“You’ve heard it said there was no adult supervision in the [Skakel] house,” remarks former detective Mark Fuhrman. “They had no intelligent supervision whatsoever. It was ‘The Addams Family,’ and the Moxleys were ‘Leave It To Beaver.’”
On Halloween of that year, Martha is found viciously murdered on her front lawn. “Her killer bludgeoned young Martha with a golf club and then dragged her body nearly 100 yards to hide it,” the New York Times reports in December 1975. It’s a brutal beating, violent and bloody, and the fifteen-year-old was left exposed, her underwear and jeans pulled down, though there’s no sign of sexual assault.
The murder weapon is discovered to be a rare Toney Penna six-iron, a distinctive golf club, which broke into at least three pieces from the force of the blows. Martha is stabbed through the throat with one of the pieces; another section is never found. The six-iron is revealed to have come from a set that once belonged to the late Anne Skakel, and Martha’s time of death is determined to have been the evening prior. Among the group of teenagers she was last seen with the previous evening—Mischief Night—are both Thomas and Michael Skakel.
Early investigations glide over the possibility of the teens having any significant involvement, focusing more strongly on troubled twenty-something men like the Skakels’ latest live-in tutor, Kenneth Littleton, though seventeen-year-old Thomas Skakel is also intensely questioned. But despite police efforts, the investigation quickly hits a wall, and decades go by without any arrests in the case.
* * *
With a family predilection toward drinking and no one to stop him, by age thirteen, Michael Skakel was already a self-described “full-blown, daily-drinking” alcoholic. At seventeen, in 1978, he’s convicted of drunk driving, and sent by his father to a notoriously harsh teen rehabilitation center in Maine called the Élan School (shut down in 2011), specializing in “tough love and discipline” that attendees liken to abuse. He tries to run away several times, and is ultimately allowed to leave in 1980.
After that, Michael focuses on sobriety and sports, becoming a strong enough speed skier that he nearly makes it to the 1992 Winter Olympics. He also develops a warmer relationship with his aunt Ethel’s kids, especially David and Bobby Jr., who also struggles with sobriety. “He helped me to get sober, in 1983,” Bobby credits his cousin. Despite the family connection, the Skakels and the Kennedys had not previously been close. “I rarely saw the Skakel boys growing up, and would not have been able to identify Michael or his brothers” until they were all well into their twenties, Bobby Jr. says of his Skakel cousins.
By 1996 Michael Skakel is twelve years sober and has a reputation for being friendly and nonjudgmental. “His primary passion in life is helping other alcoholics in recovery,” Bobby Jr. states. Ethel’s youngest son, Douglas Kennedy, also vouches for his cousin, saying, “Michael is one of the most honest and open people I know. He cares about people more than anybody I’ve ever met.”
He also becomes something of a Kennedy dogsbody, working as a driver on Ted Kennedy’s campaign and then with Michael Kennedy at Citizens Energy. Though his official title is ‘Director of International Programs,’ in reality, he is mainly a driver there, too, as well as a travel companion and confidant to Michael Kennedy. As the two spend more time together, Michael Skakel becomes known simply as “Skakel” to avoid confusion with his cousin Michael Kennedy.
Skakel, whom another Kennedy relative calls “the sweetest human being that you have ever met,” is the sort of person people feel comfortable turning to if they have something awkward to discuss. People tend to confide in him.
Skakel is who Michael’s wife, Vicki Gifford Kennedy, calls when she finds Michael in bed with the family babysitter. He’s who she entrusts to drive her husband straight to rehab, and the one who takes the heat from Aunt Ethel about the unexpected change in plans. He’s even the one who helps Marisa’s distraught mother, June Verrochi, when she’s found bewildered on the roof of their town house due to “some very disturbing news.”
“In hindsight, the strangest detail in press reports of that incident was that Michael Skakel had been on the scene and accompanied Mrs. Verrochi to the hospital,” Vanity Fair notes.
Although maybe not so strange, given that—odd as it may seem—Skakel is also a close confidant of Marisa’s. He’s apparently the one who futilely attempts to discourage the teenager from