The House of Kennedy(74)
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.
Skakel is who Michael’s wife, Vicki Gifford Kennedy, calls when she finds Michael in bed with the family babysitter. He’s who she entrusts to drive her husband straight to rehab, and the one who takes the heat from Aunt Ethel about the unexpected change in plans. He’s even the one who helps Marisa’s distraught mother, June Verrochi, when she’s found bewildered on the roof of their town house due to “some very disturbing news.”
“In hindsight, the strangest detail in press reports of that incident was that Michael Skakel had been on the scene and accompanied Mrs. Verrochi to the hospital,” Vanity Fair notes.
Although maybe not so strange, given that—odd as it may seem—Skakel is also a close confidant of Marisa’s. He’s apparently the one who futilely attempts to discourage the teenager from having a romantic relationship with the much older and married Michael (in fairness, he also tried unsuccessfully to convince his cousins to intervene, but “neither Michael nor his siblings seemed to feel a Skakel had any business telling a Kennedy what to do”), and the one who sets Marisa up with a therapist, further incensing his cousin and his aunt. “That is not your place,” Ethel reportedly chastises her nephew.
“He’s been trying to save everyone, left and right,” Bobby Jr. says of his cousin. “But you know what they do to saviors,” he notes. “They crucify them.”
Skakel’s attempts at diplomacy are partially why suspicions fall on him as the leak on Michael’s inappropriate relationship with the teen. Plus, Skakel’s known to speak openly at his AA meetings—and quite possibly has been oversharing the details of his cousin’s drama, and someone in one of those meetings likely contacted the media. According to a source in Vanity Fair, “he [the fellow AA member] admitted to me he did [contact the press].” And when authorities come looking for corroboration on the statutory rape accusations, Michael Skakel is the only one willing to talk.
The family feels betrayed.
“Nobody can stab you in the back quite like the guy who says he loves you,” Joe Kennedy sneers.
*
The cold shoulder that the Kennedys turn on Michael Skakel in 1997 in the wake of the babysitter scandal couldn’t have come at a worse time for him.
While down in Palm Beach, Florida, reporting on the William Kennedy Smith rape trial for Vanity Fair in 1991, author Dominick Dunne heard and repeated a rumor that Willie might’ve been at the Skakels’ home sixteen years earlier, on the night of Martha Moxley’s murder. “I checked it out, and it was a bum rap,” Dunne says—unsurprising, since aside from his aunt Ethel, Willie had never met any Skakels—“but it got me interested in the story again.”
So interested, in fact, that Dunne goes on to write a bestselling roman à clef inspired by the case, A Season in Purgatory, a novel in which the scion of a Kennedy-esque family covers up the murder of a young woman. In 1996, the book is made into a TV miniseries, sparking further interest in the original Martha Moxley case. At first, Dunne tells the press that he’s convinced Thomas Skakel was the killer, but over time switches his suspicions to Michael. “I firmly believe that Michael Skakel is guilty of this murder,” he tells news outlets.
More nonfiction books on the case follow shortly, keeping public interest stoked, and even Michael Skakel considers writing a tell-all about his family, going so far as to shop around a book proposal in 1999 under the title “Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean.”
It backfires spectacularly.
In January 2000, Michael Skakel is arrested and charged with Martha Moxley’s 1975 murder. Excerpts from taped conversations between Skakel and the ghostwriter he planned to use for his memoir feature heavily in his prosecution. While there are no actual admissions of guilt, prosecutors deem it “a web in which he has ultimately trapped himself.”
With no physical evidence or eyewitnesses, “the state’s case is entirely circumstantial,” the New York Times points out when the case goes to trial in 2002, yet they convincingly cite opportunity and means, alleging motive as “unrequited feelings” between Skakel and Martha. They also bring in fellow former students from the élan School, who state that they recall Skakel making oblique confessions to the murder.
During the monthlong trial, Marisa Verrochi is called as a witness for the defense to rebut testimony from a former roommate of hers who claims that Skakel had attended a party at her condo in 1997 where he joked about committing the murder. Marisa denies that any of that had taken place and confirms to prosecutors that she and Skakel had been “close friends” at the time, and that he’d provided her with support, protection, and comfort during her own scandal.