A Crime In The Clan

Today the Elan School in Poland Spring, Maine, is just that--a school. But in the years from 1978 to 1980, it was something else--an exclusive drug and alcohol clinic for children of the rich and famous. This was where Michael Skakel, 19, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy's and a son of wealth and privilege, spent two years drying out. And according to a book proposal circulated briefly last year by the now 39-year-old Skakel and writer Richard Hoffman, Elan was the scene of a flamboyant--and possibly fateful--therapy. Those who have seen the proposal for Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean say that in it Skakel describes being made to wear a sign around his neck. It read: I AM AN ARROGANT RICH BRAT. CONFRONT ME ON WHY I KILLED MY FRIEND MARTHA.

The book proposal was eventually withdrawn.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.

Once an accomplished speed skier, Skakel is amiable, a faithful member of Alcoholics Anonymous and an increasingly devout Catholic. He worked as a driver in Ted Kennedy's re-election campaign in 1994, then took a similar job with cousin Michael Kennedy's nonprofit Citizens Energy Corp. In 1997, however, Skakel talked to police about his cousin's affair with a 15-year-old babysitter. (Michael died in a 1997 skiing accident.) Soon after, Skakel moved from Massachusetts into the Florida house owned by his father in an expensive gated community. Still, Robert Kennedy Jr. told the New York Times last week that Skakel "is as honest as daylight...a genuinely good and decent soul."

He may yet defeat a prosecution hobbled by cold trails, conflicting testimony, changed laws and a quarter-century of sloppy detective work. And last week's drama notwithstanding, there may be no earthly penalty sufficient for whoever left a 15-year-old girl lying in her own blood.

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 had married Bobby Kennedy in 1950, making Rushton's seven children Kennedy cousins. Martha Moxley, pretty, vivacious and popular, became part of their crowd. (Later Dorthy found a diary entry in which Martha recounted fending off Tommy's attempts to "get to first and second base.") It was Halloween Eve, and Martha, though officially grounded for an earlier infraction, begged her mother to let her go out for pranks. Dorthy gave in.