The Night Visitor

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 me, your host, Gasmian Vesugian. We'll take a deep dive into the day's top stories with NBC News' trusted journalist. It's a fresh take that's sharp, thoughtful, and informative, bringing 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. I'm Craig Melvin. Cheers, cheers, cheers. I've always been a glass half-full kind of guy. And now, I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, challenges, their stories, their funny, and my candid. So I hope you'll join me each week and who knows. You might just come away with your own glass half-full. Search Glass Half-full with Craig Melvin from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. A year after Martha Moxley's murder, Grannich's detective Jim Loney and Captain Thomas Keegan, along with another detective named Steve Carroll, took a road trip, a very illuminating one, to the Boston suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts. For several months, they'd been chasing down a hunch about a new suspect in the case, which had now led them three hours north to the living room of Sue Weeks, an attractive woman in her late 20s. Weeks was at first reluctant to share the story the detectives wanted to hear. She explained, it wasn't really her story to tell. But after some coaxing, she turned over the name of a girlfriend, who'd been a guest at the Week's Family Cottage in Nantucket that past summer. Donna Unger Detectives speedily made their way to nearby Lexington, where Donna Unger shared a terrifying story with the police for the first time. One night in July, she told them, she and Sue Weeks ventured out for girls' night cocktails at a local Nantucket watering hole. There they bumped into a strapping guy with longish hair. Sue knew him a bit. He got to a fancy private boy's school with their brother-in-law. The man joined them at their table. They chatted. He knew the Week's cottage well from visiting her brother-in-law, he said, and appeared curious about finding out in which room Donna was bunking. He drank a lot more than the women did, and the more abuse he pounded, the louder and more obnoxious he got, and the less comfortable the women felt. At midnight, Sue and Donna said goodbye and headed back to the Week's house. Once there, Donna climbed into bed and went to sleep. I'll let the police report take over from here. Quote She was awakened at 4 a.m. by the feeling that someone was on top of her. The intruder had no clothes on, and he was kissing her about the face, neck, chest, and belly. At this time, she pushed him away from her and said it to him, what are you doing here? He replied, shhh, you'll enjoy it. She exited the bed, and again told him to get out. He just sat on the bed. She then entered a bathroom for the purpose of getting away from him and also hoping he would dress and leave. When she exited the bathroom, he was still sitting on the bed naked. She told him if he didn't get dressed and leave, she would get Mrs. Weeks. At this time, he got dressed and exited the front door of the house. Upon checking, she discovered he had removed his screen and opened an unlocked window to gain entry into her room. Why investigators wondered where they the first cops to be hearing her story? Donna explained that because the man hadn't ripped her clothes off or attempted to rape her, she opted not to call the cops at the time. She seemed to be on a shore if she'd been the victim of any actual crime. The identity of that naked 4am intruder? Kenneth Littleton. A science teacher and assistant football coach at Grinich's Brunswick School, and as you recall, the tutor for the Skakel kids whose first night sleeping at their house was October 30, 1975. That 4am visits the Weeks house? Perhaps only the tip of the iceberg of the hijinks Ken got up to in Nantucket the summer of 1976. And just one of the many reasons cops started to believe this strapping, erratic educator was the psychopath who murdered Martha Moxley. From NBC News studios and highly replaceable productions, this is Dead Certain, The Martha Moxley Murder. Ken Littleton's life once looked incredibly promising. However, by the time he landed in the employ of Rush Skakel Sr. in 1975 at 23, as the tutor and chaperone for the six Skakel kids still living at home, he felt like he'd already blown it. Ken grew up working class, but from an early age traveled in wealthy millias. His father, Wayne, originally from Tennessee, worked as a repairman for the phone company and in the meat department of groceries. During World War II, while serving on a destroyer, Wayne got a boil on his buttocks that got so infected he had to be shipped to Boston to have it launched. In Boston, he met Ken's mother Maria, a first-generation Italian-American. According to Ken, she was depressive and verbally abusive, and he only remembers his parents hating one another. The fact that instead of meeting cute, they met, well, gross, owing to his father's infected boil, had a special resonance for their only son, symbolizing the toxicity of his parents' relationship. Ken was smart and athletic and got a scholarship to the local Belmont Hills school, an elite private prep school. There, he was a model student and captain of the football team, but surrounded by wealthy kids, he developed a chip on his shoulder about class. They drove sports cars he rode the bus. Impressively, Ken got into Williams in Massachusetts, often considered the liberal arts alternative to an Ivy League university. He decided to do pre-med in hopes of becoming a pediatric surgeon, but athletics and partying gotten away. With season D's, he washed out of the pre-med program, a source of endless shame and ridicule from his mother. This is Ken talking about his mother with a forensic psychiatrist years later. Was she the type person who would be so critical as to say things that was strikingly accusing right? No, but she would say things which were accusatory of my character and just basically cutting me down. I got two sisters and at sort of traditional dinners like Thanksgiving and Christmas, we had guests, all that stuff like that. She would brought us as her new car, the LTG. A note for younger listeners, Ford used to produce a sedan called the LTD. I was the alcohol rush. My younger sister was the tea the trail and then my older sister was the deserter because she had divorced her husband. For Ken, teaching rich kids high school science at Brunswick and Grennets seemed a big come down from the dream of life as a surgeon. And of course, finding himself in proximity to a violent murder could be traumatic for anyone. But Ken admitted he'd likely been troubled regardless. Between you and I, I see myself as a very complicated individual. I see myself as an individual who is basically good, who got involved in a mess that screwed up his life, who might have been alcoholized anyways, who probably would have been bipolar anyways. Ken might have been troubled, but up until the summer after Martha's murder, he'd largely avoided getting into trouble. That was about to change. The problem started that June when Littleton wrapped his Mustang around a telephone pole, which brought an unwelcome visit from the cops to the Skakal house. Around the same time, Julie Skakal reported Ken had been drinking on the job and the kids were still failing at school. Time for a new tutor. In July 1976, now untethered from the Skakals, Ken took off to Nantucket, where he'd spent summers in the past working in partying. He got a job as a bouncer at Preston's Airport Lounge, an Nantucket bar featuring live music. That summer, he started experimenting with drugs. It was the first time that I had done cocaine. And see what happened was I got in some trouble because of this cocaine. Ken went in hard. He didn't start with the harmless little disco bump. He used syringes to inject the drugs straight into his veins. It was like Popeye trying his first can of spinach. The first night he shot Coke, Ken spied a four foot tall sculpture of a nude man breaking out of chains in front of an art gallery. It spoke to him. He said it weighed 400 pounds. At that time, I was about 6'2'10. I was really intrigued. And I just threw the thing over my shoulder and brought it back to my apartment, which was about 2,000, 3,000 years away. Walked up the slaps with it, put it in the middle of the living room, and got it on with my girlfriend. The following two nights, I did similar stunts. I got a scintail block and pumped it through a plate glass window of a gift shop right on the straight. You know, at 3 o'clock in the morning, reached in and took out and put in a pillowcase teeth of a whale, which are engraved, scrimshaw. I had had my morals broken down so much, one by the alcohol, and then pumped so much by the cocaine. It eventually was cut. Then Tucket PD arrested Ken on September 6, 1976. They charged him with breaking and entering and receiving stolen property. Brunswick got wind of the arrests, and by the end of September, Ken was out of another job, and now fully on the radar of Greenwich investigators. You know, I'm kicking myself in the ass because, you know, I hadn't been a suspect until I got in trouble that summer, and then they focused the heat on me because they couldn't get it anybody else. Actually, detectives had first begun to develop suspicions about Ken even before that. In April of 1976, when, as you'll recall from the last episode, Rush Skakal's senior's friend and neighbor, Sissy X, paid them a visit. In the course of that meeting, Sissy, who was known to be a bit of a gossip, told Captain Keegan and Detective Leni, all about Tommy's Kakal's interrogation under the so-called truth serum, sodium amatal, during which he stuck to the story he'd been telling cops from the beginning. Here's Sissy from an interview years later. I think everyone was very relieved. I thought Tommy was innocent. During that same visit, Sissy also asked, had they considered Ken Littleton? She couldn't figure out why Rush even kept him on, considering that he was supposed to be tutoring Michael and Tommy, but both were either flukking out of school or close to it. Littleton was weird, inappropriate, she said, keeping a big stack of skin mags in the house. And he was known to nude sunbathe on a gazebo on the property, in full view of poor Margaret Sweeney, the Skakal's octogenarian housekeeper. He didn't behave like a real man, too. He used to go out without any clothes on of a pool to be hit if he was so bizarre. I don't know what I was supposed to do, strange things. I imagine the investigators in Ten-Eye tingling at Sissy X's suggestion. Up to that point, Ken had aroused little suspicion. They'd done a background check on him immediately after the murder. No arrests. He'd been a value to Keegan and Loney for one reason. Ken would be able to testify Tommy was nowhere to be seen in the house at 9.45, the period corresponding to the likely time of the attack, when he did a bed check. But with their efforts to pin the case on Tommy going nowhere, Sissy's springtime tip followed by revelations of Ken's nan-tuckets summer high jinks, put Keegan and Loney hot-own Ken's trail. On October 18th, 1976, detectives Carol and Loney convinced Ken to submit to a polygraph at the state lab in Bethany. After the test, the Connecticut forensic labs' polygrapher left the room for a long time, and returned with a grim look on his face, he failed, he told Ken. Badly. Now, you, as far as I'm concerned, unless you've sent something to my bed or not about, it hadn't come up with any type of a valid explanation about these reactions. No, and I have no. I have no talent. That's fine. OK. Now, let's be honest with each other here, Ken. If you did not do this act, then you positively know who did. Or you have some real strong concrete evidence. Now, I can tell you, then we have to assume that you did. Ken maintained his innocence. I never even know her. I never came in contact with Mark the Lawsway. Were you there for your daughter? No. She didn't actually twist anybody, even though she looked like. No, only from the picture which was in the newspaper the following day. It went like that for hours, the police trying to wrench a confession from Ken. Ken blamed his failure on the stress he was experiencing because of what happened in Nantucket. Investigators proposed he'd take another poly. Or better yet, submit to sodium pentathol testing. Another barbiturate, like sodium amatol, believed to make subjects powerless to lie. Ken's lawyer shut that idea down. That's when investigators decided to high-tail it to Ken's home state of Massachusetts, where they tracked down Donna Unger of the unwelcome 4AM visit. All there, they also spoke to a 22-year-old named Vivian Oats, who said she'd shared a $75 week apartment and a lot of cocaine with Ken. She provided Detective Carol with an affidavit alleging that Ken would often try to force himself on her. She was mostly able to fight him off by scratching him and screaming, except when she was too drunk. Linda Kahun, Nantucket's dog, Kager, told Carol that she'd accidentally bumped into Ken's date on the dance floor of a bar called the chicken box. She said, Ken, back-handed, or so hard, she felt to the ground. Following his debauched summer on Nantucket, Ken managed to land a new teaching job at St. Luke's in New Canaan. But that too evaporated, when school administrators got word that their new hire was now the chief suspect in the Martha Moxley case. It was all adding up. Investigators felt sure they had their guy. But the fact was, they didn't actually have enough to bring charges against Ken. This is the X-DOTY was a weirdo. He blown a polygraph, which was inadmissible in court, and he'd spent a summer being a pervert bullion thief. But this was all circumstantial, just like all the evidence against Tommy had been. It just wasn't enough, not without a confession. The cops had nowhere to go. Their case went cold. From a distance, they watched Ken, broke, move home to Massachusetts for a few years, then in 1982, migrate south with dreams of making it big as an entertainer, like the plot of showgirls, but sadder. Eventually, I took to Orlando where I went to try to get a job on, stuck in a place in Orlando, which really had passed, and I couldn't get, you know, the job. You don't have a proper route, that's it. He was a vagrant living on the streets, racking up for a rest in the span of three months, drunken disorderly, shoplifting, etc., and throwing a rocket and moving car. He was diagnosed with a litany of mental health issues, and reported frequent paranoia and mania. By then, he'd also developed an obsession with the moxley murder, the scacals, and their famous cousins. He started going by the name Kenny Kennedy, saying he was the black sheep of the political clan. Cops arrested him for trespassing on a construction site. He was several stories up, residing JFK's Ishtbin-Einbreil-Linner speech. At a bar in Fort Lauderdale in 1983, he met Mary Baker, a 27-year-old Canadian who was staying with family. Like Ken, she was an alcoholic, but unlike Ken, she had some money. Her father just died by queating her at decent inheritance. She brought Ken back to Ottawa where they lived off her money, mostly golfing. Mary got sober and encouraged him to do the same. He'd be in AA, then he'd get it to UI, then back to AA. They moved back to the Boston area, in 1984 they had a daughter, and three years later, a son. Before long, Mary found out that the drinking was more easily treated than Ken's delusions. He would often tell her that Tommy's visit during the French connection was a failed assassination plot. Tommy was supposed to have shot Ken in the head with his father's pistol, and then, according to some fuzzy logic, the family would frame him for the moxley murder. When he was stabbed in the arm during a bar fight in Quebec in 1983, Ken saw it as a failed hit put out by the Skakal family. He once drunk dialed on a alarmed David Moxley, Martha's dad, and referred to the murder as our mutual tragedy. When he wasn't in psychiatric hospitals, he could be found spending long stretches sitting in porn theaters. Mary filed for divorce in 1990 and took the kids to Ottawa. Ken stayed in Boston and cieved. Then, one day in September of 1991, there was a knock at Mary's door. The two men outside introduced themselves as Jack Solomon in Frank Gar. There were investigators who'd come all the way from Connecticut, and they wanted to talk to her about Ken and the Martha Moxley murder. Hey guys, Willie Geist here, reminding you to check out the Sunday Sitdown Podcast. Now 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 REIT, wherever you download your podcasts. Stay informed with the NBC News app. Breaking news just coming in moments ago. In this spring of 1991, the Moxley case was ice cold. It had been 16 years since Captain Tom Keegan and Detective Steve Carroll had interviewed their last suspect, Ken Littleton, and then let him go. They'd both retired. The Martha Moxley case might have laid dormant forever, but then a Kennedy cousin, but not a scaacle, inadvertently brought it back to life. In good Friday, 1991, 30-year-old William Kennedy Smith went out partying in Palm Beach with his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy. At a nightclub called O-Bar, he met a 29-year-old woman named Patricia Bowman. Early the next morning, a bruised Bowman showed up to a police precinct and told cops Smith had sexually assaulted her during a walk on the beach. Smith was arrested and went on trial that same year. William Smith came to court with his family at his side. Three men and three women were chosen to hear the details of the early morning of March 30th, when 30-year-old Patricia Bowman claims Smith raped her at the Kennedy family's seaside estate. Prosecutors claim this is not a unique incident. Three other women came forward to claim that Smith had sexually assaulted them previously. They were not allowed to testify and Smith was acquitted to much media outrage. The story garnered blanket cupboards from tabloids and their new TV cousins. Those liked a current affair and hard copy. A rumor circulated through the press corps that William Kennedy Smith had been in Greenwich on October 30th, 1975. Some wondered, could Willie Smith have been involved in the murder of Martha Moxley? There was nothing to the rumor, which was quickly debunked. But the William Kennedy Smith arrest led to many, many retrospective stories about the unsolved Moxley case in papers all over the country. An entire new generation was introduced to the case and the previous prime suspect, Tommy Skakel. Reporters wondered, would someone finally be arrested for the murder of Martha Moxley? Political pressure can be a powerful motivator to defrost a cold case. The renewed public calls to act were enough to cause states attorney Donald Brown to respond decisively. At a press conference on August 8th, 1991, Brown unveiled a new toll-free tip line. Dorothy Moxley announced she was personally adding $30,000 to the reward for information leading to an arrest for her daughter's murder, raising the total bounty from $20,000 to $50,000. And Brown introduced the two men he had hand picked to finally solve the case. Jack Solomon, an investigator from the state's attorney's office, and a Gretter's police detective, Frank Gar. Unlike the public, Gar and Solomon had moved their sights from former prime suspect Tommy Skakel, who was married and living in the Berkshire's and Massachusetts to a new big lead. This one further north, in Canada. A month after the case was reopened, Gar and Solomon traveled up to Ottawa and knocked on Mary Baker's door. You know, the whole thing for me was a bit of a shock. Two police went out of the blue. Did they just seem like regular cops or what did you think of when you saw them? Well, Jack liked to talk. Frank sat closer to me, didn't say anything, and just looked like he was listening. Jack Solomon, thick-necked and looking like a graying actor, reminded Mary a little of John Wayne, but chattier. He never stopped talking and would earn the nickname Ricochet Rabbit after a speedy cartoon bunny from the 60s. Solomon's partner in subordinate, Frank Gar was of a younger generation and had the whiff of the rebel about him. He was a Vietnam vet. He sometimes wore a skinny ponytail. On his off days, Gar took acting lessons in Manhattan and even had a headshot made in case Hollywood ever called. Gar will become very important to this case. I know there's a lot of names to juggle in this story, but make special note of Gar. He'll be with us on this journey until the bitter end. Both investigators felt a personal connection to the case. In his duties working for the state's attorney, Solomon had been at the scene with the state crime lab on October 31, 1975. It was Solomon who'd been the leading interrogator of initial suspect Ed Hammond, whose condoms and apocryphal seamen jars you heard about in a prior episode, telling him that they knew he did it and he better confess. Gar had been the Greenwich police dispatcher in the morning Dorothy Moxley first called the police. The two were almost certainly informed of the stakes. It was more than just a career case. They had the power to either restore the reputation of Connecticut law enforcement or drag it down even further into the mud. No pressure. The good news was, by the time they're plain landed in Ottawa, Solomon was certain that they finally identified Martha Moxley's killer, Kenneth Wayne Littleton Jr. There was, of course, the failed polygraph, Ken's suspicious behavior in Nantucket, and his miles long rap sheet after that. But Solomon discovered even more hiding in plain sight. While he was pouring over the police reports, something jumped off of the page. Ken made a fascinating admission in a December 1975 interview. He told police he had left the Skakele House once that night, around 9.15 or 9.30, to check on the boys in the driveway. Here's Stephen Skakele. He says that our living babysitter Margaret Swini, who was in her mid-late 80s at that time, told him to go out and check out a fracas. By fracas, Swini meant loud kids who needed to be sent home. When he got to the front entryway to leave, Ken found a crowd. Tommy Skakele was standing with Andy Shakespeare, passing her the car keys that Julie had forgotten. Ken sent him out outside, found the driveway empty, walked by the Revcon motorhome with the base of the driveway, and then went back into the house and directly up to Rush Skakele Senior's second floor bedroom. By God's hallowement thought, Ken was placing himself at the back of the house at the approximate time that Martha was leaving the backyard. Recall that nobody would see Ken again until 10.20pm, when Tommy walked into the second floor bedroom and joined him to watch the French connection. As it had been with Tommy, murdering Martha after 9.30 and then materializing in Rush's bedroom at 10.20 in unblooded clothes would be no mean feat. But it might be easier for someone who'd had some practice. What if Martha wasn't the killer's first victim? October 7th, 1976 17-year-old high school student Cynthia Kreisack strangled to death on her way to study at the Williams College Library. May 30th, 1984 17-year-old nurses aid Bernice Corn Monge disappears while hitchhiking near her home in Claremont, New Hampshire, and is later found stabbed to death. July 4th, 1988 28-year-old waitress Pam Davisio is found in a roadside ditch in Saratoga Springs, New York. Cause of death, bludgeoning. What did these crimes and 10 other homicides have in common? There were unsolved murders of young women that occurred in close proximity to where Solomon established Ken had been at the time. Coincidence? Solomon didn't think so. When he and Gar arrived at Mary Baker's front door, I can only imagine how taken it back there whereby how open she was. It was immediately apparent that Mary loved to talk. She was a single mom with a four and six-year-old and had two people just dying to hear all about her crazy ex-husband. He could have to cry by and thought and voice of the nurse working in the nursing hospital. I know the tape's not great. Mary's saying he's preoccupied by thoughts and voices. They're more important to him than other people talking to him. She was happy to share all the bizarre stuff she'd seen Ken do as Garcer tactiously recorded the meeting. He once drank water from the toilet. He ate paper money. He was an obsessive collector of matchbooks depicting JFK. He was obsessed with a wine-colored birthmark on Mikhail Gorbachev's head, low-thriggins attorney general Ed Mies and would often try to call him at the White House in the middle of the night. He left golf clubs in synagogues. Golf clubs? The investigators must have glanced at each other knowingly. Mary told the inspector she wanted to help. She understood what Dorothy Moxley was going through because her own mother disappeared in October of 1967 and her body was only discovered five months later. Do you think Ken killed her? Saul and Blur did out? No. Mary said it had actually been a suicide and besides Ken was 13 then and living in another country. She was adamant about one thing. Ken might be off his rocker and he might have developed an unhealthy obsession with the murder. Every year she told them his psychiatric issues got worse as October 30th approached. But he did not kill Martha Moxley. Ken had steadfastly denied involvement and had shared all his theories of who he suspected. Perhaps you don't have all the facts, Solomon told her. He alluded to Ken's creepy shenanigans and nan-tucket. Then he told her all about Ken's polygraph. Ken comes and takes this polygraph again and he then confronts it out. The question they ask, Ken, is there one if you kill Martha Moxley and then they don't know. You know what the mission is? When you present, once he was killed, he said, no, Martha Moxley. Did you admit that Martha Moxley was a golfer? He said, no, Martha Moxley. The evidence is missing in this case. You don't know where the evidence is. Ken says, no, where is Martha Moxley? He walks it out now. Was Mary aware of what happened at Ken's 1977 bird blurry trial? Connecticut authorities had arranged with a nan-tucket DA to allow Ken to avoid a felony if only he'd returned to Connecticut for further tests. He'd let the answer back, Ken. No way, you're not going back. Now, that's a striking reply from a man. I just brought her this man into white. We'll come back and take a photo of her. Your energy, I'm not going to hide. Your career is back. And tell him you've got a chance to look back and teach him being a photographer that you've been through for a while, or your life. He turns his balance, but he did not want to come back. Mary considered this and then admitted she had something that might interest them. She'd kept answering machine messages, Ken left her when he was drunk and upset that she wasn't letting him see the kids. A note to listeners, there's some strong and very creepy language ahead. Your voice sounds so sweet. Unfortunately, anger and fury motivates us calm. If you think you can end away with this fucking bullshit, not communicating with me, you're full of shit. Some way or another, I'm going to fucking get you. I love two people on this earth right now. I will always love them. And that's for you. Well, you can take a bath in some menstrual juices. You're a selfish fucking whore. You separated me from the ones that I loved. If you think you're going to get away with this shit, you mistaken. Very mistaken. I want to elaborate. The checks come in at the beginning of the month, so watch out for a scratch on your window. And then remember when I was angry? Fish bait? Maybe we'll send up Charlie when he's drunk. Just fish for some muskies with you on the line. You're singing about good tunes, about the water, about how your mother ended up in an ice block. Say you have a bad fate. You menstrual cunt. I have no idea exactly when Solomon first suspected that Ken might be a serial killer. Neither he nor Gar responded to interview requests. In April of 2024, just a couple months after I stopped by his house to try to speak to him, Solomon died. But honestly, the same thought crossed my mind when I first listened to these messages. Before leaving Ottawa, Gar provided Mary with a toll free number to reach him. She used it a lot from the looks of the police files, which are littered with gossipy updates for Mary relating to Gar her every conversation with Ken. Seems as though Mary had been waiting her whole life to be part of something as exciting as a murder investigation. She did everything they asked. They needed one of Ken's hairs to compare with evidence. So in November of 1991, Mary invited him up to Canada to visit the kids. Two hours before Ken arrived, Maltese showed up at her house bearing bed sheets to collect his hairs and ash rays to collect his cigarette butts. And as soon as he'd walked out the door, the Maltese swept in to collect the evidence. Could Mary start taping calls? Sure she said. So they set her up with a tape recorder and a cheap suction cup recording contraption to attach to her phone receiver. At last they got a lead. Ken was obsessed with being set up for the Moxley murder and one day asked Mary, what would happen to him if one day some hunter walking through the woods tripped over a golf club handle and bloody clothes planted to frame him? It was an oddly specific scenario for Ken to come up with. Upon hearing this, Solomon became convinced that Ken could have ditched evidence that the Skakeles Windom New York skiboard treat right after the murder. Dogs and trippers descended upon Windom and searched all day. No golf club handle, no bloody clothes. Strike one. So Mary agreed to confront Ken. All day long, I'm alive, ladies. I've been telling you I've had too pretty fright tonight, Mary. I'm wondering, why the hell would you say she wouldn't die? I just had to jab her to death. 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. 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. In 1984, two years into what you've by now gathered was a very dysfunctional marriage. Ken Littleton and Mary Baker took a road trip from Florida to Massachusetts. One drank all the way and ended up passed out in the backseat of their firebird. Seven years later as she surreptitiously recorded their conversation, Mary asked Ken about something he'd said, actually confessed to during the trip. Why the hell would you say you know if he wouldn't die I just had to sabbret it out. That was just that was when I was blacked out. Oh sure. Going past Greenwich. Yeah. But why would you say that? I've tried to explain this how many times. Oh I know but you always claim you were drinking or you were otherwise incapacitated. No I didn't explain it like that at all. I explained it in this way in a sense that when I thought about it, I thought, you know, could there have been any way that I could have perpetrated the crime. And I went through my mind which this was all instigated by the Greenwich police putting me in a position where you know they made me feel like you know I committed it. Actually Ken needn't have explained why you said it because he'd never ever said such a thing. Solomon and Gar are perhaps tired of listening to hours of tapes of Ken and Mary yammering on about nothing important decided to prime the pump. They told her, tell him he said he'd admitted to killing Martha while he's blacked out. See what he says. This is at least the version of events that Mary Baker and Frank Gar claim occurred. Solomon would later flatly deny ever telling Mary to lie. Based on my research, I'm inclined to believe Mary's account. Either way, what's certain is that Mary absolutely told Ken he'd confessed while passed out in that firebird. But no matter how much she tried, she couldn't get Ken to confess while conscious. The calls were yielding nothing. Mary was a hopeless spook the cops decided. But Solomon and Gar weren't ready to stop pushing. If they were ever going to get their confession, they needed a new tactic. In 1992, they gave up the spy stuff and just called Ken up and pitched the idea of coming back to Connecticut to clear his name. A defense attorney Ken knew told him under no circumstances should he do it. But Ken clearly couldn't help himself. He was consumed. Just a few months before he'd been arrested for DUI in Boston, driving the wrong way on a one-way streak frequented by prostitutes. Cops reported he was muttering that he needed to talk to the Kennedys. Can I agree to return to Greenwich in December of 1992 and sit down with forensic psychiatrist Dr. Kathy Moral? She's the one you heard Ken talking to earlier in the episode. Solomon and Gar had caught Moral on a network true crime show and were so impressed they flew her to town from her home in Denver to help solve their case. And set up a video camera in the library of the Greenwich Police Department to record the sessions. Had little to never been in shape to work a stripper pole, he certainly was no longer. Ken was now a big Massachusetts galute with a significant beer punch. His oversized rugby shirt couldn't hide. He wore a longish mane of brown hair and a beater glasses. Here's how Ken described his predicaments Moral. I'm down here against a very smart defense attorney's advice. I'm down here naked, basically. I'm down here because I know I didn't commit the crime and I want to, if possible, help solve the murder. That was not the case, however, back in 1975. I trust Frank and I trust you. I trust the process we're going through right now. Ken spent a day and a half with Dr. Moral, chain smoking in the Greenwich Police Library. The cops had gone for a kitchen sink approach, encouraging Ken to do anything they could think of that might, they told him, clear him. But of course, their real motive was to find more evidence of his guilt they might use his leverage to finally get a confession. Ken even said he'd consider letting a doctor inject him with sodium pentathol, the supposed truth serum, but they couldn't rustle up a shrink willing to do the honors. So they brought in another psychiatrist who did hypnosis. Garnierly exploded when he told them he wouldn't conduct the test without a sign off from Ken's attorney. They also flew in a folksy white-haired man named Robert Brisenstein from Maryland to administer a polygraph. Brisenstein had a distinguished 30-year military career. Much of it is a polygrapher and it personally designed the Army's standardized protocol for lie detection. He was a polygraphed true believer, claiming in published articles that with the trained polygrapher, the box was at least 90% accurate in the Sussing Outliers. He began with a health intake. All right, your medication. What are you taking? I am taking with and ate per fesiny anxiety and paranoia reducer 25 and a milligrams of domicote. Well, but you trend. I have bipolar disability, panic depressive illness. Ken told him about his two recent suicide attempts, his paranoia, and his multiple psychiatric diagnoses, and then Brisenstein connected into the machine. After completing the test, Brisenstein rushed into the room where Gar weighted. Frank, that guy killed that girl. I polygraphed three convicts in jail at Confesta Crimes, and their polygraphs were not as good as this guy's. By good, Brisenstein meant suggestive of guilt, which was obviously bad for Ken Littleton. Saul and Engard then brought Ken in and used every trick they knew, using the failed polygraph as leverage to pry a confession out of them. Saul meant said, Ken, you did it. I know you did it. Give it up. You've been living with this for 17 years. It's time to be a man, Ken. Do the right thing. Ken left to his feet and sensed and started yelling. So this is what this is all about. This is why he brought me here. It's the same thing in 1976. To accuse me. To try to make me say I did something I didn't do. Ken stormed out, swearing off another generation of Connecticut cops. Ken was done, and Solomon was too. He gave up on trying to nail Ken for Martha Moxley's killing, and with that chapter closed, he also seemed to forget all about the trail of murders he had once attempted to connect to Ken. After all their efforts, all they really had on Ken was a second failed polygraph. Solomon was sure the polygraph indicated they'd the right guy all along, but there's a reason polygraphs are inadmissible in court. My name is Leonard Sachs, Professor at Brandes University. Dr. Len Sachs is basically the go-to guy on the subject of polygraphy. In 1983, President Reagan proposed polygraphing any federal employee with access to sensitive materials, as well as all prospective hires. Congress wanted to hear if the test actually worked. So Len Sachs was put in charge of a panel of scientists and polygraph examiners, some of whom were lie detector skeptics, and others true believers. Sachs was neither. I was asked to do this study originally. Some ways because I was tabular rassa, I had not been previously involved. I knew psychophysiology, I knew research, I knew how to look at cumulative data. The panel's findings were devastating. Our conclusion was that there was no scientific basis for polygraph tests. The fundamental issue is that there is no unique psychophysiological reaction to lying. In other words, the measures that the polygraph takes, changes in heart rate, sweating, grieving, these responses are not necessarily the function of a lie. One could be just really concerned. The police are interrogating you about having murdered somebody. Now, that is not to say that a skilled interrogator cannot use the polygraph if you will as a prop and use the results to try to get a confession. I showed Sachs portions of Ken's polygraph. He shook his head in disbelief. I mean, I've never heard of a case where a person who was on this combination of drugs is deemed a reasonable subject. The idea that you can test someone who is on a complex regimen of psychoactive, psychotropic drugs and assume that you can figure out from their emotional reactions whether they are afraid, they're not afraid, whatever, it just doesn't make any sense. I discovered in the police files that Solomon and Garh definitely would have been aware of Ken's unsuitability to be tested. Bristantine's polygraph, it turns out, wasn't Ken's first polygraph that month. Ken days before Bristantine flew into administer the test in Greenwich, Connecticut state police's own polygraph for Joseph Schadler tried to test him at a police station near Ken's house in Boston. He began with a health intake and a so-called STEM test, designed to see if the polygraph is able to detect a person's physiological response to deception, and also convince subjects the machine will be able to catch them in their lives. Ken was instructed to choose a number and then lie about picking it. By that Schadler meant, Ken's physiological response to the STEM test indicated an inconclusive result. What that tells us here, very simply, Ken is, as far as today goes, you're not testable. OK, I know that doesn't hardly be a heck of a lot, but it's why my concern was with some of their medication that you were taking and how it may be affecting you. You may be in that minority that just can't be polygraph. Schadler also called into question the results of Ken's 1976 failed polygraph. My concern is maybe when they did test with you back in 1976, if that was something that was undiagnosed, that may have caused some of the problems that they had with the test, and that is a possibility. So I want to make sure we don't have history repeated so here. Schadler cited Ken's bipolar diagnosis and medications as the reason he couldn't do the test and read he wouldn't do another one without a waiver from Ken's doctor. Ken polygrapher wouldn't do the test, but Solomon and Garre found another who would. My afternoon with Lensax, led me to discount any polygraph evidence related to the case. Both passes and fails, which may eliminate the most concrete evidence against Ken, but it certainly doesn't eliminate him as a suspect. Ken had never spent the night at the Skakeles before October 30, 1975. Well Haven enjoyed a solid run of almost no murders up until then. Was it just Ken's incredibly bad luck? A horrible coincidence? Or perhaps something more sinister? Ken's violent, coke-fueled nantucket crimes for you in 1976 would suggest, though undiagnosed, he was already mentally ill and not a good polygraph subject, but also just the kind of violent unpredictable sexually aggressive person who might murder a teenage girl. He told Kathy Moral that he'd been having alcohol-fueled blackouts since college. As he had put it before, when I drink, I flip out. His statements about how much he had to drink at the Bell Haven Club the night of Martha's murder were inconsistent. Started with one beer, went to two beers, and the Skakele House was absolutely filled with unmonetored liquor. And then there's the so-called Morganty sketch. At 8 o'clock on Mischief Night, a 28-year-old Bell Haven security officer named Charles Morganty stopped a man on Field Point Road and asked where he was headed. The man told him that he lived on Walsh Lane, just down the street from the Moxley House. Two hours later, at 10 o'clock, Morganty was fixing a stanchion that had fallen, and thought he saw the same man a hundred yards away, very close to the intersection of Otter Rock and Walsh Lane. This was just south of the Skakele House, and about half a block from where Martha was attacked. The sighting was at or just after the suspected time of the attack. In 1975, Morganty described the man as a six-foot tall white male blonde hair approximately 200 pounds in his late 20s to early 30s wearing dark-dream glasses, tan pants, and a green army jacket. Because of the mystery man's position close to the crime scene at the time of the crime, he's brought in a sketch artist to work with Morganty. No one could dispute the results. If you look at the side by side, the sketch looks almost identical to Ken Littleton. But there was a catch. Police determined that Morganty's first sighting at 8 o'clock was Carl Wald, a 23-year-old who did, in fact, live with his parents on Walsh Lane and remembered the interaction. But the second, Morgdistan sighting at 10 p.m. could not have been Carl Wald. Both his mother and father alibied him as at home playing pool, then watching the French connection and not leaving the house again that night. Morganty told police he was sure it had been the same man, but unless his parents were lying, it wasn't Wald. So I can only assume Morganty saw someone 100 yards away who strongly resembled the first man. Rather than 23-year-old Carl Wald had Morganty seen 24-year-old Ken Littleton fresh from a murder? Ken would not be seen by anyone else for another 20 or so minutes, at which time Tommy walked into his father's room and found Ken there and watched TV with him. And there was one more thing. I had to think that in order for the mother of Ken's children to participate in a variety of ruses she did, she must have had some suspicion of his guilt. Right? Baker wasn't hard to track down in Ottawa, and just as she'd been 34 years ago, with those cops at her door, she seemed eager to discuss her troubled ex. I had so many questions. This is one question that has been nagging at me. I listened to these tapes of you telling Ken about the blackout and about him confessing. And I just wondered what your motivation could be. You either hate him or— It was terrible. It wasn't to get it. It wasn't to get it in trouble. But you either must really despise him or you had a nagging thought in your head that maybe he'd done it. But why else would you have basically told him— What is number three? Number three is, since I met him in 1982 and saw the uselessness and the torture that went on about this particular case, if he could be free of suspicion, free of feeling guilty, that he actually might be able to recover and live a life. So I can see how people would turn around and say, you must have really despised him. No. I think it was more that I wanted to prove to Jack and Frank that he didn't do it. But I truly believed that he didn't do it and that he would be cleared. I admit I got caught up in helping the police and my judgment about going with Jack's plan was terrible. It was flawed. And there's no doubt that in my pathetic way, I tried my best to sell what I was supposed to sell. You confessed to me. I didn't sell it. He didn't believe me. But he was tortured by this. I mean, it was a classic kind of gaslighting. He was being driven crazy by this idea that he had confessed to you. Well, tell me this. Nobody told Ken until 2002 that he hadn't actually confessed, correct? I have no idea. But didn't you at some point want to call him and say that was all a ruse? You didn't actually confess? Wasn't that something that you thought might be important for him? Good point. I guess I should have. But my life was busy working, dealing with teenagers and the things that they do. And to tell you the truth, I put the whole thing out of my mind. Like I didn't have to deal with them. My son went down when he was 15 and met Ken. And Ken took a dump. Did his number two business in his sister's front yard in front of my son. And after that, I'm guilty of disconnecting with him completely. I guess I was a bitch back then. Mary may say she sure Ken didn't kill Martha Moxley. But a couple of things she told me actually made me somewhat more suspicious of him than I'd been before we spoke. You'll recall from episode two that multiple people aligned the time of Martha's murder with an explosion of dogs barking in the neighborhood. Early in the investigation, when Ken was interviewed by police, he specifically and quite adamantly insisted he'd heard no dogs barking that night. The only noise he'd heard was those rowdy kids, the fracas mentioned earlier in the episode. But by the 90s, barking dogs had become a prominent part of what Ken reported he'd heard when he left the house with the request of the Skickles housekeeper. Odd, no. And then Mary Baker told me this story about a night in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1989 when Ken scared her enough that she called the cops. Ken was going into one of his psychotic modes. He was living with a nice girl, Kimberly. And she was a stripper. And my son and I, who was three, were over at our house. And Kimberly called and said, Ken's really, really mad. He says he wants to come and kill you. So I think I called the Arlington police. But Ken did come by the bottom of the driveway, yell about the dog barking next door. I mean, the things that he carried from that night in the Skickle house, the barking dogs used to set him off. But anyhow, sorry. Kimberly called me. I called him. No, no, no. I'll finish that thought. The barking dogs would set him off. When we next door, our neighbors had a German shepherd. It was awful. He was always saying horrible things to the dog. He was afraid of dogs. The things that he carried from that night in the Skickle house? Mary seems to link Ken's fear of dogs to the night of the Moxley murder. Whoever murdered Martha Moxley would have carried out the attack while Zock, Helenex's dog, agitatedly bark just yards away. This had to have left a lasting impression on our killer. In one of their surreptitiously recorded phone calls, Mary even uses the dog trauma to try to elicit that ever-lose of admission from Ken. It's also crossed my mind that you wouldn't have locked out of that house with dogs outside unarmed. Unarmed? Yeah. Why not? I've never cut fucking Terry to gun in my life. I don't mean a gun. Or I've never been interested in a gun in my life. I didn't say armed with a gun. The only reason I am interested in a gun now is to pull a fucking bullet through my head. What I'm saying to you is that when you told me the story about the dogs and everything else, knowing how you feel about dogs, I can't imagine you going outside without something to beat them off with. So what did I go outside with a golf club? Guess it's possible. Mary never did manage to squeeze a confession out of Ken. But despite what she told me, in those tapes I just don't hear a woman who's entirely convinced that her ex-husband wasn't a murderer. When she was living in Canada and Ken was hundreds of miles away in Massachusetts, Mary was certainly treating Ken as a man capable of anything. I asked her about those messages. Those threats you heard were apparently as chilling to her as they were to me. The kids and I moved back to Ottawa. So he, in one of the calls, I, yeah, he threatened to kill me. And yes, it did scare me. When we moved, I had bars on the basement windows. He scared the kids. They wouldn't answer the phone anymore. After we spoke, one thing nagged at me. How could Mary have been so convinced that Ken didn't kill Martha Moxley, but also be afraid enough of him to put bars on the basement windows? A month after Ken Littleton's failed December 1992 polygraph, Dr. Kathy Morale outlined her assessment of him in a 27-page report for the Connecticut cops. She wrote, The examination of behavior following the crime strongly points to Mr. Littleton. Not only does he engage in violence, much of it directed towards women, his apparent preoccupation with the crime and his theories of how it occurred would typically suggest involvement or guilt. In a section labeled final thoughts, Morale concluded, Ken has to remain the primary suspect unless there is other evidence to support otherwise. But Ken's leaving Greenwich on a rage after that second poly marked the end of Connecticut authorities efforts to indict him. The Moxley investigation once again stalled out. Jack Solomon retired in 1995, and the day after Frank Garretard is a Greenwich detective, he took Solomon's place in the state's attorney's office. Years later, Garret claimed that he was always skeptical that Ken murdered Martha. But the police reports don't do anything to suggest he wasn't just as gonghodu indict Ken as Solomon. It was Gar, in fact, who had located an hired brisantine when Connecticut's polygraph were bowed out. Gar had the unenviable job of listening to all those tapes Mary sent down from Canada. Hours and hours of Ken talking dirty, complaining about his family, and how he was playing American jiggle-o, juggling three women at a time. But inevitably, Ken would return to talking about October 30th, 1975. One night, in 1992, he told Mary his personal theory about someone the authorities had never even once thought to consider. Michael, the motherfucker, says that Tommy is the last one to be seen alive with Martha. But when I went out, he was about 20. What's the dogs? And then Tommy showed up. He wasn't in any way distressed. He wasn't in any way panicked. You know, I always thought he was a nice kid. But for Michael, I always knew him as a bloodthirsty, coked-up motherfucker. He killed me animals on golf courses who shot small birds with double-lots shotguns on hunting grounds. I think Michael committed the whole thing and focused on the attention of his brother to take the attention of himself. Very smart move. Hearing those words, I imagine Gar's head cocked like a spangles. I've often wondered if by sharing his theories, Ken might have inadvertently designated the next one up in the hot seat. Michael had never been a suspect before this point. But he sure would be soon. Next time, on Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley murder. Both Thomas and Michael admitted that they had lied to the police in 1975. I pulled my pants out. I masturbated for 30 seconds in the tray. I know it's just crazy. They kept me thinking I'm nuts. Mr. Skaco's objective was that if we were able to prove that one of his sons committed this homicide, then he would bring his son forward. 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 Sheel's and Rob Heath are producers. Nora Battelle is our story editor, fact checking by Simone Butteau, production assistance by Brendan Weissau, sound designed by Rick Quann and Mark Yoshizumi, 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. This week on Meet the Press, all eyes on Iran, we dig into the latest as the conflict escalates throughout the Middle East. Plus Steve Kornaghi with a brand new NBC News poll as we break down the first primaries of the 2026 mentors. This week on Meet the Press, listen to the full episode now wherever you get your podcasts.