One set of biological swabs was logged into evidence, then quietly forgotten for decades. A possible blood smear inside the victim’s home was wiped away before anyone tested it. Both details sit at the center of new claims about what did, and did not, happen in one of Connecticut’s most scrutinized murder cases.
An Unsolved Killing in Affluent Greenwich
In the fall of 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was found beaten and stabbed with a broken golf club in the yard of her family home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The case remained unsolved for decades until a member of a prominent Kennedy-connected family, Michael Skakel, was arrested in 2000 and convicted in 2002 of her murder. The conviction relied heavily on witness accounts and alleged confessions rather than forensic evidence.
Years later, Skakel’s conviction was overturned by the Connecticut Supreme Court, which found that his trial lawyer had provided ineffective assistance. Prosecutors ultimately chose not to retry him in 2020. Martha Moxley’s killing remains officially unsolved.
In a recent episode of NBC News‘ podcast “Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley Murder,” and in coverage by Fox News and Connecticut Insider, Skakel argues that crucial evidence was mishandled or withheld and that investigators focused on him while ignoring other unresolved leads.
A Vacated Conviction and a Public Reframing
Skakel, a cousin of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was 15 at the time of the killing and lived in the neighboring Belle Haven estate. A Connecticut jury convicted him in 2002, and he was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.
In 2013, a state judge granted him a new trial, finding that his trial attorney, Mickey Sherman, had failed to present a potentially significant alibi witness. The Connecticut Supreme Court first reinstated the conviction in 2016, then reversed itself in 2018, again citing Sherman’s deficient performance. Skakel was released from prison in 2013 and has remained free since.
Speaking on the NBC podcast, he described the public narrative around him in blunt terms. “Being Michael Skakel has been a blessing and a curse. I’ve met some proudly great people in this world,” he said. “At the same time, because of what this trial and this case did to me, people only know what they know. They only know what that box in their living room tells them. And most of it has been bold-faced lies.”
Skakel maintains his innocence and now points to a mix of overlooked household observations, rediscovered forensic samples, and conflicting witness statements as evidence that the official probe was incomplete.
The Maid, the TV Room, and a Wiped Stain
One disputed element comes from the Moxley home itself. According to accounts described on the podcast and summarized by Connecticut Insider and Fox News, the family’s live-in maid, Theresa Tirado, told police she found Martha’s brother John Moxley’s bed empty on the morning after Martha disappeared. She heard loud crashes inside the house at around 9 a.m. and again around 11 a.m., and she later saw John and a friend, John Harvey, watching television in the family room.
Tirado reportedly told investigators that when she later entered the TV room, she noticed smear marks on a surface that were believed, after the fact, to have possibly been blood. Unaware of any forensic significance, she cleaned the marks. There is no indication in available public reporting that photographs or samples of that stain were taken at the time.
John Moxley is said to have corroborated parts of Tirado’s timeline regarding his and Harvey’s movements that morning, but told investigators he did not hear any crashes and suggested the smear could have been a food stain. According to Fox News, the reference to a possible bloodstain appeared in a pretrial memorandum by attorney Linda Kenney Baden, yet was not pursued by Skakel’s trial lawyer.
By the time Skakel was prosecuted in the early 2000s, Tirado had long since moved on, and she died in 2012. Her statement survives only in investigative summaries and secondhand accounts. Whatever was wiped away in that TV room cannot now be tested.
Conflicting Accounts in the Moxley Timeline
The podcast and related reporting revisit a document known as the Sutton Report, a confidential investigation originally commissioned in the 1990s by a Skakel family legal team. That report examined various potential suspects, including members of both the Skakel and Moxley households.
Connecticut Insider reports that the Sutton investigators listed John Moxley as a person of interest after noting contradictions between his early statements to police and later testimony. According to those accounts, John told police he had searched for Martha outside for roughly two and a half hours, not returning home until around 6 a.m., and that he slept on the TV room sofa. In 2002 testimony, however, he said he only looked for his sister for about 15 minutes.
The Sutton team also flagged a claim by John Harvey that John Moxley called him the morning Martha was missing so they could search a pile of brush, a detail the report described as unusual. Investigators later concluded that even if the boys had searched the yard more thoroughly that morning, they likely would not have discovered Martha’s body, which was found under a tree on the property.
The private investigators ultimately concluded that John Moxley was not the killer. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed that conclusion in his book “Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit.” At the same time, the Sutton Report text, as quoted by current coverage, stated that “a few unresolved points still demand clarification and examination.”
None of these internal defense findings were presented to jurors during Skakel’s original trial, which focused on his alleged statements at a controversial behavioral facility, the Elan School, and on changing accounts of his own movements on the night of the killing.
A Handyman, Golf Clubs, and Fading Memories
The golf club used to kill Martha was traced to a set belonging to the Skakel household. That link was one of the central facts that initially kept attention on the Skakel family even as years passed without a charge.
The NBC podcast and Fox News reporting identify another little-scrutinized figure around the Skakel home, the family’s handyman and gardener, Franz Wittine. According to these accounts, Michael Skakel said Wittine was the only person who claimed there were no golf clubs lying on the Skakel lawn on the day after the killing, despite other witnesses saying there were. In a 1991 interview, Wittine reportedly told investigators he did not recall making such a statement.
Wittine left the Skakel household about a year after the murder. He is reported to have passed a polygraph examination regarding the case in 1991 and died in 1997. Polygraph results are not generally admissible in court and cannot confirm guilt or innocence, but they are often referenced in investigative narratives.
With principal witnesses either dead, unavailable, or struggling to recall details from the mid-1970s, the record around who saw what, and when, has grown more fragmented with each passing year.
Missing Swabs and a Rediscovery in State Storage
The most concrete example behind Skakel’s claim that authorities withheld or mishandled evidence involves forensic swabs taken from Martha Moxley’s body. According to the NBC podcast team, as reported by Connecticut Insider and Fox News, investigators collected swabs from Martha’s groin area in 1975 to check for signs of sexual assault.
Those samples were never introduced at Skakel’s trial. By the time journalists examined the file years later, the swabs were widely believed to have been lost. The NBC production team contacted Connecticut forensic officials and learned the evidence was in fact still in state custody. The swabs were then sent for modern DNA testing in 2018 and were reported to contain only Martha Moxley’s DNA.
The results neither implicate nor exonerate any particular suspect. They do, however, underscore a gap between what jurors were told in the early 2000s and what was physically available to the state. Skakel has framed that gap as proof that key material was kept from his defense or from the public narrative. At a minimum, the rediscovery confirms that an important piece of potential forensic evidence sat unused during the trial that sent him to prison.
Alleged Admissions and Chemical Truth-Serum
Another contested thread involves what Michael Skakel may have told family members and doctors in the years after the killing. According to the recent reporting, a woman named Cissy Ix recalled a conversation with Rush Skakel Sr. in which he said his son Michael had confided that he might have killed Martha.
That recollection sits alongside a separate episode in which Michael reportedly underwent an interview under the influence of sodium pentothal, sometimes described historically as a “truth serum.” Psychiatrist Dr. Stanley Lesse concluded from that session that Skakel had not killed Martha. Courts today treat such drug-assisted interrogations with significant skepticism, and there is no consensus that they produce reliable accounts.
Skakel has also said he felt deeply unsure of his own memories after time at the Elan School, a controversial private facility where, according to multiple former residents, confrontational tactics were used to extract confessions and police past behavior. Several of the statements that helped convict him came from people who said he admitted involvement while at Elan.
Public Narratives, Competing Victimhood, and Ongoing Gaps
The closing episode of “Dead Certain” featured Amanda Knox, who was wrongfully convicted in Italy of the 2007 murder of her roommate and later fully exonerated. Knox spoke about what she called a “guilty until proven innocent” mentality and a “single victim fallacy” that recognizes only one harmed party in complex cases. In the Moxley case, public attention has long shifted between Martha’s family and the man once convicted of killing her.
What remains stable is the limited forensic record. The Connecticut Supreme Court has described the physical evidence as sparse and largely circumstantial, with no DNA or fingerprints tying Skakel or any other named individual directly to the attack. The golf club link to the Skakel household, while significant, does not narrow the field to a single person.
Skakel’s conviction was vacated in 2018. In 2020, the state announced it would not seek a retrial, citing the age of the case and the difficulty of obtaining reliable testimony so many years later. No one else has been charged with Martha Moxley’s murder.
The rediscovered swabs that show only Martha’s DNA, the wiped-away stain in the TV room, and the conflicting accounts preserved in the Sutton Report all sit in the record today. They neither identify a new suspect nor definitively clear any of the figures long discussed in public. Nearly fifty years after Martha Moxley was killed, the official file still contains more contradictions than conclusions.
