No one has ever been definitively identified as the person who killed Martha Moxley. A Connecticut jury convicted Michael Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, in 2002, but the state Supreme Court vacated that conviction in 2018 after finding his defense lawyer had bungled the case. Prosecutors declined to retry him in 2020. Nearly fifty years after the fifteen-year-old was beaten to death with a golf club in Greenwich, the case is officially unsolved.
The Killing in Belle Haven
On the evening of October 30, 1975, known locally as Mischief Night, Martha Moxley spent the evening with friends in the Belle Haven section of Greenwich, Connecticut. She was last seen near the Skakel residence, directly across the street from her own home. Her body was discovered the next afternoon, Halloween, under a tree in her family’s backyard. She had been beaten and stabbed with a golf club later traced to a set belonging to the Skakel family. Investigators placed the attack between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. the night before.
Who Investigators Suspected
Greenwich police focused early on two people, and neither was Michael Skakel.
Thomas Skakel. Michael’s older brother was reportedly the last person seen with Martha that evening. His account of the night shifted over time. What he initially told police differed from what he later told private investigators hired by his father, and those inconsistencies fueled suspicion that was never resolved. The Skakel family stopped cooperating with police in January 1976, and the investigation ground to a halt.
Kenneth Littleton. A live-in tutor who had started working for the Skakel family that very day, Littleton failed a police polygraph, though polygraph results are generally inadmissible in court. He was later connected to a break-in on Nantucket involving a woman’s home, and his life spiraled into alcoholism and erratic conduct that kept investigators circling back to him for years. He was never charged in Moxley’s death and consistently denied involvement.
Adolph Hasbrouck and Burton Tinsley. A separate theory pointed to two other individuals reportedly in the Belle Haven area that night. Hairs recovered from sheets found near Moxley’s body were described as having characteristics consistent with individuals of Black and Asian backgrounds, matching the physical descriptions of Hasbrouck and Tinsley. Investigators also noted that Moxley’s body appeared to have been dragged a significant distance, suggesting more than one person may have been involved. The theory never led to charges, and the hair evidence was never conclusively tied to either man.
The Skakel family’s connection to the Kennedys hung over the investigation from the start. Michael Skakel’s aunt was Ethel Kennedy, widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Critics later argued that the family’s wealth and political connections helped insulate them from the pressure police normally bring to a murder case. That accusation has never been proven, but it shaped public perception for decades.
How Michael Skakel Ended Up on Trial
The case sat cold for roughly twenty years. In the late 1990s, renewed media attention pushed authorities to look again. In June 1998, Judge George Thim was appointed as a one-man grand jury to review the evidence. Over eighteen months he interviewed fifty-three witnesses and reviewed years of accumulated transcripts and forensic materials before recommending Michael Skakel’s arrest.
Skakel surrendered and was released on $500,000 bail. Although he had been fifteen at the time of the killing, prosecutors moved to try him as an adult, and the court allowed it. His trial took place in Norwalk, and on June 7, 2002, the jury convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to twenty years to life.
The prosecution’s case was almost entirely circumstantial. There was no forensic evidence directly linking Skakel to the crime and no eyewitness to the killing. The golf club came from his family’s home, but that alone did not prove he swung it. Prosecutors built the case around witnesses who came forward more than two decades later, some testifying that Skakel had made incriminating statements over the years, including alleged admissions at a substance abuse treatment facility. The state argued he killed Moxley in a jealous rage. The Connecticut Supreme Court would later note that the state’s primary witnesses came forward only after learning about a sizeable reward, after reading a book that pointed the finger at Skakel, or both.
Why the Conviction Was Thrown Out
In 2013, a Connecticut judge granted Skakel a new trial, finding his defense attorney’s performance fell short of constitutional standards. Skakel was released on $1.2 million bail after more than eleven years in prison. The state Supreme Court initially reinstated the conviction in 2016, then took the unusual step of reconsidering. In 2018, a 4-3 decision vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial.
The ruling turned on one critical failure by Skakel’s trial lawyer: he never identified or called a disinterested alibi witness. Skakel’s defense was that he was not at the scene during the 9:30 to 10:00 p.m. window when the murder occurred. The only witnesses supporting that alibi at trial were Skakel family members, which gave the prosecution an easy target. The state’s attorney hammered the point that every alibi witness was a relative with a motive to lie, and he appealed to the jury’s sense of outrage that a wealthy family thought it could fool police with a manufactured alibi.1Connecticut Judicial Branch. Skakel v. Commissioner of Correction, 329 Conn. 1 (2018)
Grand jury testimony already on file showed that a disinterested witness had been present at the location where Skakel claimed to have been during the critical window. The court found that even a basic investigation would have revealed this witness, and that his testimony would have substantially bolstered the alibi by removing the prosecution’s argument that only lying relatives supported it. Combined with the lack of forensic evidence and the questionable motives of the state’s key witnesses, the court concluded there was a reasonable probability the jury would have reached a different verdict.1Connecticut Judicial Branch. Skakel v. Commissioner of Correction, 329 Conn. 1 (2018) The framework for the ruling comes from the Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel as tested under Strickland v. Washington, which requires a defendant to show both deficient performance and a reasonable probability of a different outcome.2Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII). Ineffective Assistance of Counsel
Connecticut sought review from the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in January 2019, leaving the state ruling intact.3SCOTUSblog. Connecticut v. Skakel
Where the Case Stands Now
On October 30, 2020, exactly forty-five years after the murder, prosecutors announced they would not seek a second trial. The charge against Skakel was effectively dropped. From a criminal standpoint, the case is unsolved.
Skakel then went on offense. He filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the town of Greenwich and Frank Garr, the lead investigator in his case, alleging malicious prosecution and civil rights violations. The suit claims Garr had a deep personal antipathy toward Skakel and his family and pressed forward “intentionally and maliciously, in order to convict a ‘Kennedy Cousin,'” and that exculpatory evidence pointing to other suspects was withheld from his defense team. That lawsuit remains pending. A separate dispute over investigative tapes that Skakel’s attorneys claim were illegally seized also has not been resolved, and the whereabouts of the tapes remain unclear.
Martha Moxley’s family has never received a definitive answer about who killed her. The golf club pointed toward the Skakel household, but after half a century of investigation, trial, and reversal, pointing is all anyone has managed to do.