Even when Joe speaks out on the dual family dramas, it is only to say vaguely, “I view these as private and personal matters,” while acknowledging, “Sometimes in my family it doesn’t always work out that way.” Nevertheless, he states firmly of Michael, “I love my brother very much, I will always love my brother, and I will stand by my brother”—an attitude Vanity Fair deems “Omertà, Irish-American-style.”
So the question remains: Who leaked to the press?
Among the Kennedy inner circle, the finger of betrayal is pointed at their cousin Michael Skakel.
Chapter 50
Michael Christopher Skakel was born on September 19, 1960, the fifth of seven children. His father, Rushton Skakel Sr. (himself one of seven children in a family that includes younger sister Ethel Kennedy), is left to raise the six boys and one girl as a single parent when their mother, Anne, passes away from cancer at age forty-one in March 1973.
The Skakel family was already “Greenwich royalty” in Belle Haven, an exclusive neighborhood in the tony Connecticut town, even without the added luster and celebrity that Ethel’s marriage to Robert Kennedy gave them by association. Besides, the Skakels are reportedly even wealthier than the Kennedys, and traditionally Republican, which didn’t change when Ethel married into a Democratic family, not even when her brother-in-law ran for president.
According to Kennedy biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, Ethel’s brother Jim Skakel says the family “supported Nixon, not Jack, in the 1960 election,” and claims their brother George Jr. thumbed his nose at the Kennedys by handing out the inauguration tickets Ethel gave him to the homeless. In a 1966 piece on George Jr. in the Stanford Daily, William F. Buckley Jr. tells a similar story, but claims that George Jr. felt the Kennedy staff was acting “a little pompously” at the 1961 inauguration, “whereupon he took the seating pass of an august Cabinet member and conferred it ceremoniously on a Negro porter, throwing protocol into utter panic.”
Ethel and Rushton’s father, George Skakel Sr., “was even more a self-made man than Joe Kennedy,” going from a railroad clerk to owner of the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, one of the largest privately held businesses in the world. Following George Sr.’s 1955 death in a plane crash—and eleven years later, oldest son George Jr.’s—Rushton Sr. takes over as chairman of Great Lakes Carbon, and grows even wealthier.
Rushton Skakel’s children are known to be ill behaved—a frustrated former nanny who worked for the family in the mid-sixties remarks, “They didn’t like discipline—the kids or the parents”—though this, too, seems in keeping with Skakel family tradition, as Ethel’s brothers were also considered terrors in their Greenwich neighborhood while growing up. However, after their mother, Anne, passes away, “an even more intense level of chaos came to rule our household,” Michael Skakel recalls. He was twelve years old at the time of her death, left with little supervision and an often-absent father who handed his children off to “friends, relatives, servants, a coterie of priests and nuns and a series of live-in tutors.”
In the fall of 1975, Rushton Jr. is nineteen, Julie is eighteen, Thomas is seventeen, John is sixteen, David is eleven, and the youngest in the family, Stephen, is nine. Michael turns fifteen that September. Their friends and neighbors diagonally across the street are the Moxleys, who moved to the exclusive Belle Haven neighborhood in 1974 with their two teenagers, John and Martha. Martha, who makes friends quickly and is deemed “Best Personality” at her new school, is also fifteen, just a month older than Michael Skakel.
“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.