Benedict’s coup de grâce was Michael’s own voice appearing to admit the murder. During his last 10 minutes Benedict unveiled a dramatic and sophisticated multimedia display that legal analysts afterward criticized as deceptive, prejudicial, and unethical. Video PowerPoint presentations were a novel device in criminal prosecution at that time. In recent years, they have become more common, as prosecutors recognize their unmatched capacity to sway juries. According to Wired magazine, at least 10 times between 2012 and 2014, US courts reversed criminal convictions because a prosecutor violated the rules of fair argument by using deceptive PowerPoint presentations of the kind that Benedict pioneered at Michael’s trial. In many other cases, appellate courts have criticized the device without reversing.
A picture is worth a thousand words and Benedict’s video utilized well-known strategies borrowed from the PR industry for subconscious persuasion. An Oregon court threw out a conviction in 2016 because prosecutors used an unflattering security camera photo of the defendant, which the court described as “a calculated device employed by the prosecutors to manipulate the Jury’s reasoned deliberation and impair its fact-finding function.” Benedict did far worse.
The story of Martha’s brutal murder was Benedict’s soft-shoe warm-up to his main act. By artfully cutting and pasting Michael’s recorded conversations with ghostwriter Richard Hoffman, Benedict transformed Michael’s words into a phony confession that would eclipse all the gaping cavities in his two scenarios.
Michael’s reedy voice filled the courtroom: “I got home and most of the lights were out. I was walking around the house, nobody was on the porch. I went upstairs, my sister’s room, her door was closed, and I remember that Andrea had gone home.” It was Michael telling his account of his actions after returning home from Sursum Corda on the night of Martha’s murder. I’d heard that story probably a dozen times since we started hanging out in the early 1980s. It was a strange story that Michael probably should have kept to himself. But those who know him understand that Michael is incapable of keeping anything to himself. He’s utterly without guile. Everything in his head registers instantly on his huge expressive face and then explodes, volcanically, from his mouth. He’s a talker, an over-sharer—oddly, it never gets tedious; Michael’s palaver is an overflowing stream of clear and honest emotion and charming, stark, and often awkward honesty.
The account went like this: drunk and stoned, Michael snuck out of the house shortly after returning from Sursum Corda. First, he visited the Walsh Lane cottage to see the “nudie lady,” but she had closed shop for the night. Then he got another plan. Benedict played the tape so Michael could be heard saying. “I said, ‘Fuck this. Martha likes me. I will be bold tonight.’ You know, booze gave me … courage again.” Michael told me he decided he would see if he could wake Martha. He climbed a tree in front of her house, called her name, and threw a few pebbles at what he thought was her window. He got no response. So he masturbated in the tree for a short period. He did not reach orgasm. He immediately felt foolish, and guilty, and it dawned on him that someone in the house might spy him “playing pocket pool.” The thought filled him with horror so he clambered down and sprinted home.
Benedict, in his audio-visual presentation, omitted the context of this story. He removed from his audio Michael’s reference to masturbation and instead superimposed Michael’s inculpatory statements about feeling guilty on top of gruesome pictures of Martha’s slain body, to make it seem that Michael was confessing to murder. For this video finale, the state of Connecticut paid WIN Interactive, a Massachusetts firm specializing in multimedia trial presentations, $67,000 to edit snippets of Hoffman’s Dead Man Talking recordings to formulate what sounded like a murder confession.
In his 1998 taped interview with Hoffman, Michael had described his reaction when Dorthy Moxley awakened him on Halloween morning. He was asleep in his street clothes, hung over and dazed. Benedict projected a picture of a smiling Martha on a screen in the front of the courtroom, with Michael’s words alongside them: “Then I went to sleep and I woke up to Mrs. Moxley saying, ‘Michael, have you seen Martha?’” Michael did not know that Martha was dead. In fact, no one then knew except the murderer or murderers. “I … was still high from the night before, and a little drunk and I was like, ‘Oh my God, did they see me last night?’” But in a bait and switch, Benedict had surgically deleted the contextual words that Michael actually spoke on the tape, describing why he was afraid he had been seen at the Moxley’s house: “Oh my God, I hope to God nobody saw me jerking off.” Benedict changed the photo from the vital, smiling Martha, to a gory crime scene photo of her crumpled, blood-soaked body, in order to suggest to jurors that Michael was describing his murder of Martha. Suddenly, Mrs. Moxley, seated right behind the jurors, let out a pained wail and doubled over in her seat. She had absented herself from the courtroom during much of the crime scene testimony. Her horror was heart-wrenching. Michael’s voice continued: “And I am like, I don’t know, I am like and I remember just having the feeling of panic like, ‘Oh shit,’ you know, like my worry of what I went to bed with, I don’t know. You know what I mean? A feeling of panic.”
It’s been illegal for over 30 years for prosecutors to write across an exhibit in red ink. But Benedict employed new technology to do something far more powerful and prejudicial. As the prosecution played the audiotape, Michael’s words appeared on a giant screen, turning red and exploding in size. Each time Michael said the word “panic,” the display flashed another crime scene photo of Martha’s body. Many observers, including Dunne, credited Michael’s conviction to this dramatic summation.
Sherman, who should have been out of his seat objecting to every third line of Benedict’s closing, appeared to be as transfixed as the jurors by Benedict’s bedeviling horror show. As usual, Sherman didn’t move a muscle. As Benedict hit his climax, Michael began to stand, saying to Sherman, “This is bullshit. They are putting words in my mouth.” Sherman grabbed his arm and said, “Yes … but they can do that. It’s legal.”
When the courtroom lights went back on, all of the many defects in Benedict’s scenarios didn’t matter; the lack of evidence against Michael no longer mattered; the conflicting theories of the case didn’t matter; reasonable doubt no longer mattered; the fact that Benedict hadn’t proven his case didn’t matter.
The grieving mother, the ugly portrait of Michael, the gruesome photos, the cut-and-paste audio-video confession provided all the razzle-dazzle that would be necessary to sway the jury into forgetting about reasonable doubt. “Could you ask the defendant to draw you a more incriminating picture?” Benedict asked of the jurors with sly earnest.
In 2008, in a CBS News reexamination of the Moxley case on 48 Hours, Lesley Stahl confronted Benedict about how he had “rescued” a weak case by slicing and dicing snippets of Michael’s innocent yammering into a fabricated confession. “If I did this,” Stahl told Benedict, “I’d be fired.” Hoffman, the author who’d recorded Michael’s words, couldn’t believe the deceptive audio editing Benedict had employed. “The prosecution perjured themselves when they spliced that tape,” he says. “But that’s of a piece with this long media assault on Michael’s character, making him the fall guy for the perception of what those rich Kennedys had gotten away with so many times in the past, Chappaquiddick and William Kennedy Smith. The whole thing was an emotional manipulation from the start because they had no facts, no forensic evidence, and no witnesses. So how else can you convict him? You have to just convince people that he’s just a fat, smug, rich kid, and murdering girls is what fat, smug rich kids do.”
In the grand scheme of the sins committed in this case’s history, Benedict’s abhorrent closing, I discovered, was actually a minor one. The rot went so much deeper than even I could imagine. The case against Michael was an artifice of lies. And the foundation was the falsehood that Michael Skakel is a Kennedy.
CHAPTER 3
Skakels and Kennedys
The first words he ever
said to me was, “I’m going to get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy.”
—Greg Coleman, resident of the Élan School with Michael, heroin addict, and prosecution witness, to a Rochester, New York, television station in 2001
Michael Skakel likely never would have gone to prison had the press, police, and prosecutors not been able to portray him as a “Kennedy cousin.” It was a false characterization from the moment Dominick Dunne and Mark Fuhrman first deployed it in 1997. (Nor did Michael write or approve a draft in 1998 for a book proposal by Richard Hoffman employing the term “Kennedy cousin” in its title.) Building on the Dunne–Fuhrman narrative, prosecutor Jonathan Benedict portrayed Michael as a monstrous fiend using the Kennedy name and connections to get away with murder. However, Michael never identified himself as a “Kennedy cousin” or rode on his relationship with the Kennedys—and for good reason.
The gulf between the Skakel and Kennedy families was always wide and deep; there was so little contact between our families that neither I nor any of my Kennedy siblings or cousins knew Michael Skakel in 1975. I wouldn’t even have recognized any of my Skakel cousins at that time. The Skakels never saw themselves as satellites within the Kennedy orbit; they didn’t need to. They had a distinctive family history with their own iconoclastic gestalt and greater wealth than the Kennedys. My mother’s generation of Skakels prided themselves on being the anti-Kennedys. They were rough and ready carbon Republicans with seasoned contempt for the nanny-state, regulating, soak-the-rich sort of government they imagined the Kennedys promoting. Among their crowd, any association with the Kennedys was a kind of social demotion. “The Skakels and Kennedys were like the Hatfields and the McCoys,” recalls Michael.
George Skakel, my maternal grandfather, the second of four children, was born in 1892 and grew up on a homestead near the South Dakota prairie town of Tyndall. George’s pedigree was Scotch-Irish and his persuasion was a particularly severe version of Dutch Reform Protestantism. He remained embarrassed by profanity and off-color stories until his death. By all accounts, alcoholism ran through the Skakel clan back to the Neanderthal era. Angry at his father’s excessive drinking, Grandpa George ran away from home at age 14, riding the rails to Chicago to seek his fortune.
With his father’s example as an admonition, Grandpa remained a teetotaler for most of his life, giving testimony to the old saw that “God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from conquering the world.” Grandpa had ambition, determination, and an entrepreneurial spirit. These qualities, along with a gift for numbers, a photographic memory, and a near-reckless appetite for risk, would make him one of the wealthiest men of his generation. My mother, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, remembers him being grounded emotionally and spiritually, saying he “had a quiet, gentle disposition. His personal humility reflected humble origins. His most striking quality was his generosity. He couldn’t bear to see suffering and he always had a hand out for people in need.”
After a short stint working for the railroad, he quickly found a job with the William Howe Coal Company, a coal distributor. In 1917 he married Ann Brannack, a tall Irish Catholic from Wabash Avenue on Chicago’s tough South Side. Her grandparents on both sides had sailed from Ireland in 1848, at the height of “the starvation” that killed 750,000 Irish and made refugees of millions more. Grandma Ann was loud, brash, and half a foot taller than her husband. She blasted up prayers to the Almighty for hours each day and cheerfully catechized everyone within earshot. She attended daily mass with a fervor that my mother and her brothers would inherit.
My mother described Grandma Ann—using more flattering words—as a striver, who was forever laboring long hours without complaint to better herself and her circumstances. She was an entrepreneur whose many business ventures in later life included the St. Paul’s bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and a consignment store under the elevated railroad on the Lower West Side called “Lots O’ Little.” Out of high school, Grandma Ann attended a secretarial academy she found advertised on a match book. Poor health soon drove her from the febrile Chicago slums to work on a South Dakota Indian Reservation, teaching English to tribal children under Catholic Church patronage. She returned to Chicago a year later “fit as a fiddle” and met George Skakel, who, though initially repulsed by her muscular Catholicism, ultimately surrendered to her garrulous personality and bulldog determination. They married on November 25, 1917, in a Catholic ceremony at St. Mary’s Church in Chicago. A decade later, George had seven children, three sons and four daughters, all living at 57th and Woodlawn, Chicago’s most Catholic neighborhood, with his fervent mother-in-law and equally zealous wife.
The drinking flowed from both sides of the family into my mother’s generation. Ann’s dad, Joseph Brannack, a jut-jawed Irish cop, was a giant with appetites to match. His thirst for whiskey scared off his Irish-born wife, Margaret Brannack, who fled soon after her daughter’s nuptials and spent the balance of her life with Ann and her son-in-law George Skakel. In her dotage, afflicted by the same genial species of dementia that would ultimately take my Uncle Rucky, she would stuff her stockings with fruit and persuade herself that she was Admiral Nelson. The first time my father met her, she shouted from the second story, “Who goes there?” My father, late of the US Navy, answered, “Lieutenant Kennedy. Permission to come aboard?” She slid down the bannister to formally greet him with peaches and bananas tumbling from her undergarments.
GRANDPA GEORGE enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1918 and became an officer, even though he lacked a high school diploma. He trained in Cleveland, Ohio, and served eight months as a Navy ensign during World War I, docking tugboats in New York City. He came home on Christmas Day 1918, so destitute that his only suit was his navy uniform, in which he returned to work at William Howe. St. Ambrose Church provided the neighborhood’s social and cultural gravities. My mother, George and Ann’s fifth child, still recalls both the poverty and happiness of her early youth.
Using his gift for numbers—my mother remembers him easily multiplying seven-digit numbers in his head—George recovered $50,000 for William Howe after discovering that the railroads had been cheating the coal company on hauling fees during the war. When the corporate brass refused him his commission for the recovered fortune, he quit, swearing to never work for a boss again.
George persuaded two fellow employees, Walter “Wally” Graham and Rushton Fordice (for whom my Uncle Rucky would be named), to cast their lots with his. Each contributed $1,000 to a joint pool and vacated William Howe on the same fateful day to launch their own coal brokerage. They named their venture the Great Lakes Coal and Coke Company and, later, Great Lakes Carbon (GLC). Great Lakes adopted the perilous course of buying and selling only extremely large quantities of the highest quality coal, a strategy for which both the coal sellers and their buyers, the large oil refiners, rewarded them with preferred pricing. Graham’s father-in-law was a senior executive at Standard Oil Company, which became their first customer.
Grandpa George spent his career in the world’s most polluting industries, leaving, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “foul dust arising from the wake of his dreams.” While pollution probably didn’t trouble him as a moral transgression, his genius was in reducing it by devising schemes to monetize the industry’s abundant waste. Mining companies customarily abandoned coal dust in mountainous heaps around their mines. When the piles of so-called “fines” grew inconveniently large, the companies plowed them into the nearest river. Grandpa foresaw that, during the periodic coal strikes, fines might be profitably marketed to individuals and industries desperate to fire empty furnaces. He contacted mine owners across coal country proposing to buy nuisance fines for five cents a ton. Great Lakes Carbon collected thousands of tons of the stuff and, when the United Mine Workers finally struck, Grandpa sold the fines for over six dollars a ton, a bargain for oil refineries desperate for fuel.
Even though George never made it past grade school, he devoured books on metallurgy and chemistry, geology and business.
Browsing through Business Journal, he learned of the exploding worldwide appetite for the pure carbon needed to create aluminum for the burgeoning aviation industry. He knew that pure carbon could be gleaned from petroleum coke (petcoke), a waste product of cracking oil into gasoline. As with coal fines, the oil industry’s solution for ridding itself of alpine heaps of refinery waste was a bulldozer and a local river. Grandpa signed 99-year contracts with Standard Oil and its competitors to purchase all those companies’ petcoke for pennies per ton. In this way he obtained a virtual monopoly on petcoke just as commercial aviation was leaving the runway.
Over the next decade, Great Lakes Carbon sold millions of tons of petcoke in the eastern United States as a substitute for coal in domestic heating, and to the electrochemical and metallurgical industries. In 1935, George and his partners spent $50,000 constructing a giant calcining furnace to refine petcoke, in Port Arthur, Texas. They had the notion to sell the purified version, thereby relieving aluminum companies of an extra step in their manufacturing process and enabling the production of aluminum of unrivaled strength. They quickly persuaded Alcoa, Reynolds, Kaiser, and the other major aluminum companies to purchase their product. They bragged that their Port Arthur oven made $50,000 every six weeks thereafter.
During World War II, George purchased a large region of Moab, Utah, hoping to find uranium. He didn’t, but like nearly everything he touched, the venture turned to gold when he struck oil. The easy profits that flowed from his gushing wells prompted my famously laconic grandfather to utter one of the longest sentences anyone recalls him speaking: “Why didn’t I get into this racket earlier?”
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 8
