New Evidence May Exonerate Skakel; Defense attorneys now contend a new witness and DNA testing could prove Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel did not kill Martha Moxley. Prosecutors stridently disagree

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 14, 2003 | by Timothy W. Maier

Byline: Timothy W. Maier, INSIGHT

If prosecutors get their way, DNA evidence that could free Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel, 42, might never see the light of day. That's because prosecutors are convinced jurors got it right last year when they convicted Skakel for the murder of Martha Moxley, 15, who was brutally beaten to death and stabbed with the shaft of a golf club in a secluded area of the wealthy community of Greenwich, Conn., during the evening of Oct. 30, 1975. Skakel, now serving 20 years to life in prison for Moxley's murder, is a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, the widow of former U.S. attorney general and New York senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Prosecutors argued Skakel, then 15, killed Moxley in a fit of jealousy because she preferred his brother Tom. Their strongest evidence consisted of a statement from Gregory Coleman, a heroin addict who claimed he once heard Skakel confess to the killing. Even though Coleman died of an overdose before the trial, the court allowed a transcript of his 1998 grand-jury testimony to be read into the record. He had told the grand jury that Skakel confessed to the killing again and again. But Coleman was never cross-examined and admitted he had shot up with heroin an hour before his testimony.

The next most damaging piece of evidence consisted of Skakel's own words from a 1998 taped interview with a ghostwriter hardly a likely means of confession. But prosecutors took these words out of context and had them superimposed over a grisly crime-scene photo of the victim displayed to inflame the jurors, of which one was a policeman and another a friend of a friend of the Moxleys. Skakel had been asked on the tape how he was feeling the morning after the incident. "And I was like, 'Oh, My God, did they see me last night?'" he says on the tape. "And I'm like, 'I don't know.' And I remember just having a feeling of panic, like 'Oh shit!' you know, like my worry of what I went to bed with. I don't know. You know what I mean? I had a feeling of panic."

Incriminating? It was made by the prosecutors to seem so because Skakel had not testified. Because of this the jury could not put any of that in context. In fact, according to several witnesses, Skakel had been worried that Martha's mother, Dorothy, had seen him masturbating on a tree outside the Moxley's residence on the night of the murder. The prosecutors later would claim Skakel's masturbation story was an attempt to protect himself in case DNA linked him to the crime scene.

But what the jury never learned is that Skakel had told this story numerous times during the two decades before DNA testing was available. In fact, when Skakel offered during the renewed investigation to submit to DNA testing, prosecutors rejected the request claiming to have lost the vaginal swabs taken from Moxley, who was found with her pants pulled down to her knees.

Today, these same prosecutors insist Skakel should be in prison, and never mind that they produced no fingerprints, no DNA evidence and no eyewitness to put the golf club in the hands of the adolescent boy a quarter of a century before. While Skakel repeatedly has proclaimed his innocence, the victim's mother never wavered in her belief that it was he who killed Martha.

But could they be wrong? Skakel neighbors say golf clubs always were scattered on the lawns of the family estate and that anyone could have picked one up. And DNA evidence might once and for all remove any doubt. That proof may be available in what Skakel's defense team claims is new evidence provided by one Gitano Pierre "Tony" Bryant a cousin of troubled Los Angeles Laker star Kobe Bryant and classmate of Skakel at the private Brunswick School in Greenwich. Bryant used to hang out with Brunswick teens at Belle Haven, the gated Greenwich community where Moxley was killed. According to Bryant, two Bronx men one white and one black confessed to the grisly crime. On the night of the murder, Bryant repeatedly has claimed, the two men bragged to him about their intention to attack a girl "caveman style," dragging her to an isolated place to have their way with her.

Bryant says he wanted no part of anything like that and returned home on the night in question. But the next day Bryant met up with the young men and details they provided made their "caveman" boast more convincing. He claimed the men told him they had stolen a golf club from the Skakel lawn before proceeding to Moxley's residence.

Warned by his mother that he might be implicated, Bryant never went to the police with his story. But nearly three years ago he confided this information he had kept secret for a quarter of a century to two former classmates, Crawford Mills and Neal Walker, on the condition that his name never be revealed. The secret exploded when Mills read an account of the case by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the January 2003 issue of Atlantic Monthly. Mills decided to call the son of the slain senator with news that cast the shadow of doubt across the case, hoping that prosecutors or a court could force these men to undergo tests in which their DNA could be compared to that extracted from hairs left at the scene.