The Out of Towners

In the days after Michael Skakel's trial, Martha Moxley's mother, Dorothy, made the rounds in the media, expressing gratitude and certainty about the verdict. Are you sure that Michael Skakel killed your daughter? Do you have any doubts at all? I have not one tiny thread of doubt that Michael Skakel did this. No question in my mind whatsoever. None. Absolutely none. Who would deny a mother this kind of closure? She had, after all, suffered for more than two decades not knowing who had murdered her only daughter and following her husband's death in 1988, taken up as her life's work the quest to bring Martha's killer to justice. But not everyone felt quite so resolved as Mrs. Moxley did about what had just happened in Connecticut's Superior Court And, as fate would have it, on her press tour Mrs. Moxley would run smack into someone who felt very strongly that the wrong man had been convicted for her daughter's murder One morning in June 2002 Dorothy arrived at the General Motors building in Midtown Manhattan to appear on CBS's The Early Show A handsome 40-year-old network audio engineer came over to attach a small microphone to her blouse. As he fiddled, he introduced himself as Crawford Mills from Old Greenwich. A third generation of Mills with the same name, he went by Trace, three in Spanish. Mills had gone to school at Brunswick with the Skakel Boys and knew the core group of Belhaven teens. His name even appeared a few times in Martha Moxley's diary. He was close friends with Neil Walker, the younger brother of Martha's best friend, Margie Walker. Here's Margie. Crawford was one of my brother's best friends. He was a Brownswick student also, and he was in all the school plays. Growing up, he was sort of an actor, considering himself actor, writer, that type of thing. In fact, Mills told Mrs. Moxley that morning at CBS, Margie had written her a letter mentioning him several months before the trial. Mills asked if she'd read it. Dorothy shook her head, confused. Mills, who'd been waiting for such an opportunity, launched into an explanation. There was another suspect in Martha's killing, he said. Actually, two of them. Mills told her that he'd been trying to get investigators to listen to his claims, to no avail. As he told his story, Dorothy Moxley looked understandably stricken. She'd likely not expected to be confronted on set by a stranger pushing an alternate theory about her daughter's murder. Immediately after her morning show appearance, Mills said she complained to his bosses about what he'd done. Here's Mills in a recorded telephone conversation that would later become an exhibit at one of Michael Skakel's appeals. Again, the audio isn't perfect. Shortly after his encounter with Dorothy Moxley, Mills said he got kicked out of the building. That is, fired. Mills was at his wit's end. For the last year, Mills had felt like the invisible man. He'd later claimed he'd reached out to both prosecutor Jonathan Benedict and defense attorney Mickey Sherman, even to the judge, trying to get their attention. None of them had followed up, and now his efforts to share the story had apparently cost him his job. In one last Hail Mary, he reached out to the press. I called the New York Times and told them all this. Mills said the Times interviewed him, but when he tried to follow up, the papers stopped responding. They had to return my calls. You know, at this point, I just threw out my hands. It was perhaps understandable. As far as most people, the media, law enforcement, the public, were concerned, the case was closed. so many people wanted it to finally be put to rest. But then, in January 2003, six months after Michael Skakel was found guilty and Crawford Mills was escorted out of CBS, Michael's first cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, as you learned in the last episode, had bonded with Michael in the 80s over their respective recoveries, authored a long piece in the Atlantic Monthly called A Miscarriage of Justice, decrying the verdict and arguing that Ken Littleton was the far more likely killer of Martha Moxley. In the late 1990s, Michael had sworn off his Kennedy kin entirely. But Bobby had attended Michael's trial briefly and eventually emerged as one of his staunchest advocates, writing in The Atlantic, quote, Crawford Mills devoured The Atlantic piece. Bobby Kennedy, he thought, had gotten one major thing right about the case. Michael Skakel hadn't killed Martha Moxley. But Mills was sure it wasn't Ken Littleton either. I'm Andrew Goldman. From NBC News Studios and Highly Replaceable Productions, this is Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley Murder. In his apartment in Lower Manhattan, a few blocks from the pit where the World Trade Center had stood just 18 months before, Crawford Mills typed a fax address to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The fax machine in the New York offices of the Atlantic Monthly Word. The cover sheet pleaded, Will you please be kind enough to see that Mr. Kennedy receives the enclosed statement? I have been trying to make this information known for over a year now. Mills faxed to Bobby read, I realized that what I'm about to tell you may, at first, sound absurd, but if you will take 30 seconds to read this letter, I'll be succinct. I went to school with Michael Skakel. We shared many friends. One of those friends, Mills wrote, was Tony Bryant. You may have heard of his cousin, Kobe Bryant. Mills wrote that Bryant, Tony, not Kobe, though I've not been able to formally confirm the family connection, had recently confided in him that he had been in Belhaven on October 30th, 1975, along with two of his friends. And Bryant was certain that he had unreported evidence leading straight to Martha Moxley's killer. Or rather, killers. This Tony Bryant, who'd given Mills the tip, in addition to being close with Mills, had also back in 1975 spent a lot of time with the Belhaven teens. Bryant was also tight with Margie Walker's brother. Definitely knew Tony Bryant. He was a frequent visitor at our house and, you know, a really nice guy with a big smile and, you know, gentle nature. Bryant had been a star athlete while at Brunswick, had graduated from undergrad and law school, and was currently a small business owner in Miami with a wife and young family. In the fall of 2001, a few weeks after 9-11, Mills got a concerned call from Bryant. He hadn't heard from Bryant in years, but Mills lived near the World Trade Center, and his old friend wanted to check in. They caught up and discussed the upcoming Skakel trial, which was much in the news. Now that the case has been transferred to adult court, this may be the first time we hear Michael Skakel officially plead not guilty. Mills mentioned that in the late 1980s, he'd actually written a screenplay about the murder. called Little Martha, but had little luck selling it. Mills got the impression from Bryant that he had showbiz cred, that he'd worked as an entertainment lawyer in Hollywood, and a script that he'd written for the Chuck Norris series Walker, Texas Ranger, had made it to air. So Mills asked Bryant, would you be interested in giving notes on, or even collaborating on, Little Martha with the hopes of selling it? Bryant said, sure, send it to me. Mills did, and waited for the Hollywood gears to crank up. Bryant never did do any work on that script, but he called Mills back sometime around Christmas. Your screenplay got it all wrong, Bryant told him, and then said he knew who really killed Martha Moxley. What Bryant had to say was a totally new theory of the case, involving not one, but two suspects. He believed the two friends he'd been with in Greenwich the night of Martha's murder were the killers. Turns out Mills had actually met these two guys. He'd been introduced to them in Greenwich right around the time of the murder. One of them had given him the creeps. Mills would later say he had a dead eye, you know. There was something wrong with the kid and all you had to do was look at him to know it. He's a scary kind of guy. As soon as he heard Bryant's story, Mills decided he had a responsibility to get the word out. If Michael Skakel wasn't Martha's killer, that meant an innocent man was just months away from being tried for murder. But there was one problem. Tony Bryant didn't want to come forward. He'd later say that he thought there was no way Michael Skakel would be convicted, and he wanted to protect his business and family. Keep my name out of it, he told Mills. Mills agreed at first. But as Michael Skakel's trial date approached, he began sharing Bryant's story and his name with anyone who would listen, including Neil Walker, who in turn shared it with his sister Margie. So I said, somebody should know about this. And, you know, is it OK if I talk to them? Though Margie didn't testify at Michael's trial, She says prosecutors periodically called or questioned her about the case as they were preparing for it. And so I went and told the prosecutors at the time, I know this sounds crazy that these guys were running around the neighborhood and nobody saw them, but, you know, maybe it's something you should look into. And they didn't seem interested. Walker later testified that about a month before Michael's trial began, she personally took the story to both Inspector Frank Garr and Michael's defense attorney, Mickey Sherman. She said Garr was dismissive. As for Sherman, based on earlier episodes, it might not surprise you to learn how he reacted. And he said, oh, no, no, you know, don't worry about it. I'm defending Michael, and that's just extra information that I don't need to get into. At Mills' urging, Margie even wrote a letter to Dorothy Moxley, the one Mills would later mention that fateful morning at CBS. But Dorothy never responded. Nobody listened. Seemed like no one ever would. The train to convict Michael Skagel had already left the station. And then, in early 2003, Crawford Mills faxed that letter to Bobby Kennedy. Bobby wasted no time calling Mills, who vented his frustration that Bobby was the first person at all receptive to hearing what he had to say. even investigate this. My credibility notwithstanding, sure it felt like at any point no one would listen to me, but that's not the point. I mean, the point is, this is the first story I've heard of anyone saying they've done it, and they don't want to hear about it. For Mills, Bobby taking an interest must have felt like being handed a cold drink after a two-day desert hike. On the phone with Bobby, Mills explained that he considered Tony a friend. He was so hell-bent on getting the story out Because he believed him. Why wouldn't he? I don't understand why Tony would tell me this unless he's a psycho. You know, why would anyone say this unless they wanted some kind of strange attention, you know? Mills finished his tale and waited. Then he heard Bobby ask, So do you think that Tony Bryant would be willing to talk to me? Mills said he thought so. Less than a week later in Miami, Bryant's cell phone rang. Tony, the voice said, this is Bobby Kennedy. Bryant, though still reluctant to get involved, shared his story with Bobby. Bobby was stunned. What Bryant told him was game changing. Bobby immediately called Michael's appeals attorney, Hope Seeley, who enlisted Vito Colucci, Mickey Sherman's investigator, whom you heard from earlier in the series, to travel down to Miami to get an official interview. This was August 2003, only a little more than a year after Michael's trial. The Skakels and their attorneys thought that if they could get this story on the record, they could use it to appeal Michael's conviction. But Bryant was not particularly enthusiastic about talking with Colucci. He didn't want anything to do with the case. He said he didn't like Michael Skakel. He said his mother didn't want him to get involved in it. Finally, he agreed to meet with me. when then a couple of times he would call me and cancel. And I kept saying, you know, we got to do this. We got to do this. Finally, Bryant agreed to a date. Sunday, August 24th, 2003, at the Wyndham Grand Bay Hotel in Miami. Colucci waited in the lobby for Bryant to arrive. A half hour passed. Then another half hour. And then yet another. He was about an hour and a half late. And I'm saying, oh, is this guy canceling again? This is ridiculous. But then there he was in the lobby. Colucci finally got a look at this elusive Tony Bryant. He was a tall, over six feet and good-looking 42-year-old with a distinctly athletic bearing. He looked prosperous with his close-cropped hair and polo shirt and totally relaxed, chewing a piece of gum. Colucci led him to a conference room where he'd set up a video camera. Initially, he didn't want it videotaped. I finally convinced him. He said, well, I guess it's all going to come out anyway. Fine. And I told him, I said, you help yourself by having a videotape so nobody can prove you said something differently. And he agreed to do that. The conversation that unfolded would later become a centerpiece of Michael Skakel's appeals. Colucci began with the basics. Can you please state your full name and spell it, please? Hitano Pierre Bryant. You're here today because you have information in regards to the Martha Moxley murder case that goes back to the 1970s. Is that correct? That is correct. And then over the next hour and four minutes, out came the story. Tony Bryant grew up in Chicago, the son of Barbara Bryant, a single mother of seven and a successful producer of educational films. Back when the Oscars had a category for them, Bryant won one. In 1971, Tony spent a school vacation week in Greenwich with friends of his mother and attended classes at Brunswick. Tony liked it. Brunswick liked him and his talents on the baseball and football fields. So starting in the fall of 1972, Tony moved in with the family friends and enrolled in the sixth grade. Went to Brunswick for approximately three years. When Barbara Bryant moved from Chicago to Manhattan, her son left Brunswick and moved back in with her, enrolling as a freshman in the Charles Evans Hughes High School on West 18th Street in Chelsea, an institution which couldn't have been more of an adjustment from woodsy, preppy Brunswick. It was a tough school. I mean, this is a city school in New York. We're not talking about Greenwich, Connecticut. There were Boy Scouts at this school, and if there were, I didn't know where they meant. He's not exaggerating. In 1980, a student was shot in the buttocks in front of Hughes in a gang incident involving a dispute over a comb. Not long after, the city closed the school entirely when teachers picketed over having to do daily battle with kids in a school with such rampant disciplinary problems. In the fall of 1975, 14-year-old Tony began hanging out with two fellow Hughes students, Adolph Hasbrook and Burr Tinsley. Like Michael Skakel, Hasbrook was 15, Tinsley a little older. But according to Bryant, both New York boys were much, much bigger. Yearbook photos I've seen of the two guys confirm this. I was probably the smallest of the three at 6 feet, maybe 160, 170 pounds. How about the other two guys? About, they were bigger than you? Yes. Burr was probably 6'2", 6'3", and Adolph was 6'3", 6'4". Now, an important question. Adolph is a black fellow. That is correct. Right. How about Burr? There is a, I would say he was of mixed descent, probably Indian and Caucasian, or there may be some Asian blood, and his bloodlines. How did the three of you come about to, let's say, hang around the Greenwich area? Well, it's all initiated through me. Okay. I still had friends in Greenwich, and one weekend we decided to go up to Greenwich and hang out, and they liked it, and they met some people that they liked, and so we made it sort of like almost a weekly thing. Bryant introduced Hasbrook and Tinsley to his Greenwich pals, including Crawford Mills. They also became friendly with a younger kid, Jeff Byrne. As you may remember, it was 11-year-old Jeff who, along with Helenix, slinked out of the Skakel yard on Mischief Night after Martha and Tommy's driveway of flirtation became uncomfortable. Bryant said Adolph Hasbrook first laid eyes on Martha in September 1975. I think the first time he met her was when they have a street fair in Greenwich at the end of, around the middle or the end of September. Okay. And they close off the main street and they sort of have a street fair. Adolph always had a thing. He had met Martha previously. And he had a thing for her. He really liked her. Do you remember him ever approaching her to ask her either out or make a play for her or anything at all? I think he would make gestures at her. But I think he was, he couldn't really, he didn't have the confidence. He wasn't a very, at that point in time, he wasn't a sophisticated person. He was very immature. Okay. Do you remember any kind of responses that Martha would give to her? She was always sort of cordial, but she sort of blushed him off real kind of nicely. Okay. You know, we're all friends here, but oh, and she was always that way. She wasn't a person that would let you down hard. She'd let you down gently. Bryant said that Martha gentle rebuffs did not deter Hasbrook who seemed particularly fixated on making something happen with her seemingly whether or not she was interested He said someday I going to have her All the time He was. All the time. He said he was going to have her. He was like, I'm going to. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. Could these chilling words have been uttered by one of Martha's real killers? We'll be right back. In his 2003 videotaped interview with investigator Vito Colucci, Tony Bryant said that as the fall of 1975 wore on, Hasbrok became increasingly graphic describing his yearnings. A warning to listeners, some of the language that follows is both misogynistic and violent. Now let me ask you now and you know we need you to to the best of your recollection to say what you remember him saying no matter how popular it was because this is important I wanted to f*** his s*** on her and he wanted to go caveman on her You know what does that mean? How would you Just take her, grab her and have her the way he wanted her So you mentioned before something about getting her from behind and dragging her Yes Are you saying dragging her by her hair or what? Definitely by her hair. That's what the whole concept of hearing me say this. I'm kidding, yeah, but going caveman meant, you know, grabbing and pulling off and not just picking up as pulling off. Late on the afternoon of October 30th, 1975, Bryant said, he and his two New York friends met up at Grand Central. We left from New York on the train. when it's a bell and probably got there 6 30 6 40. Tony said they stopped at a house in bellhaven that he knew how to stock refrigerator in the garage and collected some refreshments to go. Okay I swear it's that self-serve. Okay we got ourselves to the mirror and uh we I know we we we took about three six packs that Okay. Maybe a little bit more. Okay. At this point, the group's numbers began to swell. The Burns lived across the street right here. This is the Burns' house. Okay. And we went by there and we picked up Jeff. That's 11-year-old Jeff Burns. And then we started to do a little issue. We had toilet paper and shaving cream. We smashed pumpkins. We threw toilet paper over the lines. We shaved and soaked up some windows. How many of you were doing this? Oh, gosh. We picked up people all along the way. So it could have been maybe at that six people. Do you remember anybody else, like any of the girls in the area? Well, we saw some of the girls. It was like sort of a revolving door. We sort of ran into them in the back of, there's a big mead behind this house here. The mead, Bryant told Colucci, was an undeveloped lot in Belhaven that abutted the Skakel property. That was sort of like our collection place to sit and smoke cigarettes, smoke some marijuana and drink beer. Okay, so the parents couldn't see, but it was a big enough space to where if someone did get close, you could scatter and run and no one could catch you really. Bryant began sketching out the area on a piece of paper. I've seen the aerial maps. What he called the Meade absolutely existed in 1975. Bryant's recall of its size and location relative to Belhaven houses isn't perfect, but it's impressively accurate. The mead, Bryant said, allowed for concealment and evasion. And if the one, I'm trying to remember the policeman that used to patrol Belhaven, I can't remember his name exactly. But we would get there because we would position ourselves because we knew when he made his rounds. so we would sort of hide off and go off behind the walls or into the bushes so he couldn't see. He said that at this point, another major character from the crime scene had made its entrance, the possible murder weapon. The group had walked through the Skakel's yard on their way to the Mead. I think you mentioned in one of these reports something about the golf club. Golf. Everybody touched that club. I should say those clubs. Everybody in Bell Haven touched those clubs. We used to hit balls behind the house. Okay. And we used to also hit balls in cars. Whose clubs were these? For Skakel's clubs. Skakel's clubs. Okay. Where would you get them from? Just pick them up at the back porch. They're just laying around. You can walk and trickle or whatever. This is important. Exactly one source, the Skakel's handyman, Franz Wettin, had told police in April 1976 that there were no clubs on the lawn on October 30th. He said he'd been out and seen none. But several of the Belhaven kids I've spoken to have noted that the Skakel's yard, ball field and pitch for a near feral brood and their friends, was consistently littered with sporting equipment, golf clubs among them. I asked one time Belhaven teen Peter Kumerswamy about the possibility. You might remember Kumo from earlier episodes, describing the Skakel boys and how magical a girl Martha was. so it seems like the idea that this could have been a weapon of opportunity seems plausible to you that somebody could have picked up a club from from the lawn absolutely absolutely i mean there was probably literally i'm surprised there weren't four or five clubs laying around the freaking yard i may have critiqued greenwich police chief steven barron for his handling of the case in its earliest days but if you'll recall he's the one who said he suspected the club had been picked up near the scene, rather than from inside the Skakel house. Could he have been right? Tony Bryant seemed to think so. That night that Martha died, did anybody walk around with a golf club? I picked up one, right? Byrne picked up one, they all picked up one. Jeff Byrne picked up one. And we were, like, goofed around. They were using him as sort of, like, walking sticks. Bryant said that as he and his New York friends got drunker and higher out there in the mead, the more uncomfortable he became. It was also getting late, close to 9 p.m. I know in some of your comments to Bobby Kennedy, something triggers where you want to get away from these guys. Well, I had been in trouble that summer. Okay. And I had gotten arrested in Greenwich for being a little alien. so my mother told me that I had to catch the last train. Bryant, along with a group of other teens, had been arrested for an incident that involved pulling down signs along the road. He knew he couldn't get in trouble again. And they had made some statements also that, you know, we just got to get into something. I'm not going out of here unsatisfied. Who said that? Bernard Adolf. What did you tell, what did that mean, unsatisfied? Well, we've been talking about, this night we've been talking about the caveman. okay and so this is the night that martha died the martha she died that night and this is the the kind of the kind of conversation that had been going on since we got on the train so that had gone on for three or four hours already okay both both when you were uh sober and now and it got a little bit more exacerbated because they were like where are the bitches Okay. And so they got a little bit more out of hand. Bryant said that shortly after nine, increasingly uneasy with the conversation and expected home, he announced that he was going to catch the last train into the city. Now, you leave to go home. Is it because your mother said you have to be home a certain time? Or is it because of the actions of these two other guys? I had to go home regardless. but their actions helped me make my decision a lot easier. Did Adolph and Burr stay in Belhaven that night? Yes, they did. They stayed with the Burns. They did? Yes. You know that for a fact? I know that for a fact. You could stay in their house and they would never know, though. Okay. The parents would never know. Okay. It was a huge house. They told you they stayed there? Yes, they did. And Jeff told me that they'd also spent the night that night. Okay. So Jeff told you that they stayed there and Adolph and Burr told you they stayed in Belhaven at the Burns' house. That's correct. before I left, they were like, I said, what are you guys going to do? We're going to stay at the Burns. Okay, I'm out. Bye. See you. In that Miami hotel room, Tony Bryan had just recounted that less than an hour before Martha Moxley was last seen alive, he left two high school friends, Adolph and Burr, in Belhaven, drunk, high, and talking about taking a girl by force. Vito Colucci pressed him for more details. Okay, so you just said, I'm out of here. And you left? I left. Okay. When was the next time you saw them? I saw them that Monday, the following Monday. Okay. And it was not a pleasant experience because there were overtures made about, well, I got mine. Okay. Who said that? Adolph said it to me that day and then burned a roundabout way. He says, yeah, we did what we had to do. Blah, blah, blah. You gotta expound on that. It's tough. I mean, whatever we did, we achieved the game. They said that? Both of them? In different situations, yes. Okay. So do you believe that they killed her? Either the two of them or possibly I think they were definitely involved. Okay. Adolph and Burr. Yes, there's no doubt in my mind that they were involved. I think that... Well, they know that they were there. Oh, no, there's no... No, they were there when the murder took place. Colucci then posed the question, I imagine you're probably asking right about now. Through all those early years, why didn't you come forward to anybody? For one thing, I was afraid of being automatically pinned in as a suspect. My family didn't have money to defend me from a lawsuit that, you know, it'd be easy. If they could convince Michael Skagel on circumstantial evidence, I think that would be an easier conviction than Michael. My mistake in judgment is, I mean, I sat on this story the whole time during the trial because there's no way, there's no way we ever thought that Michael. Skanker would get convicted. Bryant would later claim that in the days after the murder, he shared the story with his mother. Keep your mouth shut, she told him. Margie Walker says she later heard something similar from her brother. Neil and Tony have talked over the years, and Tony's mother seemed to verify the story that he was out there, and she was terrified of what was going on and didn't want Tony to ever go back to Greenwich or anything. Could Bryant's story be true? When Kalusha and I spoke in 2023, I asked him if Bryant seemed credible. Oh, he seemed very credible because he named specifics. And for me, just as a side note, of all the statements that I've taken over the years, both as a cop and many, many as a private detective, it was the best statement that day. But Bryant didn't just sound credible. There were also some tantalizing hints in the police reports and interviews that back up Bryant's story and suggest what you might call some real there there. After Martha was found, her body was removed from the scene, wrapped in two blue sheets. The Connecticut State Police scanned those sheets for trace evidence and discovered a few hairs, which they sent off to the FBI's crime lab. On December 5th, the lab weighed in officially on one of the collected hairs like this. There was a logical explanation for the presence of a hare having black characteristics on that sheet. One of the pair of youth officers who was first to respond to the crime scene was black, Daniel Hickman. So naturally, cops sent a sample of Hickman's hair to the FBI, as well as hair from the son of Ethel Jones, the Skakel's black cook who lived in servants' quarters. But the FBI ruled out Hickman and Jones as the source of the unidentified hair. So whose head had it come from? And there was another mysterious hair recovered on the other blue sheet, one that had never been reported in the press. When the state crime lab sent it off for analysis before trial in 2002, the scientists reported back that the donor had an Asian background. Recall Bryant said he thought Tinsley might have some Asian ancestry, although that's never been confirmed. And obviously, Tinsley didn't offer up his DNA for testing in the case. Then there was the crime itself. Not only did the attack suggest great strength, but Martha was dragged 80 feet to be deposited under the tree in the corner of her property. Could this even have been accomplished by a solitary attacker? Greenwich investigators wondered this themselves for a certain period of the investigation, according to Martha's friend Helen Ix, who sat for numerous interviews with cops over the years. The police told us that at one point they knew for sure it wasn't one person who did it because it was so brutal and it would take extraordinary strength. Tell me about that. Wait, when did that happen? Was it Solomon and Gar? Yeah, it was Solomon. Helen's husband, Dan, sitting in on the interview, also weighed in. Yeah, and they said it was definitely two people. Do you remember when that meeting might have been? Late 80s. Before 1996. Yeah, I would say late 80s, early 90s. Yeah. And they sat you down and they were re-interviewing you and they said... Yeah, they said it was definitely two people. Definitely. And they had experts, you know, confirm that. There was no possible way that one could have done it. By the time the grand jury was convened in 1998, the multiple suspects theory seems to have been breezily dismissed. But for years, it was the dominant thinking about the case. Both Dorothy Moxley and Dominic Dunn had said so in media appearances in the years before Michael Skakel's arrest. Do you think two people were involved here? I think at least two. I mean, it could have been more. Martha Moxley, once killed, was taken from one location and put into another. Very hard to do with one person. Mrs. Moxley and Dunn, of course, were hinting at some combination of Skakel brothers and Ken Littleton. Not Tony Bryant's friends from the city. But the point stood. The brutality and ferocity of the crime suggested more than one person's involvement. As for the identity of these multiple potential suspects, other details left by Martha herself seemingly corroborated elements of Tony Bryant's story. In a diary entry from September of 1975, she mentioned going to a block party on Greenwich Avenue, which sounded a lot like the party that Bryant said was where Hasbrook first got a look at Martha. Tony is mentioned in other entries, as are Tony's friends. Still, none of this really proved anything. Ultimately, Tony Bryant's account was just one guy's story. On a Wednesday afternoon, two weeks after his interview with Tony Bryant, private eye Vito Colucci rolled up to a modest single-family home in a working-class neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Adolph Hasbrook's house. Riding shotgun was Chris Steele Remember him? Pop star Michael Bolton's one-time bodyguard Who Mickey Sherman used as security During the Skakel trial Colucci and Steele had grown tight during the trial So Colucci started bringing in Steele To help with investigative work They knocked on the door A man answered Invited them to talk on his stoop Steele might be a sweet guy But man, the description of Hasbrook In the report he wrote was brutal Appearance 6'4", 275 pounds, black, pear-shaped and sluggish looking. Here's Steele. Yeah, not a gentleman who looked like he was happy with life. Very, very sluggish. Talked very slow in his communications. Over an hour, Colucci did most of the talking. At some point, Colucci told Hasbrook of Tony Bryant's allegations. They didn't tape the conversation, even surreptitiously. Connecticut requires both parties to consent to being recorded, and the pair didn't want to unnerve their subject by whipping out a recorder. What we do have is Steele's typed report of the interview, which states, Adolph was remarkably calm when Vito told him of the accusations Tony Bryant made against him. He didn't demand Tony's telephone number. He never called Tony a liar. In fact, according to Steele's report, Adolph Hasbrook said something that only served to cement Colucci's and Steele's suspicions, that Tony Bryant might be on to something. That afternoon in Bridgeport, he admitted he was in Belhaven on October 30th, 1975. Hasbrook did not, however, admit to being in Belhaven at 10 p.m., the alleged time of the murder. Not exactly. According to Steele's report, Hasbrook was all over the place, changing his account three times when describing when he returned to the city. First, he told him he left Greenwich around noon. Then he said he left in the afternoon before nightfall. And then finally, he said he returned to the city at 9 or 9.30, noting that his mother would have, quote, tanned my hide had he stayed in Belhaven overnight. Colucci asked if he might consider taking a polygraph. Hasbrook told the investigators that he's a nervous guy, and he suspected he'd fail it. Steele's conclusion in his report? From speaking with him, it was obvious that he was not being straight with us. Steele's notes of the meeting are far from exhaustive, and Colucci never wrote a report of his own. But both men are adamant about what they heard. I asked them both a number of different ways. I want to ask you again. Chris is there any possibility that you misremembered whether he acknowledged that they were there Is there any is there any None whatsoever I remember getting back in the car and Vito and I going holy cow This guy said he was there. Vito Colucci concurred. Are you absolutely 100% positive that he admitted that he was in Belhaven on October 30th, 1975 when you interviewed him on that porch? Oh, yes. Didn't Chris Steele say the same thing? He did. Yeah, myself and Chris Steele heard that. Yeah. Exactly one week after their September 2003 interview, Steele got Hasbrook back on the phone. Again, he didn't record the call. Steele's goal? To convince Hasbrook to provide his DNA and allow them to record a videotaped statement. This time, according to Steele's report, Hasbrook was telling a different story. He was now adamant that, in fact, he'd not been in Belhaven on October 30th, 1975. He told Steele he'd looked at a calendar and realized that October 30th, 1975 had been a Thursday night, and his mother would have never let him go to Greenwich on a school night. Tony Bryant, he told Steele, probably had something to do with the murder. It went similarly with Burr Tinsley, as Vito Colucci would later testify. Colucci said that he got Tinsley on the phone at home in Portland, Oregon, in September 2003, and that day Tinsley confirmed that he'd been in Belhaven on October 30th, 1975, only to reverse himself on a subsequent call, saying he'd checked the 1975 calendar and said he'd goofed in saying so, that he wasn't there after all. With Tony Bryant's story in hand, Bobby Kennedy was sure he'd cracked the case. He shared his findings with the media. In the fall of 2003, news trucks descended upon Bryant's house in Miami, but he was done talking. The cat was out of the bag, though, and Michael's lawyers quickly seized on Kennedy's discoveries, telling a Stanford judge that they had newly discovered evidence of Michael's wrongful conviction. In 2006, a pair of PIs hired by the Skakel family tracked down Tony's mother, Barbara Bryant, outside of her apartment building in Manhattan. According to their report, she said that her son had indeed been in Belhaven the day of the Moxley murder with Hasbrook and Tinsley. She also told the P.I.s that the two boys had stayed in Belhaven that night. In 2007, remember how slow those wheels of justice move? Michael was granted an appellate hearing. We talked a bit about this hearing in an earlier episode. Michael's attorneys brought up potential Brady violations by the prosecution, but another big part of their argument was that new evidence had been uncovered in the form of Bryant's story and the interviews conducted by Colucci and Steele. Over the course of a week, Bobby and 21 other witnesses testified, notably absent from the witness list, Tinsley, Hasbrook, and Bryant. All three declined to appear, citing their Fifth Amendment rights. The judges watched Tony Bryant's recorded interview with Vito Colucci, but without his and the New York guy's testimony, they were not convinced. In the court's decision, Judge Edward Karazin wrote, The testimony of Bryant is absent any genuine corroboration. It lacks credibility and therefore would not produce a different result in a new trial. Michael, who had by then served five years in prison, would remain there for the foreseeable future. While Michael might have lost his appeal, Bobby Kennedy refused to give up the fight. In fact, he doubled down, continuing to investigate on his own, making media rounds, and ultimately publishing a book about it all. The one I helped him write, entitled Framed. After it came out, he repeated his convictions about the case in an interview with Dateline. I have a relationship with Michael. I strongly believe that he's innocent. I believe that the facts demonstrate that these two men murdered Martha Moxley. They admitted being in Greenwich that night. They knew the characters, the people. Bobby was asked, didn't Hasbrook and Tinsley later change their story and deny being there? Yes. And they took the Fifth Amendment when it came time for them to testify at Michael's hearing. If they're innocent, they should sue me. Pretty convincing, right? And I want to say this now. I realize he's controversial, but I have good memories of Bobby Kennedy. He was easy to work with. When I was helping him put together his book, in 2015, we talked several times a week, often several times a day. I wouldn't consider Bobby a friend, but we did some stuff friends would do. He drove me around Southern California in his seriously beat up minivan. We hiked with his dog. I went to his Kennedy memorabilia filled house in Malibu, watched him shower his emu with a garden hose, met his famous wife, Cheryl Hines, who I subsequently read was regularly attacked by said emu. As a result, she was eventually shown the door, the emu, not Cheryl Hines. Whenever anyone asks me about the project, I always start by saying, I really like Bobby. But, but, but. This story has so many sizable buts in it, you might mistake it for a Sir Mix-a-Lot video. But, while Bobby wholeheartedly believed he'd solved the Moxley case, I had some serious questions, concerns even, about some of his methods and his conclusions. Bobby called the chapter about the New York guys the killers. He echoed Mark Furman's earlier play to pressure the state into action, writing, using the evidence I have cited in this book, prosecutors have sufficient cause to indict Burton Tinsley and Adolf Hasbrook for Martha Moxley's murder. And he basically tried them without a trial, writing, in my opinion, that evidence suggests that the two men are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I didn't write that part of the book, nor would I have. Based on everything I'd seen, I had some doubts. Sure, the story of the New York guys was intriguing. Arguably, it should have been looked into when it was brought to investigators by Crawford Mills and Margie Walker before Michael's trial began. It would have been easy to do. Hasbrook's house is literally a 10-minute drive from Frank Gar's office in Bridgeport. Considering the stakes, a short drive to knock on Adolf Hasbrook's door seemed merited. But the authorities weren't interested in pursuing the lead. So Bobby took matters into his own hands. In 2015, as we were writing the book, Bobby and I tried to get in touch with Tony Bryant. But not long after those cameras showed up at his house in 2003, Bryant had seemingly vanished into thin air. Even years later, as I was working on this series, I couldn't track him down. Turns out, there's a reason for that. Hey guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. 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. Earlier in the episode, I described Tony Bryant as a law school educated business owner. And that's true. What's also true is that by the time Michael's habeas appeal rolled around in 2013, some pretty serious cracks had started to appear in that clean cut facade. According to court testimony from a former colleague, Around 1991, Bryant landed a job with an Austin law firm with documents suggesting he'd passed the Maryland and Washington, D.C. bar exams, which he hadn't. Hired on the condition that he passed the Texas bar, Bryant didn't let the firm know when he failed it. He was ultimately fired. One year later, in 1992, Bryant was apprehended in Beverly Hills after an armed robbery, where he and two others pretended to deliver flowers to a woman, only to steal more than $100,000 in jewelry while holding her at gunpoint. Originally, Bryant told cops he had been kidnapped by the other men, but eventually pleaded no contest to being an accessory to a felony larceny, which earned him six months of house arrest. In September 2003, two weeks after Bryant sat down with Vito Colucci, the New York Times ran an article revealing that Bryant's tobacco importing business had been shut down by state regulators. Later, I would discover that right around the time Bobby and I were searching for him for the book, Bryant, already on probation, found himself back in legal hot water for grossly underpaying taxes on imported cigars. On December 19, 2016, five months after Framed was published, Bryant pleaded guilty to a single count of mail fraud. Unlike his prior scrape with authorities, this one came with a hefty price tag. Four years in prison and a $9.4 million restitution bill. Back in the early 2000s, when Bobby first reached out to Tony Bryant, Googling someone's entire life history was not yet really a thing. Bobby didn't initially know the extent of Bryant's legal troubles. Bryant didn't mention them when they first spoke in early 2003. But even after he found out that Bryant was less than squeaky clean, Bobby was unmoved. If I had to boil down his justification for continuing to believe Bryant until at least 2016, when I last spoke with him about the case, it's contained in the phrase that my wife sometimes uses to address the fact that humans shouldn't be judged on isolated mistakes. Poe Buddies nerf it. Bryant might have been extremely par from um, perfect but Bobby still found his story about the two New York guys 100% believable They met Martha Moxley They planned her murder and or her assault and on the way up on Halloween Eve they picked up golf clubs from the Skaggle Yard killed Martha Moxley Only Tony Bryant saw them that night. When I started reinvestigating the case on my own, I still wasn't quite sure what to make of Bryant or his story. The dings to his credibility were undeniable. But did they automatically mean he wasn't telling the truth about Martha's murder? I brought it up to Stephen Skakel one day in early 2024. What do you think of Tony? Do we know where he is right now? I don't know where he is. He is, I mean, the interviews that Vito did with him are very compelling. His story is beyond compelling, considering that one of the hairs, you know, that they sent for testing was an African-American hair, which would fit into Tony's rendition of events. I proposed to Stephen, the times being what they were in 1975, if there had been reports of any black strangers in Belhaven, the Greenwich cops, as inept as they were, would likely have been all over it. He seemed to think I wasn't giving Greenwich teens enough credit for being colorblind, nor Tony Bryant enough credit for being stealthy. It got dark early. Tony, it was easy. You knew where to hide. You knew where the police were making the rounds. You knew where places on, you know, stone walls and stuff you could easily hide. And to think, I don't think anybody there really can. Nobody was looking, oh, you know, is your friend black or not? The difficulty of Tony's story is basically the partying in the mead and nobody being able to remember. If there's like a dozen people that they couldn't have found somebody. Well, you've also got Steve Harding and Maria Kumashwamy talking about a group of unknown teens at the end of Walls Lane. Stephen's right. During Michael's 2007 appeal, his attorney spoke to a few of the neighborhood kids, now well into middle age, about what they had seen in 1975. On the stand, the little sister of Belhavenite Kumo, who you heard from earlier in the episode, did report seeing large amorphous blobs of teens that she didn't recognize or couldn't remember. And back in their 1975 police interviews, a few other Belhaven teens mentioned seeing a lot of kids and a crowd near Walsh Lane. At the time, cops didn't press them for more specifics. When I asked Michael about all this, he mentioned that he'd seen several unidentified men on Mischief Night 1975. We had a, at the end of the house, there was a four-season porch. glassed in with a fireplace. When I walked into the room from our library, I looked out and there's two of the biggest apple trees you've ever seen. And I saw three large men walk one under another and then up our hill, head up our hill towards a garden and a tennis court. So why not tell this to police back in 1975? Like many of the interviews the Greenwich cops did with the Belhaven teens, Michael's was perfunctory at best. But Michael says he did share this story. When he sat down with writer Richard Hoffman in 1998, three years before Crawford Mills and Tony Bryant came out of the woodwork. I said, on the tapes with Richard Hoffman, I saw three large men walk by our pool through the floodlights and up to our hill. My point is, is that I have a crystal ball. How would I know that? But even if Michael did see three strangers that night, there's no proof they were Tony and his friends from the city. Over the years, I uncovered several other tantalizing clues that would seem to suggest there might be something to Bryant's story. Like the 1975 police interview of 11-year-old Jeff Byrne, whom Bryant described to Vito Colucci as a key figure in the story. He's the one I mentioned earlier in the episode, who fled the Skakel driveway after Tommy and Martha got flirtatious. Turns out, when police asked Jeff to review what he'd done that night, he replied, quote, we went down to the Mead and stayed there for a while. In 2003, Tony told Colucci that after Martha was killed, Jeff seemed afraid. He had made mention to me several occasions that, you know, something bad happened. These were bad guys. And, you know, he was sort of reaching out to me to help him. And I said, Jeff, I can't do anything to help you. What am I going to do? Right. What am I going to do? What do you know that I don't know? Right. and was this after the murder? It was after the murder. He's like, Tony, you got to stay clear. They're bad guys. Okay. Jeff didn't mention this to police in his 1975 interview, nor did he specifically mention Adolph, Burr, or Tony. Did you see anyone attack Martha? No. Do you suspect anyone of getting her? No. Do you know for sure who would get her? No. Did you hit her? No. But then I stumbled upon this portion of the interview. Not really anymore? Could the 11-year-old have known more than he was letting on? Obviously, I'd love to hear him elaborate. Sadly, asking Jeff about this or anything else was going to be impossible. One weekend in 1981, the Walker family was going skiing in Vermont, and Jeff Byrne, now 17, was planning to drive up with his brother and join them. Margie Walker remembers the call from Jeff's brother. His brother called us in Vermont and said, you know, I'm really sorry to tell you this, but this is what happened to Jeff. What did he say? That, you know, that he had passed, that they found him in the morning, that he had passed away. And that was really shocking. What happened? I don't really know. A horrible tragedy. And one that meant that Jeff would never get to confirm his version of events on Mischief Night. 23 years later, while investigating the story to present new evidence to earn Michael an appeal, Bobby Kennedy called Jeff's sister, Daryl, and related the tale of Hasbrook and Tinsley bunking in her house in an attempt to substantiate Bryant's claims. Unlikely, she thought, but said she'd ask her mother to weigh in. When she called Bobby back, she had this to say. She said she was absolutely shocked. She said absolutely no way, ever. And she said she was definitely going to be a black friend, and one black friend many years later was going to deport. If you couldn't quite make that out, she said Jeff never had any black friends, and in those days, there were no blacks in Belhaven. If someone had seen any, she said, it would have been so highly unusual that they would have said something. But, but, but, when Bobby Kennedy had talked to Bert Tinsley in 2003, he seemed to have a surprising amount of detail about what the inside of the Byrne family house supposedly looked like. Tinsley described how immense it was with its two kitchens, and described in detail a refrigerator like he'd never seen before, with a single button you pushed that would make the door pop open like something from a sci-fi flick. His description of the home matches those of other Belhaven kids who had spent time in the Byrne Mansion. Margie Walker, though she doesn't recall seeing Tony or the two New York guys on Mischief Night, does remember meeting them in Greenwich. I had met them at least one time, and that when we were at in the fall in September they would have sort of just like a community gathering like a pumpkin fest or a fall festival And you know I have this recollection of being with Martha and seeing Tony and the two guys and meeting them You know, we all met together. Margie also remembers the Burns Tudor mansion the way that Tony Bryant described it, a house so big that parents might never know who was staying there. Jeff lived in this very large house that had a lot of kind of secret rooms and places that they used to go in the coal shaft underneath the front of the house that you could access. And there was an iron door and you could crawl in through there. Jeff Byrne's mother, like many of the Belhaven parents of the era, may not have been totally attuned to the particulars of her son's social life. And given the sprawling floor plan of their home, the Burns could perhaps be forgiven for simply not noticing Hasbrook and Tinsley hanging around. There was someone else who would be invaluable to speak to about all this. Crawford Mills, who was responsible for outing Tony Bryant and his story in the first place. But like Jeff Byrne, Mills is another one of those people in the orbit of this story who met early and tragic ends. Margie Walker told me that Mills had a host of problems. Around the time he testified in Michael's appeal, he was diagnosed with cancer, which everyone suspected was related to him living so close to ground zero. But his slide had really begun when he got fired from that CBS job and had to move back to Connecticut and take a job with a local cable company. You know, this is part of the story, I think. What happened, the Moxley thing, is part of what happened to Trace. Trace, of course, being Crawford Mills III. In October 2008, at age 47, Mills took his own life. About seven years after he thought he'd learned who killed Martha Moxley, and one year after a judge dismissed the story he'd worked so hard to bring to light. There are stubborn, not easily dismissed aspects to Tony Bryant's story, which seemed so credible because it was so packed with details. But details, as we know, is the name of the town where Satan keeps a condo. With Bryant having vanished into thin air, I assumed all of this would forever remain a mystery. Then, on Tuesday, November 12th of 2024, Stephen Skakel called me. You're never going to guess who I was just talking to, he said. Tony Bryant, now three years since his release from federal prison camp Pensacola, had called Stephen out of the blue. He explained he'd lost all his contacts while in prison. He asked for Bobby's email. I found the timing of the call interesting. It was exactly a week after Trump's second-term victory. Trump had installed Bobby on his transition team, which was tasked with making cabinet recommendations. And by November 12th, when Bryant reached out to Stephen, press reports made it look increasingly likely that Bobby would be nominated to serve as Trump's health secretary, as he was officially two days later. Pending Senate confirmation, Bobby would soon be one of the most powerful men in Washington. Did Bryant want something from him? Turns out, I would get to ask him myself. 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. In December 2024, Tony Bryant joined me on a video call from his home in Florida. It had been 21 years since Bryant sat with Vito Colucci, almost 50 years since the crime. Well, let's talk about October 30th, 1975. As he told Colucci, Brian said that after he and his friends arrived in Belhaven, they joined with other mischief seekers in the Mead. I remember going back across the street and then going down into the Mead and drinking, smoking. There's a bunch of people coming and going, though. So at one point in time, Martha had come in into the group, into this little circle. Back in 2003, Tony had told Colucci that some of the girls who'd been in the mead, Martha included, didn't stay long. You said that some suggestive comments were made that made some of the girls in the circle uncomfortable. Oh, of course. Suggestive comments made by Al and Bert. Were they getting into the sexually aggressive language like the caveman stuff and all that? They were getting into that and then, you know, gestures and just things that are inappropriate in mixed company. And I think that you said that they left, right, the circle? Yes, that's what I'm trying to tell you. People were coming intentionally because we were hanging out. And then after the conversation, they were listening to this conversation like, what the hell? And they're like, I'm out of here. And I don't blame them. This detail has always perplexed me. Two unfamiliar teens making Bellhaven girls uncomfortable with sexually suggestive remarks just yards from the murder scene. After Martha's death, Greenwich was in a state of panic, yet none of these girls ever reported that encounter to police. One would think that in their travels, the Greenwich police would have maybe encountered somebody who would have said, well, there were these guys that were being kind of gross. No. I don't know what happened. I don't know. Seriously, I really don't know what happened with this whole thing. Yeah. And I don't know why they never, I mean, at least call my mom and say, listen, is it okay if you and your son come and we have a conversation because we understand that he may have been in Greenwich? And it just doesn't, none of it makes sense. He's right. It doesn't make sense. But how would Greenwich police have known to reach out to him since no one specifically reported seeing him or his two friends on mischief night? As to why Tony didn't consider coming forward to law enforcement, he says his mom had reservations. It's in the papers, and she's like, you need to tell me everything that you know. And we had that conversation, and she's like, this is the problem. Because Adolph is Black. I'm Black. Burr is a mixture. We're the three minorities. My mom's thinking, okay, this is going to fall on one of you three. His mom may have worried that their race could put Tony and his friends in police crosshairs. But on the subject of being black in Greenwich, Tony seemed to fall squarely into the Stephen Skakel school of thought. One of the things that's been said about this case is any black people in Belhaven would stick out like a sore thumb and attract the attention of everybody. That it's bizarre that we're even talking about this because... Why do you say it's bizarre? Because unfortunately, that construct exists in certain people's minds. And it's just how you see people. I mean, everybody knew that we were in Greenwich. Well, we were in Belhaven, not in Greenwich. We were in Belhaven. Even if you didn't see us there that night, you'd know that we existed. We would be there during the day. We'd be at the Belhaven, at the club. I mean, it's just, it doesn't mean the same as it means now. Back in 2003, Tony had been adamant that Jeff Byrne, along with Byrne Tinsley, all said the New York guys slept at the Byrne mansion after the murder. But when I asked him about it, Tony waffled. And how did you find out that they stayed with Jeff? They didn't come back, so they had to have stayed with Jeff. So did Jeff ever say, oh, the guy stayed with me that night, or is this something you just intuited? It's just, I know that's where they were. Because they had no place else to go unless they're sleeping on the street. Yeah, so they didn't say or Jeff didn't say they slept at my place. It was just something you knew. Yeah, it's just something I knew. This particular detail had evolved from something that Tinsley Hasbrook and Jeff Byrne had expressly told him into something that Tony just knew. Tony also told Vito Colucci back in 2003 that after the murder, Jeff Byrne had, on several occasions, mentioned that something bad happened after Tony left Belhaven that night. But when we spoke, Tony told me that Jeff had never made any such ominous pronouncements. And there was another discrepancy. Bryant had told Vito Colucci that he remembered bumping into Hasbrook only once after leaving Hughes High School. I saw Adolph. I was with my mother. We were at the Bombay Palace, which is an Indian restaurant. And my mother and I were leaving. And he was the doorman at the movie theater. And I just sort of, and my mom's like, you were shocked. You look like you were about to urinate on yourself. Why? Because of this murder? Because of the murder, because of their, they were just, they were unpredictable. The Indian meal came up again when Tony and I spoke. But with a significant, and I would venture, pretty memorable detail changed. It was Bombay Palace, and we walked across the street. And as we were walking, we ran into Adolf. And he was living in Central Park. He was homeless. His mother had thrown him out and put him out in the street. So my mom gave him some money. We got him some food, and we said our goodbyes. And she looked at me, and she's like, what the hell was that? I remember you saying you bumped into him. Was he also working at a movie theater or is that a different time? That's a different time. It's possible that Tony's shifting stories were just a byproduct of time distorting his recollections. Memory and its disintegration over time is a recurrent theme in this case. Or was there something else going on? During Michael's 2013 habeas proceeding, prosecutor Jonathan Benedict had flown in one of Tony's former colleagues, an attorney. who testified that Tony had lied about passing multiple bar exams. My opinion of his veracity, the attorney testified, is that he cannot be trusted. I asked Tony about this. You know, the guy in Austin came up and said that he lied about being in the bar. Not only did you not pass the bar in Texas, but you hadn't passed the bar in either Maryland or D.C. What is there? I never took the D.C. bar, never took the Maryland bar. They went on a recommendation. I never placed it on my resume. In 2013, Bryant's Austin colleague had testified otherwise. Bryant spent a bit of time explaining to me that his alleged lies were just a misunderstanding, but ultimately he admitted. I did not pass the Texas bar because I was, I mean, I took it while I was working with them and I failed. And then when the notification came, I went to them and said I didn't pass. I failed in my personal responsibilities to study. I was too interested in doing my job. I put my aspirations over my qualifications. That was my mistake. Mistake or not, it wasn't the only blemish on his record. It's hard to see how you could go from starting an entertainment division of a firm in Austin to being the following year sitting in a van while two of your buddies robbed somebody at gunpoint. How does that happen? I don't know. And it happened. I think when I left Austin, I wasn't doing well. Mm-hmm. And I made a lot of bad choices. I made choices that I'm just putting to rest right now. Did the desire to put his choices to rest, I wondered, have anything to do with the timing of his coming out of the woodwork after all these years? Are you looking, are you hoping for a pardon on the federal charges? No. No? No. I mean, you do know somebody and you have friends in high places now. Nah, I don't know. I would never put my friendship, my friendship is not something that I'm looking for, any type of, that doesn't make sense to me. And it's not related. I would never ask anybody to do anything like that on my behalf. Maybe he wasn't looking for redemption from Bobby, but Bobby had very publicly defended Michael and hired me to help him write a book based on Tony's story. So Tony's answer to my next question stunned me a bit. Let me ask you plainly. Do you think that Al Hasbrook and Burr Tinsley killed Martha Moxley? I wouldn't feel comfortable today making that statement because I don't know. I have suspicions. Do you think that they were present? Do you think that they witnessed something? I wouldn't... I wouldn't know. So the man who'd once been certain of something was now not sure what happened or if he ever really knew. I had to wonder how we'd even gotten here. Was there something else Tony was hiding? In the media, I think that there was an interview with Al Hasbrook. And he actually said, I think Tony has something to do with this. Let me just ask you plainly, did you witness or commit the murder of Martha Moxley? No, I didn't. I didn't witness it, and I did not touch a hair on Martha Moxley's head. I'm still not sure I know what to make of Tony's story or his motives in sharing it then or now. True or not, it yielded some terrible consequences. I keep thinking back to what Crawford Mills said when he and Bobby first spoke. Crawford, I think when he testified, said, Tony knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't be able to keep my mouth shut with this information. Is that the case? He, I don't agree with that. I think that he understood that I needed him to be quiet about it. And that I was trusting him with something that was very, very, very sensitive. It was a big risk for me. I could have been quiet and my life would have been a lot more peaceful. I reached out to Burr Tinsley, but never got a reply. Adolph Hasbrook's attorney said that there was absolutely no chance his client would speak to me for this podcast. But in 2016, 13 years after Bobby first amplified Bryant's story, and right after the publication of Framed, Hasbrook gave an interview to one-time Newsday reporter Len Levitt. After graduating from Hughes, he'd served three years in the Army, then graduated from SUNY Brockport, had been married for 20 years, had a grown daughter, and had taken the Metro North into the city every morning for 15 years for his tech job at ABC. Hasbrook said the press coverage totally upended his life. It affected me mentally and physically, he said. I see people looking at me. There is a change in attitude when they hear my name. People drive by my house. They park in my driveway. They knock on my door. They camp outside for hours. Before I enter my house, I look to see if anybody is lurking. I keep my curtains drawn so people can't look inside. I can't sit out in my backyard. My wife gets physically sick whenever this comes up. I don't want to be near anyone with a camera. In an interview for a 2019 Oxygen Channel special about Martha's case, Hasbrook's attorney echoed his client's sentiments. Oh, it's a horrible impact. People now look at him. People who would never know the name Al Hasbrook or know his face know exactly what he's accused of and they look away from him. I recognize these symptoms. It's a lot like what Michael Skakel describes feeling every time he leaves the house. Now that you've heard about Michael and Tommy Skakel and Ken Littleton and the mysterious out-of-towners, you may be under the impression that you've met all the potential suspects, or at least all of those who behaved suspiciously. I have some news for you. On that particular subject, we're not quite done. You're about to hear from Martha herself. Could the work she left behind possibly be the key to finally identifying her killer? Next time on Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley murder. He knew his father would be very upset if he said that he had sex with Martha. Peter was kind of a live wire, a little unpredictable. After I got out of the lawn, I asked him. I just said, look, if you did this, I forgive you. 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 Thank you.