Seven-year-old Michael Skakel was among nearly a million Americans who attended my assassinated father’s funeral in June 1968. I was 14. Neither of us recalls meeting each other. Michael’s mother, age 42, died in an agonizing death from brain cancer a year later.
My mother’s youngest brother, Rucky, was confident that he was immune from the dementia that ran through the Skakel family. “I already had that,” he once told me, thoughtfully. “And I don’t think you can catch it twice.” His confidence was misplaced. He died of the disease in 2003, at age 79.
Prior to 1981, I only recall seeing the Skakels once—in June 1965. I have only a distant memory of that day when I briefly visited them at 71 Otter Rock Drive, the house in Belle Haven that became central to the Moxley case. Uncle Rucky bought it in the 1960s with his wife, the former Ann Reynolds. Aunt Ann, another Manhattanville graduate, hailed from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Winnetka, and was as devout a Catholic as Rucky. I was 11 years old when I rode in a trailer from Hickory Hill to join my family in Hyannis Port for summer vacation. We stopped in Greenwich—the halfway point—for the night. It was my first introduction to Rucky Skakel’s children. I only recall that there were a lot of them and they seemed wild. Michael would have been 5 years old. I have no memory of him. In 1975—at the time of Martha’s murder, I would not have recognized him, and at that time in his life, Michael had no recollection of ever having met a Kennedy.
Politics probably played second fiddle to the Skakels’ maverick nature as the force that kept the Skakels and Kennedys apart. “It wasn’t just that your family were Democrats,” explains Rush Jr. “Even without the political differences, I doubt we would ever have seen you guys. That older generation of Skakels were unbranded iconoclasts. They were right-wing Bohemians—totally individualistic. They liked to keep to themselves. They didn’t mingle. They had such huge personalities and they were all so volatile and competitive. Even if they liked your politics, they wouldn’t have liked the rivalry. They all seemed to agree to love each other from a distance—and the farther the better. That’s why Jimmy moved to California and Aunt Pat to Ireland—to get away from their siblings. They were outsized characters too large to share the spotlight. They needed open range.
“We didn’t see you until we all got mobile and found each other,” Rush continues. “I didn’t know Uncle Jimmy’s kids growing up and I never went to the Terrien/Dowdles, even though they lived in the same town. I didn’t know them until I was 16 and I started riding my bike over to the fortress at Sursum Corda to see the Dowdle kids. The parents made no effort to put us together.”
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we all began finding each other and discovering that we had a lot in common. My little brother Max met Michael and Rush Jr. by chance in 1978, while skiing at Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. The following year, my brother Michael Kennedy heard he had a Skakel cousin attending the Élan School in Poland, Maine. My brother, who was on his way to run Maine’s Kennebeck River with a group of friends, stopped by Élan to meet his cousin for the first time and invite him kayaking. Surveying Élan’s vacant-eyed inmates, Michael Kennedy added uncertainly, “You can bring your friends.” Michael Skakel remembered the visit with a smile. Shaking his head he said, “He had no clue what he’d walked into! He looked like he’d just blundered into the Thunderdome.” It quickly dawned on Michael Kennedy that he had stumbled into some kind of squalid and sinister reform school. Shocked, he asked Michael Skakel, “What are you doing in here?” The visit caused an uproar. Élan inmates and counselors recognized Michael Kennedy and realized, for the first time, that Michael Skakel was some species of Kennedy relative. Despite having been at Élan for months, he had never told anybody of the connection. The counselors accused him of putting on airs. “I took a big pounding after Michael [Kennedy] left,” Michael recalls.
We all shared the Skakel sense of fun and a love for the outdoors. At that time, most of the boys from both families were getting sober. Michael has five brothers—all soft spoken, handsome, and athletic. Initially, I became closest to his brother Rush Jr., with whom I share a birthday. The brothers, for the most part, did not adopt their parents’ right-wing politics. They were smart, funny, kind, considerate, and unassuming—never ostentatious, even though, in our company, they had a lot they could have boasted about. Each of the Skakel boys was a gifted athlete excelling at the same sports the Kennedys loved.
The first time I remember meeting Michael was in the early winter of 1983. He was recently sober. Michael had graduated from Élan two years earlier, in June 1980, at age 19, with a high school diploma he hadn’t earned. “I was hardwired to drink myself into oblivion every day,” he told me. “The moment I left Élan, I was back in the bottle with a vengeance. My drinking was worse than when I got locked up. I felt as if my alcoholism had been doing push-ups the entire two years that I was dry in Élan.” His discovery that year of cocaine accelerated his free fall. He flunked out of Bradford College and lost his job in the computer room at Great Lakes Carbon. “I was still in denial,” he says. “I thought my only drinking problem was that I had two hands to hold bottles and only one mouth.”
On October 25, 1982, a month after his 22nd birthday, Michael believes that God spoke to him. He was driving on North Street in Greenwich when he heard a voice ask, “Do you want to keep doing this your way?” A vision of blackness and death flooded his mind, and he watched himself plummeting into a pit. The voice continued, “Or do you want to do it my way?” at which time, a comforting image of a solitary flame replaced the grim spectacle. “I believe it was the Holy Spirit in the car,” he says. “I didn’t tell anybody for 10 years because I was embarrassed. I thought people would think me crazy.” A half hour after seeing the vision, he walked into his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Michael has been drug and alcohol free for the 34 years since.
His life improved immediately. He cofounded and funneled the entirety of his savings—$50,000—into The Serenity Project, a program that helped expose the abuse at Élan and contributed to alumni efforts to finally shut it down. “I didn’t want one more kid to go through the hell that I went through.” He volunteered for Mother Theresa’s men’s shelter in the Bronx. When Mother Theresa visited the facility, Michael gave her a bear hug and lifted her off her feet. “I later read that she abhorred being touched,” confesses Michael sheepishly. He was also working with the crisis intervention team at Greenwich Hospital and making regular presentations about substance abuse through an outfit called Freedom from Chemical Dependency (FCD) to students, parents, and teachers in classrooms in Darien, New Canaan, and Greenwich. After finally receiving a proper diagnosis for dyslexia, he enrolled in Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, which offers a special program for students with learning differences. In 1990, he graduated with honors.
I got sober in September 1983, a year after Michael. I lived in Mt. Kisco, New York, only 10 minutes from Greenwich. Michael became one of my closest friends and we spent much of the time over the next 15 years in each other’s company. We skied, fished, hiked, camped, scuba dived, and traveled together, often with my wife and children. During that time, I sometimes spent as many as two or three weekends a month with Michael. I brought my children to the Skakels’ ski house in Windham, New York, almost every weekend in the winter. We all slept in the bunk room, ate pizza, and skied all day. Together, we taught my six kids to ski, starting when they were 2 years old. My children adore Michael. His natural gentleness, his humor, and his childlike vulnerability give him an easy manner with children. His gift for communicating with kids and making them laugh and his genuine love for playing with them make him a popular favorite among their many fun and funny older relatives. Children appreciate that he is never overbearing, pretentious, or phony.
During that time Michael and I attended hundreds of 12-step meetings together. Every evening at Windham we put my kids in front of a VCR and spent the next hour in some church basement. I got a kick watching Michael inspire laughter reci
ting his wild stories of addiction and recovery. He shares his experience, strength, and hope with openness and raw, soul-wrenching honesty that melts hearts, cheers program veterans, and encourages newcomers. Michael’s natural generosity and openheartedness mesh perfectly with the 12-step formula of service. After nearly every meeting, I watched him seek out and comfort the most shattered or bereft newcomers. He scribbled his telephone number on napkins and AA’s big books and then spent hours on the phone comforting fragile and hopeless neophytes, helping them make it through the often despairing days of early recovery. Together, we would pick them up for meetings or sit with them in diners to work through the hard days or nights.
Rather than being bitter or self-pitying over a difficult, often-brutal childhood and his two-year nightmare in Élan, Michael had transformed those years of torture, neglect, and abuse into his greatest capital asset: empathy. Michael is hypersensitive to suffering in others. I’ve watched his openness about his own struggles alleviate pain and inspire courage in recovering alcoholics. That’s not hyperbole. During his sentencing proceedings, 90 people would send letters to the court supporting Michael, with 18 of these attesting that Michael Skakel’s moral support and guidance kept them sober. Many of them, including his brother Stephen, said that Michael had saved their lives.
Michael is among the most solidly spiritual people I’ve ever met. He always carries a rosary and prays it daily. (In prison, he prayed three rosaries on his knees at 3:30 p.m. every afternoon.) During the first decade of our sobriety, we often attended mass together daily. Michael’s deeply held religious beliefs and faith in God infuse his every action. He is always trying to do “the next right thing.” Yet he lives his beliefs and he practices his religion quietly.
Don’t get me wrong; we weren’t spending all day in church or meetings. Despite his bulk, Michael, like his brothers, is a graceful and gifted athlete. Like his brother Rush, he is a superb skier. In 1990, Michael qualified for the US World Cup team for speed skiing and earned sponsorships from Swix Wax and Swanee Glove. He was named to the US National Speed Ski Team in 1993 and represented America on the World Cup circuit for the next four years. He landed among the top 10 competitors in World Cup tournaments in Sweden, Norway, and France. In 1997 on the legendary track at Les Arcs, Michael clocked 136 mph. He finished that year ranked third in the United States and 18th in the world. He was 26 years old.
Michael always dresses well. Usually he is in outdoor gear, neat and well-groomed, wearing hunting pants and a sweater, with tweeds that evoke his rustic Celtic heritage. Contrary to the malicious press reports, he has never worn an ascot. He is indeed the opposite of a snob. Humble and hilarious, devoid of pretense or vanity, he is curious about everyone and comfortable in every company. He is nearly always the butt of his own jokes.
Almost nothing the prosecutors said or the press wrote about Michael during the trial was true. No one ever deserved the label of “monster” or “this spoiled brat” less than Michael Skakel. Michael is constitutionally honest and a natural-born gentleman. At all times, he is self-effacing, generous, and unfailingly courteous, as exhibited with his impeccable manners: opening doors for everybody, standing when a woman enters the room, and holding their chairs when they sit or stand. After his trial, jurors complained that Michael had endeavored to ingratiate himself by standing when they entered the courtroom. He wasn’t trying to flatter. Courtesy is his nature.
During a visit to Loblolly, Florida, when Michael’s cousins and siblings were on the water or playing tennis or golf, Suzanne M. Walsh, a Montessori school teacher from Windham, New York, told me that she spotted Michael crouched in the sweltering 95-degree heat beneath a merciless sun with a bucket of pitch tar and a bale of shingles, putting a new roof on the ramshackle cinderblock home of an elderly lady who once worked for his family. Michael regularly bought her groceries. During a post-hurricane delivery, he noticed a fissure in her roof and returned the next day to patch it. Walsh recalls another day mentioning to Michael that she needed to drain her pond. “Without a word, Michael came over, set up his sump, and did the job.”
Michael offered Walsh a ride in Windham in January 1998 only to find an elderly homeless man sitting in front of the car. Michael stopped and talked to the man. With no cash to give him, Michael opened his trunk and pulled out his winter coat, draped it around the fellow and sat down and talked with him for a short while. Then Michael gave him a pat on the back and said, “Keep warm.”
In 1991, I was at Michael’s Westhampton, New York, wedding when he married Margot Sheridan, whom he met during a Colorado skiing vacation. Margot, a tall, beautiful ski instructor and former racer, had a ready laugh and large, bright, wideset eyes framed by high cheekbones on a broad, open face reminiscent of her great grandfather, Civil War General Philip Sheridan. The two lived in Quincy, Massachusetts, while Michael was finishing college. In the early 1990s they moved to Windham, New York. In 1994, my brother Michael Kennedy, recently sober with Michael Skakel’s help, asked Michael to join him in Massachusetts to work on Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1994 reelection campaign. Michael and Margot moved to Cohasset, Massachusetts.
After the election, Michael worked briefly as a real estate agent for RM Bradley in Boston and then went to work at Citizens Energy Corporation, the energy nonprofit founded by my elder brother Joe, to provide affordable energy and other services to the poor. Michael Kennedy had been running the company since Joe went to Congress in 1986. In 1995, Michael Skakel became Citizen Energy’s international director, supervising projects and assistance to impoverished communities in underdeveloped countries. While employed at Citizens Energy, he helped launch projects in Angola, Ecuador, and Cuba.
In 1997, Michael had a falling out with my brothers. Led by Dominick Dunne and Mark Fuhrman, the wolves were beginning to circle, pointing fingers at Michael as a murderer. Aggravated by his occasionally debilitating PTSD resulting from his time at Élan, Michael partly blamed my family for his woes. Michael became convinced that Joe and Michael Kennedy were promoting his arrest for the Moxley murder. “Michael was mad at your whole family,” explains his elder brother Rush Jr. “It wasn’t completely unjustified. We all knew that the Skakels had nothing to do with the Kennedys. Yet here he was being persecuted because of this thin, tendentious relationship between our two families. It was like a witch hunt. They were gonna burn him at the stake no matter what the evidence said. That inconsequential link with your family turned out to be this powerful fuel that kept burning and burning ’til it consumed him. It was the Kennedy connection that fed and enriched the press and the whole drama served the interests of the people who hate your family. So they kept fanning the flames. The irony was that Michael never identified himself as a ‘Kennedy cousin’ and yet that became his epithet. I don’t blame him for being angry and suspicious toward your family. Michael doesn’t have a drop of Kennedy blood and yet the relationship destroyed his life and destroyed Tommy’s life. You could say that it destroyed everyone in our family in one way or another. I made the choice to keep my head down and even to leave the country. [Rush Jr. moved to Bogotá, Colombia, with his family in 1995.] I saw how destructive and toxic that whole relationship between your family and the press was. Between the media and the Kennedy haters, it was like a bluefish feeding frenzy. Innocence and guilt were irrelevant. Everyone in the blood plume was gonna get mangled. Just take a look at Benedict’s legal theory as it unfolded. He was not just trying to jail Michael; he was implicating our entire family in a horrible 30-year conspiracy.”
Michael left his job at Citizens Energy Corporation and went to work with the International Institute for Alcoholism as a volunteer. He traveled to Russia with the group in order to bring the message of AA to prisons in St. Petersburg. Michael accepted an offer as executive director of the organization, a job that fell through when Mark Fuhrman’s book Murder in Greenwich named Michael as Martha Moxley’s killer. Before long, Michael was under grand jury investigation. Overnight, he became unempl
oyable. The media madness put increasing stress on his marriage; the couple suffered a miscarriage. They sold the Cohasset house and moved to Florida to live with his father and stepmother. While in Florida, Margot gave birth to their son, George Henry Skakel, on December 7, 1998. Michael did housework and took care of the baby while Margot taught golf and worked in school six days a week to get her sports and massage therapy certification. Michael also took care of Rucky, who was suffering from a long menu of physical and mental health problems. “He’d had prostate cancer,” Michael says. “I’d been changing his diaper for two years. I took him to church every day, sometimes twice a day, seven days a week.” They lived in Florida for two years.
After Michael was arrested in 2000, the couple moved back to Windham, New York, in order to be closer to Connecticut. Under pressure from the relentless media pounding and vitriol, Michael and Margot separated in the fall of 2000, and were divorced on September 19, 2001. The divorce decree gave them joint custody of their son.
One Sunday in 2001, after dropping George off with Margot at Windham, Michael saw a broken-down van filled with children on the opposite side of Interstate 287. A man with a military buzz cut stood next to the van helplessly watching traffic pass. A couple miles down the road, Michael did a U-turn and went back. The man, a soldier heading back to West Point, and his wife said they’d been stranded for over an hour. Michael was the first person to stop. Michael called a tow service and waited with the family. When the hooker truck arrived, the driver told him that all the nearby garages were closed. The tow to West Point would cost over two hundred dollars, and the soldier didn’t have the money. Michael paid the driver, the kids piled into the tow truck for a fun ride, and Michael drove the man and his wife up to West Point in his car. At this point in his life, Michael spent his waking moments hoping that nobody would recognize him and take him for the monster the media had so effectively convinced the world he was. Nevertheless, and despite Michael’s objections, the soldier insisted on taking Michael’s address. His wife wanted to send a thank-you note. A few weeks later, Michael received a handwritten note from Major Sean Lewis. The letter would later provide him comfort in prison.
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 10
