Deepening the mystery around the 1975 murder of teenager Martha Moxley, prosecutors in the trial of Michael Skakel said Wednesday that they could not find a document detailing evidence against Skakel’s older brother, who was an early suspect in the case.
The missing document, a 1976 request for a warrant to arrest Thomas Skakel, indicates how confident police were at the time that the older brother, and not the man now on trial, had murdered the 15-year-old Moxley, according to a defense attorney.
Prosecutors countered that the evidence listed on the warrant request was already known and that an arrest warrant was never issued, proving that the evidence was inconclusive. Michael Skakel, 41, is accused of beating Moxley to death with a golf club on Oct. 30, 1975, in Greenwich, where they were neighbors. Like Moxley, he was 15 at the time. The Skakels are nephews of Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, Ethel.
Thomas Skakel, then 17, was the last known person to see Moxley alive.
“He was a hot suspect,” said Thomas Keegan, who led the investigation until 1986, first as chief of detectives for the Greenwich police and later as police chief.
Keegan testified that Greenwich detectives prepared an affidavit listing the evidence against Thomas Skakel to establish that he had murdered the popular teenager. The affidavit was sent to the county prosecutor’s office, which had to approve the request before an arrest warrant could be issued.
The prosecutor denied the request, said Keegan, who is now a South Carolina state representative.
Defense lawyer Michael Sherman told Judge John Kavanewsky that he had asked prosecutors to produce the arrest request in a pretrial filing but had not received it. Susann Gill, an assistant prosecutor, said the request could not be found but that the defense had seen all of the evidence against Thomas Skakel.
“How do I know that without seeing it?” Sherman said. “To say they can’t find it is kind of scary.”
During the nearly 27 years since the murder, other key pieces of evidence have been lost or were never found, including the jeans that Michael Skakel was wearing the night of the murder, which were later found in the Skakels’ garbage but have since disappeared. Also, the shaft of the golf club that was used to bludgeon Moxley was either never found or lost, according to different witnesses at the crime scene.
And in addition to Thomas Skakel, others were considered suspects, including Kenneth Littleton, a tutor who had started work at the Skakels on the day of the murder. Like the older Skakel, Littleton was never charged.
But under cross-examination by Sherman, Keegan said he had sent detectives to Cape Cod and western Massachusetts to check on Littleton’s background.
The case against Skakel is based on reported confessions to friends over the years. Keegan admitted that he once said that the physical evidence against Skakel was “zilch.”
Dr. Henry Lee, a forensics expert who testified in such high-profile cases as the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, told the jury Wednesday afternoon that no direct evidence, such as blood or semen, had been found to link the murder to any suspect.
In a day spent reviewing the details of a case more than a quarter-century-old, lead prosecutor Jonathan Benedict showed the jury a shoe that Moxley was wearing when she was killed. The name “Tom” was written on the shoe. The jury also saw pieces of the golf club, a 6-iron, which fractured into pieces because of the force with which Moxley was struck.
Dr. H. Wayne Carver, the state medical examiner, told the jury that Moxley was struck at least eight times with the golf club, breaking her skull in several places and causing brain injuries and internal bleeding. She was also stabbed three times, apparently with the broken shaft of the club. One of the stab wounds went through her neck.
Following his testimony, Carver refused to speculate about the time of death, a major factor in the trial. The defense claims that the murder took place while Skakel was at his cousin’s house between 9:30 p.m. and 11:15 p.m. on Oct. 30, but the autopsy report said the murder could have occurred as late as 5 a.m. the following morning.
