[NYP] Of course, he gets away with it.He’s a Kennedy.
Forty-five years to the very day Martha Moxley, just 15 years old, was savagely beaten to death, found in a sexually humiliating pose with her pants and underwear yanked down, stabbed through the neck with a broken golf club, Michael Skakel, convicted of Martha’s murder in 2002, is now a free man, never to be retried.
Though the murder weapon matched to Skakel’s late mother’s set, though Martha had written about her unease with teenage neighbor Michael in her diary — "a real asshole . . . I really have to stop going over there" — and though Michael, after the murder, bludgeoned a squirrel to death with a golf club, then tacked its remains over a hole with tees, it took law enforcement and prosecutors 25 years to make the arrest.
In those intervening decades, Skakel was a full-blown alcoholic who wrapped his car around a tree at 17, attempted suicide at least once, allegedly confessed to multiple people that he had done something so terrible he had to leave the country, that he may have killed someone, that he climbed a tree that night and masturbated as he spied on Martha undressing in her bedroom, that he stood over her dead body that night and ejaculated. He allegedly told at least one other person that he killed Martha.
But these are Kennedys, and the arc of justice is slow to nonexistent. Ask not for shame or empathy, either. In 2000, when Skakel was finally arraigned in a Connecticut court, he had the gall to confront Moxley’s grieving mother.
"You’ve got the wrong guy," he said.