When Tony saw Adolph and Burr at school the following Monday, the boys were swaggering. Tony said, “Adolph said some very, very, very, very damaging statements that, I mean, just blew me away.” Adolph’s admissions left Tony no doubt that they had committed the murder. Adolph boasted, “Well, I got mine”; Burr in a roundabout way says, “Yeah, we did what we had to do” and “We did it. We achieved the caveman,” The two friends vaunted to Tony. “We’ve achieved one of our fantasies. … We got her caveman style,” Adolph said. Tony told me that Adolph boasted that “he had achieved what he set out to do, you know what I mean? I asked the question, ‘With who?’ and then I thought better, and said, ‘You know what? I don’t want to know.’ It was her because later on—these conversations take place over a, maybe, two- or three-month period, and each time you get more details, more details … because … it’s the type of behavior, they can’t stand to keep that secret. They got to share, they got to gloat.” While Adolph and Burr never mentioned the victim by name, it was obvious that they were talking about Martha. “I knew exactly who they were talking about. They were talking about Martha Moxley. They were bragging. They were bragging about it. They would take me to the limit and never mention the name, but, I mean, come on. ‘We grabbed her’? ‘We got her’?” Tony told me the two boys took pleasure in crowing about the murder. “After school they would stop by my mom’s apartment or wait downstairs for me to come out of the building and they would walk and talk and share things with me. The most graphic things. Like just going into details about things that they had done and they would say everything but leave out the name. ‘We got her good.’ I didn’t have to ask the name. I knew who it was. It was, it was just that graphic and you could tell who they were talking about that, and they just wanted me to say, ‘Oh, you were talking about Martha’ and I would never say it. I just said, ‘Um-hum, oh really? Okay.’ I wouldn’t say the name and I was like, they are baiting me to say the name.”
According to Tony, Adolph and Burr showed no remorse for what they did that night. “They made a joke of it.” He added, “They were proud of it.”
At some point, Bryant confessed to his mother that Adolph and Burr were involved in the murder. His mother warned him that they were dangerous to the entire Bryant family. Barbara Bryant ordered Tony to distance himself from his two friends. “I had already been in trouble with the police in Greenwich. So what I’m thinking in my mind is I’ve got to get out of this situation. This is not healthy for me. That is not good for me. So I just started creating distance.” The following year, Tony’s mother sent him to boarding school in Texas.
In the weeks after Martha’s murder, Tony awoke every morning expecting that that day the police would appear at his door and take him into custody. He worried that his role in bringing his friends to Greenwich, and his presence on the Mead that night, would make him a target for prosecution. “I was afraid of being automatically pinned in as a suspect. My family didn’t have money to defend me from a lawsuit that, you know. It would be easy.”
At first, he was certain his two talkative friends would be arrested any moment and that when everything exploded, he needed to be a great distance from the splatter. “I did not want to become a suspect or get involved with any of that, because I said, ‘They are going to find out who did it. They don’t need my help.’” Tony told me, “When it first took place I said, they are going to catch who did it.” He was astonished that the police never arrested Adolph and Burr and no one from law enforcement ever appeared to question him. “I mean, this is what is so amazing about this whole thing: No one ever came. No one ever asked me. No one. Miss Walker didn’t even mention that I was at her house that night.”
As the days, months, and years went by, the police never questioned him about his night in Greenwich. Tony tried to put his friend’s murder out of his mind and focus on his family and career. When the grand jury charged Michael, Tony believed, “The case will never go to trial.” When the trial began, he thought, “They’ll never convict.” He knew Michael was innocent; “They don’t have anything on him.” He felt that this was a case Michael’s attorneys simply couldn’t lose. He remembers thinking, “I think they got a pretty slam-dunk case here.” In any case, he had told his story to Crawford and Neal and Margie. He knew they had spoken to Benedict, Garr, and Sherman, and that if anyone was interested in the truth, they could easily find him. “I am not a hard person to find,” Tony says. “When I heard the verdict, I was in shock I mean, I mean, I am sitting in total disbelief of what had transpired.”
Michael’s conviction reinforced Tony’s mistrust of the system and validated his reasons for not coming forward. Tony explained to Vito Colucci that he feared the Connecticut justice system. “And when you have suspects that have been described by other people as having been in Belle Haven and police not following up and prosecutors not following up, it sort of makes you kind of wary. They just beamed in on that one family, the Skakels. And unfortunately for Michael, they had a bull’s-eye on him. Based on the evidence that they had, they were able to convict him. But he’s not guilty.” Tony, who had attended law school, understood the jeopardy of getting swept into the criminal process, a peril particularly acute for a black man. “I sort of understand legal process and I know how things are supposed to work. If they can convict Michael Skakel on circumstantial evidence, I think I would be an easier conviction than Michael,” he said.
Tony also stated, “One of the parties, Geoff Byrne, has passed away. So that made me … run to the hills even worse, because I knew Geoff knew as much, if not more, than I did.”
GEOFF BYRNE, 11 years and 9 months old in 1975, was yet another victim of the cascading tragedy. On the Monday immediately following Martha’s murder, Adolph and Burr told Tony that they had spent the murder night at the Byrne mansion, a fact Geoff later confirmed to Tony. Tony told me that Geoff’s house offered “the perfect place” for Adolph and Burr to clean up after the crime. “If you were going to do something, in that neighborhood or in that area, and you wanted to escape, and hide, and clean up and get fresh clothes and no one would ever see you, that’s the only place where you could have gone. There was hardly anybody home. … You could stay at that house and the parents would never know,” said Tony. Anyone who had ever been in the Byrne house knew this to be true. Built in 1891, the manse was a 10,000-square-foot Tudor castle with 12 bedrooms, 8 baths, and an old coal shaft used by neighborhood kids to access a secret basement-level entrance. Adolph and Burr could have counted on Geoff’s accommodating nature. According to Tony, Burr and Adolph usually simply announced that they wanted to stay at Geoff’s house and Geoff was grateful to comply.
Tony, who describes himself as Geoff’s close friend, said, “I knew Geoff very well. Everybody loved this kid.” Tony recalled, “His parents didn’t keep track of him very good, and he had an older brother [Warren] who pretty much looked after him because his mom and dad were always going on some type of trip or something. He was always out there looking for affection,” Bryant trailed off sadly. “He was a great guy. He was a great guy. He was one of the best kids.” Michael confirmed Tony’s description, remembering Geoff as a “sweet, lost, affection-starved little boy” whose parents were never home and who was raised by his brother, Warren, a chef, who was 10 years Geoffrey’s senior. “Geoff was a lonely boy in a big corral,” said Michael. “He seemed to be always trying to fit in, always trying to please. He would do anything to be accepted.” Tony remembered that Geoff smoked pot and drank with the older kids. These qualities made it easy for Adolph and Burr to take advantage of him.
Based on what Geoff told him in the weeks after the murder, Tony reckons that Geoff was present when the murder occurred. “I am willing to bet big money on that one.” But whether Geoff was present or simply allowed Adolph and Burr to hide out in his home after the murder and clean up their bloody clothes, the little boy was clearly traumatized by the events. “He came into the city a couple of times and he wasn’t even
supposed to be in the city. He was younger, like, two or three years younger than we were and he would just leave his house and come to my mom’s apartment in lower Manhattan.” But when Geoff told Tony, “I saw what happened and I need to tell you about it,” Tony, who had already “put pieces together because of things that Adolph and Burr had said to me,” begged off. Tony believed Adolph and Burr were about to be busted, and the less he knew about the details of their crime, the better. “I told Geoff, I am not interested. I didn’t want to know.”
Tony was heartbroken that he couldn’t help his obviously upset friend. According to Tony, Geoff was “freaked out” to the point that he became “a different person.” Geoff “had fear in his heart.” Rattled, he repeatedly told Tony, “Something bad happened. They’re bad guys.” He warned Tony that Adolph and Burr were “out of control.” “He said, ‘Tony, you’ve got to stay clear. They are bad guys.’” As damaged as he was by what he had seen, Geoff was concerned for Tony’s welfare. “They are going to get you in trouble and they are already in trouble. You just need to keep your distance.” He warned Tony, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the police come and question them.” Sometimes when Geoff took the train into Manhattan to talk to Tony, he would also express his dismay and anger over what had happened. Tony said that Geoff sometimes blamed him for getting him mixed up with Adolph and Burr. Recalled Tony, “[He] was just like, ‘How did I get to this place? How did you put me here?’ And, you know, he was sort of reaching out to me to help him. And I said, ‘Geoff, I can’t do anything to help you. What am I going to do?’”
Just as Tony was putting distance between himself and the dangerous duo, Geoff also felt a new fear of Adolph and Burr. Tony told me, “One time Geoff came to my house and he said, ‘Listen, I got to tell you something. I was in Greenwich at home on the weekend. Burr and Adolph showed up at my house uninvited.’ They had let themselves in, because they never lock doors in Greenwich.” They were sitting in Geoff’s bedroom when he walked in, and Geoff thought for a moment that they might attack him. He was, according to Tony, “completely freaked out by it. … He first thought he was going to get jumped. He was like, I just felt really uncomfortable. He was very taken aback at that. I think he knew they were dangerous.”
In 1980, just after Michael got released from Élan, and while he was still an active alcoholic and addict, Geoff’s father approached Michael during a ski weekend in Windham, New York. Mr. Byrne was desperate because Geoff was so badly strung out on drugs. He told Michael that he was certain his son was going to die. “At that time,” recalled Michael, “there was nothing I could do. I was still a user myself.”
Geoff Byrne died at age 16 on December 27, 1980, six years after Martha’s murder.
The Connecticut papers reported that Geoff died of an overdose, but Tim Dumas wrote that Geoff’s autopsy showed him clean at the time of his death. His siblings will only say that his death was “a family tragedy.” Dumas says that Geoff died by suffocation in a waterbed on the third floor of his parents’ massive Belle Haven mansion. Art Byrne, Geoff’s father, told Dumas that some tightly held secret about that night may have haunted Geoff and contributed to his death. “I’ve always been under the impression that he willed himself to die,” he said in the 1990s. “Now, how much of his memory of what transpired in 1975 contributed to his … feelings of despair, shall we say? He never said what he thought. He never gave me an opinion, or the police an opinion, of what he thought happened.”
AFTER MY initial conversations with Tony, I attempted to verify some of his claims. I tried to reach Geoff’s older brother Warren, but he didn’t return my calls. I found Daryl Fleuryn, Geoff’s older sister. She was astonished by the story, and doubted that her 11-year-old baby brother could have been involved with these homicidal villains. She promised to call her mother, Dori, and other brother Greg.
She called back later that day. “I talked to my mom,” she said. “She was absolutely shocked. She said no way, ever, were those guys there that night.” Daryl said that her father was sitting on the porch when Geoff came home, and their mother saw Geoff asleep at 10:00 p.m. She’d never even heard of the guys. “And she said Geoffrey never had any black friends. He had one black friend many years later who was a Greenwich boy.” Her brother told her, “There were no black kids in Belle Haven in those days.” I apologized for bothering her. I was convinced Tony Bryant had been honest with me. I sensed that Daryl, who was 28 at the time of the murder, was also telling the truth—or what she believed to be true. But one of them had to be wrong. Their certainty reflected the deep commitment to flawed memories I encountered in so many other witnesses during my investigation—often in direct contradiction to historical facts.
First, I had to discover whether Tony Bryant’s two phantoms were real human beings who had ever been to Greenwich, Connecticut. With the help of my friend, a White Plains Police detective, I was able to determine, using high school yearbooks and police databases, that Adolph was Adolph Hasbrouck and Burr was Burton Tinsley. I found a telephone number for Hasbrouck in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he eventually gave me Tinsley’s telephone number in Portland, Oregon. When Hasbrouck answered the phone, I identified myself as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., first cousin to Michael Skakel. I tape-recorded the conversation. Adolph told me about his life—he worked at ABC television as a technician—and he happily reminisced about good times. He knew Tony and had been with him to Belle Haven. He told me they all used to “run around the same circle at one time.” Who was in this circle? “Me and Tony Bryant and Geoff, a couple of other people, Neal Walker,” he said. Had he ever, by chance, been to Geoffrey Byrne’s house? “Yes, I was, many times,” he said. “Geoff lived right across the street from Neal.” How about Geoff’s parents—did he ever meet them? “Oh yes,” Adolph said. “I met them a few times.” I asked if he happened to be in Belle Haven on the night of the Moxley murder. “That night, we weren’t up there, unfortunately,” he said. Considering what happened, it struck me as an odd construction. Adolph told me that he had only recently learned about the Moxley murder. “It was a few years ago,” he said. “I said, ‘Yeah, how about that.’ Because that was the time we all used to hang out together … I wondered if anybody, if Neal was involved, or connected, or have any more knowledge of that, but I never followed it up.” Adolph further confirmed that he was friends with Burton Tinsley, who lived in Oregon. Although he spoke with Burton regularly, he had not been in touch with Geoff, Neal, or Tony since the 1970s.
I provided a tape recording of my conversation with Adolph to Vito Colucci. On September 2, 2003, Colucci and another co-investigator, Kris Steele, knocked on Adolph’s door on Pixlee Place, a pleasant, working-class neighborhood of two-story houses in Bridgeport. Adolph started talking immediately and, over the course of approximately 70 minutes, changed his story three times with respect to his whereabouts on the day of the murder. Adolph acknowledged that he was in Belle Haven on the night of the murder, but gave three conflicting accounts of the time he was there. First, he told Colucci and Steele that he had arrived in Belle Haven on the morning of the murder but left around noontime because “nothing much was going on. …” Next, he recollected that he, Burr, and Tony arrived in the morning but went home between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m., “before it got dark.” Finally, at the conclusion of the interview, he said that the group got there in the morning and left around 9:00 or 9:30 p.m. He said that he didn’t realize that there had been a murder in the neighborhood until he showed up at the Byrne residence a few days later and the police informed him of the Moxley murder. This contrasted with Adolph telling me that he had only recently learned of the murder. When Colucci and Steele asked if he would be willing to take a polygraph, Adolph demurred, “I’d probably flunk it.” He explained that he gets really nervous and that his jitters might affect his performance. Adolph also told Colucci and Steele that he had not spoken to Burton Tinsley since the previous December, of 2002. In an email to me, however, Adolph stated he had spoken to Burton
in June 2003. Following the interview, Adolph called Kris Steele collect to say that he had “checked his calendar” from 28 years before and realized that he was not, after all, in Belle Haven on the night of Martha Moxley’s murder. Adolph also told Steele that since their first encounters with defense investigators, he and Burr had spoken to be sure that their stories would match.
ON MARCH 3, 2003, a few days after speaking to Adolph, I phoned Burton at his Portland home. Again, I recorded the conversation. Burton told me that Adolph had warned that I might call. Burton explained that he and Adolph befriended Tony Bryant at Charles Evans Hughes High School and that they frequently visited Greenwich. “Going up there was sort of fun,” he said. “New people to meet. Rich community.” Burton said that he was originally from Portland, but in the early 1970s he moved to New York with his older brother, who was going to graduate school at Hunter College. Burton said he was hoping to pursue a music career in the city after Hughes High School, but by the time I found him in 2003, he said he was working as a photographer. He recalled being in Greenwich about a half dozen times to socialize with Neal Walker and Geoff Byrne. I asked him whether he had gone to Greenwich on the night before Halloween. Burton responded, “Halloween, it seems to me we were going up there. I have a hard time remembering. …” Burton recalled going to a party in Greenwich sometime during the week leading up to Halloween, but could not pinpoint if it was Mischief Night. “I found out about the murder in the New York Times. My brother and I were out in the city. We might have been going out for coffee. I don’t remember the girl. My brother said, ‘See, it’s like a whole different world.’” Did he keep up with his Greenwich friends? “You know after the murder, we never went up there.” I asked whether he knew that Geoff had committed suicide (which I then believed) a few years after the murder. Burton responded that he was not aware of that fact. “After the murder,” he repeated, “we never went up there. …”
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