They were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

On October 30, 1975, a 15-year-old girl named Martha Moxley was viciously bludgeoned to death in the most exclusive part of Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the most exclusive communities in the United States, where rich people live in grand mansions on lush grounds and go to country clubs and yacht clubs and always feel perfectly safe. The girl’s body was dragged 60 or 80 feet and left under a pine tree near her parents’ house, where it was discovered the following day by a schoolmate.

The only thing that said Greenwich about the crime was that the murder weapon was a No. 6 Toney Penna golf club. Martha was struck so hard that the shaft broke into four pieces, only three of which were discovered at the scene of the crime. The grip part, which might have had fingerprints of the perpetrator on it, has never been found. The killer used one of the pieces, which had a sharp point, as a dagger and stabbed Martha Moxley through her neck.

For a lot of people in Greenwich, it was inconceivable that one of their own kind could have committed such a heinous crime. They talked about how some awful transient must have come in from Interstate 95 and killed the poor girl. Behind closed doors, however, a lot of people in Belle Haven, as the exclusive enclave is called, firmly believed that the perpetrator was most likely one of the brothers who lived in the beautiful residence of Rushton Skakel, a widower with six unruly sons and a daughter and a staff consisting of a tutor, a nanny, a cook, and a gardener. Tommy Skakel, then 17, was the last person to be seen with Martha, and they were roughhousing. Rushton Skakel’s very rich family had been residents of Greenwich for three generations. Martha’s parents had been residents for only a little over a year. For a quarter of a century, the murder has gone unsolved. This is not a step-by-step account of the case. This is a mini-memoir of my part in this story many years later.

In 1991, when I was covering the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in West Palm Beach for Vanity Fair, a rumor circulated around the courthouse that Willie Smith had been an overnight guest at the Rushton Skakel house in Greenwich the night Martha Moxley was killed. Although Tommy Skakel, the second son, had been considered a suspect for years, no charges had ever been brought, and the case was at a standstill. In the end the rumor turned out to be bogus; Willie Smith had not been in the Skakel house that night. But my curiosity had been aroused. “What ever happened to that case?,” I asked someone I knew in Greenwich. “Nothing,” I was told. At that point, 16 years had gone by since the murder. “Remind me of exactly what happened,” I said.

A young girl was beaten to death with a golf club that belonged to a set of clubs in the Skakel house. The Skakels had always enjoyed a bad reputation, and Tommy was thought to have been involved. “What happened to the family of the dead girl?,” I asked. They moved away. Then the father died. “Where’s the mother?” Annapolis, Maryland, was the answer. Her name was Dorthy Moxley. Somehow I felt drawn to this woman. I wrote her and asked if I could come and see her. I said I wanted to talk about her daughter’s murder. In those days she was media-shy. She did not ask me to her house. Instead we met at a coffee shop in the Baltimore/ Washington airport. I asked her why she had moved away from Greenwich, since that meant there was no one there to keep the case alive. She said she could not bear to look out her windows at the Skakel house. As she described it, I called it a house of secrets. She said she didn’t know who had killed her daughter, but she was sure that someone in that house either had done it or knew who had. She told me that the day after the murder there were limousines with out-of-state license plates parked in the Skakel driveway. In 1988 she and her husband, David, who was then head of the New York office of Touche Ross, moved with their son. John, to New York. After her husband died and her son married, Dorthy Moxley moved to a condominium in Annapolis.