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Speaker 1: and thanks Thinking Sideways. I don't just I'm you never
Speaker 1: know stories of things we simply don't know the answer too. Well. Hi, there,
Speaker 1: welcome to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I'm Joe, joined
Speaker 1: as always by Devon and Steve, and we're gonna guess
Speaker 1: what We're gonna talk about cooking, not really okay, of course,
Speaker 1: a mystery, another groovy mystery. Okay. Our mystery began on
Speaker 1: Halloween Day. Yeah, it's forty some years um, but actually
Speaker 1: there's still a little movement on this one, believe it
Speaker 1: or not. Still stuff going on there is. Yeah. First
Speaker 1: of all, I want to thank Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Speaker 1: Who suggested this mystery to us. Laughing right now, but
Speaker 1: really really genuinely. Yeah. He just published a new book
Speaker 1: and uh, and his publishers sent us a copy. And
Speaker 1: I love it when people give us free stuff, which
Speaker 1: it's cool. The book is called Framed Again by Robert F.
Speaker 1: Kennedy Jr. And it's a really good roundup of the
Speaker 1: story and all the suspects. And this case has actually
Speaker 1: received a lot of national attention for a long time.
Speaker 1: Lots of books have been written about it, not just
Speaker 1: arf Kase. And also there's another book that was written
Speaker 1: in the nineties by Mark Furman. And he may have
Speaker 1: heard of Furman. He was the LPD homicide detective who
Speaker 1: was assigned to the O. J. Simpson murder. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: remember that guy. He did a really good job with. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't work out so well. And so the murder
Speaker 1: of O. J. Simpson's wife and her boyfriend remains unsolved.
Speaker 1: Um Ferman's book, it's got some good information in it,
Speaker 1: though I don't really agree with all of his conclusions.
Speaker 1: He did a lot of reconstruction of the crame scene.
Speaker 1: He did. He did. He's got some drawings in there
Speaker 1: and stuff and and so. And he's a professional, obviously,
Speaker 1: he knows how to read his crime scenes better than
Speaker 1: the Grantwich p D. By the way, our murder takes
Speaker 1: place in Granwich, Connecticut. So thanks to rfk and thanks
Speaker 1: to Ferman for suggesting this mystery to us. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: Furman didn't, yeah, I said, I sent an email to
Speaker 1: his publisher to see if he be willing to talk
Speaker 1: to me. In surprise, I never heard back. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well back to our mystery. Halloween October thirty first, about
Speaker 1: noon on that day, the body of a fifteen year
Speaker 1: old girl named Martha Moxley was found under a tree
Speaker 1: in her family's yard in Granwich, Connecticut. She had been
Speaker 1: bludgeoned on the head with the golf club, and the
Speaker 1: club then broke into several pieces, which was either either
Speaker 1: from the force of the blows to her head or
Speaker 1: maybe from the deliberate action of maybe the killer actually
Speaker 1: broke it deliberately. It's hard to say, but it wasn't.
Speaker 1: It was in basic four pieces before you go on.
Speaker 1: Probably should warn people if there's munchkins around. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: pause from here on forward. Yeah, it's kind of a brutal. Yes,
Speaker 1: yeah it is. I know. I was just thinking, how
Speaker 1: maybe we should have just said that earlier. I realized this,
Speaker 1: I know what's coming. Yeah, okay, so yeah, So it's
Speaker 1: three pieces of the club were found laying in the
Speaker 1: grass in the Boxley yard. That was the head, you know,
Speaker 1: that the part that you actually whacked the ball with,
Speaker 1: and then two pieces of shafts stainless steel shaft. And
Speaker 1: then the fourth piece was a piece of stainless steel
Speaker 1: shaft with the handle attached to it. You know, it's
Speaker 1: the part that you grip with your hands when you
Speaker 1: swing the golf club, the rubber grippy bit. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: that part. That part was used to stab her in
Speaker 1: the next several times. And the last one went all
Speaker 1: the way through and it went through her windpipe. And
Speaker 1: it is believed that even if she survived all the blows,
Speaker 1: she would have died anyway from drowning in her own blood. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, the killer at that point. Uh, And I'm
Speaker 1: getting out of hand here. It's like there was one
Speaker 1: blow delivered in the driveway. If you look at you
Speaker 1: look at an aerial of the house, it's the house
Speaker 1: where it took places at thirty Walsh Lane and Grantwich, Connecticut.
Speaker 1: If you go to Google you can get a look
Speaker 1: at an area of it. But they've changed up the
Speaker 1: driveway a little bit. It used to be east to
Speaker 1: run on the west side of the house north to
Speaker 1: Walsh Lane, and then a little semi circular piece breaks
Speaker 1: off and branches out and goes also to Walsh Lane.
Speaker 1: So you have a sort of semi circular driveway there.
Speaker 1: So that Patrick grass in the middle is where the
Speaker 1: initial attack appeared to have taken place. In the middle
Speaker 1: basically a round about, yeah, kind of a roundabout thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then apparently it's a half circle. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: a quarter circle. Actually, when you think about it, it's
Speaker 1: not a round about, a quarter about. It's like a
Speaker 1: it's like a U shaped driveway, yeah, except it's not
Speaker 1: quite you shaped. It's like this like this right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't see what I did, but when when when
Speaker 1: the murder happened, not anymore, it's totally it's a total
Speaker 1: horseshoe shape now. Yeah, and I guess it's probably worth
Speaker 1: noting that this is a gated community, so there's no
Speaker 1: street view. You have to just look at who the
Speaker 1: earth right now. I know that's so frustrating that anyway,
Speaker 1: So the attack happens on the quarter circle, the initial attack. Yeah.
Speaker 1: After that point, the killer dragged Martha south Based down,
Speaker 1: grabbed her by the feet, basically a drugg her face
Speaker 1: down across the driveway, and we know this because there
Speaker 1: were lots of gouges in her face, took her to
Speaker 1: a place over by a Japanese maple todjest to the
Speaker 1: south of the driveway and resumed beating and stabbing her.
Speaker 1: This was the main attack took place, because there was
Speaker 1: a major amount of blow that was found there. And
Speaker 1: then uh, and then last of all, you drugged her
Speaker 1: don like eighty feet south to a big pine tree
Speaker 1: and left the body under the pine tree. It's in
Speaker 1: Mark Ferman's book. He says that the wounds were such
Speaker 1: that they would have would have been ouzing rather than
Speaker 1: gushing blood, so he believes the killer actually left her
Speaker 1: laying next to the Japanese maple for about half an
Speaker 1: hour and then came back and administered the kuda gras
Speaker 1: with the handle and then dragged her away. For me,
Speaker 1: that vastly changes the total zone of this thing, right,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's one thing to say, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody went a little crazy statement pretty quando crazy, and
Speaker 1: you know, beat this girl a lot, and you know,
Speaker 1: stabbed her and killed her and then dragged her body
Speaker 1: to hide her, versus somebody beat this girl, left her
Speaker 1: and then came back and continued to do some like
Speaker 1: took a union break in the middle. Yeah, but but
Speaker 1: of course I could I could be wrong about that too.
Speaker 1: He might have actually done all and she did all
Speaker 1: the bleeding there, and then he came back later decided
Speaker 1: to move the body, but didn't actually attack her anymore.
Speaker 1: So we don't really know, yea. And the broken bits
Speaker 1: of golf club where were they next to her body?
Speaker 1: So they were moved as well? No, no, we were
Speaker 1: with the initial attacks. There were two of them were
Speaker 1: with the initial attacks side the circle in the driveway,
Speaker 1: and then one of them was fairly close to her body.
Speaker 1: It was a piece of shaft. And then the fourth
Speaker 1: one was the handle itself was sticking out of her neck.
Speaker 1: Remember that to you, by the way, I looking at
Speaker 1: the golf club handle, because that becomes an important little
Speaker 1: clue later on. Yeah, when much of this body was found,
Speaker 1: her jeans have been pulled down and her panties have
Speaker 1: been rolled down. She was faced down. There were two
Speaker 1: smears of blood on her in her thighs, and there
Speaker 1: was no evidence of rape, by the way, or sexual
Speaker 1: assault of any kind, right really, Yeah, except for except
Speaker 1: for the blood smears on our thighs, which we probably
Speaker 1: put there by the murderer, you know, doing something, But
Speaker 1: he didn't actually complete any act or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I thought I had read that in the Corners report
Speaker 1: there was no signs of any kind of assault or
Speaker 1: trauma in her genital region. Yeah, it was that she
Speaker 1: was she had not been, so either there was something
Speaker 1: like totally consensual that had happened, or that's I don't
Speaker 1: I don't think about anything sexual activity. That there was
Speaker 1: some sexual activity earlier in the evening, but it wasn't earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't full intercourse. And I think that that's
Speaker 1: that's what it's probably what you're why it's it's coming
Speaker 1: up as Joseph, there's no assault that way, there's no
Speaker 1: evidence of it, right, Yeah, I want to clarify that
Speaker 1: as well. But yeah, that's but the fact that her
Speaker 1: panties were rolled down and the fact that they found
Speaker 1: blood spatter on the inside of the panties told the
Speaker 1: police and the medical examiner types that she had probably
Speaker 1: been attacked by somebody that she knew, in fact, not
Speaker 1: just not just somebody that she knew, was somebody that
Speaker 1: she'd be willing to roll her panties down for. So wait,
Speaker 1: I don't understand how the blood on the inside of
Speaker 1: the panties leads to that that understanding, Well, because have
Speaker 1: you beaten there with their pants up and everything, the
Speaker 1: blood would have gone all over her pants outside and
Speaker 1: the outside of her pants. Not The point is her
Speaker 1: pants were down, and then she was treated as a pincushion. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: that's that's the distinction. I wasn't quite gidding. And I
Speaker 1: think the further distinction on that is that it looked
Speaker 1: like she had done it, not that they had been
Speaker 1: like torn off her, so her pants weren't pulled double
Speaker 1: or anything crazy like I got it. I got it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So at this point I described that to described the murder.
Speaker 1: Let me tell about I'll tell you guys all about
Speaker 1: our cast of characters. It's a big one. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of people involved in this story, and so
Speaker 1: I'm going to try to keep this to a manageable
Speaker 1: number of people. First of all, Martha's family, the Moxley's,
Speaker 1: they've been living in bell Haven. But then I mentioned
Speaker 1: this is in bell Haven, Connecticut. Bell Haven is a
Speaker 1: like a neighborhood within Greenwich, Connecticut, and it's like the
Speaker 1: richest neighborhood in Greenwich, which is also, by the way,
Speaker 1: a fairly wealthy city. Itself. It's so it's posh. The
Speaker 1: aerial pictures of this is kind of one of those
Speaker 1: things where you look at it and you're like, how
Speaker 1: one yard is that a country club? Do people live there?
Speaker 1: I don't have that many pools tennis court and three pools? Okay,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, Well, like one of the one of the
Speaker 1: families here, this SkELL family, they have this huge tract
Speaker 1: of land for an area where I'm sure land is
Speaker 1: incredibly expensive. They have like a tennis court and a
Speaker 1: chipping tea with two golf golf holes in and everything,
Speaker 1: and in a swimming pool and it's just just this
Speaker 1: big area, this meadow to wander around in and huge
Speaker 1: house and yeah, it must be nice. Yeah. So basically
Speaker 1: this is the kind of neighborhood where they wouldn't let
Speaker 1: you buy a house. They would specifically, but it's also
Speaker 1: the kind of neighborhood where like, really horrible murders don't happen,
Speaker 1: not very often. Now. Yeah, Maxes had been there about
Speaker 1: a year and a half. Moxyes were David and Dorothy.
Speaker 1: That's mom and dad. They had two kids, John and Martha.
Speaker 1: At the time of the murder, John was seventeen and Martha,
Speaker 1: his little sister was fifteen. Across the street to the
Speaker 1: north across Walsh Lane was a large piece of land
Speaker 1: on whether Skagles again with a big, big house and
Speaker 1: lots of other cool stuff on it. And Russians Sr.
Speaker 1: Also known as Ruckie Um was a winner with seven kids.
Speaker 1: He had six sons and one daughter. Yeah. Russo's kids
Speaker 1: were Rushton Jr. A k A. Rush Julie, John, Tommy, Michael, David,
Speaker 1: and Stephen USA. But the two characters out of all
Speaker 1: the all the siblings to really remember, Tommy and Michael
Speaker 1: middle boys, Yeah, because they were the They were the
Speaker 1: ones who became the suspects. Tommy, of course was was
Speaker 1: the major suspect and his murdered for years and then
Speaker 1: in the late nineties, Mark Firman wrote his book Murdering Greenwich,
Speaker 1: which pointed the finger at Michael. Michael Skea was eventually
Speaker 1: convicted of Martha's murder in two thousand two and he
Speaker 1: was sentenced to twenty years to life. Do you know
Speaker 1: how how old those boys were? Uh, Michael at the
Speaker 1: time was fifteen and Tommy was seventeen. Then Michael, by
Speaker 1: the way, was a Ronto. He was like five five
Speaker 1: ft two at the time, waited about twenty pounds. Actually
Speaker 1: he actually grew up and became a big guy, but
Speaker 1: at the time he was pretty small. Maybe he's small
Speaker 1: to committed murder. I don't know, Well, I don't know
Speaker 1: of fifteen year old girls, not exactly. I don't think
Speaker 1: Martha was exactly hulking now she was. She was actually
Speaker 1: about about as tall as Michael at the time. Michael
Speaker 1: said late when many years later than that, if he
Speaker 1: had attacked her, she would have kicked his ass. I'd
Speaker 1: actually also mentioned one other major character in this story,
Speaker 1: which is Ken Littleton. He was hired by Rush Senior
Speaker 1: to look after the Sco kids and also to be
Speaker 1: a living tutor to Tommy and Michael because their mother
Speaker 1: had passed away. Yeah past Friday. There was not much
Speaker 1: in the way parental supervision. She died about three years
Speaker 1: because from cancer. So yeah, he was kind of like
Speaker 1: living nanny basically, right. He cleaned, he took the kids out,
Speaker 1: but he also tutor. Now they actually had other servants
Speaker 1: that did the cookie and the cleaning, but he took
Speaker 1: the kids out, He took them out, and he was
Speaker 1: he was there to provide a little supervision and tutor
Speaker 1: Tommy and Michael. I think the politically correct term is staff.
Speaker 1: They had a lot of servants. Must be great house staff. Okay,
Speaker 1: so Ken Ken's first day on the job was October Yeah,
Speaker 1: when he moved into the scake house, and talk about
Speaker 1: your bad timing. He's kind of like the maid in
Speaker 1: the hinter Kai fact case. Remember that. Yeah, it shows
Speaker 1: up the day of That turned him into a major
Speaker 1: suspect for years, and police harassed him and tried to
Speaker 1: try to get him on this for years, and they
Speaker 1: did everything from his telephone and and cooking up sketchy
Speaker 1: deals with his ex wife to try to get hurt,
Speaker 1: get him to implicate himself and on. And I I
Speaker 1: just feel like your first day on the job, really like,
Speaker 1: who's going to go out and kill somebody the first
Speaker 1: day on the job? The girl that lives literally across
Speaker 1: the street on the first day of the job. Really
Speaker 1: really like, I might not understand the impulse of um,
Speaker 1: you know, serial killers or anything like that, but really
Speaker 1: it's on the list of things not to do on
Speaker 1: day one, just like getting drunk the night before your
Speaker 1: your first day on the job, not something you do.
Speaker 1: Dyeing your hair a crazy color or crazy cuts. Things
Speaker 1: you don't do. Murdering the neighbor girl also also a thing.
Speaker 1: Don't do it now, I know, I know. And there's
Speaker 1: actually even though he was such a major, there's actually
Speaker 1: no evidence that he ever even met Martha. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: they hunted him down. But they did this with all
Speaker 1: of their suspects. Oh yeah, they were asked a lot
Speaker 1: of people. They went after everybody. They thought it could
Speaker 1: be super hard and frankly they did some some kind
Speaker 1: of sketchy things. The police did talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about that later. But anyway, Ken had his life
Speaker 1: went really downhill after the murder, and there he had
Speaker 1: a lot of drug drug and alcohol abuse and that
Speaker 1: some mental illness and stuff. And it's hard to say,
Speaker 1: you know, he had a promising future at that time,
Speaker 1: but then that stuff might have happened anyway. He might
Speaker 1: have known habits and the drug habits. And how old
Speaker 1: was he when it happened. He was twenty foward. He
Speaker 1: was teaching at Brunswick School, which is a very exclusive
Speaker 1: private school in bell Haven or not. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's in bell Haven, but it's not far away. And
Speaker 1: where Tommy and Michael were both going to school. So
Speaker 1: it's one of those places where the rich people senior
Speaker 1: their kids to school. So Ken had a good future
Speaker 1: ahead of them. Oh and one last thing you need
Speaker 1: to know about the Skego family. They were related to
Speaker 1: the Kennedy's as in you know John F. Kennedy and
Speaker 1: Robert F. Kennedy and all that Russian ske Senior ruk
Speaker 1: Ruckie the dad was the brother of Ethel Skeko who
Speaker 1: married Robert F. Kennedy Senior. And you remembered him. He
Speaker 1: was He was JFK's brother and he was assassinated in Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's and so Tommy and Michael ske Are cousins of
Speaker 1: RFK Jr. Which is why he wrote the book. And
Speaker 1: obviously he doesn't believe Michael committed the merger. He's got
Speaker 1: he's got a vested interest in having his family be
Speaker 1: cleared of this murder. He's been good buddies with Michael
Speaker 1: for many years and and uh and he but he
Speaker 1: presents some some actual pretty compelling evidence and so but
Speaker 1: we'll talk about that. And one of the most recent
Speaker 1: twists in the case is in a Connecticut judge named
Speaker 1: Thomas Bishop. Throughout Michael Skegle's conviction and ordered a new
Speaker 1: trial based on the argument of incompetence of counsel. Michael's
Speaker 1: attorney for his two thousand two trial was a guy
Speaker 1: named Mickey Sherman, and RFK has some pretty harsh words
Speaker 1: for him in his book. I don't know if you
Speaker 1: guys read the book or not. No, I skimmed it.
Speaker 1: I'll be honest with you. I we had so much
Speaker 1: stuff going on. I didn't. Yeah, that's two books I was.
Speaker 1: I was stuck in so I did not. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: That's okay. Uh, Mickey's defense. I have to say that
Speaker 1: even if he didn't cross every t I still really
Speaker 1: don't see how the prosecution in this case got a conviction.
Speaker 1: It seemed like a lot of it was circumstantial. Well,
Speaker 1: yeah it was. There was no physical evidence. I mean,
Speaker 1: there was linking him to the crime. There was some
Speaker 1: physical evidence at the crime scene. One of the things
Speaker 1: I forgot to mention, by the way, that the golf
Speaker 1: club handle that was sticking out of her neck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: two police officers and one doctor saw that thing. The
Speaker 1: police officers sought sticking out of her neck, and a
Speaker 1: doctor who was examining the body to make sure she
Speaker 1: was actually dead, saw it laying on the ground next
Speaker 1: to her body. So it looks like somebody pulled Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he so it should have been in until Yeah,
Speaker 1: he probably should have been it. You can see, you
Speaker 1: can understand why somebody might want to pull it out,
Speaker 1: but they didn't. The police didn't actually do a great
Speaker 1: job of securing the crime scene. And apparently there were
Speaker 1: a lot of people hanging around. Yeah, I know, yeah
Speaker 1: it was they the Greenwich ailie had not actually investigated
Speaker 1: a murder in decades, and obviously it never happens in
Speaker 1: that town, and so it just wasn't there kind of thing,
Speaker 1: and so they didn't really. There was other stuff found
Speaker 1: near the body of a pair of jeans with a
Speaker 1: size thirty six waist that was all soaked in blood
Speaker 1: was found near the body. Some beer cans were found,
Speaker 1: a golf ball, and all that evidence was apparently collected
Speaker 1: but but lost. Yeah, well, please lose stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: it happens, I mean, but usually not like key pieces
Speaker 1: of evidence. You know about dB Cooper's cigarette butts, Right, Devin,
Speaker 1: Remember this is twenty seven years later by that point,
Speaker 1: when when this case comes up. All I can say
Speaker 1: is that I hope that when I'm blundened to death
Speaker 1: and they find some soaked genes in my blood next
Speaker 1: to the body, they hold onto those until like hundred
Speaker 1: years later. We will we will go ahead and store
Speaker 1: them in Joe's basement, because everything is in Joe's basement
Speaker 1: and it never leaves perfect. That's a great spot. I
Speaker 1: hate throwing stuff out. Yeah, they had the most important piece,
Speaker 1: of course, that I was saying was the golf club handle,
Speaker 1: and and the prosecution in Michael's trial managed to spend
Speaker 1: that fact that that this this thing was missing as
Speaker 1: the killer took it with him when he left the
Speaker 1: crime scene. Right. Wait wait, wait, wait wait, wait back up.
Speaker 1: So we have witnesses that see it in her initially
Speaker 1: and then on the ground next to her later, and
Speaker 1: then when it's disappeared twenty seven years later, that's because
Speaker 1: the killer took it out of the body with them
Speaker 1: at the time of the murder. Yeah, that is the
Speaker 1: dumbest thing I've heard all day. Well, you know, I
Speaker 1: read I didn't have time to read the entire transcript
Speaker 1: of the entire thing of the entire trial, but I
Speaker 1: read the summations of both the prosecution and the defense,
Speaker 1: and so they went to all their arguments and talked
Speaker 1: about all the evidence. So, you know, I really didn't
Speaker 1: need to read the entire trial transcript. It was all there.
Speaker 1: All the arguments were there, and the execution's theory was
Speaker 1: a little strange. And they talked about the gulf the
Speaker 1: missing murder weapon, because the thing about it is is
Speaker 1: this was what's called the brand on this golf club
Speaker 1: is Tony Panna. Apparently they're not It's not a really
Speaker 1: common brand. And it had been owned by by Russian
Speaker 1: Senior's wife Ann, who had died, and every every every
Speaker 1: one of the clubs was embossed with her name, said
Speaker 1: Mrs R. K. Skagill. And but by the way, was
Speaker 1: that in the was that carved into the metal or
Speaker 1: was that in the rubber of the handle? I believe
Speaker 1: it was in the medal? Yeah, And so so that
Speaker 1: the prosecution's theory was that the killer must have been
Speaker 1: a skag because it would have been somebody from somebody else.
Speaker 1: Then they wouldn't have had an interest in taking that
Speaker 1: handle away because because it wouldn't be embossed with their
Speaker 1: mother's name on it. Yeah. Yeah, and so obviously he
Speaker 1: took that, he took the fact that this thing was
Speaker 1: not in evidence that obviously that points a guilty finger
Speaker 1: at somebody in the Skag family. I could see that,
Speaker 1: except I also seemed to remember that these teenagers being teenagers,
Speaker 1: left stuff lying around all the time, and if I
Speaker 1: remember correctly, wasn't it it wasn't uncommon to see several
Speaker 1: of the clubs just sitting on the on their property,
Speaker 1: just hanging out. It wasn't as if they were always
Speaker 1: put away and cared for. Yeah, that's that's that's true.
Speaker 1: I mean they were apparently, so it's not as if
Speaker 1: it was under lock and key and only by having
Speaker 1: access to the home could you get one of those.
Speaker 1: So now we have really good arguments for why the
Speaker 1: case has been overturned. Yeah, so sorry, Yeah, but actually
Speaker 1: Michael is not totally out of the woods. Obviously, the
Speaker 1: prosecutors appealed his decision, and and they but it was
Speaker 1: upheld on appeal, and now it's in front of the
Speaker 1: Connecticut Supreme Court, and we should be hearing any day
Speaker 1: now whether Michael gets to remain free or if he's
Speaker 1: going to go back to prison, or if he's going
Speaker 1: to get a new trial, and I think that he's
Speaker 1: not gonna get I don't think they're going to retry him.
Speaker 1: I would be amazed. Yeah. Yeah, it's incredible. The number
Speaker 1: of people who are serving serious time for crimes that
Speaker 1: they literally didn't commited. Happens a lot more often they'd
Speaker 1: like to think. It really does, Yeah, which is scary
Speaker 1: to me. Yeah. It just goes to show you when
Speaker 1: anything like this happens, to be really careful what you
Speaker 1: say to the police. Yeah, this is why I was. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, that doesn't look guilty at all. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: just got it, you know. Dump them in a swamp somewhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it. Take them up to the marshes on tape. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know. Actually there's a book on how to get
Speaker 1: rid of dead bodies. Yeah, I've seen it on your bookshelf.
Speaker 1: I guess i'd better hide that. Let's go back to
Speaker 1: the previous night. October thirty is ken Littleton pork In
Speaker 1: first day in the job. He took the scgle kids
Speaker 1: to the bell Haven Club, which is one of those
Speaker 1: super exclusive places that wouldn't let somebody like me join
Speaker 1: because you wouldn't be able to own a house there,
Speaker 1: so yeah, yeah, I've seen aerials and stuff of it,
Speaker 1: and it looks like a pretty possible club. They returned
Speaker 1: to the chicle house about Martha Moxley had left her
Speaker 1: house across the street around sixty seven, joined up with
Speaker 1: their friends Helen X and Jeff Byrne. October thirty in
Speaker 1: Belhaven is what's called Mischief Knight. Apparently, Mischief Night happens
Speaker 1: in a lot of places. I mean, it's never a
Speaker 1: really better thing in places that I've lived, I've heard
Speaker 1: of it. It's it's common enough that though I never
Speaker 1: was in an area that it happened or partook in it,
Speaker 1: I knew of it. Yeah. Yeah, but that's Halloween Eve
Speaker 1: and the tradition of the neighborhood is for the kids
Speaker 1: to go out and and bull pranks. You know, they
Speaker 1: like ring people's doorbells and run away and like a
Speaker 1: bag of dog poo and run away. That's a good one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Houses and trees and houses, yes, egg cars stuff, Oh
Speaker 1: my god. I know one time when I was home
Speaker 1: alone without my parents over a Halloween, somebody egged our
Speaker 1: house and they were like gone, you know, and I
Speaker 1: didn't know how to deal with it, and it was
Speaker 1: the worst and I had no idea. Uh well, now
Speaker 1: you know, and for anybody who's listening, the first thing
Speaker 1: you do is get out the garden hoses starting hosing
Speaker 1: off the house because it's gonna stick. Yeah, and also
Speaker 1: it can wreck your pain job in your car, so
Speaker 1: you gotta get cleaned. Yeah. Yeah. All these hijaks were
Speaker 1: accepted with good humor by the local homeowners because, after all,
Speaker 1: they were rich, so they weren't cleaning up the mess
Speaker 1: house needed a new paint job again anyway, big deal,
Speaker 1: right shack you kind of you kind of wonder if
Speaker 1: that's the sort of tradition that gets started by the
Speaker 1: staff or like painters, you know where they're like, you
Speaker 1: should go to egg that house. So I found out
Speaker 1: how to get onto that that property and go ahead
Speaker 1: and just egg every house you can because I need
Speaker 1: we need some work winners coming. It's gonna be slow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh yeah. And they were always in the Bell Haven,
Speaker 1: by the way, if you were on foot, it's just
Speaker 1: that if you're on car, they had these guardhouses and
Speaker 1: gates at the you know, at the community. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like that in every community. No, no gated community is
Speaker 1: completely sealed off. Oh no, it can't be. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: Martha Moxley, along with her friends Helen and Jeff, stopped
Speaker 1: by the Scag House um since they were buddies with
Speaker 1: Tommy and Michael. But of course Tommy and Michael weren't there.
Speaker 1: They were at the bell of Haven Club with Canon Littleton.
Speaker 1: They laughed, but they returned a little after nine pm,
Speaker 1: and Michael took them out to the family's Lincoln Continental
Speaker 1: in the driveway and they all climbed in and started
Speaker 1: listening to eight track tapes and smoking cigarettes. The eight track.
Speaker 1: We eight track? That the worst format ever. Have you
Speaker 1: ever listened to an eight track tape? They never stopped,
Speaker 1: They just well, I think the thing that drives you
Speaker 1: crazy is it always happens in the middle of your
Speaker 1: favorite song on the tape. You're going along along, there's
Speaker 1: all of a sudden dead and then you just jump
Speaker 1: and standing, reverses and starts playing back the other direction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: terrible format. Don't buy an eight track. Well, they're pretty
Speaker 1: they're still pretty popular. I'm sure everybody's good at one
Speaker 1: there called eight tracks dot Com. Oh really, is it
Speaker 1: like the Museum of eight Tracks? No, you just make playlists,
Speaker 1: got it? Okay, that's my only experience with eight tracks.
Speaker 1: You've never actually seen one in real life, too young. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you see that book right there, that that's the
Speaker 1: size of an eight track because big big cartridges. Yeah
Speaker 1: that was anyway, your young kids today don't know how
Speaker 1: good you got it with your fancy iPod. Okay, So Martha, Tommy,
Speaker 1: and Michael are in the Lincoln. Yeah, back to our thing.
Speaker 1: Well yeah, well the four of them were almost and
Speaker 1: then yeah, Tommy comes out of the house supposedly to
Speaker 1: get one of those hawk and big tapes out of
Speaker 1: the car, and he wind up joining them in the car.
Speaker 1: But then not long after that, around Rush Junior brother,
Speaker 1: yeah the oldest one, and his cousin Jim terry and
Speaker 1: came out and told them they were gonna have to
Speaker 1: get out of the car because they needed to take
Speaker 1: Jim to his house, which was about when eleven miles away. Michael,
Speaker 1: by the way, had been planning to go to the
Speaker 1: terry In's house because apparently Rush Junior had seen an EPI.
Speaker 1: So do Monty Python's flying surface. He was in a
Speaker 1: test group. He was he was away at college at
Speaker 1: Princeton or somewhere like that or Yale or something, and
Speaker 1: apparently he'd gotten that chance to see this and he
Speaker 1: thought it was really awesome. It was Monty Pythons flying
Speaker 1: Surface was a great show. Yes it was weird, but
Speaker 1: it was fun. Yeah, it was totally off the wall,
Speaker 1: but it was great. But apparently that it was the
Speaker 1: American premiere of the Flying Circus was taking place that night,
Speaker 1: and so they were going to all just go back
Speaker 1: to the Harrians and hang out and drink a beer
Speaker 1: and watch it. Because this was the time when you
Speaker 1: couldn't just DVR it and watch it later. You had
Speaker 1: to see it then or you weren't going to see
Speaker 1: it again. Pretty much. I guess maybe I don't know
Speaker 1: why they couldn't just stay there. I'm going to guess
Speaker 1: that it was Wow what it would it was seventy
Speaker 1: five cable access. It had to be antenna TV, but
Speaker 1: it might have been a station issue. In other words,
Speaker 1: they may not have gotten the same station at one
Speaker 1: house to the next based on the antenna set up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it could have been that in a neighborhood. Like even
Speaker 1: I assume that they have everything you would think, but
Speaker 1: you're it's it's antenna television. You might be rich, but
Speaker 1: you can't change air waves, So that could have been
Speaker 1: It could have been something as simple as they were
Speaker 1: just going to kill two birds with one stone. Jimmy
Speaker 1: had to be home at a certain time, and then
Speaker 1: you know, he had a massive stash of weeds. Yea,
Speaker 1: his parents weren't home. Yeah, they didn't know if Kenna
Speaker 1: let them drink yeah, uh oney, way, Michael, before Martha
Speaker 1: exited the car, asked her if she wanted to come along,
Speaker 1: but she said she couldn't because she had a nine curfew.
Speaker 1: So then Tommy and Martha, Helen and Jeff get out
Speaker 1: of the car. Michael stays in Russ, John and Jim
Speaker 1: climb and they leave for Jim's house, which is called
Speaker 1: Cirsam Corda. I'm sorry what Corda? No, I'm sorry. I
Speaker 1: was more reacting to the fact that his home has
Speaker 1: a name. I know, I know because his Jimmy, Terry
Speaker 1: and his family is also really sticking rich and they
Speaker 1: had imagine so huge when they get to a certain
Speaker 1: size to get to have a name of their own.
Speaker 1: I really got to come up with a name from
Speaker 1: my house. Yeah, and then put it on Google I
Speaker 1: think your in your house has a name already. Pee
Speaker 1: what I don't even make sense. I was going to
Speaker 1: say something way less flattering. Okay. So that left Tommy, Martha, Helen,
Speaker 1: and Jeff standing in the driveway, and apparently, according to
Speaker 1: what Helen and Jeff said to the police afterwards, Tommy
Speaker 1: and Martha were engaging in flirtatious behavior with one another
Speaker 1: and it was kind of making them uncomfortable. Is that
Speaker 1: an euphemism for flirtatious behavior? Yeah, like, were they like
Speaker 1: going at it. They were just flirting. They were flirting
Speaker 1: and there was a little a little pushing and horseplay
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. It's always weird to me when
Speaker 1: fellow teenagers are like it was making me uncomfortable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like, actually felt like a third wheel. Well,
Speaker 1: I was just saying, as as a dude watching another
Speaker 1: dude hitting on a girl and he might be maybe
Speaker 1: getting some traction. It's weird you're just standing there and
Speaker 1: you can't have a conversation because every time you make
Speaker 1: a joke they ignore you. It's it's awkward. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: I said, Helen's hell, I felt like a third she said,
Speaker 1: and so that and she had to care for you anyway,
Speaker 1: nine thirtyes, so she took off one with Jeff And
Speaker 1: so that means Tommy was the last known person to
Speaker 1: see Martha alive to seventh Michael's fifteen there was and
Speaker 1: that's that's one reason he was a suspect for so long. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Tommy was. So this was about nine twenty and Tommy
Speaker 1: told police the following day after her body was found.
Speaker 1: The police came by the Sago household and they interviewed
Speaker 1: everybody there that afternoon. But yeah, oh yeah, he said
Speaker 1: that he and Martha chatted for a little while, that
Speaker 1: she left around nine thirty and then she went back
Speaker 1: and said the house to work on a report for
Speaker 1: school about Abraham Lincoln, which turned out to be a lie.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, yeah, I guess. Police check to Tommy's school.
Speaker 1: They found out Tommy hadn't been assigned any such report. Uh.
Speaker 1: And also Cam Littleton, the tutor he was also supposed
Speaker 1: to be keep an eye of kids. He did a
Speaker 1: bed check, uh and about five and uh he said
Speaker 1: that Tommy wasn't there. Tommy said that while he stepped
Speaker 1: across the hallway to a guest room to get a
Speaker 1: book for his report, he stayed there to work on it.
Speaker 1: Probably probably also another line um that was just big enough.
Speaker 1: Though he could have theoretically been anywhere, he just wasn't
Speaker 1: in bed. Yeah, yeah, just it just wasn't his bed.
Speaker 1: And he changed his story in summer the summer of two.
Speaker 1: More about that later. But he was with Martha longer
Speaker 1: than he actually said, six seventeen years, okay, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been a while that he finally changed his story.
Speaker 1: A lot of people in this story. A lot of
Speaker 1: people change their stories in this one. I mean a lot,
Speaker 1: I guess. I mean it does. We're talking about like kids, really, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen,
Speaker 1: Like these people are kids, and they may not totally understand.
Speaker 1: Especially I'm sorry if any of our listeners are, you know,
Speaker 1: super rich, but like the super rich kids that I've
Speaker 1: ever met really have that mentality of like like like
Speaker 1: I'll get away with it doesn't matter, or they don't
Speaker 1: understand the like severity of if you're fifteen and you're
Speaker 1: trying to not get in trouble for like sleeping with
Speaker 1: a girl, you're not necessarily going to be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: well we had sex, and then you know this, Maybe
Speaker 1: it's not the accurate example, right, But you're not going
Speaker 1: to say, oh, yeah, we had sex and then I
Speaker 1: came home. You're going to say like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm perfect. Right, And then what fourteen fifteen years later,
Speaker 1: when you kind of realized like, oh, not that that
Speaker 1: was dumb, you might come out and admit that. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's shady, but it's not such a huge problem to me.
Speaker 1: I guess, well, yeah, now there's that. Well we'll talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about that. But yeah, he he was.
Speaker 1: What turns out it really was with Martha for about
Speaker 1: twenty minutes longer than he said, which pushing with Martha
Speaker 1: were right about the time of the murder or right
Speaker 1: up to it one timeline, Yeah, according to one, I
Speaker 1: mean what I meantime, of course, Russ Junior, John and
Speaker 1: Michael were over Jimmy Terran's watching Monty Python and they
Speaker 1: got back home around and twenty pm, And they gave
Speaker 1: that statement to the police on the thirty first, and
Speaker 1: Michael la later changed his story to which is what
Speaker 1: landed him in jail. Eventually, at the same time that
Speaker 1: the skateboys got home, John Moxley's markin Who's Martha's Brother seventeen,
Speaker 1: also arrived home and his mother, Dorothy, told him that
Speaker 1: Martha wasn't home yet and that she was wordy worried.
Speaker 1: And I saw an interview with John on Unsolved Mystery.
Speaker 1: It was done years after. There's a little bit of
Speaker 1: humor in this. I like, yeah, yeah, and he said
Speaker 1: that when she first said that, his initial reaction was,
Speaker 1: and I'm paraphrasing everything, he said, well, well, for once,
Speaker 1: it's a little bits perfect his home lade, not me unquote,
Speaker 1: which obviously it was not a good thing after the fact,
Speaker 1: but yeah, And I'm making note of that because a
Speaker 1: lot has been made about Martha's curfew and how scrupulous
Speaker 1: she was about obeying her coup curfew kind of a
Speaker 1: big bone of contention, because if she would have or curfew,
Speaker 1: she was obedient to a curfew, she would not have
Speaker 1: stayed out until way, way late, right, in order to
Speaker 1: be murdered by Michael. Well, God, with maybe like one exception, right,
Speaker 1: I mean right, I mean you can say this was
Speaker 1: the first time she stayed up late. Yeah, it could
Speaker 1: were the one of the first times. Yeah. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of arguing about that. Mark Ferman claims his
Speaker 1: book that she had violated her curfew by many hours
Speaker 1: just a week before. But he doesn't sign any actual
Speaker 1: sources for that or documentation. That's gonna say. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you said sources because in your script you say documentation,
Speaker 1: and that's like my favorite thing. Like Dorothy the mom
Speaker 1: was sitting there, you know, with a nightly Bob ten
Speaker 1: fifty four pm, Martha still not home. Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: mean that kind of thing. I just said, he doesn't
Speaker 1: say where he got Yeah, yeah, right, No, I mean
Speaker 1: I think you know, again, it's like she's fifteen. She's
Speaker 1: probably starting to push the bounds of her curfew a
Speaker 1: little bit. Seems like maybe it's an early curfew, and
Speaker 1: especially on a night like that or if she was
Speaker 1: getting involved with someone or something like that, she may
Speaker 1: be trying to test it a little bit. Um, But
Speaker 1: staying out till two in the morning, I'm not so sure. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: probably not staying out til two in the morning, and
Speaker 1: probably not like all the time, you know, like once
Speaker 1: every couple of weeks by a half hour. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's relevant just to the establishment of the time
Speaker 1: of death. Yeah, so what is what is the official
Speaker 1: time of death? Well, the police said it at ten pm,
Speaker 1: right around to maybe ten to maybe his latest ten fifteen.
Speaker 1: They're using a kind of a half hour window, yeah,
Speaker 1: right in there. And the reason they're putting it at
Speaker 1: that is that the X dog, Helen X, lived across
Speaker 1: Walsh Lane in in a nice big mansion. Of course,
Speaker 1: she and her family lived across Walsh Lane to the
Speaker 1: north and they had an Australian shepherd named Zach and
Speaker 1: apparently Zach was a bit of a barker, but that night,
Speaker 1: at about nine pm, he started barking really furiously and
Speaker 1: super intensely, and so that's it's thinking, this thought that
Speaker 1: the assault was beginning right about the time when he
Speaker 1: started barking. Yeah, the dog did bark. Yeah. Also there's
Speaker 1: Mark Berman, the decided and said that he thought he
Speaker 1: she had violated a curfew by a lot because he
Speaker 1: wanted to be able to expand the time window for
Speaker 1: the time of death. And I you know what, I
Speaker 1: kind of agree with him a little bit. I think
Speaker 1: that the police is reasoning for this timeline is like
Speaker 1: weird to well, actually, the police, the police want and
Speaker 1: got themselves one of the primary forests medical examiners in
Speaker 1: the country guy, the guy from Houston, Texas who had
Speaker 1: done thousands of not tens of thousands of murders and
Speaker 1: everything and and presented all everything though the autopsy reports
Speaker 1: and and all the reports about dogs barking and everything else.
Speaker 1: And he's at the time of death at ten PM.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't just the local grainichpdo did this? I mean,
Speaker 1: did that based on contents? Well that's the part that
Speaker 1: kind of gives me a bit of a pause. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because Martha had had a grilled cheese sandwich about six
Speaker 1: thirty six thirty, so that was gone from her stomach.
Speaker 1: So the stomach takes two to four hours to clear food,
Speaker 1: so that means she could easily have been killed around ten.
Speaker 1: But her stomach also had three ounces of fluid in it,
Speaker 1: and she had had a coke at the Skags, or
Speaker 1: at least part of a coke, and the stomach obviously
Speaker 1: clears liquids a lot faster than it clears solids, and
Speaker 1: so she's still So the fact that she still had
Speaker 1: that after drinking all a part of a coke at
Speaker 1: the Skkles indicates that she was not murdered hours and
Speaker 1: hours and hours after unless she had been somewhere for
Speaker 1: hours and hours and then drank three or four ounces
Speaker 1: of something which would then be in her stomach. There's
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of there is. The logic isn't
Speaker 1: completely perfect because it assumes that that coke at the
Speaker 1: Skeggles was the very last thing she drank. You don't
Speaker 1: know what she was out and about doing. I also
Speaker 1: but that the reason I think the time at the
Speaker 1: time of death was around Tin is that if she
Speaker 1: was seen anywhere, if she was out and about, she
Speaker 1: was a sociable person. She wouldn't have just wandered around
Speaker 1: the darkness and not met up with somebody, and she
Speaker 1: would have been seen by somebody, and she wasn't about
Speaker 1: not by anybody. Um And so that's my major reason
Speaker 1: for thinking that she could not have dropped somewhere else.
Speaker 1: Right around Tin was the time of death. This, this
Speaker 1: whole thing actually has me asking this very morbid question
Speaker 1: of like, yeah, but when you're going undergoing um an assault,
Speaker 1: like a really severe assault like she underwent, is your
Speaker 1: body still processing food? Right? Is your body still processing liquid?
Speaker 1: So like, if she was being beat over the period
Speaker 1: of you know, ten to fifteen minutes, does that affect
Speaker 1: the time. That's just something that like popped into my
Speaker 1: head to read. That doesn't change the timeline that much.
Speaker 1: But I just started to think about that as a
Speaker 1: really maccab question, as they should ask one of our
Speaker 1: experts about what I was about to suggest. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know a good question. So listeners, if you
Speaker 1: weren't just like totally turned off by that and you
Speaker 1: had the answer, email us, please do Back to the
Speaker 1: night of the thirtieth, Dorothy Moxley fell asleep in her
Speaker 1: cach that's Martha's mom, remember, and we woke up around
Speaker 1: one thirty. Martha still wasn't home, and Dorothy was getting
Speaker 1: pretty worried by this time, so she wakes John up
Speaker 1: uh and asked him to go out looking for Martha,
Speaker 1: and John said he drove around for a few hours
Speaker 1: looking but found a sign of Martha and anyone home
Speaker 1: and went to sleep in the TV room in the
Speaker 1: basement apparently. And during this time Dorothy is calling all
Speaker 1: around for basically anybody that knows Martha and called the
Speaker 1: called the scats obviously in a lot of other people.
Speaker 1: And this is the next morning, this is the wee
Speaker 1: hours of October two I'm sure they were all really
Speaker 1: happy about Yeah, I'm sure they were. I'm sure they
Speaker 1: were understanding about it. Actually had reason to be scared,
Speaker 1: you know that. And then about eight thirty in the
Speaker 1: morning of the thirty one, Roarthy went over to the
Speaker 1: skate goes to ask if they had seen Martha. Michael
Speaker 1: Ska had fallen asleep in his clothes on his bed,
Speaker 1: and when Dorothy saw him, she said that he was
Speaker 1: pale and looked a little fraid around the edges, but
Speaker 1: he had had a lot to drink the night before.
Speaker 1: I didn't maybe mention what. They went to the bell
Speaker 1: the bell Haven Cloud, they drank alcohol and stuff and
Speaker 1: continue to drink after they got back to the house.
Speaker 1: As teenagers, they don't know what they're doing. Yeah, oh no,
Speaker 1: they know what they're doing. Getting drunk is what they're doing.
Speaker 1: They don't know what they're doing when Yeah, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so Michael had just woken up, and so he and
Speaker 1: he was wearing his clothes. He was wearing his clothes
Speaker 1: from the night before. Yeah, so he had passed out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he passed out. He was They took his shoes off
Speaker 1: and then just conked out. But also, like i'd like
Speaker 1: to clarify he was wearing his clothes from the night before.
Speaker 1: He wasn't like missing his blood soaked pants somewhere now.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know if he was wearing the
Speaker 1: exact same clothes that he was wearing the night and
Speaker 1: that night before when he went over to the Terran's
Speaker 1: house he was wearing clothes. Theoretically he was wearing the
Speaker 1: same clothes if he will went to sleeping is closed though, Yeah, probably,
Speaker 1: and theory, I mean, there's no reason to come home,
Speaker 1: take off your bloodstained clothes and then and then get
Speaker 1: redressed and go to bed. Yeah, you would put your
Speaker 1: PJS on probably, or just you know, go to bed
Speaker 1: in your underwear or something. Anyway, Michael searched the house
Speaker 1: and the grounds of the end of the house, and
Speaker 1: then their gardener, Franz, and the teen wentn't checked their RV.
Speaker 1: They had this r V called a rev Con. I
Speaker 1: don't know what brand that is, but check that because oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sure it was the best there was. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: apparently you know she uh, well, apparently Martha and the
Speaker 1: kids like to party in the rev can occasionally, so
Speaker 1: that was worth checking. But Martha was not there, so
Speaker 1: about noon. Martha's friend, Sheila McGuire, who was also fifteen uh,
Speaker 1: and she lived in the house just to the south
Speaker 1: of the Moxley house. He was cutting across the Moxley
Speaker 1: yard headed towards Walsh Lane. Once she spotted Martha's body
Speaker 1: under the big pine tree. And so she goes to
Speaker 1: the Moxley house to tell them what she's seen, because
Speaker 1: by the I didn't mention, by the way, the whole
Speaker 1: neighborhood knows. By this time, and the whole neighborho was
Speaker 1: out because they were woken up at like three o'clock
Speaker 1: in the morning. Yeah, yeah, So a lot of people
Speaker 1: were out looking for Martha, and and then she just
Speaker 1: happens to find her by accident. You'll be happy to know.
Speaker 1: She was never a suspect, by the way, and that
Speaker 1: of course the police are called. Then again, the first
Speaker 1: two Greenish policemen have showed up, confirmed that she was dead,
Speaker 1: called for more troops, and then again they noticed the
Speaker 1: handle of the golf club sticking out of her neck.
Speaker 1: And in fact, one of them mentioned it to his
Speaker 1: wife that night when he got home. Yeah yeah, and
Speaker 1: she remembered him saying that too. It's pretty crazily. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty brutal murder. And of course the Moxley family
Speaker 1: doctor was called in to confirm her that she was
Speaker 1: actually dead, and he noticed the golf club handle laying
Speaker 1: in the ground next to Martha. Um, so he can
Speaker 1: remember the golf club handle. And Dorothy, for her part,
Speaker 1: did not go outside is to view Martha's body understandably. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: she didn't want she didn't want that to be her
Speaker 1: last memory of Martha. You know, I can't blame it
Speaker 1: for that. And the initial theory by the police of
Speaker 1: the people who Granwich was that it was committed by
Speaker 1: some random transient who had wandered through the neighborhood. So
Speaker 1: we're not quite there, but that was that was the
Speaker 1: initial theory. It was the police. Yeah, I mean that
Speaker 1: was what everybody because everybody thought, I mean, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is this is Belle Haven, Connecticut, this is like,
Speaker 1: these are the best people in hon earth. There's no
Speaker 1: murderers living in our town. But maybe there was. Of course,
Speaker 1: Tommy Skill was the last person to see Martha alive,
Speaker 1: so he was grilled pretty good. In fact, the night
Speaker 1: of the thirty feet they hauled him down that After
Speaker 1: questioning Tommy and all the other kids, they hauled Tommy
Speaker 1: down to the police station and grilled him for about
Speaker 1: six hours. Well that's it's gotta suck because you know,
Speaker 1: he has to put a lot of work into his
Speaker 1: Halloween costs and we didn't get to use it. Well,
Speaker 1: I know, the poor guy. Well that kind of sucks
Speaker 1: from Michael, Kasie and Martha had made plans to go
Speaker 1: trick or treating on the night oft one, and well
Speaker 1: his date was gone. So scotch that the police while
Speaker 1: they were over on the thirty one at the Skill household.
Speaker 1: Of course they are already a stabbed last by finding
Speaker 1: the pieces of the golf club that it was a
Speaker 1: Tony pen of golf club. Yeah, and to a couple
Speaker 1: of grandish police but noticed that there was a Tony
Speaker 1: penn of golf club which was a fore iron. That
Speaker 1: the murder weapons was a Tony pen a six iron. Uh,
Speaker 1: they've noticed his fore iron in a barrel in the
Speaker 1: family's mudroom. Had the barrel head to you know what
Speaker 1: whatever you have in your mode room, you know, umbrella. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so they noticed this. Two days later they came back
Speaker 1: and they asked permission to search the house number one,
Speaker 1: and they asked permission to take the fore iron which
Speaker 1: was still there in the barrel, and so they took
Speaker 1: that sand. Of course, it was engraved with the words
Speaker 1: Mrs R Case Skegle on the handle, and they did
Speaker 1: serious to According to the police, they searched the Skagle
Speaker 1: house pretty thoroughly and didn't find anything. So eventually this
Speaker 1: case kind of kind of went cold. I mean, they
Speaker 1: investigated Tommy for a long time. They questioned him many times,
Speaker 1: they gave him polygraphs twice which we were inconclusive, and
Speaker 1: they they really went after a bunch of other people
Speaker 1: to mentioned Candle, a Littleton and all talk about a
Speaker 1: few others also. But then eventually the case went cold
Speaker 1: until the nineteen nineties, and then there was a sentence
Speaker 1: from I don't want to get too deep into the
Speaker 1: weeds here, but there there was this rumor that came
Speaker 1: out during the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith there
Speaker 1: was another Kennedy cousin. There's a lot of Kennedy cousins, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are, and so he was on tropic rape and
Speaker 1: of course that received national attention. Some of the tabloids
Speaker 1: for some reason started circulating a rumor that he had
Speaker 1: been present at the Skegal household on the night of
Speaker 1: the murder. And it's the tabloids. You gotta love the press,
Speaker 1: I know. But but of course it wasn't true. But
Speaker 1: that brought some more attention back to this case, because
Speaker 1: it was long, long since cold at that point. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: police announced they were going to like look into the
Speaker 1: case again. I mean at this point rushed and senior,
Speaker 1: a rookie, was really tired of living under this cloud
Speaker 1: of suspicion. It was mainly over Tommy. And that's right.
Speaker 1: He commissioned the report. Yeah, I had two. He hired
Speaker 1: a group called Sutton Sudden Investigations too, and they were
Speaker 1: easily were a bunch of former FBI agents and stuff,
Speaker 1: and they were private investigation organization. He said, we want
Speaker 1: you to solve this case. You know, sky's the limit
Speaker 1: on one time it comes to the cash. And so
Speaker 1: they fully expecting that it was going to exonerate his
Speaker 1: entire family. Well yeah, because yeah, because if he if
Speaker 1: he knew it was a member of his family, why
Speaker 1: the hell would you do something like that, right, I mean, so, yeah,
Speaker 1: he hired them to do this and that's when things
Speaker 1: kind of like got out of hand. They they were
Speaker 1: they were questioning Tommy and Michael, and Tommy, well, Michael
Speaker 1: changed his story. It turns out he didn't just go
Speaker 1: straight to bed when he got home. He actually went
Speaker 1: back out and I want to go window peeping. There
Speaker 1: was this this lady Michael did Tommy. Yeah, So Michael
Speaker 1: went out to go window peeping. Apparently there's some local
Speaker 1: lady who liked to walk around naked and sometimes after
Speaker 1: dark and so, you which to a fifteen year old
Speaker 1: boys is just irresistible in the seventies particular, right, I
Speaker 1: mean for the Internet, that's not good point to Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it turns out her her lights were out and
Speaker 1: there was no action there. So he said that had
Speaker 1: this thought that, well, you know, maybe I'll go by
Speaker 1: the go by to the Moxley's house and see if
Speaker 1: I could wake up Martha, you know, and Sean want
Speaker 1: to see he wants to make out or something. Actually,
Speaker 1: I think there's are his words, woul Maybe I'll see
Speaker 1: if can get a kiss from Martha. She likes me.
Speaker 1: So he climbed a tree that outside and then in
Speaker 1: the front of the house and tosses a few pebbles
Speaker 1: at her window and calls that her name and gets
Speaker 1: no response, and its believed that she He actually was
Speaker 1: outside a second story window that was actually John and
Speaker 1: her brother John's bedroom. But that wouldn't have got a
Speaker 1: good Yeah, if somebody been home, he would not have
Speaker 1: been happy with the results he got. Yeah, not really. Uh.
Speaker 1: And Martha's bedroom was actually on the third floor. She
Speaker 1: had the entire third floor to herself, and so he
Speaker 1: was he had totally had the wrong room. But John, John,
Speaker 1: I think was at that point was downstairs watching the
Speaker 1: evening news with his mother, So he wasn't that he
Speaker 1: wasn't in the bedroom. Uh So Michael at that point,
Speaker 1: uh um, I don't tact the way to put this.
Speaker 1: He masturbating can be said just like sitting in the
Speaker 1: tree outside of John's bedroom. Yeah, he decided to just
Speaker 1: start playing a little pocket pool and according to Mark Ferman,
Speaker 1: he reached orgasm. According to RFK Jr. He did not.
Speaker 1: He realized he suddenly realized what a stupid thing he
Speaker 1: was doing, and so he put it away, a climb
Speaker 1: back down out of the tree and left. He walked
Speaker 1: towards the question, Yeah, why does it matter what's that
Speaker 1: if he reached because if he reached completion, then he
Speaker 1: would have listened DNA evidence at the scene, which nobody
Speaker 1: collected anything at that treanch in a tree like next
Speaker 1: to a window on the other side of the house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it was sudden and Mark Ferman uh and there
Speaker 1: there was one of the guy have an old childhood
Speaker 1: classmate of Michael's name, Andy Pugh LF but yeah by Andy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Andy re established contact with and with Michael, and Michael
Speaker 1: was thinking like, you know, hey, let's let's start hanging out.
Speaker 1: You know, it's been too long with we should get
Speaker 1: to know each other again and all yeah, the YadA,
Speaker 1: and Andy said, look, you know, I really have to
Speaker 1: know what's what really happened with Martha before I can
Speaker 1: really in good conscience to do this. And and so
Speaker 1: Michael told him this story. This was back about I think,
Speaker 1: And it turns out the guy was still a prep
Speaker 1: school jerk. Yeah, and Andy, Andy Pew. When he heard
Speaker 1: about the climbing the tree, he assumed it was the
Speaker 1: pine tree underneath which the body had been done. Okay,
Speaker 1: because well, for one thing, I mean, all the kids
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood climbed that tree. It was a big
Speaker 1: tree with a big, big, strong, well space branches, and
Speaker 1: it was a great climbing tree, but it was a
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty ft away from the Moxley house. So
Speaker 1: you can't exactly climb that tree and toss pebbles at
Speaker 1: Martha's window. That's not a good spine tree. And it's
Speaker 1: also on the wrong side of the house. And so
Speaker 1: the tree evening. Yeah, okay, so it's kind of just
Speaker 1: like Ferman is just like dragging his name through the
Speaker 1: mudel a little bit by saying like and he reached
Speaker 1: orgasm and and and and and got it all over
Speaker 1: the body, look at look at this guy, Yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: And well, and what what he was saying is that
Speaker 1: Michael changed his story in because at that time DNA
Speaker 1: evidence was becoming a thing. Yeah, so he was trying
Speaker 1: to explain We're trying to explain away the presence of
Speaker 1: his semen. But I don't think there was seen on
Speaker 1: the body. No, there wasn't. Great, just wanted to clear quick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, interestingly, at the trial in two thousand two,
Speaker 1: the prosecution said that there was yet, but it was lost.
Speaker 1: Let me guess it was lost. Well, I don't. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen any evidence that there ever was any semen
Speaker 1: that was even collected. Yeah, you would think that if
Speaker 1: they had collected it, they would have gone ahead and
Speaker 1: had it run and just marched into court and said,
Speaker 1: printed up the results on a giant placard and said
Speaker 1: guess who. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean they could definitely,
Speaker 1: even before the advent of DNA, they could still get
Speaker 1: all kinds of information out of that stuff. Bodily fluid.
Speaker 1: You can get blood type and other stuff. You know
Speaker 1: that you're calling it the advent to DNA. Yeah whatever,
Speaker 1: But testing, Yeah, I guess the testing asking't been around
Speaker 1: for at least several hundred years at least. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: So so anyway, that but that's that's Burman's theory of
Speaker 1: it is that is that that's what that's why he
Speaker 1: made up this story in and so suspicion. Michael had
Speaker 1: never been a suspect in this case, and suddenly suspicion
Speaker 1: shifted to him because he admitted to being a peeping
Speaker 1: tom Bessie because he there was no trying. It really looked.
Speaker 1: And when I first heard this story, and I I
Speaker 1: heard that tale about about the whole thing, in the
Speaker 1: tree and everything. I thought, that's he's guilty as sin.
Speaker 1: He's obviously trying to explain away the presence of DNA,
Speaker 1: and so he actually had an explanation for it. He
Speaker 1: had actually talked about this, like I said to NDP,
Speaker 1: I think in the mid eighties, and he asked, I
Speaker 1: had another guy named Michael, Michael Meredith who was the
Speaker 1: guy that he had been. Michael, by the way, not
Speaker 1: too long after the murder was shipped off to the
Speaker 1: school for troubled children called Elon. It's in Maine, and
Speaker 1: there they had this for brutal regiment where they you know,
Speaker 1: they didn't beat people and got in their faces and
Speaker 1: everything for kids that had drug and alcohol problems. The
Speaker 1: boot camp situation kind of yeah, Bootcamp, except like even
Speaker 1: more brutal. Well, it was the tough love was bloody
Speaker 1: your nose. Yeah. And so in nine seven, Michael Meredith
Speaker 1: was living temporarily with Michael Scagell because they were working
Speaker 1: on they're working on the possibility of like the sort
Speaker 1: of tell all book about about Elon and schools like
Speaker 1: Elan and a little scandal but not that and and
Speaker 1: so at that point he told Michael Meredith that story also,
Speaker 1: which don't ask me why it's not a story I
Speaker 1: would be telling anybody. Uh yeah, no, yeah, no, yeah.
Speaker 1: And also rf K Jr. Says he told him that
Speaker 1: story back in the early eighties. So you know, again, Michael,
Speaker 1: Michael maybe talks a little bit too much. I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, he may just have a very poor filter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds like he doesn't have very good filter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know guys that tell you things and you're like, what,
Speaker 1: why don't don't ever tell anybody that again. Alternately, you know,
Speaker 1: somebody did say to him. Those are situations where they said, well,
Speaker 1: what really happened with the home? Martha Moxleer, like you
Speaker 1: you know something more, don't you? And he said, yeah, okay, yes,
Speaker 1: I you know this is actually what happened. I was
Speaker 1: trying to protect myself. You know, I was seventeen, seventeen,
Speaker 1: I was fifteen. You know, I didn't know better. I
Speaker 1: thought I was going to get in huge trouble for
Speaker 1: being this peeping tom. You know, he'd have been serious trouble.
Speaker 1: But so I'm sure that you know, in his fifteen
Speaker 1: year old mind, it was better to just lie than
Speaker 1: tell the truth. And you know, again. Later he realized, like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'll just you know, I've told enough people.
Speaker 1: I can say, hey, I had this problem when I
Speaker 1: was child and it's better now, and that's fine. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I So I don't think there's all that suspicious that
Speaker 1: he lied and then that the day after the murder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think it is. I mean, yeah, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be I wouldn't be telling that story, but I just
Speaker 1: wouldn't have changed my story later. Yeah, not really. Should
Speaker 1: we get into theories here, yeah, okay, and yeah, I
Speaker 1: think I think we've we've got the whole thing laid out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of suspects here. First off, of course,
Speaker 1: the random transient theory, which is silly. Yeah, that's my favorite. Yeah, because,
Speaker 1: as I said, Martha was found with the panties rolled down, um,
Speaker 1: which indicates that the attack it was somebody that she knew.
Speaker 1: That's what That's certainly the inference that the police and
Speaker 1: drew from this. And so there I was stranger in
Speaker 1: the dark night, dark cold night. You're gonna just roll
Speaker 1: that pulling your pants and rolled in your So the
Speaker 1: one thing that Okay, I was joking when I was
Speaker 1: saying this my favorite theory, but I don't necessarily agree
Speaker 1: with the had to be somebody that she knew. I mean,
Speaker 1: it could very well have been a threat that was
Speaker 1: going to lead to a sexual assault. I mean, somebody
Speaker 1: could have had a knife to her throat and said
Speaker 1: you pulled down your pants and you pull down your
Speaker 1: underwear or I'm gonna slit your throat. Okay, but yeah,
Speaker 1: question if somebody had a knife to her, why beat
Speaker 1: her with the golf club and stab her with the
Speaker 1: golf club? Why not just kill her with the knife.
Speaker 1: Maybe they had the golf club across her neck, I
Speaker 1: don't know, choking her saying I will choke the life
Speaker 1: out of you if you don't pull your pants down.
Speaker 1: Seems like there would be some markings there. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm just saying that. Well, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't think that it is so outlandish as the both
Speaker 1: of you do. Well, there's an alternative theory, which, of course,
Speaker 1: she got whacked once on the head, which is enough
Speaker 1: to know disorient, dis orient or maybe even kao her
Speaker 1: pretty good. And then her pants and panties get pulled
Speaker 1: down and then and then a more brutal beating takes
Speaker 1: place after that, because something happens, right, yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 1: even though I kind of suspect it was some of
Speaker 1: issue knew, you know, I got I gotta say it.
Speaker 1: It is possible. Well, and and I will fully admit
Speaker 1: that a random trans you just happening to wander into
Speaker 1: this gated community and not be seen by anybody and
Speaker 1: not raising any alarms. I find that very suspicious. I
Speaker 1: don't think that it probably happened, But I also can't
Speaker 1: say that this evidence of it couldn't have been. I
Speaker 1: don't say, I just don't agree with it. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: the other the other reason is there's so many other
Speaker 1: good suspects there. They're really okay, let's let's have one. Okay.
Speaker 1: Our next guy, Franz Vatine, who I think was born
Speaker 1: in Yugoslavia, had served in the German Army in World
Speaker 1: War Two and all around weirdoh yeah, kind of a
Speaker 1: strange guy. He lived in a basement apartment. He was
Speaker 1: a gardener, this cakeless gardener. He lived in an apartment
Speaker 1: in the basement and h his wife at that on
Speaker 1: that weekend was away, so just him in the apartment.
Speaker 1: So and he had he had an exit from the
Speaker 1: house that would have allowed him to get out murder
Speaker 1: Martha come back undetected. It doesn't doesn't prove anything, but
Speaker 1: the scate kids said that sometimes dry He would tell
Speaker 1: them really strange stories from World War Two about how
Speaker 1: they would you know, that he and the other German
Speaker 1: soldiers would go around raping women and stuff, which is
Speaker 1: kind of a strange thing to be saying to a
Speaker 1: bunch of teenage kids. Teenage dudes. Though, Yeah, well but
Speaker 1: you got you also remember that he he probably was
Speaker 1: messed with a lot by the kids. They probably made
Speaker 1: fun of him, and they probably screwed with him a lot.
Speaker 1: He if he was in the war, it wasn't uncommon
Speaker 1: for guys to shell shock, to have shell shocks, so
Speaker 1: he's got some issues because of that. So he's just like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I think it's okay to tell you
Speaker 1: a little different word. I was gonna use a little
Speaker 1: jerks who were screwed with me all the time a
Speaker 1: story that I know is gonna really screw you up
Speaker 1: a little bit and get you back. Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean again, this is this is right up there
Speaker 1: with with Mr. Ed as a reasoning. Yeah, he's well
Speaker 1: and well, the only other thing that makes him look
Speaker 1: even possibly good is um No, there were no there
Speaker 1: were diary entries in Martha's In Martha's diary, don't mention.
Speaker 1: I didn't mention Martha had a diary. No, you brought
Speaker 1: this up yet Martha had a diary. Yeah, and eventually
Speaker 1: wound up in the hands of the prosecution. But there
Speaker 1: were entries in their relating to France. He was referred
Speaker 1: to as Frank in there, and she talked about how
Speaker 1: she was really creeped out by Frank and and thought
Speaker 1: he was really a scary guy. And understandably afterwards, before well,
Speaker 1: Dorothy Moxley started reading Martha's diary after the death. Let's
Speaker 1: see if there was any good information in there, obviously,
Speaker 1: and she asked some of some of Martha's friends, who
Speaker 1: is Frank because she seems to really be really afraid
Speaker 1: of Frank. I believe it was Sheila McGuire who had
Speaker 1: entified him as Franz Beatine. That was that what that
Speaker 1: that could only be Franz. It was Frank And apparently
Speaker 1: after the prosecution of the police took the diary and
Speaker 1: kept in an evidence for many years, Dorothy spent years
Speaker 1: lobbying to get it back. By the time she got
Speaker 1: it back, the pages relating to Frank had been removed.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, but Franz did. He did take a light
Speaker 1: detective test, which he passed, and so they dropped him
Speaker 1: as a suspect. Nazi of course he passed. Yeah, Suli
Speaker 1: didn't have sociopath I don't. I don't think he's a
Speaker 1: good for this. There's not really much of anything to
Speaker 1: tie him to this crime. So let's move on to
Speaker 1: our next suspect here, which is Ken Littleton to live
Speaker 1: in Tutor. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah he um. Well, there
Speaker 1: was again no physical evidence connecting Kenny to the crime
Speaker 1: at all, and no, not not nothing that connects anybody really. Uh.
Speaker 1: The thing about Kenny is he uh he lost his
Speaker 1: job with the Skegles a few months after of the
Speaker 1: murder because he was drunk and he crashed their car
Speaker 1: and left apparently left the accident scene. So he kind
Speaker 1: of got fired by Rookie, and so he after that
Speaker 1: he was sort of drifting around. He got a job
Speaker 1: as a bouncer and a bar up in and Providence
Speaker 1: or somewhere like that. It's weird that he went from
Speaker 1: working in a high class school and being a tutor
Speaker 1: to quite quickly not doing that kind of work, and
Speaker 1: I wonder if he's weird. I was wondering if he
Speaker 1: got blacklists because because the Skaks were like this guy. Now,
Speaker 1: the Skaks didn't blacklist him. Now what happened is he
Speaker 1: kept his job teaching. But then in the summer, while
Speaker 1: as a teacher, you know, you go he wanted to
Speaker 1: like I can't remember where if it was, it wasn't
Speaker 1: Fire Island, and I can't remember where it was. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but he he went to this beach community where he'd
Speaker 1: hung out the summer before and got a job as
Speaker 1: a bouncer in a bar and hung out and stuff.
Speaker 1: It was just kind of a summer job, kind of
Speaker 1: summer job, kind of daily But he went on a
Speaker 1: little crime way if you broke into some some houses
Speaker 1: and businesses and stall stuff. He was he was. He
Speaker 1: broken the one woman's apartment, she had left the window
Speaker 1: window opened, He removed the screen, climbed in, and she
Speaker 1: woke up to find him lying naked on top of her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he did a lot of stuff like that. He has
Speaker 1: described more time between that and the things had a
Speaker 1: bit of a mental breakdown. Yeah, his behavior was his
Speaker 1: behavior was strange. And and so what happened is that
Speaker 1: what eventually the police found out about these crimes. The
Speaker 1: Greenwich police did, and so they they rated about to
Speaker 1: the school that he worked at, and so immediately got
Speaker 1: fired and okay, so now he gets blacklisted. Okay, and
Speaker 1: didn't well he didn't get blacklisted then, but then he
Speaker 1: got a job teaching at another school and yeah, and
Speaker 1: then and then the police went immediately went down there
Speaker 1: and rated him out again. So he got fired again.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, things kind we're kind of going downhill
Speaker 1: for Ken. Yeah, it stayed like the that. I'm happy
Speaker 1: that the Internet exists so that like the police don't
Speaker 1: have to actually track Pool anymore, that there's like a database. Hey,
Speaker 1: don't hire this person because they like to break in
Speaker 1: and lay naked on strangers. Because sadly, there was a
Speaker 1: time where there was a lot of departments that just
Speaker 1: were overworked and they couldn't do it. Yeah. Another another
Speaker 1: odd thing that happened is that Tommy went into Kid's
Speaker 1: room in the house. Canada's sitting there watching the French Connection.
Speaker 1: Remember that movie Gene. Yeah, back in those days, I
Speaker 1: don't know if they even still do this, because I
Speaker 1: don't watch TV anymore, but the networks in those days
Speaker 1: would run theatrical release movies, you know, like say nine
Speaker 1: to eleven or whatever. Yeah, they don't do that anyh Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so, but they used to do it back in
Speaker 1: those days. So The French Connection was showing on TV,
Speaker 1: and so Tommy went into his room at about ten
Speaker 1: fifteen and started watching the movie because there's just a big, huge,
Speaker 1: famous chase scene in the movie, and so he stayed
Speaker 1: for the through the end of the whole chase scene.
Speaker 1: So that sort of maybe it kind of kind of
Speaker 1: makes Tommy look a little better as far as because
Speaker 1: I mean Tommy, because he do you have a had
Speaker 1: time to murder Martha and then get all cleaned up
Speaker 1: and then go in there and watch TV with Can.
Speaker 1: Well we'll talk about that, but so he so Tommy
Speaker 1: was able to provide an alibi for Ken each other.
Speaker 1: They kind of allied by each other. But one of
Speaker 1: the things that Tommy noticed that it was kind of
Speaker 1: strange is he said it was warm in the room,
Speaker 1: and yet the whole time that he was there watching
Speaker 1: The Fresh Connection, Kenny was covered with a blanket from
Speaker 1: head to toe. I mean not not his face, but
Speaker 1: I mean from his from the bottom of his chin
Speaker 1: all the way. He was covered like he was laying
Speaker 1: in bed. Now he was now he was sitting in
Speaker 1: a chair, but sing a recliner or something like that.
Speaker 1: But he was covered with a blanket. Tommy thought that
Speaker 1: was a little strange. But you know what, I have
Speaker 1: laid around and watched TV, and it is very easy
Speaker 1: to get a bit of a chill. It's October. Yes,
Speaker 1: the heat is on, but it's a little little bit
Speaker 1: of a chill, and I'm just gonna throw a blanket on.
Speaker 1: There's a conversation. I have actually a lot with my
Speaker 1: boss because we share an office and he his job
Speaker 1: is very like get up and go right. He gets up,
Speaker 1: He's often like around and then he comes back into
Speaker 1: the office, whereas I'm sitting at my desk the whole time,
Speaker 1: and I'll have the heat on, yeah, and he comes
Speaker 1: in and he's like it is boiling, and here, what
Speaker 1: are you doing? And I can also imagine that it's
Speaker 1: that sort of situation that you know, Tommy has been out,
Speaker 1: he's been drinking back. You know, He's like, well, it's
Speaker 1: warm in this room and Ken's been sitting in there
Speaker 1: and he's like, it is cold. I'm gonna put a
Speaker 1: blanket on. Yeah, it doesn't necessarily prove much of anything. Well,
Speaker 1: there's also a little weird and there's also the there
Speaker 1: is a huge body temperature difference perception of teenagers to
Speaker 1: the rest of the adult world. Metabolis been slowing it
Speaker 1: out a little bit. Yeah, you know, I see, I see,
Speaker 1: you know, teenagers this time of year running around it's
Speaker 1: sixty degrees and they're a pair of basketball shorts and
Speaker 1: that's it. And then like, man, it is so hot.
Speaker 1: What But also again, you know, again, I presume that
Speaker 1: Ken knew to his job, hadn't been drinking nearly as
Speaker 1: much as the rest of the kids. Probably not right.
Speaker 1: He was trying to take responsibility. So if Tommy had
Speaker 1: been drinking the whole night, or had been making out
Speaker 1: with a girl and came back in, yeah yeah, uh
Speaker 1: so yeah, so can's uh he's he seems to have
Speaker 1: been pretty much cleared. I think there was there was
Speaker 1: some discussion that among police and everybody that he maybe
Speaker 1: it was a serial killer dumb well yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: not overall, just people like like some some some women
Speaker 1: got blood into death in various places that were not
Speaker 1: far from places that he was living. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean much. I say, women have been blooded to
Speaker 1: death not far away from places that you've lived. And
Speaker 1: yet as far as I'm aware, it wasn't, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't think it was. And that guy who's serving time,
Speaker 1: he seems to have probably been the culprits likely. Well,
Speaker 1: I think Kenny has been kind of cleared because in
Speaker 1: a grand jury, and that in Connecticut law, you can
Speaker 1: have what's called a grand jury of one where you
Speaker 1: basically the judge, there's a one judge who was the jury.
Speaker 1: He decides that there's probable cause, and so it's really
Speaker 1: worth you know, indicting somebody. And so they brought Kenny
Speaker 1: Littleton in. But under Connecticut law, he had to be
Speaker 1: immunized so he could confess to killing Martha, and there
Speaker 1: would not have been a thing they could do because
Speaker 1: as long as he told the truth, you know about whatever,
Speaker 1: and I as you have to assume that they asked
Speaker 1: Kenny then oh, immunity, Sorry, he's got to get a shot. Yeah, judicially, yeah,
Speaker 1: he uh so, presumably they asked him if he had
Speaker 1: murdered Martha, and presumably Kenny said no, of course he
Speaker 1: could have lied. I guess you know, I'm saying, you're
Speaker 1: telling a guy he has immunity and that guy believing
Speaker 1: it can be very two different things. I've seen t s. I.
Speaker 1: I know what's up. I watched Law and Order. I know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's say that Kenny. Let's say that Kenny really did
Speaker 1: do it, but he wanted to lie about it. But
Speaker 1: at this time, this is like hard times for Kenny.
Speaker 1: He's had a rough life, right, He's been sort of
Speaker 1: like in a floating from job to job, in place
Speaker 1: to place. I suppose he really did did it. You
Speaker 1: know what I would do if I had been Ken,
Speaker 1: I would have gotten the cakeles and I would have said, Hey,
Speaker 1: tell you what, if you give me a suitcase full
Speaker 1: of cash, I'll go into that jury room, the grand
Speaker 1: jury room, and I will tell them that I murdered
Speaker 1: Martha Moxley and that'll be the end of it for
Speaker 1: all of you. Yeah, and just make sure it's cash
Speaker 1: in twenties. Uh yeah, and just do that well. And
Speaker 1: I'm amazed. I mean, you say that with a bit
Speaker 1: of humor, but I'm amazed. That there's always this talk
Speaker 1: of Kennedy families having all this money and they can
Speaker 1: buy whatever they need. And I'm amazed that nobody has
Speaker 1: walked up and said it was me having been paid
Speaker 1: for said testimony. I mean, I'm not trying to cast
Speaker 1: anything negative against him. It's just that there's you know,
Speaker 1: you've got a lot of money. You can just have
Speaker 1: a you can convince a guy that for X amount
Speaker 1: of money, you take the fall. Dude. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: especially you know, in the case of Kenny, suppose Kenny
Speaker 1: didn't do it, they still you know, you kind of
Speaker 1: suppose somebody in the Skag family did do it. And
Speaker 1: they're rich, and they're of course all powerful and everything,
Speaker 1: and wouldn't they wouldn't they have offered him like a
Speaker 1: suitcase full of cash in order to do you know,
Speaker 1: you think they would have, you know, well, even today,
Speaker 1: I mean, if they have all this money in power.
Speaker 1: Of course, the Skates are not wealthy anymore unfortunately, but
Speaker 1: you know, if they had all this money in power,
Speaker 1: they could they could give somebody a suitcase for the
Speaker 1: cash to confess to the crime. And since somebody has
Speaker 1: already been convicted of the crime, well good luck getting
Speaker 1: a commission of somebody else, right, Yeah, okay, Tommy's skeg
Speaker 1: well again a favorite for a long time. He um, well,
Speaker 1: let's see last to see Martha alive. Tommy had a
Speaker 1: head injury when he was young, very young, and that
Speaker 1: caused a change in his behavior when he was prone
Speaker 1: to violent outbursts. I mean very violent where he had
Speaker 1: to be physically restrained and he would damage things, break things,
Speaker 1: and um did he but that seems like the sort
Speaker 1: of thing that takes hours to calm down from right,
Speaker 1: usually not necessarily, but I think it was either his
Speaker 1: sister or his brother, or maybe it was Michael. He
Speaker 1: said that he was like like milk boiling out of stove.
Speaker 1: Every seen everything ever boiled milk, You know how it
Speaker 1: looks like totally calm, and then the next second that's
Speaker 1: just said boost, It's up over the sides of the
Speaker 1: pan and all of them all. Yeah, he said that
Speaker 1: was he was like that. So it took nothing, apparently
Speaker 1: to set him off. And also ken Lyttleton was not
Speaker 1: sure afterwards. He he thought that perhaps Tommy had changed
Speaker 1: his clothes. He couldn't really remember. Yes, said something you'd
Speaker 1: pay attention to unless it was you went from a
Speaker 1: really nice sound fit to a crappy one, or from
Speaker 1: a crappy one to a really nice just changing your
Speaker 1: shirt or your jeans from one fair jeans to another. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not really something you'd note. Yeah, No, not really. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know if there was a dress
Speaker 1: code at the bell Haven Club. I'm sure there was.
Speaker 1: There probably was, if you want to come back and
Speaker 1: change out of your your slacks and your tie and
Speaker 1: it into something a little more casually. Was Tommy a
Speaker 1: thirty two inch waste? Tommy was He was pretty athletic.
Speaker 1: He was not a you were thinking of the thirty
Speaker 1: six inch waiste jeans. Yeah, Now, I don't think Tommy
Speaker 1: was nearly that big. Yeah, I mean he was seventeen
Speaker 1: years old. You know you're usually skinny at that age, right,
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'm sure it wasn't Tommy. But one of
Speaker 1: the other reasons. I mean, of course he lied about
Speaker 1: the whole book report thing. He was not in bed,
Speaker 1: but and that's so for that and many other reasons.
Speaker 1: But they spent a lot of and yeah, he failed
Speaker 1: his first well I didn't really fail his first polygraph.
Speaker 1: It was inconclusive. Well, so here's a question. I guess right.
Speaker 1: One of the big things from the um allegations was
Speaker 1: that when Ken did his bed check at five, Tommy
Speaker 1: wasn't in his bed, but wasn't that because he was
Speaker 1: in Ken's room with Ken watching a video TV room.
Speaker 1: He didn't, he didn't go into Ken's room to watch
Speaker 1: the door. He was in the TV room, but he
Speaker 1: was with Ken when Ken was reportedly doing this bed chack. No, no,
Speaker 1: he was not. It's after. It was after the bed check.
Speaker 1: It was like quarter after he started watching the movie. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and well Ken was already watching the movie and then
Speaker 1: Tommy just sort of wandered in and sat down and
Speaker 1: watched it with Yeah, you know, a getting no physical evidence,
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things that would indicate to
Speaker 1: me that maybe it was Tommy is that, of course,
Speaker 1: after there's that whole thing about the roll down panties,
Speaker 1: Tommy was a real ladies man. He was larting. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, he definitely of all of our suspects,
Speaker 1: Martha is excuse me, Tommy is the most likely to
Speaker 1: roll pull out her pants for him. So I don't
Speaker 1: want to get too graphic here, but correct me if
Speaker 1: I'm wrong, Joe, I swear I remember there was some
Speaker 1: discussion of the use of hands in a sexual manner
Speaker 1: from one or both of Martha and Tommy at sometime.
Speaker 1: Is that correct? Yeah? There was they're playing with each other.
Speaker 1: H yeah, that's that story changed in summer. Okay, So
Speaker 1: I'm not misremembering because that I'm kind of I'm kind
Speaker 1: of looking at this in two ways. I'm looking at
Speaker 1: Tommy as a suspect up until he changed his story,
Speaker 1: and then Tommy as a suspect after he changes. So
Speaker 1: let's let's see. Okay, so we've done before he changed
Speaker 1: his story. Yeah, but the before is he had an
Speaker 1: inclusive It's kind of a uh. His polygraph results were
Speaker 1: never really all that conclusive, you know, one way or
Speaker 1: the other. And you know, there were reasons for the
Speaker 1: police to be suspicious, but obviously they couldn't get an indictment.
Speaker 1: The prosecutor refused to sign an indictment of him because,
Speaker 1: I mean, they just didn't have any evidence. The evidence
Speaker 1: was he was the last person to see her alive,
Speaker 1: and he had had some psychiatric issues, some violent outbursts.
Speaker 1: I mean, so what doesn't mean it doesn't prove anything, right,
Speaker 1: That didn't stop him from being a suspect. No, not
Speaker 1: at all. But we'll come back to Tommy in a minute. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk about another suspect, Martha's brother, John Moxley. After
Speaker 1: he went and drove around a bit, he was outside
Speaker 1: searching and Julie Skeegle came out of the house and
Speaker 1: she was wanted to look too. That's them now. Julie
Speaker 1: is Michael's older sister. She was It's hard to keep track.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of names in here. Um, so John
Speaker 1: was He was actually polygraphed by the police. I think
Speaker 1: he passed, and so he was removed as a from
Speaker 1: the list of suspects. But one of I think it
Speaker 1: was Sheila, said that she was actually afraid of John
Speaker 1: Moxley and he was known for violence. He went after
Speaker 1: He was known to go after people with baseball bats
Speaker 1: a couple of times. Of course, he was a teenagers, seventeen.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm privilege. There's no repercussions to my actions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: possibly not. But when he was out with Julie, Julie
Speaker 1: didn't really remember this until much later, when she was
Speaker 1: hip she wanted her hypnosis. She suddenly remembers. Okay, remember something, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: remember me with it. He was kind of over over
Speaker 1: the scage place, kind of calling Martha's name, and he
Speaker 1: says to Julie, you know you should go. We're looking
Speaker 1: our lawn. And Julie was like why, I mean, she
Speaker 1: could see you're you're yelling her name. She'd be able
Speaker 1: to hear it from over there if she was over there, right,
Speaker 1: you know, And and he was like, he was kind
Speaker 1: of insistent, he really wanted to go over to the
Speaker 1: Moxley yard and look around. She thought it was kind
Speaker 1: of creepy and strange in retrospect. Uh. The next thing
Speaker 1: that happened is in that that that came out of hypnosis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was a recalled memory. And nobody can see this
Speaker 1: but us in the studio. Yeah, which I do through
Speaker 1: every episode because everything is air quote. But memory is
Speaker 1: Memory is a really tricky thing, and it can be
Speaker 1: It can be really seriously altered by just cheer repetition
Speaker 1: if nothing else. And that there's probably at least a
Speaker 1: few witnesses in this case who have had their memories altered.
Speaker 1: Every time you remember something, you're altering it, you're overwriting it,
Speaker 1: and that's a known fact. But what you're remembering is
Speaker 1: actually the last time that you're remembering nothing. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't actually remember that thing anyway. You're overwriting the file
Speaker 1: every time you access it. Yeah, so it gets it
Speaker 1: gets a little de great at every time. So but
Speaker 1: the next thing that happened is a friend of his
Speaker 1: came over that nine o'clock the morning of ten thirty one,
Speaker 1: and John was of course had been asleep in the
Speaker 1: TV room. But this is something that got the guys
Speaker 1: at Sutton Associates, you know, the private investigators, got them
Speaker 1: kind of interested in John is a suspect, and that
Speaker 1: is that he and his friend we're thinking, well, we
Speaker 1: gotta go out look for Martha. Martha's missing. So they
Speaker 1: had out the house, out of the house and the
Speaker 1: Moxle house, and then they head towards the back of
Speaker 1: the house, which would have take and them like right
Speaker 1: by the pine tree where Martha's body was. And this
Speaker 1: is something police will tell you is that if there's
Speaker 1: a search party for a body or for somebody who's missing,
Speaker 1: then if a family member is part of that, they're
Speaker 1: part of organizing it or they're out participating with it.
Speaker 1: You want to watch them, because if they're the murderers,
Speaker 1: they're going to lead you straight to the body. And
Speaker 1: the reason being is they can't stand the idea of
Speaker 1: animals getting to the body and chewing it up and
Speaker 1: carrying it away or whatever. So that's always that's something
Speaker 1: you want to do, is watch those guys. And it
Speaker 1: looked like John was trying to lead his friend towards
Speaker 1: Martha's body and also maybe Julie the night before exactly
Speaker 1: because yeah, he wanted the body to be found, he
Speaker 1: just didn't want to be the one to find it himself.
Speaker 1: But again I'm not Oh yeah, there were also some
Speaker 1: potential but blood stains in the TV room on the
Speaker 1: table in there that were apparently cleaned up by the
Speaker 1: maid before the police could look at them. That's about
Speaker 1: it for the avidence against John Marxley. There's really not
Speaker 1: much there that that is really paper thin. It is
Speaker 1: it is, I think, so. Yeah. I mean some other
Speaker 1: questions right as to like how did he get the
Speaker 1: golf club, Well, I mean, like we said, they left
Speaker 1: him laying about, they were readily available. He would have
Speaker 1: had to gone over to the other house and get
Speaker 1: it and then brought it back it's not as tho
Speaker 1: it would be laying about the Mocksley property, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe not. But think about this neighborhood too, is it.
Speaker 1: It really wasn't much in the way of fences in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood and people all just sort of crossed each
Speaker 1: other's property all the time. It's it's much like you know,
Speaker 1: it drives me nuts. It's very It makes me think
Speaker 1: of my neighborhood, which is not nearly as ritzy or large.
Speaker 1: But understatement of the air, yes, but the kids in
Speaker 1: the neighborhood, uh, you know, they run through my yard,
Speaker 1: my front yard, and then they run across my neighbor's
Speaker 1: front yard, and then that neighbor's front yard, and then
Speaker 1: they veer onto the sidewalk, and then they veer across
Speaker 1: the street, and then they veer into somebody else's front yard,
Speaker 1: all of this at top speed. Yeah. But how old
Speaker 1: are they? Uh? Twelve to fifteen? Okay, all right, Well,
Speaker 1: the problem is is that I can't keep them off
Speaker 1: of my yard. I am not that old man. I
Speaker 1: have to I have to physically restrain myself so that
Speaker 1: I don't go running out there and saying get off
Speaker 1: of my grass. But I mean, it happens. I watched
Speaker 1: this all the time, and I'm like, do you not understand?
Speaker 1: And then I realized they don't. They don't get it,
Speaker 1: and I think that the same thing is that it's
Speaker 1: it's communal to them at that point. Oh yeah, the
Speaker 1: the CAA goals. They left the golf club. I picked
Speaker 1: up the golf club. I carried it home. I'll wander
Speaker 1: back by in a couple of days and just chuck
Speaker 1: it on their lawn or the garden will pick it up.
Speaker 1: That weird old guy, I'll do it. There's I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess there's some I can explain away why John
Speaker 1: might have gone the way he went right to go
Speaker 1: out back. I mean her Martha's body was discovered by
Speaker 1: her friend who was cutting through her property, which means
Speaker 1: that like, that's how those friends got to each other's property,
Speaker 1: usually right. It was probably a route right, so one
Speaker 1: would assume that, But also one would assume that if
Speaker 1: you were going to go investigate that way, you would
Speaker 1: see the body, depending on that light at the time
Speaker 1: that you're walking through. If it's if he's wandering about
Speaker 1: four in the morning and it doesn't fall into his
Speaker 1: flashlight beam, he's not going to see it. No, but
Speaker 1: it was my understanding that that was the search. The
Speaker 1: search with his male friend was like eight or nine.
Speaker 1: It was about nine, and it was very brief. Basically,
Speaker 1: they want it, just went out back and sort of
Speaker 1: took a look, you know, and yelled. Probably I don't
Speaker 1: think they even yelled. They just sort of looked and yeah.
Speaker 1: But you know, again, I'm not going to try to
Speaker 1: accuse John. I've seen a couple of different interviews with
Speaker 1: him on the on the tube, and he seems like
Speaker 1: a reasonably decent, sincere guy. Yeah. I don't see any
Speaker 1: any of cases he's a psycho killer. Next step is
Speaker 1: Martha's boyfriend at the time, Peter's of Luca. She had boyfriends,
Speaker 1: You had a boyfriend. I think I think Peter was
Speaker 1: sixteen at the time. He has since deceased. A lot
Speaker 1: of people involved with this case. By the way, he
Speaker 1: died young for some reason. Um, you know, usually a
Speaker 1: drug overdoses or just whatever, heart attacks. Martha's father is
Speaker 1: dead living in an indulgent lifestyle. Yeah, Well, Martha's father
Speaker 1: was actually not indulgent. He was he was a workaholic.
Speaker 1: He's one of those guys you know, never stop type
Speaker 1: a personality. You know, you know who died in his
Speaker 1: fifties I believe, maybe maybe sixties. I don't know he died.
Speaker 1: He died fairly young, though unfortunately Dorothy Age of my knowledge,
Speaker 1: is still alive. Back to Peter's Luca the boyfriend. Uh,
Speaker 1: there were some diary entries in Martha's diary about Peter,
Speaker 1: apparently that he had some really bad moods. He said
Speaker 1: hateful things to Martha. He was a violent he had
Speaker 1: reputation as a violent person to fighter. How old was he?
Speaker 1: I think he was sixteen, Dade. That explains that, got it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I know, six year old dudes. They're dumb, they say
Speaker 1: stupid stuff. Got it, Okay? Yeah, But apparently Martha god
Speaker 1: into her diary at least was planning to break up
Speaker 1: with Peter, which indicates nothing. Okay, but Peter, I understand.
Speaker 1: It indicates that she may have done it that night
Speaker 1: and that he reacted badly. But or perhaps you know,
Speaker 1: he has an alibi, which is his mother. That which
Speaker 1: is not the tightest alibi I've ever heard. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a pretty common. Yeah it is, and not an a
Speaker 1: tight one. But if you if you look at it.
Speaker 1: He apparently said that he worshiped Martha. He was apparently
Speaker 1: really gaga over over Martha. Imagine a scenario where he
Speaker 1: went out. He didn't actually stay home at all with
Speaker 1: his mother, because why would he stayed on with his mother?
Speaker 1: Stayed on with his mother and watch TV, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, imagine he went after Ristef and I imagine
Speaker 1: he made he's made his way over towards the Moxley
Speaker 1: house and it was maybe crossing the Cakele's land with
Speaker 1: they had a fairly decent sized parcel and happened to
Speaker 1: see Martha and Tommy going at it, fooling around. Uh
Speaker 1: huh yeah. That that they explain exactly how he changed
Speaker 1: his story. I'll talk to all to Tommy. Yeah, Tommy, no,
Speaker 1: you decided to break him up, so you haven't. You
Speaker 1: haven't told us a second story. They had a sexual encounter.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, well they hung out remember the hands pants Yeah,
Speaker 1: hands and pants conscription. That's that's what he means by
Speaker 1: a sexual encounter. Yeah, they sexually. According to Tommy, they
Speaker 1: engaged in a mutual masturbation. Yeah yeah, hants pants yeah,
Speaker 1: pants yeah. And supposing if he witnessed us uh, and
Speaker 1: if you're, you know, sixteen and head over heels and
Speaker 1: love and something like that. You see that. I mean
Speaker 1: obviously that I could see where that would cost somebody
Speaker 1: to flip out. Yeah, I can all yeah, I can
Speaker 1: see the violent rage. I can also see the sobbing,
Speaker 1: blubbering mess. I mean that could go either way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's also it would also be interesting if the
Speaker 1: dude in that scenario, the extra dude in that scenario,
Speaker 1: didn't bear some of the wrath that you would think.
Speaker 1: You would think that he would be good after Tommy,
Speaker 1: even for yeah, yeah, and then Martha maybe not. Ye. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: Peter's Luca took a polygraph and passed apparently, And I'm
Speaker 1: not so sure how ironclad polygraphs really are. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: they're not They're not the best ever. But okay, so
Speaker 1: Peter's Peters cleared. So that leads us with one and
Speaker 1: a half suspects. Yeah kind of. Well, you know, Michael
Speaker 1: changed his story, um, and eventually the Sutton the Sutton
Speaker 1: investigation was closed down. Tommy had a lawyer ever since,
Speaker 1: ever since, like nineteen seventy six, he had an early
Speaker 1: seventy six, he had a lawyer shocking named Manny Margolas,
Speaker 1: and he was present when when Tommy changed his story.
Speaker 1: That was in summer nine and that's when he shut
Speaker 1: down the Sutton investigation. And but then there was somebody
Speaker 1: that Sutton had hired. They had hired this college this yeah,
Speaker 1: and this guy was about three and his job was
Speaker 1: to distill all the information in the pilots into a nice,
Speaker 1: co hair out, well written report. And he is the
Speaker 1: guy who leaked the report to Dominic Dunne. I remember
Speaker 1: him and story for Vanity Fair. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: leaked a copy of that report to Dominic Dunn because
Speaker 1: he felt that, you know, this report really implicated the Cagles,
Speaker 1: especially Michael, And of course Dominic Dunn eventually gave the
Speaker 1: report to Mark Furman, who used this the basis for
Speaker 1: a lot of charges his book. So we talked about
Speaker 1: how Michael changed his story and when he when talking
Speaker 1: to that was it was for the Sutton Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that was not the first time he had actually changed
Speaker 1: his story, which we talked about, which we talked about, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but it formed it formed the basis for the Ferman book,
Speaker 1: which again was the blueprint for the prosecution case. The
Speaker 1: major difference between the prosecution of Furman's book is at
Speaker 1: least Furman was honest enough to acknowledge the golf club
Speaker 1: handle was present at the crime scene. I mean he
Speaker 1: and he insinuated that there was corruption in the Granwich
Speaker 1: Police department, that perhaps a corrupt cop had had gotten
Speaker 1: rid of the evidence, but at least acknowledged that that
Speaker 1: it was president at the crime scene, which the prosecution
Speaker 1: didn't do. The prosecution said that the murderer, whoever he was,
Speaker 1: had carried it away with him from the crime scene.
Speaker 1: Michael's also made statements to a guy named Richard Hoffman
Speaker 1: who was a ghostwriter. He was going to write a
Speaker 1: book since he had been come back into the microscope.
Speaker 1: He was gonna gonna write a book about yeah and
Speaker 1: tell the story and all that, and and so they
Speaker 1: made a bunch of tapes, and in these tapes he
Speaker 1: made some various statements, like he talked about the whole
Speaker 1: climbing of the tree thing. And he also talked about
Speaker 1: when he woke up the next day and Dorothy Moxley
Speaker 1: was standing outside his bedroom door. He said it's His
Speaker 1: statement was basically like, oh, mared, what if she saw
Speaker 1: me last night? You know? And they played that, and
Speaker 1: that the prosecution played that in closing arguments. They played that,
Speaker 1: they played the tape and they had selectively edited and stuff,
Speaker 1: and they played the tape and along with the picture
Speaker 1: of Martha's dead body laying in the yard some kind
Speaker 1: of like power audio power point. There was a power point. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and apparently that was a very yeah, that was very effective.
Speaker 1: So that was part of their closing. Their evidence was
Speaker 1: basically the nonexistent seamen, which said that the prosecution actually
Speaker 1: stated he had he had purposely ejaculated on Martha's body
Speaker 1: as a final act of disrespect. And I read that,
Speaker 1: I read the closing. That's what he said, even though
Speaker 1: nothing was found on her body. Man, Michael should have
Speaker 1: just stuck to the shaggy defense no matter what they say,
Speaker 1: wouldn't I But who Yeah, alright, so much for that.
Speaker 1: But and there was a little a little more evidence.
Speaker 1: But obviously the statement of the tape was taken by
Speaker 1: the journey. I mean, what if she saw me murdering Martha?
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, that that that that was that was
Speaker 1: as stitched together as some of our past episodes, totally
Speaker 1: totally put together. And you know, and obviously if she
Speaker 1: had seen Martha being murdered. I don't think she would
Speaker 1: have waited till eight thirty in the morning to come
Speaker 1: over and say, hey, Michael, I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about you murdering my daughter. Yeah, but that seems
Speaker 1: to be the implication from that. I mean, that's totally
Speaker 1: the application. Yeah, Okay, this guy is so going to
Speaker 1: be out of jail by the or the decisions gonna
Speaker 1: have come through by the time this episode post. I
Speaker 1: hope I am so. Based on what we've talked about
Speaker 1: and I've read. I hope you guys resolutions. Good lord,
Speaker 1: you know I can't. I have to break it to you, guys,
Speaker 1: but I gotta tell you this. Judges are more concerned
Speaker 1: about process than they are, for the most part, about justice.
Speaker 1: They are, but the process was ruined because they said
Speaker 1: they had evidence, which that evidence has never been presented.
Speaker 1: Well exactly, they like so much evidence and and and
Speaker 1: and to take the loss of the golf club handle,
Speaker 1: and to make so much hay out of that, like
Speaker 1: the points a finger at our at the and I
Speaker 1: just lost it. To say you have a piece of evidence,
Speaker 1: but not make that available to the defense, To then say,
Speaker 1: well you didn't want to do any testing on but
Speaker 1: let me do testing to see if I can prove
Speaker 1: my client innocent. I mean, that's a process problem. This
Speaker 1: whole thing is just so yeah, okay, so that's Michael. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the uh yeah, Well the other evidence they had is
Speaker 1: the ad testament. I remember I said elon the school
Speaker 1: where they the drug adult kids and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: There are two guys that were at that school with
Speaker 1: him who testified at his trial. One of them was
Speaker 1: John Higgins. And John Higgins actually doesn't get very good
Speaker 1: character references. I've read a lot of trial court transcripts
Speaker 1: of various people that want to belong with him and
Speaker 1: then had very low opinion of him, and then he
Speaker 1: was honest or trustworthy. But the states State of Connecticut
Speaker 1: is an investigator. Frank gard Uh was apparently contacted by
Speaker 1: somebody in need Higgins and said that he should call
Speaker 1: Higgins because at this time there was a fifty dollar
Speaker 1: reward post posted by the Moxley family. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: Higgins apparently contacted them or maybe guard contacted Higgins, and
Speaker 1: John Higgins basically said, look, you know I didn't I
Speaker 1: I don't know, I know nothing because you know, I
Speaker 1: Michael never told me that he confessed to you, never
Speaker 1: said he never told me he murdered Martha Moxley. And
Speaker 1: so then Frank Garr spells out to him very carefully.
Speaker 1: Do you know about the reward? This is a policeman again.
Speaker 1: Frank Carr says, do you know about the reward? And
Speaker 1: Higgin says, yeah, I hear it's fifty thousand bucks. And
Speaker 1: at the time the reward had just been raised to
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand bucks. And so Garr says to Higgins, well,
Speaker 1: it's a hundred thousand bucks, and Higgins says to him, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's special. And then Gar explains to him, you know,
Speaker 1: like you know, the terms of it pretty much what
Speaker 1: he needs to tell him, you know, and then calls
Speaker 1: him back, calls him back in a later time and says, hey,
Speaker 1: have you thought about that? I thought about all this
Speaker 1: that And then Higgins changed And how do we know that?
Speaker 1: By the way, is this on tape somewhere? Yeah, Frank
Speaker 1: Guard taped the conversation, so we hear him leading building
Speaker 1: the witnesses story and then having the witness and then
Speaker 1: he changes his story, and he doesn't change his story.
Speaker 1: He doesn't change his story to Michael, saying I did it.
Speaker 1: He changed his story to Michael saying, yeah, it was
Speaker 1: all kind of in a haze. It was kind of
Speaker 1: like in a dream. I was in the garage pulling
Speaker 1: a golf club out of a set and the next
Speaker 1: thing I know, I was running through made into a
Speaker 1: dream scene. Yeah, TV show. Okay, I was running through
Speaker 1: some pine trees, you know, with the golf club, and
Speaker 1: that's you know all I remember. That was enough for
Speaker 1: the jury. But he never actually told Higgins never actually
Speaker 1: said Michael said I did it. I mean, because he
Speaker 1: was so he was willing to shade it in order
Speaker 1: to collect some money. But he was not willing, apparently
Speaker 1: to go over the line and say that Michael had
Speaker 1: actually said I did it. Uh. There was another witness
Speaker 1: is Greg Coleman. All it is for again Michael. This
Speaker 1: was against Michael. Yeah. Uh, similar kind of guy. Not
Speaker 1: he was a heroin addict and uh and you know,
Speaker 1: you know heroin addict people. I don't want to sound judgmental,
Speaker 1: but they're not the most trustworthy people, you know. But
Speaker 1: he said that Michael had confessed to him while that alone,
Speaker 1: he said that he had done it, and and he
Speaker 1: changed his story up a little bit. Uh, He's at
Speaker 1: one time he said that Michael confessed to him like
Speaker 1: six times and then finally if he wintled it down
Speaker 1: to maybe two times. But you know, nobody else said
Speaker 1: a lot. Everybody else that want to along with Michael
Speaker 1: said that if he had fessed up it along, it
Speaker 1: would have been all over the school. There was a
Speaker 1: small school, about a hundred students, and they were all
Speaker 1: anything at any school spreads like wild. Yeah, they were all.
Speaker 1: They were totally encouraged to write each other out too,
Speaker 1: and so you know, and so for the other people,
Speaker 1: there were other people that testified for defense, the defense
Speaker 1: that said this was completely laughable. This whole idea that
Speaker 1: he this, this guy would have kept it to himself. Yea,
Speaker 1: he ridiculous. So the other thing about Michael is is,
Speaker 1: you know, they interrogated them on the day of the
Speaker 1: body being discovered, and they didn't give him all polygraphs.
Speaker 1: But I saw Michael's brother, John, who was in the
Speaker 1: car that went to the Terryans and provided him with
Speaker 1: an alibi. I saw him on the two. He seemed
Speaker 1: completely honest and sincere, and he said, look, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean I was with Michael, and that's what I
Speaker 1: told the police the day of and I took a
Speaker 1: polygraph test and I passed it and that was good enough.
Speaker 1: Now now they complaiming that we're all liars. I mean
Speaker 1: he was, he was. He was sincerely a little outraged
Speaker 1: by the whole thing. Yeah, but I do think that
Speaker 1: Michael Skegle is innocent. I don't think I think his
Speaker 1: alibi is solid. But one thing I forgot to mention
Speaker 1: is that Ken Littleton was it was routinely being picked
Speaker 1: up by the police. And it's nineteen seventy six. He
Speaker 1: told Greenwich police that Russian Jr. Told him at about
Speaker 1: nine fifteen and the night of the thirtie that he
Speaker 1: was going to take Jimmy Terryan back home and then
Speaker 1: he was taking his brother's John and Michael with him.
Speaker 1: He told that to the police and that was in
Speaker 1: the police files. The police withheld that from the defense. Again, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they withheld that from the defense, along with some other tidbits.
Speaker 1: So basically Michael's innocent, apparently because they could not have
Speaker 1: gotten a conviction without undermining his alibi the way they did.
Speaker 1: But his alibi and my and they found one there
Speaker 1: was one other witness that was not president at the
Speaker 1: trial at all, who also confirmed his alibi that he
Speaker 1: was arrians. So essentially, you know, that's it. He's innocent.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that the Supreme Court is gonna is
Speaker 1: not going to toss him back in jail, because you
Speaker 1: don't know the way the lawyers think. But anyway, sorry,
Speaker 1: lawyers out there, by the way, let me get on.
Speaker 1: So Michael's out, let's get it. Get on to the
Speaker 1: next ones. These ones were put forth by, first of all,
Speaker 1: a guy named Tony Bryant. RFK Jr. Talks about him
Speaker 1: in his book. Tony Bryant actually went to granted, he
Speaker 1: claims on the day of the murder. Tony is, by
Speaker 1: the way, his brother of Kobe Bryant, the basketball player. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can see his He was interviewed by detectives
Speaker 1: that were sent by Mike else defense team to to
Speaker 1: interview him. And it's it's two it's a two part video.
Speaker 1: It's on YouTube. If you go to and type in
Speaker 1: Tony Bryant interview you'll find it. Have you seen it? Uh?
Speaker 1: Start ringing a bell? Okay, Uh, So you talked about
Speaker 1: these two guys that he went to high school with
Speaker 1: Tony used to actually go to school and live in Grantwich,
Speaker 1: but then he moved to New York City and he
Speaker 1: was going to a much rougher high school, and he
Speaker 1: knew these two big dudes. They were like sixteen years old,
Speaker 1: Adolf Passbrooke and Burton Tinsley. The three of them like
Speaker 1: to actually occasionally go out to bell Haven and hang
Speaker 1: out since he used since Tony used to live out there,
Speaker 1: and apparently he said He says in his interview that
Speaker 1: Adolf became obsessed with Martha. He met her apparently a
Speaker 1: few times, and he believes that from things that he
Speaker 1: said that Adolphinburg said before and after the murder, he
Speaker 1: believes that they did it. I don't want to get
Speaker 1: into great detail, by the way, there I do want
Speaker 1: to say, by the way, there's no corroborating evidence I
Speaker 1: was for those two. Yeah, there for him, there is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is not again, not much in the way of evidence.
Speaker 1: But apparently these guys did did lawyer up and they're
Speaker 1: not talking. But and again I'm not I'm not saying
Speaker 1: they're guilty of anything because frankly, I I really don't
Speaker 1: see much of a motive here. So let's move on
Speaker 1: to our last suspect, Tommy's giggle. Tommy, as as we've noticed,
Speaker 1: had a history of violent outbursts. He changed his story.
Speaker 1: Like Michael, he changed his story. But here's the deal.
Speaker 1: Michael changed his story a lot sooner, before DNA was
Speaker 1: a thing. Tommy waited until out there there were a
Speaker 1: couple of couple of sudden investigators has had him down
Speaker 1: for an interrogation summer of one of them, Billy Krebs,
Speaker 1: I think he was x NYPD, said look, Tommy, you
Speaker 1: gotta you gotta understand this. We're gonna be doing some
Speaker 1: DNA testing and so you know, if there's anything that
Speaker 1: you haven't told us before, you should tell us now.
Speaker 1: That's standard procedure to rattle somebody. Okay, yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: that is when Tommy changed his story and said that
Speaker 1: they spent on extra twenty minutes between nine thirty and
Speaker 1: nine fifty out back behind the tool shed in the
Speaker 1: yard doing their whole hands hands pants thing and they
Speaker 1: were leading on a pretty hard Apparently that from what
Speaker 1: I can, what I understand is the investigators were they
Speaker 1: were they were after he changed his story, and apparently
Speaker 1: Tommy looked like he was about to cry then want
Speaker 1: him to suggest that they that they take a break.
Speaker 1: Billy Krabs was infuriated by this because it broke the
Speaker 1: whole It broke the whole tension thing, and also it
Speaker 1: allowed Manny Margolis, who was present lawyer, to basically put
Speaker 1: an end to the whole interview. So they never got
Speaker 1: any further with Tommy. But I gotta say, I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean, all the suspicion has been cast upon Michael
Speaker 1: because he changed his story, because that would account for
Speaker 1: see human being present when it was. Yeah, when Tommy
Speaker 1: did the same thing and the exact thing. And the
Speaker 1: thing is he didn't do it until here's the other thing.
Speaker 1: Tommy lied the night of or I should say he
Speaker 1: he lied the day after. Now I can see why
Speaker 1: Tommy would leave a few silaous details out. I can
Speaker 1: see why why he would leave out the party about
Speaker 1: the hands pants. But you don't have to lie about
Speaker 1: when you actually parted ways with her, and that would
Speaker 1: be useful information for the police who are trying to
Speaker 1: establish the time of death and what her movements were.
Speaker 1: But he lied, and well, Hamm, there's no conceivable reason
Speaker 1: to lie when he could have just sanitized his account,
Speaker 1: except he wanted to remove himself as far away in
Speaker 1: time as he could from the actual time of death,
Speaker 1: which he knew. He but he no, he doesn't have
Speaker 1: to have known the time of death. We talked about
Speaker 1: this earlier. You're of seventeen year old kid. You've been
Speaker 1: playing tickle with a girl, and you know that's not
Speaker 1: going to go down well with your family, led loan
Speaker 1: the cops now that she has found with a golf
Speaker 1: club stuck in her neck. But of course you're gonna
Speaker 1: You're gonna try foolishly because you don't think clearly in
Speaker 1: the heat of the moment. You're you're you're putting your
Speaker 1: all of your investigation time to say, well, obviously it
Speaker 1: would make sense, but you don't know that at the time.
Speaker 1: For him, did you go, I don't know. I no, No,
Speaker 1: We kissed and we walked away. We were doing anything, untoured,
Speaker 1: nothing at all. But there's the deal. Is that again,
Speaker 1: Tommy didn't he could just sanitize his account. All you
Speaker 1: needed to do. Let's say, yeah, we hung out, we
Speaker 1: sipped beers, we smoked a cigarette, we parted way as
Speaker 1: a ten minute still ten and you're giving Billie because
Speaker 1: again at this time, but if Tommy didn't do the crime,
Speaker 1: then Tommy had no clue what the time of the
Speaker 1: murder was. As far as tommy, it was midnight, it
Speaker 1: was three and three am. He had no idea. Well,
Speaker 1: he went on TV show at some point and he
Speaker 1: may have done really crappy man as to what time
Speaker 1: he left her. But I don't know that I understand
Speaker 1: that you feel that it is really really important that
Speaker 1: he changed his story the way he did. I don't
Speaker 1: see it the same way. I think it casts a
Speaker 1: lot more suspicion on Tommy than it does on Michael.
Speaker 1: Michael had better reason to leave out his account of
Speaker 1: climbing the tree and playing pocket pool. Tommy had no
Speaker 1: reason to not tell the police the time that he
Speaker 1: parted ways with Martha. I want to clarify when he
Speaker 1: told police that was it after they found her body
Speaker 1: or before they found her body. That was after they
Speaker 1: found a body, but before before any time of death
Speaker 1: had been established. Yeah, established that it does with a
Speaker 1: good solid window. Yeah, it does, and so and so Again,
Speaker 1: that's a little bit of a head scratcher when he
Speaker 1: could have provided them with a little more solid information
Speaker 1: that he chose to lie instead. Um, you know, well, realistically,
Speaker 1: I have a really crappy sense of time, and I
Speaker 1: couldn't tell you like, you know, this episode feels like
Speaker 1: it's been literally ten hours, but you know it's been
Speaker 1: what like too So I think, you know, for me,
Speaker 1: as somebody with a really bad sense of time, it's
Speaker 1: reasonable to say like, I don't know, we hung out
Speaker 1: for ten more minutes. Well then, but then I thought
Speaker 1: we had a bad sense of time. Then how do
Speaker 1: we know we parted ways from Martha ten minutes? Still
Speaker 1: tenn and not we don't We don't really know that,
Speaker 1: But it just seems to me that the later it
Speaker 1: goes the like later her time of death is. You know,
Speaker 1: for me, it's just saying like, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: mean not to sound like a jerk, but it could
Speaker 1: have been that he hung out with her for five
Speaker 1: or ten minutes and she talked to him the whole
Speaker 1: time and him being a tiple. Go dude, it's like
Speaker 1: this has been going on for so long, she just
Speaker 1: won't stop talking. It feels like I've been here for
Speaker 1: like twenty minutes. Alternate alternately, right, Um, you ever been
Speaker 1: like having sex and been like oh my god, this
Speaker 1: is the most amazing hour of my life. And you
Speaker 1: look at the clock and you're like, it's been five minutes,
Speaker 1: Like do you ever do that? Though, Like ever in
Speaker 1: your life have you been like, wow, this is like
Speaker 1: amazing And then you're really So there's also I guess,
Speaker 1: some reality to him, you know, them engaging in whatever
Speaker 1: we're calling it, hands pants or whatever, right, and them
Speaker 1: both thinking like oh my god, or him particularly being like, wow,
Speaker 1: that was an amazing ten minutes, but actually it was
Speaker 1: like an hour, or even vice versa where he says
Speaker 1: and then you know, Ken says, no, dude, you were here,
Speaker 1: you know, ten minutes later, and he's like, oh really, Well, honestly,
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know how Tommy kept track of time.
Speaker 1: They might have had clocks, he might have glasced at
Speaker 1: clocks the whole time, and he might be off something.
Speaker 1: But the fact of the matter is is that he
Speaker 1: deliberately chose to put himself as far away from the
Speaker 1: time of murder as possible, which, in my opinion, is behavior.
Speaker 1: You can't say that Joe cannot a he deliberately did it.
Speaker 1: Of course, you don't know that. You can't say that
Speaker 1: you don't know that you had no reason to do otherwise,
Speaker 1: he may not have done it intentionally. How can you
Speaker 1: say that, because we just had the conversation. If he
Speaker 1: may have a crappy sense of time, so you can't
Speaker 1: say he's doing it intentionally. I think it was Peter,
Speaker 1: Peter Man Peter. Yeah. The nice thing about Peter is
Speaker 1: he's one of the dead ones, so you can keep
Speaker 1: him of all kinds of stuff. So, in fairness to Tommy,
Speaker 1: Tommy has lived under a cloud of suspicion for many,
Speaker 1: many years. I think a lot of people still suspect
Speaker 1: Tommy of being the killer, and you know, we don't
Speaker 1: really know. I mean, Tommy is uh. I still like
Speaker 1: Tommy as a suspect. But I have to tell you
Speaker 1: if I were sitting on a jury, I would not
Speaker 1: vote to convict Tommy of anything. I wouldn't know. There's yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no there's no solid evidence anywhere now there isn't there.
Speaker 1: And so whoever killed Martha? You know, I think that
Speaker 1: he has gotten away with it, but that happens. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: let's do some of that housekeeping stuff. Do we do
Speaker 1: with the other episodes? Yeah? Uh, First of all, our
Speaker 1: website Thinking Sideways podcast dot com where you can find
Speaker 1: our episodes. You can't come anymore unfortunately, but you can
Speaker 1: still listen to the episodes. Uh. And there's always links
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Speaker 1: free expenses. So that's it. The Murder of Martha Moxley.
Speaker 1: I guess we gotta wrap this mystery up. You Guys,
Speaker 1: have your final thoughts. Yeah, yeah, it wasn't me either,
Speaker 1: So anyway, too bad about Martha, that too bad about Michael. Anyway.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week. Guys. Let's see you next week.
Speaker 1: But