ATTANIAN: Why are you telling her that?
RIDGE: Everything’s confidential with her.
ATTANIAN: Geranne, you’re telling everybody. … You told Rose [a mutual friend] too, right?
RIDGE: I did tell Rose. Rose, I know, would never say anything.
ATTANIAN: You’ll tell her tonight?
RIDGE: Yeah, but I won’t use any names or anything.
Ridge told Attanian that not only was she worried about being dragged into this trial, she was also concerned about another possible trial.
RIDGE: You know what I’m afraid of now? There was this thing in the Herald yesterday. Ronald Borino, you know the attorney I dated? How I decorated his whole entire apartment, from towels to marble?
ATTANIAN: Yeah, well, who gives a shit?
RIDGE: Well, he stole nine million [dollars] from the treasury and it said that they were waiting for Rick Arrighi and Ronald Borino to admit they were involved, and they haven’t. And he spent at least one million renovating his waterfront condo with a quote ‘friend.’ What if I get called now for that? All his friends know that I was the one who decorated that.
ATTANIAN: So you didn’t do anything wrong. … Geranne, are you talking out of your ass? Geranne I think you’re talking out of your ass. … Are you sure all the shit you’re telling me isn’t, like, repeated from Marissa?
RIDGE: Like what stories?
ATTANIAN: That night about what that guy told you and everything?
RIDGE: No … he was here, honey. But I was in and out of the room and I only heard, I didn’t hear, like the whole, I mean, I missed a lot of the conversation.
All through the conversation, Attanian expressed a newfound skepticism about the stories his friend had told him so vividly. “Well, Geranne, your story keeps changing,” he said. Any reasonable person with access to Ridge’s taped conversations would immediately understand that she was spinning a yarn for attention. Her fairy tales were inconsistent. She couldn’t keep track of which version she’d already told Attanian. Listening to the tape, you can feel her giddiness, her thriving on the teasing, the scolding, the drama. Even while adorning her fable with salacious new details, she is simultaneously backtracking—claiming she wasn’t in the room to hear much of anything.
Everybody knows a Geranne or two. And under cross-examination in Michael’s trial, Geranne admitted that her desire for “notoriety and fame” caused her to fabricate the story. “I did make stuff up, trying to appear to be knowledgeable, from things I heard from Marissa and from magazines,” she testified. Why would she lie to her friend Attanian? “Because he was so inquisitive about the case; he wouldn’t let it die,” she testified. “He was always bragging about who he knew and I had done some modeling and he is a part time photographer and he was talking about famous models he knew and so forth.”
Of course, Garr and Benedict realized that she knew nothing. They nevertheless called her as one of three star witnesses who claimed they heard Michael “confess” to Martha’s murder.
Michael never visited her home. To this day, he has never met Geranne Ridge. In June 1997, when Geranne claimed Michael confessed at her party, Michael was in Russia, helping to establish the Alcoholics Anonymous program in the Russian prison system with a well-established American group. On cross-examination, Ridge admitted concocting the story. Neither Ridge nor Garr could produce a single witness who could place Michael at her apartment. Besides Verrochi, Ridge could not name any of the eight people whom she claimed had attended the imaginary party in her apartment. Verocchi testified that she had no memory of the evening. Ridge told Attanian that Michael was drunk and was excusing himself to the bathroom often, presumably to snort cocaine, “apparently having fallen off the wagon,” as Benedict put it in his closing. I can attest that both Benedict and Ridge were lying about this. Michael had at that point been 15 years sober. “If I were doing cocaine,” laughs Michael, “you would have heard about it on the Weather Channel. It would have been a typhoon and it wouldn’t have blown over till I was dead.”
Ridge was a nightmare witness for the prosecution. She drank 12 full glasses of water on the stand and repeatedly shot pleading looks at her attorney desperate for evacuation. Her testimony was worse than useless—but Benedict’s ulterior motives for calling Ridge soon became clear. Summoning her to the courtroom allowed Benedict to play her recorded conversation with Attanian, exposing jurors to the juicy calumnies she’d read in the supermarket tabloids. Benedict produced no evidence to support Fuhrman’s wild theory that Michael committed the crime out of filial jealousy. But there it was in the tabloids. Those sensational fabrications had, of course, been leaked to the Enquirer, the Star, and the Globe, by Garr’s office. Ridge became the prosecution’s vehicle for getting his otherwise-inadmissible speculations before the jury.
Unbelievably, it got worse. When Sherman cross-examined Geranne about the sources of her information, she confirmed that her primary source for the libels she’d shared with Attanian were, in Sherman’s words, “Star, Globe, Enquirer—those kinds of things.” In specifying the tabloids, Sherman walked into Benedict’s trap. Geranne’s attorney had brought to court one issue of each of these rags to illustrate the pedigree of Ridge’s concoctions. However, none of the three scandal sheets that Ridge’s attorney carried into court featured a specific story about Michael masturbating in a tree. Benedict, therefore, asked Judge Kavanewsky to admit the tabloids into evidence, as a way of impeaching Ridge. Benedict said that he wanted to show that she was lying about lying. The impeachment purpose didn’t hold water: Ridge had testified, under oath, that she had read other tabloid stories about the case. Those other tabloid stories included the masturbation tale. These particular tabloids were compendiums of “Kennedy scandals”—Chappaquiddick and Will Smith’s trial and my 1980 arrest for heroin—all flashed with opprobrious headlines about the Kennedys. Most courts would have overruled Benedict’s motion in a microsecond. Almost any appellate court in the country would consider a decision to allow a jury to be exposed to that kind of prejudicial poison reversible error. But Kavanewsky must have intuited that the Connecticut appellate courts would bend over backward to not reverse the jury verdict in this highly publicized case. Public outrage about the O.J. Simpson acquittal was pervasive, and Kavanewksy was a prosecutor’s judge. Instead of laughing Benedict out of the courtroom, Kavanewsky asked mildly if Sherman had an objection.
All first-year law students with an evidence course under their belt would have been on their feet with the obvious objections to this material: “Irrelevant,” “Immaterial,” “Hearsay,” or “Potential for prejudice outweighs its probative value.” Sherman rose. Somewhere in his alcohol-addled memory, those objections were fighting their way through the fog, but it was all too much for him. He had already given up on the case. “I will object, Your Honor,” he began. “I can’t think of the grounds, but it just bothers me to put this stuff in evidence. I mean, the Star, the Globe, the Enquirer, I just can’t believe we would degenerate to have a jury check out …” He trailed off, and sat feebly down. Unbelievably, Judge Kavanewsky allowed the tabloids into evidence, providing jurors with the most irrelevant, venomous reading material imaginable. “They are not being admitted for the truth of what they contain,” Kavanewsky instructed jurors disingenuously. “Only in connection with this witness’s testimony that she collected them as sources of information.” Typical of the three, the National Enquirer teased in a cover story: “Kennedy Family Secrets Exposed: Cousin blows lid off 25 years of cover-ups.” That tabloid story highlights the most scurrilous and inaccurate ignominies about my family.
Unless Ridge was a time traveler, she hadn’t passed information from that particular Enquirer to Attanian; the Enquirer published the issue on March 19, 2002, several months after Ridge’s taped call. Filling the jurors’ heads with prejudicial misinformation about our family was the essential tactic in the prosecution’s strategy: Benedict needed to inspire in the jury such a revulsion toward the
Skakel family, and my family, that the jury would overlook the dearth of evidence. Garr had skillfully controlled the press narrative: his selective leaks helped create the tabloid frenzy. Now prosecutors had inveigled the most poisonous of those slanderous scandal sheets into the sacrosanct jury room.
Astonishingly, in a post-trial brief, Benedict would refer to Geranne’s admittedly invented fantasies as “one of three direct confessions” Michael made to the crime. The other two “direct confessions” are even less plausible than Ridge’s: the string of events that would carry Garr to John Higgins and Greg Coleman began in 1996.
CHAPTER 15
The Bully
What are you willing to give me to betray him to you?
And they weighed out thirty pieces of silver.
—Matthew 26:15
As part of his media strategy to reinvigorate the 20-year-old investigation, Garr arranged for NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries to film a segment on the Moxley murder and to provide a telephone hotline for informants. The show publicized Mrs. Moxley’s $50,000 reward in the hope of eliciting leads. On February 15, 1996, Garr escaped the Connecticut winter for a three-day jaunt to Los Angeles to field hotline calls. He thought he’d hit pay-dirt with a call from a Phil Lawrence in Florida. In his summary of their brief chat, Garr wrote that Lawrence’s 1977 to 1979 Élan bid overlapped with Michael’s. “Mr. Lawrence reports, during group therapy, Michael Skakel admitted responsibility for this murder,” Garr wrote. “Michael claimed to have been under the influence of alcohol, and that he had used a golf club during the commission of the crime. … Present during this group therapy session was owner and Executive Director of Élan, Joseph Ricci. According to Mr. Lawrence, Joseph Ricci tape-recorded these admissions.” Garr’s notes painted Phil as a promising witness. Nevertheless, it took Garr a month to call him after returning to Bridgeport. It was very uncharacteristic for Garr to procrastinate on tips he considered hot. But at that point, Garr still believed Littleton or Tommy was the perpetrator. Expediency had not yet refocused his attention on Michael. In any case, the tip wasn’t so hot, it turned out. Phil either changed his story, or Garr had let wishful thinking color his recollection of the hotline call. In their taped interview, Phil said he had not witnessed any confession. “It was common knowledge that it happened … that he had committed the murder,” Phil told him. Garr drilled down. How had it become common knowledge? “I think he admitted it in one or two groups.” Phil said he hadn’t been in the group, and could not provide any names of any other residents who might have overheard a confession. Maybe Ricci had heard it, Phil posited. “He had a lot of private meetings with Joe Ricci,” Phil said, trying to be helpful. “I know the way Joe Ricci operates. … I guarantee you he has recordings of those confessions. I’d bet you anything. I’d bet the moon.” But when Garr pressed hard about where he heard the confession, Phil went squishy. “I can’t remember,” he said. “And I’ve been asking myself that. I can’t say for sure one way or the other.” Garr asked about the thrice-daily group therapy sessions at Élan. “Do you think it was during one of these sessions that he made these admissions, or was it just general chitchat in the dorms when he said these things?” Garr probed. “Well,” said Phil, “we weren’t really allowed to have chitchat in the dorms. It had to be in a group.” At this point, Garr should have learned something essential about Élan: the institution was so repressive, that there really was no such thing there as casual chatting between residents. Garr would have to will himself to forget this.
One of the few names Phil provided Garr was Alice Dunne. When Garr reached Alice, she told him definitively that this confession never happened in any group. “I kept saying it over and over again to Frank Garr,” Alice says. Nevertheless, Garr persevered, hoping that Phil’s hunch had been accurate. Garr tracked down and interrogated a legion of former Élan residents, none of whom could remember any confession.
Garr was an aggressive prospector. Diane Hozman, a Californian therapist, was an Élan alum in whom Michael had confided during his confinement. When Diane heard that Garr was investigating the crime, she contacted him, she told me, to help clear Michael. Garr flew Diane to Connecticut four times, once with her son and another time with her boyfriend. She felt Garr was bullying her into saying that Michael confessed. “I felt they were desperate to blame Michael,” she told me. “Garr took everything I said out of context to make it fit into his puzzle. He definitely didn’t want to hear anything good about Michael. I’m sorry I even talked to Garr.” The night before she was to testify, Diane reiterated to Benedict that Michael had never confessed. Benedict and Garr sent her home without calling her to the stand.
After the Unsolved Mysteries episode aired in February 1996, People magazine featured the $50,000 reward in a follow-up story. Élan alumni passed that article around. That June 1996, the Moxley family announced that they were hiking the reward to $100,000. The following Halloween, eight months after Garr’s Unsolved Mysteries Hail Mary, a former Élan resident, Chuck Siegan, called the detective. Chuck told Garr that his friend John Higgins had heard a bona fide confession from Michael. According to Chuck, Michael said, “I did it.”
Garr reached Higgins by phone in early 1997. Higgins asked if Garr was recording the call. Garr said no. As usual, he was lying. “So ya know, what you say to me right now stays between you and me,” he reassured Higgins. “Talking to you right now, is there any way I can be subpoenaed to give you this information?” Higgins asked. “No,” Garr lied again. During the conversation, Higgins contradicted Chuck. He swore there’d been no confession. He gave his word. “I live and die by the truth,” Higgins told him. “I never ever lie.”
Higgins, then 34, hadn’t fared as well as Michael after Élan. Police had arrested him six times, for theft, battery, criminal damage to property, and pot possession. His last bust was three years before his conversation with Garr. Courts convicted him in three of those cases. He was living in Lisle, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, near two Élan friends, Chuck Siegan and Harry Kranick. He hadn’t heard Michael confess. However, he did recall a conversation they’d had on a porch in Élan. Garr had forgotten that casual conversations did not happen at Élan. There were no other witnesses. And Higgins could not recall the year. It could have been at any time between 1978 and 1980. Higgins was on “Night Owl duty” with Michael—conducting occasional bed checks to assure that nobody escaped. While the others slept, a weeping Michael spontaneously confided details about the Moxley murder. “He remembers being in his garage,” Higgins told Garr. “He remembers having a golf club, he remembers being in tall pine trees, and he remembers waking up back in his house and his big dilemma at the time was he doesn’t know if he did it or not. … And that was the only time we ever discussed it.” Over and over, Garr asks Higgins to repeat everything he knew. Even though he claimed the conversation with Michael lasted two hours, Higgins was only certain of three details. “He [Michael] remembers being in his garage … going through golf clubs, going through a golf bag,” Higgins said. “He remembers a party,” Higgins said, though he could not say whether the party was in the day or the evening. “He remembers running through the woods,” Higgins said. “When he leaves the garage, he’s in the woods. His house is in the woods or something.” Higgins did not know anything more about these woods. “He said he remembers pine trees.” That was all Higgins could recall. Garr told Levitt this was when he knew Higgins was telling the truth. “Only Michael could have known about the pine trees,” Garr said. “No way Higgins could have known that on his own. He had to have heard that from Michael.” Garr was either lying to Levitt or delusional; by then, the fact that Martha was found under a pine tree was common knowledge, reported hundreds if not thousands of times on TV, in national tabloids, and in newspapers. Garr pushed Higgins to dig deep for some recollection of Michael confessing.
GARR: I want you to be up front with me in everything he told you.
HIGGINS: Well, I pretty much got you everything that he told me. I mean he
never specifically told me that he killed anybody. I mean, he never said that specifically.
GARR: Are you sure?
HIGGINS: Yeah. I’m certain of it.
Garr asked why Higgins had kept this conversation a secret for so long, knowing that there was an unsolved murder.
GARR: Why didn’t you call us? Why not Greenwich Police or some authority?
HIGGINS: Well, actually Harry Kranick called me. He told me that the whole thing was in People magazine. He told me that they were offering $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of the murderer of this Moxley girl.
GARR: It’s been increased to $100,000.
HIGGINS: Oh that’s special.
With this fresh in mind, Garr again coaxed Higgins to comb his memory for a confession.
GARR: It’s really important now, at last, to come out with everything, okay, to tell the whole thing. … And I know there’s more and I want you to feel free to tell me the whole story.
HIGGINS: The amount of things I remembered … I told you.
GARR: But you know, there’s more. I mean, is that a fair statement?
HIGGINS: Um, no. I don’t know that there’s more.
GARR: Well, I mean, I think you know more, and you’re just a little hesitant to share it all with me. Is that a fair statement?
HIGGINS: No, I would not say that’s a fair statement.
GARR: In other words, you’ve told me everything you know?
HIGGINS: If, believe me, if I had a confession from him, I’d give it to you.
Garr then slowly and deliberately provided Higgins the exact details and language that Higgins would need to remember if Higgins decided he needed the reward money. “My information is that along with what you’ve told me, Michael did, at one point, only once, tell you that ‘I killed her,’” Garr said. “And I got that from a couple different places. Michael told you one evening, ‘Ya know, I did,’ and he never mentioned it again to you.”
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 29
