The House of Kennedy Read online

  Even when Joe speaks out on the dual family dramas, it is only to say vaguely, “I view these as private and personal matters,” while acknowledging, “Sometimes in my family it doesn’t always work out that way.” Nevertheless, he states firmly of Michael, “I love my brother very much, I will always love my brother, and I will stand by my brother”—an attitude Vanity Fair deems “Omertà, Irish-American-style.”

  So the question remains: Who leaked to the press?

  Among the Kennedy inner circle, the finger of betrayal is pointed at their cousin Michael Skakel.

  Chapter 50

  Michael Christopher Skakel was born on September 19, 1960, the fifth of seven children. His father, Rushton Skakel Sr. (himself one of seven children in a family that includes younger sister Ethel Kennedy), is left to raise the six boys and one girl as a single parent when their mother, Anne, passes away from cancer at age forty-one in March 1973.

  The Skakel family was already “Greenwich royalty” in Belle Haven, an exclusive neighborhood in the tony Connecticut town, even without the added luster and celebrity that Ethel’s marriage to Robert Kennedy gave them by association. Besides, the Skakels are reportedly even wealthier than the Kennedys, and traditionally Republican, which didn’t change when Ethel married into a Democratic family, not even when her brother-in-law ran for president.

  According to Kennedy biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, Ethel’s brother Jim Skakel says the family “supported Nixon, not Jack, in the 1960 election,” and claims their brother George Jr. thumbed his nose at the Kennedys by handing out the inauguration tickets Ethel gave him to the homeless. In a 1966 piece on George Jr. in the Stanford Daily, William F. Buckley Jr. tells a similar story, but claims that George Jr. felt the Kennedy staff was acting “a little pompously” at the 1961 inauguration, “whereupon he took the seating pass of an august Cabinet member and conferred it ceremoniously on a Negro porter, throwing protocol into utter panic.”

  Ethel and Rushton’s father, George Skakel Sr., “was even more a self-made man than Joe Kennedy,” going from a railroad clerk to owner of the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, one of the largest privately held businesses in the world. Following George Sr.’s 1955 death in a plane crash—and eleven years later, oldest son George Jr.’s—Rushton Sr. takes over as chairman of Great Lakes Carbon, and grows even wealthier.

  Rushton Skakel’s children are known to be ill behaved—a frustrated former nanny who worked for the family in the mid-sixties remarks, “They didn’t like discipline—the kids or the parents”—though this, too, seems in keeping with Skakel family tradition, as Ethel’s brothers were also considered terrors in their Greenwich neighborhood while growing up. However, after their mother, Anne, passes away, “an even more intense level of chaos came to rule our household,” Michael Skakel recalls. He was twelve years old at the time of her death, left with little supervision and an often-absent father who handed his children off to “friends, relatives, servants, a coterie of priests and nuns and a series of live-in tutors.”

  In the fall of 1975, Rushton Jr. is nineteen, Julie is eighteen, Thomas is seventeen, John is sixteen, David is eleven, and the youngest in the family, Stephen, is nine. Michael turns fifteen that September. Their friends and neighbors diagonally across the street are the Moxleys, who moved to the exclusive Belle Haven neighborhood in 1974 with their two teenagers, John and Martha. Martha, who makes friends quickly and is deemed “Best Personality” at her new school, is also fifteen, just a month older than Michael Skakel.

  “You’ve heard it said there was no adult supervision in the [Skakel] house,” remarks former detective Mark Fuhrman. “They had no intelligent supervision whatsoever. It was ‘The Addams Family,’ and the Moxleys were ‘Leave It To Beaver.’”

  On Halloween of that year, Martha is found viciously murdered on her front lawn. “Her killer bludgeoned young Martha with a golf club and then dragged her body nearly 100 yards to hide it,” the New York Times reports in December 1975. It’s a brutal beating, violent and bloody, and the fifteen-year-old was left exposed, her underwear and jeans pulled down, though there’s no sign of sexual assault.

  The murder weapon is discovered to be a rare Toney Penna six-iron, a distinctive golf club, which broke into at least three pieces from the force of the blows. Martha is stabbed through the throat with one of the pieces; another section is never found. The six-iron is revealed to have come from a set that once belonged to the late Anne Skakel, and Martha’s time of death is determined to have been the evening prior. Among the group of teenagers she was last seen with the previous evening—Mischief Night—are both Thomas and Michael Skakel.

  Early investigations glide over the possibility of the teens having any significant involvement, focusing more strongly on troubled twenty-something men like the Skakels’ latest live-in tutor, Kenneth Littleton, though seventeen-year-old Thomas Skakel is also intensely questioned. But despite police efforts, the investigation quickly hits a wall, and decades go by without any arrests in the case.

  * * *

  With a family predilection toward drinking and no one to stop him, by age thirteen, Michael Skakel was already a self-described “full-blown, daily-drinking” alcoholic. At seventeen, in 1978, he’s convicted of drunk driving, and sent by his father to a notoriously harsh teen rehabilitation center in Maine called the Élan School (shut down in 2011), specializing in “tough love and discipline” that attendees liken to abuse. He tries to run away several times, and is ultimately allowed to leave in 1980.

  After that, Michael focuses on sobriety and sports, becoming a strong enough speed skier that he nearly makes it to the 1992 Winter Olympics. He also develops a warmer relationship with his aunt Ethel’s kids, especially David and Bobby Jr., who also struggles with sobriety. “He helped me to get sober, in 1983,” Bobby credits his cousin. Despite the family connection, the Skakels and the Kennedys had not previously been close. “I rarely saw the Skakel boys growing up, and would not have been able to identify Michael or his brothers” until they were all well into their twenties, Bobby Jr. says of his Skakel cousins.

  By 1996 Michael Skakel is twelve years sober and has a reputation for being friendly and nonjudgmental. “His primary passion in life is helping other alcoholics in recovery,” Bobby Jr. states. Ethel’s youngest son, Douglas Kennedy, also vouches for his cousin, saying, “Michael is one of the most honest and open people I know. He cares about people more than anybody I’ve ever met.”

  He also becomes something of a Kennedy dogsbody, working as a driver on Ted Kennedy’s campaign and then with Michael Kennedy at Citizens Energy. Though his official title is ‘Director of International Programs,’ in reality, he is mainly a driver there, too, as well as a travel companion and confidant to Michael Kennedy. As the two spend more time together, Michael Skakel becomes known simply as “Skakel” to avoid confusion with his cousin Michael Kennedy.

  Skakel, whom another Kennedy relative calls “the sweetest human being that you have ever met,” is the sort of person people feel comfortable turning to if they have something awkward to discuss. People tend to confide in him.

  Skakel is who Michael’s wife, Vicki Gifford Kennedy, calls when she finds Michael in bed with the family babysitter. He’s who she entrusts to drive her husband straight to rehab, and the one who takes the heat from Aunt Ethel about the unexpected change in plans. He’s even the one who helps Marisa’s distraught mother, June Verrochi, when she’s found bewildered on the roof of their town house due to “some very disturbing news.”

  “In hindsight, the strangest detail in press reports of that incident was that Michael Skakel had been on the scene and accompanied Mrs. Verrochi to the hospital,” Vanity Fair notes.

  Although maybe not so strange, given that—odd as it may seem—Skakel is also a close confidant of Marisa’s. He’s apparently the one who futilely attempts to discourage the teenager from having a romantic relationship with the much older and married Michael (in fairness, he also tried unsuccessful
ly to convince his cousins to intervene, but “neither Michael nor his siblings seemed to feel a Skakel had any business telling a Kennedy what to do”), and the one who sets Marisa up with a therapist, further incensing his cousin and his aunt. “That is not your place,” Ethel reportedly chastises her nephew.

  “He’s been trying to save everyone, left and right,” Bobby Jr. says of his cousin. “But you know what they do to saviors,” he notes. “They crucify them.”

  Skakel’s attempts at diplomacy are partially why suspicions fall on him as the leak on Michael’s inappropriate relationship with the teen. Plus, Skakel’s known to speak openly at his AA meetings—and quite possibly has been oversharing the details of his cousin’s drama, and someone in one of those meetings likely contacted the media. According to a source in Vanity Fair, “he [the fellow AA member] admitted to me he did [contact the press].” And when authorities come looking for corroboration on the statutory rape accusations, Michael Skakel is the only one willing to talk.

  The family feels betrayed.

  “Nobody can stab you in the back quite like the guy who says he loves you,” Joe Kennedy sneers.

  * * *

  The cold shoulder that the Kennedys turn on Michael Skakel in 1997 in the wake of the babysitter scandal couldn’t have come at a worse time for him.

  While down in Palm Beach, Florida, reporting on the William Kennedy Smith rape trial for Vanity Fair in 1991, author Dominick Dunne heard and repeated a rumor that Willie might’ve been at the Skakels’ home sixteen years earlier, on the night of Martha Moxley’s murder. “I checked it out, and it was a bum rap,” Dunne says—unsurprising, since aside from his aunt Ethel, Willie had never met any Skakels—“but it got me interested in the story again.”

  So interested, in fact, that Dunne goes on to write a bestselling roman à clef inspired by the case, A Season in Purgatory, a novel in which the scion of a Kennedy-esque family covers up the murder of a young woman. In 1996, the book is made into a TV miniseries, sparking further interest in the original Martha Moxley case. At first, Dunne tells the press that he’s convinced Thomas Skakel was the killer, but over time switches his suspicions to Michael. “I firmly believe that Michael Skakel is guilty of this murder,” he tells news outlets.

  More nonfiction books on the case follow shortly, keeping public interest stoked, and even Michael Skakel considers writing a tell-all about his family, going so far as to shop around a book proposal in 1999 under the title “Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean.”

  It backfires spectacularly.

  In January 2000, Michael Skakel is arrested and charged with Martha Moxley’s 1975 murder. Excerpts from taped conversations between Skakel and the ghostwriter he planned to use for his memoir feature heavily in his prosecution. While there are no actual admissions of guilt, prosecutors deem it “a web in which he has ultimately trapped himself.”

  With no physical evidence or eyewitnesses, “the state’s case is entirely circumstantial,” the New York Times points out when the case goes to trial in 2002, yet they convincingly cite opportunity and means, alleging motive as “unrequited feelings” between Skakel and Martha. They also bring in fellow former students from the Élan School, who state that they recall Skakel making oblique confessions to the murder.

  During the monthlong trial, Marisa Verrochi is called as a witness for the defense to rebut testimony from a former roommate of hers who claims that Skakel had attended a party at her condo in 1997 where he joked about committing the murder. Marisa denies that any of that had taken place and confirms to prosecutors that she and Skakel had been “close friends” at the time, and that he’d provided her with support, protection, and comfort during her own scandal.

  Surprising some and thrilling others, Michael Skakel is found guilty of the 1975 murder and given a twenty-year prison term. But in 2013, his conviction is vacated, citing poor representation by his legal counsel. Then in 2016, his conviction is reinstated…and again overturned in 2018.

  “The state of Connecticut had a very, very, very good case, and we absolutely know who killed Martha,” Dorthy Moxley, Martha’s mother, declares in January 2019. “If Michael Skakel came from a poor family, this would have been over. But because he comes from a family of means they’ve stretched this out all these years.”

  “The evidence shows that Michael [Skakel] spent eleven years in prison for a crime he did not commit,” Skakel’s attorney, Roman Martinez, rebuts. “The Supreme Court’s decision rejecting review should end this case once and for all.”

  Throughout his cousin’s trials, Bobby Jr. stands by Skakel’s side, convinced of his innocence. In 2016, he writes a book called Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit.

  “Michael dished some pretty nasty dirt on [the family],” says Timothy Dumas, a Greenwich local and former classmate of Martha’s, and author of the book A Wealth of Evil: The True Story of the Murder of Martha Moxley in America’s Richest Community. “But the Kennedys are known for their loyalty and for drawing together in times of crisis.”

  Chapter 51

  Despite Norfolk district attorney Jeffrey Locke’s willingness to pursue the allegations of statutory rape, if it can be shown that Marisa Verrochi was under sixteen when her sexual affair with Michael Kennedy began, by July 1997 the investigation is dropped due to lack of cooperation.

  The Verrochis release a statement citing fears of the same media hysteria that dogged the William Kennedy Smith rape trial a few years earlier, pointing out how “a protracted investigation and trial, accompanied by unrelenting media coverage, would cause potentially irreparable harm to the victim of this outrageous conduct.” So while “Michael Kennedy has caused us great pain and suffering by his outrageous conduct and his breach of the trust we placed in him as a neighbor and friend,” their priority is their daughter’s “health and well-being [which]…cannot be further jeopardized.”

  Michael’s wife, Vicki, steps in as well, denying any knowledge that her estranged husband committed a criminal act.

  “Without the willing involvement of the victim, there is no basis to proceed further,” Locke concedes, and Michael quickly issues a statement, saying, “I deeply apologize for the pain I have caused. I intend to do all I can to make up for the serious mistakes I have made and to continue to obtain the help I need.”

  Nevertheless, fallout from the revelations about Michael’s illicit relationship with the babysitter continues, sparking more stories in the press about the less-than-admirable behavior of the younger Kennedys in decades past, dredging up David’s death from overdosing, Bobby Jr.’s drug arrest, the jeep accident Joe caused which paralyzed Pamela Kelley. And there’s no denying that a high percentage of the family are admitted alcoholics: “It’s easier to get an AA meeting together than a touch-football team now,” Christopher Kennedy quips.

  But the articles largely ignore how “none of the RFK sisters appears to have suffered a turbulent youth or later moral failings.” In fact, the oldest Kennedy grandchild, Kathleen, has “none of the rakehell appetites of the Kennedy men,” and founder of the Washington Monthly, Charlie Peters, calls her “the embodiment of the best the family represents. She’s stayed loyal to the true faith.” The sisters Michael is sandwiched between, Kerry and Courtney, are both active in humanitarian issues, and Rory, the baby of the family, is a serious documentary filmmaker who focuses on social justice issues. Even reformed addict Bobby Jr. is now described as “messianic” in his impulse to continue his father’s work. “After my father died, I had a feeling I should pick up the torch…er, pick up the flag,” he tells reporters.

  The attitude toward the family is still rather askance after these latest scandals, however, and after examining his poll numbers, in August 1997 Joe Kennedy decides to bow out of the governor’s race. Earlier that year, the president of the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, Samantha Overton, had noted, “Everyone I know was saying Joe Kennedy could just walk right int
o the governor’s office,” but after the “one-two punch” of the annulment and babysitter scandals, women voters are no longer looking favorably on Joe. “I don’t know if he can get beyond it,” she’d cautioned at the time, and it seems Joe agrees.

  The most unexpected media blow comes from one of their own.

  In the September 1997 issue of his pop-political glossy magazine, George, John F. Kennedy Jr. appears to take a potshot at his troubled cousins. In an issue that evokes the Garden of Eden, with a photo of Kate Moss and a snake on the cover and JFK Jr. himself with an apple in the interior (both seemingly nude), the editor’s letter John Jr. writes references “temptation” and “desire” and “the distraction of gawking at the travails of those who simply couldn’t resist.”

  He goes on to specify how “two members of my family chased an idealized alternative to their life” and in so doing, “became poster boys for bad behavior.” Paraphrasing Grandma Rose’s favorite Bible verse, John Jr. writes, “To whom much is given, much is expected, right? The interesting thing was the ferocious condemnation of their excursions beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior. Since when does someone need to apologize on television for getting divorced?”

  Multiple media outlets pick up on the phrase “poster boys for bad behavior” as proof of John Jr. chastising and attempting to distance himself from his cousins. Despite Joe himself having previously appeared on Good Morning America a few months earlier to also decry his brother’s “bad behavior,” he’s clearly miffed at being lumped in with Michael in John Jr.’s magazine, and lashes out: “I guess my first reaction was ‘Ask not what you can do for your cousin, but what you can do for his magazine.’” Kathleen takes a more tempered view, saying of their cousin John, “I think he probably wishes he hadn’t written it. I’m sure he wishes that.”