Known Unknowns

At the beginning of this series, I asked you to consider a question. What do you know? Over the course of the last 11 episodes, we've trod every step of Martha Moxley's walk around Bellhaven the night of October 30th, 1975, many, many times. And we followed the steps of a lot of other players in this case in the ensuing years, too. Investigators, suspects, attorneys, journalists. I've done my very best to give you a lot of information about the Martha Moxley case in a manner that doesn't cut corners, doesn't edit out inconvenient facts, in hopes of providing you a new answer to that original question, what do you know? Hopefully, you know a lot more now than when we started. But at the end of a story like this, if you've come along the whole way, like Martha's family, like everyone involved in the case, you probably want definitive answers. Closure. I understand. As I was in the thick of production on this podcast, I found myself repeatedly fielding the same question from friends, listeners, the press. Exactly how are you planning to land this Airbus, Sully? Are you going to solve this case? What do you, Andrew Goldman, really know? Given the time we've committed to listening, if it's truly a finale, surely you plan to unmask the real killer, right? Right? As a storyteller, I don't want to disappoint. Though ultimately, I'm a reporter, not a detective. And although I have my theories and suspicions about what might have happened that night, as I'm sure you do too, my own thoughts on the case refuse to sit still. They're always jumping around based on new discoveries, believe it or not, to this very day. For reasons we've explored, uncertainty defines this case. 50 years in, there are still chapters untold, threads unexamined, several of which we'll be exploring today. You've been so patient. So let's begin the end with a biggie, with something we discussed a long, long time ago. The wait is over. So about that mysterious blood. Recall back in episode one, I told you about a 47-year-old woman named Teresa Tirado who worked as a maid in a house in Belhaven. Toronto, in an interview with police, reported seeing smears of blood inside the house she was cleaning the morning of October 31st, 1975. The house was one that Martha was very familiar with, a place where she spent a lot of time, nearly every day of her life for the preceding year and a half. A place where she wrote diary entries, hung out with friends. Her best friend Margie Walker Told me about a small room on the third floor That Martha and pals turned into a kind of clubhouse Where the girls would listen to Elton John or Peter Frampton And clip out phrases and pictures from magazines And paste them on the walls Like a vision board anticipating their future adventures Yes, the house where the blood was spotted Was Martha's very own Teresa Tirado was the Moxley's maid Here's what Tirado told police on November 6th, a week after the crime, with the assistance of a translator. On Halloween morning at 8 a.m., she'd arrived at the Moxley house to clean it, as she'd done every Friday for the preceding year. Martha had, by this point, been missing for nearly 11 hours, although no one relayed this to Tirado, perhaps because she only spoke Spanish. Shortly after arriving, the police report states, Torado observed the bedroom door of Martha's 17-year-old brother, John Moxley, to be open and his bed to be empty. Torado recalled hearing a loud crash in the basement at 9 a.m. She did not investigate. Torado told the cops that she first saw John Moxley that morning around 9.15 a.m. He was in the first floor TV room watching television with a friend. They stayed there until around 11 a.m., at which point she observed the pair go outside to the wooded area behind the house for about 10 minutes. Tirado noted that during this time, she heard another crash in the basement. The police report notes John Moxley came back into the house briefly, then the two boys left for good. At this point, Tirado went into the TV room to clean up after them and spotted something on the table. Smears of blood, as if from three fingers, is how it's phrased in the report. Tirado, still unaware that Martha was missing, didn't think anything of it, and proceeded to wipe up the smears and finish cleaning the Moxley home. In their report, investigators wrote that on the basis of Tirado's interview, a recheck of the Moxley house will be made. Recheck is an interesting term. Right after the murder, the Greenwich police had questioned the entire Moxley family, including Martha's mother Dorothy and father David as well as brother John. However, as far as I can tell based on the police reports, they never did an initial thorough search of the Moxley home. Whatever the case, they scheduled the recheck for the following day and in the meantime summoned John Moxley for a follow-up interview. At the station, John confirmed the outlines of Toronto's story. He had in fact been watching TV with a friend from Greenwich High named John Harvey. As for that blood, John said he had no recollection of seeing any blood. Police pressed, albeit gently. Might he or his friend John Harvey have cut themselves accidentally while weightlifting? No, John said. Had he heard the crashes, they asked, that Tirada reported emanating from the basement? John said he had not. Was there any reason for blood to be found in the TV room, investigators inquired. Here, John offered up a theory, stating that, quote, The room is used by all members of the family, and the stains that Teresa observed could have been food stains, as everyone eats snacks in the room while watching the TV. Greenwich police proceeded with their recheck of the Moxley house the next day. Their report mentions a thorough search of the basement. However, it makes no reference to even setting foot in the TV room, where Tirado said she'd seen the blood. Per the report, the search yielded nothing. And that seems to be where the Greenwich Police's investigation into the supposed blood spotted in the Moxley house just ended. There's no further mention of it in any police documents that I've come across. Investigators didn't speak to John Moxley's friend John Harvey to ask him about the blood or the noises, and they never spoke again with Teresa Tirado. In December of 1975, they brought John Moxley back in for another round of questioning. This time with the help of their favorite investigative tool, the polygraph. John passed. Ultimately, it's impossible to know for sure what Teresa Tirada wiped up off the TV room table that day. But let's take a moment and presume she was right. That the materials she cleaned up the morning of Halloween 1975 was, in fact, a blood smear. That would be significant in several ways. It would be the only blood found outside the crime scene, yes. But there's more. Photographs of Martha's body taken at the crime scene also show a smear of blood, clearly visible on the back of Martha's left inner thigh. At Michael Skakel's trial, Dr. Henry Lee testified about the mark, calling it a contact smear, theorizing that a bloody hand or fist could have come in contact with Martha's thigh, transferring the blood. Dr. Lee noted an additional blood smear visible in the photos that could have been left by bloody hands. The killer's hands should have a lot of blood. When you touch, you should have a lot of transfer of blood. These details made little impression at the trial, since there was never any blood tied to Michael Skakel or the Skakel home. But if what Teresa Tirado spotted in the Moxley's TV room was in fact blood, the question remains. Who left it there? When? And under what circumstances? And did Greenwich investigators miss a critical opportunity to hunt down one of the only promising forensic leads in the case? When I first learned about the existence of the Teresa Torado police report, I was shocked. No media coverage I'd ever come across even mentioned it. When I spoke with Mark Furman, whose book was so pivotal in shifting public focus to Michael Skakel, I asked what he thought about Torado's story. What did you make of the blood in the Moxley house? Well, what kind of blood was it? Was it drops of blood? Was it fresh blood? Was it shoe prints? I read Furman an excerpt from the police report. She observed on one of the tables what appeared to be smears of blood as if from three fingers. Yeah, I think I had the redacted report. I didn't ever see that. The redacted FOIA police reports were indeed missing a lot. but not Teresa Tirado. Furman seems to have just somehow missed it as did most of the journalists covering the case. But not everyone overlooked it. When she was working on Michael Skakel's case in 2000 trial attorney Linda Kenny Bodden picked up on the blood smears from police reports. And in fact, one item on her pre-trial memo where she sketched out all the issues Michael Skakel's defense team could pursue to try to secure an acquittal Teresa Tirado. Their maid, the Moxley maid, saw blood smears, three fingerprints she thought were blood, on this table. She wiped them up, and then she was never asked by anybody about them. So I felt, look, we should go find her and talk to her. Maybe it was nothing, but somebody should talk to her and see what she found. And I think I had located her in Florida by just a search. Kenny Bodden says she understood that further investigating the reported blood would be a sensitive undertaking, as it could potentially be perceived as an attempt to pin the crime on Jon Moxley. Everyone was scared, saying, well, you're going to be saying that Jon Moxley killed his sister. I said, no, I'm not. I'm going to be saying that there's blood in this house, and somebody may have gotten into the house, you know, looking for her. Maybe they were looking for something. Maybe that's where they were, you know, earlier. Maybe it's a friend. Who the heck knows? Based on how Michael's defense unfolded, it probably won't shock you to learn that no one on attorney Mickey Sherman's team seems to have ever tracked down or spoken with Teresa Tirado. Unfortunately, it's now too late. Tirado died in 2012. And along with her went to any additional details she might have been able to share about Halloween morning 1975 in the Moxley house. But as with so many things in this thicket of a mystery, that's not quite the end of the story. I'm Andrew Goldman. From NBC News Studios and Highly Replaceable Productions, this is the final episode of Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley Murder. In the early 1990s, you'll remember, at the behest of Rush Skakel Sr. and his attorney Tom Sheridan, the Sutton investigation was commissioned. Its mandate was to reinvestigate Martha Moxley's death. And 20 years after the blood was reported by Teresa Tirado, Sutton investigators pouring over the police files seemed to have latched onto it. When it comes to the Sutton reports, it's commonly presumed that there were only three of them. One for Skakel tutor Ken Littleton, and one each for Michael and Tommy Skakel. There was, however, a fourth report. The existence of which has been for decades ignored, essentially unreported upon. It was about John Moxley. John Sutton report is not one of the worst case scenarios compiled by then recent college grad Jamie Bryan, who leaked documents to Dominic Dunn in late 1996. It's a more straightforward analysis. John had passed a polygraph back in 1975 and was never seriously considered a suspect by police. But in their reinvestigation of the case, the Sutton team took another look at him to follow up on some of, quote, John's behaviors and inconsistencies. Even allowing for post-traumatic confusion, they wrote in their report, a few unresolved points still demand further clarification and examination. The blood spotted by Teresa Tirado in the Moxley House was one reason that Sutton Associates reassessed John two decades later. But there was another issue that Sutton flagged in its report. According to his police interviews, here's how John accounted for his whereabouts on Mischief Night 1975. John said he arrived home after hanging out with friends, including John Harvey, between 11 and 11.30 p.m. that evening and went to bed. He was awakened around 3.30 a.m. by his worried mother, who informed him that Martha had not yet returned home and asked him to go look for her, as John later told Dateline. My mom was very nervous. My dad was out of town. And she asked me to drive around Belhaven just to see if I could find anything. And I drove around and, you know, I didn't come across anything. At Michael Skakel's 2002 trial, John characterized the search as very brief, lasting only 15 minutes. But in 1975, John had told police that he drove around for two and a half hours looking for his sister, returning home around 6 a.m. When he got back, notes the police report, quote, Instead of returning to his bedroom to sleep, John advised that he was very tired and fell asleep on a sofa in the family TV room. Went home back to sleep, got up the next morning, she still wasn't there. According to the police report, shortly after John awoke around 9 a.m., his friend John Harvey came over to the house, as Teresa Tirado had also confirmed. The Sutton team noted this in their report, writing, quote, It seems a little curious that Harvey, who had been with John for most of the previous night, would arrive at the Moxley residence so early. John Harvey would later say he got a call from John Moxley that morning, telling him that Martha never came home and asking him to come over. The two Johns watched TV together until about 11 a.m. before heading outside to search for Martha, specifically checking, quote, behind an eight-foot wall directly to the rear of the house, which had a large pile of brush in a pile. This particular detail also aroused the suspicions of Sutton investigators. In reference to the brush pile, the Sutton report noted, quote, On the surface, this is a slightly strange inclination, not to mention an unlikely place to find one's sister. Back in 1975, the Greenwich police didn't specify in the report how this odd brush pile search came about, and Sutton never interviewed John Moxley's friend, John Harvey, to inquire further. But I did. And though he didn't want to be recorded, Harvey told me, like John, he recalls seeing no blood in the TV room. As for the search that had piqued Sutton's interest, he said John Moxley was simply honoring Mrs. Moxley's request that they look around the property, about an acre and three-quarter parcel. According to John Harvey, Mrs. Moxley said, why don't you guys walk around? Maybe she passed out somewhere. And we were thinking nothing of it. So we just kind of gave her a courtesy stroll around the yard. In an interview with Dateline's Dennis Murphy, Moxley echoed this sentiment. Did you think anything was wrong with that? No, no. You just don't imagine anything could help. Other than your sister was going to be in big trouble when she finally walked in. Right. You just never imagined. I could never have imagined what happened. John Moxley may not have been concerned that Martha hadn't come home, but Mrs. Moxley certainly was, and had been since 3.30 that morning. In addition to sending out John to drive around in the middle of the night she called the Skakel House multiple times and also the police looking for her daughter And that wasn all When Sutton investigators spoke with John Moxley on August 15 1994 they asked him why he believed that the Greenwich police had asked him to take a polygraph. He mentioned the blood spotted by Teresa Tirado, but also another incident that occurred on Halloween 1975, shortly after he and John Harvey did their search of the brush pile. Here he is, recounting part of the story. I had football practice, so I left for football practice. No school that day, but you did have practice. Right. We had a game on Saturday, and so it was the Friday practice. You know, walk through everything that you hoped to do in the game. Coach called you assigned at some point? Coach, we were getting dressed. Coach called me into his office and said, something's happened at your house. They want you home right away. Upon pulling up to the house, John told Sutton investigators, he saw a sea of emergency vehicles and a crowd gathered. and says he called out, that's my sister over there. Well, perhaps understandable that he might have concluded this based on Martha being missing. According to the Sutton report, John believed this, quote, is what led police to suspect he had some knowledge of Martha's death. But it wasn't just that which troubled Sutton investigators. It was also his morning stroll around the yard with John Harvey. As the Sutton report notes, quote, if John Moxley was making even a mildly concerted effort at looking around the property for his sister, it borders on the incredible that he never noticed Martha's body lying only yards away to the side of the house. For Sheila McGuire, who discovered Martha's body beneath the pines in the early afternoon on Halloween, the fact that no one else stumbled upon her first is hard to grasp. How the hell did they miss her? How the hell did I find her and they missed her? She was not tucked under. I mean, like the one portion of her body was in kind of light of day. I mean, there was a limb, but the bigger limb that was covering was her, the front of her, her like her head. But it wasn't like over her head. You know, you could see her. I did not have to look for her. She was there. In April 1992, after Greenwich police renewed their efforts to investigate the Moxley case, Sheila sat down for an interview with Inspector Frank Garr. According to the report, Sheila, quote, remembered having no fear of Tommy, no fear of Michael, or any of her other friends, and being horrified of Jon Moxley. I was afraid of Jon. He was the only kid I was afraid of. But I wasn't, like, terrified, deathly afraid of him. I couldn't cross him off my list. Not that I thought that he did it, but I thought that he was capable. She also recounted to Gar an incident she recalled Martha had told her about, which she shared with me. He did not like Peter Zaluca. That's Martha's boyfriend, whom we talked about at length last episode. He did not want Martha dating him. So something happened and he started chasing Peter Zaluca around the house with a baseball bat and was going to hit him, was going to hurt him with it. Unless there was more than one incident with a baseball bat and Peter Zaluca, this event is in fact referenced in Martha's diary. Though Martha wrote that Peter fled the house before John actually had a chance to grab the bat. August 9th, 1975. John came home slightly drunk, and then Peter and Tyler came back and just walked in, and John got really pissed because they didn't knock. So he chased them away by swearing at them and telling them that he was going to get his bat. So then they left, and he came out with his bat. Later that night, he came up to my room, and I was so mad that I just started screaming at him. I was swearing my mouth off. I started crying the whole deal. As I said earlier, Jon Moxley was never named a suspect in his sister's murder, nor is there any evidence that he had anything to do with it. And despite devoting one of their four reports to him, the Sutton team decided that Moxley wasn't their guy. So why raise all this at all? Bobby Kennedy touched on it in a 2016 Dateline interview. Oh, I don't believe that John Moxley murdered his sister. He engaged in some strange behaviors. And he did other things that if Michael Eskekel had done them, they would have, you know, they would have provided fodder for a successful prosecution. Linda Kenny-Bodden made a similar point regarding the general quality and quantity of the evidence against Michael. The amount of evidence they had against Michael, I mean, could apply for anybody. The point is they depict Michael out of all these people. In other words, as we've established throughout this series, multiple people in this case, besides Michael Skakel, behaved in ways that, were the Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass trained on them, might appear suspicious. Kenny Bodden thought Greenwich was lousy with potential perps. I mean, you have suspects everywhere, you know, and there may be more. I mean, I'd say the whole town was a suspect. Back in 1975, Greenwich police seemed to treat John with kid gloves. Years later, Sutton investigators were somewhat less gentle. John Moxley has left a small but lingering element of doubt to his own credibility in this investigation, they wrote in their report. However, they also noted, We are fairly comfortable concluding at this point John Moxley had nothing to do with the murder of his sister. In a 1998 interview with NBC News, Jon Moxley expressed the deep sorrow and pain his sister's death had wrought. You never want to see your mother cry like the way I've seen my mother cry. You never want to see your father, who had been a champion of the world, reduced to being helpless in something he cared so deeply about that he had no ability to influence and to change. I had one conversation with John in May 2023. I told him about the podcast and asked if he'd sit for an interview. He was friendly but declined, explaining that since 2020, when the state decided not to retry Michael, he and his mother decided they were done talking to the media about it. He said, I've spent too much of my life on this case. when we spoke John told me my mom's 91 she deserves some peace Dorothy passed away a year later on Christmas Eve 2024 I never spoke with her directly but from talking to John it seemed to me that at the end of her life she'd achieved that oft-sighted goal of victims families closure John told me he was resolute in his belief in Michael Skakel's guilt and that Michael's Tabeas proved to him that if it wasn't Michael who killed his sister, it was definitely his brother Tommy. He'd said as much in media interviews before Michael's 2000 arrest. I think there's a strong possibility that the person that killed, person or persons that killed my sister, came out of the Skakel house. Dorothy Moxley had said something similar before Michael was indicted. Who do you think killed Martha? Someone who lived in the Skakel house. Someone who lived in the Skakel house. John and Dorothy may have indeed meant one of the Skakel boys when they said this, but there were plenty of non-Skegles in the house on Mischief Night. One of them didn't arouse much interest from the Greenwich police, but he absolutely should have. If you ever needed to be persuaded that bad things can happen anywhere, Then take a journey with us. From compelling mysteries to in-depth investigations, our Dateline episodes are available as podcasts. You can hear the latest stories every Tuesday. For more, follow Dateline NBC on Amazon Music, or just ask Alexa. Play the podcast Dateline NBC on Amazon Music. Great storytelling with a twist from the true crime original. On Mischief Night 1975, there were all kinds of people coming in and out of the Skakel house. There were the seven Skakel kids and members of their teen social circle, yes, but there were also various adults who happened to sleep or even live on the Skakel grounds. The most notable among them, of course, being the tutor, Ken Littleton, whom investigators chased for years, and whom, for a long period before Michael was arrested, John Moxley had also considered a suspect. In your mind, is Ken Littleton a suspect in this? Absolutely. I don't know if he did it. I don't know if he didn't do it. But I certainly know that his life has been changed because of it. As we covered earlier in the series, Ken Littleton was considered a top suspect for at least a decade and a half, starting back in 1976. Littleton had failed multiple polygraph exams, racked up a number of criminal charges starting the summer after the murder, and otherwise behaved in what most would consider highly questionable fashion. Remember the story of him sitting naked on the bed of poor Donna Unger in Nantucket after trying to force himself on her? Not to mention his disturbing phone calls to his ex-wife. If you think you're going to get away with this shit, you're mistaken. Very mistaken. Littleton was abandoned as a suspect in the early 1990s after Connecticut authorities failed to wrench a confession out of him. In all his conversations with investigators, Littleton always maintained that he never met Martha Moxley. I never even saw the girl. Anybody even know what she looked like? No, only from the picture which was in the newspaper the following day. But there's reason to believe that might not be true. In the 43-page suspect profile for Ken Littleton, compiled by Greenwich Police and the state's attorney's office in 1992, investigators concurred, noting, quote, It has been established that Littleton had been at the Skakel residence on prior occasions during the preceding weeks as a tutor for the Skakel boys, particularly for Thomas and Michael. Could Littleton have met or spotted Martha during one of those visits? It's impossible to know. Littleton died in 2019. Despite trying, I never got to speak with him. Littleton may indeed be an obvious suspect, and we've dedicated a lot of time to him in this series. But he was far from the only non-Skekel member of the household staff. Remember that the Skekels had all kinds of live-in and day help, including a cook, a nanny, and a handyman slash gardener named Franz Weteen, who went by Frank. I've mentioned his name a couple of times in the series. Weteen was 61 in 1975. Born in the former Yugoslavia, he spoke with a thick accent and had apparently been in Europe during World War II. Here's Michael Skakel. Five days a week, he stayed at our house and drove us to and from school. He was the caretaker. He did the yard work. If something broke, he would fix it. I mentioned Wateen in the last episode, when we circled back to Tommy Skakel. Wateen had shared some intel in April 1976 about Tommy that certainly didn't dissuade cops from suspicions about him. reporting that on a few occasions he'd witnessed Tommy leave the house to walk, golf club in hand. You mentioned that Tommy would carry a golf club sometimes when he went out. Is that true? When he went in the evening out for a walk? Yes. But you have seen him on more than one occasion take a golf club? Yes. Wateen is also the only person, as far as I can tell, who made a point of telling police that not only were there no golf clubs on the Skakel lawn on Mischief Night 1975, there hadn't been any for the preceding couple of weeks. At no time did you observe any golf clubs. Did you observe any golf clubs in New York? No, not that time. This particular statement has always perplexed me. Basically, everyone else I've spoken to about the topic says the opposite. From the Skakels to Martha's friends to Tony Bryant, who, you'll recall, asserted his friends might be the killers. There were clubs. There was stuff everywhere. There was tons of stuff. They're just laying around. You can walk and trip over and let them. I'm surprised there weren't four or five clubs laying around the freaking yard. Why would Frank Wateen go out of his way to deny something that most everyone else I've spoken with about it has confirmed? And why would he specifically mention Tommy taking the golf club as a walking stick? In 1991, Wateen spoke with investigators once more. They again asked him about Tommy walking around Belhaven with a golf club. He said he had no recollection of making such a statement. But it turns out his eyebrow-raising stories weren't the only slightly hinky thing about the groundskeeper with a heavy accent. Here's Helen Ix again. He was kind of creepy too. He was scary. He was kind of a scary guy. In the book I helped Bobby Kennedy write, Framed, Julie Skakel alleges that Witteen was, quote, sexually inappropriate with her, though she declines to elaborate. And she wasn't the only one to raise alarm bells. Two weeks after Martha's murder, Andrea Shakespeare told investigators about an uncomfortable encounter with Frank. I think it was that night that, um, and then I knocked him, you know, and we asked him to go on the porch and turn to the thermostat. If you didn't quite catch that, Andrea said that on the night she thinks that Martha was killed, Julie asked her to go downstairs and turn down the thermostat. They were handing me in front. Put a gun on me and they ducked out of his line and walked away. Ever since then, I kept my distance. He put his arm around her, she said. She ducked out of it, and since then, she'd kept her distance. The police asked if Frank scared her a little. She said yes. He always looks at everybody. I mean, I don't like that. You get that chilly feeling? He looks at the most of the girls. In his 1976 interview with police, Weteen admitted he knew Martha. Have you ever seen Martha inside this cable house? I, oh, yeah. I guess she was over there more than once, he said. I didn't pay too much attention. But Michael Skakel shared a story with me from around the time of the murder that suggests Weteen might have been paying more attention to Martha than he let on. Around that time also, I was in the bus waiting for Martha. By bus, he means the Revcon Motorhome, where the Skakel kids and their friends often hung out. And she came in one day, and I'd never seen her that upset. I'm like, what's the matter? She said, nothing. I'm like, Martha, seriously. And she just, she said, your gardener's an asshole. I'm like, what did he do? And she just said, ah, forget it, I'm going home. And I remember feeling really ashamed, like, what the hell just happened? And Frank was kind of a scary guy, so I didn't say anything. I didn't know what it meant. Martha may have memorialized those feelings. In 1978, Hellenix's mother, Sissy, specifically recalled being asked by Greenwich cops who Frank was because they'd come across a diary entry in which Martha mentioned being afraid of someone so named. This entry did not become a state's exhibit, so I can't confirm whether it ever existed. There are several other Franks, not Weteen, mentioned in the pages that I do have access to, though none Martha said she was afraid of. In April 1976, after eight years of working for the Skakels, and five months after Martha's murder, Weteen retired. Weteen was one of the few people close to the case who didn't take a polygraph in 1975 due to medication he was taking for diabetes. But during his November 1991 re-interview with investigators, Wittin did submit to a polygraph at state police offices near his home in upstate New York. He passed it. And as with so many others in this story, that was the end of the line. But there are a few undeniable facts about Franz Wittin that suggest he should perhaps have been looked at harder starting back in 1975 He was a member of the Skakel household quite familiar with Martha Moxley and even more familiar with the Skakel property giving him both proximity and opportunity. He'd apparently exhibited some creepy behavior around teenage girls. He was also seemingly the only person who denied the ubiquitous presence of golf clubs on the Skakel lawn. For many years, police were laser-focused on Tommy Skakel precisely because he was the last known person to see Martha that evening. But what if he wasn't? On the night of the murder, Frank Wattin claimed he'd gone to bed alone between 9.30 and 10. Police seemed to take him at his word, but no one else witnessed him go to bed. There's no actual accounting of what he might have been doing after he left the company of the Skakel kids that evening. Frank Wattin died in January 1997, so I never got to ask him any of my burning questions. But he represents just one of the many potential investigative blind spots in this case. Someone who perhaps should have been looked at harder. Blind spots. Tunnel vision. In a case like Martha's, with decades of police reports, multiple viable suspects, and a wealth of dead ends, blind spots are perhaps inevitable. It's easy to get bogged down in the details To miss the forest for the trees But every so often Something comes along that forces you to zoom out To question everything you thought you knew Something that jolts you from complacency And drives you to ask What if I've had it wrong all along? I love you. 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. Welcome to Ashfield Place. The safest, safest, safest town in America. These people are crazy. Starring Emmy Award winner Kiki Palmer. So what's the deal with that old Victorian house? There have been whispers of murder, murder, murder. Aren't small towns just the best? Just give and get out. The Burbs, streaming now, only on Peacock. So are we going to go in? Do white ladies love salads? Hell yeah, we're going in. Over the decades, the police and Sutton investigators looked at so many possible suspects in Martha's murder, including some we just don't have time to delve into in this series. Maybe it was somebody we've named. But of course, there's a possibility that Stephen Barron, Greenwich's police chief in 1975, could have been right when he initially posited that Martha's killer was probably a psychotic visitor from parts unknown, just dropping by Belhaven. It's a theory Jon Moxley entertained in a Dateline interview years ago, before he became convinced of Michael's guilt. The unknown, the stranger, someone who comes in off I-95 inside the gates. Exactly. You haven't dismissed that as possible. No, I haven't. Can't. Will we ever know who killed Martha Moxley? As we've talked about at length, one of the biggest problems with the case has always been that, since the very beginning, it's been plagued by a lack of forensic evidence. There were those hairs found at the crime scene, which matched back to no one. Dr. Henry Lee told Greenwich Time in 1993 that there was so little physical evidence collected from the crime scene in 1975 that he couldn't even run DNA tests. In 1997, the state, in a last-ditch effort to produce some kind of forensic results, had the FBI test several items found near the crime scene. A gum wrapper, a cigarette butt, Martha's shirt. But once again, they came up dry. The case against Michael Skakel was largely circumstantial, which is one of the reasons his attorneys, including the late Hubie Santos, thought his guilty verdict should be vacated, as it eventually was. There are no forensics. There's no DNA. There's no trace evidence. There's no evidence at all that can be analyzed. That's what the conviction is so terrible. But there was one piece of forensic evidence that might have held an answer. Back in 1975, when Dr. Elliot Gross performed Martha's autopsy, he collected swabs from Martha's body for examination. Here's attorney Linda Kennybotton. They take swabs of her vaginal and her anal areas. They were looking for sperm. Apparently, they looked at him and didn't see anything. In 1975, forensic testing as we know it was still in its infancy. Dr. Gross used the swabs to create slides, which were then examined under a microscope to see if any sperm cells were present. None were, so sexual assault was ruled out. But as Kenny Bodden pointed out, You could still have a sexual act and not have sperm. The Innocence Project has made a whole career of finding these swabs from people that supposedly there was no ejaculate on or anything. At Michael's trial in 2002, neither the slides nor the original swabs from Martha's autopsy were introduced as evidence. Beyond a brief mention during the medical examiner's testimony, the state never acknowledged whether the slides or swabs still existed or had been further tested. which led Kenny Bodden to conclude the slides or swabs both of them have been lost they were lost but in the very last days of putting together this podcast as we were finalizing our fact checking our production team reached out to the Connecticut Forensic Lab to inquire about the swabs and slides the response we got was a total surprise while they didn't provide information about the swabs it turns out that the state did have the original slides from Martha's autopsy. And in May 2018, just two and a half weeks after a judge ruled that Michael Skakel had earned the right to a new trial, they sent them off for DNA testing. The DNA report, dated March 2019, describes the samples collected as originating from a single female. And based on a comparison to Dorothy Moxley's DNA, the report states, The DNA on all three slides was most likely Martha's. And only Martha's. It was yet another, and possibly the last, forensic dead end in Martha Moxley's case. A year and a half later, amidst the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic, the state of Connecticut announced they would not retry Michael Stakel for Martha's murder. Looking at the evidence, Your Honor, looking at the state of the case, It is my belief that the state cannot prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt. So therefore, the state is going to enter a nolly. Meaning the state would not proceed. We determined that there was, again, 51 potential witnesses and 17 of them are deceased. And with that, 18 years after Michael Skakel's conviction, the case against him was officially over, leaving Martha's case once again unsolved. in the final weeks of production on this podcast as much as I tried to drown out the noise and just focus on finishing out the series I have to confess that I did read the online comments often through my fingers as I shielded my eyes I also scanned the social media posts and a lot of strangers reached out to share their thoughts the most common theme of these notes many people out there say they still struggle to accept the possibility that Michael Skakel could truly be innocent. And the number one thing they bring up as the prime impediment to getting to that place? The masturbation in the tree story. Why, they ask, would Michael put himself so close to the crime scene, so close to the time of the attack, masturbating? What a weird thing to do, they say. And what an even weirder thing to share, as Dateline correspondent Dennis Murphy once articulated. And after years of Tommy likely being guilty, here it is. Michael, Michael, Michael, what's going on with this kid up in a tree? The truth is, wondering about it is perfectly understandable. You're not alone. I have too. I've turned it over so many times in my head, trying to make sense of it. Perhaps in the chaos and trauma following the murder, Michael's timing got mixed up. Maybe the masturbation in a tree story took place on a different night. and over the years the two nights became conflated. Michael, for his part, insists that his memory hasn't failed him, that his story and its timing are rock solid. But there are other reasons that at times I've considered that maybe I was being too credulous. Maybe I'd gotten duped, co-opted. Could Michael Skakel in fact be guilty and I was just too deeply invested in my contrary take that I came down with my own case of tunnel vision? Never had I experienced that feeling more than when, during my reporting, I stumbled upon a police report authored by Inspector Frank Garr, dated November 20, 1997, about seven months before the grand jury would ultimately convene. It chronicles a visit by Garr to the Ickes household. Remember Sissy Ickes, good friend and neighbor of Rush Skakel Sr. and mother of Martha's friend Helen? During the meeting, Sissy reiterated her long-held belief that Tommy Skakel had nothing to do with Martha's murder. and also happened to mention a conversation she'd had years earlier with Rush Skakel Sr. about Michael, which she said she did not know if she should share. But Sissy did share. Although somewhat hesitant, the report reads, Mrs. X revealed that sometime after the murder, she believes around 1981, but was not at all sure of the date, Rush and Skakel came to her house and informed her that his son Michael had confided in him that he believed he may have murdered Martha Moxley. According to Mrs. Ix, Michael told his father that he'd been drinking on the night in question, had blacked out, and may have murdered Martha. When I read this, I gasped. Michael himself had at one point wondered if he'd killed Martha. I confronted Michael about it, presuming that, as with some of Sissy Ix's other recollections, he might refute it. But no, it was absolutely true, he said. It all went down shortly after he was finally sprung from the Elan school and was living back in his father's house in the early 1980s. You know, you were told that when you leave Elan, you're going to feel great and you'll have no, life will be nirvana and blah. They have a 98% success rate. And I came back and I'm like, I still feel like shit. I'd been through no therapy, no treatment. I'd never been able to grieve my mother's death. I'd never been able to grieve Martha's death. We never were able to grieve anything. I went and I was seeing a guy, Dr. Stanley Lessie in Manhattan, because that's all I knew that I had. Dr. Stanley Lessie. Remember him? The psychiatrist from Columbia Presbyterian who, as you heard last episode, after two weeks of prodding and probing and injecting Tommy Skakel with sodium amytol in 1976, pronounced he had nothing to do with the murder? Michael wondered if Lessie might be able to help him. Well, I asked him. I said, look, I have all this bad feeling. These people have just blamed me for two years. By these people, he means Joe Ritchie and his Elan gorillas. First they say, it's Tommy. Then they say, it's me. I'm confused. Can you please help me? And he said, yes, I can. I will give you sodium pentothal, truth serum, and you won't be able to lie. I'm like, okay. And that's what I did. I mean, I thought my learning, well, maybe I'm doing so shitty in school. Maybe, maybe I just, maybe I was drunk and didn't remember. I don't know. Meaning Michael found himself wondering if perhaps there was some remote possibility that he could have killed Martha while drunk and didn't remember. Michael said that before Elan and all the trauma he endured there, he'd never questioned himself or whether he could be involved in the crime. But now he found himself unsure. He wondered if he'd experienced some kind of brainwashing at Elan, but still the uncertainty gnawed at him. Michael says that with his father's approval, he went to see Dr. Lessee, who, after a round of truth serum testing, allayed his fears that he had anything to do with the murder. Afterwards, Michael says he was able to move on, his conscience and psyche cleared. Michael may have been reassured, but as for me, given that Lessee had not sussed out Tommy's lies about his interactions with Martha on Mischief Night as you heard about last episode, I find any conclusion from Lessee to be less than rock solid. And there was another stumbling block for me along the way. Dennis Osorio. You heard the name, albeit briefly, a few episodes ago. Osorio was the one-time boyfriend of Michael's cousin, Georgian Tarion. At Michael's habeas proceeding, Osorio had testified that he remembered Michael being present at the Tarian's mansion, Sersum Korda, on Mischief Night, watching Monty Python with the rest of the gang. Osorio could have testified at Michael's original trial, but Michael's defense attorney, Mickey Sherman, never reached out. Michael was left with only family as alibi witnesses, whose testimony jurors were told they could treat as less reliable than testimony from non-family alibi witnesses. Michael felt Osorio's testimony was revelatory. Dennis Osorio said, look, I've got no skin in this game. He was, I believe, a psychologist who helped abused women. So if it's the first night he's met me, why would he lie for me? Another person who apparently found Dennis Osorio's testimony revelatory, Judge Thomas A. Bishop, who, partly based on Sherman's failure to track him down, ruled that Michael likely would have been acquitted had Osorio testified. But, but, but, there go those troublesome buts again. As part of my reporting, I did a deep dive on Osorio. He'd been interviewed by a private investigator at his home in Rybrook, New York, in December 2006, years before Michael's habeas appeal. During this preliminary interview, Osorio said he'd indeed been at Sersum Korda on Mischief Night 1975 and remembered seeing Michael there. But then, the P.I. called Osorio three days later and conducted a more detailed phone interview. One line from the P.I.'s report leapt out at me. Mr. Osorio remembers the night in question when he encountered Tommy and Michael Skakel at the Tarion House. To the best of his recollection, he saw both Tommy and Michael there. I think you'll likely see the problem here. Tommy, as we know, didn't go to Sersum Korda. He never left Belhaven. So while it might be possible that Osorio did see Michael that night, it's hard to say with certainty, because he said he also saw someone else who absolutely wasn't there. During the habeas proceedings, prosecutors failed to get Osorio to reveal this in their cross-examination. I shared with Stephen Skakel what I knew would be unwelcome news. This might seem like nitpicking, but if he remembers Tommy there... It's a legitimate point. It was obviously deflating, but Stephen countered. Tommy, Johnny, Rush, all say Michael was in the car. The prosecution letters to Jam Check, the forensic pathologist, numerous letters back and forth, including the you know suspect profile it has been established Michael was in the car It true All these people vouch for Michael being in the car But I admit the Osorio report shook me I began thinking about Michael's brother, John, unable during the grand jury proceedings to recall Michael going to Sursum Corridor, even after being shown his 1975 police report saying exactly that. I had a moment of reckoning, accompanied by, frankly, a touch of panic. And then I took some time to reflect on what I really knew and believed. I went back through countless police reports and documents, none of which cited Michael as the suspect until years after the crime. I studied the picture of Michael from late 1975. A shrimp. I tried to envision him possessing the strength required to commit such a brutal, forceful assault and then drag a body of his own size 80 feet. I couldn't do it. I reviewed Michael's alibi and all the people who vouched for him back in 1975 in the days after the crime. His brothers, his cousin, other Belhaven teams. I reflected on Michael's trial as a whole. His attorney, Mickey Sherman's failure to introduce the concept of reasonable doubt to the jury. How jurors heard almost none of the circumstantial evidence against anyone but Ken Littleton, while Tommy Skakel's name was barely mentioned. I thought about all the individuals in the case over the years. from Ed Hammond to Ken Littleton, and all the potential suspects, Martha's boyfriend, the Skakel's handyman, who may have been overlooked. I thought back to the conversation I'd had with Michael's ghostwriter, Richard Hoffman, and the reaction he'd had to a question I'd asked him. You know, you asked me before about why am I convinced that Michael didn't do it? And I was a little bit stunned by the question because I think that that's back-ass words. I mean, that's exactly what happened in the trial. It's like, well, what do you mean? Who did it then? How can you say he didn't do it? Well, wait a minute. I can't say he didn't do it. I can say I have seen absolutely not an iota or scintilla of evidence that he did it. But even supposing for a moment that Michael did kill Martha, I thought about that too. How it would require a conspiracy of silence from at least some of the seven Skakel siblings. Having spoken with five of them and emailed with a sixth, I have my doubts that this is a group of people that could carry a secret like this for 50 years. Michael alone, I think, would have blown it immediately. This is a man who seems to have rolled off the assembly line with zero filter. We have logged dozens of hours together, on the phone, over Thai and Indian lunches, on long drives around suburban Connecticut. I know a lot about this man. And at moments, I've thought, maybe a little too much. If he had a deep, dark secret to share, I can't imagine that he wouldn't have gotten it off his chest by now. In order for me to live a life on the right path, I have to be fully responsible for my actions, good, bad, or indifferent. If I killed Martha Moxley, everyone would know. Because I wouldn't be able to stay sober. I wouldn't be able to live as a human being. I wouldn't be able to love. I wouldn't be able to be with my kid. So that brings us back to the masturbation in a tree story. It's strange. Yes, even suspicious. And I understand those of you who can't let it go. But if that's the only thing holding you back, then I ask you this. What if it wasn't Michael Skakel, but it was someone you knew personally? Your brother, your neighbor, your friend. maybe even your kid, sitting at the defendant's table facing these charges, would the same evidence that was brought against Michael be enough to convince you of their guilt? Could you confidently say, I believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this person killed Martha Moxley? And would that be enough to justify a sentence of life in prison? From where I stand, and for that matter, where the justice system ultimately landed, it's not enough. The standard for putting someone in prison for life should be higher. Michael spent 11 1⁄2 years behind bars for the murder of Martha Moxley. But as he's told me many times the pain of this story didn't end the day he walked out of prison or after the state decided not to pursue a retrial. It continues to follow him to this day even to the place which he sees as a lifeline a safe space his daily AA meeting. I've heard a woman at a meeting recently say, oh, you're from Connecticut? Where are you from? I say, Greenwich. She said, oh, that's where that damn Michael Skakel's from. So I hear that regularly too. I'm a human. I'm just trying to live more like a human every day. I just want this to be gone. It's an experience that only a select few members of an unfortunate club can lay claim to Which led me to track down this person My name is Amanda Knox I'm most notoriously known for having been accused of my roommate's murder When I was studying abroad in Italy in 2007 I was ultimately acquitted of that crime We'll see you next time. Amazon Music. Great storytelling with a twist from the true crime original. Few people are more intimately acquainted with the experience of being publicly accused and then cleared of a high-profile homicide than Amanda Knox. In 2007, after the then 20-year-old was charged with murdering her roommate while studying abroad in Italy, the case became a global sensation and she a figure of media obsession, the Foxy Noxy of countless British tabloid headlines. The Italian authorities alleged an irresistibly tawdry storyline, a sex game gone wrong. A Perugia jury bought it and Nox spent nearly four years in prison before Italy's Supreme Court overturned her conviction in 2015. What a wrongful conviction is, is another victimization that occurred as a result of the police or the detectives or the prosecutors directing an investigation in the wrong direction. So there's an original victim, an original crime, but then a different wrong thing happens as a consequence and it leads to other victims arising. Once someone is accused of a crime, Knox told me, it's hard to turn the ship of public perception around. It's more that they're guilty until proven innocent, not they're innocent until proven guilty. Because there's a need for a sense of closure. There's a need for a sense of certainty. In fact, despite another man being convicted of the murder and no forensic evidence connecting her to the crime, the mother of the slain roommate until her death in 2020 continued to harbor doubts about Knox despite her full exoneration. The family has never made any conciliatory overtures to her. And what a lot of people in the true crime space say is that if you start expressing concern or tell the story of the wrongfully convicted person, that somehow negates or takes away from acknowledgement of the original victim. She's actually coined a term for this phenomenon, the single victim fallacy. Michael says he's experienced it himself. The idea that even raising questions about his guilt is somehow an affront to the memory of Martha Moxley. A pointless exercise that only serves to re-traumatize her grieving family. Knox says this is a familiar dynamic. I've felt that personally in my own life to the extent that I've had people who even are supporters of mine say things to me like, well, you know, I'm glad that you're free and I'm glad that you're living your life. But can you be a little bit like less visible? Because it's kind of an offense to the memory of your dead roommate that you get to live your life. As if like me being alive, just the very fact that I am alive today is somehow an offense to the memory of the original victim. Being murdered or being the loved one of a murder victim is obviously the ultimate trauma. But it's far from the only trauma a human can experience. And I think, as you've seen, that this case has wrought endless pain to many, many people. The only way to really provide justice to both Martha and all the collateral victims of the case would be to finally get a definite, incontrovertible conclusion about who killed her and crucially, who didn't. But until that happens, for stories like Martha's, there is no happy ending. Her savage murder took a profound toll on all who knew and loved her. None more than her parents, Dorothy and David, and her brother, John. Nothing is ever going to bring your sister back. No. Nothing's ever going to put a bomb on the pain all these years. What would you like to happen? Does anything make sense for you at this point? I'd like to wake up and find out that I'm 17 and yeah, I have a whole life in front of me. Nothing will ever change. There'll be no satisfaction. There'll be no closure. It's something that we'll live with every day of our life. It's part of who we are and what we are. Martha's father died of a heart attack at age 57 in 1988. I asked John McCraight about his former boss and friend's relatively premature death. McCrate, you may recall, presciently told David Moxley on the day Martha was found that he feared the Greenwich police were not up to the task of solving her murder. He then spent years advocating on behalf of the Moxley family with authorities. David died very young. He died at 57. Do you think that this crime, do you think that this had any effect on him? Oh, yeah. In fact, I think it killed him. I think the fact that he, with all of his brains and all of his energy and all of his relationships, the fact that he couldn't solve this thing, I broke his heart. You know, when you go through something like that, you never forget it. And of course, it's never over. Your reaching out was a reminder that this has never really been solved. So it's one of those things that hangs over you. And it's a big, big disappointment because we didn't solve it. We couldn't work our way through the fog. Over and over in my reporting, I've heard people tell me how this case has left an indelible, painful mark on them. Former Bellhaven teens Peter Kumerswamy and Sheila McGuire told me that this event 50 years ago continues to yield to aftershocks and in many ways has determined how they engage with the world. There's not a lot of people that go through something like that and come out with a worldview that is like it was before. And I don't think people are going to understand you or that or what happened. I don't believe that there was justice in this because there's just so much that wasn't done. I mean, there's just so many questions that I have that sometimes make me want to just scream into the wind. When Michael Skakel's father died in 2003, the headline of his New York Times obit read, Rushton Skakel is dead at 79, father of killer. And regardless of how the world ultimately comes down on his guilt or innocence, when Michael dies, he'll likely experience something similar. Newspapers will inevitably link his name with a girl he'd only known for a few months, and it will appear that the sum total of his life occurred on one single tragic evening 50 years ago. Somehow, he's able to be philosophical about it. Being Michael Skakel has been a blessing and a curse. I've met some profoundly great people in this world, kind people, good people. and yet at the same time because of what this trial this case did to me people only know what they know they only know what that box in their living room tells them and most of it's just been bold face lies that's all I'm going to say I don't want to shine the light on somebody else it's been a long journey bringing this podcast into the world a year and a half in production before that years and years of reporting this case has been my life's work since first digging in my two little boys have grown to man size i've lost a lot of hair and the little that remains has gone totally gray i've been so deep in this for so long that as it finally winds down I'm honestly at a loss as to what I'm going to do with myself for the rest of my life. I can't imagine that I will have the energy to pursue anything else as long or as hard as I have chased this story. Ultimately, I didn't uncover the identity of Martha's killer and I'm not particularly optimistic that anyone ever will. But who knows? Hope springs eternal. Maybe this exercise will serve to finally dislodge something stuck in the universe. I do think someone out there knows what happened and if there ever are some new revelations thanks to some science that doesn't yet exist a guilty conscience finally relieved well, I expect you'll hear from me again until then I'm Andrew Goldman and it has been my honor to present to you Dead Certain, The Martha Moxley Murder 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, writer, and head of audio at NBC News Studios. Megan Shields is senior producer and writer. Rob Heath is our producer. Nora Battelle is our story editor. Fact-checking by Simone Buteau and Laura Hunkadea Production assistance by Brendan Weissel Sound design by Rick Kwan, Mark Yoshizumi, and Bob Mallory Original music by John Estes Amanda Moore is our production manager And Marissa Riley is the director of production Liz Cole is president of NBC News Studios The production would like to offer very special thanks to Robin Goldman Darren Winslow Michael Taney Mary Noonan Paul Ryan Andy Berg Ethan Goldman Allison Benedict Marcy Cleary Andrew Rice Vanessa Gregoriadis Alex Zuccardi Leigh Ling Ju Dominique Donohue Nick Offenberg Susan Nall Veronica Fulton Abby Boucher Lauren Andrulevich Miranda Patterson Garrett McCloskey, Drew Roger Conrad, Frannie Kelly, Anne Schilling, Kevin Lockhart, Roger Rose, Lauren McDowell, and George Shiro. This podcast has been a production of NBC News Studios and Highly Replaceable Productions. Thank you.