The Trail Went Cold - Episode 351 - Martha Moxley (Part 2)

The Trail Went Cold

Robin Warder

True Crime, Tv & Film

4.5 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2023

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	And the Oh, And the Hello everyone and welcome to our latest episode of the Trail Went Cold.
0:40.0	I'm your host Robin Warder and today we're going to be presenting the second of our two-part series about the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley.
0:48.0	So it's always been tradition for our podcast to spend the month of October covering mysteries which have some sort of Halloween slant to them,
0:55.8	and this particular case is one of the most famous examples of that
0:59.4	because Martha Moxley was believed to have been murdered sometime during the late evening hours of October the 30th and her body was discovered on Halloween.
1:08.0	Of course it's such a complicated story that I felt the need to split the whole thing up into two parts. We released part one last week on
1:15.2	October the 25th and it outlined the most important facts of the case, so if you haven't heard that
1:19.8	episode yet, I'd suggest you go back and listen to it.
1:23.0	We're finally releasing our conclusion today on November the 1st,
1:26.0	and I'm going to be discussing a lot of the information I previously shared,
1:30.0	as well as providing some additional details about the case, and sharing my own theories and analysis.
1:36.0	So as a brief recap, Martha Moxley was a 15-year-old girl who lived with her family in the affluent
1:42.0	Bellhaven neighborhood in Greenwich, Connecticut.
1:45.0	On the evening of October 30th, 1975, Martha went out with friends and was last seen hanging out at a resident of a family called the Skakles, who pretty much lived directly across the street from the Moxley's. Martha was supposedly seen heading home at around 9.30 p.m. but she never arrived, and her body would be found in her family's backyard at 12.45 p.m. the following day.
2:08.3	She had been stabbed in the neck and bludge into death with a golf club and pieces of the murder weapon would be found near Martha's body and were soon matched to a set of clubs from the Skaco residents.
2:19.0	Two of the Skaco brothers, 17-year-old Tommy and 15-year-old Michael, would come under suspicion, but it would not be until
2:26.4	over 24 years later when Michael was finally charged with Martha's murder.
2:31.6	It was theorized that Michael attacked Martha in a fit of rage
2:34.2	because she was more interested in his brother, but the case against him was
2:38.5	very circumstantial and based largely on incriminating statements Michael was alleged to have made over the years.
2:45.0	Regardless, Michael was still found guilty by the jury and received a sense of 20 years to life in prison,
2:51.0	but after serving only nine of those years his conviction was overturned
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Robin Warder, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Robin Warder and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.