World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (24 page)

There was other evidence that pointed to the Skakel boys. Martha’s girlfriends reported seeing Tommy with Martha before they left for home that night. Looking for clues in Martha’s diary, Martha’s mother told police that her daughter had written about Tommy’s sexual advances towards her, and how she had tried to repel them. Although the police searched the Skakel home, it was only a cursory visit. The police never issued a search warrant, which would have enabled them to do a proper search of the house without the owner’s permission. Later, commentators criticized the police’s conduct, claiming that Rushton Skakel’s high-up connections and political influence had stopped them from going further.

Instead, the police followed up leads on other suspects, such as a tutor living with the Skakel family, a neighbour who lived close by the Moxleys; and several drifters who had been near the area on the night of the murder. However, these clues led nowhere, and by the 1980s, the investigation into Martha Moxley’s murder had come to a grinding halt. In Belle Haven, it became an unmentionable subject: perhaps because of the Skakel influence, or perhaps because the wealthy inhabitants of this seemingly peaceful, well-tended residential area could not bear to remember that they were not, as they thought, safe from danger.

Teenage Alcoholics

It was not until another Kennedy – William Kennedy Smith – became the centre of another drama that memories about Martha Moxley were jogged. In a high-profile case that attracted a great deal of media attention, Smith was accused of raping a woman in Palm Beach, Florida. He was acquitted, but rumours began to circulate that he knew something about the Moxley murder. In 1991 an article about the Moxley case, written by journalist Len Levitt, appeared in a local newspaper. Two years later, a novel by Dominick Dunne entitled A Season in Purgatory appeared, which was based on Martha’s murder. The novel proved to be a best-seller. The author went on to meet Mark Fuhrman, whose notorious role in the O.J. Simpson case received enormous publicity. Fuhrman decided to look further into the Moxley case and, in 1998, published Murder in Greenwich. In it, he named Michael Skakel as the prime suspect.

Opinions as to why the murder had not been solved years before varied. Some felt that the wealth and influence of the Skakel family had prevented the investigation from going further, while others pointed to police inexperience as the cause. After all, Greenwich was not a place where murder happened very frequently – at the time of Martha’s murder, there had not been a murder in the area for thirty years. However, all agreed that now, the case had to be given a boost, and accordingly, in May 1998, a request for a grand jury investigation was granted.

A Fit Of Jealousy

Under this new initiative, over fifty witnesses were called in, some of them pupils and staff of a rehabilitation programme Michael Skakel had taken part in at Elan School in Maine. He had apparently confessed to Martha’s murder during that time. Other witnesses, such as the tutor in the Skakel household at the time of the murder, talked about Michael’s disturbed behaviour. He was reported, on one occasion, to have killed a squirrel when out golfing, and pinned it, crucifix-like, over a hole. By his own admission, he had been an alcoholic from his early teens, and had suffered abuse from his father. He had been devastated by his mother’s death, and had felt that she was the only person holding together the dysfunctional Skakel family.

As it emerged, from an early age both Michael and his older brother, Tommy, had been extremely disturbed, difficult children. In all, there were seven Skakel children, and there were numerous family problems throughout their childhood. Rushton Skakel had left his children to their own devices, and the older ones among them regularly drank and smoked pot. On the night of Martha’s murder, Tommy and Michael had been drinking heavily in front of their younger brothers and sisters, and their tutor Kenneth Littleton. Martha and her friends had visited, and she and Tommy had begun to make amorous advances towards each other.

What also transpired was that, after the murder, police initially investigated Tommy as a suspect. He took two lie detector tests, one of which he failed, and one of which he passed. However, after this, his father Rushton refused to make Tommy available for further investigation. The fact that the police accepted this, and ceased their enquiry, had attracted criticism at the time. However, it later became clear that the police were following up the wrong suspect. It was Michael, not Tommy, who killed Martha, in a fit of jealousy because she appeared to prefer his older brother.

The results of the grand jury investigation were made public on 19 January 2000. Skakel was then arrested on a charge of murder, and brought to trial two years later, on 4 May 2002.

The jury took a total of four days to reach a verdict, but when they did they found Michael Skakel guilty of murder. He was sentenced to a term of life imprisonment.

The Murder of the Heiress

The case of Helen Brach, the heiress who mysteriously disappeared in 1975, is one of the most surprising in United States legal history. With no witnesses, no body, and no leads for police to follow up, the investigation went cold shortly after her death – even though, clearly, someone had killed her for her money.

Then, in a surprise twist, the case was warmed up many years later, and the man responsible for her murder finally brought to justice. Chillingly, however, it was the fact that the heiress left so much money sitting in the bank, rather than that she herself was missed, that had prompted a re-investigation of the case.

The Hat-Check Girl And The Millionaire

Helen Brach was born Helen Vorhees, and came from a working-class Midwestern family in Ohio. She lived most of her life in workaday circumstances, without much money and was working as a hat-check girl when she met her millionaire husband-to-be, Frank Brach. Frank was the son of Emil Brach, an immigrant who had come up with a new method for making caramel, and had founded a massively successful candy empire, E.J. Brach and Sons. His son Frank proved an astute businessman, and subsequently had made millions for the company since then.

When Frank and Helen met, Frank was in the midst of a messy divorce. Not long after he divorced, he and Helen were married. The couple had no children – Helen was forty by the time she married, for the second time, and had no children by her first brief marriage. When Frank retired, the Brachs divided their time between their home in Chicago and a rented property in Palm Beach, Florida. Helen was generous with her new-found wealth, particularly with respect to her family, and bought her mother and brother new houses to live in. However, she did not flaunt her money or parade it in high society, as many other women in the same position would have done.

In many ways, she remained a down-to-earth Midwesterner, who was careful not to spend too much on unnecessary fripperies.

Helen and Frank Brach lived comfortably, and uneventfully, for twenty years, until Frank died in 1970, at the age of seventy-nine. This left Helen with a fortune of twenty million dollars. Typically, she continued to live quietly, keeping in touch with her friends and family by phone, and caring for her pet animals. Her two dogs, named Candy and Sugar, became devoted companions, and she went to great lengths to make sure that they were properly looked after. In a rare show of extravagance, when the dogs died, she had them buried in an expensive pink marble grave. Her love of animals also led her to give money to charities, such as the Chicago Zoo.

The Shady Horse Dealer

Although not interested in the glitzy parties of Chicago’s rich elite, Helen did take an interest in racing, and after Frank died, expressed a wish to own some horses. She got to know Richard Bailey, the owner of a stables and country club. He was a charming, good-looking man but he had a reputation for shady dealing. He also had a reputation as a ladies’ man of the worst kind: he would wine and dine rich old women, particularly widows, and extract money from them by asking them to buy his horses, most of which cost considerably less than he sold them for. He also often asked the women for a temporary loan which he never paid back. He stopped at nothing to gain their confidence: he would pretend to fall in love with them, have sex with them, even propose marriage, although he already had a wife. He made a specialty of choosing women who were ill, lonely, and even dying. There were more than a few elderly ladies who were smitten by his charms, so he made a good living, but those who knew how he operated despised him.

When Richard Bailey met Helen Brach, he must have thought he had hit pay dirt. Brach was considerably richer than any of his previous conquests, and obviously lonely. She enjoyed his company, and entrusted him with choosing her new racehorses for her. He began by selling her three horses, all of which were worth much less than she paid for them. However, with Brach, it seems, he bit off more than he could chew. She was not stupid, and although she lived in a very private way, her fortune made her a powerful, well-known figure in Chicago society. Once she realized that Bailey was conning her, she threatened to expose his actions and report him to the police. Exactly what passed between them then, no one will ever know, but the outcome was that Bailey plotted to have her murdered.

The Heiress Vanishes

On 17 February 1977, Helen Brach went for a check-up at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota. This was the last time a reliable witness saw her alive. Then, according to her houseman, John Matlick, she flew to O’Hare Airport, where he picked her up. However, there is no record of her buying a plane ticket for the flight. For the next few days, while she prepared to go to Florida, no one heard from her, which was unusual for a woman who liked to chat daily to friends and family on the phone. Matlick then claims that he drove her to the airport for her flight to Florida, but that she did not have any luggage or a flight reservation, which again did not tally with the normal habits of this well-organized woman. Two weeks later, not having heard any more from her, Matlick reported her missing. So did another person – her brother, Charles Vorhees.

Suspicion immediately fell on Matlick and Vorhees, both of whom stood to gain from Brach’s will. The pair admitted that they had destroyed her diary, which might have yielded valuable information about the days leading up to her disappearance, but said that she had asked them to do this should anything ever happen to her. Both their stories appeared questionable, but the police did not manage to find enough evidence to charge either of them, and dropped the case. Without a body, or any concrete information that could lead to finding out what had happened, the investigation began to dry up. Nobody seemed to care very much what had happened to Helen Brach, and her disappearance was soon forgotten. Yet her money – of course – was not, and it was the investigation into her accounts that finally brought the truth to light.

Everett Moore, Helen Brach’s accountant, was a trustworthy man with an intimate knowledge of his client’s day-to-day spending habits. He wanted to administrate Helen’s estate, but the Continental Illinois Bank also felt it had a claim to this position. In the end, the court appointed an outside guardian, John Menk, to preside over the investigation. However, Menk did not get very far: Vorhees and Bailey both refused to talk, and since this was not a criminal investigation, there was no way that Menk could make them.

A Lucky Break

In 1984, almost ten years after her disappearance, Helen Brach was declared dead. Her estate was divided between the Helen Brach Foundation, Charles Vorhees and John Matlick. A meticulous accounting process began, presided over by Moore, and it was found that Matlick had embezzled thousands of dollars out of the estate after Brach had disappeared. In September 1993, Matlick was ordered to pay the estate back. Further investigations into the estate’s accounts showed that Bailey had also defrauded Brach, and this time, once his name came up, the law did not let him go.

In 1989, an investigation had begun into the horse-racing business in Chicago, and in the process, Richard Bailey’s name had come up. His frauds over selling the horses to Helen Brach soon became known to the investigators, and the case was taken up by Assistant US Attorney Steven Miller. His approach, he announced, was to ‘follow the money and solve the murder’. By a lucky break, he and his team found a veterinarian, Dr Ross Hugi, who had had dealings with Richard Bailey, helping him in his scams. Through Hugi, they found out about an infamous Chicago family, known as ‘The Jayne Gang’, who had been running organized crime in the horse business since the 1930s. Their leader was Silas Jayne, who was widely feared throughout the business as a man who would stop at nothing, including murder – he had even been responsible for the killing of his own brother. And one of Jayne’s associates turned out to be none other than Helen Brach’s erstwhile friend and horse dealer: Richard Bailey.

The Right Man Brought To Justice

This was an extraordinary twist to the Brach case that no one could have foreseen. Quite separately, Bailey’s name had come up in another investigation. For the next five years, Miller and his team worked day and night to make the evidence against Bailey stick in the Brach case. Finally, in 1994, they were able to bring Bailey to court, charged with soliciting the murder of Helen Brach.

Initially, Bailey did not appear unduly troubled by the charge, since there was so little concrete evidence in the case against him. But gradually, as the list of elderly women whom he had defrauded was read out in court, his innocence began to appear more and more questionable. Witnesses also took the stand to testify that he was a violent person, as well as a con man.