Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: The Murder of Martha Moxley

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

On the night of October 30th, 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club in the wealthy Connecticut town of Greenwich.On the night of October 30th, 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was beaten to death with a golf club in the wealthy Connecticut town of Greenwich. Her body was found the next morning under a pine tree in her own yard, the broken club nearby traced back to a set owned by her neighbors, the Skakels, a family related by marriage to the Kennedys. Despite the obvious lead, the case went cold for decades. Witnesses changed their stories, evidence was lost, and the family at the center of the investigation continued to live their lives. It took 25 years, a true crime book, and a tenacious investigator to finally bring charges. Even then, the conviction that followed would eventually be overturned, leaving the case in legal limbo. In this episode of Murder: True Crime Stories, host Carter Roy revisits one of the most notorious cold cases in American history, the wealth and influence that shielded a family from scrutiny, and the question that still divides Greenwich today: who really killed Martha Moxley?Head over to our Murder True Crime Stories YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@MurderTrueCrimeStoriesIf you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosYouTube: @murdertruecrimestories

Hi listeners, it's Carter. Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting. I know you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends,

and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. There are places in this country built to keep danger out, houses with gates and guard shacks, high hedges and long private driveways. The whole idea is that if you have enough money, you can wall off the bad things and keep your kids safe. but a gate only works if the dangers on the outside.

And on the night before Halloween in 1975, in one of the richest neighborhoods in America, that promise fell apart. That evening, a 15-year-old girl walked out her front door to have a little fun with her friends. She never came home. The next afternoon, they found her under a tree in her own backyard. She'd been beaten to death with a golf club.

And the trail of evidence pointed straight at the main, mansion just up the road. But knowing who did it and proving it are two very different things. And in this case, it took 27 years to win a conviction. But even then, it still wasn't enough. This is the story of Martha Moxley. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final challenge, arrives far too soon and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder True Crime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios.

New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crime house community. Please rate, review, and follow the show. And for early, ad-free access to every episode, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content.

To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays. I'm covering cases with questions that I cannot get out of my head, the ones where the evidence points in multiple directions, and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Today, I am talking about the murder of Martha Moxley,

who was just 15 years old when her life was cut short in 1975. It's one of those cases where the answer seems obvious, and yet no one has ever been held accountable. Not really. That might be because the prime suspect had ties to one of the most famous families in this country. Or it might be because investigators were looking at the wrong person the whole time. So what really happened to Martha? All that and more coming up. Before Martha Moxley was a headline, before she was a court case, before her name got tangled up with one of the most powerful families

in the country. She was just a kid from California. She was born in San Francisco on August 16th, 1960. She had one sibling and older brother named John, who was two years ahead of her. Her mother, Dorothy, was a stay-at-home mom. Her father was a managing partner at a big global accounting firm, so the Moxley's had money, but that's not the part anyone remembers about Martha. What they remember is who she was. She loved cats and frogs, wrote letters to her friends, and kept a detailed diary. teachers called her quote a ray of sunshine her brother john put it more simply he said she was quote the kind of kid you'd like to be around that was martha's life in california happy settled full of friends but it was about to change in 1974 her family packed up and moved clear across the country to

greenwich connecticut for her dad's work now greenwich isn't just any town it is is one of the wealthiest zip codes in America, home to billionaires, movie stars, even a future president. And the Moxleys didn't just move to Greenwich. They moved to Bell Haven, one of the most exclusive corners of the whole town. It was gated with guard shacks at the entrance and long private driveways. There were tennis courts and swimming pools out back and a members-only yacht club just down the road. The Moxleys settled into a sprawling three-floor mansion with a U-shaped driveway and a big grassy lawn lined with tall trees. That sounds like a pretty great situation, but Martha was still just 14.

You might think that getting uprooted and dropped and all that would be difficult for her, but Martha was a natural extrovert, and she made friends fast, which she happily documented in that diary of hers. Within a year, she was an editor on the yearbook, and playing field hockey and basketball. The new girl had folded right into Greenwich like she'd always been there. Like a lot of kids in Belhaven, Martha got friendly with the family that lived down the road, about 400 feet from her front door. The Skakles. They were old money, big old money.

Their grandfather, George Skakel, had built a company called, Great Lakes Carbon into one of the largest privately held corporations in America and made himself a multimillionaire in the process. They were also tied to American royalty. In 1950, one of the Skakel daughters, Ethel married Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's brother. That made the Skakel kids cousins of the Kennedys. And there were a lot of Skakles, seven kids, six boys and one girl, and despite all their privilege, they also faced their own challenges. Their mother, Anne, had died of cancer two years earlier, and their father rushed him was away a lot.

And because of that, the kids pretty much had the place to themselves most of the time. And two of them were right around Martha's age. Michael was 15, the same as her. His older brother Tommy was 17. For Martha, the Skakel House was. was where the action was. The boys were cute. They had a fancy car in the driveway, and by the fall of 1975, both brothers had taken an interest in her. Michael had a crush on Martha, and that part was obvious to everybody, but it was Tommy, the older one, who'd been flirting with her hard for about a

month, and Martha was flirting back. In one diary entry from that September, she wrote, quote, went driving in Tom's car, and I was practically sitting on Tom's lap. He kept putting his hand on my knee. That was the dynamic going into the end of October, with Halloween around the corner. In Greenwich, the kids had a tradition the night before the holiday. They called it mischief night. It was mostly harmless stuff. Toilet papering trees, spraying shaving cream on mailboxes, lighting a few firecrackers.

That year, the public. school kids like Martha were especially excited because school was closed the next day. On the evening of Thursday, October 30th, 1975, Martha got ready to head out and join the fun. Her mom, Dorothy, told her not to stay out too late. It was a cold night. Frost in the air, leaves coming down, jackal lanterns flickering on the porches. Martha met up with one of her good friends, a 15-year-old neighbor named Helmut. and Ix. Together, they walked over to the Skakel house. When Martha and Helen first knocked, around 7.30, nobody answered. The gardener told them the Skakel kids were down the street, having dinner

at the Belle Haven Club, the private yacht and social club. Their brand new live-in tutor, 23-year-old Ken Littleton, was also with them. So Martha and Helen finally caught up with the Skakel kids back at the house around 9 p.m. Michael piled into the family's Lincoln Continental in the driveway with Martha, Helen, and another neighborhood kid named Jeff Byrne. They were just sitting in the car, listening to music, hanging out. Michael later called it a, quote, moment of closeness with Martha. And then his older brother Tommy slid into the front seat next to her. Whatever moment Michael thought he was having. It was over. Witnesses described Martha and Tommy that night as, quote, pushing back and forth with sexual overtones. Around 9.30, two of the older Skakel boys came out of the house,

19-year-old Rushden Jr. and 16-year-old John. They needed the Lincoln to drive their 17-year-old cousin Jimmy Terry home. So everybody piled out, and the group split up. Michael decided to go along for the ride to his cousin's house, Tommy stayed behind with Martha. Helen and Jeff stuck around for a few more minutes, but Martha and Tommy were so wrapped up in each other that Helen and Jeff started to feel uncomfortable. So eventually, they left and went home. Somewhere between 9.30 and 10, they caught their last glimpse of Martha. She and Tommy were, in one witness's words, falling together behind the fence near the Skakel pool. That was it. That was the last time anyone admitted to seeing Martha Moxley alive.

Around that same time, back at the Moxley house, Martha's mom, Dorothy, heard a commotion outside. The neighbor's dogs were barking. She looked out the window, but all she saw was darkness. Dorothy was alone in that big house. Her husband was way on a business trip, and her son John was out with friends. so she shook it off. At 11 p.m. John came home and Dorothy told him she was getting worried. Martha still wasn't back. He told her not to stress.

Martha would turn up soon. But Dorothy stayed up on the couch anyway, waiting. At some point, she dozed off. When she woke up, it was somewhere between 1.30 and 2 in the morning. Martha still wasn't home. Now Dorothy was scared. She woke John up and asked him to go live. look for his sister. He drove around Bellehaven a couple of times, but didn't see her. That's when

Dorothy started making calls. First, to Helen Ix's house, Helen told her that when she'd left, Martha had stayed behind with Tommy. So next, at around 2 a.m., Dorothy called the Skakel's. The Skakel's only daughter, 18-year-old Julie, picked up. Now, something about that call stuck with Dorothy, Julie answered right away, wide awake, even though it was the middle of the night. She went and got Tommy and got Tommy and brought him to the phone. Tommy said he and Martha had said good night around 9.30 and that he'd gone inside to study. He figured she'd just walked home. Dorothy would call the Skakel house three or four times before the night was over.

At one point, Julie suggested she'd try the cousin's house. where Michael and the older boys had gone. Dorothy did. The cousin's mother answered, but that was another dead end. Finally, at 3.48 in the morning on Halloween, Dorothy gave up and called the Greenwich Police.

Around 4 or 5 a.m., officers started searching for Martha. They kept at it through the morning, behind sheds, around the pools, by the tennis courts. They found nothing. By 8 a.m., Dorothy couldn't take it anymore. She walked over to the Skakel house herself and knocked on the door. Michael answered.

The Skakel kids went to private school, which, unlike the public schools, hadn't closed for the holiday, so he should have been in class. Dorothy later said he seemed hung over. She asked if he'd seen Martha. He said no. So she asked to look inside the family's Winnebago parked in the drive. driveway. There was no sign of Martha in there either. After that, Dorothy went home to wait. By now, word was getting around the neighborhood that Martha was missing, and a few neighbors came over to help. Then, around 12.15 in the afternoon, the back doorbell rang. It was another 15-year-old,

a classmate and neighbor of Martha's named Sheila McGuire. She was crying, but through tears, she told Dorothy she had found Martha. She pointed toward a row of trees at the edge of the Moxley property and said, quote, Martha's there under the tree. Dorothy ran outside across the big grassy lawn and saw it. Her daughter, lying face down in the grass, jeans and underwear pulled down around the knees. For one awful second, it didn't even look like Martha. Martha was blonde, but this person's hair was crimson red. And Dorothy realized Martha's hair was so caked in blood that it only looked that way.

There was no doubt left in Dorothy's mind. Her daughter was dead. A little after 12 p.m. on Halloween, 1975, Dorothy Moxley found her 15-year-old daughter dead under a tree at the edge of her own backyard. What had started as a frantic search for a missing teenager was now a murder investigation. And almost immediately, the evidence started pulling the Greenwich police in one direction.

The first clue was the blood, and there was a lot of it. One of the first Greenwich investigators on the scene, a detective named Steve Carroll, had the same reaction as Dorothy. He couldn't even tell what color Martha's hair was. because it was so caked in red. There were also crimson marks on her thighs that might have been bloody handprints,

but they were too smeared to be sure. As the officers worked their way out from the body, they realized the blood wasn't just where Martha was lying. About a hundred feet away, there was a large puddle in the grass, three or four feet across. Another 40 feet beyond that, near the Moxley's driveway,

was a second pool of blood. Put those three spots together, the body under the tree, the puddle out in the open, the blood by the driveway, and the picture started to form. Detectives believed Martha had been attacked within sight of her own house. Then she'd been dragged across the lawn to the tree and left face down. And here's the part that's hard for me to wrap my head around. All night and all morning, people had been coming and going. from the Moxley House, Dorothy or son John, neighbors, the police. Nobody noticed the blood by the driveway. To be fair, the yard was covered in long, shaggy grass, and piles of dead leaves. So in the dark,

it might have been easy to miss, but the really strange detail is what they didn't find. There were no bloody footprints leading away from the body. No trail? No droplets? It was like, whoever did this had simply vanished. Still, the killer had left one very important thing behind. The murder weapon. It was a golf club, or really pieces of one. Right next to that first big puddle of blood, there was an 11-inch chunk of a golf club shaft,

half hidden under the leaves. Near the driveway, detectives found two more pieces, a smaller section of the shaft and the club's head, When investigators reconstructed it, the picture was brutal. They believed the killer knocked Martha out with one blow to the head and kept going, swinging so hard that the club shattered. Then they used a broken, jagged piece of the metal shaft to stab her in the neck. The autopsy would later estimate Martha's time of death at somewhere between 9.30 and 10 p.m. Right around the time Dorothy heard those dogs barking and that commotion in the dark.

And despite the fact that Martha was found with her pants pulled down, there was no evidence of sexual assault. Still, this wasn't cold and calculated. The sheer overkill told investigators they were probably looking at a crime of passion, something done in a rage. The club itself was also a real lead. It was a specific, somewhat exclusive brand, a Tony Pena six iron. So the police put out an all-points bulletin for the matching set. They didn't have to wait long for a hit. Because Martha was last seen at the Skakel House,

detectives were over there almost immediately talking to the family. Within hours of her body being found, one of the officers noticed something. a set of golf clubs in a barrel by a back hallway. At the time, it didn't set off alarms, but the next day, the police came back for a closer look. By then, the boy's father, Rushden Skakell, had come home early from a hunting trip,

and he gave the detective's permission to inspect the clubs. They were? Tony Pennis. And each one had a little label near the handle that read, Mrs. R. W. Skakel. The set had belonged. to Anne Skakele, Tommy and Michael's mother, who died two years before. But here's what was missing from that set. The Six Iron, the exact club that had been used to kill Martha.

Now, that wasn't proof. Any decent defense lawyer could argue that someone stole the Six Iron. The Skakel Mansion wasn't exactly a fortress, with all those employees coming and going. But it was enough to focus the investigation, squarely on the skakles. And that raised an obvious question. If it was a skakle, which won?

When police went looking for the two brothers closest to Martha's age, they got their first real surprise. Both Tommy and Michael had skipped town. On the morning of November 1st, not even a full day after Martha's body was found, almost everyone in that house cleared out. Michael and Tommy, their brother John, their cousin Jimmy, and the tutor Ken Littleton, all drove more than 100 miles to another Skaco home in upstate New York.

Only Julie and the two youngest kids stayed behind. Tommy came back from Martha's funeral three days later. By then, plenty of people in the neighborhood already suspected that one of the brothers had killed Martha. One of Martha's friends remembered Tommy showing up at a McDonald's where the kids were gathered after the funeral. She said, quote, I remember being really pissed. Like, how dare you show up here? But the police made a decision that would haunt this case for decades. They didn't officially question the Skakel Kids until November 14th, two full weeks after the murder.

Why the delay? we can't say for sure. Maybe the Skakel's money and influence held the police off. Maybe investigators just couldn't believe that a kid from one of Greenwich's best families could do something so savage. Whatever the reason, the delay gave everyone time. Time to compare stories, to clean up, to let memories blur, and in a murder case, those first 48 hours are everything. Once they're gone, they're gone.

they're gone. When the Skakles finally gave statements, the brothers had their stories ready. Tommy said he'd last seen Martha around 9.30, then gone inside to do homework. Michael said he'd ridden to his cousin's house with the older boys, gotten home around 10,30 or 11, and gone straight to bed. The family backed each other up. The brothers who'd driven to the cousin's house vouched for Michael. The ones who'd stayed home vouched for each other. Whatever the police made of it, the Skakles closed ranks.

So suspicion drifted toward the one person in that house who wasn't a Skakel at all. Someone who had only just moved in. Someone with access to those golf clubs. The family's brand new tutor, Ken Littleton. Littleton was 23 years old, a teacher and coach at Brunswick, an exclusive private school in Greenwich that Tommy attended. The Skakels had hired him on the side as a live-in tutor to help keep their house full of kids in line. The timing was almost unbelievable. His very first day living in that house

was the same day Martha was last seen alive. Most of what investigators learned about Littleton has been lost or locked away in police archives over the years. But we know that when he was questioned, he said he and Tommy had been inside watching TV around 10BM and that nothing seemed off. But we also know something strange. Littleton failed a lie detector test, at least twice. Now, polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and we don't know exactly what they asked him. But there was one simple fact about Ken Littleton that kept him from being. the prime suspect.

He didn't know Martha Moxley, but everything about that scene, all that blood, all that fury, said the killer almost certainly knew her. This was personal. So with no connection and no clear motive, the police let Littleton go.

But suspicion kept drifting back to the Skakles. There's one piece of evidence from those first days I haven't told you about yet, one that pointed right back at that house. When police searched Martha's bedroom, they found her diary. One passage in particular jumped out. We heard part of it earlier that September entry about being in Tommy's car, but there was another one. About a week later, on September 19th, Martha wrote, quote,

Michael was so totally out of it that he was being a real asshole. Then a few lines down, she added something that reads almost like a warning. She wrote, quote, I really have to stop going over there. She meant the Skakel House. To a lot of people, that diary sounded like Martha was pointing a finger from beyond the grave. But still wasn't evidence, not the kind you could arrest someone on. The boys had alibis.

They had wealth and a powerful family name on their side. So the case stalled. There were no witnesses, no usable fingerprints or foreign DNA on the clubs, no way to prove who took the murder weapon. Months turned into years. But the Moxleys refused to let Martha be forgotten, offering rewards, keeping her name in the press, with Dorothy holding on to the belief that one day,

someone would answer for it. Then, almost 20 years later, the Skakel's own father tried to clear his family's name once and for all. By the early 90s, the suspicion around the Skakel boys still hadn't faded, and Rushden Skakel was sick of seeing his family in the papers. So in 1992, he hired a private investigation firm called Sutton Associates, a top-tier outfit run by a former FBI agent to dig up another suspect and put the rumors to rest.

It backfired completely. Sutton Associates was good at their job, maybe too good. They went back over every lead and re-interviewed the key players, including Tommy and Michael, who are now in their early 30s. Both brothers pulled a different story

than they had in 1975. Tommy admitted that he hadn't actually left Martha at 9.30 like he'd always claimed. He now said that two of them had spent another 20 minutes together, kissing and fooling around. But it was Michael's new story that was the bombshell. He still said he'd gone to his cousin's house. But now he admitted that when he got home around 1130, he hadn't gone to bed. Instead, he said he'd snuck back out, gone over to Martha's yard, and climbed a tree near her house to throw pebbles at her bedroom window. He also admitted that while he was up in that tree, he masturbated.

He said that when Martha didn't come to the window, he went home around 12.30 a.m. That story was a problem for Michael in more ways than one. It blew up his original alibi about going straight to bed. It also implied that Martha was alive and in her room after the time pathologist believed she'd already been killed. And most damning of all, it put Michael in a tree right at the spot where Martha's body was found. So how did he climb down, go home, and never notice her lying in the grass below? Either it was a staggering coincidence, or Michael had just put himself at the scene of the murder.

Nobody knew what the answer was, but that wasn't the only thing Sutton turned up. The team had also built a psychological profile of the kind of person who could have done this. They said the killer was probably a teenager, 14 to 18 years old, from the same kind of wealthy family as Martha. someone who lived close enough to walk to her house,

who knew her and saw her regularly, someone with behavioral problems at school and at home, and a strong rivalry with a sibling, someone who'd been drinking or doing drugs the night of the murder. When they showed all this to Rushden Skakel, he didn't want any of it to ever see the light of day. He told them to shut the investigation. down. But some secrets don't stay buried. And the most damaging material in this entire case had

come from Michael himself. Over the years, Michael had said some things. In the spring of 1976, just months after the murder, Michael was at a Greenwich Barbershop with his sister and oldest brother. According to court records, he suddenly snapped. I'm going to kill him, apparently in reference to the barber. His sister Julie told him, shut up, Michael. He shot back, quote, why not? I did it before. A year later, Michael was being driven into New York City by the family gardener. On the way, he told the man he had, quote, done something very bad and that he had to either kill himself or leave the country. When the car stopped in traffic on a bridge, Michael bolted for the railing like he was going to jump.

The Gardner grabbed him, put him back in the car, and Michael slipped out the other side and ran for the opposite railing. The Gardner caught him again. Once they were moving again, Michael said that if the man knew what he'd done, he'd never speak to him again. In 1978, after a drunk driving incident, Michael got sent to a place in Maine called the Elon School, an expensive, hardcore facility for troubled teens.

While he was there, Michael talked. One student later testified that Michael told her he'd been drinking the night Martha was murdered and that he couldn't remember what he'd done. He also thought he'd been sent to Elon partly to keep him away from the police and partly because his own family believed he killed Martha. He told another student he'd get away with it because he was, quote, a Kennedy. Now, a lot of these alleged confessions are shaky.

Some came from people with criminal records or histories of substance abuse. Others came from people who said Michael was drunk or high at the time. All of them surfaced years, even decades, after the fact. Michael's lawyers would later argue, not unreasonably, that you can't convict a man of murder on secondhand recollections like that. But there was one statement that was harder to wave away because it came from a recording Michael made himself. In the late 90s, Michael was working on an autobiography.

He'd titled it, Dead Man Talking, A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean. His agent reportedly told publishers, quote, What he has to say will make international headlines. The book never got finished. His own lawyer apparently killed it. But a proposal, an outline, and an audio recording of Michael describing that night got out.

On the tape, Michael described being up in the tree near Martha's house. He said, quote, I pulled my pants down. I masturbated for 30 seconds in the tree. And I remembered thinking, oh my God, I hope nobody's song. me jerking off. Then I woke to Mrs. Moxley saying, Michael, have you seen Martha? I was like, oh my God, did they see me last night? Now, on that tape, Michael never said he killed Martha, but the implications were enormous. Once again, it put him at the scene and tore his original alibi to shreds. And while Michael's own words were piling up, the case got a jolt from a

completely different direction. Rushden had tried to shut the Sutton investigation down, but by then it was too late. The firm had spent years and possibly more than a million dollars on the case. Every investigator had signed a confidentiality agreement. Everyone except a young freelance writer hired just to type up the files. In 1995, that writer leaked at them. Within months, pieces of the Sutton Report were turning up in the press. In 1998, former LAPD detective Mark Furman, a controversial figure from the O.J. Simpson case, built an entire book around the leaked material called Murder in Greenwich. After two decades of near silence, the Moxley case was suddenly everywhere,

and this time, the pressure didn't let up. In June of 1998, Connecticut prosecutors announced a one-judge investigative grand jury would finally review the evidence. On January 18, 2000, an arrest warrant was issued from Michael Skakel, who was now 39 years old. The next day, he surrendered, was charged with murder, and released on a half a million dollar bond. Nearly 25 years after Martha was killed, a Skakel was finally under arrest for it. But at his arraignment, Michael reportedly walked right up to Martha's mother, Dorothy, looked her in the eye and said,

You've got the wrong guy. It took two more years before Michael Skakel actually stood trial. Jury selection began in the spring of 2002, nearly 27 years after the murder. Michael had been 15 the night Martha died, the same age as she was. Now he was 41. And starting with the opening statements, the two sides painted completely different pictures of him. The prosecution described him as a privileged Kennedy-connected teenager who killed Martha in a jealous rage,

furious that she'd picked his older brother over him. Remember, the last time anyone saw him. Martha alive, she was slipping off into the dark with Tommy. That was the prosecution's motive. Plain teenage jealousy. And they brought in witness after witness to lay out Michael's confessions over the years and hammered the fact that his story about that night kept changing. The defenses, Michael, was a troubled but innocent man being scapegoated for a crime decades later because of his famous name. They argued that memories had faded, evidence was long gone, and other people.

His own brother Tommy, or the tutor, Ken Littleton, were more likely the killer. They also attacked the credibility of those witnesses, pointing out the drug use and the criminal records and the inconsistencies. And most importantly, they kept coming back to one fact. There was no forensic evidence linking Michael to the sea. scene. No physical proof. Just words. Then in closing arguments, the prosecution made a choice that people are still arguing about today. They played that audio recording, the one from Michael's book project, but they played the end of it, the part where he says, oh my God, did they see me last night? What they left out was the context, the masturbation,

the sexual fantasy in the tree. Without that setup, the line landed completely differently. It sounded like a man confessing to murder, not a teenager terrified that someone had caught him doing something embarrassing. The defense pushed back hard, pleading with a jury not to send a man to prison on gossip and decades-old hearsay, but the damage was already done. After four days of deliberation,

On June 7, 2002, the jury found Michael Skakel guilty of murder. As the verdict was read, Michael looked stunned. Across the courtroom, Dorothy Moxley and her son John held each other and cried. The one person missing was Martha's father, David. He had died back in 1988, never knowing whether anyone would answer for his daughter's murder. Outside, Dorothy told reporters she'd prayed before court that morning. She said, quote, my prayer started out, Dear Lord, again today like I have been doing for 27 years,

I'm praying that I can find justice for Martha. Then she added, this is Martha's day. This is truly Martha's day. About three months later, Michael was sentenced to 20 years to life. For the Moxley's, it seemed like their ordeal was finally over. But it wasn't, because one person refused to accept the conviction, Michael's cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

At the time, Kennedy was a well-known environmental lawyer. He had no background in criminal defense or politics, but he dug into Michael's Michael's case anyway, and in January 2003, he published a piece in the Atlantic called A Miscarriage of Justice. His biggest objection was that recording, the one prosecutors had played for the jury stripped of all its context. That article eventually grew into a whole book, arguing Michael had been wrongly convicted. In that book, Kennedy pushed a different theory entirely. During Michael's trial, a former classmate had come forward, claiming he knew who really killed Martha. His name was Tony Bryant. In 2003, Bryant told Michael's legal team that on the night

Martha died, he and two friends from New York City had come up to Greenwich to hang out. According to Bryant, one of them had become fixated on Martha during earlier visits. On the train up that night, the two friends supposedly talked about wanting to, in Bryant's words, go caveman on a girl. He apparently described that as hitting a woman over the head, dragging her into the bushes and assaulting her. He claimed they'd found golf clubs in the Skikl's Yard to use. Brian said he'd left and went back to New York before anything happened. but the two days later, the two friends told him they'd done it. But Bryant's story had serious problems.

A respected investigative reporter named Leonard Levitt dug into Bryant's story and came away deeply skeptical. For one thing, Bryant himself had a troubled record, including a conviction for armed robbery. For another, he wouldn't repeat his account under oath. to Connecticut authorities, and no one could corroborate it. On top of that, no one could explain how two strangers from the city could have slipped past Belhaven's guarded gates unnoticed. There's also another detail that's impossible to ignore. One of the men Bryant pointed to was black.

The other was mixed race. This country has a long, painful history of pinning violent crimes on people of color. who turn out to be innocent. Still, in his book, RFK Jr. argued that there was enough evidence to charge the two men. Prosecutors disagreed. A Connecticut court ruled that Bryant's claims weren't credible. They never brought charges because the evidence simply wasn't there.

But even a questionable theory was enough to plant a seat of doubt. And that doubt fed into years of appeal. Here's where the case turns into a roller coaster, so stay with me. In 2006, the Connecticut Supreme Court upheld Michael's conviction, and he stayed in prison. But his team kept fighting. In 2013, after Michael had served more than 11 years, a judge granted him a new trial, ruling that his original defense lawyer had done a poor job. Michael walked out on a $1.2 million bond.

Then the state appealed, and in December 2016, the Connecticut Supreme Court reversed that, reinstating his conviction in a sharply divided decision. Once again, Michael was a convicted murderer headed back to prison. Then it flipped one more time. In 2018, the very same court reconsidered, this time with a new justice on the bench, and reversed itself again. they vacated Michael's conviction and ordered a new trial. In early 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in.

Now, that left the state with a choice, retry Michael Skakel from scratch, almost half a century after the murder, or let him go. For a while, it looked like they'd try again, dragging every aging witness back into a courtroom, reopening all of it for the Moxley's. then in October 2020, on the 45th anniversary of Martha's murder, Connecticut's chief state's attorney stood up in court and made it official. There would be no new trial.

He said the state simply couldn't prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. That was it. The conviction was gone. After all of it, the 27 years to trial, the guilty verdict, the 11 years in prison, Michael Skakel walked away a free man. In the eyes of the law, the murder of Martha Moxley was once again unsolved. Michael, now in his 60s, has never stopped insisting he's innocent, and in late 2023 he went on the offensive suing the lead investigator

and the town of Greenwich for malicious prosecution. He claimed evidence had been hidden from his defense. Martha's brother John said, He still believes. Michael did it. But after the state dropped, the retrial, he told reporters that he and his mother had made peace with it. He said, quote,

His life will never be the same. Mine will never be the same. I wouldn't want to walk a mile in his shoes. So, What are we left with? This is one of those cases where most people who've studied it land in the same place. Although Michael Skakel is innocent in the eyes of the law, he is the most likely person to have killed Martha.

That profile Sutton built, the troubled, well-off teenager who lived nearby and was caught up in a rivalry over her fits him almost perfectly. But there's one loose end that genuinely nags at me. Think about that night. A drunk, maybe high, 15-year-old beat someone to death with a golf club, swinging so hard it shatters. There should have been blood everywhere on his clothes, his hands, and his hair. But there were no bloody footprints leaving the scene and nothing that ever physically tied him to it. Could a drunk teenager really have cleaned up that perfectly?

on his own. A lot of people don't think so, which points to an uncomfortable possibility that whoever did this had help covering it up. Was it an older sibling? The tutor, Ken Littleton? We don't know, and we may never know, in part because of those botched early days.

The boys were gone by the next morning and no one officially questioned them for two full weeks. In an investigation where the trail goes cold fast, that was a wound the case never recovered from. On top of all that, this was 1975, long before the kind of DNA testing that might have answered everything in a single afternoon. You can't help but wonder how differently it might have gone today. If Martha had carried a cell phone,

if those boys' movements could have been tracked, if forensics had been what they are now, maybe we'd finally know. The questions never went away. And in November 2025, half a century after Martha's death, Michael Skakel told his side of the story publicly for the first time. He sat down for a 12-part NBC news podcast called Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley murder.

If you can believe it, the journalist behind it, Andrew Goldman, was the very same writer Robert Kennedy Jr. had originally hired to research and ghostwrite that book arguing Michael's innocence. But Goldman has said that even back then, he was never fully convinced. He spent years re-investigating it on his own. In the podcast, Michael talks about his childhood, how his father's drinking tore at the family, how his dad beat him and blamed him for his mother's fatal illness.

It's a portrait of a damaged kid, and I think it's worth hearing. I also think it's worth taking with a grain of salt. Maybe that's the real danger in a case like this. With the Kennedy name, the appeals, the celebrity defenders, the dueling theories, it's easy for the story to become about everything except the person at the center of it. So let me bring it back to her. Martha Moxley was 15 years old. She loved cats and frogs,

and she filled a diary with the small dramas of being a teenager. She was the new girl who made friends in a single year with a whole life still in front of her. Maybe she'd have been a writer, maybe a veterinarian. We'll never get to find out. Her friends are in their 60s now. When they talk about her, their voices still break. Her mother, Dorothy, passed away in December of 2024, never getting any real answers about what happened to her daughter.

But I'll leave you with the way her brother John described her. He said, Martha was a person who had everything in the world going for her. She was friendly. She was athletic. She was talented in the arts. The kind of kid you'd like to be around. In the end, the courts couldn't give the Moxley's a final answer.

The verdict came and then it went. But that shouldn't be the last word. The real story here was never about a Kennedy cousin or a famous family or a golf club. It was about Martha Moxley. And the people who loved her have spent 50 years making sure the world never forgets her. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected.

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of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Protovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Cassidy Dillon, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Hi, listeners, it's Carter.

Before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to tell you about another podcast I am hosting. I know you'll love. Crime House and A&E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series, The First 48. Each week, I'll take you inside a landmark homicide case, the interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.