L.A. Rage Spurs Look For Justice Can Wealth And Power Truly Influence Justice?

When Michael Skakel, scion of wealth and cousin to the powerful Kennedy clan, gave himself up on Wednesday to face charges in the quarter-century-old murder of Martha Moxley, some of the seeds of his fate lay a continent away.

For there, in Los Angeles, the rage engendered in 1995 by the O.J. Simpson verdict spurred two men to re-examine the Moxley case and explore whether money can truly trump justice in this country.

Those men, author Dominick Dunne and former L.A. police detective Mark Fuhrman, rekindled public interest in the 1975 Moxley murder by writing about the case so compellingly that, in retrospect, their questions about the justice system seem to have led inexorably to Skakel’s arrest.

Dunne’s “A Season in Purgatory,” published in 1993 as fiction, is a thinly veiled account of the teenager’s slaying that excoriates the corrosive influence of wealth and power. While covering the Simpson trial, Dunne encouraged Fuhrman to investigate the Moxley case, which Dunne also revisited in a Vanity Fair article.

“Dominick told me about the case,” said Furhman, who now lives in Sandpoint, Idaho. “I was done with `Murder in Brentwood,’ ” a book he wrote about the Simpson investigation, “and I was looking for something to do. He said, `I’ve got you something.”’

Fuhrman, whose inflammatory racial attitudes may have influenced the Simpson verdict, retired from the L.A. force in August 1995. By 1998, he had written “Murder in Greenwich,” a analysis of the Moxley case in which he identified Michael Skakel as the likely killer.

A month after Fuhrman’s book was published, a Connecticut grand jury was convened to re-examine the Moxley case. New evidence had emerged, including significantly altered alibis from Michael and Thomas Skakel.

The grand jury, consisting of a single Superior Court judge, also is believed to have heard testimony that Michael Skakel allegedly told classmates at a Maine school for troubled boys that he had committed murder.

Stephen Carroll, one of the first Greenwich detectives assigned to the case, said he believes the initial team of investigators were dazzled by wealth and power.

“I think initially we were intimidated by the power and the wealth that’s there,” Carroll said. “If they didn’t live where they lived or had the relatives that they did, the investigation probably would have been much more aggressive.”

Greenwich police at first refused to believe that such a “heinous crime,” one in which the 15-year-old Moxley was bludgeoned to death by a golf club, Carroll said.

Detectives at first were given free run of the Skakel home by the boys’ father, Rushton, Carroll said. But because of the informal approach, and without a search warrant, the evidence gathering was less scrupulous than it would have been done at the home of a more ordinary resident, the detective said.

Then, later, when police began to focus on Thomas Skakel as their primary suspect, the investigation virtually “shut down,” Carroll said, when a high-powered attorney hired by the family told police they would face harassment charges if they continued to question the youth.

The family, once one of the richest in the country, stopped cooperating with police completely in 1976.

Timothy Dumas, a former Greenwich reporter who wrote “A Wealth of Evil” about the case, also believes wealth and aura impeded the investigation.

“The ‘70s were a lot different from the ‘90s,” Dumas said. “Police were more respectful then of the prominent citizens of the town, and they poked about much too gingerly, I think, when it came to the Skakels.”