It was no shock when Coleman died a little over a year later, in August 2001. A batch of bad heroin killed him and six other Rochester junkies in one week. Even though this meant that his star witness would be unavailable to appear at trial, Benedict told the press that he would proceed “without batting an eyelash.” Benedict had good reason not to mourn Coleman’s passing. His demise was a prosecutorial windfall. Judge Kavanewsky ruled that since Sherman had had an opportunity to cross-examine Coleman at the reasonable cause hearing, prosecutors could read the dead junkie’s earlier testimony to the jury. Michael’s attorneys would have no opportunity to cross-examine Coleman at the trial, and the jury would never view his ruined demeanor. Rather than having the bulbous, twitching, sweating Coleman on the stand at trial, Coleman’s testimony instead would be performed by Chris Morano, Benedict’s deputy. Morano is considerably less menacing and more presentable than Coleman. Rather than a disheveled, fidgeting dope fiend with darting eyes, the jury got to swoon at Morano, who looks like a buttoned-down leading man. Morano was the calm, coiffed, credible young lawyer that every Greenwich mother on the jury would want her daughter to marry.
Playing the role of Coleman, Morano recited the deceased addict’s prior testimony to the adoring jury. His delivery was the linchpin in the elaborate, expensive but fragilely constructed case that convicted Michael.
Summarizing Coleman’s testimony to the jury, Benedict pointed to Michael. “The spoiled brat smugly boasted, ‘I can get away with anything’ and continued to describe to Coleman how he had beaten a girl’s head in with a golf club and later masturbated on her and was being hidden from the police.”
After the trial, perhaps thanks to Morano’s reading, jurors in Michael’s case told the press they found Coleman’s testimony believable, citing it as one of the primary reasons they convicted Michael.
Coleman family attorney John Regan didn’t think much again about that 1998 call until he read that Michael had been convicted. “I continued to assume that there must have been a lot of other solid evidence,” he wrote in his affidavit. In 2003, he was horrified to learn from my piece in The Atlantic exactly how crucial Coleman’s evidence had been in convicting Michael. He tracked down Michael’s new attorney, Hope Seeley, and offered to help free Michael in any way he could.
Long after Michael’s conviction, we all got independent corroboration of Coleman’s dishonesty. On the stand at the grand jury, Coleman testified that former Élan resident Cliff Grubin had been guarding Michael with him and overheard his confession. In the four years between the grand jury and trial, Sherman made no effort to locate Grubin. Michael had been in prison for three years when Colucci traveled to Ibiza, Spain, in 2005 to interview Grubin, who was running a juice bar there. At the Hotel Monte Sol, Grubin told Colucci that Coleman had invented the entire tale. Grubin had never guarded Michael. He described both Coleman and Higgins as “liars.” Contrary to Coleman’s testimony, Grubin said that Michael was given no special privileges at Élan. If anything, he was treated worse than the other residents. Cliff had been at the brutal general meeting when Michael was beaten savagely for eight hours. “Why would Michael confess to Coleman and then get pelted at a general meeting and not confess then?” Cliff asked.
Both Coleman and Higgins claimed that Michael had confessed to them under conditions of shocking brutality. In its closing argument, even the prosecution conceded the “concentration camp–type atmosphere” at Élan. Despite the pummeling, the beatings and the threats, humiliation, degradation, and torture, witness after witness from Élan testified that Michael never confessed to killing Martha Moxley. These included Sarah Petersen, Donna Kavanah, Dorothy Rogers, Alice Dunne, Angela McFillan, Mike Wiggins, Liz Arnold, and Charles Siegan. There were only two exceptions, John Higgins and Greg Coleman, two Élan residents who stood out among many others for the brutality of their conduct, the unreliability of their stories, and their reputations as pathological liars.
Even though Levitt would spend dozens of pages in his book recounting Garr’s insistence that Higgins and Coleman were telling the truth, he now admits he put little stock in the Élan “confessions” that, according to post-verdict interviews, swayed the jurors to convict Michael. “I dismissed much of the Élan testimony regarding Michael’s confessions as coerced,” Levitt emailed me in May 2016. Levitt explained to me the reason he did not include in his book the dire warnings about Coleman’s credibility offered by Rochester attorney John Regan Jr. In the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours they spent discussing the case, Levitt’s soul mate, Garr, never bothered to mention the telephone call. “I don’t recall Garr saying anything to me about Regan,” Levitt writes.
CHAPTER 17
The Handyman
Most of the trouble in life comes from misunderstandings.
—L.M. Montgomery
In addition to the full confessions that Michael allegedly made to Geranne Ridge, Higgins, and Coleman, prosecutors produced a category of characters to whom Michael allegedly made limited inculpatory statements that didn’t rise to the level of confession. One of these was the Skakels’ occasional handyman and driver Larry Zicarelli.
Long before Michael’s indictment, I was already familiar with the tale told by the pistol-packing mechanic with the Italian-horn necklace. Zicarelli worked for the Skakels for a short period in the late 1970s. Stephen recalls Zicarelli as a cocky, cologne-soaked hood with rolled up T-shirt sleeves and an ill-tempered German shepherd. “He reminded me of a skinny Joe Pesci—but shorter and angrier,” says Stephen. Zicarelli’s wife worked in the pizza parlor on Greenwich Avenue. Stephen says Zicarelli drove and ran errands for the family. “Mostly he polished his white Corvette in the driveway and tinkered with the engine—especially when Dad was away.” Zicarelli also had a dark pickup truck. He kept baseball bats in both vehicles. On Zicarelli’s first day of work, he spotted a parked vintage Corvette while driving Michael to school. He asked Michael to help him steal the hubcaps. Michael declined.
Many years ago Michael told me a story with his customary honesty and humor. At age 16 he had fallen asleep in his room, clutching a dress belonging to his late mother. Michael, who had prayed for their mother’s death as a way of ending her suffering, felt he had helped his mother die. He had fallen asleep clutching her dress to remember her, feel close to her, and beg for her forgiveness. A maid discovered him and reported him to Rucky. His father, who considered Anne’s artifacts sacred, went wild, beating Michael ferociously. Michael called Zicarelli and asked for a ride to his psychiatrist’s office in New York City. He did not have an appointment, but he was wracked with guilt, self-loathing, and anxiety, and needed to talk. The psychiatrist was unable to see him. Zicarelli testified that during the ride to the city, Michael said “he had done something very bad and he had to either kill himself or get out of the country.” On the way back to Belle Haven, Zicarelli testified, Michael tried to jump off the Triborough Bridge. Shortly after that incident, Rucky fired Zicarelli. Among other sins, Zicarelli pulled a gun on the Ixes’ shepherd, Zock, when he caught the dog relieving itself on his newly washed Corvette’s tire.
The prosecution offered Zicarelli’s story as a confession to the Moxley murder. In fact, despite widespread press reports to the contrary, Michael never said he was the murderer—to the driver or to anyone else. After Zicarelli went to work for the Skakels, Lunney was regularly in touch with the handyman, encouraging him to report anything suspicious about the family. Zicarelli professed to be eager to help, yet he never recounted his Triborough Bridge tale to Lunney or any other police officer. The handyman never intended to come forward with the story. But in 1993, he offhandedly reported the story to his bank manager, Edwin Jones, who repeated the yarn to Garr, who pressured Zicarelli to appear against Michael at trial.
CHAPTER 18
The Barber
In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
—Andy Warhol
Finally, the prosecution produced Matthew
Tucciarone, a hair stylist from the Golden Touch Salon in Greenwich. Tucciarone approached Benedict two weeks before Michael’s trial in 2002. Tucciarone said that after seeing Michael’s picture in the paper, he remembered that in the spring of 1976, Michael, Rush Jr., and Julie had come into his salon on Greenwich Avenue. As Tucciarone clipped his curls, Michael spontaneously proclaimed to his siblings, “I’m going to get a gun and kill him.” To this, according to Tucciarone, Julie scolded, “You can’t do that.” Michael replied, “Why not? I did it before. I killed before.” Julie answered, “Shut up, Michael.”
Tucciarone’s memories were vivid. Michael, he testified, didn’t want a full haircut, just a little trim. Tucciarone described Julie as having a ponytail and showing her navel. “Dad would have grounded her for a year,” Stephen told me. “Absolutely not,” Julie said when I asked her if she would ever have dressed that way. “I had short hair and Dad made me zip up like an Eskimo before I left the house. I was the last person in my class to get my ears pierced. In 1975, I still had never worn blue jeans or loafers, because Dad regarded them as too promiscuous!” Moreover, Julie testified that she, Rush Jr., and Michael would not have gone for haircuts together during that era, or at any time in their lives. Julie had her hair done at Chateau Coiffures on Putnam Avenue—usually with her cousin Georgeann Dowdle. “We never had a single haircut together,” she says of her brothers. The Skakel boys went to Mike at the Subway Barbershop. No Skakel, the family told me, has ever been to the Golden Touch Salon or met Tucciarone. Coincidentally, according to Tucciarone, Michael’s confession occurred on the one day of the week Tucciarone was working alone in the salon—a holiday when the entire Skakel family always left town. Tucciarone waited 26 years to tell his graphic tale: he came forward only after casually relating it to one of his customers, a Stamford sheriff, who pressed him to report it to the State’s Attorney’s office.
ALL OF Benedict’s material witnesses—Geranne Ridge, John Higgins, Greg Coleman, Larry Zicarelli, and Matthew Tucciarone—have so little credibility that their testimony would be comical had it not helped send an innocent man to prison. Most of these witnesses had changed or retracted their stories before the trial began. In each case the witness did not initially go to the police but bragged about the story to an acquaintance or to the media, who then notified the police. How likely is it that Michael Skakel, who endured years of abuse at Élan during which he refused to admit guilt, would suddenly “confess” to these crackpots, but never to any person he knew or trusted? Benedict was far too smart to have swallowed these wild yarns, but, with a little hocus pocus, he was able to persuade the jury to believe them.
CHAPTER 19
The Friend
What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
On June 5, 2002, the jurors deliberating Michael’s fate sent a handwritten note to the judge. They wanted to review Andrea Shakespeare’s testimony. Following the trial, the jurors said they considered Andrea’s statements to be just as dispositive to their decision to convict as either Higgins’s or Coleman’s “confessions.” And like other pieces of evidence in the case against Michael, Benedict knew that he was selling lies.
Very few people understand the challenges facing witnesses asked to retrieve 25-year-old memories. Think about this: most Americans know where they were on 9/11. But how many of the smaller details do you recall with accuracy even 15 years later? The terrorist attacks were memorable and traumatic for all of us, even if we were not personally touched. I lost two friends among the nearly 3,000 killed, and my downtown law office was a casualty of the attack. Imagine that every couple of years someone sat you down and interviewed you about your 9/11 experience. Each time you did your best to remember every movement of that day. Inevitably, you will add new details to your story. Unless there is video footage recording your entire day, you will never be certain whether these memories actually occurred nor whether they represent the brain’s natural editing. You almost certainly would share false memories of 9/11.
On the morning of 9/11, I was in Washington, DC, in a meeting at the office of AFL/CIO President John Sweeney. I accompanied my comrade and boss, John Adams, then president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and a small group of my fellow NRDC attorneys. We were there to strategize with Sweeney on deploying his and other unions in the fight against President Bush’s plan to drill for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. At 9:37—and I only know the exact time because I looked it up—we heard an explosion. From Sweeney’s window, we could see the Pentagon in flames, and eventually, we watched SWAT teams fanning out, as fireman battled the inferno. After a harrowing period, I and a few of the New York–based NRDC contingent decided that we needed to get home. Together we traversed Capitol Hill, on foot, to a Hertz rental car location. Because the nation’s airports and rail traffic were shutdown, rental cars were at a premium that day and we had to pack into a sedan with another contingent of New Yorkers in order to get home. Sitting here now, I cannot remember any of the faces of the other occupants of that car, not even of the attorneys from the meeting, even though these were people with whom I worked daily. As the years passed, I found myself remembering looking out the window of Sweeney’s office and not only seeing the Pentagon burning, but also seeing the White House, its roof crawling with snipers. I’m quite certain that there’s no window in Washington, DC, that has a vista of both the Pentagon and the White House, and upon reflection, I probably walked by the White House on the way to pick up the car, and saw the snipers on the roof then. But I just can’t be sure.
This phenomenon of false memory is likely what happened in 1991, when Garr and Solomon interviewed Andrea. Sixteen years after the murder, she remembered something that didn’t happen. Her false memory would help land Michael in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.
I give Andrea benefit of the doubt that I can’t give Coleman or Higgins. Andrea did lie on the stand, but not for money. I doubt she did so knowingly. To her, Michael is the equivalent of my Chuck Clusen. Chuck is an NRDC lawyer who specializes in federal public lands and Alaska. Sometimes, he works out of the NRDC’s Washington offices. Other times, he works in the San Francisco office. He also spends good chunks of time in the Arctic. I consider Chuck a good friend, but I can’t, for the life of me, remember if he was in DC for that meeting. And in 2017, which is 16 years after 9/11, I guarantee my memories will be no clearer. I remember John Sweeney in that meeting. I remember John Adams. I don’t remember Chuck. But if Chuck called me today and told me that not only was he in that meeting, he was also shoehorned into that car back to New York, I reckon that my 9/11 memories would soon include Chuck’s face, whether he was actually there or not. Memory, it turns out, is malleable and we are highly suggestible creatures.
Andrea erred when she said that Michael didn’t go to Sursum Corda with his brothers. In the years following the crime, police interviewed Andrea repeatedly about the two suspects who were in the Skakel house with her that night. Over and over again, they asked her the same questions: Did you see Tommy in the house before Julie brought you home? Did you notice Martha lingering by the side door when Tommy came to the front door to pass you the station wagon keys? What do you remember about Kenny Littleton’s behavior during dinner at the Belle Haven Club? Was Littleton with Tommy at the front door when Tommy passed the keys to you? Even on these familiar issues, Andrea’s memories are fluid. In the early years, she said that Littleton, Stephen, and Tommy all met her at the door to give her the station wagon keys. (This is correct: Littleton had trouble opening the broken front door, and the two boys scrambled to help him.) But by the 1990s, she was adamant that it was only Tommy. So what about a new issue of inquiry? Until the 1990s, Michael was not a suspect. So for Andrea he was merely a bit player, her best friend Julie’s little brother. Michael never figured in any of the questions, so naturally, he faded out of her memories. Until 1991, that is.
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sp; Garr and Solomon drove up to Massachusetts in June of that year to interview Andrea. She was by then in her mid-30s. She’d married and had three kids with Rick Renna, who worked in residential real estate. Garr and Solomon began by reviewing with her the established facts of the night of the murder. Since Andrea was in the house with Julie drinking tea and watching TV while the boys were out in the car, she demurred that she had little to offer. “I didn’t see anybody after a certain point,” she told the detectives. “I mean, the first time I ever heard about guys sitting in a car listening to tapes, is right now.” Garr laid out the facts. “When the Dowdle boy gets in, John gets in, Rushton comes in, and they depart … with Michael in the car,” he said. She stopped him. “I don’t know why my memory serves me this way, but I thought it was Rush, Johnny, and Jimmy,” she said. “But I don’t even know if I saw them leave.” Because no witness in 16 years had ever suggested that Michael might not have gone to Sursum Corda, the investigators were surprised. “That was our understanding of what occurred,” Garr told her.
Andrea was forthright about the murkiness of her memories. “For some reason, I don’t know who told me … I don’t know if I remember it, I thought it was the three boys,” she said. “Did I see [Michael] in the house? No. Did I see him leave? No … I thought when we were recounting our stories before today, I thought I remembered hearing stories that Michael was in the back saying goodbye to Helen … Not that I saw, but it’s just what I heard afterwards … It was my assumption, and it’s a total assumption that there were four people in the backyard … Tommy, Michael, Helen, and Martha … I never even heard about a Geoffrey Byrne. And I don’t know whether it’s a story I was told from somebody. I don’t know where the information came from.”
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit Page 31
