Word: martha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...book proposal was eventually withdrawn. But the document circulated, and last week, 25 years after the bludgeoning of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn., Michael Skakel was confronted with a vengeance. He was indicted for her murder. Police showed up to arrest Skakel at the half-million-dollar Florida home he shares with his golf-pro wife and child, but he was already on a plane north. He turned himself in to Connecticut police, pleaded not guilty and was released on $500,000 bail...
...Martha Moxley's mother Dorthy last saw her daughter alive on Halloween Eve 1975. Martha wore a blue parka and was skipping out the door of the sumptuous house the family had settled into just the year before, joining a group that included two across-the-lane neighbors, Thomas Skakel, 17, and his 15-year-old brother Michael. If the Moxleys were well off, the Skakels were Greenwich royalty. Rushton Skakel was chairman of Great Lakes Carbon, one of the world's largest privately held companies. In a union of money, power and more money, Skakel's sister Ethel...
...Martha never returned. Friends later testified to seeing her and Tommy "making out" near the Skakel home at 9:30 p.m. At 10, Dorthy heard dogs barking and a commotion outside. Martha's body was found at noon the next day under a tree in the Moxley yard. She lay in a 3-ft. pool of blood; her head had been bludgeoned some 14 times with a blunt instrument, and the sharp, broken shaft of that instrument, a Toney Penna 6-iron golf club, had been driven into her throat...
Toney Penna golf clubs were rare, but Tommy and Michael's mother, who had recently died of cancer, had left behind a set. However, that fact did not provoke the Greenwich police to take extraordinary measures. They had not investigated a murder in 46 years. They initially left Martha's body unattended, and a dog defiled some of the evidence. They allowed a funeral director to remove the corpse before a medical examiner arrived, preventing an exact assessment of the time of death. They never obtained a warrant to search the Skakel home. And conflicts of interest abounded...
That was probably a mistake. Thomas and Michael altered their testimony drastically when they talked to Sutton. Rather than studying at 9:30, Thomas said, he and Martha had engaged in mutual masturbation for 20 minutes before she left. Michael now recalled climbing a tree outside Martha's window later that night, throwing pebbles at the pane and eventually masturbating among the boughs. He claimed that he'd heard noises in the Moxley bushes and had thrown a rock at them before running home...