Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder: A Reporter and a Detective's Twenty-Year Search for Justice

I read this book in four days; it was truly an amazing piece of work. Once again Len Levitt offers an insight that only he can. Frank Garr's input complimented the story with amazing details that where previously unknown. I have prided myself in the past with thinking I had a full grasp on the case, but after reading the first four chapters of this book it was quickly apparent that I did not. Although the book does contain the general information of the case it does far more to enlighten the reader as to the aspects of the crime and the participants of the story; there is much to be learned by this book. I felt that the review by the critics of Publisher Weekly was unfair in saying 'perhaps the book's greatest deficiency is Levitt's failure to seriously confront and refute the logical arguments made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.', this is simply untrue, there are several references in the book that address the question of Mr. Kennedy's essay, Len Levitt simply does not waste time going into great detail on the explanation of the Kennedy/Skakel propaganda machine, that asks more questions than it ever attempts to answer. I highly recommend this book to others, it does not disappoint. My hats off to Len and Frank for all their hard work over the years, their team work is the REAL reason this case was solved. Unlike others who jumped on the media bandwagon when it was time to bask in the limelight, this dynamic duo deserves the true credit and recognition for solving the murder of Martha Moxley.

The murder of Martha Moxley and its aftermath constitute one of the most disturbing crime stories of the last thirty years. Of the four books that deal with the case (one of them mine) only Leonard Levitt's was written after the 2002 conviction of Michael Skakel. There had been especially high hopes for Mr. Levitt's book, since he'd been reporting on the case longer and more effectively than anyone else. Now he has delivered on those hopes. This is a brisk, hard-nosed, highly engrossing account with much new information. It also performs the service of showing how Frank Garr, who doggedly pursued the case when his colleagues had abandoned hope, ended up solving it. Given Mr. Levitt's command of his subject, I am struck by the Publisher's Weekly review printed above. The reviewer cites Mr. Levitt's "failure to seriously confront and refute the logical arguments made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr." in the Atlantic Monthly last year. Mr. Kennedy's essay was well-structured and nicely written, which must have fooled the reviewer into believing that it was also "logical." The essay is in fact a breathtaking exercise in distortion. Mr. Kennedy smears inconvenient witnesses, ignores inconvenient facts, and molds other facts to suit his purposes. (Examples overflow; I'll mention just two: He implies that Ken Littleton, the Skakel tutor, was "inflamed and in an alcoholic stupor" on the night of the murder, an idea that no witness -- not even a Skakel -- has supported. And he writes that one of the case's original investigators, Steve Carroll, was "convinced" of Mr. Littleton's guilt when Mr. Carroll was actually convinced of his innocence.) Whatever one's feelings about the quality of evidence presented at trial, there is no reason Mr. Levitt should have stooped to answer Mr. Kennedy's feat of misdirection.

Leonard Levitt's "Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder" puts the knife into the heart of Michael Skakel. The book cuts the ground out from Robert Kennedy Jr., whose specious claims in the Atlantic Monthly dwell on the Skakel family tutor Kenneth Littleton as Martha's killer, while ignoring the fact that both Michael and Tommy Skakel lied about their whereabouts to the Greenwich police on the night of the murder. And then six months after Kennedy wrote that article, he comes up with another theory--that two black youths from the Bronx murdered Martha. What a liar. What a hypocrite. And far from having a "bias", against the Skakels as they claim, Levitt shows how it was the Skakels themselves that sowed the seeds of their own destruction as a family.

As a reporter who covered the Michael Skakel investigation for several years and is familiar with the facts of the case - and the arguments of critics like Robert Kennedy, Jr. - I can state flatly that Levitt's book is the most comprehensive telling of the Skakel-Moxley story we've seen to date. While the Publisher's Weekly critic noted Levitt's failure to address the Skakel family gardener and dispute the points in Mr. Kennedy's lengthy 2003 piece in the Atlantic Monthly, I can say with no hesitation that those points were not worth mentioning in the book. The Skakel family gardener was never considered a real suspect in 24 years. And Mr. Kennedy, who is Mr. Skakel's cousin, has been a weak champion of what he believes to be his cousin's innocence. In his 18,000-word piece in the Monthly, he pointed to a former Skakel family tutor as the real murderer. But that individual testified at trial and was introduced to the jury over several days. What's more, after Mr. Kennedy attempted to indict that tutor through the media, he then came up with a story last year pointing to two African-American former classmates of Skakel's who were allegedly in town on the night of the murder. Mr. Kennedy fails to ever mention that Michael Skakel and his brother Tommy both changed their alibis to a private investigator in the early 1990s. Levitt's book is truthful. With riveting detail, he manages to tell the real story of the Martha Moxley murder, and to finally bring the gavel down on a haunting case that went unsolved for a quarter of a century.

I picked up Mr. Levitt's book "Conviction" on a Saturday morning and couldn't put it down until I finished it the next evening. More than just a look at the investigation into the murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley and the conviction of Kennedy-cousin Micheal Skakel, the book tells the compelling story of how Mr. Levitt and Frank Garr fought tooth and nail to overcome their respective bureaucracies. Long after the case had gone cold, Mr. Levitt, an investigative reporter, tried to jump start the investigation only to find the newspaper he worked for was too timid to buck the Greenwich establishment and print his story. Mr. Garr, a detective with the Greenwich police who inherited the case, had to overcome years of missteps by his fellow cops who feared his investigation might uncover their own ineptitude. It's a tremendous read. I recommend it to everyone.