Episode description

October 31, 1975. Greenwich, Connecticut. After she fails to return home the previous night, the body of 15-year old Martha Moxley is discovered in her backyard. She has been stabbed in the neck and bludgeoned with a golf club and pieces of the shattered club are traced to the residence of the Skakels, a prominent family from the neighborhood. Decades later, one of the family’s children, Michael Skakel, who was 15 at the time of the crime, is charged and convicted of Martha’s murder. However, Michael’s conviction winds up being vacated on two separate occasions due to ineffective counsel at his trial, so he is released from prison. In 2020, the state announces that they have no plans to retry Michael, meaning there are no conclusive answers about what happened. Did Michael Skakel actually kill Martha Moxley or was someone else was responsible? Last week, in Part One of our series about this controversial murder, we shared the basic facts of the case. This week, we will attempt to analyze and break down the crime by exploring all the different theories about what happened.

Additional Reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Martha_Moxley

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-killed-martha-moxley/

https://unsolved.com/gallery/martha-moxley/

https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Martha_Moxley

http://thesuttonreport.com/The%20Sutton%20Report/campysuttontoc.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20130315150324/http://www.marthamoxley.com/news/050502gt.htm

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-skakel0522.artmay22-story.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2003/01/kennedy.htm

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ct-supreme-court/1455643.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/nyregion/skakel-gets-new-trial-in-75-killing-of-teenager-in-connecticut.html?ref=nyregion

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/30/nyregion/michael-skakel-martha-moxley-timeline.html

http://nypost.com/2017/09/17/i-tutored-a-kennedy-relative-and-wound-up-accused-of-murder/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/nyregion/michael-skakel-conviction-reversed.html

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/30/us/skakel-no-retrial-moxley-murder/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/article/skakel-moxley-murder-case.html

“The Trail Went Cold” is on Patreon. Visit www.patreon.com/thetrailwentcold to become a patron and gain access to our exclusive bonus content.

“The Trail Went Cold” is doing a weekly livestream show on Vokl every Thursday from 7:00-8:00 PM ET as part of their “True  Crime Thursday” line-up. For more information, please visit their website.

The Trail Went Cold is produced and edited by Magill Foote.

All music is composed by Vince Nitro.