Mischief Night

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Neil Diamond's coming to the Civic Center. What do you know? But before we begin this story, I want you to treat it as a serious question. What do you know? I mean, really, no. Is it possible that what you say you know is actually an opinion, something you just think? And if you think something, what various forces worked on you to make you think that way? And were those forces so effective in making you think something that somewhere along the way you started believing that you didn't just think it? You knew it? In 1975, a 15-year-old girl named Martha Moxley was murdered in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was rich and beautiful and loved by all who knew her. For decades, despite intense media scrutiny on the tragic murder in a wealthy, supposedly safe community, police failed to make an arrest. Until the year 2000, when they took Martha's one-time neighbor, Michael Skakel, into custody. He was 39 years old. Back in 1975, he'd been 15, just like Martha. He was wealthy, like her. He was also a cousin of the Kennedys. The media responded in predictable fashion. Kennedy nephew Michael Skakel, now 39, charged with murdering his Greenwich, Connecticut neighbor, Martha Moxley, of a late Robert Kennedy. A teenage neighbor and friend of Martha Moxley related to the Kennedy name has lent this case tremendous notoriety. I'm like a lot of people. I have an appetite for lorid news, a good murder story, especially one involving famous names. I watched the news. I read the articles. Of course, Michael Skakel killed his next door neighbor, Martha Moxley. He beat her to death with a golf club on October 30, 1975, when there were both 15. I knew it. And if you followed the case like I did, I bet you knew it too. In 2002, a jury convicted Skakel and the judge threw the book at him. It was nearly the maximum sentence possible, 20 years to life for Kennedy and a few Michael Skakel. Convicted of killing his Greenwich, Connecticut neighbor, Martha Moxley, back in 1975. And then, in 2013, a judge released Michael Skakel on appeal after he'd served 11 and a half years in state prison. For the media, it was anything but an exoneration, but rather the kind of clever legal maneuver only accessible to the super wealthy, free on a technicality. A famous New Yorker writer, Jeffrey Tuben, when tweeting about the case, appended the hashtag RichPeopleJustice. I live in Westport, Connecticut with my wife and two teenage boys. It's just a handful of exits north of Greenwich on I-95. A few summers ago, my then 15-year-old son Henry was doing an odd job for a woman in town, helping to clean out her garage. Henry said he told her that I was a journalist, researching the Martha Moxley case. When she heard that, she immediately stopped what she was doing and said, I know exactly what happened to Martha Moxley. Michael Skakel murdered her. She knew just like I knew. And a lot of people who had important roles in the outcome of this case knew too. At the start of this episode, I asked you to consider a question. What do you know? Now I want to ask you a follow-up. Says who? My name is Andrew Goldman. I've been a journalist for 30 years. I got involved in this case in 2015 when current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Bobby Kennedy Jr. reached out asking if I was interested in ghost writing his book about it. He wanted me to help exonerate his cousin. It was a great offer. Except unlike Bobby, I didn't believe Michael Skakel was innocent. At that particular moment, I really needed the work. It was a moral quandary. The Kennedy family has a long history of using the media to carry its water, sometimes to defend the indefensible. Was I willing to be part of that machine? I consulted my wife and my shrink. I came up with moral justifications. But today, when I think back to why I took it, my true motivation is obvious. I think if I'm good at my job, it's because I'm curious. A less charitable way to put it would be nosy. I was way too fascinated with the Kennedys, with Michael Skakel and the Moxley murder, to turn down the opportunity to penetrate the cases in our circle. The book was published in 2016. But here's the thing. Once I started researching this case, I couldn't stop. I was no longer working for RFK and the book was done, but I wasn't. I think it would be fair to say that this story has become an addiction for me. If I can do justice to this unbelievable yarn, I suspect it will become an addiction for you too. I thought I understood the case. It was a decade-long story about the powerful and the privileged seemingly getting away with murder. At the deeper I dug, the more I came to question everything I thought I knew. I discovered a much darker, more shocking tale than I ever could have guessed. In this series, you'll be hearing from dozens of voices, some of whom may be familiar to you. I'm Jeffrey Tuben. My name is Amanda Knox. My name is Mark Ferman. Linda Kenney-Baden. Dr. Henry Lee. Oh, and one more person who's never before spoken to the media. Can you tell me your name? Say my name is, and why I might be interviewing you. My name is Michael Skakel, and why am I being interviewed? I mean, that's kind of a big question, isn't it? From NBC News Studios and highly replaceable productions, this is Dead Certain, The Martha and the Martial Sleep Margaret. When I accepted the Skakel book gig, I did the first thing I do whenever I approach a story. A deep dive on the subject. I read the three books that had been written about the case. I went back and read a bunch of trial covers from newspapers, as well as the work of two of my heroes in journalism writing for the most esteemed high-profile publications in America. My research confirmed everything I thought I knew about the case, and worse. Writing for the New Yorker, Jeffrey Tuben reported that Skakel, driven mad from a romantic obsession, killed Moxley and incriminated himself by confessing to the crime repeatedly in the 27 years following the murder. Tuben dismissed out of hand the idea that any of the others suspected of the crime over the years could have done it. Dominic Don, In Vanity Fair, described how Skakel's family, rich in Kennedy connected by marriage, used its wealth and influence to evade justice for decades. He reported that a detective agency, the Skakel Patriarch hired in hopes of clearing the family name, had reinvestigated the case and determined Michael Skakel to be the likely killer. In 1998, Mark Furman, made famous by the OJ Simpson trial, authored a popular book that renewed interest in the case. Furman wrote that immediately after the murder, Skakel's father had apparently hatched a conspiracy of silence within the family, shipping his kids off to their ski retreat so they could get their stories straight. Then, he warehoused his son Michael in a treatment center where investigators couldn't get to him. In the end, it was the rich kid's big mouth that undid him. Skakel's multi-million dollar gold-plated defense couldn't save him from justice. When Skakel successfully appealed his conviction, Tuben wrote that Skakel had finally found a judge who believed his story. His freedom he wrote was about his privilege, not his innocence. I didn't grow up with money. I never wanted to sleep away camp, never learned to play tennis, golf, ski, or even go on a family vacation. It's true. I have lived in Westport a really nice town at Connecticut for the last decade, but the ways of the country clubs and money to lead remain a complete mystery to me. I'm a stop and shop sale watcher living among a lot of, if you have to ask, you can't afford it types. To understand this murder, I'd have to learn about how the other half lived. In Tony Greenwich. In the 70s, if you wanted to get rich, you worked in New York City. Likewise, in the 70s, if you worked in the city where rich and had kids, you lived anywhere but New York City. There were plenty of nice suburbs to stash your family far from the crime-ridden, nearly bankrupt metropolis, but Greenwich Connecticut was the dream. Its schools were among the best in the country, and it only took 25 minutes for the express into Grand Central. Of all the towns on Connecticut's so-called Gold Coast on the Long Island Sound, a Greenwich address had and continues to have the most cashier among the money to lead. Well like every crem, Greenwich had its crem to the crem. And the creamiest crem was Bell Haven, which on a map looks like a toe dipping into the Long Island Sound on the South tip of Greenwich. Bell Haven was built as a vacation colony in the late 19th century. Grand white, clabbered cottages with wraparound porches on which you could sip your sherry at sunset while listening to scratchy bromsimped pennies on the gramophone. VIPs, captains of industry, and a couple famous entertainers, like Frank Gorshin, the Riddler from the 60s Batman series, were typical of Bell Haven's residents. In the summer of 1974, a moving truck rolled up to the big white house at 38 Walsh Lane. It had come 3,000 miles, all the way from Piedmont, California. 42-year-old David Moxley had been tapped by a counting giant Tushross to relocate from the West Coast to run its New York office. The job, and the house, and the neighborhood were a big step up in the world for the Kansas native. David and Dorothy Moxley's teenage kids, Martha and John, would live among the most privileged families in America. That being said, at least for kids, Bell Haven didn't feel all that stuffy. My name is Sheila McGuire. The back of my home looked at the back of Martha's home. Sheila's a mom of two grown kids. I interviewed her on her day off in the Newtown Connecticut Public Library near her home. Like her friend of neighbor Martha, Sheila was also 15 in 1975. One of a big Catholic brood of seven girls. Yeah, it was a charming time. There was kick the can going on in the streets, flash light tags. We had special little codes. We were putting little secret notes and trees. We had secret calls for one another. We rode bikes all over the place. I've swam in almost every pool there, and a couple of them in the middle of the night. It just goes kind of the way it was. Everyone was essentially safe. Like most Bell Haven kids, Sheila and her sisters were basically free range. I think a lot of the parents were absentee at the time because it was just the way it was. I mean, the sound of music and Bell Haven was clinking of ice and glasses. And 11-year-olds watching three-year-olds for 12 hours a day. Or nine-year-olds watching three-year-olds for 12 hours a day. The club, I think I've babysept for three families at the same time when I was 11. By the club, Sheila means the Bell Haven club. It sat within a mile of each of the 120-year-olds and Bell Haven that offered sailing lessons, tennis, and a huge dining room overlooking the sound. Homeowners were nearly a short membership, but they didn't need to be sponsored. At a cocktail party, not long after moving in, the Moxley's met the recent winner who lived in the massive spread just around the corner on Otter Rock Drive with a swimming pool and tennis courts and countless rowdy kids. Rush Skakele was his name. He was a row-tund man, jokie, friendly, goofy, the types of sometimes greet friends with belly bumps and hardly gave off a corporate vibe, even though he was the chairman of Great Lakes Carbord Corporation, one of the most valuable private companies in America. Rush was remarkably solicitous to his new neighbor. He seemed, and in fact was, the type to be a tad too eager to be liked by all. Rush didn't hesitate to offer to sponsor David Moxley's membership at the club. This gesture was typical. Rush also invited the Moxley's to his family's private ski resort in Windom, New York, and almost certainly, based on his usual habits, suggested the family should join him on the company plane to go see the Atlanta Braves play. Rush was a part owner of the team. But his social bonafides were even loftier. He had friends in high places. Despite the Skakeles being a rock-ribbed Republican family, Rush was close personal friends with Hugh Carey, the Democratic governor of New York. And although Rush certainly wouldn't have mentioned it right away himself, everyone in Belhaven knew that back in 1950, Rush's older sister, Ethel, had married Robert F. Kennedy right there in town at St. Mary's on Brennan Chavinen. Rush had been a nushur. JFK, then a congressman from Boston, Bobby's best man. Patriarch Joe Kennedy famously used his considerable riches to fund his family's political ambitions. Somebody even say he bought the White House for a son Jack. But as rich as the Kennedys were, the Skakele fortune dwarfed that of the Kennedys. The Skakeles resided in a whole other financial universe. So much so that the Skullbud at the time was that Bobby had married the Skakele girl for her money. A family's wealth and corporate affiliations might have been of interest to the parents of Belhaven, but this kind of social yardstick wasn't as relevant to their 15-year-old kids. There was more immediate stuff to consider. How's my hair look? Does he like me? Why is my complexion betraying me? Who's got beer? To both the boys and girls of Belhaven, Martha was different. Less self-conscious than the other girls, a little more adventurous, like an emissary to frigid Connecticut from free in EZ, California. You know, I think that one of the things that really totally gets lost in a lot of this stuff is how absolutely awesome and wonderful Martha was. It's Peter Kumbher Swamy. His father was chief of cardiac surgery at both Grinich and Stanford hospitals. His mother was a prominent attorney and one of Martha's mom, Dorothy Moxley's closest friends. He was known as Kumo back then and was 15 in 1975, just like Martha Moxley. I was a member I was sitting in a room with her and a bunch of other girls and everybody got up and left and she was very, very, very pretty. I remember her sitting across from me and just started talking to me. And I was like, oh my goodness, this girl is really, really genuinely interesting and a nice person and wow, she's really good, you know? Just genuinely interested, not polluted enough to be fake. Everyone I've spoken to agrees with this assessment. Here's Sheila McGuire again. Yeah, she was joy on legs. I mean, she just was this blonde smile, very happy, very kind of flirtatious, but not in a, not in like a sexual inappropriate way. Just this like happy person, you know? Just, just darling. She came from California. She was like the gidget, the server girl kind of saying, we all loved her, you know, just, just really special. So girls liked her and boys really liked her. The feeling that I get when I talk to guys who knew Martha, especially the ones who are a bit older than her, is that there is perhaps a reluctance to come out and just talk about how low-earning she was. Maybe that's because even though she'd be 65 now, she'll always be stuck in time at 15 and forever off limits. But back in the 70s, she made on a felt that way to her peers. Martha's diary entries from 1975 portray what might today be called a burgeoning sex positivity. Boy Crazy was the phrase kids in my generation used. She called the many boys she liked foxes, which she often scrawled in capital letters to emphasize her attraction and chronicle her hut make-out sessions. She'd only had her braces off for a few months, but it's clear from her diary that many, many boys seem to find her particularly fascinating. In her diary, she was as the saying goes, fighting them off and clearly enjoying the attention. On October 30th, 1975, Martha's diary entry centered on a boy who'd been writing her flirtatious notes. These notes are too much, she wrote. He was in bed dreaming of me last night. I can hardly wait to see Tamarro's. But Tamarro from Martha never came. Hey guys, Willie Geist here. We're celebrating 10 years of Sunday today by hosting a very special Sunday sit-down live event. And our guest is one of the biggest stars on the planet, Ryan Reynolds. We're taking our conversation to the stage in front of an audience of you for one night only at City Winery in New York on April 7th and intimate in-person evening. I promise you won't want to miss tickets are limited so grab yours now at today.com. He was a young Marine. She didn't care about convention. They made a life together. Then one night, the Marine died. And then the death investigation took a wild, unexpected and utterly bizarre turn. I'm Josh McGuartz and this is Trace of Suspession, an all-new podcast from Dateline. Listen for free each week or unlock new episodes early and enjoy Add Free Listening by subscribing to Dateline Premium on Apple Podcasts. Stay informed with the NBC News app. Breaking news just coming in moments ago. Watch, read and listen throughout your day. And now, unlock even more with a subscription. Watch the best of NBC News with fewer ad interruptions, including Add Free Articles, Podcasts and full NBC News shows. Plus, deeper access and exclusive content. Let's just take a step back. It's more context and clarity from the reporters you trust. Download the NBC News app now and subscribe for more. We call it Doorbell Night. That's Martha's friend and neighbor, Helen X, who was also 15 in there that evening. One editorial note. I'm going to refer to everyone in this podcast by the last name they went by in 1975. Yeah, it was a big deal. Yeah, the whole neighborhood was out. And basically, it was pretty innocent. I mean, we'd shaving cream and toilet paper and we'd throw in the trees and it would be, you know, that was it. So it was kind of just a little bit of innocent, I guess, benign vandalism. I don't know. Benign enough, though, everyone was always scared to death of getting hit with anything foamy because of the stories of kids losing all their hair after getting smacked in the head with nair. But this was probably just an urban legend. It was cold that Thursday. It would go down to 32 degrees. So Martha wore layers. She put on her blue parka over a black and yellow striped rugby shirt with a turlneck underneath. Between 630 and just before 9, she hung out with a variety of bell haven kids, but she seemed especially eager to see her neighbors the Skakles. Before finally rendezvousing with them at their house, she and Helen X stopped by the Skakles at 71 Autorock two separate times. Both times the Skakles live in Gardner, France, Wattine, told the girls that they were still out to dinner. Maybe Martha had a thing for one of the brothers or maybe she was just looking for a warm place to hang out, like the Revcon, a motorhome that was usually parked at the side of the Skakles house. Martha's journal entries from that fall mentioned doing the usual in the Revcon, which was mostly smoking cigarettes, sometimes drinking beer, sometimes smoking weed, while listening to tunes, the Revcon's heat cranked. The Revcon was basically a dive bar on wheels that didn't cart. As Martha bided her time, the Skakles kids were sizing up their new minder a half mile away at the Bell Haven Club. Their father, Rush Skakles Sr., was away that night, on an annual hunting trip 175 miles north in the Adirondacks. Even though the family had an elderly living nanny as well as a full-time cook, Rush believed the kids needed some more adult oversight. Following his wife's death two years earlier, Rush's heavy drinking increased, and his children became yet another problem to throw money at. He hired Burley 23-year-old Kenneth Littleton, a science teacher and football coach at Brunswick, the private school most of the Skakles kids attended. October 30th would be his first night sleeping at the house. A spacious timing. At the Bell Haven Club, all the guys were in jackets and ties per the club dinner dress code. This is the point in the story where you're going to start hearing a lot of names. Keeping track of the 7 Skakles kids was a challenge for their own father. So don't worry too much about remembering them all at this point. We'll keep tabs on them for you and bring you back to meet many of them more intimately as the series goes on. In addition to Ken Littleton at the Bell Haven Club, there were all 7 Skakles kids. Rush Jr., 19th, home for the weekend from Dartmouth, Julie, the only Skakles girl, 18th, Tommy 17, John 16, and Michael 15, plus David 12, and Stephen, the baby, 9th. Kumo, the one time Bell Haven teen who you met earlier, knew all the siblings. That the kids and that family being so different. All right, Stephen, scrawny, freaking pain in the ass. David, super nice gentle kid. Okay, Michael, more like Stephen, pain in the ass, hyper, crazy, kooky, super animated. John, totally mellow, nice guy. Okay, Julie didn't know her much worked on her car a lot. Okay, generous, normal girl. Tommy, Tommy was different. He was quiet, he was super strong and a big guy, and he just, he had a presence, but he never really seemed like one of the gang. You know what I mean? Two other teens joined the Skakle kids in their tutor that night. Julie Skakles best friend, Andrea, Andy, Shakespeare, as well as the Skakles first cousin, Jimmy Tarion, aged 16 and 17 respectively. Both also lived in Greenwich, but outside of Bell Haven, and both would need rides home after dinner. A detail that will have great significance to the story. Several of the rowdy party of 10 were served alcohol at the club, including Ken Littleton and 15-year-old Michael. Littleton didn't flinch when Michael ordered a rum punch. Michael, like his father and his grandfather, and every generation of Skakle back to the mid-1800s, and probably all the way back to the invention of distillation, was it 15 already a serious alcoholic. The Skakles arrived home just before 9, and mostly gathered on the glass in some porch of the house. Not long after returning, Tutor Ken Littleton disappeared to Russian seniors room on the second floor, where he'd be spending the night. Martha arrived a couple of minutes later, along with Helenix and another Bell Haven kid, Jeffrey Bern, who, at 11, seemed like a child next to the teenagers. There's a lot of names here, but again, don't worry about keeping them straight. Martha's are focused, just to your best to follow her. Martha and her poxies saw the Skakle crew in the sun porch. Michael opened the door, but rather than usher the new visitors back to the sun porch, he led them instead to the driveway. Michael invited the three kids to sit in his father's maroonly concontinental to smoke and listen to tunes. The Skakle kids called the limo-sized car the love mobile, because it was obvious that their father intended to use the car as rich guy plumage to attract women. He'd even had a $5,000 La Leque crystal eagle installed to replace the hood ornament, with a tiny light to illuminate it from below. Michael and Martha sat in front, Jeff Bern, and Helenix in back. A couple of minutes later, Tommy Skakle came out, ostensibly to get a tape from the car, and squeezed into the front bench seat next to Martha. At the time, it is 9.30 AM. It is November 15, 1975. That's Detective Jim Lunning. He interviewed Michael, Julie, and Tommy Skakle shortly after Martha was found, and then brought each of the seven siblings except for Rush, who was back at Dartmouth, to the police station on November 15th to get their stories on tape. Humber night in question, which is the night before Halloween. A game go through what you remember on a particular night in reference to Martha. All the kids told the same story. They ate dinner at the Bell Haven Club, and returned home about 9. My family and I had gone after dinner at Bell Haven, so we returned about 9. After dinner at the Bell Haven Club, I came home. We came back from the Indian Bell Haven Club, and we got back at the house at about 9. And we all went into the porch, and it looked like a back end and a point to see the... Back at the end of the sun porch, then out to the love mobile. Nobody deviated from this account. Here's Michael, then Tommy. I saw Martha Helen and Jeffrey Burns, the door saw her flag the most the other way. So we went in one side of the house, now the other. And went in dad's car and listened to music a little while. And Martha was in the car with a little of Michael, and Jeffrey Burns, the next one, the seat, and then I got in the front seat and up for a while. The love mobile party was short-lived, probably enough time for two smokes tops. In fact, by 9.30, the Lincoln was gone from the driveway altogether. Rush Skakele, Jr. was behind the wheel, driving Jimmy Terry in home, across town to his family's massive estate in the so-called Greenwich Backcountry. In the many interviews that the police conducted in the months following the crime, several teens, John, Michael, and Tommy Skakele, Jeff Burns, Helen X, and Jimmy Terry, and all remembered seeing Martha alive between 9.15 and 9.30, standing at the back of the Skakele house by a pack of Sandra Patch at the end of the driveway, but none were called senior after 9.30. The party dispersed, everyone said their goodbyes and went their separate ways. Martha never made it home. The walk from the back of the Skakele's house to Martha's front door is about 200 yards, two minutes for the average walker. Before digging into the case, I imagined Martha's walk home that night to be a long journey in a kitten to red-riding-hunts trip through the forest. I watched her experience how close to home she was and how long it should have taken her to get there. From the end of the Skakele driveway, Martha presumably would have walked the length of the back of the Skakele house on the leaf-covered lawn, then, coming to the southern end of the home, she'd pass between the pool and the sun porch, teaming with kids a half hour ago, but now empty. She'd exit the Skakele property between a couple of the pine trees lining the lot, rush Skakele-like buying live Christmas trees, then adding them to this row along Walsh Lane. Now through the trees, she's on to Walsh Lane, her street. From there, it's a straight shot. She'd cross the street at a southeast diagonal onto her paved driveway, then onto her front lawn and pad through the grass straight to her front door. Easy. Obviously, it didn't go that way. At 3.48 in the morning on Halloween 1975, Martha's mother Dorothy Moxley called the Greenwich Connecticut Police Department and reported that Martha had not come home the night before. The Missing Person's report begins. At the above time in date, Dorothy Moxley, Walsh Lane Greenwich, reported their 15-year-old daughter was missing. Car number 51 dispatched. Upon arrival at the scene, the undersigned was met by the complainant, who stated that her daughter Martha Moxley was expected to home at 9.30pm October 30th, 1975. Missed this Moxley further stated that Martha had gone out with a girlfriend and two young children to visit friends in the area. Cops encountered a mother sick with worry. When Martha missed her curfew by several hours, Dorothy Moxley started calling Martha's friends, some more than once, and well into the pre-dawn hours. But all she was able to glean was that Martha had been at the Skakele House until 9.30 and no one had seen her since. Greenwich Cops, meanwhile, set out with flashlights and scoured the dark wooded lanes of Bell Haven, as well as known teen hangouts Grass Island and Bruce Park. The cops checked back in with Dorothy Moxley at 6.30pm. She'd still heard nothing. Just after 8.30pm, Dorothy Moxley walked over to the Skakele House and rang the doorbell. She knew that Martha drank beer, and she also knew that the kids would often party in the revcon. Had Martha perhaps passed out in the mobile home? Michael answered the door in bare feet, a T-shirt and jeans. She'd never met him before. He looked both scrawny and hung over to her. People told her that he didn't know where Martha was. The Skakeles live in Gardner, France with Teen, checked the revcon, and reported back that it was empty. As the morning wore on, Bell Haven mother started pouring into the Moxley hump to show their support. David Moxley was out of town on business. They didn't want her to feel alone. Local teens, meanwhile, formed their own ad hoc search parties. One of those teens was Martha's friend Sheila McGuire, who you'll recall babysat all those kids at the Bell Haven Club when she was 11. You said out at about noon. So, my mom in the middle of the night had come and welcomed me up to say, Mrs. Moxley's on the line, Martha's missing. Do you know where she is? I said, no, I went out with David last night. I don't know. But we were kids. We would have little party areas and forts. I thought maybe she was at one of the forts. I got dressed, ready to go, went out my back door, went through the little gate into her back yard. So it's this archway, beautiful wooden snow white gate. And walk through Martha's home is here to the right. So I'm walking around the bushes and stuff. Martha is trying to find what I can. And I look over to the right. Something catches Sheila's eye. It's sticking out from under a tall pine tree on the corner of the Moxley's yard. And I see this long thing. And it looked like one of those kind of flesh-colored, egg-crate foamy, mattress things. And so I approached it. You know, didn't think twice about it. And I'm standing over it. And all of a sudden it's like, like your body is in your mind or like trying not to process what's there. And I am soaked in tears as this horrific scene is at my feet. And I am calling her. I am afraid to touch her. And I raced to the front door and was like scratching and banging, like, let me in. And so all these women came over and they wanted me to bring one of the women down to her. And so when the police came, the woman could take the police there so that I didn't have to go back. And so I brought one of the mothers down to Martha. And she lifted up a bow to look at her. And she was very disturbed. So they call my mom. She comes and gets me. She said they asked me to bring you home. And she said they said they found Martha. And they said, yes. And she said, where is she? And I said, she's right there. Martha was face down. Her puffy blue parka was bunched up over her head. Her striped black and yellow rugby shirt was still on. But her blue corduroy jeans and flowered underwear were both down and bunched around her calves. Martha was a blonde. But owing to the amount of blood caked in her hair, it would have been impossible to tell. 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. Hey guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I get together with music superstar Charlie Puth to talk about his nailing the National Anthem at this year's Super Bowl and the inspiration for his new album, drawn from a line about him in a recent Taylor Swift song. You can get our conversation now for re- wherever you download your podcasts. On November 4th, 1975, five days after Martha's body was discovered beneath a pine tree in Bell Haven. Martha's family and friends from Grannich High, who'd been excused from class for the day, gathered at first Lutheran Church to attend her funeral. A local reporter stood in the parking lot, keeping a respectable distance. It was a sad day in Grannich. A day when people stood outside a church and talked quietly. They talked about violence, which it turns out can even find its way into the suburbs, and about the waste of a young promising life. Reverend Richard Manus read a eulogy written by Martha's classmates. Martha Moxley loved life each day. Her friends found her trustworthy and honest. Martha once said, at my funeral, I want everyone to be happy and to remember all the good times that we had. A small funeral procession drove off to Putnam, Summitary for a private burial service. Many of the other mourners stood around the church for a long time, some crying, some just thinking. All of them tried to make some sense, out of something that makes no sense at all. When I started looking at this case in 2015, close to 40 years after Martha's death, I had one advantage over all who had covered it previously. Peter Michael Skakel successfully appealed his conviction in 2013. His entire case file became a matter of public record. No one who had written the books and articles I'd read had access to all that was sitting in dozens of boxes in Rockville Superior Court. An hour and a half drive north of my home in Westport. One fall morning, I drove up Route 91 to the Courthouse, a red brick building that occupies an entire block of the small town, 20 minutes north of Hartford. A parked and a mostly empty garage around the corner and steps through the metal detectors, then walked into the first floor clerk's office. I always remember pouring rain that morning, and whenever I've thought about that month I spent there digging through this box, it seemed like every day it rained. But as it turns out, Hartford's weather from late October to late November 2015 had been heavy rain only one day, but not my first day there, then sprinkles on three others. It had been a relatively dry month in fact. Memory can be tricky. This will become a theme. A very bored looking young clerk wheeled box after box into a Spartan evidence room. I'd walked in off the street, filled out a form, presented no impressive credentials. I could hardly believe what they turned over to me. Every artifact associated with the case records of polygraphs never before seen police interview transcripts, handwritten notes, diagrams, police sketches, psychological profiles of suspects. Naturally, there was a ton of paper dozens of file boxes. There were thousands of pages of police reports numbered from 1 to 1806 from October 31, 1975 to June 29, 1999. Among the trial exhibits, I discovered a thick stack of photos. There were eight by tens, the color garrison saturated as pictures from the 70s often are. There were crime scene photos of Martha, as she looked when Sheila gaze down upon what she thought was a mattress under the bows of a tall pine tree. And right alongside those photos were those taken during the autopsy the following day. Here's the photo of the top of Martha's head shaved, showing three horrible gashes each about five inches long, allowing a view inside her skull to what looks like brain matter. The photo frames her entire face. There's a U-shaped gash on her forehead where the face of the club hit her and a ghastly four inch gaping wound above her left eye, which is shut. Her right eye is open a bit and downcast as though sad. Her eyelashes remain perfect, youthful and beautiful like a cartoon fawns. But one of those photos stayed with me more than any other because I wasn't even sure what I was looking at. It was a close up view of the left side of Martha's face. She's still wearing her silver hoop earring. Her ear is flaming red and the outer ring of the ear has a chunk missing as though she'd been hit hard on the side of the head with something solid. Maybe the golf club or shaft. Her right below her jaw is a circular wound. And out of that wound hangs what looks like a three inch long piece of brown cable about the diameter of a sweatshirt drawstring. It was, I would learn after reading autopsy reports, a tight blood caked bundle of Martha's hair that had passed through one side of her throat and emerged out the other. I felt queasy. I had a flash to Sheila McGuire as a teenage girl stumbling upon this horrifying scene. This was horrific. Somebody was capable and somebody did that disgusting like crazy. And I just found her. Then I was destroyed. The crime I'd learn would inspire in many it's hardless desire for vengeance. Looking at these photos then and looking at them again now, I totally understood why. These injuries weren't the result of a momentary horrible mistake made in the heat of a moment. These injuries required someone to have hit this girl over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then to have grabbed a sharpened shaft and rammed into her neck with the kind of force that it went in one side of her throat and out the other. The crime went beyond violence. It suggested derangement, the work of a psychopath. Just a couple minutes after Sheila's discovery, the first cops arrived. Two juvenile officers who were already in Belhaven searching for Martha, who was immediately obvious that Greenwich PD was wholly unprepared. Controlling traffic flow and Greenwich Avenue downtown on busy Saturdays covered murder outmatched. There hadn't been a murder in town in 20 years. The department didn't even possess crime scene tape to secure the area. David Moxley made it back from his Atlanta business trip as soon as he could on Halloween. Shortly after he got home, he received a phone call from his deputy at Tush Ross. This man. Well the name is John McCraight. I'd been a management consultant in public practice since 1968. McCraight was calling to offer his help and expertise finding Martha's killer. Though devastated and in shock, Moxley told McCraight he was looking out the window and didn't think that was necessary. He said the place is crawling with cops and so we don't need any help. I said great, but David they're not going to be able to solve it. McCraight knew law enforcement well. His first major consulting assignment at Tush Ross had meant to help the mayor of Detroit restructured the police department following the riot of 1967 in which 23 black residents were shot and killed by authorities and thousands of buildings burned and destroyed. He'd spent hundreds of hours at crime scenes with cops. McCraight was immediately skeptical of the Greenwich PD. Small departments don't have homicides. They don't know how to solve homicides. It's very hard, very hard to do. And even though they have a lot of cops on the grounds including state police, there was a lot of things that they didn't know how to do. The body stayed at the crime scene from noon until dark, the cops having lit the property with clean glights. According to police reports, Elliott Gross, the Connecticut medical examiner, was otherwise occupied, so he never visited the crime scene and didn't get around to performing the autopsy until noon on November 1st. A full 24 hours after Martha's body was discovered, possibly 36 hours since she was attacked. A dog was seen licking a pool of Martha's blood. The cops did their best to scour the area on the lawn around where the body was found. One spotted the bloody head of a six iron golf club lying nearby in the leaves. The murder weapon they determined. It's brand, Tony Pena. In the vicinity, they found two pieces of the broken shaft, one eight inches and the other 12 inches. But the club handle was nowhere to be found. So the club had been split into probably four pieces with one missing. Police found two 18-inch wide pools of blood. They noticed a trail of flat and grass, 86 feet long, suggesting that the killer had either killed or incapacitated Martha, then dragged her away from Walsh Lane to a more hidden spot in the property. Under the tree where Sheila would eventually find her. A lot of those things, you know, really were devastating for me for years. I had dreams of like golf clubs coming through my window. I couldn't go by a pile of leaves. I mean, I was messed up for a long time. On Halloween, precisely 24 hours after Martha had finished her grilled cheese and set out, Detective Jim Lonnie showed up at the Skakal House while canvassing the neighborhood for clues. Rush had yet to make it back from his hunting trip. Lonnie was walking through the back hallway right by the door that leads out to the Skakal driveway when he looked down and spied a storage bin full of golf clubs. He picked up a foreiron and examined it. On its head, in red, a T.P., just like the one on the murder weapon. It was a Tony Penna. But this iron, unlike the murder weapon, had its handle intact. Clear as day on the Leatherhead handle was a custom label. It read, Mrs. R.W. Skakal, Grennitch C.C. as in Grennitch Country Club. The Deadmother's foreiron. From, it would turn out, the only set of Tony Penna's ever-founded bell haven. I met Michael Skakal on October 23rd, 2015, and his younger brother's living room just a few miles from my house. He was wearing a bulky GPS tracker on his ankle while he waited to hear when and if Connecticut would retry him. Jeffrey Tupin once pronounced Skakal guilty as hell on Twitter, and that morning I was right there with him. When I shook hands with Skakal I had two thoughts. He might have been the strongest person I'd ever encountered, probably 300 pounds, but solid, muscular, with a strength of a bull. I experienced an uncomfortable unsettling sensation like a small jolt of electricity. In my career as a journalist I've met a lot of famous people, but I'd never before shaken the hand of a convicted murderer. I remember thinking, my palm is touching the very palm that swung the golf club that night and killed that poor girl. A few days later when I drove up to Rockville Superior Court for that first time, I saw a jumbo ziplock bag sticking out of a box. I pulled it out. I could hardly believe what I was holding. It was the golf club head. The famous Tony Pena 6 iron that killed Martha, with a big red T.P. and bust on the club face. I pulled it from the bag, held it, hefted it, ran my finger over the edge of the broken shaft. I couldn't imagine how hard you'd have to hit a person to cause the stainless steel club to snap where it did. Poor Tony Pena is one of the lesser victims of this horrible story. Italian immigrant wins a bunch of PGA events in the first half of the 20th century, but it's the golf club he designed that killed a 15 year old girl that's the only reason his name might still ring a bell. Poking out of another box where the shoes Martha wore the night she died. There were boat shoes, leather top siters. I remember my sisters both wore them in the 70s. I looked closer. There was a name written in marker on the inside of the flat white sole. Unmustakably a boy's first name. Tom. That was strange. Martha had a boyfriend when she died. His name was Peter. So why did Martha or even someone else write Tom on her shoe? And when? And what would Peter have thought if he'd seen another boy's name written on his girlfriend's shoe? I filed it away. And then I made another discovery, which I shared with Sheila McGuire. Have you ever seen the police report that mentions Theresa Toronto? No. In 1975, Theresa Toronto was 47 years old. She worked as a maid in a house in Belhaven. She showed up in a police report dated November 6, 1975, six days after Martha's death. When I'm porting fact about the case, there had been copious amounts of blood at the scene of Martha's murder, but a conspicuous lack of it found anywhere else. Whoever killed Martha Moxley would have been covered in blood. Nobody's ever disputed this, yet no blood was ever located anywhere besides the crime scene. At least that's what I'd thought, because no one had ever reported otherwise. The Thursday after the murder, with the help of a Spanish language interpreter, police interviewed Toronto, who believed she had information that might have been important to the case. Toronto reported seeing smears of blood as if from three fingers, inside a house she was cleaning in Belhaven four hours before Martha's body was found. The blood's potential significance only occurred to her the next day once she learned the news of the murder. Theresa Toronto was not the Skakeles housekeeper. The house where she found the blood was not a house Michael Skakel had ever been inside. It was a house that Martha knew, one she'd been inside the day she died. Police knew about that blood, journalists did too, but Theresa Toronto and those bloody fingerprints were nowhere to be found in the books, dozens of television shows, or thousands of articles about the case. Why? This is one of the great mysteries of the case and we'll come back to it, but we have a lot of ground to cover first. Martha had a best friend in 1975. Her name was Margie Walker. Margie's father, Mort Walker, created the comic strip Beel Bailey, set in an army base as well as high and lowest based on his family life and granite. I'd worked in the media my entire professional career. The deeper I got into the Moxley case, the more I found myself experiencing the kind of revelation that Margie had at 15 in the days following her best friend's murder. I can tell you that this whole event made me like a lifelong skeptic of media and authority. I mean from day one, the very first newspaper article said, well that's not right, well that's wrong. You know, that couldn't possibly be, you know, just feeling like there were authority figures, whether they were policemen, detectives, media, that nobody can get it right, you know, there are errors and people are too quick to believe what they read, what they hear, you know, hearsay. What you're going to hear in the rest of the season is the result of almost 10 years of research and endless interviews. And what I believe will be a full true authoritative story of the Martha Moxley case. Trust me, it's a doozy. A lot of stories have a big twist at the end. To me, this story felt like Lombard Street, that famous twisty road in San Francisco, just one hairpin turn after another. Buckle up. We're about to go on a hell of a ride. This time, on Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley murder. Some 15-wrenner detectives are questioned hundreds of people and search the murder site thoroughly. A lot of it was, do you know who did it? That's a perfectly to me normal thing to ask a bunch of kids in a situation like this. I think so many people had a crush on Tommy. He was a good looking guy and Gucci shoes. He doesn't stutter. He's no stammering. Nothing. Very con-cool and corrective. There's so many things that are starting to come out now, but... From NBC News Studios and highly replaceable productions, Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley murder, is written, reported, executive produced, and hosted by me, Andrew Goldman. Alexa Danner is executive producer and head of audio at NBC News Studios. Megan Shields and Rob Heath are producers. Nora Patel is our story editor, fact checking by Simone Butteau. One assistance by Brendan Weissau. Sound designed by Rick Kwan and Marquio Shazumi. Original music by John Estes. Bryson Barnes is our technical director. Amanda Moore is our production manager and Marissa Riley is the director of production. Liz Cole is president of NBC News Studios. As the day wraps up, get the scoop on what's been happening. With Here's the scoop, a new podcast from NBC News with Meet Your Host, Gazzmi Bisugin. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News' trusted journalists. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and informative for you closer to the headlines and conversations that are shaping our world. From the front page to the zeitgeist, here's the scoop from NBC News. Listen daily on Apple Podcasts.