Transcript of Family Ties

October 15th, 2024, Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Upper Manhattan. Hey. I'm here to see somebody in cardiac. Michael Skakel, F-K-A-K-E-L. Is there a Skakel back there? Sorry? Skakel back there? Michael? Yes. I'm I'm in physical therapy.

We're just working with each other. But go, no.

I don't want to- No, you can even come with us. No problem. Me, Andrew. What's your two? They literally just pulled poses out of my chest.

I had two out of Right next to my heart.

You're alive. That's fucking present. I was worried about you.

Yeah, with good reason.

Yeah, this isn't hyperbole. I was truly worried about him. For about a week there, this was pretty close to becoming a podcast in which you'd hear the life story of and the murder allegations against a recently dead guy. For much of 2024, Michael had been complaining of feeling lousy, tired, and winded after not very strenuous activities. When he got in to see a cardiologist, the doctor was alarmed at the extent of plaque blockage in his arteries. He was immediately scheduled for an emergency triple bypass and an aortic valve replacement. Steven Skakel kept me and put a decent spin on the news, but it hit home. Over almost four decades before he died at 83, my father had a quintuple bypass and countless subsequent heart attacks and artery clearing procedures. Many times, he seemed to be on death's door. Every few years, I traveled up to Portland to offer pre-op last goodbyes to him at Maine Met. But he'd never been out so long during and after an operation, about eight hours under the knife and on a ventilator for three days after that. I tried to be optimistic when talking to Steven, but privately, I felt like Michael's chances of ever waking up were about 50/50.

Michael doesn't trust many people. He feels that he's been raked over the coals in the press more times than I can count. But perhaps because of my work on Bobby Kennedy's book and the time I've dedicated to covering this story since, he's decided to confide in me. While he was dangling between life and death, I relistened to a couple of his voicemails he'd left me over the years, including this one from 2023.

It's just before 3: 00 on Wednesday, May third. I just needed to hear your voice because it brings me peace and knowing that You hold the torch of truth where no one else wants to be. I'm profoundly grateful for what you do. Thanks, Andrew. Peace.

Bye. As a journalist, being called the Torchbearer of Truth makes me squirm a little. That's a lot of pressure for one guy with a microphone and a notebook. I've known Michael and Steven for years now. We've texted each other's stupid dad jokes, hit some major impediments to getting this story out, and had more than a few temper flares and sulks that threatened to derail the whole project. But at the end of the day, the journalist in me has one job: to be nosy, to follow the story wherever it leads, no matter how uncomfortable that might get. I was relieved when Michael pulled through. As I sat with him in the hospital room, our conversation drifted to one of Michael's favorite or maybe least favorite topics, the Kennedy's. In one of the several days Michael was out of it, his last surviving aunt, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, had passed away at 96. I asked if he'd heard.

No, I didn't know that.

Steven didn't really have much nice to say about her.

But Steven also didn't have the relationship I had with her. She was literally like my mom.

Was she? At one point?

I don't want to get sober. Really? Yeah, I think it was when I helped David. We hit it off.

That's David Kennedy, one of Ethel's seven sons. We'll be coming back to him in a moment. But it surprised me to hear Michael's reaction to the news of Ethel's death. Do you remember that legal pad I mentioned? Michael brought along to one of our interviews, the one with the headline Culprits, a top list names of folks he feels are responsible for his conviction? Trial attorney Mickey Sherman's name was on that list. But if we're talking sheer volume, one name comes up more than any other. Kennedy. I'm Andrew Goldman from NBC News Studios and Highly Replaceable Productions. This is Dead Certain, The Martha Moxley Martyr. The Skakeles and Kennedy's have a complicated relationship, one I still struggle to fully wrap my head around. We're talking a generation of family lore involving snubs, scandals, and a rivalry that's the stuff of legend. In our conversations over the years, Michael has described the relationship as akin to the infamous Hatfield-Mcoy feud. As we'll get into shortly, Michael has many thoughts on this topic, and a lot of his feelings about his Kennedy cousins and their actions are filtered through this lens of antagonism.

I'm not a Kennedy. I'm a Skakel through and through.

Michael's been through a lot. For much of his life, he says he's lived through a worst-case scenario of circumstances. Family tragedies, physical and emotional abuse, both at home and at school, and a conviction for a murder he says he didn't do. It's easy to understand how these experiences might have changed his worldview. I imagine that culprits list was probably first drafted, at least mentally, during the 11 and a half years he spent behind bars. Plenty of time for many of his personal theories to harden into rock solid facts in his own mind. We're going to delve into some of those theories in a moment. But before we do, I wanted to do a quick history lesson on the Kennedy's Skakel feud as documented in the media and biographies. Michael may frame it in terms of Hatfields and McCoy's, but I think of it more like Shakespeare. Two houses, both alike in wealth and standing, with 20th century New England subbing for Renaissance Verona. Here's how Bobby Kennedy Jr. Described it in a Dateland interview from 2016.

They were similar in that they were both Irish Catholic. They were both very wealthy and spent a lot of time doing wilderness stuff. But After that, the similarities ended. They were opposed politically from the outset.

The Skakeles were right-wing Republicans whose money came from oil and coal. The Kennedy's were Democrats. Their fortune amassed by Joseph P. Kennedy senior through a mix of finance, shipping, Hollywood studios, and liquor distribution. The two families were miles apart on the political spectrum, so they did what's always guaranteed to improve relations. They intermarried. The Skakel family couldn't have been thrilled when Ethel Skakel, Michael Skakel's aunt, went to the dark side and married into the Kennedy clan. And there are, in fact, snippy tales about the run up to Ethel and Bobby's 1950 wedding, spats about where each family would bump, and heads budded between the strong-willed matriarchs of their respective clans. Ethel's biographer, Jerry Oppenheimer, paints a portrait of Ethel as being stuck between two worlds, the unrestrained chaos of the Skakels on one side, and the carefully choreographed expectations of the Kennedy's on the other. But it seems pretty clear on which side she landed. As soon as the newly married Mr. And Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy jetted off for their Honolulu honeymoon, Ethel shook the Connecticut dust from her feet and wholly embraced being a Kennedy. She was a perfect political wife who seemed more than happy to leave Greenwich and her loudest siblings back in the Nutmeg State.

More Kennedy than the Kennedy's was how she was known within her new family. Being embraced so completely by the political clan made Ethel swell with pride and likely rankled all the Skakeles she'd left behind. The death of Ethel's parents, George and Big Anne Skakel, in a 1955 plane crash, seems to have further frayed the fragile ties between the two families. And according to Oppenheimer's sources, Ethel and Bobby made only a brief appearance at the funeral and seemed to continue on with their lives unaffected, enraging Ethel's Skakel kin. The personal and political animosities kept compounding. When Ethel became a pivotal player in JFK's 1960 election campaign, a number of the Skakels threw their support behind his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon. Stories, many of which I suspect to be based in truth, but honed by age and exaggerated for effect, had become part of both families' lore as evidence of the ongoing feud. A disproportionate number of them involved the hijinks of Ethel's older brother, George Jr, the family's resident charmer, troublemaker, and unapologetic party animal. It was George who, as the story goes, skipped JFK's presidential swearing in ceremony and handed his ticket off to a stranger, then further ticked off the Kennedy's by trying to make out with actress Kim Novak at the inauguration party.

What might have begun as barbed but harmless ribbing between families turned into something uglier. Per his sources, Oppenheimer writes, upon hearing that George Jr. And his wife, Pat, had been in a drunk driving accident with their children in the car, Bobby turned to Ethel and said, Watch, they'll all kill themselves, and then we won't have to worry about any of them anymore. Even RFK's 1968 assassination didn't seem to precipitate an interfamilial thaw. Publicly, Ethel was now a widow of Camelot. She saw her eleven children as Kennedy's through and through. But when some of them got into trouble, which they did a lot, Teddy, who, as the sole-surviving Kennedy uncle, was called on to help skipper the family through these storms, would share a pet theory about their misconduct.

Well, one of the things that I've heard this several times is that when branches of that family, when some of Ethel's children were getting trouble that Ted would shake his head and say, That's not the Kennedy side, that's the Skakel side.

That's Scott Lehigh, who's covered Massachusetts politics for over 40 years, mostly for the Boston Globe, where he's currently a columnist. Few living reporters have known or covered as many Kennedy's as he has.

I think that people try to attribute some of their misbehavior to the Skakel side.

The rift between the two families continued into the next generation. Julie Skakel reported and framed that Rush senior didn't allow the kids to refer to New York's airport as JFK, which it was renamed in 1963, following the President's assassination. He insisted it remained Idlewild. All this animus meant that growing up, the Skakel kids, Michael and his siblings, never got to know their Kennedy cousins. Here's what Bobby had to say on Dateland.

My mother was, I wouldn't say it's strange from a family, but there was no contact between the two families, and I never knew any Skakel. Really, I never knew. I would not have recognized any Skakel prior to 1983.

I should mention briefly, Bobby and I didn't speak for this podcast. His old email sends an auto reply that he's too busy now to write back, and the HHS press office never responded to my interview request. No bad blood to my knowledge, but as you know, I did work with him to write a book about Michael's wrongful conviction. So at this point, you may be thinking, Wait a minute. If the Kennedy's and Skegles despise each other, how could that even happen? Like so many things in this story, it all starts with drugs. At the top of the show, you heard Michael from his hospital bed to Ethel Kennedy growing fond of him because of his efforts to help her son, David, who was just a few years older than Michael. David Kennedy, Ethel's fourth of 11 children, right below Bobby Jr, was only 12 in 1968, when his father, then presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel. David was in a room upstairs, watching the news of his father shooting on TV. At 1: 44 this morning, Pacific Time, The life of Senator Robert F. Kennedy ended 42 years after it began and 25 hours after he was fell by an assassin.

The things that David saw that night and the impact it had on his family left him and his older brother Bobby, particularly haunted. Within two years of the assassination, David was in the throes of addiction. By 1979, his drug problems were known to the public. Newspapers reported he'd been mugged in a New York City hotel known as a Heroine Supermarket and Shooting Gallery. Around the same time, Michael Skakel was struggling with his own drug and alcohol abuse. His stint at the Alon School, unsurprisingly, did little to help. But in 1982, Michael finally found something that worked for him, and with the help of AA, he got sober. David, on the other hand, continued to struggle. Michael had met his cousin David in passing, but like most Skakels and Kennedy's, they weren't particularly close. In the early '80s, Michael found himself spending more time in Boston. While there, he started to nose around his Kennedy cousins, who seemed as curious about him as he was about them. Michael had one thing that some of his Kennedy relatives didn't. A sobriety success story he wasn't shy about sharing. And David Kennedy's girlfriend seemed to see Michael as a lifeline.

She begged Michael to help David with his substance abuse in whatever way possible. In early 1984, Michael got David into the same facility where he'd gotten sober, St. Mary's rehabilitation in Minneapolis. After David's four weeks in treatment were up, Michael says he flew to Minnesota to retrieve him. For David, rehab didn't take. According to Michael, almost immediately after leaving the facility, David was already off the wagon. In the subsequent weeks, David continued his downward spiral. Michael, who was at that time living in his Uncle Jimmy spread in Bel Air, California, invited David to crash with him, but David said he needed to be in Palm Beach for Easter, his alien grandmother, family matriarch, Rose Kennedy, wintered.

So I said, If you change your mind, you know where I am. And like a week later, I got a call from Ethel saying, David's in trouble. Is there any way you could get him into another place? And I said, Yeah, let me make some calls.

Michael says he called several facilities, searching for an open bed.

And I told Ethel that there won't be a slot open for the other two weeks. But if I tell them who he is, I can guarantee they'll let him in tomorrow. They'll make room for him. And she said, Absolutely not. So I told her I would be down the next morning or the day after. And I turned on the TV the next morning, and David had died at the Brazilian court, and the rest was history with that.

In 1984, At just 28 years old, David Kennedy died alone in his seedy Palm Beach hotel room. Another young Kennedy gone before his time. According to Michael, Ethel never forgot his efforts on behalf of her troubled son.

What I tried to do for David transcended the Hatfield-McCoy thing. Addiction doesn't have a prejudice.

Addiction may not have prejudice, but it does seem to have preferences. It tends to run in families, and the Kennedy's were no exception. A few months before David's death, Bobby Kennedy Jr, then 28, and having recently resigned from the Manhattan DA's office after failing the bar, was arrested for heroine possession after getting sick from a suspected overdose on a flight to Rapid City, South Dakota. The arrest seemed to shock Bobby into addressing his addiction. Shortly after emerging from rehab in 1983, Bobby was looking for support in his sobriety and started spending a lot of time drug-free in the great outdoors with a cousin who'd tried to help his brother, Michael.

So we ended up spending a lot of time together. He lived in Greenwich. I lived in Mount Kisco, New York, just a few miles from each other. His family had a ski house up in the Catskills, so I took my children up there almost every weekend. I went during the summers. I did kayaking trips, whitewater trips with them. I spent a lot of time in doing wilderness trips with them, and I went to literally thousands of 12-cent meetings with them.

Hearing Michael describe that time in his life, it seems lifted straight from the pages of an LLBeen catalog. In addition to the rafting trips and ski weekends you just heard Bobby describe, there were pickup football games in Hyannasport with Bobby, Bobby's brother, and their cousin, John Kennedy Jr. Michael grew even tighter with his long-lost relatives. Bobby and brothers Max and Chris, all three sober, served as ushers at Michael's 1991 wedding. Michael Skakel was officially in with the Kennedy clan, at least for the moment. In 1994, Michael Skakel's growing social circle of Kennedy cousins expanded once again. This time, it was Bobby's younger brother, named, unhelpfully for the purposes of this podcast, Michael.

Michael called and said, Hey, is there any way that I can come up to the house and wind him? Because our plans fell through in Vail or something like that. And I said, Yeah, absolutely. And I gave him the master suite, and his kids all had rooms and their friends. And he said, Do you have a fax machine? I said, Yeah. And it turns out he was running Teddy's 94 campaign against Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney, as you probably know, became the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who lost to Barack Obama. But his first run for office was back in 1994, when he ran for Senate against Ted Kennedy. He'd already made a ton of money in finance, and as the son of George Romney, a popular governor from Michigan, had more potential than the usual palukas Kennedy faced every six years. Michael Skakel was 34 years old, but fresh out of college and newly married. That weekend at Wyndham, his cousin Michael Kennedy, who was Teddy's campaign manager, asked him, What are you doing for work?

I said, Well, I'm trying. I really, really I really want to get in the sports marketing field, but I just keep getting the door slammed in my face. And he said, Why don't you come work for me? He said, You'll love it. It's a blast. He goes, You stay at my house and cohace it. He said, I've got like 15 bedrooms right on the ocean. We're going to be working 18-hour days. I said, I don't know anything about politics. He said, You'll learn quick. And I did.

Michael did advance scheduling VIP jumpers for Teddy, like Alec Baldwin, and driving Michael Kennedy around. I asked the globe's Scott Lehigh if he knew Michael Kennedy.

Michael? Oh, yeah. I mean, not an impressive person in my mind. I remember sitting with him at the Parker I was talking about the campaign. It was me, him, and someone else. He talked like a dope. But I also remember him bragging about all the damage he and a couple of friends had done to a hotel room somewhere. I'm thinking, Why the hell is he telling me this?

Despite his less than impressive hotel room trashing campaign manager and the strength of his opponent, Ted Kennedy would ultimately win his sixth Senate re-election handling. Just a few minutes ago, I phoned Mitt Romney called me to congratulate me on being re-elected in the United States Senate. It might have been the last regs, but the campaign gave Michael Skakel a close-up peak at the magic of Camelot. The world his Kennedy cousins inhabited was glamorous and exciting. He was hooked.

It was incredible. It was absolutely incredible to see how people reacted, how the system works.

As soon as the confetti and ticker tape from Ted Kennedy's victory party got swept away, Michael Skakel found himself in need of a new job. His cousin soon delivered. Michael Kennedy had been running the Boston nonprofit Citizens Energy, a household fuel company providing heat to low-income families. Originally started by his older brother Joe, Michael Kennedy took it over following Joe's successful 1986 Congressional run. Michael Kennedy needed a new international programs director, so Michael Michael Skakel moved to Cohasset, a town on the south shore of Massachusetts Bay, a wealthy commuter suburb of Boston, like Greenwich is to Manhattan. Michael Skakel was now fully inside the Kennedy orbit, and from that vantage point, he had a front row seat to a scandal that would ultimately blow up political careers, upend personal lives, and provide endless tabloid father. Recall that shortly before Michael moved to Cohasset, his cousin Michael Kennedy had first reappeared in his life, calling to ask if he and his kids could come to Wyndham to ski and stay at the house. He didn't bring wife, Vicky, but did indeed bring his three pre-tean kids. Also along for the trip was their babysitter, Marissa, who had just turned 16 years old.

The weekend that Michael came with his children while he was running Teddy's campaign, he came with Marissa Veracchi, the babysitter. I thought that it was... I didn't know how old she was because she looked really, really young. When I was saying good night, I came up and said good night. They're sitting very close to each other, and they're both drinking what looked like wine. I thought, Okay, that's a little strange.

It was more than a little strange, as he'd soon learn. Marissa's parents were dear friends of Michael and Vicky Kennedy. They lived in their own seaside mansion right down the street, so close that Marissa could walk home from babysitting. They were in and out of the Kennedy house and the Kennedy's in and out of the Veracchis. Marissa's father, Paul Veracchy, nine years older than Michael Kennedy, was loaded. He'd started a company that sought to consolidate the fragmented ambulance business in 1992, and six years later sold it for over a billion dollars, which in those days was still considered a lot of money. Paul Veracchy was also close to Joe Kennedy. He had contributed lavishly to his campaigns and was offered a board seat on Citizens Energy, which makes what unfolded even more shocking. Several times a year since his Harvard days, Michael Kennedy would take a rotating cast of friends and family on whitewater rafting and camping trips. Michael Skakel, who went on several of these excursions, remembers that his cousin brought his kids and Marissa, but his wife, Vicky, didn't come along. Michael also noted that on at least one trip, Marissa took leave from the kids to partake in one of the Otter Kennedy camping camping rituals, the Vodka Sauna.

They would heat up the rocks and put them in a big pot and then pour a bottle of vodka on it and everybody would inhale. I didn't do it just because I wasn't partaking making of that stuff anymore.

But there was something else that Michael says caught his attention.

The one thing that stuck out the most was watching Michael's young children see he and the babysitter going to a tent, and they just looked very forlorn as young kids. It broke my heart for the kids.

Michael says by the time he was with Michael Kennedy and Marissa on the rafting trips, he had started to suspect that the two were romantically entwined. Did you talk to Michael Kennedy when you first began to suspect the affair?

No, I didn't bring it up. Honestly, I didn't think it was appropriate because I was like, Well, maybe this is just me. You know what I mean? I had no proof.

Also, Michael says that because Marissa was 16 and legally of age in Massachusetts, he didn't feel it was his place to get involved.

I wasn't judging him. I just said, Look, what you're doing is between you and God. As long as if you're not hurting something... I mean, by the time I was there, she was already of age. You know what I mean?

At some point, you had to start talking more directly about it, right?

Honestly, it was so long ago. I couldn't honestly tell you when I started talking about it.

Michael doesn't remember exactly when he and Michael Kennedy started openly acknowledging the affair. But he does remember clearly that in January 1995, right around the time of Rose Kennedy's death, when the family was gathered at her compound, he got a call from Michael Kennedy. I'm in huge trouble, Kennedy said. Vicky caught me with the babysitter.

He called me halfway up from Hyannis Port back to Cohasset saying, Holy shit, man. Holy shit. Holy shit. I got caught with Marissa by Vicky. And he said, She's definitely going to go to the press. She's going to... And he said, I don't know what to do. I said, Just meet me in my house.

Michael had already guided some of his other cousins through recovery journeys. In Michael Kennedy's desperate phone call, Michael Skakel says he saw another opportunity to help.

I called Father Martin, who was a guy in the treatment industry who had one of the best treatment centers in the country, in Haverty, Grace, Maryland, and I gave him Michael's ultimatum. I said, Well, you You can continue on doing what you're doing, and you're just going to destroy you. You're going to destroy your family and your wife, and it won't be good. I said, Or you could take a 30-day time out and learn something about yourself.

Michael Kennedy's 1995 rehab stint was for alcohol, though Michael Skakel says he hoped it would also lead his cousin to stop the affair.

I did talk to Michael about the affair once he went to Father Martin. I said, You need to end this shit. You're going to destroy your life.

Michael Kennedy didn't end the affair. But a year later, in 1996, Kennedy went back to rehab, this time for sex addiction. Kennedy to be trying to repair his life in marriage. What he probably didn't foresee was that both were about to come crashing down. In the fall of 1996, Marissa Veracchi, now 18 years old, headed off to college in Boston. I know the sleuthiest among you have already caught it. Yes, Marissa Veracchi is the same Marissa Veracchi who was staying at Jaron Ridge's South Boston Loft, the site of Michael Skakel's nonexistent admission that he'd killed Martha. You remember Jaron, the confession witness at Michael's trial who retracted her testimony on the stand, the one who left this voicemail on her friend's answering machine? I said he was drunk, and that's what he said.

I said he told that he hit it with a golf club.

Back in 1996, Michael Skakel's connection to the Moxie murder was not yet headline news, but the effects of the affair and carrying the secret weighed heavily on Marissa. One of the few people she could talk to about it was Michael Skakel, who'd by then become her friend and confidante.

I got a call from Marissa, and she said, Michael, I don't know what to do. I'm in trouble. I've lied to everybody. I'm feeling extremely depressed. And I said, Well, when my wife at the time and I have problems, there's a woman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who I think is good. I think she's helpful. I think she could help you.

Michael says he made an appointment for Marissa with his therapist and dropped her off.

And then again, another three weeks later, four weeks later, she called me and said, The doctor says that I need to tell my parents, and I don't want to.

She hadn't told her parents the truth about- She hadn't said anything.

I said, Look, you need to take care of Marissa. If that's what the doctor says to do, then that's what you should do.

Michael says Marissa followed his guidance. Not long after, all hell broke loose.

A few nights later, I got a call at 11: 00 at night from Marissa, He's saying, My mom has gone off the wagon and is calling everybody who will listen. And she's screaming about how Michael raped me. So I got in the car, I drove into Boston from Cohacet, went to their apartment apartment that was right across from the Rose Garden. The doorman let me in. They had the penthouse.

Michael says he tried to calm Marissa's mother, June Veracchi, down, but eventually she locked herself in a room and crawed out onto the roof. Cops and firemen were called for fear she might jump. June was transported to the hospital.

We got a call about 45 minutes later from the head of the ER saying that there's going to be an investigation. They wanted Marissa down there, And so Marissa and I went to Mass General.

For Michael Kennedy, it must have been a moment of pure panic. The affair had just ended, and now the girl's mother was causing a public spectacle, airing his dirty laundry to strangers and possibly inviting the attention of law enforcement. It must have felt to Michael Kennedy like he was suspended a mile above a rocky canyon with a piece of rapidly fraying dental floss. Behind closed doors, Vicky and Michael Kennedy's marriage was in the process of imploding, but the press hadn't yet caught wind of his marital troubles or his affair with Marissa. As winter became spring, the Kennedy name was back in the headlines for a different reason. Michael Kennedy's eldest brother, Joe, was preparing to launch his campaign for governor of Massachusetts. Here's the Boston Globe's Scott Lehigh.

I think publicly, he was perceived as the next big Kennedy political success story.

Though he hadn't formally announced, the media was already reporting that Joe was a likely shoe in.

Joe is very popular, and it looks like he's going to run. So that's about the time that the babysitter story starts coming up.

The Babysitter Story. It officially began on April 25, 1997, when the Boston Globe broke the news on A1, carrying Lehigh's byline and the headline, Kennedy Kinn, Allegedly Had Affair with Sitter. In addition to revealing the affair publicly for the first time, The article reported that it had been a source of trouble for Michael and Vicky Kennedy for at least two years, ever since Vicky discovered her husband in bed with Marissa in early 1995. A more salacious scandal New England had rarely seen.

The town was obsessed with it. It was an all-consuming story for some months as you tried to track down the various aspects of what had happened with Michael and the babysitter.

Lehigh is not kidding. I remember following every drip-trip detail of it from the cubby of my first writing job at Boston magazine. Every day, the respectable establishment globe, then owned by the New York Times, did battle for scoops with the grimey tabloid, the Boston Hérald. Once owned by Rupert Murdoch. It was like Boston Media was doing a trial run for the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.

The question quickly became, had there been a sexual relationship with a babysitter before she was 16, in which case it would have been statutory rape and serious problems, very serious problems for Michael Kennedy.

The same day the babysitter story broke in the Boston Globe, the Norfolk County district attorney announced a preliminary investigation into whether the relationship between Michael and Marissa had had begun when she was 14. Wherever the truth lay, Merce's father, Paul Veracchi, reacted to this situation as any father, especially a very rich one, would. He went on the war path and made the seriousness of his furia apparent when he hired Bob Poppio, one of the most politically connected lawyers in Boston, to represent him.

It was two families with money and two families with publicity. I don't want to say publicity managers because it wasn't exactly meant that way, but people who were very media savvy, going to war over this story.

As the chaos unfolded, Michael Skakel says he suddenly found himself caught in the crossfire. A quick note to listeners. The audio you're about to hear is compiled from different conversations I had with Michael. I went back to him repeatedly to confirm all the details.

When the story broke, Michael asked me, he said, Oh, my God, what do I do? What do I do? And I said, Look, dude, I've been warning you forever. Leave her alone. And that's when he said, Well, you've got to go after.

What did he say specifically?

He said, You have to go after Paul publicly and Marissa. And I said, I'm not going to do it. I said, I'm not going to tell the truth about you or lie about them.

That is, he would protect his cousin's secret, but he wouldn't participate in trying to bury Marissa or her father in the press.

And he just said, Well, then you're off the reservation. I said, Well, I was never on that reservation.

And so that was the end of your employment?

No, because he made it impossible for me to... He made it all almost impossible for me to work. He also got angry at me.

He says he tried to reason with his cousin, Michael.

I pleaded with him to just please sign a non-disparagement clause. I said, I'll sign one and you sign one. I'll show you legally that I'm serious. I don't want to fight you. I don't want to fight anybody. I just want out. Pay me seven to three months like you've been doing with everyone else, and I'm out of here.

He says Michael Kennedy refused. Shortly after, Michael Skakel says he found that his keys no longer worked at the office. His company credit card was turned off. And with that, the fragile bridge that had been built between himself and his Kennedy kin crumbled. Michael says he was kicked out of Camelot. His cousin Bobby remembers it differently.

I never stopped talking to him, but Michael stopped talking to me and all the members of my family.

Whoever was giving whom the silent treatment, things were about to get much worse. In the wake of the Michael Kennedy babysitter controversy, rumors of all kinds began to fly, including some that centered on Michael Skakel. In an August 1997 Vanity Fair piece, reporter Michael Schneerson wrote, Among the Kennedy's and their friends, the story that began to circulate was that Michael had been betrayed by his Citizens Energy colleague and cousin, Michael Skakel. As in, Michael Skakel leaked the babysitter story. Here's Boston Globe columnist Scott Lehigh again.

Well, it was pretty obvious that That Michael or his lawyer was quite a good source for the Hérald, I think. You can't read the stories and look at that without thinking that.

I've asked Michael numerous times about this accusation, and he has always vehemently denied it.

I never broke the story.

Did you or your lawyer speak to the press subsequently after the story broke?

Absolutely not. Never.

Regardless, what Michael did next didn't exactly calm the Kennedy family's nerves. When prosecutors mulling statutory When the rape charges against Michael Kennedy wanted to talk, Michael agreed.

I sat with the prosecutors for four hours and answered honestly to the best of my ability, what I knew and didn't know.

That question, who knew what about the babysitter affair and when was exactly what prosecutors and the public wanted to know. Here's Scott Lehigh.

The question became, when had there been a sexual relationship? But it also became, what had Joe Kennedy done about this.

Meaning, had Joe Kennedy tried to do something to stop the affair between Michael Kennedy and the babysitter? Joe, hoping to be Massachusetts' next governor, found himself in the hot seat.

Originally, I think he said he hadn't known that Michael was in a relationship with this person. Then I think later it became he hadn't realized that there was an allegation of an underaged relationship.

Scott Lehigh remembers that the press coverage framed Michael Skakel as at least attempted to intervene to stop the affair.

Skakel, I think he was one of the people who objected to this and tried to get this thing ended, this relationship ended. The storyline was accepted that he had tried to do the right thing Michael Skakel says that long before the story broke in the papers, he had voiced concerns to both Bobby and Joe Kennedy about the relationship and was told in no uncertain terms to mind his business.

Whatever Joe or Bobby had said to Michael, Don done or not done about the affair, the public blowback for the Kennedy's was swift.

I think it's fair to say that it wasn't hugely convincing that they had done much that would earn the public's admiration.

And there were more headwinds afoot. The same month the babysitter story broke, Joe Kennedy's ex-wife began promoting her upcoming book about her troubled marriage to Joe and their painful, very public separation. The memoir R. R. Also criticized some of the Kennedy family for protecting Joe's political image at her expense. For congressman Joe Kennedy, son of Robert Kennedy, the last 10 days have been a nightmare. Headlines scream of clouds over Camelot. To Kennedy, it must feel more like a tornado. In Massachusetts, seeing the Kennedy legacy tarnished by scandal involving women is hardly new. But so far, Joe Kennedy seems to be paying a higher than usual price. Joe Kennedy may have been down, but he wasn't totally out yet. On June 18, 1997, Kennedy spoke to reporters at a news conference on Capitol Hill saying, I've made it very clear that I never heard other than in press reports that any relationship took place prior to the woman's 16th birthday. While Joe Kennedy worked to repair his public image, in the meantime, the criminal case against Michael Kennedy was withering on the vine. Marissa and her family had decided not to cooperate, setting a desire to protect Marissa from the in scrutiny of such a high-profile trial.

Then on July eighth, the Norfolk County district Attorney dropped all charges. That same day, Vicky Kennedy issued a statement through her lawyer saying, The district Attorney's decision to close his investigation will help put an end to a nightmare for me and my children. As I told the district attorney's office, I have no knowledge, and I do not believe that Michael ever committed any criminal wrongdoing. I hope that the media will now respect my privacy and my children's privacy and allow us to move forward with our lives. Charges may have been officially dropped, but the damage to Joe's gubernatorial ambitions was already done. The one-two punch of the babysitter and his own marital problems had eroded the public's trust. With his pulse cratering in the governor's race, Joe took his medicine on August 28, 1997. In recent weeks, I've come to the conclusion, reluctantly, that if I am a candidate for governor next this year, the race will focus on personal and family questions. Therefore, I've decided not to be a candidate for governor in 1998. By the fall of 1997, some of the highest-profile candidates had seen their reputations irrevocably damaged. Michael Kennedy was in the process of getting divorced.

Joe Kennedy's political career was in ruins. He would not seek re-election to Congress in 1998 and hasn't run for office since. As for Michael Skakel, he was out of a job and on the outs with his Kennedy cousins. And whether rational or not, he became increasingly convinced that there was more to come, that members of the Kennedy clan would seek some revenge against him for meddling in the babysitter affair. As I've already mentioned, over the years, Michael Skakel has developed an acute sense of persecution, and what was about to happen caused a major flare up. We haven't talked much about Martha Moxley in this episode. But in the background, as the babysitter controversy was unfolding, the investigation into Martha's murder was rocketing along on a parallel track. The Unsolved mysteries episode in early 1996, and then the reward money bump that summer, had renewed public interest in the case and given Inspector Frank Gahr new leads to follow. But once the babysitter scandal broke in April 1997, the 22-year-old cold case got an exponential boost. The media was writing about the Kennedy's and their Skakel cousin, yes, but also about how that Skakel cousin had been linked to Martha Moxley's murder.

I remember in the press, they were saying, Michael Skakel is a potential murderer, and I just went, wow. And I just felt that my reputation was just being trashed.

Whether true or not, behind the media coverage, Michael believed he sensed the unseen hands of Michael Kennedy and his family's machines. Me. Michael decided it was time to take preemptive action.

And I said, If you guys are going to keep lying about me, then I'll start telling the truth about other stuff.

In late 1997, he started to consider writing a tell-all memoir, one that would include damning details about his Kennedy kin, a literary collateral. He might never have followed through on the idea, but for the Kennedy curse. A sad beginning to this new year for the Kennedy family, a family that has been haunted by tragedy. Michael Kennedy, a son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, was killed last night in a skiing accident in Colorado. On New Year's Eve, 1997, less than a year after the babysitter story broke, Michael Kennedy, who'd been playing football on his skis with no helmet on, crashed into a tree and died. As with every Kennedy tragedy, the press swarmed. Michael Kennedy had led a mostly private life until scandal tarnished his image earlier this year. He was accused but never prosecuted for an alleged affair with a teenage babysitter.

The rumor soured his brother, congressman Joseph Kennedy's bid to become governor of Massachusetts.

By then, Michael Kennedy had become a punchline in Boston. His shocking death ended the press pile on, but the damage to the family reputation outlived him. Michael Skakel came to believe that some of his Kennedy relatives faulted him, at least in part for that damage. Do you think that the Kennedy family believes that you were instrumental in either ending the political career of Joe Kennedy or causing the death of Michael Kennedy?

Absolutely.

Michael says one of his cousins has even said so to his face.

Several times. What's he said? You know that it was because of me that Michael died. It's like I was in New York. Michael skied into a tree. Michael skied recklessly. He was very reckless in everything he did.

It's hard to argue that point. Michael Kennedy's recklessness tore his own family apart. Michael Stakel was concerned that it would tear his life apart as well. Michael's perception, whether accurate or not, was that some of his Kennedy kin saw him as a villain in the latest dark chapter of their history. Based on that, he says he began to worry that some of them might seek revenge against him, perhaps in the form of a smear campaign that could hurt his future career chances. So on January first, 1998, the day after Michael Kennedy's death, Michael signed an NDA with a now retired writing professor named Richard Hoffmann. I met with Hoffmann in the study of his Salem, Massachusetts home in June 2023. Did you feel like Michael was doing this as a defensive move, that this was possibly- Partly.

Partly, yes.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

He thought they were coming for him. And I think he believed that, Look, I'm not I'm not going to go quietly. I have stories to tell. You force me in the position of being a whistleblower, I'm going to blow it loud.

Michael spent three days hold up with Hoffman, spilling his guts.

We went on a retreat to his family's place up in Wyndham, New York, and I just got him talking on tape.

Three days is a long time, and Michael had a lot to get off his chest. He didn't just limit his storytelling to ax grinding about his Kennedy relatives. He mapped out everything that had happened in his life so far: his difficult childhood, the trauma of his time at Alon, and, of course, Martha Moxley's murder. Hoffman thought Michael's life story had all the trappings of a great memoir.

But the book that I envisioned, I was looking at the Pulitzer. How could it be that someone with that wealth and that privilege could live a Dekensian boyhood?

But Hoffmann said his book agent had a different notion. He instructed Hoffmann to toss in every bit of dark side of Camelot's sleaze Michael had alleged.

That book that I had envisioned was fading farther and farther away. And the book that the agent wanted was more and more salacious at each draft.

Hoffmann put together a proposal for the book titled Dead Dead Man Talking, a reference to the turn of phrase Dead Man Talk. Michael says, Ethel Kennedy once used with him, vowing him to secrecy when they met for lunch in Boston to discuss Michael Kennedy's growing troubles with the babysitter. The proposal is a pretty tawdry document. It teases an insider's look at the babysitter scandal, Joe Kennedy's alleged efforts to hide his knowledge of it, and Michael Skakel's opinion that his cousin had indeed had sex with the babysitter when she was 14. There's also a promise to divulge another scandalous sexual exploit involving a Kennedy, and a conspiratorial tidbit about efforts to dig up dirt on babysitter Marissa's father in order to silence him. If it fulfilled the proposal's promise, the book had the potential to unleash a firestorm. But Michael Skakel says before he even began shopping the book in earnest, it appears some of his Kennedy relatives got wind of it.

There's no question in my mind they got wind of it because a famous person came to my house in Florida.

Following the babysitter affair, Michael had abandoned Cohasset. Not only had he been staked out many times by the press as the scandal broke, he was now unemployed and couldn't keep up with a mortgage. Not long after that, he and his wife, Margot, now pregnant, decamped to his father's house in Hope Sound, Florida. Michael says that in early 1998, the doorbell rang and a familiar figure was at his doorstep, a prominent businessman and friend of generations of Kennedy's. He had a question for Michael.

Are you or are you not writing this book? And I said, If they sign a non-disparagement clause and I sign one, we walk away from this. This stuff will never see the light of day ever. Then this person who I love and respect highly said, So you're writing a book? And I said, So you're telling me that they're not going to stop? And he got up and and flew, flew hours back to where he was going.

When a member of our production team reached out, the businessman, now elderly, praised Michael as a good guy with a great heart, saying he believed he was innocent, but he denied knowing about the book or inquiring about it to Michael or being asked to speak with him on behalf of the Kennedy's. Two weeks after that alleged visit, Michael says that same doorbell rang again.

And I open, there were two men that looked like guys from Men in Black with dark glasses and dark suits. I said, Can I help you? And they said, Yeah, we're with the Secret Service.

Michael said they showed their badges and their guns.

They said, We believe you sent a death threat letter to President Bill Clinton.

He says it was promptly sorted out as a misunderstanding, but the agents posed a question.

They said, Do you have any idea why somebody would do this to you? I said, This sounds like these guys just trying to make me look bad because they think I'm writing a book about them.

By these guys, Michael told me, he meant some of his Kennedy relatives.

Yeah, absolutely. Because they were trying to discredit me.

I wasn't able to independently corroborate all of the details of Michael's surprise Florida visits, but I've spoken with several people who said Michael told them about them at the time. So what did the visits mean? In Michael's eyes, there were a warning from some of his Kennedy relatives who he believed wanted to ensure the book never saw the light of day. But Michael didn't back down. His agent proceeded with shopping the proposal. Several months later, in June 1998, a grand jury was convened in Martha Moxley's case with Michael as its target. In this timing, Michael sees something suspicious. Though I've not been able to verify his claims, he believes that as retribution for the book proposal, for his role in the babysitter scandal, some members of the Kennedy clan use their political sway to influence the Moxley investigation, specifically turning its focus towards him. You thought perhaps maybe the Kennedy's were behind your prosecution, or is this something that you always suspected.

Absolutely always suspected. Because of the things on those tapes could potentially put some of them, they wouldn't be liked very much in. They covert their reputation.

Michael has shared his theory with me time and time again. It's complex, convoluted even. But he's told me names of influential people whom he thinks pulled the levers of power to get him indicted. We aren't going to go into the details about the specifics of Michael's theory here. The tough part about reporting on alleged backdoor deals is that they're hard to substantiate, though I will say I tried. However, there is one thing I keep coming back in my own reporting, and it's that there does appear to be a sudden investigative shift towards Michael after years of persistent efforts to buttress the cases against his brother Tommy and also Ken Littleton. The case file gets sparse in the late '90s, police. So it's hard to identify the exact moment when Michael became the primary suspect in this investigation. But in a March 1998 interview with Dateland, Frank Gahr kept his options open.

Who were the suspects in this case in 1975?

Tommy Skakel, Michael Skakel, Ken Littleton, a fellow by the name of Ed Hammond. To be clear, Michael Skakel was not considered a serious suspect by police until the 1990s.

1998, who were the suspects?

Same. Same people. Nothing has changed with the suspect list.

23 years.

Same names. It's possible Gar was just holding his cards close to his chest. But just three months later, in June 1998, an investigatory grand jury was convened. A surprising new development tonight in the unsolved murder of a Greenwich teenager. A one-person grand jury has been appointed to probe the killing of Martha Moxley. This was a rare form of grand jury in Connecticut, made up of a single judge, in this case, 56-year-old George Thim, who had been appointed to the bench in 1985 by the state's then governor, Democrat William O'Neill. In Connecticut, these one-judge investigatory grand juries are used to dig into difficult, long-stalled cases because they have a power the police do not, the ability to issue subpoenas, meaning anyone who refuses to appear can be jailed for contempt. The judge also had the benefit of an 18-month mandate to investigate wherever the evidence led. Yet no witnesses were called by the state to testify about the longest running prime suspect, Tommy Skakel. The same was true for tutor Ken Littleton. Although unlike Tommy, he did testify to Grand Jury and was granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation. Michael was the only item on the lunch menu.

The Grand Jury did arrive right on the heels of Mark Furman's media blitz, during which he appeared on every outlet willing to amplify his investigation and his conclusion that Michael Skakel was Martha Moxley's killer. Former LAPD Detective, Mark Furman believes he now has solved the mystery of this murder in Greenwich. Michael, the 15-year-old, is the prime suspect in Mark Furman's the book. But prosecutor Benedict and investigator Gar consistently pooh-poohed the notion that Furman's book had anything to do with their pursuit of Michael. Here's Gar in a dateland interview years later. Mark Furman had nothing to do with this investigation, never did and never will. His book didn't produce the indictment that resulted in the trial. That I almost don't even want to dignify with a comment, but absolutely not. I mean, there's no way that any law enforcement authority would would take the the writings of anyone, Mark Furman or anyone, and use that as a guide. And that's what makes this part of the story so hard to pin down. Cause and effect, correlation versus causation. It gets incredibly muddy here. Many players had the power to influence the Moxley case. The police, the press, the public.

It's hard to untangle what or who led to what. Sutton associate Jim Murphy, with whom Michael has stayed in touch over the years, has his take. He thinks it's strange that Michael suddenly found himself in the crosshairs of the state of Connecticut in 1998. You don't think it was enough that Mark Furman comes out with his book and starts beating the drum in the newspapers? It never made any sense to me that it got to the point that it did where they could indict Michael, and then he'd go to trial and be found guilty of this, and there were so much time in jail. It just didn't make any sense. I reached out to both Bobby and Joe Kennedy directly. As I mentioned earlier, Bobby didn't respond. And through his attorney, Joe replied to a list of questions we sent stating they were premised on fabricated and disproven rumors, but included no specifics beyond that. But in his 2016 interview with Dateland, Bobby had this to say.

For Michael, who had never had anything to do with the Kennedy's and never claimed any advantage from being a Kennedy, was never considered himself a Kennedy, it became some somehow confused in his mind that this tendential connection that he had with the Kennedy family had gotten him into this terrible, terrible trouble.

Bobby, who'd gotten to know Michael well through their shared recovery journeys, had an explanation for his cousin's thinking.

The thing that's important to understand about Michael Skakel is that he has very, very deep post-traumatic stress disorder. From the years that he spent in a reform school in Maine, and one of the indicia of that illness is that he sometimes gets a vaguely paracletal worldview. And part of that worldview was that the Kennedy's were conspiring to jail him. And in fact, there was a plausibility to it because every time he was mentioned in all of the prosecutorial interest in him, that was directly related to his connection to the Kennedy family.

Here's Michael's attorney, Stefan Seeger. Michael has been through a lot. A man who serves 11 and a half years for a case that he should have been involved in the first place probably thinks about a lot of different things. He probably sees people who were his friends before are his enemies now, and a lot may go through his mind. Do I think that his connection to the Kennedy family put the guilty verdict into the juror's mouths? I don't think that. But I do think that there are political aspects of this case that stem all the way from the grand jury. But Sieger says he's not seen proof that Michael's theories are right. Before I would implicate anybody on something like this, I would love to have evidence of that fact because that would really turn the whole system upside down. In one of the great ironies of this story, by the time he was arrested in 2000, Michael Skakel had fully broken with the Kennedy family, sworn them off, cut all ties. Yet, in the minds of the media and public at large, Michael, in some ways, became a proxy for the Kennedy family's bad behavior.

It was a compelling narrative. A rich kid with a privileged upbringing and a connection to America's most famous family, tangled up in a grizzly murder case. The coverage of his trial, in some ways, seemed like a referendum on the well-documented compendium of Kennedy misbehavior that never seemed to result in any serious consequences. The 1969 drowning of Mary Joe Kupekny on Chappaquitic Island off of Martha's Vineyard after Teddy Kennedy drove his car into the drink and failed to alert the police till the next day, Teddy got a slap on the wrist. The 1973 Pam Kelly crash. 20-year-old future congressman Joe Kennedy flipped a Jeep full of Kennedy cousins and their friends on an Intucket road, leaving 18-year-old Pam paralyzed. A $100 fine and no criminal charges. And then, of course, in 1991, William Kennedy Smith was acquitted of rape after a high-profile trial. So by 2002, when Michael Skakel was put on trial for Martha Moxley's murder, the public was ravenous for something that looked like justice. Bobby Kennedy, though Michael didn't want him to, attended the trial for two days. The two men had once been close, and Bobby felt an obligation to show his support.

He later told Dateland he believed the Kennedy Association absolutely contributed to Michael's guilty verdict.

I don't think there's any question that it was used in a prejudicial way, but it was used not because people hated the Kennedy family, but because it fed the press interest. I think that Michael Skaker would not be in jail if people had not been able to call him Kennedy cousin.

Maybe that's one of the things we can say definitively here. Michael's connection to the Kennedy family, briefly close, mostly distant, still ended up shaping the path that led to his arrest. Whether his suspicions about some of his Kennedy relative's involvement in his prosecution are valid or the product of years of trauma, there is a lot that is strange about this case. So is Michael just incredibly unlucky? Or is there more to this story than meets the eye? There are pieces of Michael's theories and stories that he's told me that I simply can't corroborate. Does that mean they're not true? I can't say. As you heard Michael say earlier in the series, his recovery-related way of life requires him to tell the truth or risk falling off the wagon.

I have to be honest about everything or I'm screwed. If I'm not honest, then I'm in pain.

For his friends, it's sometimes been challenging to believe this to be the case. But I'll tell you, my ex-wife used to say, I'd get off the phone, I'm like, Man, I just can't believe what that guy's going through right now.

She'd say, Oh, that's It had to be just made up.

This is David Sly, a Boston-based real estate professional who's been a friend of Michael's since the '80s. Then six months later, you'd find out it was true. I never had any reason to doubt him. But if other people heard these things, they'd be like, Well, that's crazy, or, Oh, that would never happen, or, That's not the way the world works.

Sure enough, six months later, whatever he said would be like, Yep, bang.

This phenomenon rings true to me. I'd like to share an illustrative anecdote. For years, I'd heard snippets of a story Michael likes to tell about sitting across a desk from Fidel Castro inside Havana's Palace of the Revolution, the seat of the Cuban government. He claimed he told Castro that prior to the 1959 Revolution, before the land seizures and nationalization of private property, the Skakels had owned a sprawling oceanfront estate there. Here he is telling me again.

And he looked at me.

That would be Fidel Castro.

I said, When are we going to get our house back? And he said, We nationalize that? I said, Yeah, if that's what you want to call it. He said, As soon as the embargo is lifted, you can have your house back, but not until then. I said, Yeah, well, the way I look at it, you have 40 years of rent. I said, I like your tobacco, Pay up in cohibus. He was like, Who the F is this guy?

And for many years, I thought Michael was out of his mind, surely a fabulist. And then a couple of years ago, I asked him to elaborate, and he said that it had been reported in the New York Times. So I dug around and I found it. Right there on the front page of the February 19, 1996 edition, above a story about a Citizens Energy-sponsored mission to Cuba was a photo of Michael, flanked by Bobby and Michael Kennedy beaming across a desk from Castro. The story specifically mentioned a lively conversation about the Skakela state that was nationalized after Castro came to power. So there you have it. An unbelievable Michael story that ultimately turned out to be true. And one of Michael's specific gripes relating to the Moxley case also has some evidence to back it up.

Frank Gahr stole my property. I got a call one day that Frank Gahr has come up with a search and seizure warrant with state police with guns and He demanded my property.

The property Michael is talking about here are the Hoffman tapes, a topic that still hits a nerve for him. At trial, they played a major role in shaping how the jury saw Michael. But the story of how those tapes ended up in the prosecution in his hands, is itself one of the many strange twists in this case. Author Richard Hoffman says that six months after the grand jury was convened, there was a knock on his door.

It was Connecticut State's attorney's investigator, Frank Gahr. A little guy in a black suit with a ponytail and a Massachusetts State trooper in his full regalia, smoking the bear hat and everything. Frank Gahr shows me a piece of paper with the seal of the state of Connecticut on it. And they said they had a warrant to get this information about Michael Skakel, and I invited them in. Sat them down at the kitchen table, poured them each a coffee, and we sat there. I really thought what was going to happen was I would say, Okay, fine. You came here with this, and I'll give you the stuff, and you'll see that you're barking up the wrong tree here. When I hesitated, at one point, I said, What is it that you want from this material? Gar side, and he said, Look, we can do this the easy way or we could do this the hard way.

Hoffman later testified that he believed that Inspector Gar was telling the truth when he said he had a warrant. He was not. What Gahr had was a summons for Hoffman to testify at the grand jury, not a warrant for the tapes of his sessions with Michael. But Hoffman, who says he didn't fully understand what was happening, gave them up, as well as a copy of the unpublished book proposal and a box of family mementos and photos Michael had left with him. A week later, the Boston published an article that teased a secret project penned by Michael Skakel about the Moxley case and life as a Kennedy relative.

And I called Gar. I had his card. He'd given me his card. I called him. I said, What the hell? I mean, this is a grand jury. How does this reporter suddenly have this book proposal? And he said, Well, I don't know. We got a lot of people come and go in this place. Could be the cleaners, maybe one of the secretaries. And I thought, Okay, this is not on the up and up.

This was a turning point for Hoffmann. He'd wondered at moments whether Michael's fears of persecution were valid or perhaps paranoid. He says this episode settled it for him.

I will say, here's where I began to really believe Michael. This all starts to look like the KGB.

In Michael's habeas case, the judge ruled that the tapes would have been discoverable. In other words, defense attorney Mickey Sherman would likely have lost any motions to keep them from being introduced at trial. All that to say, too bad. Tough luck. Once the tapes were in the state's hands, they were fair game. But what about after the trial? When the state vacated Michael's conviction in 2020, he requested that all of his property be returned, specifically the tapes. It should have been an easy ask. The clips that were played at trial, some of which you've heard in this podcast, are public record. But they're only a fragment of the many hours of tape that Michael recorded with Richard Hoffmann. To this day, neither the original tapes nor any copies made by the state have been returned to Michael. For a time, while Michael's case was still in limbo, the state claimed the tapes had evidentiary value. In the wake of his conviction being vacated, the state now says it's unable to find them. I asked Michael's attorney, Stefan Seeger, about it. The state has been unable to produce the so-called Hoffman tapes. They were the centerpiece of the closing.

Does that seem surprising to you? The state loses evidence. They lose evidence conveniently sometimes. But in this particular case, Andrew, I can tell you it's absurd to believe that somebody charged with the custody of the evidence in this level of a murder case that everybody in the country knows about, that a key piece of evidence, something that the state itself purports is a confession, would be left out of the lead investigator's sight in any way whatsoever. So for me to believe that Frank Gahr does not know where these tapes are, I can't fathom it. As of this recording, Michael is still in a lawsuit against Frank Gahr and the town of Greenwich to get the tapes back. Wherever you land on the question of Michael's grander theories about the Kennedy's, the Hoffman tapes serve as a that there are many questions about how this case has been handled over its long and winding history. Missing evidence, tunnel vision, unexplored leads. Martha's case is a tangle of peculiarities and unforeseen twists. In 2003, a year after Michael's conviction, it took yet another unexpected turn when a new figure emerged in the case. Someone who'd been close to the tight-knit group of Bellhaven teens at the center of this story, someone who was adamant that everything that happened in the case up to that point was all wrong.

Someone who said he had information about who really killed Martha Moxley. Next time on Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley murder. You're here today because you have information in regards to the Martha Moxley murder case. Is that correct? The police told us that they knew for sure it wasn't one person who did it because it was so brutal and it would take extraordinary strength. There's no doubt in my mind that they were involved. They were there when the murder took place. From NBC News Studios and highly replaceable productions, Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley murder is written, reported, executive-produced, and hosted by me, Andrew Goldman. Alexa Danner is executive producer, writer, and head of audio at NBC News Studios. Megan Sheels is Senior producer and writer. Rob Heath is our producer. Nora Patel is our story editor. Fact-checking by Simone Buteau and Laura Hunkadeya. Production assistance by Brenda Weisell. Sound design by Rick Kwan, Mark Yoshizumi, and Bob Mallory. Original music by John Esties. Amanda Moore is our production manager, and Marissa Reilly is the director of production. Liz Cole is President of NBC News Studios. Liz Cole is President of Thanks for listening. New episodes of Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley murder dropped Tuesdays through January 20th.