‘Touch DNA’ may identify Moxley killer
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the state’s motion to review the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision last May to vacate Michael Skakel’s conviction for the murder of Martha Moxley. As a result, the state faces a difficult choice — whether to try him again, knowing that, in view of the disappearance of some critical evidence, death of some key witnesses and discovery of some exculpatory evidence since his trial in 2002, there would be a low likelihood of a conviction, or accept dismissal of the charges against him.
Martha, like Michael 15 at the time, was attacked from behind by someone wielding a golf club that had belonged to Mrs. Skakel in the driveway of her home in the Belle Haven section of Greenwich as she returned from the Skakels’ backyard across the street on Halloween eve 1975. There was no forensic evidence pointing to Skakel — no blood stains on his clothing, no fingerprints (the golf club was broken in the attack and the club handle and shaft was lost in the initial investigation), no eyewitnesses. He was convicted largely on the basis of a theory about the time of the murder that ignored important facts in the case and the since-discredited grand jury testimony of a heroin addict.
Knowing the odds of obtaining a conviction for a crime committed more than 43 years ago in the absence of any forensic evidence are vanishingly low, and knowing also that, as she said after the Supreme Court’s decision, Martha’s mother is grateful for the continued commitment and support of the prosecutors and will accept whatever they decide to do, the state may well decide, if reluctantly, to allow the charges to be dismissed.
But before deciding whether to try Skakel again or accept dismissal of the charges against him, the state needs to do something else first: review all of the existing evidence in the case and, in particular, make full use of recent advances in the collection and analysis of DNA to determine if, even now, more than four decades later, it’s possible to identify the killer.
Perhaps the most persuasive demonstration that new advances in DNA can solve very old cases came from Massachusetts in late November with the announcement by the Middlesex County District Attorney that investigators had identified the man who sexually assaulted and bludgeoned to death Jane Britton, a
23-year-old Harvard graduate student, in her Cambridge apartment on Jan. 7, 1969. Using the latest advances in DNA technology, investigators in the Massachusetts State Police Crime Lab were able to obtain from evidence in the case the Y-STR profile, consisting of short tandem repeats on the malespecific Y chromosome, of the murderer. The profile matched one in the national CODIS DNA database from a man who died in 2001 and whose DNA had been matched to evidence in the rapes and murders of two women in Boston in
1972 and 1973.
As she walked up the driveway to her house, Martha was hit from behind with the golf club — hit so hard her skull was fractured and the club broken into several pieces. She veered off the driveway onto the lawn and, after going a short distance, either fell down or was knocked down and then stabbed through the neck with the broken-off handle and shaft of the club. Her body was dragged 80-to-90 feet and hidden under a large pine tree.
One of the most important advances in DNA technology in the last decade has involved the ability to harvest the skin cells that are left on an object when a person touches it and then obtain the person’s DNA profile from those skin cells. Martha was 5-feet, 5inches and weighed 120 pounds. Given her weight and the distance she was dragged, the killer undoubtedly left ample amounts of his “touch DNA” on her clothing where he grasped her as he dragged her — most likely, on the blue jeans she was wearing in the area between the knees and the cuffs.
Perhaps, like some of the other vital evidence in the case, the clothing has disappeared. And if the state still has it, it has no doubt been handled by many people over the years. Nevertheless, if the state still has her clothing, the killer’s “touch DNA” may still be on it. If so, we may yet find out who killed Martha Moxley.