Opinion ID: 2273504
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 19

Heading: History of the Investigation

Text: At this point, a short history of the investigation is necessary to a fuller understanding of the original trial evidence and to my conclusion that that evidence was neither particularly trustworthy nor particularly strong. The Greenwich police followed numerous leads in the weeks, months and years following the murder. In 1976, the police prepared an arrest warrant charging Tommy Skakel with the murder based, in part, on misleading statements that he had given to the police on the day after the murder, and because he was the last person known to have seen the victim alive. The arrest warrant, however, never was executed. The police then focused their suspicions on Littleton, the tutor whose first night in residence at the Skakels' house was the night of the murder. Littleton's bizarre and erratic behavior in the months and years following the murder, certain allegedly incriminating statements that he had made to his wife and others, and multiple run-ins with the law, convinced Solomon, the state's chief investigator through the early 1990s, that Littleton was the killer. Solomon also believed that Littleton, an alcoholic, was responsible for a series of unsolved murders involving the bludgeoning deaths of young women in and around places Littleton had lived or visited before and after the victim's murder. Like Tommy Skakel, however, Littleton never was charged, and the case went cold for many years. In the early 1990s, several events caused the revival of the investigation and eventually led to the petitioner's arrest and conviction. In 1991, a rumor circulated that William Kennedy Smith, who then was facing sexual assault charges in Florida, was in Belle Haven on the night of the murder. Like the Skakels, Smith was related to the family of Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel Kennedy. Although there was no truth to the rumor, it renewed public interest in the case and put pressure on the police to solve it. In 1993, A Season in Purgatory, which was authored by Dominick Dunne, was published. The book was a best-selling fictionalized account of the victim's murder in which Dunne effectively accused Tommy Skakel of the murder and the entire Skakel family of conspiring to cover it up. Because of the renewed scrutiny on his family, Rushton Skakel, Sr., hired a private investigation firm, Sutton Associates (Sutton), to investigate the murder with the hope of exonerating his family. According to Leonard Levitt, another author who wrote about the victim's murder, before Sutton agreed to take the case, Rushton Skakel, Sr., assured Sutton that they could pursue the investigation wherever it led, and that, if it turned out that a member of his family had committed the crime, the family would publicly acknowledge it. As part of its investigation, Sutton interviewed Tommy Skakel and the petitioner. Both Tommy Skakel and the petitioner disclosed that they had not been truthful with the police in 1975. Tommy Skakel told Sutton that, after Julie Skakel had left to take Shakespeare home, he went back outside and spent another twenty minutes with the victim in his backyard, where they engaged in heavy petting and mutual masturbation. The petitioner told investigators that, after he returned home from the Terrien residence, he, too, went back out, at around midnight, to peep in the window of a woman who lived on Walsh Lane. On the way home, he stopped at the victim's house, climbed into a tree to look in her window and masturbated. The petitioner later told the same story to Richard Hoffman, a ghost writer with whom the petitioner briefly collaborated in 1997 on a book about the petitioner's life. Hoffman testified at the petitioner's criminal trial regarding his conversations with the petitioner, which he had tape recorded. According to Hoffman, the petitioner told him that, like . . . all the other boys in the neighborhood, he had [had] a crush on [the victim]. The petitioner also disclosed that, by the age of thirteen, he had developed a serious alcohol problem. In 1994, an employee of Sutton stole the firm's files on the case, including detailed suspect profiles, and gave them to Levitt and Dunne. On November 26, 1995, Levitt published the first part of a four part series of newspaper articles in which he disclosed that the petitioner and Tommy Skakel had changed their stories with respect to their activities on the night of the murder. Dunne later gave the information that Sutton had obtained to Mark Fuhrman, a detective formerly employed by the Los Angeles police department who testified at the O.J. Simpson murder trial. In 1998, Fuhrman published a book in which he accused the petitioner of the victim's murder. Fuhrman's conclusion was based in part on the petitioner's statements to Sutton that he had gone back out on the night of the murder, peeped in a neighbor's window and masturbated in a tree in the Moxleys' yard. [101] Following publication of the Levitt article in 1995, the television show Unsolved Mysteries dedicated a segment to the victim's murder. After the program aired, police received numerous tips from around the country. Some of them were from people who were fellow residents of the petitioner at Elan School (Elan), the alcohol and drug rehabilitation facility that the petitioner had attended as a teenager. A number of them recalled that the petitioner, who attended Elan from 1978 to 1980, appeared to have had some involvement in or knowledge of the victim's murder.