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Waiting for justice

We couldn't believe there was nothing we could do about the fact that the Skakels wouldn't cooperate. It's so hard as a mother to say, "My child was murdered, and there's nothing we can do."

"I just can't believe it's finally happening," says Dorthy Moxley. "After so many years, I just can't believe it."

Moxley sits in her Chatham, New Jersey, living room, facing the portrait of her two children. It's where she settles to talk on the phone and spend time with visitors. In the painting, Martha and John Moxley sit in front of the sofa with their cat and dog, looking as blond and attractive and carefree as two teenagers could ever hope to look. The painting was Moxley's gift to her husband, David, for his 40th birthday in 1972, three years before Martha was bludgeoned to death. She was 15 years old.

And now, a quarter-century later, someone has finally been charged with Martha's murder. Michael Skakel, who was a teenage neighbor at the time of Martha's death, was arrested in January and will go on trial later this year.

With her beauty-parlor hair and tasteful skirt and blouse, Moxley, who is 67, looks like any other well-off suburban matron. She couldn't be nicer, more thoughtful, more polite. Her living room is spotless. And, yes, she plays tennis and keeps busy attending concerts and plays and taking art classes.

Her son, John, two years Martha's senior, has settled into a career as a real estate agent in Manhattan. Now 41, he lives a few minutes away with his wife, Cara, and their two young children, and Moxley sees them often. (Moxley and her husband settled in Annapolis, Maryland, after he retired. But David died of a heart attack in 1988, and in 1993, Moxley moved to New Jersey to be near John and his family.)

But in the years since Martha was killed, Moxley's life has been a strange mix of the suburban and the surreal. Most of her mental energy has revolved around the case. Her husband used to do the paperwork and talk to reporters, lawyers, and the police. "That was the kind of family we had - father was the head of the family," she says. Now Moxley handles the paperwork and the interviews, often with her son by her side.

"It has turned out to be more or less a job," says Moxley. "Would you like to see one of my books?" she asks, pointing to a pink paisley notebook on the coffee table. The three-ring binder, which once belonged to Martha, is filled with articles, letters, and legal documents about the case. Moxley has four of these "books" that chronicle the years of pain.

Everything in her life has changed over those years: Her husband is gone, her son grown, her Connecticut estate exchanged for a sunny "apartment-size" three-bedroom house. The one thing that remained constant was the mystery of Martha's killer.

Now Dorthy Moxley's long wait may be ending.

In the 1970's, as a young housewife from California married to a successful executive, Moxley settled happily into the family's new house in Belle Haven, an enclave of two- and three-acre properties in Greenwich, Connecticut. She spent her days fixing up the new house, cooking meals for her family, and sewing clothes for Martha. On weekends there were cocktail parties, and she quickly became friends with many of her neighbors. Belle Haven was protected by 24-hour security, and Moxley felt so safe there that she didn't lock her back door. "There was basically one way to get into Belle Haven," she says, "and that was the guard booth."

At the local public high school, John was on the varsity football team, and Martha played basketball and field hockey. She liked school and was popular and well adjusted, her mother says: "Martha had a very good, happy life."

That happy life came to an abrupt end on Thursday, October 30, 1975. "I hate October 30," says Moxley. "It's definitely the hardest day. October 30 and August 16, Martha's birthday. Those are days I don't spend by myself."

When Martha wasn't home by 11 p.m., Moxley began to worry. Her daughter, who had gone out with neighborhood friends, was never out much past 9:30. Moxley was home alone - her husband, David, was in Atlanta on business, and John was out with friends. When John returned home shortly after 11, he went out looking for his sister. Over the next several hours, Moxley called almost everyone she knew, looking for Martha. She called one of Martha's classmates, who told her that she had last seen Martha with Tommy Skakel, at Tommy's house.

The Skakels lived across from the Moxleys, and Rushton "Rush" Skakel Sr. was among the first neighbors whom Dorthy and David had gotten to know when they arrived in Belle Haven. The brother of Ethel Kennedy, Skakel was chairman of the board of the Great Lakes Carbon Corp., one of the largest privately held companies in the country. The Moxleys met him often at social events.

"We were becoming quite good friends," says Moxley. "His wife, Ann, had died of cancer two years before we moved there. We knew he had a lot of kids. But we had never been in his home or met any of the kids." (There were seven children in the family, six sons and a daughter, ranging in age at the time from 9 to 19.)

Moxley called the Skakels that night and spoke with 18-year-old Julie. (Rush Skakel was out of town, as was often the case.) Julie told her that Martha wasn't there. Growing increasingly concerned as the night wore on, Moxley called the Skakel home twice more looking for Martha. She insisted on speaking with Tommy, 17, and Julie got her brother out of bed to come to the phone. He told Moxley he had no idea where Martha was. Finally, at 3:45 a.m., Moxley called the Greenwich police. They searched the Moxley house and the neighborhood but found no trace of Martha.

At around 10 o'clock on the morning of October 31, when Martha still hadn't returned, Moxley walked over to the Skakels' to see what she could find out. She knocked, and Michael, 15, came to the door. She had never met the boy, and she introduced herself. He was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and "looked like he didn't feel well," recalls Moxley. "Do you have any idea where Martha might be?" she asked him. No, he answered. Moxley says, "He was polite and sounded like he wanted to help but said he hadn't seen her."

Moxley returned home, and by now three friends had come to wait with her. She was expecting her daughter to come walking in any minute; instead, a young neighbor girl came running up to the front door at around noon. "She was in hysterics," Moxley says. "She thought she'd found Martha, under one of the trees in our side yard, under a Norwegian spruce."

In the awful hours that followed, Moxley learned that her daughter had been savagely beaten with a golf club and left lying face down, with her jeans and underpants pulled down to her knees. She had been struck so hard that the club split into three pieces, and one of the pieces had been driven through her neck. Moxley never saw her daughter's body. "Police have told me it was very brutal," she says. "There was lots of blood." But there was no sign of sexual assault, despite the disarray of her clothing.

A family friend reached David Moxley, who took the first flight home from Atlanta. John would learn of his sister's death when he returned from a football practice in the early afternoon. "I just sat in a chair in the living room," says Dorthy Moxley. "I was afraid to move. I thought, `I'll fall apart. Stay in this chair, so you can get through the day.' So I didn't move all day."

Later that day, police determined that the golf club used to kill Martha was a Toney Penna club, a rare model. They searched the neighborhood and found no one who owned a set like it except the Skakels, who had a set of Toney Penna clubs that apparently matched the pieces of a club found at the crime scene. Stunned, and scared that the killer was still out there, Moxley was careful now to lock her doors.

In the weeks and months after Martha's death, the Moxleys put all their trust in the police. "We felt they would solve it," says Moxley. That belief kept her going as she and David coped with their pain in different ways. "David dealt with it by going to work. He could not talk about it to me, and I think it really was very hard on him, not being able to talk about it." John couldn't talk about his sister's death, either. "I think that they thought they were protecting me by not talking about it," Dorthy Moxley says. "But I simply had to. I'm one of those people that has to talk."

Every morning, Dorthy would have to take David to the train. "So I had to get up and get dressed," she says. "I was a zombie." Then she would sit with her closest friend and talk about Martha. "We would hash over all the possibilities. We tried to figure out what was going on in the neighborhood, what was in the paper, what the kids were saying." Police were pursuing various leads - that Martha had been killed by a transient off the highway, or by the Moxleys' 27-year-old next-door neighbor, or possibly the tutor who lived with the Skakel family. "We just didn't want to believe it was any one of the kids," says Moxley, referring to the Skakel boys.

During this time, the Moxleys and Rush Skakel remained friends. "We even went to their ski house up in Windham, New York," says Moxley. But about six months after Martha was killed, investigators began to suspect that Tommy Skakel might have been involved in the death, and Rush Skakel stopped cooperating with police, says Moxley. "For a long time after that, we did think it was Tommy Skakel," she says. And from that time on, the case was essentially frozen. "The police would come, we would see them maybe once or twice a year. Every now and then, a little something would happen. But it became fewer and fewer things. By the time David died, we didn't think anything would ever happen."

Mentally exhausted and frustrated, the Moxleys went on with their lives. "We couldn't believe there was nothing we could do about the fact that the Skakels wouldn't cooperate," says Moxley. "It's so hard as a mother to say, `My child was murdered, and there's nothing we can do.' " In January 1991, feeling "very depressed," she sought professional help. Moxley had seen a counselor after Martha's death and had attended a few meetings of the support group Compassionate Friends, for families that have lost a child. But the depression she had struggled with in the first years after Martha's death had descended again. "I went to see a social worker and told her, `My husband has been gone for two years, and I'm handling that just fine. But I still cannot handle my daughter's case, and I don't know what to do.' "

What Dorthy Moxley knew for certain was that she could no longer sit back and do nothing. Together, she and the social worker came up with a plan: to try to find out who killed Martha. The counselor urged Moxley to go back to Greenwich to talk with the prosecutor, the chief of police, and as many of Martha's friends as she could find.

Before Moxley could embark on her plan, a series of events renewed interest in Martha's case, and reporters and investigators were coming to her. In 1991, William Kennedy Smith was charged with rape; he was acquitted, but his case stirred up interest in the unsolved murder as the spotlight turned to the Kennedy cousins. And in 1993, the author Dominick Dunne, whose own daughter had been murdered, published A Season in Purgatory, a novel based loosely on Martha's murder.

A Newsday reporter broke the story in 1995 that Thomas and Michael Skakel had been interviewed by private investigators hired by their father in 1992 and had told them a different story from the one they had told Greenwich police about Martha's death. (Skakel had hired the private detectives to investigate the death and, he hoped, to remove the shadow of guilt from his sons.) "After we learned that Michael and Tommy had told private detectives different stories than they told the police," says Moxley, "that's when we started thinking that Michael could be the one."

Then, in 1996, the TV show Unsolved Mysteries featured Martha's case. (That same year, John and Dorthy Moxley increased the reward for information leading to the arrest of Martha's killer from $50,000 to $100,000.) The show brought a number of calls from people who had been at the Elan School in Maine, a residential school for troubled teenagers that Michael Skakel had attended in the 1970s; some of them said he had made admissions about his role in Martha's death. By the time Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles police detective, published his 1998 book about the case, Murder in Greenwich, "everything seemed to fit," says Moxley.

Fuhrman theorizes in the book that the Skakel brothers both had crushes on Martha. In the hours preceding her death, he speculates, Martha had been "fooling around" with Tommy; this drove Michael, who had a history of behavior and alcohol problems, into a jealous rage, since he thought of Martha as his girlfriend. And that's why he followed her home, struck her with a golf club, beat her to death, then dragged her body by the feet to lie in a pool of blood beneath a pine tree on her own property.

In fact, Martha had a boyfriend who called and came to the house often and whom her parents liked. Moxley says she had no idea her daughter even knew the Skakel boys. Whatever romantic secrets Martha had are contained in her diary, which the Moxleys turned over to investigators in 1980. "I read Martha's diary 24 years ago," says Moxley. "She wrote about both Michael and Tommy in the last two weeks in her diary. She said she had to be careful of one. I thought it was Michael. But after all these years, I'm really not sure which one it was. It's so frustrating. It will only be clarified when I get to see her diary again."

In June 1998, a one-man grand jury was appointed to investigate the case. (In Connecticut, one judge is appointed to sit as an investigatory grand jury.) Superior Court Judge George Thim heard from 53 witnesses over the next year and a half. Dorthy Moxley was the first to appear, followed by her son. Rushton Skakel was also called to testify. Belle Haven neighbors and friends of the Moxleys and Skakels testified, as did former residents and staff of the Elan School who had known Michael Skakel.

On January 18 of this year, Frank Garr, now the chief investigator in Martha's case, called Moxley at home to tell her that the grand jury had reached its decision. She knew Garr better than just about anyone connected to Martha's case and thought of him as a friend. "I think he cares about Martha's case as much as I do," she says. "Frank said they were going to make a major announcement the next day." Her heart leapt. "Am I going to be disappointed?" she asked him.

"No, I think you will be very happy," he said. Moxley hung up the phone and looked at Martha's picture, and for the first time since losing her daughter, she had something positive to tell her. "I said, `Martha, yes! We're gonna get him!' I was so happy." But even the most positive news was a reminder of her loss. "I was so happy. But all I wanted to do was cry."

The next day, Michael Skakel, 39, was charged with murder in Martha's death. He surrendered to police in Greenwich, was released on $500,000 bond, and returned to his home in Hobe Sound, Florida, where he lives with his wife and 2-year-old son in a gated community close to his father. Moxley stayed home in Chatham that day, the phone ringing off the hook and her house packed with reporters. She knew little about Skakel or where he'd been all those years. "I've never been a Kennedy follower," she says. "And I didn't think that it was wise for me to try and keep track of where the Skakels were. That was just beating myself up."

At the arraignment in Juvenile Court in Stamford in March, Skakel's lawyer, Michael Sherman, declared that his client "did not commit this crime." Dorthy, John, and Cara Moxley sat in the front row of the courtroom. "Seeing Michael Skakel didn't bother me as much as I thought it would," says Dorthy Moxley. "I just kept thinking, `You are the one that killed my daughter.' " To her surprise, Skakel turned to speak to her as he made his way out of the courtroom. "Dorthy, I feel your pain," he told her. "But you've got the wrong guy." She was speechless.

Martha and David Moxley are buried in Greenwich, "where I will be buried someday, too," says Dorthy Moxley. Four or five times a year, she goes back to visit the graves and to see friends. When the trial begins, she plans on being there for every day of it. Depending on the outcome of the criminal trial, there could be a civil suit as well. But first there will be a court hearing later this month to decide whether Michael Skakel will be tried as a juvenile - because of his age at the time of Martha's death - or as an adult.

"They say that Michael Skakel really has turned his life around," says Moxley. "That he is on the wagon and helps other people and has gone back to the church. I think that's all wonderful. But I would like it if he were tried as an adult. And if he is guilty, I want him to go to jail - for a long time. He's been out there for nearly 25 years, and I think it's time he paid his debt to society. I want justice for Martha."

And after a jury has decided on Skakel's innocence or guilt, how will Moxley fill all that time she has devoted to her daughter's case? "I want to get involved with something," she says. "I'm not sure what. It could be trying to get the legal system changed. I know it will be something to do with Martha's case."