Michael Skakel
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Michael Skakel, born September 19, 1960, is the convicted murderer of Martha Moxley. Skakel's father is the brother of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's widow, Ethel.
Martha Moxley was found dead on October 31, 1975 on her family's property in Greenwich, Connecticut, after having been bludgeoned with a golf club, a 6-iron soon determined to belong to the Skakels. Initially, the murder remained unsolved, though a cloud of suspicion hung over the Skakel home. When William Kennedy Smith was tried for rape in 1991, information surfaced that he knew more about the Moxley case, resulting in renewed investigation to the then, "cold case." In 1993 author Dominick Dunne, father of murdered actress Dominique Dunne, published A Season in Purgatory, a fictional story loosely based on the murder of Martha Moxley. Mark Fuhrman's book Murder in Greenwich named Skakel as the murderer in 1998.
In June of 1998 a grand jury was convened and, after 18 months (in June of 2000), Michael Skakel was indicted for the murder of Martha Moxley. In a highly publicized trial in Norwalk, Connecticut, Skakel was represented by Attorney Mickey Sherman. He was convicted for the murder of Martha Moxley on June 7, 2002, and received a sentence of 20 years to life in prision. Skakel's alibi was that at the time of the murder he was "masturbating in a tree."
In January of 2003, Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Skakel's cousin, wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled "A Miscarriage of Justice," highlighting ambiguities that remain in the case and arguing that then-twenty-three year old Skakel family live-in tutor, Ken Littleton, may have killed Moxley.
Subsequently, there have been attempts to overturn the conviction. In November 2003, Skakel’s lawyers filed an appeal claiming that the trial should have gone to Juvenile Court, that the statute of limitations had expired, and that there was misconduct on part of the prosecution. These appeals were all rejected by the Connecticut Supreme Court on January 12, 2006. Skakel has since retained attorney Ted Olson, who on July 12, 2006 filed a petition for a writ of certiorari on behalf of Michael Skakel before the United States Supreme Court. On November 13, 2006, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, without comment.[1]
[edit] References
- ^ "Skakel Murder Conviction Left Intact by U.S. Supreme Court," Bloomberg, November 13, 2006
- Fuhrmann, M. (1998). Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?. ISBN 0-06-019141-4.
