No Good Deed

this week on Meet the Press. All eyes on Iran, we dig into the latest as the conflict escalates throughout the Middle East. Plus Steve Kornaki with a brand new NBC News poll as we break down the first primaries of the 2026 midterms. This week on Meet the Press. Listen to the full episode now wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Craig Melvich. Cheers, cheers, cheers. I've always been a glass half full kind of guy. And now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, challenges, their stories, or funny, and my candid. So I hope you'll join me each week and who knows. You might just come away with your own glass half full. Search Glass Half full with Craig Melvich from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Our last episode ended just before Christmas 1992. With Skakal Twitter, Ken Littleton angrily ditching Grednitch after failing his second polygraph. And accusing Michael Skakal of being a coke crazed animal murdering 15-year-old. Mostly thanks to Ken, this became a pervasive opinion in the press about him. Was it true? We'll get to that. But first, we're going to have to rewind the tape of Smidgen a little over a year back to the fall of 1991. The state of Connecticut was right in the thick of their efforts to pin Martha Moxley's murder on then prime suspect Littleton. One day, Jack Solomon, the state's attorney's chief inspector for Fairfield County, which encompasses Grednitch, came up with a ruse to nail the former Skakal Twitter. Solomon, the chain-smoking John Wayne look-alike, who'd been in the case since Martha's body was discovered, rang up many Margolis, Tommy Skakal's long-time lawyer. Margolis, you'll remember, was hired in early 1976 after it became clear that the police were honing in on Tommy as a suspect. Solomon told Margolis the newly reopened investigation into Ken Littleton required his office to photograph the Skakal House. I've come to suspect based on what unfolded. This was really just a strategic move to get in a room with Margolis. In any case, it worked, and it would forever change the trajectory of the Martha Moxley case. When Inspector Solomon and his colleagues arrived at the Skakal House on Otter Rock, they were, as Solomon had hoped, met by Margolis, as well as a thick set 67-year-old attorney named Tom Sheridan, who also worked for the Skakals, mainly handling rushed Skakal seniors of fares. On the Skakal's son porch that autumn afternoon, Jack Solomon brandished a three-ring binder for the two lawyers. He flipped through page after page, documenting unsolved murders of women on the east coast. Murders he thought Ken Littleton might have been responsible for. In addition, of course, to killing Martha Moxley. Solomon told the lawyers he was now hot on the trail of Littleton and only Littleton, and that Tommy was no longer a suspect. Someone was hoping that by revealing this, many Margolis would finally allow him to interview Tommy Skakal about Ken Littleton. In the 15 years since Rush Senior hired many Margolis to represent his son, Margolis hadn't allowed any cops anywhere near Tommy. He and Tom Sheridan would field questions from investigators and deliver answers from the siblings, but there would be no direct access to the Skakal family. Solomon wanted FaceTime with Tommy. He heard something or remembered something helpful about Ken's demeanor when they watched the French connection together. But Solomon was kind of like the wily coyote of investigators. His intricate plans, like all those schemes with Ken's ex-wife Mary, trying to get him to confess, seemed to always bring the boulder down on his own head. This scheme was no exception. Solomon's ruse was a bust. Margolis never allowed him to interview Tommy. Solomon's efforts to butter up Margolis ended up making a much bigger impression on Rush Skakal's lawyer, Tom Sheridan. Sheridan knew how much appearance it mattered to Rush Senior and how much it distressed him that periodically the Greenwich time and other publications would rehash the Moxley case. Here's many Margolis on date line in 2003. Rush and Skakal and Tom Sheridan were concerned about the fact that this was a case that wouldn't go away. There was still all of this noise and constant repeating of the stories about the murder and whether or not Tom was the perpetrator. Since William Kennedy Smith's Spring 1991 arrest on rape charges, the scrutiny had gotten a lot worse. So if, as Jack Solomon suggested, the authorities were about to arrest Littleton, wouldn't it be a perfect time to initiate an independent investigation that could clear the Skakal name and restore some honor to the family? After the meeting, Sheridan sought a recommendation from an old friend for a private investigator who could help with the case. He found an ideal candidate in a man who would spend 15 years as an FBI agent. My name is Jim Murphy. My server is a president of Sutton Associates. And back in the early 90s, I conduct an investigation regarding the death of Moxley. If you saw Jim Murphy at the grocery store, you'd probably look right through him, which in my mind makes him an ideal investigator. Tom Sheridan, represented the Skakal family. And he is the one that expressed that that Mr. Skakal wanted an investigation conductive. So they came to me. Mr. Skakal's objective, and the reason I accepted the assignment, was that if we were able to prove that one of his sons committed this homicide, then he would bring his son forward, appropriate DA, appropriate authorities, acknowledge that, and get whatever help his son needed. Sound like a very good objective on his part, an honorable one. One other thing to know about Murphy, he's a man of deep faith, deacon in his Catholic church for 25 years. A devotion that he attributes in large part to the death of his 12-year-old son, Brian, of a rare thyroid cancer in 1992, while he was working on the Moxley case. As you'll see, the Sutton investigation would run into some serious bumps along the way. But I don't see Murphy as someone who would take investigating the murder of a 50-year-old girl as anything but a solemn duty. Still, it's an odd plan that Tom Sheridan and Rush Skakal cooked up. Rush's self-directed inquest into Rush's own children. As you'll learn, there may have been other motives at play. After all, an intensive private investigation wouldn't come cheap, but Rush Senior was used to solving problems with money. Maybe that's why Sheridan's plan sounded reasonable to him. Whatever the case, when Rush Skakal hired Sutton Associates, he lit the fuse of a bomb. It was only a matter of time before it blew up his entire family. I'm Andrew Goldman. From NBC News Studios and highly replaceable productions, this is Dead Certain, the Moxley murder. In the summer of 1992, the investigation began. Even though the Skakal siblings were no longer kids, the youngest, Stephen, was now 26, and oldest, Rush Junior 36, Rush Senior encouraged and got full family participation. All siblings appeared for days of questioning, as did Rush Senior himself, Ken Littleton, and Martha's brother, John Moxley. They did interview all of us. Hit the ties to a number of us. Success to the Skakal family wasn't just limited to hypnosis and interviews. Tommy's complete medical records were delivered to Sutton Associates. They had access to the mother load. Initially, the plan to clear the Skakal name was playing out brilliantly. In July 1993, a story ran in the New York Daily News announcing Sutton's investigation. Jim Murphy told the reporter that his mandate was, wherever the ships may fall, they want to know the truth. He also gave credence to the idea that Ken Littleton might be a serial killer by identifying three unsolved homicides of women in Northwest Massachusetts that occurred while Littleton was nearby. Publicly at least. It seemed as though the news was tightening around Ken Littleton's thick yanky neck. But 1993, then 1994, came and went. After all the tricks dreamed up by the Grunge investigators had failed to produce their much needed confession, that imminent arrest of Littleton that Solomon had hinted at on the Skakal Sun porch never materialized, so there was no public victory lap for the Skakal family. In the meantime, the Sutton investigation marched on for nearly four years. Investigators re-interviewed witnesses close to the case, poured over police documents, and workshoped their theories of the crime. The sleuths kept on sleuthing. Perhaps because the Skakal checks kept clearing, something you'll be hearing more about. But whatever was dragging out the investigation, it showed no signs of wrapping up. Then, around Christmas 1995, Skakal family attorney Tom Sheridan unexpectedly called Sutton Associates Jim Murphy. We were told to wrap up our investigation. Were you given a reason, specific reason? We're stopping. We're not doing anything more. No explanation. Even though Murphy wasn't told specifically why they were shutting down, I have a hunch. About a month prior to the shutdown of the Sutton investigation, a series of articles about the Skakal family was published by newsday journalist Len Levit. Levit reported that Tommy Skakal, during an interview with Sutton Associates, had, for the first time in 20 years, changed his story. It appeared that he'd had more contact with Martha the night she was killed than he'd previously let on. A week later, a second story dropped in newsday. This time reporting that not only had Tommy admitted to Sutton Associates that he lied to cops in 1975 about his whereabouts, but his brother Michael had too. The details were vague, something about Michael being outside of Martha's house on the night of the murder. All of a sudden, the Skakals were back in the news, and not in a way that patriarch Rush Skakal would have appreciated. The headline alone was damning. Lying brothers, second Kennedy kin admits lying in murder case. It marked the first time that any insinuations about Michael had been made public, as Len Levit would later acknowledge on date line. Articles I wrote talked about Michael's changing story and Tommy's changing story. Michael had never been in the frame as a suspect. The suspected Skakal was his older brother Tommy. That's right. Tommy was the suspect. Michael had been totally in the clear. Rush Skakal had now gone from his dream scenario. The Ken Littleton would be cuffed and Tommy exonerated to having not just one but two sons linked to the crime in the papers. Many Margolyce, clearly the more responsible of the Skakal family's heronies, went into full damage control mode. Alerting the Skakals that Sheridan's plan was proving to be a monumental mistake and urging them to shut it down immediately. It was then that Sheridan, having received some choice words from Margolyce about his ill-conceived scheme, called Murphy and said the investigation was over. He requested all the files back from Jim Murphy so he could return him to Margolyce. I took all of our files, everything, and gave him back to Tommy. To be clear, that's Tom Sheridan. He's talking about turning the files over to, not Tommy's Skakal. And as you'll soon learn, it turns out it wasn't quite everything. In the meantime, a frustrated detective whose case had gone stone-cold was turning the pages of Newsday, his mouth-a-gog, Inspector Frank Gar. The first time I heard about those changes stories were in the newspaper article written by Len Levin. Both Thomas and Michael admitted that they allied to the police in 1975. As you read those stories about the Skakal brothers, Garb must have been hearing the signature pops and cracks of Ice Thigh. Garb's name should be familiar to you by now. He was on the Moxley case since the beginning. It was Gar who'd been the police dispatcher the morning of Halloween in 1975 when Dorothy Moxley first called to report her daughter missing. He was Grendtish's rebel detective, he of the ponytail in the acting headshot. I reached out to Garb for this podcast, but he ignored my calls and the certified letters that I wrote. The clip of his voice you just heard and the ones that follow are from interviews Garb did with Faithline. But we have an even more comprehensive source to draw from. In 2004, nine years after Newsday reporter Len Levin published those scoops about the Skakal brothers changing their stories, Levin published Conviction, solving the Moxley murder, a book documenting Gar's history with the case. Although only Levin's name was on the cover, it was very much a collaboration with Gar, who took half of the small book advance. Much of what you're going to hear about Gar comes directly from that book. For years, Gar had worked under Jack Solomon, the state's attorney's chief investigator, as they tried to build a case against the Skakal tutor Ken Littleton. In 1995, three years after Solomon's disastrous final meeting with Littleton, following his questionable failed polygraph, and just months before those leaks made Newsday, Solomon retired. Gar stepped into his job, taking over the Moxley case. When Gar left the Grendtish Police Department and reported to his new digs in the Bridgeport offices of the Fairfield County State's Attorney, he moved from one of the wealthiest towns in Connecticut, a half hour north to one of the poorest. Unlike Solomon, Gar had no junior partner. The Moxley case was now his and his alone. When I left the Grendtish, I took your wit me up there, because there's nobody on this department now left that worked on it. Everyone else is retired. It would seem to be a cause for celebration, but almost immediately he was miserable in his new gig. The case was now colder than cold. So cold that cops had by then consulted with eight psychics, one of them only 11 years old. And not only were the Skakals refusing to speak with Gar, now, thanks to Solomon's handiwork, so was Ken Littleton. Gar felt confident that the case would not be solved by forensics, because there were effectively none to speak of, besides a few hairs gathered from the crime scene that didn't conclusively match any known suspect. Investigators never found Seaman, saliva, or fingerprints. And if an eyewitness to the murder hadn't come forward yet, it seemed highly unlikely that one ever would. The only thing that would finally solve this case was a confession, or locating a witness to a confession. Gar would need to cast a wide net. In 1995, as a Hail Mary, he tried to interest the producers of various crime TV shows, Serona's segment on the case, that would hopefully yield some new tips. No dice each one told them. There simply wasn't enough interest in an old case, as Gar would later explain on the day line. I had gone to the television and wanted this to be broadcast at a segment, and I had been turned down because of lack of any new information that they felt would be needed in order to get this on the air. But then fate? Certicy, if whoever leaked the details of the Sutton investigation to Newsday, did him a solid. People were again talking about Brennan's most notorious unsolved crime. Gar went straight to his boss, Don Brown, the longtime states attorney for Fairfield County, Newsday articles in hand. But Brown was unfazed. Just as he had in 1976, Brown punted, opting not to pursue charges. Gar was understandably frustrated, but there was a silver lining. They might not have precipitated a quick arrest, but those articles about the Sutton leaks did move the case in one important way. Those TV producers who just blown off Frank Gard were now interested. That's the information that I was able to use to get unsolved mysteries to get interested in this and to airing their segment. The episode ran in February of 1996. Both Gar and Levin appeared. Leonard Levin is an investigative reporter for the Long Island-based Daily Newsday. He has been looking into the Moxley case since 1982. There were no defense wounds which indicates that she knew her attacker. Nearly the fact that she was hit repeatedly with a golf club indicates some kind of rage which personalizes this thing, which indicates that there was such anger that the two had with no one each other, that it was a crime of passion. On the segment, Levin's opinions on the case seemed to point to the Skakele brother who had long been one of the state's top suspects. Tommy. Frank Gard was standing by in the Burbank studio to field calls from those who phoned the toll-free number the show had provided. In that night, a guy named Phil Lawrence called in from Florida. One of the operator's wavegarg over to the desk to take the call. Lawrence said he had information to share. He said he'd once attended boarding school with a Skakele brother in Maine, and while there, he'd learned who killed Martha Moxley. And it wasn't Tommy Skakele. Friday night on Tateline. We don't get to many cases like that. A hit for hire and an undercover staying were just the beginning. Some people call this a twisted love story. I think it's true love. To see that this case took a turn, no one expected is really the understatement of my career. Nobody saw this coming. Tateline. Friday night at 9.8 Central. Only on NBC. Stay informed with the NBC News app. Breaking news just coming in moments ago. Watch, read, and listen throughout your day. And now unlock even more with a subscription. It's the best of NBC News with fewer ad interruptions, including ad free articles, podcasts, and full NBC news shows. Plus, deeper access and exclusive content. Let's just take a step back. It's more context and clarity from the reporters you trust. Download the NBC News app now and subscribe for more. We are Charlie Puth to talk about his nailing the National Anthem at this year's Superbowl and the inspiration for his new album, drawn from a line about him in a recent Taylor Swift song. You can get our conversation now for re- wherever you download your podcasts. On the phone in the unsolved mystery studio, Phil Lawrence told Frank Gar that he'd attended the Alon school a reformatorian main for troubled teens in the late 1970s, along with Michael Schaiko. Lawrence then shared something astounding. He said it was common knowledge among those at Alon that Michael Schaiko had murdered Martha Moxley. What did common knowledge mean, Gar asked Lawrence? Had he personally heard a confession? No, Lawrence admitted. He didn't remember a personally hearing one. But supposedly, Schaiko had confessed in group therapy. It wasn't exactly a smoking gun, but Gar wondered. Could it be legitimate? If Michael Schaiko had actually confessed to murder, could the key to finally closing the Moxley case be found at the Alon school? It was a tantalizing new lead to chase down. Michael had never been a suspect before, but under the other suspects, had stuck. Maybe there's something to this, thought Gar? Once again, Gar went to his boss, long time states attorney Don Brown and tried to get him on board, and again, his efforts to get traction failed. Brown just didn't seem interested in pursuing Michael, or anyone for that matter as a suspect. Publicly, at least for the time being, the media remained focused on Tommy as the Schaiko and the hot sea. In June 1996, seizing on the renewed media interest in the case brought on by the unsolved mysteries segment, the Moxley family held a press conference at the Bridgeport Holiday Inn to announce they were doubling the amount of the reward money offered in the case from $50,000 to $100,000. The news of the reward bump had the effect of shaking the trees even more forcefully than unsolved mysteries. On Halloween 1996, four months after the announcement, Frank Gar got another even better lead about Michael. A 39-year-old Chicago man named Chuck Siegon called the Greenwich Police, saying he had pertinent information. On the phone with Frank Gar, Siegon said he'd overlapped at the Alon School with Michael Schaiko and wanted to share something he'd recently heard while hanging out with another fellow Alon Alon from the Chicago area. His name, John Higgins. One night in the dorms at Alon, Higgins had told Siegon, he and Michael Schaiko were talking and the subject of the Martha Moxley murder came up. Yes, I did do it. Michael allegedly told Higgins and then went quiet. When Gar heard this story, he was understandably pumped. It was yet another crack in the metaphorical ice. But like journalists, detectives have an imperative to turn scuttle butt into something more. In court, hot gossip heard over your neighbor's coffee table is called hearsay. Chuck Siegon saying someone told him he heard Michael's kick-al-confess? Here's a thing. Unless Gar could get direct testimony from the person who heard first hand, any murder confession would be useless. So in early November 1996, Gar tracked down a number for former Alon student John Higgins, a 34-year-old Volvo mechanic living in Lyle, Illinois. Higgins told Gar that he'd indeed had a very emotional conversation about the murder with Michael one night at Alon. Higgins didn't, however, share the confession Siegon reported. In fact, Higgins insisted there'd been no explicit confession. Well, I pretty much got a lot of everything that he told me. He never specifically told me to kill that guy. Never set that. That's the original audio of Gar speaking to Higgins. It's not great, right? Higgins reiterated exactly how certain he was that he'd given Gar everything he had. I live in, die. I never ever caught, ordered, with cost, you know, the way I am. I live and die by the truth, said Higgins. It costs me more than you would possibly know to be the way I am. It must have felt a guard like he'd hit yet another dead end. But miraculously, days later, on their second telephone call, Higgins changed his tune. What exactly did he say? Get out of that from alone. If he couldn't quite make out Gar's words, he's asking Higgins about his conversation with Michael Skickle that night in the Alon dorms. Well, at the end of the conversation, Michael was just, obviously, destroyed. He was just sitting there crying. And he was probably crying five minutes or so. And then he said that killed, that I killed him. What did you say? I don't think I said anything. I just never knew the only word he said about it. That I killed him. So, it probably gave the guy a hug. Michael said, I killed her. And I probably gave the guy a hug. Higgins told Gar. That cracking ice of his 21-year-old cold case had overnight melted into a torrent. I've got him, Gar thought. More than two decades after the death of Martha Moxley, Gar found himself in a position that every cop would work the case had dreamed about. Finally, he had a confession. He immediately hustled down the hall to tell his boss. But by now, you probably know enough about state-saturned Don Brown to guess what happened. Absolutely nothing. Gar was infuriated. They had a witness to a confession. What else did Don Brown need to finally act, Gar wondered? The wheels on his brain started turning. Was now retired Jack Solomon still meddling, insisting to his old boss that Kent Littleton was their guy? Gar speculated this was the case. Brown, for his part, likely would have characterized his continued inaction on the Moxley case as judicious or prudent. Though I think it's probably more of a case of political self-interest. Prosecutors I've learned are by nature fiercely protective of their conviction rates, and Brown was no exception. Winning is everything, and if a prosecutor racks up enough L's, they tarnish their legacy or even lose their jobs. Gar claimed Brown once discussed his impending retirement and admitted, Frank, I don't want to go out a loser. I'll say DNA evidence, no 20 plus year old case would offer great odds for victory. Failing to get a conviction in the high profile of Martha Moxley murder case would absolutely assure he'd got a huge loser. Gar surely must have thought this was the end of the line. But unbeknownst to Gar, there was a major development stirring behind the scenes, something that ultimately would set a blowtorch to his frozen case. We've already briefly touched on how, when speaking to the Sutton investigators, both Tommy and Michael Skakel changed their stories about their whereabouts on October 30th of 1975, but we haven't yet dived into the particulars of what they said. We'll come back to Tommy, who had long been a suspect in the eyes of both law enforcement and the press. Even though what he said was indeed significant, the revelation didn't move the powers that be to act. Tommy was kind of old news. Michael was the new news. Or is it sometimes called the news? The story he told Sutton associates presented a turning point in the case. Had he not shared it, the case almost certainly would have died inside Don Brown's office. So what exactly did he say? Recall back in 1975, in the days following Martha's murder, Michael, like all the Skakels and other Bell Haven kids, sat for an interview with the Greenwich police. Here he is recounting to Detective Jim Lonnie what happened after he and the Skakel gang returned from dinner at the Bell Haven Club. You heard some of it in episode 1. After dinner at the Bell Haven Club, I came home and we sat around on our porch for a while. I saw Martha Helen and Jeffrey Burns the door, so I flagged him over the other way. So one in one side has now the other and one in dad's car and listen to music for a while. And then Rush came out and said that he had to use the car. So and then to me came out. So Michael, Martha, Tommy, Helen, X and Jeff Burns listen to music in the love mobile for a few minutes. Then two Skakel brothers, 16-year-old John and 19-year-old Rush Junior come out. They say that they need to use the car to take their cousin, 17-year-old Jimmy Terrien, home to a rambling castle like a state in the backcountry of Greenwich, where parental supervision was sparse and teens could run wild. The family named the mansion Sirsum Corta, for the Latin phrase meaning lift up your hearts the Catholic priest say it mass before offering holy communion. And then Tom and Martha, Tom stayed, so Martha and we left Terrien. Who was in the car with you? Um Jimmy Terrien, one brother John, not the other Rush. Okay, when you left the driveway you went directly to Jimmy Terrien's home. Correct. Did you make any stops before getting to Jim's house? Cigarettes, candy? That's a car. Okay. How long did you stay at Jim's house? About half an hour or not. Okay, about what time did you get back to your house? Oh, it's 10-30. So Michael said that he joined his brothers in the Love Mobile trips to Sirsum Corta, eight miles away in the Greenwich backcountry, a drive of about 20 minutes. The police established that the car departed before 9-30, so that the boys could arrive in plenty of time to watch Monty Python's flying circus, which started at 10 pm. Over the first two decades of the investigation, this was never controversial. Michael went to his cousin's house. In separate interviews with the police, John and Rush Jr., as well as their cousin, Jimmy Terrien confirmed this account. In a variety of documents, all the detectives investigating the case, Loney, Keegan, Solomon, and Gar consistently noted that it had been established that Michael accompanied his brothers and cousins on this trip to Sirsum Corta. When Michael sat down with sudden associates and investigators in Tom Sheridan's office in 1992, nothing about his account of that part of the night changed, but something significant in his story had changed. Here's what he said in 1975. Okay, what did you do when you got back to your house? Came inside, and I'm not sure if I got a snack or not, but I didn't think I might have no one upstairs. Okay, what time did you think you got the bed? Probably about 15 minutes after. Okay, sometime between 10-13 and 11, and out there. Okay, did you go to sleep right away? Did you read? What's TV? No, I slept right. Did you hear anything suspicious after you got into bed? Anything that, you know, might make you believe something was going on outside. Yeah. Why did you leave the house after you went to your bed? That last part where Michael says he didn't leave the house after he went to bed, that's the part that's 17 years after Martha's murder suddenly shifted. Actually, Michael told the Sutton Associates investigator in August of 1992, he had not in fact just gone to bed when he got back from his cousin Jimmy's house. He then proceeded to recount a jaw-dropping story about his activity the evening Martha Moxley died. No audio exists of Michael Sutton interview, but several years later, Michael, then 37, would tell the same story to a writer he hired to help him write his memoir. Where we got home and all the life, Martha's lights were out. You know, walking around half nobody was on the porch. I think I got some to eat. One upstairs went to bed and I couldn't sleep. And, um, I'm trying to move, got horny. And I kept thinking about this lady. Now I'm up, wall of slain. But it's dark outside and I'm scared of the dark. So I'll fuck it, don't go. I think I snuck out the back door or maybe the front door. Anyway, I remember running past the pool, up wall of slain. And I just ran to that lady's house and, you know, I was like spying in her window and hoping to see her naked. And I was like, this is bullshit. And I was kind of drunk, so I like couldn't get it up. So it's fucked this up. You know, why should I do that? You know, Martha liked me. I'll go get a kiss from Martha. I'll be bold tonight. You know, booze gave me courage again. So I went over to that house and ran up onto the front stairs. There's a huge front stairs, front entrance. And I remember climbing up, seeing the light was on, like on the second or third floor. They had these huge feeder trees, pine trees, raised the front door. And I remember climbing up them, like way up there. And I think I threw rocks or sticks at the window and I was yelling her name. I don't know, I guess a little out of my mind because I was drunk and high. I pulled my pants out. I masturbated for 30 seconds in the tree. And I was just crazy. They catch me, they're going to think I'm nuts. A moment of st. clarity came into my head. I climbed down the tree and they haven't. On oval driveway, half oval driveway. And I started, it would be a direct route from their front door to our house. But it's really dark. And when I started walking through something, in me said don't go in the dark over there. But I went under the street light. And I remember yelling, who's in there? Who's in there? And then I was like, run at home. I ran home. And I remember thinking, oh my god, I hope you got to know me, tell me, Cherkin off. And then went to sleep and I woke up, and this was mockingly saying, Michael has he seen Martha. Nobody, the police had interviewed over the years, had ever put themselves so close to the crime scene. Let alone masturbating there. It was a mind-blowing tale, creepy and confounding. And a very dark one, considering Michael had apparently been in a tree, trying to lure a girl out of her home, who for the last hour had been lying dead or dying on the ground nearby. In 1995, when Newsday reporter Len Levit wrote about Michael changing his story, he didn't include the masturbation detail. Maybe he didn't know it, or maybe it was deemed unfit for a family newspaper. Had he included it, it's possible suspicion might have shifted to Michael. But as far as the public knew, Tommy, as the last known person to see Martha moxley alive, still seemed a better bet. The cops strongly believed that Martha was killed between 9.30 and 10 pm, when Michael was a cross-town at Sirsomcorta with his brothers and cousins. Unless Michael could be in two places at once, he just wasn't a viable suspect. The Sutton investigation might well have just faded into history, just become a forgotten detail in an old newspaper story. Except for what happened next. The End The End Hey, guys, Willie Geist here. We're celebrating 10 years of Sunday today by hosting a very special Sunday sit-down live event. And our guest is one of the biggest stars on the planet, Ryan Reynolds. We're taking our conversation to the stage in front of an audience of you for one night only at City Winery in New York on April 7th, an intimate in-person evening. I promise you won't want to miss tickets are limited, so grab yours now at today.com. Trace of Suspicion, an all-new podcast from Dateline. Listen for free each week or unlock new episodes early and enjoy Add Free Listening by subscribing to Tateline Premium on Apple Podcasts. Joe from Community or The Sub, his new show Animal Control, he asked for four bottles of Washington State wine for our interview. He has news about whether there's a community movie coming. He tells the story of how he got one of his first big acting gigs by lying about his height, and you have to stay through the credits. He's so funny. We have behind-the-scenes bloopers and outtakes from our conversation. Hope you'll listen and follow the drink wherever you get your podcasts. Recall that shortly after Levitt's articles appeared in News Day in late 1995, Sutton Associates founder Jim Murphy got a call from Skakel Family lawyer Tom Sheridan. We were told to wrap up our investigation. As instructed, Murphy closed up shop on the Martha Moxley murder investigation and turned over all relevant materials to Sheridan. Or at least he thought he'd turned over everything. There was one member of his team who was more reluctant to give up than the others. His name was Jamie Bryan. Two years into the investigation, Murphy had a specific assignment that required someone with writing skills. A relative of Murphy recommended Bryan. He was an aspiring writer in his early 20s, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia. Murphy had read a few of his articles and was impressed. I was looking for someone to bring in who could take a look at all the work that we had done over a couple of years now, right? So I asked him to take all the information that he had and he had free access to all my files. And put together what I call the worst case scenario. Murphy asked Bryan to marshal all of the thousands of pages of evidence that the detectives had collected and make the most compelling case he could for the hypothetical guilt of the most likely murder suspects, both skakals and non-skakals. Hearing Michael's weird tree story had the same effect on the Sutton guys that it probably did on you. So along with Ken Littleton and Tommy Skakal, Michael earned his own worst case scenario report. The exercise had a couple purposes. Bryan's fresh eyes might locate something that detectives had missed and might want to pursue further. And as an added benefit, if Tommy or Michael Skakal were ever arrested, the suspect reports could provide their attorneys with an idea of what kind of case the prosecution might mount. I have to stop for a moment to reiterate what I just shared. Rush Skakal's senior, at the urging of his own attorney, hired a former FBI agent to build a case against two of his sons, and paid him to spend four years doing so. Apparently, this plan made sense to Tom Sheridan and Jim Murphy. Other attorneys I've spoken to about this suggest this plan was, as my mom used to say, nuttier than a fruitcake. The struggling to even find words voiced your hearing belongs to seasoned Connecticut criminal defense attorney Jessica Walker, who would eventually work on Michael's case. You'll hear more from her throughout the series. That's absolutely crazy. It doesn't make any sense. Nobody, no criminal defense attorney in the right mind would ever say, hey, do you think that you could write a report that makes my child look guilty as soon? Why would you do that? Who does that? But for argument, Sake, let's say you do decide to pursue this perhaps ludicrous idea. You'd probably want an attorney to write them up. Not only because they would be anticipating how things might play out in a trial, but even more importantly, because their conclusions would be safe from any and all prying eyes, protected by attorney client privilege. But if you didn't want to spend the dayo, at the very least, you'd insist that anyone with access to Sutton's files sign an iron-clad non-disclosure agreement. After all, the materials Brian had access to were top secret and of intense interest to both Connecticut authorities as well as the media. Given the extreme sensitivity of the documents, did either Tom Sheridan or Jim Murphy get recent college grad Jamie Bryan to sign an NDA before opening their files? Nope, not a chance. Well then certainly, Bryan must have been monitored very closely while he was going through the documents at Sutton Associates. Perhaps even subjected to searches before leaving at night, just like they do at libraries and government agencies that deal in sensitive information. Right? Right? And so did he come into the to the Long Island offices and go through the files? I mean, did he spend weeks? What did he do? Yeah, yeah, he came in and then I gave him permission to work from home. So he took the documents that he thinks that he needed or wanted to take him home, work on them, bring him back. In late 1995, following Tom Sheridan's call to cease the investigation, Jim Murphy broke the news to Jamie Bryan. He had a very hard time accepting that. Jamie's perspective with me says, we can't stop. You know, we're close to solving this thing now. And I said, no, I said, we're working for an attorney. He told us to stop. So we're going to stop. In addition, nobody's paying us for this. Yeah, so this is over. That's why it's just way, where you go? What are you saying? I was just curious. Well, when he was working, he was, he was working from home. You know, so I went, I took a ride down to where it was at the time. And he gave me a box with documents in it and whatnot. And this is everything, right? Yeah, this is this is everything. I said, okay, so that and that was it. The Skickle case may have been over for Jim Murphy, but it was far from it for Jamie Bryan, who has since had a long career in advertising copywriting. I've reached out many times to Bryan over the years, but he's consistently ignored all my calls and emails. In certain ways, I recognize a lot of myself and Jamie Bryan. And I think I understand why he might have done what he did next. For about the same age, and after delving into much of the same material that Bryan had, I was hooked too. And I had a hard time giving up the case. Even after my official work as Bobby Kennedy's ghost writer was over, I certainly understand what it's like to be a young aspiring journalist. And I'm old enough to remember the mid 90s when glossy, condin-ass magazines like Vanity Fair had incredible cashier and bottomless budgets. So even though I believe what he did next was unethical, and I don't imagine that anyone not even Bryan himself could have predicted the chain of events his actions kicked off. I think I understand why he did it. It's hard to express exactly how excited I was to be invited to launch by Dominic Dome in 1999. I was in my mid 20s, a fledgling newspaper reporter Newdemand Hatton, and nobody. And he was, as New York Magazine would dub him a few years hence and a cover story, America's most famous journalist. I'd written a devastating expose about a writer he apparently hated. I distinctly remember that when he left me a congratulatory message on my work phone, done refer to him as, that cock sucker. At that moment in time at Vanity Fair, done basically owned Long Form True Crime. His reporting on the OJ trial in Menendez Brothers was the kind of writing a dream to doing one day. I idolized him. He invited me to launch with him at his favorite spot, Patrune, a clubby restaurant around the corner from his East 49th Street apartment. I had no idea how much I'd be thinking about done over the next 25 years, and how dramatically my opinion of him would change. At Patrune, the Moxley case didn't come up. I'm sure I was too busy pepying him with fanboy questions about the OJ Simpson trial. But by then, done already had an eight year history with the Moxley murder, and a consequential one at that. The first time done, heard the name Martha Moxley was in 1991. He was on assignment in one of his favorite towns, Tony Palm Beach, Florida, covering the William Kennedy Smith trial. Done was a sponge for Gossip, especially about the Kennedy family. When he heard the erroneous rumor that spread through the press corps, that Smith had been a granite the night a 15 year old girl was murdered, he decided he wanted to know more about the case. He set up a meeting with Dorothy Moxley. Dominic Dunn heard about Martha's case, and he wrote to me and asked if he could come and talk to me, and I said yes, of course, he said he would like to write a novel about Martha's case. You know, it's fiction, and it is not the actual story of Martha's case, but it parallels Martha's case. Fiction allowed Dunn the freedom to tell the story as he imagined it. The novel, which Dunn titled a season in purgatory, was published in 1993. In May 1996, just a few months after the unsolved mystery segment about the Moxley case aired, CBS broadcast a mini series based on the book. Based on Dominic Dunn's bestseller, the explosive mini series of a powerful family shocking fall from grace, and their season in purgatory. Patrick Dempsey, a decade from playing McDremion Gray's Anatomy, played murdering teen Harrison Burns. Dunn's media appearances erased any doubt about who he believed to be the real-life Harrison Burns. Dunn told People magazine he was convinced 100% that Skakel, that would be Tommy Skakel, knows a lot more than he is saying. Although, as I'd come to learn, Dunn would end up changing his opinions about their suspects, about his often as he'd switch out eyeglass frames. Dunn died in 2009, and I was never able to speak to him about the case. So I want to invite someone in to help me tell this part of the story. My name is Jack Donahue, and I was both the employee and friend of Dominic Dunn. So I would say the two years previous to 9-11, I took over four. I think his former assistant was a female who he probably didn't talk about because she was ripping him off. She was like ordering things on his credit card and having it delivered to that apartment, and then when he was at lunch should get it from the super. It was, yeah, so that was ugly, but we had a great a great relationship. I actually sang it as funeral. As well as having incredible insights into Dunn from having been his assistant. Jack is also a professional singer and trained actor. And after talking to him, I thought his impression of Dunn was so spot on that I convinced him to record some quotes from Dunn, from his articles, from newspaper quotes, and from things his biographer Robert Hoffler reported him saying, here's the real Dunn. The reason I can write asshole so well is that I once was an asshole. And here's Jack Donahue who is Dunn. I guess in the end, I'm just a f*** who needs to get even. We spared you the slur Dunn used for Irishmen, but not bad, right? Here's what I've taken to calling Jack Donahue's almost Dunn, reading from a vanity fair piece The Real Dunn wrote about his 1991 meeting with Martha Moxley's mother. I told Mrs. Moxley that I thought I could write another book based loosely on her daughter's murder and it might turn a spotlight on the long dormant case. Dunn was uniquely positioned to take on this story. He grew up in Connecticut and like the Kennedy family, his background was what was once known as Lace Curtain Irish, wealthy with a high social standing. He actually knew the Kennedys. He'd been a plus one at Robert Kennedy's 1950 wedding to Ethel's Skakel. In the late 60s, Dunn was a marginally successful Hollywood producer, as well as an indefategable social climber and gossip. After it got around town that he'd made a cruel joke about the weight of Sue Manger's, the most powerful talent agent in town, his membership to the Hollywood Incroud was yanked. As Dunn once recounted in a documentary about his life, Robert Evans, the legendary godfather producer, informed him of his fate. Here's the real Dunn. Broke and washed up more than a decade of substance abuse followed. Like Ken Littleton, Dunn enjoyed his cocaine intravenously. It's hard to pinpoint his exact rock bottom, but it might have been in the late 70s when he sold his West Highland Terrier Alphie for $300 to buy cocaine. Though he was a closeted gay man, only admitting his attraction to men in a book published after his death, he'd been married to a woman and fathered three kids. In the early 80s, the Dunn name was enjoying a Hollywood renaissance thanks to Dominic's children. His elders ungriffing, a hot young acting commodity, would later go on to star in Martin Scorsese's dark comedy After Hours. His youngest, Dominic, was pursuing an acting career of her own. But then, in 1982, not long after the release of the hit horror film Pultergeist in which she had landed her breakout role, 22-year-old Dominic was murdered. The following year, her father, still shattered, happened to be seated at a Manhattan dinner party next to the soon-to-be editor of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown, who described their fateful first meeting in the audiobook of published Diaries. The emotion of the night ratcheted up when Dominic suddenly revealed to me something terrible. His daughter Dominic was murdered. She got involved with an increasingly controlling man, a chef at L.A.'s fashionable Marmazzan restaurant. He throttled her. For three days before she died, Dominic sat by her hospital bed looking at her bruise neck. Brown told them that if he took notes, she would publish his trial memoir in Vanity Fair. His face lit up as if I'd just thrown him a lifeline. He seemed buoyed up when he left the dinner, as if he glimpsed some redemption from all his suffering. That piece from 1984, Justice, a father's account of the trial of his daughter's killer, was a passionate protest of a broken justice system. Lamenting how an expensive defense attorney managed to suppress from jurors evidence of the defendant's extensive prior violence towards women. He was convicted not of murder, but manslaughter, and only served a fraction of his multi-year sentence. Tina Brown knew that she'd found a star, and Dominic Dunn had not only found a new career, but a cause. He later wrote, with a dramatic flair that would come to embody his signature style, I had never attended a trial until that of the man who murdered my daughter. What I witnessed in that courtroom enraged and redirected me, how I hated his lawyer, how I hated that judge. Dunn's calling turned out to be high-profile murder cases. His stories were full of delicious gossip, but also included a running theme, how the justice system always tilts in favor of rich or well-connected defendants. As he told Dorothy Moxley in 1992, when he was asking for her consent to write a season in purgatory, his interest was particularly personal. His own daughter had been born a year apart from Martha, and, like Martha, the attack that led to her death occurred on October 30th, albeit seven years later. Dunn's book, written with Mrs. Moxley's blessing, simultaneously raised the profile of the Moxley case and Dunn himself. By 1995, when Vanity Fair sent him to cover the OJ Simpson trial, he was probably the most famous person in the courtroom besides the defendant, but unquestionably the best dressed. Dunn could now afford to look like a million bucks, in Gushi horse bit loafers, gold Tiffany cufflinks, and his signature black-round frame glasses that made him look like a stylish owl. By the time Jack Donahue became his assistant, Dunn confided that Vanity Fair was paying him $33,000 a month for his column. The OJ Simpson trial ended with an infamous acquittal. When the verdict was announced, cameras captured Dominic Don, mouth a gap in horror. Just before Christmas 1996, nearly a year to the day after Tom Sherrod and Fire Jim Murphy and Sutton Associates, Dominic Don's phone rang. Here's Don's one-time assistant again, reading from Vanity Fair article from the year 2000. I had a call from Bernice Ellis, the receptionist at Vanity Fair, who monitors the call that come in for the magazine's writers. She knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff. It's about the moxley case, she said. I think you should talk to this guy. Don scheduled a lunch date for the following day at Petrune. Like I said, his favorite restaurant. Carrying a Manila envelope, he came into the restaurant wearing jeans and a t-shirt. That wasn't quite the dress code for Petrune, but they let him in. I had an imagined talking to him on the phone how young he was going to be. He was 24, but could easily have passed for 17. He was of course a spiring writer Jamie Bryan. He hadn't in fact turned over everything to Jim Murphy. He'd held on to those purposely prejudicial worst case scenario reports Murphy had tasked him to write. And in what much shortly have been an effort to ingratiate himself, perhaps with the Vanity Fair article in his sights, he handed over the Sutton reports. Murphy only learned of this handoff months later after fielding a call from Newsday's Len Levit, who had gotten the tip from Dorothy Moxley. Murphy was understandably upset. I didn't have any indication of the oil that he had given anything away until I got the call from Len Levit. So he says, he says, Jim, you know, you know this guy, Jamie Bryan, he says, well, he says he has provided information to Dominic Dunn. You know, I was just going to pull you baffled by you know, and obviously pretty embarrassed. I should pause here to remind listeners that Dunn up to that point had been vocal about his belief that Tommy Skakel killed Martha. This theory had been the centerpiece of both his fictionalized book and many series. According to Jim Murphy, Jamie Bryan had come to a different conclusion, a shocking one that Michael, not Tommy, was the killer, a conclusion he apparently shared with Dunn over that lunch. Let me just ask you a question. Do you think that, I mean, Jamie Bryan just got not a school? Do you think that he is as qualified to decide who killed Martha Moxley as you are? No. I mean, the writing that he did is persuasive, but also some of it's not actually factual. No, it's not. Whether Dominic Dunn understood that the documents Bryan handed off were largely speculative is open to debate. But according to Dunn's own biographer, when they met, Bryan explained to Dunn that the documents were a rhetorical exercise. That's not what Dunn wrote in Vanity Fair. When it came time to give the results to Skakel, the agency knew it had to put all its findings into a cohesive report that he could read and digest. When the report was presented to Russian Skakel, it indicated that Tommy had not killed Martha Moxley. Michael, the fourth Skakel son who had never been a suspect had an all probability killed her. I wondered what Jim Murphy would make of that passage. Vanity Fair Dominic Dunn wrote, specifically wrote Sutton Associys decided that Michael was the one most likely. Which is not true. Not true. No. I never would have written that. As for Sutton Associys' presentation of the findings to Rush Skakel, unmasking Michael as the killer fiction, Stephen Skakel said he'd never seen any evidence that his father ever saw the reports, which I find credible, given Skakel attorney Tom Sheridan's tight grip on information. Sheridan felt part of his job was not only to protect Rush Skakel's interests, but also to keep him virtually in the dark about a variety of stressors, chief among them the ongoing Moxley investigation. As he wrote to Tommy's lawyer, Minnie Margolis, in a 1978 memo, with respect to Mr. Skakel, let me advise you that I try to keep him knowing as little as possible. Not to mention in the latter part of Sutton's investigation, Rush Skakel was already suffering from dementia. There's an expression in journalism. Too good to check. Meaning a detail that were reported wishes were true, but collapses under the slightest scrutiny. I've come to realize that too good to check was a done specialty, and in this case, one that kept him right where he wanted to be. Sena's an authority with special knowledge of yet another of the country's most notorious murder cases. In what must have been a great disappointment to Jamie Bryan, his byline never glaced the pages of vanity fair. But the luch turned the tide on the Moxley case in an unexpected way. Intertwining Grennich's most notorious unsolved crime were the case so famous that it changed the way we look at white Broncos forever. In 1997, a new and notable public figure made his entrance in the Martha Moxley case, who would also forever change the way the public looked at Michael Skakel. Well, my name is Mark Ferman. I was in detective with Los Angeles Police Department. I ended up doing an investigation for Dorothy Moxley on the murder of her daughter Martha Moxley, and that's how I ended up talking with you. Next time on Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley murder, we'll finally hear from someone who is never before spoken publicly about this case. Can you tell me your name? Say my name is and why am I interviewing you? My name is Michael Skakel, and why am I being interviewed? I mean, that's kind of a big question, isn't it? If we had all the information in the Sutton Report November 1st, 1975, who would have went to the police station? From its book, it was the map that would lead to Michael Skakel. From NBC News Studios and highly replaceable productions, Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley murder, is written, reported, executive produced, and hosted by me, Andrew Goldman. Alexa Danner is executive producer and head of audio at NBC News Studios. Megan Shields and Rob Heath are producers. Nora Patel is our story editor, fact checking by Simone Butteau, production assistance by Brendan Wiseau, sound designed by Rick Quan and Marquio Shazumi, original music by John Estes. Bryson Barnes is our technical director. Amanda Moore is our production manager and Marissa Riley is the director of production. Liz Cole is president of NBC News Studios. Friday Night on Date Line We don't get too many cases like that. A hit for hire and an undercover staying were just the beginning. Some people call this a twisted love story. I think it's true love. To see that this case took a turn, no one expected is really the understatement of my career. Nobody saw this coming. Date Line, Friday Night at 9-8-Central, only on NBC.