Word: skakel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Both Buckleys had enormous personalities and appetites, which caused them to behave in ways that seem godlike and infantile at the same time. Patricia's major vice was lying: at dinner with a Kennedy, she loudly claimed to have been a juror at the trial of Michael Skakel. (She was not.) William's towering professional achievements and his genuine affection for his son were offset by impatience, impulsiveness, arrogance, gluttony and criminal thoughtlessness. He walked out of Christopher's Yale graduation because he was bored. He blew off his sister's funeral to accept an award...
Fuhrman redeemed himself--at least in the eyes of news-show bookers--by going to wealthy Greenwich, Conn., to look into the 1975 bludgeoning death of teenager Martha Moxley. The case had never been solved, though rumors pointed to two neighbor kids, Tommy and Michael Skakel, members of the extended Kennedy family. A bungled case, a famous name, the rich possibly getting off scot-free: the case was Fuhrman's white whale or, more accurately, his white O.J. After poking around, Fuhrman concluded that Michael had killed Moxley in a fit of jealousy because she liked abusive ladies' man Tommy...
...what the story could have been if told by someone not so close to the hero. As it is, it's a trite but inadvertently intriguing whodunit about a bitter adolescent whose vanity and resentment make him act out in ugly ways. Oh, and it's about Michael Skakel too. --By James Poniewozik
...SENTENCED. MICHAEL SKAKEL, 41, to 20 years to life in prison for the 1975 murder of his teenage neighbor Martha Moxley; in Norwalk, Connecticut. Skakel, nephew of Robert F. Kennedy's widow Ethel, testified for the first time on the day of sentencing, tearfully saying he was innocent. During the trial, a prosecution witness testified that Skakel had told him: "I'm going to get away with murder, because I'm a Kennedy...
Barring a successful appeal, Skakel, now 41, will go to prison for the crime of the feral 15-year-old he once was. A last thread remains unresolved: Did he act alone, or did he have an accomplice? "I think it's unlikely he cleaned his mess up by himself," said Benedict after the trial. "That's about all I would venture to guess." Which goes to show there are some messes that will never be cleaned up and some secrets time will never tell...