeps getting muddier and muddier. Every new piece
of information that is introduced into this case makes it
less clear, not more. Yes, i don't know how you
feel about this, but I've gone on a real journey
(38:03):
and I think where I've ultimately come out is I
don't know, but I do think Michael or Tommy have
the motive. Are They're the only people in this case
with motive in my reading of it. I mean, again,
it is absolutely insane that GRWCH police did not search
the Scahall house and there were just like a million
(38:24):
missed opportunities. But the idea that it was hoodlums who
came in from New York City, yes, is crazy to me.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
And to be honest, I don't know if this podcast
is ultimately making that argument. I mean, I have no
way of knowing. It to twelve part series and only
one episode has come out. But one thing that I
did find intriguing is that there is new evidence that
has been released since all the other books have been
written about this case. So the value add of this
(38:55):
podcast is that they have new information that they're working
with that has not been reported before. So as much
as I am listening with a critical I And of
course I don't inherently trust the guy that ghost wrote
the RFK book that was then widely discredited.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
It seems like he's a reputable journalist.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
He's a reputable journalist. And as much as what can
I say, I still have some trust in mainstream media.
I still believe that NBC News would not just give
any house a podcast to rewrite the history on a
settled case.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
I also trust NBC News. I'm also a shill for
the mainstream media. I love them, and I give them
a little kiss every day.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
Yes, every day we wake up and we say thank
God for Jake Tapper and all the rest of the
gangs such work. I'm looking forward to our listeners never
understanding when we're joking it when we're not showking. If
there's one place where kind of deadpad humor works, it's
on a history podcast about topics that are right famously
(39:55):
difficult to form opinions about. I mean, we had no
way of knowing when we planned this episode that it
would truly coincide with a Bobshell investigation that included the
first interview with the actual convicted or exonerated at this point,
but with a formally convicted murder of the case itself.
But I don't know. I'm thinking, you know, it really
(40:17):
is one of those news stories that I could convince
myself either way, I guess, is what I'm saying. Yeah,
and I think the only thing that is convincing to
me is that there's some sort of evidence that has
been hidden. I don't think based on the facts that
I have, reading the research that was given to us,
and reading the articles that have already been written, I
(40:37):
don't think based on those facts I could draw any
conclusion that makes sense. But you know, I would not
be surprised if somehow some huge part of the story
has been hidden all these years. I mean, one small
thing that was mentioned in the first episode of this
show is that there was a ton of blood on
the crime scene, but then no blood was found anywhere else.
(40:58):
It was as though the person that did it cleaned
up everything but the actual crime scene itself. Yeah, it's
just this very strange thing. There was an allusion to Obviously,
this show is doing the true crime thing of edding
every episode on a Cliffhagger, but they alluded to the
fact that blood was found in a different house in
the neighborhood, but that the police never followed up with it.
(41:18):
They said the potentially Martha had had a boyfriend that
is not part of the official narrative during this time
which she's potentially hooking up with tomby scicole, she also
had a boyfriend that could have been upset. I mean,
there was just all this stuff that has not been
part of the official narrative, right.
Speaker 2 (41:33):
But that's so funny because in the forty eight hour
special they go pretty in depth into Martha's diary, and
she doesn't mention a boyfriend, but she does mention Tommy
and Michael, and she mentions Tommy in a romantic sense
and how he had all of these advances on her,
not all of which were welcome. But she also mentions
Michael's drinking. She said that they were at a dance
(41:56):
or something like that, and that Michael was loaded and
being an asshole. And it's clear, based on a few
different things, that he was in some way jealous of
Tommy's relationship with Martha. So I think that if she
did have a boyfriend, maybe it was a secret, But
I don't know that it would have been a secret
from her diary.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Well, yes, that's the thing. You hear that and you're like, wow,
that's the key that unlocks it a little. But then,
of course again you have to remind yourself, well, this
is being reported by the person who wrote this other book.
It's just it's very confusing, I mean.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
And also the fact that the case is now fifty
years old.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
Right exactly. I mean, I have to say, so far,
I'm impressed with the number of people from the community
that they are interviewing. I mean, just the fact that
they have the woman that found the body on record
and she's describing that experience. They have a lot of
other neighbors that are discussing what Martha was like as
a young girl. But it is impressive that they were
able to get all these people. And it is one
(42:52):
of those things where the clock is ticking. I mean,
fifty years is already way too long, but this is
Michael Skeigel's last chance to prove his innocence, right. And
another thing, I know I've now mentioned this many times,
but it really is important to note the sheer violence
of the act. This is something that would happen in
a horror movie. I mean, there is a graphic description
of how they found the body in the podcast, and
(43:14):
one visual that has really stayed with me is that
one of the blows that she took the golf club
went through her neck, and so there is literally a
strand of her hair that went through that hole and
came out the other side of her neck. I mean,
that is the level of violence we're talking about. And
so obviously, yes, I could see Michael as a troubled
(43:35):
teen with substance abuse issues and a difficult home life
committing an act of violence, But something like pushing someone
off a cliff or something is different than this kind of.
Speaker 2 (43:48):
Playing someone with a six iron so hard that the
shaft of it shatters exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:53):
Yeah, I mean it's this catch twenty two, right, because
if that is what happened, then he is the literal
psychopath and you can't trust anything he says in this series,
you know what I mean, Someone who is able to
commit that level of violence is I'm sure also able
to lie with a straight face about it.
Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah. This is one of those cases that I think
will be cold forever until all parties involved are dead.
I honestly was thinking even when the case was going
on in the early two thousands, how credible are everyone's memories,
then my memory is barely credible for things I did
last week totally.
Speaker 1 (44:30):
I mean, I really think, and this is something that
I've discovered with so many of these Kennedy related cases,
especially the more salacious ones that we've talked about, is
every case like this is so dependent on the time
in which it is being covered by the media. Like
the fact that this was happening in two thousand and
two thousand and one. People have such strong memories at
(44:52):
the time of the oj Simpson trial of other kind
of like salacious live stream trials. You know, for example,
the Johnny Depp case could only have gone the way
it went in a media environment that was dominated by TikTok,
that was dominated by these sort of like very strange
forces on each side. I mean, who knows if the
(45:12):
same exact thing, with the same exact actions had happened
in I don't know, twenty ten or nineteen thirty five,
if it would have gone the same way. Right, So anyway,
that's where we're at. This is a very non traditional
episode because we really both are still working through how
we feel about this case, and as Julia keeps saying,
we highly recommend the forty eight hours special about it.
(45:33):
It's all available on YouTube, and I have to say
so far, I am cautiously recommending this new NBC podcast
that's we listen. It's called Dead Certain the Martha Moxley Murder.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Andrew Goldman, Come on the show.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
Andrew Goldman, We would love to have you on the show.
I think even if the podcast is a complete bust,
I think there is certainly new information that they are
somehow bringing to light. So it's an open topic here
in the United States of Kennedy. We're going to talk
about it again. If you have any tips, please, said
the mid Thank you for bearing with us as we're
thinking about this in real time. But that is this
(46:09):
week's episode.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
United States of Kennedy is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Subscribe and follow United States of Kennedy for all Things
Kennedy every week
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