State's Attorney Attacks Skakel Strategy

September 11, 2003 -- Prosecutors filed a motion yesterday asking that the state Superior Court order Michael Skakel's defense team to hand over the names and addresses of two men who are alleged to have admitted to a friend that they killed Martha Moxley in 1975.

At the same time, lawyers for the state also issued a statement criticizing Gitano "Tony" Bryant's alleged admission to a screenwriter friend that two Bronx, NY, companions murdered Moxley on Oct. 30. They pointed out that Skakel's trial attorney, Michael Sherman, had information about the allegation during the trial and declined to use it in defense of his client.

"That we didn't see any of the Bryant allegations in the trial is hardly surprising. It only demonstrates Sherman's experience and sagacity in culling the incredible from the credible," State's Attorney Jonathan Benedict wrote.

Skakel's appellate lawyer, Hope Seeley, did not return messages seeking comment yesterday.

Bryant, who attended Brunswick School with Skakel in the 1970s, has said that he and two friends from the Bronx, NY, were in Belle Haven the night Moxley was bludgeoned to death with a golf club belonging to the Skakel family. He reportedly confided in two longtime friends, Crawford Mills and Neal Walker, that his Bronx friends wanted to attack a girl "caveman style," and that they later confessed Moxley's murder to him.

Skakel, 42, was convicted of Moxley's murder last year and is serving a sentence of 20 years to life in jail. The two lived in Belle Haven and were 15 when Moxley was slain.

Benedict added that the screenwriter, Mills, a former Brunswick Academy student, sent prosecutors a three-page fax in July 2002, titled "Little Martha." The fax, in large, bold type, gave an account of Bryant's story, but did not mention the names of the two friends. Investigators had seen a version of Mills' screenplay about the murder years before the trial when Mills sent a copy to Dorothy Moxley, Martha's mother, but that version made no mention of the Bryant story.

"We have knowledge of the original screenplay that did not mention Tony Bryant's story, but the only thing we got that did mention this new story is the three-page fax sent last summer. This office gets tips every day, and if we don't get anything that can let us pursue it, that's the end of it," Benedict said. "But I still put a cover page on it last summer and sent it right to attorney Sherman."

Sherman refused to elaborate yesterday on why he didn't use the Bryant story in defense of Skakel.

"I've always said that I stand by my conduct in and out of the court on this case," Sherman said. "Beyond that, it's not up to me to comment on this."

Mills has not returned several messages.

Meanwhile, Benedict said that Skakel's lawyers, Hope Seeley and Hubert Santos, have likely had information for more than a year detailing the Bryant story, since the three-page document was sent to Sherman last summer. He asked why the information had only recently surfaced publicly and why prosecutors were not privy to the names.

"Despite repeated requests to Santos and Seeley, and more recently to (Robert) Kennedy (Jr.), we have yet to be provided with the identities of those persons who it is now claimed murdered Martha Moxley," Benedict wrote.

Benedict said members of the prosecution have attempted to secure the names of the men, one of whom lives in Bridgeport and the other in Portland, OR, every day for a week.

"All we've heard is, 'Maybe later' or 'We've got to think about it,' " Benedict said.

Kennedy, who is Skakel's first cousin and has been championing Skakel's innocence since his June 2002 conviction, said he would be willing to give his information to the prosecutor's office, but not to State Inspector Frank Garr, who is the subject of a book being written by Newsday reporter Len Levitt. The book is expected to describe Garr as heroic for his work in securing Skakel's conviction.

"I told Frank today that I was uncomfortable handing my materials over to him because of his bias, with the book coming out," Kennedy said. "But I said I was happy to hand everything over to an unbiased team from the prosecutor's office or the state police."

Reached last night, Garr called Kennedy's statement "ridiculous."

"Is this man looking for justice or is he playing games?" Garr said. "I'm not at all surprised he's looking for any distraction to take away from the fact that his cousin murdered Martha Moxley."

Kennedy, who wrote a several-thousand-word article in The Atlantic Monthly in January asserting that there was as much evidence to charge former Skakel family tutor Kenneth Littleton with the murder as there was to charge Skakel, said he believed that the two new men in question should also be investigated.

"Listen, I don't know whether these two men had anything to do with the murder. I just know there is enough evidence here that it should have been investigated by the state when it was raised," Kennedy said.

When asked to comment on why neither the Greenwich Police Department nor the Sutton Associates, a private investigative firm hired by the Skakels in the 1990s, offered any mention of the two being in Belle Haven on Oct. 30, 1975, Kennedy refused to comment.

"I don't have to answer that," he said.

Meanwhile, Bryant, who lives in Florida, appeared to be buckling this week under the pressure of national scrutiny, according to The Hartford Courant. The newspaper reported in yesterday's edition that Bryant said the whole story had been "blown out of proportion."

He told The Courant that he stood by the 90-minute videotaped interview he gave defense investigators August 24, in which he is said to have portrayed his two friends as Moxley's likely killers.

"At no time did I say I saw what happened or know who did it," he told the newspaper.

Seeley and Santos are expected to file a petition for a new trial later this month, based on Bryant's story. -- By Lindsay Faber in Greenwich Time