By the time of Michael’s 1978 arrest, Michael had been kicked out of 11 schools, mostly for academic reasons. For a fee, Howard Green, a Westport psychiatrist, would place troubled kids in prep schools, and Michael was keeping him flush. But now, Green was scraping the barrel bottom. After the Lowell Whiteman School in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, ejected Michael, Dr. Green arranged for his matriculation to The Vershire School in central Vermont, an institution distinguished for its loose structure and reigning drug culture. Vershire alum Darren Jachts described the school to the Stamford Advocate as “a Grateful Dead show without the band every day.” State officials closed Vershire in 1988, after staff members complained about drug abuse, dangerously filthy living conditions, and routine sex between students and faculty. Michael lost his virginity to a thirty-year-old Vershire teacher. Alumni boasted that it was impossible to not graduate from Vershire. Tommy, who was barely a better student than Michael, earned a Vershire sheepskin in 1977. Michael flunked out in March 1978.
A week after Vershire booted Michael, Rucky dispatched Tom Sheridan to handle the Windham wreck. “Sheridan spent all of his time dealing with Michael,” Julie says. “That and trying to get his hands on my father’s money.”
In addition to his monthly retainer, Sheridan used Rucky as his ATM. He regularly borrowed large sums. One legal document shows that Rucky loaned Tom $250,000 in 1993 ($413,946 in 2016 dollars). Michael saw a personal check to Sheridan for $300,000. Even though Rucky had a financial planner, Sheridan often proposed investment schemes. He convinced Rucky to buy stud rights to Seattle Slew, the 1977 Triple Crown winner, and pitched him on purchasing the Wauwinet Inn in Nantucket and a 100,000-acre ranch in Darby, Montana. “It took a long time to realize his friend was bamboozling him. He was a flimflam wizard,” says Stephen.
The lit cigarette dangling perpetually from Sheridan’s lip lent him the aspect of a shady card sharp. His hospitality with the booze went beyond enabling. The Skakel kids saw it as a deliberate strategy to incapacitate and manipulate their father. “I can’t tell you how many times as a teenager I brought my father to rehab,” Julie recalled. The routine was to drop him at Greenwich Hospital, for trans-shipment to a one-month inpatient facility to dry out. “One of these times, when he was fresh out of rehab, we’re up in Windham for the weekend,” she said. “It was 10:30 in the morning and I’m trying to keep an eye on dad. Then he just disappeared. I found him at Tom Sheridan’s house with a drink in his hand. Tom knew that he had just dried out. That man was evil.” Michael reminisced, “We were always trying to get Dad sober and Tom was working to keep him drunk.” Stephen, who is solid, even-handed, and equanimous, concurred on this point. “There are very few people in this world I intensely dislike, but Tom Sheridan was one of them,” he told me. “Tom Sheridan was a diabolical scoundrel. The guy was Satan, feeding all that disinformation to Sutton. Leaking to Len Levitt. He did everything he could to stab us in the back.”
Sheridan wasn’t fond of the Skakel kids. He seemed to regard them as needy impediments to the good life he and Rucky could otherwise be enjoying. “The level of his children’s behavior disorders is staggering,” he complained to Rucky’s elder brother, Jimmy Skakel, in a November 1992 letter. “You know as well as I do the level of dysfunctionality that exists.” He especially loathed Michael for his big mouth. Julie coined the term “camp followers” to describe the entourage of hangers-on, attracted by her father’s easy generosity and epic incapacities. Michael loudly and persistently characterized Sheridan as the worst of the blood-sucking parasites. Characteristically, he said it to Sheridan’s face. “I was always the one always saying, ‘Man, I don’t trust this guy: this guy is stealing,’” Michael recalled, “‘He’s a lousy bum and a con artist and he’s fleecing Dad!’” Julie confirmed the open antipathy between Michael and Sheridan. “Michael had been vocal about it,” she said. “It was Michael’s nature. If he saw things, he said things, especially when he thought Dad was being wrangled, because there were so many people who were leaching onto him [because of his generosity]. Sheridan was terrified of Michael exposing him for manipulating Dad, and taking money.”
A couple days after Michael’s accident, Sheridan visited Michael at the Windham house. It was midmorning and Michael was alone. He’d just woken up, so he was drinking his vodka with orange juice and smoking cigarettes. “We found a great place for you Michael,” Sheridan told him. “Another place in Maine. They’ve got skiing, whitewater rafting, rock climbing. It has a great reputation for working with kids like you.” When Michael asked for details—Was this a school? Did it have a summer semester?—Sheridan abruptly cut him off. “So you’re refusing!” Sheridan declared. “I don’t have time for this.” He stormed from the house. A few minutes later Michael heard the door swing open violently and what sounded like a squadron of storm troopers barreling into the house. Four brawny men tumbled in followed by Sheridan. It was Élan School’s goon squad. Michael scrambled to his feet and dashed up the stairs. Closely pursued, he leapt from a porch balcony and lit out across the Catskill wilderness. The fastest kid in Brunswick School, Michael left them in his dust. They finally ran him to ground in a bathroom of the Windham ski lodge after locating him in the cafeteria seeking sanctuary with family friends. The four thugs tackled Michael, grappled him out the door in a headlock and handcuffs, and pitched him into a waiting van like a feed sack. Michael shouted, “Sheridan, you bastard, you’re fired! I’m getting a new lawyer!” he remembered. “The goons slapped me silly in the van,” recalled Michael. “They skinned me for running.” At a small airfield in Ancram, New York, they heaved him into a twin-engine turbo-prop owned by the school, handcuffed him to a seat, and bee-lined to Poland, Maine, where Hell was preparing for Michael’s arrival.
Michael’s rendition to Élan proved advantageous to Sheridan. He could claim to have earned his keep as Rucky’s lawyer, and he had pleaded away Michael’s DUI charges in exchange for a two-year stay in a drug treatment facility. In doing so, Sheridan removed a particularly nettlesome gnat from his own hair. Finally, Sheridan was a sociopath with a vendetta against Michael, and Michael’s confinement in Élan would indulge his sadistic streak. He sent Rucky a $60,000 bill in 1978 ($220,178 in 2016 dollars. According to the legal website nolo.com, current legal fees for a first-offense DUI are generally about $2,000.)
Rucky took a long time to realize his friend was bamboozling him. Others knew. “I remember [Rucky] came over one day very upset, very distraught,” Cissie Ix told me. “It was after Michael had had his drunk-driving case in Windham. Tom Sheridan had given him an unbelievable bill—I think it could have been as much as $60,000. [Rucky] just couldn’t believe it. Tom wasn’t even a criminal lawyer,” Ix continues. “He said to me, ‘I thought he was my friend.’” Rucky was an easy mark. It was less painful for him to sign the checks than to confront his friend.
During Michael’s trial, Benedict would have Élan alums Greg Coleman and John Higgins, two longtime drug addicts, lie under oath. Both men testified that Michael told them that he had been placed in the Élan School in Poland, Maine, in 1978 because his family suspected that he had murdered Martha Moxley. The Skakels, Benedict claimed, were stashing Michael in the Maine woods beyond the reach of law-enforcement inquiries. “His family felt a need to put him in that awful place,” Benedict told the jury, “because that’s what they had to do with the killer living under their roof.” Benedict’s assistant, Chris Morano, told the court, “[T]here has been testimony produced before the jury that the defendant was there to be hidden from investigators.” Benedict knew that this was all invention. Michael was not hiding from Connecticut Police. The family told the police exactly where he was and why he was there. Several Greenwich police reports in 1978 and 1979 detail Michael’s Maine ordeal. Jim Lunney heard the story of Michael’s DUI arrest directly from Windham Police Chief James Scarey, a close friend of the Skakel family. Sheridan told Officer Lunney that Michael would probably be spending 10 months in the school, to
satisfy the Windham traffic court. Greenwich police even traveled up to Maine and questioned him about Tommy and Kenny.
Élan practiced a controversial and now-discredited behavior-modification program, originally developed at Synanon and Daytop Village. That system of violent peer, physical, and emotional confrontation made Élan a fiendish concentration camp for teenagers where Michael endured two years of daily beatings and degrading humiliations.
The school closed in 2011, thanks to an Internet campaign by Élan “survivors” intent on shuttering the barbaric hellhole. Thirty-five years after his internment, Michael was diagnosed with acute PTSD in the late 1980s as a result of the ordeal. (He cannot talk in any detail about his experiences there without breaking down in shoulder-shaking tears.) “For a good 10 years after Élan, I’d have nightmares,” said Kim Freehill, a former resident whose tenure overlapped with Michael’s. “You wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats, dreaming of being brutally beaten, or being burned alive. It was horrific, like coming out of Vietnam or something.”
Élan’s “campus” was a Hooverville of dingy shacks and shabby mobile homes on a retired fishing camp in the mosquito-infested North Woods. Parents of troubled kids shelled out up to $75,000 in tuition for Élan to warehouse their children in the grimy stockade where non-accredited bullyboy counselors would throttle them into mental health. Élan was the brainchild of Joe Ricci, a diminutive, truculent, street-smart entrepreneur whose other Maine business was a third-rate harness racing track called Scarborough Downs. With his silver Mercedes, floor-length leather coat, leashed Doberman Pinscher, and aviator sunglasses, he looked more like a gangster than a mental-health professional. Former resident Liz Arnold told Details magazine in 2001, “[Ricci] called himself the God of Therapy, but he looked like a pimp. He was cocky as hell.” Ricci was a con artist who never finished high school, but shrewdly identified the burgeoning drug-treatment industry as an underexploited business niche. Born in Port Chester, New York, Ricci was, by 15, addicted to heroin. Police arrested him at age 18 for robbing a mail truck. The court allowed him to choose rehab over jail. His stint at Daytop Village in New Haven, Connecticut, exposed him to the kind of extreme authoritarian therapeutic community that would inspire his creation of Élan. In 1971, Ricci and Boston-based psychiatrist Gerald Davidson founded Élan, which featured Daytop’s greatest hits: rigid, boot camp–style discipline; a purgatorial menu of hazing and bullying by other inmates, menial tasks, public shaming, and an idolization of authority figures. Counselors forced residents to wear giant dunce caps or large signs announcing their crimes and personality defects (for example, “CONFRONT ME AS TO WHY I’M A WHORE”). Discipline was corporal and included buzz haircuts and brutal public abasement sessions, in which residents beat, shamed, and heckled fellow inmates for minor infractions, real and contrived.
Élan greeted newcomers by dousing them in “electric sauce”—a mixture of mess-hall trash, ketchup, and mustard. Ricci forced newbies to wear Brillo pad necklaces designed to chafe their skin until it bled. He recruited the largest, most thuggish inmates as “counselors” to coerce weaker colleagues to perform degrading jobs like cleaning a dumpster with a spoon or a toothbrush. Ricci had a love for the theater: his hooligans compelled girls as young as 14 to dress as hookers and drag street signs that said “42nd Street” across a stage. Teenagers deemed “babies” wore giant diapers. Ricci flaunted his own drug use. “While you worthless little fucks sit around here, I’ll be home smoking a joint,” he’d say. Alice Dunne, a counselor at Élan, recounted, “Joe did coke. He drank. He was out until 2 every morning.” Alice arrived at Élan at age 15 and stayed on as an employee until she was 22. “He was popping Percodan, Vicodin, that kind of stuff. He might have been driving a Mercedes and living in a big house in Falmouth but the bottom line was, whatever hole he’d had in his heart was still there.” Ricci personally welcomed Michael. “Joe Ricci asked me in front of the whole place why I thought I was there,” Michael says. “I said, ‘Because I drink too much.’ Bam, he punched me in the face. He said, ‘You piece of shit, there’s no such thing as addiction. You’re just a fuckin’ asshole.’ Élan wasn’t rehab. It was a cult.”
“Élan was a huge con,” said Richard Ofshe, a University of California Berkeley professor emeritus and probably the country’s foremost expert on false confessions and therapeutic cults such as Synanon, Daytop, and Élan. “The con was that they could cure drug addiction.”
Ricci rewarded devotion to “the God of Therapy” with perquisites and privilege. Compliant residents earned management roles. Big bruisers became “gorilla” enforcers. A draconian reward system put a high premium on harvesting intelligence. “Expeditors” were Ricci’s spy platoon, tasked with recording and reporting back rumors and “incidents” they’d observed or heard about. Ricci organized mob paddling; formal beatings of reprobates were a weekly routine, known as “General Meetings,” or GMs. Inmates most dedicated to the violent aspects of the program rose quickly through the ranks. “Everybody was involved in the beatings,” says Kim. “But Greg Coleman and John Higgins were far more sadistic than the others. Coleman was one of the sickest.” Lacking the qualities of guile, sadism, or cunning, Michael had a hard time getting with the program.
Kim’s father, a successful Manhattan attorney, dropped her off at Élan on December 7, 1978. She was 16. He had lied when he told Kim they were driving to Maine for a campus tour of Bowdoin College. “I was sent there because I smoked pot and my parents didn’t like that,” she recalled. She arrived just in time to witness a General Meeting—Élan’s most brutal punishment. A noncompliant inmate would don boxing gloves and a helmet and be forced to fight nine rounds. In every round, a new opponent entered the ring. “You never got a break, so you could never win,” Alice remembers. “They do that until you’re completely beaten down and afraid.” Kim was appalled at what she witnessed that first day. “I saw them brutally beating Michael, spitting at him, screaming at him,” she says. “There were about 100 people, everyone that lived in Élan at that time. It was like out of Lord of the Flies. I found out that if you didn’t participate in the beatings, you would be beaten next, so the fear of not doing it created this kind of frenzy.” On that day, Ricci’s goon squad had put Michael in the boxing ring as punishment for running away. But Michael was always the default target because of his gentle nature and poor academic performance. He couldn’t read. For much of his time at Élan, Ricci made him wear a three-foot dunce cap. “Nobody knew what dyslexia was in the eighties,” says Kim. “He wasn’t doing well in school so they painted Michael up as a clown and made him sit on the stage.”
Kim lasted only six months at Élan. She went in relatively healthy, but confinement in the facility caused her to stop eating and drop 30 pounds. “Four people would hold me down and then they’d beat me with a two-inch wooden paddle,” she says. Coleman, who was 18 at the time, admitted under oath that he took a lead role in Kim’s final stomping. After losing consciousness she was medevaced to Hillside Hospital in Long Island. “When I arrived at Hillside they were absolutely horrified. They had never seen anything like it,” she says. “I had open sores all over my body from the beatings. Bruising everywhere. I have a scar on my right buttock that never went away. I had to be taught how to speak and feed myself in a strait jacket for three months until I was well enough or sane enough to leave Hillside.”
Michael’s experience was no less brutal, but lasted two years. Early in his stay, he asked Ricci if he could go to church. Ricci slapped him in the face. “Church?” he said. “There is no God. I am God. I am the great God of Therapy.” For two years Michael never received a letter during weekly mail call. He later learned that friends and siblings had written, but Ricci had hijacked his correspondence. “They’d say, ‘Skakel, stand up. Did you get mail?’ And I’d say, ‘No.’ They’d say, ‘We want to make everyone aware, Skakel comes from a large family but he’s nothing but a piece of shit and nobody writes him. So take shit where shit bel
ongs.’ Then Higgins, Coleman, and their goons would drag me to the bathroom and stick my head in the toilet.” He spent his days doing pointless tasks: digging holes using only a spoon, polishing a 12-inch-square of linoleum with a toothbrush for 12 hours straight, sweeping sunlight from a cabin floor.
Counselors would hold him over a chair, while inmates took turns beating him with a paddle. “They bored holes in the planks so that they wouldn’t catch air,” recalled Michael. The abuse was systematic and well documented. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services accused Élan of abusing 11 Illinois juveniles who resided at the facility in 1975, effectively turning them into “automatons.” The same year, the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services launched a similar inquiry. In December 1982, two years after Michael graduated, Élan students, at a General Meeting, beat 15-year-old Phil Williams unconscious in the boxing ring. Phil died the following day of a brain aneurysm. The Maine State Police recently reopened a cold-case murder investigation of Phil’s death.
Élan utilized a specific strategy of breaking strong-willed inmates. “Counselors” would identify a psychological crack and hammer it relentlessly. Often, their wedge had no basis in reality. A former Élan patient named Sarah Peterson testified at Michael’s trial that she suffered from chapped lips while at Élan. Ricci and others accused her of acquiring the condition while giving blowjobs and made her dress as a hooker. With beatings, humiliation, and relentless pressure, she quickly admitted that she was a “slut.” She was a 15-year-old virgin at the time. “They would twist and turn anything just to get at you,” said Kim. “The model was that if they broke you down to absolutely nothing, they could rebuild you.”
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 22
