Sheridan made sure to provide Élan with plenty of source material for use in Michael’s rehabilitation. “Everything they had about me was from Tom Sheridan,” Michael says. “My father hadn’t a clue.” Shortly after he arrived at Élan, the goon squad gave Michael the sign he wore for the next year: “I’M A SPOILED RICH KID FROM GREENWICH CONNECTICUT. ASK ME WHY MY BROTHER KILLED MY FRIEND MARTHA MOXLEY.” It wasn’t until the final year they changed the sign to “I’M A SPOILED RICH KID FROM GREENWICH CONNECTICUT. ASK ME WHY I KILLED MY FRIEND MARTHA MOXLEY.” When Garr learned of this sign years later, he considered it persuasive evidence of Michael’s guilt. “Why would Ricci confront Michael about the murder?” Garr asked Levitt, pointedly. “When Michael flew to Élan in 1978, he had never been a suspect. How would people at Élan have had suspicions about him unless someone in or close to the family had told them?” Garr was right: Sheridan had provided an entire dossier on the Skakel family and the Moxley murder. But Élan’s system of psychological domination had no interest in truth. “It would simply be the entry point to pressure him,” said Richard Ofshe. “Information would get collected that they could constantly use to put somebody under enormous pressure. But the idea that anyone actually told Élan that they knew that Michael killed Martha Moxley is fantasy. It’s wild prosecutorial speculation.”
Given Sheridan’s manipulative nature and his simmering antipathy, Michael doesn’t rule out that the lawyer may indeed have told Ricci that Michael was guilty of murder. We now know that Sheridan had quietly hinted to Sutton Associates that Michael was guilty, though he never had evidence to support his suspicion.
For Sheridan, there was a valuable advantage in Michael being a suspect in the Moxley case. Manny Margolis had firm reins on Tommy’s defense so his predicament posed no opportunity for Sheridan. But there was ample upside for Sheridan in making Michael a suspect. “This was standard operating procedure from Tom,” says Stephen. “So long as Dad believed Michael might be guilty, Tom was guaranteed a role and a salary. His strategy was to keep Dad in a state of terror, where he was happy to sign checks.” Rucky was paralyzed when it came to the boys and the Moxley murder. Michael’s status as a suspect represented billable hours to Sheridan whose business plan was to keep Michael under suspicion, but out of jail. “Tom Sheridan fabricated a story to hurt me and keep the gig going,” Michael says. “As long as he could keep my father questioning my guilt or innocence he could keep getting paid.” Hearing all this, I was skeptical that the family’s own lawyer had set Michael up, but that was before I discovered extensive evidence confirming the boys’ suspicions.
With the ammunition supplied by Sheridan, Michael got beaten over Martha’s murder every day at Élan. He says that in his first months there, the verbal abuse always included mentions of Tommy. “You will never leave here until you admit that your brother Tommy committed this crime,” Ricci admonished him.
Michael says the interrogation techniques changed after the first of his three escape attempts. Eight months into his stay—a few days after his recapture—guards dragged Michael over to Ricci’s trailer. Michael was surprised to find Sheridan waiting for him, but happy to see a familiar face at Élan, even if it was Sheridan’s. “Thank God,” Michael thought. “They’re going to get me out of here.” He soon realized he was mistaken. “Tom dismissed the guards like a mobster,” Michael says. “Then turning to me, he snapped ‘sit down,’ sharply. It was like we were in the military.” Michael continued, “And then he said, ‘You’re a hard bronc to saddle, but we’re going to saddle you.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.” That afternoon, as he scrubbed a linoleum square, Michael overheard two of the Élan goons talking. “We just got the green light to fuck this guy up.”
Immediately following Sheridan’s visit, the beatings escalated. Michael plotted another escape. In late November 1978, he made it 20 miles from the facility on foot in sub-freezing temperatures. The beating he received as punishment following his capture was the one Kim saw on her first day. “They beat me for eight hours,” Michael said. “Kim said when it was finished I had no clothes on. They beat me to the point I could barely see out of my eyes, and they threw me in the kitchen and said, ‘Run away now. We’re done with you.’ I remember my body hurt so much I couldn’t get off the floor. And I saw a knife and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just slit my throat, but as a Catholic I couldn’t, because I knew if I did it, I’d go somewhere even worse than Élan.’ I thought, ‘Man, am I fucked.’” Michael says that at the end of the stomping Ricci forecast his future. “After they were done with me, Joe Ricci said, ‘Your brother didn’t murder Martha Moxley. You did. You committed this crime.’” Michael’s torturers adopted a new theme. Michael, himself, was now the killer.
But try as Ricci might, his thugs could not beat Michael into an admission. Michael never broke. “They used me as a punching bag every day for four months,” he says. “They made me sleep on a stage. They didn’t give me any food. I’d have to go to the bathroom on myself. They said I’d be there for the rest of my life. And the whole time they just kept saying, ‘This will not stop until you admit to this crime.’ I couldn’t admit to something I didn’t do, so I figured out if I just said, ‘I don’t know,’ they would stop hitting me.” Michael sobbed as he told this story. “So I just kept saying, ‘I don’t know.’”
Alice’s recollection of the Élan torture regime perfectly mirrors Michael’s. “I would admit to things too that I didn’t do, just to not be beaten anymore, but Michael never, ever said he did it,” she says. “He sat up there with 100 people screaming in his face, crying after having nine rounds in the boxing ring, beaten, saying, ‘I just don’t know.’ If he did it, he would have known that he did it. I don’t think he did it and I never did. In the time I spent with Michael, he was just so emotional, like a raw nerve. I never saw him as having the capability to ever hurt someone.”
Benedict called Alice Dunne as a prosecution witness in Michael’s trial in an attempt to convince jurors that Michael’s admissions that “he didn’t know if he did it” were tantamount to confessions. Ricci, who died of cancer in 2001, the year before the trial, proved an unlikely character reference. “The notion of Michael’s confession is just preposterous,” Ricci told Time magazine the year before his death. “I was there, and I would know.”
Even though Michael has spent 11½ years in brutal conditions in Connecticut’s toughest prisons, it’s Élan that haunts him. “I went to a public AA meeting in Rye, New York, a month ago,” he told me. “The whole meeting people stare at me like I’m a killer and I had this visceral reaction to their hostility. I feel like I’m right back in Élan. I can’t begin to explain to you what it’s like to have a mob of people beat you for hours and hours and kick you and spit on you. It’s still with me today.”
As horrible as Sheridan’s decision was to send Michael to Élan, his 1991 judgment to retain Sutton Associates was even worse. The Skakel kids laugh at the notion that their father dreamed up the idea for an internal investigation of the family. “I loved my father,” says Stephen, “but this wasn’t a man who was really capable of ordering up anything except dessert.” The connection to Sutton Associates came through Sheridan, who broached the idea that Rucky might pay for a grand-scale reinvestigation of the Moxley murder. Sheridan’s friend Dick McCarthy, the independent gumshoe, called his former FBI buddy Jim Murphy, whose Sutton Associates annexed McCarthy into the Sutton fold to work as a contractor on the Skakel job. “Tom took care of his friends,” says Stephen. “They all made out.” Sheridan made the personally lucrative decision to run the investigation out of his Manhattan building. Sutton’s offices were in Hicksville, Long Island, and three of the people Sutton planned to investigate—Kenny Littleton, Tommy, and Michael—were all living in Massachusetts at that time. The most economic strategy would have been to find some cheap office space in Connecticut, near Rucky and the crime scene. But Sheridan said the investigation should be close to his office where he kept the fa
mily’s files. Sheridan owned a brownstone on East 51st Street where he maintained his law office on the first floor, and an apartment on the second. He arranged to rent the third floor to Sutton, a cost he billed to Rucky. Rucky eventually would pay more than a million dollars to Sutton. “There was absolutely no reason for that investigation to be located in Manhattan, except so that Tom Sheridan could get his kickback and act as gatekeeper,” says Stephen.
The office deal was only one part of the arrangement that left the Skakel kids scratching their heads. The idea of investigating the family was lunacy from the outset. No experienced criminal defense attorney would have sanctioned the scheme. Tommy’s lawyer, Manny Margolis, was in revolt, but Sheridan insisted that Rucky wanted to know the truth.
Sutton’s entire report on Michael is colored by Sheridan’s loathing for him. Fuhrman and Levitt obtained Michael’s Sutton report at a time when police had never regarded him as a suspect, so they were understandably astounded to read this line: “Some feel Michael and other suspects were not thoroughly examined … due to a somewhat premature conviction on the part of local authorities that Tommy Skakel was the murderer.” The report continues, “It was only later when the spotlight of serious scrutiny was placed directly on Michael. His arrest on drunk driving charges in 1978 probably did as much as anything to renew the police’s interest.” This demonstrably false statement, which could only have come from Sheridan, lends credence to Michael’s and Stephen’s belief that Sheridan was guiding the project to smear Michael.
In fact, cops had zero interest in Michael during the period when he was locked away in Élan. The Greenwich Police investigation had all but shut down. Lunney had so exhausted his leads by then that he was spending his days conducting interviews with a psychic who, among many other things, told them she’d had a vision of Martha Moxley swinging a golf club. She offered the words “drugs,” “stone wall,” and “apparently one parent” to Lunney as clues. The psychic also examined pictures of the suspects. According to Lunney, “She … picked Littleton’s photo as the subject she sees killing Martha Moxley.” She didn’t react to Tommy’s picture. Michael was so far off the radar that the police didn’t bother to show the psychic his photo.
As soon as they ramped up their investigation in 1992, Murphy realized that his team was starting at an extreme disadvantage. Len Levitt, when writing his article that the Greenwich Time published June 1991, had succeeded in obtaining the 400-page Martha Moxley police file through a Freedom of Information request. But when Sutton detectives asked for the same file, the Greenwich Police refused. The police explained that the case was reopened. “We were viewed almost as investigators for the defense,” Murphy says. “And certainly I think the Greenwich Police Department would have been embarrassed had anybody else come in and solved this.” Without those files, they’d get nowhere.
Sutton decided to strike a deal with Levitt. Sheridan brokered a meeting, and he and Murphy went to Newsday’s Melville, New York, offices to meet the reporter. Murphy had the impression that Sheridan and Levitt had dealt with one another previously. Levitt says that the meeting was the first time he met Sheridan but does not say whether the two had previously spoken by phone. The men struck a verbal deal: in exchange for the case file, Sutton would give Levitt first crack at reporting Sutton’s results once they had wrapped up the investigation. This proposition went beyond dicey: Sheridan’s team was heaping insane on crazy. No criminal layer would have ever countenanced this daft project for a client they were trying to protect. Criminal Defense 101 is “Never let your client speak.” Yet Sheridan had persuaded Rucky to finance a prosecutorial investigation of his own children. And now he was promising to give the results to a hostile reporter! As we shall see, Sheridan was meanwhile secretly contaminating the report with ginned-up calumnies about Michael. The entire project was a study in attorney malpractice. Sheridan’s enterprise, from the outset, wreaked of malice.
Murphy knew he was playing in an ethical Twilight Zone: Sheridan was paying Sutton, with Rucky’s dough, to follow the evidence even if it inculpated a Skakel. Murphy realized that if Sutton found some new piece of evidence against Tommy or Michael, no sane defense attorney would want this to appear in a newspaper. Still, Murphy felt they had little choice: “What Levitt had was historical information from day one, and access to information that the police department had that we were never going to get access to.” And, Murphy reasoned, Sheridan was speaking on behalf of his client. Murphy’s only obligation was to solve the case, not question the client’s judgment. Boneheaded though the plan might be, it was supposedly his client’s wish. Murphy didn’t realize then that Sheridan was manipulating Rucky like a sock puppet. “This deal with Levitt only would have been done with Sheridan’s agreement,” Murphy said. Still, Murphy was cautious, resolving that he would be especially circumspect in any of his dealings with Levitt. He got Sheridan to agree that, in advance of any communications with the reporter, they would consult each other. Sheridan would repeatedly violate this promise.
Soon after he commissioned the Sutton Report, Sheridan began poisoning it. For example, he provided Sutton a memo about Michael’s Windham crash chock-full of editorial slanders. “He was obviously a disturbed person and hooked on either booze or pot,” Sheridan wrote. “He showed little or no remorse for having nearly killed the companion in his car, and when confronted with the potential problem of a subsequent conviction for drunken driving, his only comment was, ‘Next time I won’t get caught,’” an implausible declaration that Michael swears he never said. Sheridan was also providing Sutton investigators with information he professed to have gleaned from Rucky. “Thomas Sheridan also noted being informed by Mr. Skakel that ‘Julie is frightened to death of Michael,’ and that Michael suffers from enuresis (bed wetting), and has engaged in some transsexual behavior.” Julie says Sheridan must have simply invented this stuff since her father never had any reason to think these things. “I was never, ever afraid of Michael,” she says. “I wasn’t even afraid of Tommy. I was dreadfully fearful of my father because I could see how he would fly off the handle with Michael. I was scared every second in that house when he was there.”
Sheridan also provided highly prejudicial impressions he claimed to have heard from Mary Ellen Reynolds, a former nun and aunt of the Skakel children who lived for a period in the Otter Rock Drive house. “Reynolds … spent much time eyeball to eyeball with Tommy and she is persuaded that Tommy had nothing to do with the crime,” Sheridan’s memo reported. “On the other hand, she has ‘very negative vibrations with reference to Michael.’ Michael is deeply involved in alcohol and not under control—he is capable of anything.” Stephen thinks Sheridan made these words up, too: “She loved Michael,” he says, “and I find it very hard to believe she would have ever said such a thing.” But even if she had uttered those words, it’s challenging to imagine how Sheridan deemed these damaging gut feelings helpful to Sutton’s investigation, which he had launched, ostensibly, to clear both brothers. Sheridan deluged the Sutton sleuths with an obsessive cascade of gossipy slander, implicating Michael on pure hunches. From the Sutton report: “A Tom Sheridan memo of 6/6/78 stated that it is possible Michael could have committed the murder and doesn’t know it, and possibly someone else, i.e., Tommy, could have hidden the body and taken Michael to the Terriens’ to provide him with an alibi.”
One of Sheridan’s contributions stopped me dead in my tracks. “We know that he went after his aunt Ethel with a kitchen knife when she found him stealing liquor,” the report reads. “What other incidents haven’t we been told about?” The allegation is rank fabrication. Michael was never at our house and had no contact with my mother until after he got sober in 1982. Furthermore, there was a ton of liquor at Hickory Hill and Hyannis Port, and no one ever fought over it. It wasn’t even locked up. Because my mother entertained nearly every night, there were huge caches of alcohol in an unlocked walk-in wardrobe beneath the house’s central staircase, another liquor closet i
n the basement, liquor in the living room cabinet, and in glass cabinets in the kitchen. There was always lenty of cold beer and wine in three industrial-sized refrigerators, and cases of Pouilly-Fuissé stacked shoulder high in the laundry room and another in the basement storage room. The idea that Michael would have had to liberate booze at knifepoint is laughable. My mother, who adores Michael Skakel, scoffs at the story. “Nothing remotely like that ever occurred,” she said. “Never happened,” Michael texts me, when I alert him to the passage: “Another Tom Sheridan frame up. Tom Sheridan had a LONG history of falsifying evidence against me.”
Sheridan’s subtle campaign to implicate Michael began even before Sutton launched its investigation. In 1992, during his first meeting with Frank Garr, Sheridan told the detective that Michael had lied about owning a stained pair of pants that police recovered from the Skakel garbage. The Wrangler dungarees had come from Camp Pasquaney in New Hampshire, but Sheridan told Garr that Michael denied having ever been to Camp Pasquaney. Police initially believed that stain on the jeans might be blood. It wasn’t, but Garr considered Michael’s denial significant. “That’s when I knew Michael was our boy,” he told Levitt many years later. However, Michael said that Sheridan never talked to him about the camp or the pants. “That’s Tom Sheridan acting the provocateur once again,” he said. “Of course I didn’t deny owning those pants. Everyone knew those were my pants and the sneakers that went with them. And everyone knew I’d been at Camp Pasquaney. I threw them out because of the paint stains. Of course I didn’t lie.”
Two years after his first meeting with Murphy and Sheridan, Levitt reports that he began receiving communications from a source he’s only ever identified as “The Caller.” The Caller, Levitt wrote, phoned to tell him that Tommy, in his Sutton interview, had changed his story and admitted that he’d been with Martha until 9:50 p.m. The Caller also told Levitt that Michael, too, had changed his story, and confessed to the bizarre masturbation saga. The Caller informed Levitt that Sutton had brought on the Manassas, Virginia–based Academy Group, a consultancy led by two retired FBI agents who had run the agency’s behavioral science lab, where they’d studied serial killers. The Academy Group, The Caller said, had determined that because of Martha’s lack of defensive wounds and the fact that neighbors heard no screams (conveniently ignoring the fact that her mother heard her screams) she likely knew her attacker. “Martha didn’t know Littleton,” Levitt told The Caller, wondering if the killer may have been a Skakel. “That’s what it would look like,” The Caller replied.
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 23
