Dorthy Moxley, who crusaded half her life for justice in the murder of her teenage daughter, Martha, in Greenwich, Conn., in 1975, but was never fully vindicated in her belief that a young neighbor related to the Kennedy family had killed her with a golf club, died on Tuesday at her home in Summit, N.J. She was 92.
Her son, John, said the cause was complications of the flu.
For more than four decades after the gruesome death of her daughter, Mrs. Moxley remained a compelling figure in the sprawling story of a classic mystery that captured world attention with its wealth and celebrity, its idyllic setting, its endless wrong turns and dead-end investigations, its inconclusive courtroom dramas, and an outpouring of books, films, documentaries and publicity.
Throughout those years, Mrs. Moxley had no standing except as a witness and on the moral high ground of a mother devastated by the loss of her child. But she was a tenacious presence in the case, talking to journalists and anyone who might help further the investigations, pushing detectives for new leads, and eventually championing the prosecution of a prime suspect, Michael C. Skakel.
In an emotional roller coaster, Mrs. Moxley seemed to triumph in 2002 when a jury found Mr. Skakel guilty of the murder. He served 11 years in prison. But in a series of court reversals, he won his freedom in 2013, was ordered back to prison and won another appeal in 2018.
In 2019, the Supreme Court rejected prosecutors’ attempts to revive a case in which witnesses had died, evidence had been lost and the chances for a new trial seemed remote.
“You can still go on,” Mrs. Moxley, her cause seemingly lost, told The New York Times. “You don’t have to bury your head in the sand. You get up and greet the day. You still have your loved one in your heart, and you don’t ever stop crying.”
On Oct. 30, 2020 — 45 years to the day after Martha Moxley’s murder — Connecticut prosecutors announced that Mr. Skakel, 60, would not face another trial, effectively ending the case. Proving his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt would be impossible without witnesses, the prosecutors said. Mr. Skakel had no comment.
Mrs. Moxley, then 88, said she still believed that Mr. Skakel killed her daughter. “I will never forget the day they found him guilty,” she said. “It gave me all the sense of justice I needed. I don’t need any more. I don’t believe the Skakels do, either.”
The daughter of a Detroit autoworker raised in Depression-era poverty, Mrs. Moxley and her now prosperous family were newcomers in 1974 to Greenwich, one of America’s wealthiest towns, a community of old-money estates, yacht clubs and winding woodland lanes. They had moved from California when her husband took charge of the New York office of the accounting firm Touche Ross & Company.
Until Oct. 30, 1975, Mrs. Moxley was as anonymous as any millionaire matron could have been: the wife of J. David Moxley, a partner in his globally prestigious accounting firm; the mother of Martha, 15, and John, 17, who were popular students at Greenwich High School. Theirs was a family quietly secure in their mansion on Walsh Lane in the gated, privately guarded enclave of Belle Haven.
It was the evening before Halloween, often called Mischief Night: Neighborhood children rang doorbells and threw toilet paper at houses, and some teenagers drank, took drugs and had sex in the leafy shadows. Mrs. Moxley saw her daughter alive for the last time at about 7 p.m., Martha left home with two girlfriends. The friends later told the police that they had sprayed shaving cream on mailboxes.
By 1:30 a.m., Martha had not returned. Her mother called friends, and then the police, who searched but found no trace of the missing girl.
The Mystery Begins
Early the next day, Mrs. Moxley went across the street and knocked at the Skakels’ door to ask if the family had seen her daughter. The Skakel brothers, Michael, 15, and Thomas, 17, were nephews of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy, the assassinated former United States senator and presidential candidate. Michael answered the door.
“He looked hung over and was barefoot,” Mrs. Moxley told The Times years later. “He said he hadn’t, and that’s my last and only memory of him.”
Later that morning, Martha was found face down under a tree in her family’s backyard. Her crushed head was so bloody it was impossible to tell she was blond. She had been bludgeoned with a steel golf club so ferociously that it broke into three pieces. Part of the shaft had been used to stab her in the neck, and another piece was missing.
Martha’s pants and underwear had been pulled down, but an autopsy found no signs that she had been sexually assaulted. There were no fingerprints and no eyewitnesses. Evidence at the scene showed that she had been killed near the driveway and dragged 80 feet to the base of a pine tree.
Her diary mentioned recent encounters with Thomas and Michael Skakel. And the friends who had been with Martha said they last saw her about 9:30 p.m., talking with Thomas Skakel on his lawn.
The golf club was traced to the Skakel home, and the two brothers and a newly hired live-in tutor, Kenneth Littleton, all became suspects. Investigators learned that the brothers had been seen drinking with Martha on the night of her murder, but the police failed to safeguard the crime scene, never sought a warrant to search the Skakel house and never found the golf club fragment.
Thomas and Michael Skakel gave alibis for the estimated time of the killing, 10 p.m. But after cooperating with investigators for months, the Skakel family refused to answer any more questions. No one was charged, and the case languished for years. There was talk of police bungling and whispers of a cover-up, but no proof was offered.
At the time of the murder, Michael was a troubled 15-year-old alcoholic. From 1978 to 1980, he attended the Elan School in Poland Spring, Maine, a private institution for youths with mental health and substance abuse problems. In therapy sessions, students there said, he blurted out hints that he had killed Ms. Moxley, but he did not actually confess.
The Moxleys eventually sold their Greenwich home and moved to Manhattan. In 1986, they moved to Annapolis, Md. During the Republican presidential primaries in 1988, Mr. Moxley was a senior adviser for the candidacy of Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. Months later, he died of heart failure at 70. Mrs. Moxley subsequently moved to Chatham, N.J., to be near her son.
While there were no major developments in the murder investigation for years, public interest was sustained by newspapers and television programs. Mrs. Moxley, politely but firmly, continued to talk publicly about the case. Several journalists and detectives published books that produced no breakthroughs.
Reviving the Case
The case lay mostly dormant until 1998, when Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles police detective who was prominent in the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, published “Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?” In that book, Mr. Fuhrman concluded that Michael Skakel was the likely killer and suggested that he had acted in a jealous rage after seeing Martha kiss Thomas.
The book renewed interest, and Mrs. Moxley appeared in a 1999 television documentary, “A Murder in Greenwich: The Martha Moxley Case,” on the A&E network’s “American Justice” series.
A one-man grand jury, Judge George N. Thim of Bridgeport Superior Court, interviewed 50 witnesses, including former Elan students, and issued an arrest warrant for Michael Skakel, who surrendered to the Greenwich police in January 2000 and was charged with Martha Moxley’s murder. He was 39 and living in Florida with his wife and small son. He posted $500,000 bail and was released, pending trial.
Dorthy Moxley vowed to attend the trial. “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away,” she said.
In 2002, nearly 27 years after the killing, Mr. Skakel, recently divorced and living in Windham, N.Y., went on trial in Norwalk, Conn., charged on the basis of what prosecutors mostly called self-incriminating statements — some of them attested to by classmates at the school for troubled teenagers that he had attended, others overheard by people, like a barber, who said they sounded like the confessions of a guilty conscience.
The prosecutor said Michael Skakel had talked about the Moxley killing obsessively for years, even when the investigation seemed stalled and forgotten. The judge said that the law permitted a jury to consider a “consciousness of guilt” that reflected culpability. The jury convicted Mr. Skakel, and he was sentenced to 20 years to life.
For Mrs. Moxley, who had testified about the anguish she felt on the night of the murder and for years afterward, it was clearly a triumph. She wept and hugged her son. Later, standing in the rain, she thanked well-wishers and journalists who had covered the case, and she called the sentence reasonable.
“I wanted to find justice for Martha,” she said. “That’s what this is. It’s all about Martha.” But, in an acknowledgment that the case was a tragedy for two families, she added, “I have empathy for the Skakel family.”
The case was far from over, however. Several appeals by Mr. Skakel were rejected over the ensuing decade. But in 2013, a Connecticut judge granted his request for a new trial based on his claim of an inept defense by his lawyer. After 11 years in prison, he was released on Nov. 21, 2013, on a $1.2 million bond.
Mrs. Moxley expressed disappointment, as well as confidence that the decision would be reversed. Mr. Skakel’s family voiced satisfaction and said they would fight for complete vindication.
In 2016, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published “Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit,” in which he explored what he called a botched police investigation and an unfair trial, and offered alternate theories of who killed Ms. Moxley.
“I just don’t care for Robert Kennedy Jr.,” Mrs. Moxley said. “I’m convinced Michael Skakel was the one who swung the golf club that took Martha’s life.”
In a dizzying turnabout in 2018, the Connecticut Supreme Court first reinstated the Skakel conviction, saying the evidence against him had been “overwhelming” and his legal representation adequate, then months later the same court vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial, saying that Mr. Skakel’s lawyer had failed to contact a key alibi witness.
Prosecutors were left to decide whether to retry a 43-year-old case in which evidence had been lost and witnesses had died. Another trial seemed doubtful.
“I am surprised and not particularly happy about this,” Mrs. Moxley said. “But we’ll handle and do what we have to do.”
But a day later, speaking to The Times, she sounded tired and, perhaps, at the end of her long quest for justice. She was 86.
“I’m just so conditioned to this happening, and then something else happening,” she said. “If something else happens, it won’t surprise me in the least.”
But, she continued, “I don’t feel as though that’s my job now. We got him arrested and convicted and put in jail. It isn’t my job now. It’s enough. It’s enough.”
Born Into Poverty
Dorthy Moxley was born Dorthy Elaine Jolgren on June 5, 1932, in Iron River, Mich., one of two children of John W. Jolgren and Emma (Lundwall) Jolgren. When Dorthy was 4 and her brother, Sheldon, was 9, the family moved to Rochester, Mich., near Detroit, where the father, a tool and die maker, worked in the auto industry, mostly for Dodge.
The Jolgrens were poor. Their small house had no indoor plumbing, but Mr. Jolgren installed running water and a bathroom, a garage and other rooms. He also planted grapevines and fruit trees that yielded peaches, plums, apples and pears, while his wife made jams and jellies each summer.
“I had a wonderful, wonderful childhood,” Mrs. Moxley told Timothy Dumas for his 1998 book, “Greentown: Murder and Mystery in Greenwich, America’s Wealthiest Community.”
She was a good student and a popular cheerleader at Rochester High School. At Michigan State University, she majored in education and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1955. She moved to California and became a fifth-grade teacher in Long Beach.
There she met Mr. Moxley, a junior naval officer, whom she married in 1956. John was born in 1958 and Martha in 1960. In addition to her son, she is survived by two grandchildren.
After Mr. Moxley’s discharge, the couple moved to Lawrence, Kan., where he had earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Kansas. She taught school while he earned a master’s in business administration at the university in 1958. He soon joined Touche Ross in San Francisco, where he rose to managing partner.
In 1974, as he took charge of the firm’s flagship New York office, the Moxleys moved into the privileged life of Greenwich, and bought their mansion across the street from the Skakels.
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