Martha Speaks

Dear Diary, today is my birthday. I'm 15. I've gotten a yellow 10-speed, a pair of earrings, a baseball bat from John. How dumb. And some clothes as part of my clothing allowance. And a green frog made out of pom-poms from the Walters. Oh, how could I forget? That was the August 16th, 1975 entry of Martha Moxley's diary, written about two months before she was killed. The diary excerpts you'll hear in this episode are voiced by an actor, and some entries are condensed for simplicity, but the words remain her own. Before social media, diaries used to be a big thing, especially with teenage girls. They served as a testament to existence, importance in the world, and even more than that, a totally non-judgmental mother confessor. They were, by definition, private. Their contents sacrosanct. Some even came equipped with cheap little locks. I didn't keep one. My sisters did. My older sister recently told me about the trauma she experienced when our mother read her diary when she was a teenager. It was such a violation that decades later, she's still not over it. So at 53, do I feel a touch uncomfortable reading the multicolored, loopy scrawls of a 15-year-old girl's diary? I do. But if I am violating her privacy, I'm far from the first to do so. After Martha's murder, the Greenwich police took her diary from her mother Dorothy Moxley as evidence. Years later, the diary would become an exhibit at Michael Skickle's trial. Every page was scanned and posted on Court TV's website. I've combed through the diary entries page by page. True to teenage girl form, many of them are about boys. The desirable ones, Martha called foxes. The sheer number of suitors is overwhelming, like a swarm of cicadas suddenly descending upon this unsuspecting blonde Californian. The attention is obviously novel to her. There are mentions of objectively inappropriate, potentially dangerous situations that for Martha engender only excitement, never fear. At 14, she writes of a salesman at the local sports car dealership, taking her for joyrides in a Ferrari Dino and Maserati Bora. Here's another excerpt from June 26, 1975. Dear Diary, Karen and I were walking home and we saw some guys and asked for some gum. Then we had to go to the bathroom, so they said we could use theirs. Then they invited us in for a beer. So we went and Mark was upstairs. Altogether, there were six foxes. Mark, Brad, Matt, Larry, Ralph, Skip. Martha didn't hold back, in life or on the page. She chronicled the most intimate moments in her teenage life in great detail in that diary. I'm choosing to share excerpts of it here because I believe it's undeniably valuable. For one, it gives Martha a voice in a story that's been told by so many others. But there's another reason, too. Hidden in the pages of Martha's handwritten words, I found some passages that have for decades been overlooked. passages that might finally provide new clues to who that October night in 1975 killed Martha Moxley. I'm Andrew Goldman. From NBC News Studios and Highly Replaceable Productions, this is Dead Certain, The Martha Moxley Murder. The Skakels barely merited a mention in Martha's diary until September of 1975. But apparently as summer turned to fall, she got to know them fast. Once school started, Martha was referring to what sounded like a well-established routine on their property. On September 11th, Martha wrote the following. Dear Diary, After school, I went to the ortho. Then me, Jackie, and Mooj went over to Skakel's house and did the usual in the mobile home. Mooj was Martha's nickname for her best friend Margie Walker. The usual, as I think I mentioned some time ago, was smoking and drinking in the Revcon mobile home, which was usually parked in the Skakel driveway. When I spoke to Margie Walker, she said in the fall of 1975, the core Belhaven cohort consisted of all 15-year-olds. Herself, Martha, and Michael Skakel, plus the bubbly, eternally positive Jackie Wettenhall. Martha had a boyfriend at that time whom she'd been dating since the summer. I mentioned him in the very first episode. His name, Peter Zaluka. Margie also had a beau. That left Jackie and Michael, who, as Margie remembers... He seemed like a little volatile and, you know, crazy. and he would use swear words that none of us had heard before and things like that. In other words, a real catch. So I think we decided that he and Jackie would make a nice couple. We sort of as a group decided, well, okay, you two go together. You know, so now you're a couple. But I can't say they were really romantic. Not part of this cohort? 17-year-old Tommy Skakel. Well, Tommy, first of all, Tom didn't hang out with us. You know, he was older. And that when you're, you know, that age, like a couple years older, it's just like a different generation almost. So he wasn't around a lot when we were together. But Tommy possessed a superpower none of the 15-year-olds had yet. The reason Tom was there is because we needed a driver. The rest of us were too young. So he would get pulled into stuff like that, and we piled into the Cadillac. She means Rush Sr.'s fly Lincoln Continental with the illuminated crystal eagle on the hood. And, you know, that was sort of exciting for all of us, too, to be in this car. Michael might have nicknamed the Lincoln the Lovemobile because of his father's romantic ambitions. But that fall, Tommy seemed to be milking the power of the luxury ride as well. Dear Diary, me, Jackie, Michael and Tom went driving in Tom's car. Margie and I kept yelling out the sunroof. I drove a little then and I was practically sitting on Tom's lap because I was only steering. He kept putting his hand on my knee. Then we went to Friendly's and Michael treated me and he got me a double, but I only wanted a single, so I threw the top scoop out the window. Then I was driving again and Tom put his arm around me. He kept doing stuff like that. That last entry was from September 12th, 1975, just six weeks before Mischief Night, when Martha was killed. It's been a little while since we talked about it, so let me quickly refresh you on the goings-on that evening. According to original police interviews with the Skakel siblings, their friends, and Tudor Ken Littleton. After the Skakels and Littleton returned from dinner at the Belhaven Club, a group of kids, including Martha, Michael, and Tommy Skakel, ended up sitting in the Lovemobile, listening to tunes. Then, around 9.20, Rush, John, and Michael Skakel, and their cousin Jimmy Tarian, commandeered the Lovemobile and drove it across town to Sursum Korda to watch Monty Python's Flying Circus, leaving Tommy, Martha, Jeffrey Byrne, and Helen Ix at the base of the Skakel driveway. The flirting was heavy. Tommy shoved Martha playfully, and she screamed and fell into the Pakisandra patch. Two of Martha's friends told police they last saw her at 9.30 that night, hanging out with her 17-year-old neighbor Tommy Skakel near his home. Here's Dorothy Moxley. She and Tommy were flirting with each other and pushing each other, and he pushed her down and jumped on her. And that was the last they saw of Martha. Jeff and Helen, embarrassed by the interaction, decided to skedaddle. As they were leaving, Martha told Helen she'd be right behind her. The next day, Martha was found beneath a pine tree on the edge of her property. As you learned earlier in the series, in his 1975 interview with Greenwich Police, Tommy Skakel said that after the horseplay in the driveway, Martha didn't stick around long. When Dorothy Moxley called the Skakel house in the middle of the night looking for her daughter, Tommy related that he last saw Martha padding across the yard toward her house at 9.30. Did she say anything to you when she left? Do you know for a fact that she said to you, I'm going home? No, she didn't say she was going home. She didn't say she was going home? No, she said that she was going home. You sensed that she was going home? Yeah. Tommy said that after Martha left, he went upstairs to do some homework. That homework turned out to be a fib, as Greenwich Detective Steve Carroll would later recount. When we asked Tommy where he was, his whereabouts, he said he was doing a report on Abraham Lincoln and the log cabin. And when we checked with his teacher in school at Brunswick School, there was no such report due. And there was more. At 9.50, neighborhood dogs began barking their heads off in the direction of the Moxley property. Dorothy Moxley would later remember hearing voices outside her home around 10 p.m. By this time, cops concluded, Martha was either already laying dead or dying amidst the autumn leaves. Skakel tutor Ken Littleton reported that when he'd meandered around the house to do a bed check at 9.45, Tommy was not in his bedroom. Where was he? It's unclear. But a half hour later, he materialized. Ken Littleton reported that around 10.15, Tommy came into Rush Skickel Sr.'s room, plunked down, and watched the famous car chase from The French Connection, which ended at 10.33. Here's Newsday reporter Len Levitt in a Dateline interview years later. After Tommy leaves Martha at 9.30, about 40 minutes later, he turns up in Littleton's room watching TV. Tommy's being unaccounted for at precisely the time investigators concluded the murder occurred. fueled their suspicions. It also didn't help that Martha had chronicled some of her flirtations with Tommy in her diary, as Greenwich detective Steve Carroll would later tell NBC News. There's indications in her diary where Tommy was trying to get the first base, second base, hit a home run, all kinds of things with sexual connotations in them. But there was a problem with the timeline. The cops trying to pin the crime on Tommy just couldn't resolve. At around 9.30, just when Tommy had reported that he saw Martha heading home, Andrea Shakespeare reported seeing him when she came to the door to fetch Julie's forgotten car keys. Shakespeare, you'll remember, had a little trouble with her recollection of that evening over the years. She notably, and detrimentally to Michael Skakel's defense, claimed at trial he hadn't made the trip to his cousin's mansion, Sersum Korda. But one thing that never wavered in Shakespeare's various accounts, when she went back to the house to collect the keys, Tommy Skakel answered the door. Crucially, if Tommy was inside to pass off those keys at 9.30, he wasn't with Martha. The story he told cops about parting with her around that time would seem to check out. And then there was the matter of what Ken Littleton told police about Tommy's appearance when the two watched The French Connection together in Rush Sr.'s room. Here's Newsday reporter Len Levitt on Dateline years later. They say to Littleton, well, look, Tommy's clothes bloody. What'd you notice about Tommy? Nothing. He was perfectly normal, says Littleton. Tommy repeated his story consistently over the course of multiple police interviews and also took and passed his second polygraph. His first, you might recall, was deemed inconclusive, as recounted by Greenwich detective Jim Lunny. They were getting nothing. They were getting no reaction. He wasn't even moving the needles. Lunny would also remark on how Tommy maintained a placid demeanor through intense hours of questioning. No sweat, no perspiration. Very calm, cool, and corrective. Tommy also stuck with his account in March 1976 after his father, confronted with the police's suspicions, had him admitted to Columbia Presbyterian for two weeks under an assumed name. I briefly mentioned this visit in an earlier episode. Tommy was put under the care of a psychiatrist named Stanley Lessie, who performed a variety of exams on him. long sessions recounting his childhood, tests with German names, Rorschach and Bendergestalt. Clutching a clipboard and pen, Lessie asked him a bunch of embarrassing questions, the answers to which Tommy would have known would be typed up in a report to be read by his rabidly puritanical father. Asked about masturbation by Lessie, Tommy replied that he did not masturbate. Asked about Martha, Tommy said, I never knew her. She was a good friend of Michael's. I only met her two or three times. Was she a sexy girl? Lessie inquired. She did not appear to be a very sexy girl to me, Tommy responded. You'll remember that Lessie even injected Tommy with sodium amytol, considered a truth serum, and queried him on a, quote, point-by-point basis as to the events that had taken place on the night of October 30th. Tommy, a needle phobe, wept as the syringe plunged into his arm, crying, take it out. But even pumped full of truth serum, Tommy's answers, Lessie wrote, remained exactly the same. He'd chastely said goodnight to Martha at 930, went into the house, and never again set eyes on her. Lessie pronounced Tommy to be a gold star patient. In his report, he wrote that Tommy, quote, responded promptly to all questions. He did not appear to take questions lightly on the one hand, nor did he appear to be extremely apprehensive on the other hand. But the conclusion that certainly meant the most to Rush Skakel was this one. I could not document after repeated interviews, including a sodium amytol interview, that Thomas Skakel was responsible for the death of Martha Moxley. This was the pronouncement that caused Rush Skakel to excitedly trot over to the Moxley house in late March of 1976 and declare to Martha's parents that Columbia Presbyterian's best hedgehrinker had cleared his son. But here's the thing. It turns out that Tommy had lied to Lessie. A lot. If you ever needed to be persuaded that bad things can happen anywhere, then take a journey with us. From compelling mysteries to in 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. In the early 1990s, Tommy Skakel's father turned to a private investigation firm. Both Tommy Skakel and his younger brother Michael gave accounts of their whereabouts to the agency, which were inconsistent with their original statements to police. We've talked a lot in this series about how Michael Skakel changed his story in the years after Martha's murder with his strange tale of masturbating in a tree. It was Michael's admission of this incident during the Sutton investigation that drove Mark Furman to conclude that Michael had to be the killer. Please tell me why Michael would say what he said on the night of a murder 20 years later. I'm going to implicate myself in a homicide that nobody thinks I'm the suspect. By using Furman's logic, one could just as easily pose the same question about Tommy Skakel. You'll remember me mentioning earlier in the series that when speaking to Sutton Associates decades after Martha's murder, Tommy also changed his story. But I was being a little coy. It wasn't some small alteration. In 1992, when the Sutton investigation kicked off, in addition to founder Jim Murphy, the firm brought in two other bona fide investigators. One was Dick McCarthy, a retired FBI agent and good friend of Tom Sheridan, the Skakel family attorney. The other was Willis Billy Krebs, an imposing 6'6", former New York City detective. I spoke to him briefly while making the podcast. Citing an NDA he signed decades ago, Krebs declined to comment on the case. But based on Sutton documents, he was deep in the investigative trenches, interviewing many people involved with the case, including Ken Littleton and Michael Skakel. The Sutton team had long wanted to get Tommy Skakel in the interview chair. And in 1994, Tommy's attorney, Mandy Margolis, finally allowed them access to his client, for reasons he later explained to Dateline. That was never a concern to me as Tommy's lawyer. I guess it was clear to me that he wasn't involved. It was a decision that he'd come to regret. On October 7th, 1994, Tommy Skakel sat down across from Billy Krebs and Dick McCarthy in Margolis' office in Stanford. It had been almost 20 years since he'd spoken to any investigator about the case. Krebs, the towering ex-cop, had a reputation as a relentless interrogator, according to Jim Murphy. He's not the guy you want after you. He's very thorough, he's very intelligent, and he was doing what he was doing for a very long time on the police department. Under intense questioning by Billy Krebs, Tommy began to weep. And out of nowhere, his story, which he'd stuck to for nearly two decades, suddenly did a 180. Tommy now, when he's being interviewed by Sutton Associates, in front of his attorney. Tell us a different story. It wasn't some small change, as I mentioned. It was a whopper. Tommy tearfully admitted that he'd been lying when he said he'd last seen Martha at 9.30 on Mischief Night. He said that Martha had not in fact gone home, but rather stuck around for another 20 minutes or so, and that he'd had a sexual encounter with her on the grass 50 feet behind the Skakel house. Here's how the Sutton team recorded Tommy's new story in their report. They began an extended 20-minute kissing and fondling session, which, the report noted, culminated in orgasm. At this point, approximately 9.50 p.m., both Martha and Tom rearrange their clothes and Martha says goodnight. She is last seen by Tom hurrying across the rear lawn towards her home. The report further noted that after leaving Martha, Tommy re-entered his house, but never changed his clothing or showered. This was a drastic evolution of Tommy's story, as Mandy Margolis would later acknowledge. Tommy suddenly was with Martha that evening, hadn't told the police about it. Well, they knew he had been with Martha, but the story changed at the point where the Sutton report took place to be more in line with the details of what happened, which... Became a sexual encounter. Yes, sir. The timing of Tommy's story change is also significant. It was October 1994, and O.J. Simpson was in jail awaiting trial, having been arrested four months before. The Simpson case was all over the news, as was talk about how newly advanced DNA science would be used in his upcoming trial. Anyone who wasn't living under a rock would have now learned about DNA testing and its ability to crack open cold cases, even ones that were decades old. And in fact, the Connecticut State's attorney head, in 1991, declared their intent to test evidence from the Martha Moxley crime scene using new techniques in the hopes it might bring fresh answers to the long-dormant case. Could that have been why Tommy's story changed? Could he have been trying to account for his DNA potentially being found on crime scene evidence years later? Jim Murphy, and others I've spoken to, think it's possible. I think Tommy had to come up with an explanation why some of his DNA might have been found I'm Arthur. Remember at Michael Skakel's trial, the state had presented a parallel theory that Michael's infamous masturbation in a tree story materialized because he was trying to account for his DNA, possibly being linked to the crime scene. But as you'll recall, Michael had told the story to his friend and state's witness, Michael Meredith, as well as to Bobby Kennedy, before DNA was widely used in criminal cases. As for Tommy, Newsday's Len Levitt reported hearing a different reason that he may have changed his story. I pushed very hard on this, and the explanation I was given by one of the Skakel people was that he knew his father would be very upset if he said that he had sex with Martha. That would have bothered the father. And he was afraid to tell this to the police because of that. Obviously, Levitt is using the term sex loosely. Tommy never claimed that he and Martha had sexual intercourse. But recall that Michael also says he didn't come forward with his own story change, the masturbation in a tree tail for the same reason, fear of Rush Skakel Sr.'s reaction. Regardless of what precipitated Tommy sharing, he'd just taken himself from being the last known person to see Martha to something much more sinister, someone who'd lied about the circumstances of their final encounter. And not only was Tommy placing himself with Martha near the scene of the crime, he was doing it at 9.50 p.m., right around the time when the neighborhood dogs began barking their heads off, widely believed to be when Martha was attacked. But if investigators thought they had a smoking gun, there was a problem. Given Tommy's new story, how, just after 9.30, could he have both been fooling around with Martha outside, but also simultaneously at the front door, handing the forgotten car keys to Andrea Shakespeare? Tommy had an explanation for this. He said that after horsing around with Martha in the driveway, He told her he had to go inside the house for a moment and instructed her to wait for him just inside the door by the driveway. What did he need in the house? A beer for the road? To use the bathroom? Unclear. But as soon as he got inside the house, Tommy said, he heard the doorbell ring. He answered the door, passed the car keys to Andrea Shakespeare, and then went back to Martha, who was waiting for him where he'd left her, inside the back door. And then, Tommy said, he and Martha headed outside to make out on the lawn. Afterwards, Martha went home, and that was the last he saw of her. It was at this point in the interview, as he would later tell Jim Murphy, that Krebs felt like he was close to making a breakthrough. Billy Krebs felt as if he had Tommy on the ropes because Tommy had changed his story and began to cry during the interview. But there's a lot of questioning that has to take place about that itself. Now he's upset and he's crying. That's when you keep going. But Murphy says Krebs' partner, Dick McCarthy, wasn't on the same page. And at that point, Dick McCarthy says, he's all upset we should take a break. Or words that aren't effects. Billy Krebs' position on it was, let's keep going. We're right there. Let's keep going. They didn't keep going. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tommy's lawyer, Manny Margolis, pulled the plug on the interview. After what his client had just disclosed, he must have been in shock. Here's Jim Murphy. The things that Tommy was saying, it was the first time that Margolis was hearing them. It was? Yes. How do you know that? He never would have allowed him to say that. Not after the story that he had for so many years. Yet for reasons unknown, and frankly, difficult to fathom, though he stopped the interview that day, Margolis allowed Tommy to sit for a second interview. Four months later, in February of 1995, Tommy was back in front of Sutton investigators, answering more questions. The story that Tommy told was largely the same as his first sitting, with a few minor alterations. This time, he said he hadn't told Martha to wait inside for him, but rather that she'd done it of her own accord, surprising him. Why would Martha have come into the house uninvited to wait for him? The Sutton guys asked. His reply, as cited in their report, maybe she wanted more of Tommy. And there was another deviation. In his first interview, Tommy had stated that Martha had forcibly and verbally rejected his advances when he tried to feel her breasts at the side of the house. In the second version, Tommy only remembered asking Martha if she wanted to make love, and her replying no. When pressed about the changes, sudden investigators wrote in their report Tommy could offer no clarification. He simply repeated, I don't know or didn't reply at all. Many divergent and damning conclusions can be drawn, the report concludes. But any conclusion, good or bad, will remain only speculation without further cooperation and clarification from Tommy Skakel. There was to be no more cooperation or clarification. After Tommy's seemingly disastrous interviews, Manny Margolis revoked Sutton's backstage pass to Tommy Land. Reporter Len Levitt would later talk about the Sutton investigation hitting this dead end with Tommy on Dateline. They could never get him back to that point again. Never finished whatever ended that story. That's it. Stopping Tommy right here may have prevented his telling all that he knew about this case. By shutting down the interviews, Manny Margolis probably thought he'd pushed his client out of the way of a speeding bullet, and the new details that Tommy divulged might never have become public. But then, as you'll likely remember, a year later, someone leaked information about the Sutton investigation to Levitt, and in November 1995, Tommy's story changes were making headlines and reorienting the focus of investigators. Greenwich detective Steve Carroll, who'd since retired, told Dateline in 1998 that although he'd long been convinced that Ken Littleton was Martha's killer, Tommy's new admission about Mischief Night had tipped the scales. We did do quite an extensive background on Ken Littleton, and he did some strange things. We thought that at that time, yeah, this guy's a pretty good suspect. But then as we went over it and over it and over it and over it, you come down to Tommy's cake hole. By admitting that Martha had denied his advances, Tommy had inadvertently opened the door for investigators to assign him something he'd never had before, a motive. What's the motivation? Motivation is sex. Rejection, humiliation. Most definitely. Most definitely. It's true that in Martha's diary, there's a bit of mixed messaging about Tommy. Her September 12th, 1975 entry is all fun and ice cream, as you heard earlier in the episode. We went to Friendly's and Michael treated me and he got me a double, but I only wanted a single. So I threw the top scoop out the window. Then I was driving again and Tom put his arm around me. He kept doing stuff like that. But from an entry just a week later, Martha's mood seems to have changed considerably. Michael was so totally out of it that he was being a real asshole in his actions and words. He kept telling me that I was leading Tom on when I don't like him except as a friend. I said, well, how about you and Jackie? You keep telling me that you don't like her and you're all over her. He doesn't understand that he can be nice to her without hanging all over her. Michael jumps to conclusions. Just because I talk to Tom, it doesn't mean I like him. I really have to stop going over there. By the time Mischief Night rolled around a month later, Martha was apparently back on the Skakel bandwagon, and eagerly so. If you'll recall, she actually came by the Otter Rock house twice that night with Helenix while the Skakel kids were out to dinner at the Belhaven Club, finally meeting up with them on her third attempt. Based on the playful roughhousing that ensued in the driveway, it appears that Tommy was firmly back in Martha's good graces. Martha's apparent hot-and-cold stance towards Tommy didn't go unnoticed. In his 1975 police interview, 11-year-old Jeff Byrne, who'd left the driveway with Helen Ix as Martha and Tommy's flirting ratcheted up, had this to say. Was there any conversation between you and Helen when you were walking home to your house and her house? Yeah. What were you talking about? Just about Martha. What about? Just how she leads boys on. You thought she was leading Tommy on at this time? Byrne was just 11, but the sexual tension he witnessed was palpable even to him. An indication, perhaps, that Martha and Tommy might have had different expectations of what was to come of their flirtation that evening. It's important to note that Tommy was never charged in relation to Martha's murder, but it probably won't surprise you to learn that some people close to the case, including Sutton's Jim Murphy, still suspect that Tommy may have been involved with Martha's murder. It'd only be logical, based on the documents that we have, that it'd be Tommy. Now, I obviously don't know everything. Our investigation was cut short. But there are a number of things that kind of line up that suggest that it could very well be Tommy. Now, again, I'm not saying it is him. I'm saying there's good reason to think that it's him. Murphy also has thoughts about how exactly that night might have gone down, whether Tommy was involved or not. I think that there was a second attack. His theory is that the killer whoever he was first attacked Martha near her driveway where a large pool of blood was found then later plagued by a concern that she might have survived the initial attack to identify her assailant returned to make sure she didn't. Probably a classical act with someone who, in a moment of passion, takes someone's life, and then afterwards thinks, are they really dead? At some point, somebody comes and drives the remaining part of the golf club, the shaft, if you will, the handle part, through Martha's throat. Part of this hypothesis stems from Murphy's review of the autopsy report. In the report, the medical examiner, Dr. Elliot Gross, noted that there was very little bleeding from the puncture wound to Martha's throat. This suggests that Martha was already dead or extremely close to death when the injury took place. It's not confirmation that there was a second attack, but it doesn't rule it out either. In 1998, retired Greenwich detective Steve Carroll had proposed something similar, that Tommy returned to the crime scene, but just to move Martha's body, not necessarily to attack her again. Again, theory, when Tommy goes back into the house and then realizes that he can't leave the body there because she'll be found too quick, returns outside and drags her another 65, 75 feet under the tree where she has come to final rest. So about midnight, in your theory, Tom Skakel goes back to the now dead Martha Moxley and drags her. Not necessarily dead. She may not be dead. May not be dead. May not be dead. But drags her under the tree. But drags her. Right. If we accept investigators' conclusion that the first attack on Martha occurred just before 10 p.m., however, this theory of a return trip to the crime scene, at least as it pertains to Tommy, has a major flaw. This part of the story that he met Kenny Littleton in the house and they were watching the French Connection. This meetup, according to Ken Littleton, occurred around 10.15 p.m. in Rush Skickle Sr.'s room, which means for the two-pronged attack theory to be viable, Tommy would have had to make the one trip for the initial assault, take a brief movie-watching break, then make a second trip back to Martha's yard to move her body. The problem with the idea of a second attack is that Martha's murder was extremely violent. Whoever killed her most likely would have been covered in blood. Recall from earlier in the series that Ken Littleton, in a police interview in December of 1975, had this to say. To the best of his recollection, Thomas was attired as he had been when he went to dinner, which matches up with Tommy's account of not changing his clothes after his encounter with Martha. The choreography, going in and out of the house, changing clothes twice after two separate attacks and disposing of them, unseen and unnoticed by anyone, seems virtually impossible, especially for a 17-year-old kid. Tommy has always denied being involved in Martha's killing. In Bobby Kennedy's book Framed, when asked whether he was about to confess during his Sutton interviews, Tommy had this to say. Quote, Confess to what? I wasn't going to admit to something I didn't do. I had just had enough of holding that sexual encounter in for all these years. But I figured if dad finds it out at that point, I don't care. It was too much. He said Rush's staunch Catholicism meant fooling around with a girl was a mortal sin. And if Rush had found out he'd done so with Martha, Tommy was terrified of what he might do. There's no physical evidence connecting Tommy to the murder of Martha Moxley, though there was enough circumstantial evidence to keep him at the top of an investigator's suspect list for years. But police never brought charges against him. And since Michael's conviction was vacated, there has been no indication that they intend to reinvestigate Tommy or anyone else for the murder. Tommy may have initially fibbed to the Greenwich police and drastically changed his story years later, but he's been interviewed many times. By cops, Sutton associates, and by mental health professionals, sometimes while hooked up to a polygraph machine. Point blank, he always said he didn't do it. Did you know for sure who picked her? No. Did you hear him? No. I reached out to Tommy Skakel on numerous occasions, asking him to speak with me for this podcast. He declined, saying in a text message, quote, That chapter of my life is something I've worked hard to put behind me. It was a difficult experience, and I prefer not to revisit those memories. Tommy, more than most other characters in this series, remains in many ways a mystery, though there are glimmers of his persona in the documentation of the case. Manny Margolis, in some of his memos, refers to his client as prone to delusions of grandeur and vulnerable to unsavory characters trying to dupe him out of money. Tommy also seems to have had a knack for coming up with get-rich-quick schemes. Martha's friend, Helen Ix, says he brought one to her marketing company in the 90s, hoping for help to create an infomercial. Tommy invented a golf club. It was a sandwich. And he came and brought it to me to see if I could help market it, and it was called The Terminator. That's right. A Tommy Skakel golf club called the Terminator. Helen says she didn't end up getting on board and the product never did come to market, but it left her with a specific impression. Then I was just like, there's just no possible way he would have ever done anything like this and invented a sand wedge called the Terminator. Helen's not alone. It seems that a lot of people in Tommy's life had a hard time believing he could be capable of the crime. Even someone who might surprise you. Given their lifelong animus, it would have been so easy at any point for Michael Skakel to point the finger back at his brother. If I knew my brother Tommy murdered Martha Moxley, I would absolutely say something in a heartbeat. But Michael never has. Honestly, I didn't think my brother Tommy did it. I just don't, for some reason, I don't think so, no. As I mentioned, Michael and Tommy are now estranged. But Michael says they had one conversation about the murder many years ago while rooming together in Las Vegas. After I got out of Elan, I asked him and I just said, look, if you did this, I forgive you. And he just didn't say anything. And I never brought it up again with him. Though it might be hard to fathom this level of non-communication between family members, especially about a topic that so dramatically impacted their lives for decades, it tracks with other accounts of how the very traumatized Skakel kids interact. Margie Walker, Martha's best friend, testified twice in Michael's appeals. Once in 2007 and again in 2013. Something from the latter experience has always stuck with her. When I went up to testify for the habeas corpus trial, we took a lunch break. And I went out to lunch with some of the Skakel brothers. She remembers having lunch with John, Rush Jr., and David. She says Stephen might have been there as well. I checked with Stephen, and he confirmed he was. And I asked them, what does Tom say about all this? You know, I've never heard his side of the story about that night. and they responded by, we never asked him, which I thought was kind of surprising for all those years to go by and never even ask him. I was like, how can you go so many years and never ask your brother what happened? Details about the evening, because he was the last person who was with her. And normally you would think you'd start there and then try to find out what happened. Whether or not they ever specifically asked him, Brothers John and David Skakel, when interviewed by Dateline in 2016, were adamant that neither Michael nor Tommy had murdered Martha. Though they didn't seem to have a lot of other insights into their brother Tommy. Here's David. My impression was that Tommy grew up, like all of us did, and settled down and became, you know, the calm creature that he is today. Only Martha Moxley could confirm or correct Tommy's account of what happened on Mischief Night. But if you were looking solely at her diary for clues about who killed her, you'd likely cross Tommy off the list. Because while Martha might have thought Tommy was a little forward, she never expressed actual fear of him. Remember this entry from earlier in the episode? I drove a little then, and I was practically sitting on Tom's lap because I was only steering. He kept putting his hand on my knee. What you didn't hear was what she wrote next. Jesus, if Peter ever found out, I would be dead. On this week's episode, I get together with one of the biggest stars in all of music, Nick Jonas, to talk about his new album Sunday Best and his rise to fame with the Jonas Brothers. You can get our conversation for free wherever you download your podcasts. Hey, it's Kate Snow, NBC News anchor, host of the podcast The Drink with Kate Snow. I sit down with all kinds of celebrities, musicians, athletes over a drink of their choice for candid conversations about how they made it there. With actor-comedian host Joel McHale, I could barely stop laughing. You know Joel from Community or The Soup, 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. Dear Diary, guess who called me? Peter Zaluka, twice. Once at around 5.30 and then at 12 p.m. I really couldn't believe it. Somehow I didn't get nervous like I usually do when some guy calls me for the first time. Peppered throughout Martha Moxley's diary entries in the months before she died is a boy whose name I mentioned earlier in the episode, Peter Zaluka, her boyfriend. Peter and Martha started dating in August 1975, a little over two months before her murder. He was a young sailing fanatic who grew up in his father's massive hilltop chateau, known by everyone in town as The Castle, a mansion on 36 acres with a driveway a quarter mile long. Peter was Italian with an incredible pedigree, a direct descendant of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the famed Italian revolutionary, considered one of Italy's great national heroes. More relevant to Martha, with his sleepy eyes and tussled dark hair, Peter was a major folpe. That's fox in Italian. Here's Martha's best friend, Margie Walker. Peter had like a, maybe not a full motorcycle, but like a mini bike that he would ride around in the driveway and things like that. I mean, Peter kind of came off as a little bit of a bad boy. You know, people were attracted to him because he was a little bit mysterious. Based on Martha's diary entries, she and Peter had about a month of unadulterated lust and joy. Here's August 19th. Peter and I left and walked along the path and had a few kisses on the side. And August 20th. Peter gave me the worst wedgie. Boy, is he dead. He told me that he'd cry if I died. How sweet. But things seemed to change as soon as September came. Peter had been living in the fortress-like so-called castle with his father, a stockbroker, and his stepmother, a former fashion model. Peter did not seem happy. He was moody and stoned a lot of the time. On September 2nd, Martha wrote this in her diary. Dear Diary, Well, today I've been going out with Peter for one month. Pretty decent. Today, Peter goes back to Old Church Road to live with his mother. He called me and he says that he is very nervous about starting school. Summer is gone. Bummer. As September wore on, it was clear that Peter was becoming increasingly morose. The bloom was off the rose of the romance. Here's an entry from September 11th. Dear Diary, I talked to Peter a lot today. Sometimes I wonder why I go with him. He's always telling me that he hates me, but Margie talked to him, and he said that he hopes that I know he's only joking. A few days later, on September 15th, it's clear that things weren't improving. Dear Diary, Yesterday, I decided that I really don't like Peter anymore. I just got done talking to him for around an hour, and I got everything out that I wanted to say, and he still insults me. I guess I don't really hate him, but I don't really like him that much. He won't bring himself down low enough to apologize to me. The next day didn't seem to be any better. Dear Diary, Peter was being his usual self again. Margie talked to him and she said that the reason he wasn't talking to me was because he got really wasted and he felt like everyone was laughing at him and he just couldn't talk. After Martha was killed, Peter was first interviewed late on the evening of Halloween, along with a bunch of other local teens who had gathered at a Belhaven house. A few days later, Captain Keegan and Detective Lunny showed up at Nancy Zaluka's house in the Old Greenwich neighborhood three miles north of Belhaven to speak with her son at greater length. According to the police report, Peter told the cops a notably conflict-free story about his relationship with Martha, not mentioning any of the issues Martha had expressed in her diary. Peter said that since they'd started dating over the summer, there'd been, quote, no secrets from each other. And to his knowledge, Martha, quote, had not had any problems, nor was anything bothering her. This was not, of course, how Martha's diary portrayed their relationship, nor how her friend Helenix and mother Sissy described it to police in April of 1976. He could get very violent and moody, and he'd be so mean to Martha sometimes. Peter said he'd last seen Martha at school at 2 p.m. the day of her murder. They had plans for her to come over to his house and cook him dinner, but he said he begged off because he was too tired and just wanted to go home and go to bed. As for his whereabouts on the night she was murdered Peter provided a very thorough alibi After coming home from school around 2 p he was sleepy so napped until 6 p when his mother woke him He ate dinner from 7 until 8 p with his mom then watched TV with her from 9 to 11, the French Connection. And then they watched the late local news together from 11 to 11.30 p.m., at which point his mother went to her bedroom. But they were again reunited near 12.45 a.m. when his sister, away at college, called the house and mother and son saw one another. And the alibi didn't even end there. He said that he and his mother were again together at some point later in the early morning hours, standing at the front door, watching two Grinch police officers making a driving-related arrest. Peter, it seemed, had more face time with his mother in one night than I generally do with my own teen sons over the period of a week. Afterwards, he went to bed and was awakened the next morning at 10 a.m. by his mother. A very detailed account, which did not contain mention of any attempts to contact his girlfriend, Martha, over a 15-hour period. Peter's mother, Nancy, the report notes, concurred with her son's interview, which she bore witness to, since they were not separated during questioning, and also added to his story. She told the detectives that she was a recipient of one of Dorothy Moxley's worried phone calls at 3.40 a.m. She told Dorothy that she hadn't seen Martha and Peter had been home with her all night. The report reads, At this time, Mrs. Zaluka reported she checked Peter's room and he was asleep. The report continues. She related she also received other calls from Mrs. Moxley later in the morning, 6 a.m. to 7 a.m., concerning the whereabouts of Martha. She then woke Peter. So, as you just heard, Peter reported his mom woke him up at 10 a.m., But Nancy told detectives she woke him at 6 or 7 after Dorothy Moxley called a second time. Which was it? The detectives didn't flag the discrepancy. As the interview wrapped, Peter told the cops two additional details. One, that based on past conversations with Martha, she frequented a two-story, two-room shack on the Skakel property. In their report, the cops noted that they'd already checked out said shack and cleared it. Also, Peter said, he believed Martha would not be involved with any other boys. As was their custom with many Belhaven kids, Greenwich to Texas polygraphed Peter on November 12, 1975, asking him the same four questions they'd ask other neighborhood teens. Did you kill Martha Moxley? Do you know for sure who killed Martha Moxley? And deemed his denials to be truthful. Saluka is also notably absent from media coverage of the case over the years. He's barely mentioned in Mark Furman's book, and the name Zaluka is not mentioned once in Lund Levitz. In fact, it appears Peter only spoke to one journalist in all these years, Tim Dumas, the Greenwich native who published Greentown in April 1998, two weeks before Mark Furman's book came out. Peter's story to Dumas started out the same as the one he'd told the cops, that he'd canceled dinner plans with Martha due to being tired, though now he noted that it was likely due to excessive pot smoking. From there, he added a few other curious details. For one, despite the fact that he didn't have a driver's license, he says his mother offered to let him take the car to see Martha on mischief night, but he declined. The reason? He heard branches tapping at the window of his mother's house and got freaked out. For once in my life, I was scared, he said. I was like, no, I'll stay home and watch the French Connection. This, from a strapping 16-year-old, once described to me as being physically imposing. Here's Stephen Skakel. He was a tough kid. I didn't know him as well as my older siblings, but I definitely got the feeling he was a guy you didn't mess with. In another deviation from his 1975 story to cops, Peter also told author Tim Dumas his mother had woken him up when Dorothy Moxley called looking for Martha, and that he spent the rest of the night wondering, though not deeply concerned, about Martha's whereabouts. I probably went to sleep thinking there's no problem. She's over at Sheila's house or something like that. It's no big deal, he said. In the morning came a second worried phone call from Mrs. Moxley. Yet Peter never mentioned making any effort to track his girlfriend Martha down, including joining any of the ad hoc searches that were unfolding a few miles away. Whatever concern that may have been building apparently did not motivate him to leave the house. He told Tim Dumas that he learned of Martha's death from a call his mother received, which would have come well after noon when her body was found. You might already be thinking that this is a bit of an odd story, that what you've heard should have been enough to make the Greenwich police take a genuine look at Peter as a suspect. In February 1976, Greenwich detectives were told by Houston's eminent forensic pathologist, Dr. Joe Yahimchick, that the probability of this being the act of a stranger is, in our opinion, very remote. That's somebody, that's not an stranger. That this was somebody, either a he or she, who knew a young lady. Studies show that among female murder victims who know their killers, roughly half are killed by a husband or intimate partner. Jealousy is a regularly cited motive. What if moody, possessive Peter had found out that Martha was regularly flirting, and more, with other boys, including Tommy Skakel? I was practically sitting on Tom's lap. Jesus, if Peter ever found out, I would be dead. Turns out, there's a pretty strong indication that Peter might have found out. On September 28th, almost exactly one month before Martha's murder, she wrote about a pretty notable incident in the life of a teenage girl. Dear Diary, As you've probably noticed, you are a little mutilated. Because Peter, Dickie B, and Tyler came over and tried to read you. They took you all the way over to the Wettenhalls. and almost but didn't quite read you. I could have killed him. When I first read that entry, the possible implications gave me chills. Peter, who had been in a dark mood seemingly for a month, had attempted to read Martha's diary, then snatched it and made it all the way to Jackie Wettenhall's house. Jackie's house was behind the Moxley house a couple lots away on Field Point Road, but not right next door. So Peter got far enough to be out of sight, certainly. How long did he possess the diary? How could Martha be so certain that they didn't quite read it? Did she just take Peter's word for it? And if he didn't read it, how did the diary get mutilated? One thing's for sure. Had Peter opened practically any page and perused it, he likely would have been very unhappy. It chronicles numerous makeouts before Peter, a recent clear desire to dump Peter, and a hefty tally of boys who seemed eager to take Peter's place. And, of course, the increased appearance of the Skakels, particularly Hansy Tommy. In his 1975 interview with police, Peter had painted his relationship with Martha as drama-free. But we know from Martha's own words that this was far from true. And we know that for some reason, Martha's plan to go and cook for Peter at his house on mischief night got scuttled at the last minute. Peter also made sure, seemingly out of nowhere, to tell cops he didn't think Martha was involved with other boys. But based on his theft of her diary just weeks earlier, it seems highly unlikely he would have believed that. So what else might he have been hiding? Here's trial attorney Linda Kenny-Botten, who you'll remember from prior episodes. Martha's boyfriend, who would have a motive to kill her. What if he had seen Martha with Tommy and got angry? This could be a crime of anger because this was definitely overkill. I want to walk you through a rhetorical scenario. What if the story Peter told years later about his mother offering him the car was actually a tell of some kind? What if Peter did, in fact, go to Belhaven on mischief night and make his way to the Skakel House, where he knew, by his own admission to police, Martha liked to hang out? When interviewed by police in 1991, Sissy Ix, mother of Martha's friend Helen, remarked that anyone passing the Skakels around 9.30 would have seen Tommy and Martha clearly, illuminated by the headlights of the Lovemobile before it pulled away. They also had the lights from the car, so anybody could have seen it, see? They could have seen Martha burning with Tom. They had the lights from the car, Sissy said. Anybody could have seen that scene. They could have seen Martha flirting with Tom. What if, after observing this upsetting display, Peter parked and approached the Skakel house by foot, only to witness Tommy and Martha's flirtation escalating with a sexual encounter in the grass. Here's Martha's best friend, Margie Walker. One possibility that I've always thought about, if she's out there with Tom getting a little frisky or whatever they were doing, and she rebuffs him because he wants to take it a little bit further, and then she leaves, and somebody's watching this whole thing, because remember, people are wandering around the neighborhood, They're doing things, you know, if Peter had seen that and she didn't know he was there, would he be jealous? Could a blind with jealous rage Peter have grabbed a stray golf club from the Skakel lawn and followed her home in the dark? Could he have confronted Martha in her own driveway only to have things escalate, culminating in the deadly assault? It's a lot of what ifs, I know. But the biggest one is, what if investigators had looked more closely at Peter from the outset? It seems they took him at his word, including every part of his unusually detailed alibi, because his mother vouched for him. Michael Skakel has long taken issue with this, understandably, since his own robustly established alibi was attacked aggressively at trial. Martha's boyfriend, his mom says, oh no, he was with me all night. And that's an alibi? That's okay for them, but not for us? Okay. There are many questions that investigators didn't ask Peter that I would have loved to. But you can probably guess where this is headed. In the years after Martha's murder, Peter Zaluka seemed to spiral. I think Peter was kind of a, what do you say, I don't know, live wire, a little unpredictable or troubled, I guess is a good word. That's Margie Walker again. So his life didn't really pan out the way he would have wanted. And he did some carpentry. You know, he got involved in drugs, things like that. By the late 2000s, Peter had been arrested multiple times, including twice for criminal mischief and once for battery of a household member. His life had obviously taken a wrong turn And on February 8, 2011 At age 51 It ended in Santa Fe Unexpectedly, according to his obituary In the mid-90s When Tim Dumas interviewed him Saluka suggested that the wrong turn began Even before Martha's murder Things went wrong for me When my parents got divorced, he said That was before Martha, obviously But not that many years before So I was going through a really rough time in my life Peter told Dumas that he'd been kicked out of his mother's house And then abandoned by her and his sisters When they relocated to Santa Fe Which traumatized him It was almost like another death, he said My girlfriend leaves me And then my mother and sisters leave me There I am, left in Greenwich Peter's one alibi witness His mother Nancy Died in 1992 I was able to talk with Peter's sister Gina A few times in 2025 It was clearly painful for her to speak about her brother's life and death. I asked her why he'd gotten in so much trouble. He was unhappy, she said. Why, I asked. Because of two things, she said. Their father had not been nice to his underachieving only son. In fact, she said, she had to move mountains to make sure that Peter wasn't totally disinherited. And the other reason for his unhappiness, I asked. She paused for a very long time. Because Martha died, she said finally. But he did not kill Martha, she added. Was Peter Zaluka yet another kid caught in the blast radius of this murder? Or someone who should have been looked at a lot more closely? We can't say for sure, because the theories in this episode are purely circumstantial. There is no forensic evidence tying either Tommy Skakel or Peter Zaluka to this crime. In fact, as has been noted again and again throughout this series, apart from the scene of Martha's murder, this is a case almost entirely devoid of forensic evidence. I say almost, but there are a few exceptions. There were those hairs found on the sheets Martha's body was wrapped in, which matched back to no one. There was the DNA testing when the case was reopened in the early 1990s that came up dry. But those of you with a memory of elephants will recall that at the very beginning of this series, I mentioned that Teresa Tirado, a Belhaven maid, told police she'd seen blood inside a home the morning Martha was found. It was the only report of any blood outside the crime scene, and it was spotted in a house Martha Moxley knew well. We're coming to the end of this long journey. At last, you, the patient ones, the curious ones, will finally learn the truth about that mysterious blood, fresh revelations about the case and so, so much more. Next time on the final episode of Dead Certain The Martha Moxley Murder. I was in the bus waiting for Martha and she came in one day and I'd never seen her that upset. What kind of blood was it? Was it drops of blood? Was it shoe prints? He was kind of creepy too. He was scary. He was kind of a scary guy. How the hell did they miss her? How the hell did I find her and they missed her? 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. Thank you.