Martha Moxley

Case background and investigation

Martha Elizabeth Moxley was a 15-year-old high school student who lived in Belle Haven, a wealthy gated neighborhood in Greenwich, Connecticut. On the night of October 30, 1975, the evening before Halloween, Martha was out socializing with other teenagers in the neighborhood, including brothers Michael and Thomas Skakel, nephews of Ethel Kennedy. She never came home. The next day, October 31, 1975, her body was discovered under a tree on her family's property. She had been savagely beaten and stabbed with a golf club; a broken Toney Penna six-iron found near her body was traced to a set belonging to the Skakel household across the street.

The murder went unsolved for years despite early suspicion falling on people close to the Skakel family, including Michael, his brother Thomas, who was one of the last people seen with Martha, and the family's live-in tutor, Kenneth Littleton, who had started the job that very day. Thomas Skakel initially passed a polygraph but later admitted he had lied to police about when he last saw Martha, while Littleton failed a lie-detector test. The investigation nonetheless stalled for more than two decades. Renewed attention in the 1990s, fueled in part by books about the case, including one by former Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman, eventually pushed authorities to act. In 2000, Michael Skakel, who had been 15 at the time of the killing, was arrested and charged with Martha's murder.

Michael Skakel was tried in 2002. Prosecutors presented incriminating statements he had allegedly made and evidence of his behavior, though no physical evidence directly tied him to the crime. On June 7, 2002, he was convicted of murder and later sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. His case then wound through years of appeals. In 2013 a judge granted him a new trial on grounds that his trial attorney had been ineffective; the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated the conviction in December 2016, then reversed course and vacated it on May 4, 2018, ruling that his lawyer had failed to present a viable alibi witness and thereby denied him a fair trial. Skakel, who had served more than 11 years, was freed.

In October 2020, on the 45th anniversary of the killing, Connecticut prosecutors announced they would not retry Michael Skakel, concluding they could not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. As a result the murder of Martha Moxley today stands with no one convicted. Skakel has continued to assert his innocence, and in January 2024 he filed a lawsuit against the town of Greenwich and the lead investigator, Frank Garr, alleging malicious prosecution and that authorities ignored more likely suspects while targeting a Kennedy relative. Over the decades others have been floated as possible culprits, including Thomas Skakel and Kenneth Littleton, but none has been charged. Nearly half a century after Martha was killed, the question of who murdered the 15-year-old in Belle Haven remains, in legal terms, unanswered.