Baker began calling Littleton to conduct undercover interviews and report back to Garr. When Solomon and Garr needed a hair sample, she was eager to help. She invited Littleton to visit her in Ottawa. The second he left, Mounties swept in and bundled the sheets off to Connecticut for criminalist Henry Lee to test. Lee found Littleton’s hair “microscopically consistent” with a hair found on Martha’s body, one of the few pieces of physical evidence that police had managed to recover and not lose. Baker began to see more and more of Littleton, ostensibly to reconcile, but Solomon and Garr treated the reunions as intelligence-gathering missions.
On December 4, 1991, according to the search-warrant request, Baker called Garr to say that she’d just had a telephone conversation with Littleton. He was fretting that the Connecticut State Police might find the missing golf-club handle and trace his fingerprints. “Even if I’m innocent, I could be charged with murder,” she said he told her. “Let’s say a hunter or someone tripped over them in the woods.” He mentioned a pair of pants that he said might have Martha’s blood on them. The police knew that Littleton, at his own suggestion, had taken some of the Skakel boys to the family’s Catskills cabin the weekend after the killing. Even then, it struck the Skakel family as odd that Littleton insisted on driving his own car the 2 hour and 20 minute ride to Windham. Police speculated that he could have disposed of the evidence on that trip. The police report noted that while in Windham, Littleton had borrowed a shotgun from Tom Sheridan, saying he wanted to go hunting in the woods. Solomon ordered a new-fangled metal detector, cadaver dogs, and a search party to the Skakels’ Windham, New York, ski house. Rucky, as per usual, consented. They came up empty-handed.
With Baker’s permission, the police began taping conversations between the estranged couple. With the help of the Boston Police Department, Solomon and Garr wired room 1501 of the Boston Howard Johnson’s on February 10, 1992. Baker lured Littleton into this ambush with the scent of reconciliation. During the rendezvous, Littleton provided another new detail that sounded to Solomon like a chilling admission. Littleton had long been adamant that he had heard no dogs barking when he left the house that night and he hadn’t heard any barking thereafter. He now recalled barking. Baker told the police that Littleton had a peculiar hatred of dogs, “specifically when they bark.” She did not say when that hatred began.
“The Irish nanny, she’s about 75 years old, half senile, um dogs are barking outside, the German shepherd is barking outside, ‘Will you go out and check on what’s happening?’” Littleton’s voice is audible on the concealed tape. “Um and so the front door is here and there’s a circular driveway that goes like that, with another driveway like this, and then … there’s a row of tall cedars right there.” At this point, Littleton was obviously drawing a map, but the details he includes about the Skakel property are curious. Though he places himself in the driveway, at the side of the house where the Revcon motor home was parked, the Skakels had no circular driveway. The Moxleys, however, did, and Martha had first been struck in the grass patch inside of the Moxley’s circular driveway. The only line of cedar trees on the Skakel property was adjacent to the tennis courts, at the very southeastern edge of the property, directly across the street from the crime scene. In his story, Littleton mentions the dogs barking several more times, and discloses for the first time that he heard the sound of “leaves rustling” as he stood outside in the pitch black. He also said that he was outside when the dog stopped barking. “So, ah, I, the rustling stops, and I stop, the dog stops barking, and I got into the house,” Littleton said.
This was consistent with Solomon’s speculation that, after Nanny Sweeney asked Littleton to check on the fracas, Littleton’s hatred of dogs prompted him to grab a golf club from the barrel near the door. Outside he heard the rustling of Tommy and Martha in the bushes. Inflamed and in an alcoholic stupor, Littleton followed Martha as she walked toward her house. When she refused his advances, he struck her and dragged her under the evergreen boughs. In Solomon’s judgment, the zigzagging path across the yard, first toward a neighbor’s house and then back to the pine tree, indicated a perpetrator unfamiliar with the terrain. The tree under which Martha’s body was found was adjacent to a path used daily by local children as a shortcut from southern Belle Haven to Walsh Lane, where many of their friends lived. According to Tom Sheridan, “Anyone familiar with the neighborhood would have dragged her another 10 yards into the tall grass, where she might have remained hidden for days.”
In June 1992, Baker reported to police that Littleton told her he couldn’t have committed the crime because he would have been covered with blood. Baker reported that “Ken made the statement, ‘You take a five iron to a girl’s head and smash the shit out of it, it’s like taking a baseball bat to a tomato, a big tomato: there’s going to be a lot of fucking blood.’” Julie Skakel told me that, when she talked with Littleton as he entered the kitchen from the pantry at around 10:00 p.m., he had changed his clothes. His location in the kitchen, at that time, is inconsistent with any of his alibis: when he first described leaving the house, he said he had re-entered through the front door. The door to a mudroom off the pantry was the only place one might expect to enter the Skakel home unobserved. Instead of the plaid shirt he had worn at dinner, Julie said, Littleton was wearing a sweatshirt.
Finally, Tommy told me that he and Littleton had watched The French Connection after 10:00 p.m. on the night of the murder, and that Littleton had mysteriously kept his body entirely draped with a blanket—something Tommy had considered odd, because it was not cold in the room.
Six months after the Howard Johnson’s operation, Solomon dispatched Garr to talk to Littleton. During that meeting, Garr unleashed the same suite of dirty-pool tactics that he would subsequently deploy on reluctant witnesses to build his case against Michael: lying, intimidation, and psy-ops. “I had to schmooze him,” Garr told Levitt. Garr’s objective was to get Littleton to take another polygraph and meet with Kathy Morall, a Colorado-based forensic psychiatrist Solomon had seen on 48 Hours. According to Levitt’s book Conviction, Littleton asked Garr if he should have a lawyer. “If you get an attorney you’ll never clear this up because he won’t let you do it,” Garr advised. “We all know you didn’t do it, but you can’t clear this up if you have a lawyer. He won’t let you take the polygraph.” In December 1992, Kenny Littleton appeared in Greenwich, sans attorney, with Garr’s assurance that the cops thought he was innocent. The opposite was true. In Solomon’s words, “That meeting would eliminate any residual uncertainty about Littleton’s guilt.”
Littleton spent a full day with Morall in the Greenwich police library, talking openly about his childhood, his sexual history, his drug and alcohol abuse, and his chronic mental illness. The following day he spent eight hours with polygrapher Robert Brisentine. A heavyweight in the lie-detection field, Brisentine had formerly served as the chief investigator for the army’s Criminal Investigation Command. Brisentine had complete confidence in the machine—and his own ability to detect artifice. “You don’t fool the instrument. You fool the examiner,” Brisentine would tell a reporter. “And I believe that if an examiner does it properly and doesn’t have a preconceived idea [of a suspect’s guilt or innocence], he will get the truth.”
Brisentine asked Littleton the following questions:
Did you have any quarrel with Martha Moxley on October 30, 1975?
Did you have a golf club in your possession on October 30, 1975?
Regarding the matter pertaining to Martha Moxley, do you intend to answer truthfully to each question about that?
Did you cause those injuries to Martha Moxley on October 30, 1975?
Did you have a golf club in your hand on October 30, 1975?
Brisentine approached Solomon afterward. “The man who murdered Martha Moxley is sitting in that room,” Brisentine said, according to Solomon. “Don’t ever let anyone persuade you otherwise.” Garr told Levitt that Brisentine also took him aside. “Frank, th
at guy killed that girl,” he told Garr. “I polygraphed three convicts in jail that confessed to crimes and their polygraphs were not as good as this guy’s.” When I approached Brisentine in 2002, he wouldn’t specifically own up to saying those things, but he did offer this: “Even if he didn’t commit the crime, he definitely had guilty knowledge of the crime and probably knows who did.”
If Brisentine’s report wasn’t powerful enough, Morall’s, which arrived in late January 1993, closed the door on any lingering doubts about Littleton’s guilt. “The examination of behavior following the crime strongly points to Mr. Littleton,” she wrote. “Not only does he engage in violence, much of it is directed towards women. … His apparent preoccupation with the crime and his ‘theories’ of how it occurred would typically suggest involvement or guilt.” Morall also downgraded Tommy’s profile as a suspect. “In looking at the limited amount of available information about Tommy following the crime, one would have to conclude that, if he committed the crime, he did not follow it with the expected behavior consistent with a person of anger and with a disturbed psychological makeup,” she wrote. “The chance that someone would display a one-time-only episode of violent rage is highly unlikely.” In his interview, Littleton had once again inched closer to the crime scene. This time, he placed himself at 10:00 p.m. at a line of conifers on the edge of the Skakel property, less than 25 yards from where Martha was attacked. He reported that he heard scuffling in the leaves, like something was being dragged or an animal moving. Kenny Littleton’s evolution during the course of the investigation had gone from him not setting foot outside the entire night of the murder, to checking on a “fracas” in the driveway, and hearing no dogs barking, to being less than 30 footsteps from the crime scene, and hearing not only dogs barking, but what was likely the attack or its aftermath.
Kathy Morall reported that Littleton had hinted he sexually abused children, and had been abused himself. At 15, Morall reported, “an older adult male invited him into his home and performed oral sex on him.” That same year he began babysitting a 3-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl. Morall reported that Littleton admitted, “He would periodically pull their pajamas down and view their genitals. He could not explain his motivation for this behavior.” He’d had sex with about 60 women, and his type was Martha to a T: “the classic blonde, blue-eyed type.” Considering the crime scene, and the amount of blood that certainly sprayed from Martha during the attack, curious imagery popped up in his memory of his first psychotic break in 1981. “I saw pine trees and felt water sparkling over my ankles,” he told Morall. “I dashed through it and was going towards a garden. I was doing ritualistic praying in sets of three like the trinity.” Littleton was subsequently hospitalized after slashing his forearm with three deep parallel cuts—the mark of the trinity.
Littleton agreed to meet with Martha Moxley’s brother, John, in 1994. “When I left there, I felt like I had been in the presence of a true wacko,” John told Mark Fuhrman. “And you’re standing there thinking, ‘Oh my God, this could be the guy who killed my sister,’” he told Dumas, just two years before the State brought Michael’s case to the grand jury. “I had the impression that he was crazy enough to do anything.”
Solomon, like Morall, believed that whoever had killed Martha would certainly act out again. With Garr, Solomon created a 42-page “Time Lapse Data” report that tracked 15 years of Kenny Littleton’s movements, and how his locations corresponded with 20 unsolved murders of white women, beginning with Rocky Krizack in 1976. Many of the connections to serial murder might have been coincidental, but others showed some eerie consistencies. On August 6, 1988, a 22-year-old woman named Jane Boroski, seven months pregnant, stopped at a closed convenience store in West Swanzey, New Hampshire, to get a drink from a vending machine. As she sipped her Coke, a man dragged her from her car and stabbed her 27 times. Miraculously she and her baby survived. She reported that her assailant was a white male driving a golden brown Jeep Wagoneer with wood-grain sides. At the time, Littleton drove a yellow Plymouth Voyager with wood grain-sides. As he buried his knife in her chest and her arms, the man accused Boroski of beating up his girlfriend, which sounded to Solomon rather like Littleton’s dance-floor attack of Linda Cahoon years earlier at Nantucket’s Chicken Box.
In the years after Michael’s conviction, Garr would say that during this whole period he never really thought that Littleton had killed Martha: he was at the mercy of his monomaniacal boss, Solomon. He claimed to have known from the beginning that Michael was the murderer. “I didn’t think Kenny did it,” he told Levitt in 2003. Unlike Solomon, “My ego wasn’t on the line.” This statement, like Garr’s entire case against Michael, doesn’t pass the smell test. Police reports from that period, all signed only by Garr, demonstrate that he was as convinced of Littleton’s guilt as his boss. Garr told Levitt that when Fuhrman called him in 1997, he had long since determined that Michael was the killer and that Kenny Littleton was an innocent patsy. But here’s what he said to Fuhrman at the time: “It’s interesting, in 1976 Littleton submitted to a polygraph examination and failed it, and then 18 years later he takes another polygraph examination and fails again. I mean, that’s interesting.” Garr not only regularly lied to witnesses and suspects, he also lied to Levitt, his collaborator and hagiographer. Garr’s claim that he long suspected that Michael was the culprit was convenient revisionism.
In February 1993 Littleton told the police that he was no longer willing to cooperate with investigators. In 1994 Solomon told Sheridan that Boston authorities had impounded Littleton’s car after a run-in with a Boston policeman. Sheridan told me that Solomon then showed him and Manny Margolis a black three-ring binder containing photos of the bodies of 13 teenage girls fatally bludgeoned within the vicinity of Littleton’s various homes. One of them was a 15-year-old blonde girl who looked eerily similar to Martha and whose dissected body had been cleaved in half and thrown in a dumpster across from Littleton’s apartment in Boston’s Combat Zone. Kenny Littleton was a suspect in those murders, Solomon told him. Solomon said he was trying to assemble an arrest warrant for Littleton in the Moxley murder.
Solomon never got the warrant. In the summer of 1998, Connecticut’s attorney general granted Littleton lifetime immunity and removed him from the suspect list in exchange for his testimony before a rarely invoked one-man grand jury called to indict Michael Skakel. Benedict later explained his decision to grant immunity to Littleton in a colloquy with Michael’s trial court Judge John Kavanewsky: “Mr. Littleton was given immunity because the State felt it had no evidence whatsoever to prosecute Mr. Littleton. We used his testimony to clear [Tommy Skakel], another longtime suspect.”
In July 1999 Kenny Littleton called the Greenwich Time from McLean Hospital and said that the Kennedy family was trying to kill him. Shortly after his release, Littleton stabbed himself four times in the chest with a kitchen knife. The police who searched his apartment found the charred pages of a diary, torn from the binding and burned. Littleton refused to talk with the police about the stabbing.
The law requires prosecutors to turn over all exculpatory evidence to the defense prior to trial. This includes evidence that might support a third-party culpability defense. Prior to Michael’s trial, Benedict and Garr withheld key pieces of evidence pointing to Littleton’s guilt. These included the composite sketch created from descriptions by Belle Haven security guard Charles Morganti of a man seen near the murder scene minutes before Martha’s killing. The sketch resembles Kenny Littleton. Michael’s lawyers had specifically requested all sketches related to the case. Under oath, in Michael’s new trial hearing, Garr conceded that the sketch was both an important piece of evidence and should have been turned over to Michael’s defense.
Garr and Benedict also withheld Dr. Kathy Morall’s interviews with Littleton. That interview was certainly exculpatory since Littleton had placed himself at the crime scene at the likeliest time Martha was killed. Benedict’s office also never turned over Solomon�
��s extensive and inculpatory profile of Littleton, or the 1976 unsigned arrest warrant for Tommy. Those documents demonstrated that the State had compiled compelling cases against two other suspects. But the Littleton profile would have had a far more crucial value to the defense. It showed that on October 30, 1975, before the Skakels had left for Sursum Corda, Rush Jr. had informed Littleton that Michael would be joining them. This seemingly small detail from an interview with Littleton obliterated the prosecution’s theory that Michael was in Belle Haven at 10:00 p.m. to kill Martha. Michael’s well-documented 9:30 p.m. trip to Sursum Corda was one of the many reasons that police had never considered him a suspect. Unfortunately, at trial the only corroboration for Michael’s alibi were family members, all of whom Benedict discredited as participants in the continuing family conspiracy. Littleton’s statements were precisely the kind of “independent” corroboration that Benedict told the jury didn’t exist. Solomon’s “Littleton suspect profile” includes the critical conclusion, “It is known and believed that as that vehicle departed from the driveway, occupied by the SKAKEL boys (Rushton, Michael and John) along with their cousin JAMES TERRIEN, that both HELEN IX and GEOFFREY BYRNE began to walk to their homes, leaving only THOMAS SKAKEL and MARTHA MOXLEY standing in the driveway” [emphasis in original]. Benedict certainly would have known that this one point would have gutted his case against Michael. So why hadn’t Garr turned it over? “Uh, I was told not to,” Garr said under oath in 2007. “By whom?” Michael’s lawyer asked him. “Mr. Benedict,” he replied. These are brazen so-called Brady violations, one of the most common forms of prosecutorial misconduct. Courts commonly overturn convictions that have relied on this “convict at all costs” mentality. Judges jail prosecutors for prosecutorial infractions less serious than Benedict’s outlaw shenanigans in Michael’s case. Connecticut’s new prosecutors need to restore the integrity of Connecticut’s criminal court system by holding Benedict and Garr to the same standards.
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 20
