Jury selection to begin in long-awaited Skakel trial for 1975 death

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GREENWICH, Conn. – The warmth of summer suddenly gave way to an autumn chill and the moon was lost in the overcast sky on that dreadful night in 1975.

A dog barked incessantly. The sound bothers Charles Morganti to this day.

“It was dark, very cold for that time of year,” said Morganti, a special police officer on patrol in the exclusive Belle Haven neighborhood of Greenwich on Oct. 30, 1975. “It had an eerie feeling to it that night.”

Teen-agers were out in force, marking “Mischief Night” – the night before Halloween – with shaving cream, toilet paper and eggs. By Halloween, residents of the gated, shoreline community would be haunted by much more than mischief.

Martha Moxley, a popular, attractive 15-year-old blonde, never made it home Oct. 30. Her battered body was found by a friend the next day under a pine tree on her property.

Murder is rare in Greenwich, one of America’s richest towns. The brutality of the crime added to the shock: Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club and stabbed through the neck with the broken shaft.

For some 25 years the crime was officially unsolved. Then, after several books about the case, a nephew of the late U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, was charged with Moxley’s murder. The nephew, Michael Skakel, has pleaded innocent.

Jury selection for Skakel’s trial starts April 2 in Norwalk. Selecting a jury is expected to take a month or more, while the rest of the trial may take up to two months.

“I think it’s a miracle we’ve gotten this far,” said Dorthy Moxley, the victim’s mother. “I’m getting very anxious. But I feel very confident. I just think we have the right person.”

When Skakel, now 41, faced Mrs. Moxley in court for the first time on March 14, 2000, he told her, “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

The trial will bring the courtroom back to an era when the nation was recovering from Vietnam and Watergate. Patty Hearst’s kidnapping seemed to epitomize the wildness of the times.

But Greenwich was a place apart, especially Belle Haven, a peninsula that juts into Long Island Sound.

“It seemed like nationwide there was a sense of disorder, things falling apart,” said Timothy Dumas, who was coming of age in Greenwich at the time and later wrote a book on the Moxley murder. “Greenwich felt protected. Then Martha was murdered and that changed my whole notion of feeling insulated from the confusion that was happening.”

While the country was in turmoil, Christy Kalan remembers lighter moments. She and Martha listened to Elton John and Led Zeppelin albums and hung out on long hot summer nights at a favorite spot near Kalan’s house.

“We just had so much fun sitting on this stupid gray electrical box,” Kalan said. “We used to sing all the time – we were kind of goofy.”

Kalan and Martha became instant friends when they met in the ninth grade at Western Junior High School, where Martha was voted best personality. Kalan and Martha would pool hop and sneak a beer when they could.

“She was so full of energy and so full of life,” said Kalan, now a 41-year-old resident of New York.

The teens left numerous notes in each other’s locker every day about boys and grades. Martha’s notes would always start: “The most exciting thing happened today …”

“She just had so many things to say,” Kalan said. “Everything was fun.”

Dorthy Moxley tries to cherish the pleasant memories of her daughter.

“She was just a really wonderful daughter,” Moxley said. “I try not to think of all the things I’m missing out on because she’s not here.”

Many Greenwich residents – including police – had a hard time believing one of their own could murder Moxley.

“Somehow it pierced their world in a way they didn’t want pierced,” Kalan said. “It was messy and they didn’t want it to mess up their world.”

An early theory: An outsider came in from the Connecticut Turnpike and committed the murder.

But the murder weapon was traced to a set of golf clubs owned by Skakel’s mother, whose death from cancer in 1973 had devastated the family. The Skakels, neighbors of the Moxleys, were a rich but troubled family.

Martha, teen-age brothers Thomas and Michael Skakel, and other teens listened to music that night in a Lincoln Continental belonging to the Skakel family. Thomas Skakel, 17 at the time, was an early suspect; he was apparently the last person seen with Moxley.

Authorities say both Skakel brothers were romantically interested in Moxley, whose family had moved to the town about a year earlier from California. Kalan said Moxley didn’t seem to have much interest in either brother.

Police were unable to solve the crime, leading to criticism that authorities showed too much deference to a wealthy and connected family in the crucial early stages of the investigation.

Rather than obtain a search warrant, police initially relied on the cooperation of Skakel’s father, Rushton, and his daughter, Julie.

A police report in 1975 underscored the approach: “Mr. Skakel and Julie advised the investigators that they would make a thorough search of the house in an attempt to locate the golf clubs and advise the department of their findings.”

Rushton Skakel is the brother of Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, Ethel.

Intrigue surrounded the case for decades. Thomas Skakel was never charged. He retreated to a town in the Berkshires where Norman Rockwell painted America at its most innocent.

Suspicion eventually turned to his younger brother, Michael, who like Moxley was 15 at the time of her slaying. Michael changed his alibi when interviewed by Sutton Associates, a private investigative firm hired by his family in the early 1990s to clear the brothers.

Skakel originally told police he saw Moxley at his house early in the evening, and left about 9:30 p.m. to go to his cousin’s house.

But Skakel told Sutton Associates that he went outside after returning home. He said he climbed a tree near the Moxley home, yelled at a window he thought was Martha’s bedroom, then masturbated in the tree.

Michael Skakel would have years of personal troubles, including substance abuse problems that landed him at the Elan School, a private treatment center in Poland Spring, Maine, in the late 1970s.

While there, authorities say, Skakel admitted to the killing. Gregory Coleman, a key prosecution witness, admitted at a pretrial hearing that he was high on heroin when he told the grand jury that Skakel confessed while the two attended Elan.

But he stood by his testimony that Skakel once told him: “I’m gonna get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy.”

Coleman died of a drug overdose last year in Rochester, N.Y. His wife is on a list of prospective prosecution witnesses.

Skakel was arrested in January 2000 after a one-judge grand jury investigated the case. Trying him is expected to be a challenge because of the age of the case and the credibility of some witnesses.

Pretrial hearings suggest prosecutors will call witnesses who say Skakel confessed or at least made incriminating statements. According to the arrest warrant affidavit, Skakel threatened in 1978 to jump from the Triborough Bridge in New York City, saying he had done something bad.