Michael Skakel

She was found dead in the backyard, beaten to death by a golf club.

25 years later, a guy by the name of Michael Skakel.

who was also 15 at the time of the slaying, was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

However, he maintained his innocence, and on May 4th of 2018, the Connecticut Supreme Court vacated his conviction, and in 2020, the case was actually reopened.

Because even I got confused, like, as I was typing to make sure that I wasn't kind of messing up people's names.

But the, like, main group of friends that we're going to talk a lot about are Michael and Thomas.

Some articles called him Tommy.

Most of them call him Tommy.

We'll preview.

The author states that Ethel Skakel, the brother of the father and his wife, Anne, had seven children.

So Michael and Tommy were one of seven.

Oh.

She wasn't anywhere in the house.

Trying to tamp down her anxiety, Dorothy sent her 17-year-old son out to look for his sister, and she began calling all of Martha's friends and all of the family's neighbors, including the noisy and rambunctious Skakel family.

The Skakels were a pretty wealthy and well-known family.

They were seven kids all being raised at this time by a single father because the

mother

And they had like an 80-year-old nanny.

So she's not keeping the kids in line.

So the Skakels were well-known in this area.

Martha enjoyed things like swimming, tennis, spending time at Bell Haven Club, and even being home with her family and her pet cat, particularly, who was named Tiger.

But among her new friends were two brothers living directly across the street who were members of the Skakel family, who were extraordinarily wealthy, having made their fortune through the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation.

The family's patriarch, Rushton Walter Skakel, was also the brother of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, whose husband, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in 1968.

Now, Rushton had seven children, including 17-year-old Thomas Skakel and 15-year-old Michael Skakel.

Their mother, Anne Reynolds Skakel, had died of cancer in 1973, and following her death, Rushton struggled with alcohol and frequently traveled, leaving much of the children's supervision to the household employees.

So, the Skakel residence became a popular gathering place for the neighborhood teenagers, including Martha.

Both Thomas and Michael appeared to be romantically interested in her, although their affection wasn't always welcome.

Martha even documented some of these interactions in her own diary.

The three then headed off into the night in the direction of the home of a couple of neighborhood boys, a couple of teenage boys, a couple of very rich, very well-off brothers.

Um, th- this was Thomas Skakel, who was 17 years old and went by the nickname of Tommy, and Michael Skakel, who was 15 years old and went by Michael.

The two boys' father was actually out of town on this evening, and so he hadn't...

He had hired a tutor to, like, come over and spend time with the boys and to be, like, tutoring them in some sort of math, kind of babysitting them.

She was hanging out with her friends.

She was socializing.

She was hanging out with the, the Skakel brothers.

She ended up at one point in a car, um, with some friends and with Michael Skakel, and it seemed like Michael was really, like, into Martha and was, like, spending his evening trying to win her favor, and she was a little bit flirty, but she wasn't, like, completely sold on him, and that's probably because she had eyes for his older and c- cooler and maybe cuter...