Oct. 30, 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the horrific murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Belle Haven in Greenwich, Connecticut. Found lying under a pine tree in her backyard the next morning, she had been repeatedly bludgeoned with a golf club — and stabbed with a broken piece of it — after a night out looking to cause some pre-Halloween mischief with friends who lived in the neighborhood. Her pants and underwear had been pulled down, though police found no evidence of sexual assault. The brutal slaying rocked the town, where such crimes were basically unheard of.
It would be 27 years before Michael Skakel, a childhood neighbor of Martha’s and relative of the Kennedy dynasty, was convicted of the crime, but that verdict was thrown out in 2018, deepening a macabre mystery that has remained a source of fascination due to the gruesome details of the slaying and the powerful families involved. Now, half a century after Moxley’s death, an explosive new podcast from NBC News Studios and Highly Replaceable Productions is questioning every conclusion that law enforcement, Greenwich residents, reporters, and true crime buffs have drawn about what transpired that cold October night in 1975.
Over a dozen mesmerizing episodes of Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley Murder, veteran journalist Andrew Goldman unravels the narrative from the beginning, with unprecedented access to an archive of case materials as well as candid accounts from people close to the Moxley and Skakel households — and, in a first, revealing interviews with Michael himself. Rolling Stone has the exclusive trailer, offering a sneak peek into this gripping tale of a quiet community turned upside down and put under a microscope.
It took more than a decade to bring Dead Certain to life, and it shows in the depth of Goldman’s reporting. He had to work with the faded memories of certain sources and do without the perspectives of many players who have died since the Moxley murder first seized the national consciousness. It certainly wasn’t an easy undertaking. “There have been incredibly low moments during this when I didn’t think that I was going to continue,” Goldman says. “It feels a little like victory from the jaws of defeat.”
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At the outset of the series, Goldman explains how he, like many others, had long been convinced of Michael Skakel’s guilt in Moxley’s brutal slaying (hence the title of the podcast). A Connecticut native himself, and intrigued by stories that invoked the so-called “Kennedy Curse,” he had always maintained a keen personal interest in the case, and embarked on his own investigation after Skakel’s cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., hired him in 2015 to ghostwrite a book arguing that Skakel had been wrongly accused. When Goldman did finally sit down with the man who had spent more than 10 years behind bars for the infamous Greenwich murder, the conversation didn’t go the way he expected after the countless articles and TV news segments that portrayed him as the entitled, cold-blooded scion of a well-connected family.
“I found Michael to be very much different than the character portrayed in the media,” Goldman says. “He’s funny, and he’s a little off the wall. He’s ultimately a little damaged. But Michael is somebody who I think has desperately wanted to tell his story, and has become somewhat distrustful of the media in general, so it took a great deal of time to earn his trust. He is one of the most unvarnished, unrehearsed, honest subjects that I’ve dealt with before — honest to a fault. And I think that you’ll probably see that his honesty plays a part in the story as well.” Goldman adds that listeners of Dead Certain will hear how his relationship with Skakel evolved in the course of their interviews, “and how my feelings have changed about him, mostly for better, sometimes for worse.”
In the podcast’s early episodes, Goldman recounts the ways that an investigation into the Moxley killing by local police was thwarted at almost every turn, with one theory after another yielding no viable suspect for arrest. But in time, two teen brothers who lived nearby, Thomas and Michael Skakel, were each considered as the possible killer, in part because the golf club used as the murder weapon belonged to a set owned by their family, and Thomas had been the last to see Moxley alive. That the Skakel boys became part of the story made it all the more sensational, as they were nephews of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
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Nevertheless, the case went ice cold after a few years, and was only revived in the 1990s by another Kennedy family scandal as well as two books from major figures in the O.J. Simpson trial: one was a fictionalized account of the Moxley murder published by the Vanity Fair crime writer Dominick Dunne in 1993, before the Simpson media circus, and the other was released afterward, in 1998, by former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman. Both painted Michael as the likely killer, with Fuhrman’s account relying on materials from a private investigation commissioned by Rushton Skakel, the brothers’ father, which found that they had both changed their stories about the night of Moxley’s murder. (Interviews with Fuhrman also feature prominently in Dead Certain.)
A new law enforcement probe, launched in 1998, led to Michael Skakel finally being charged with the crime in 2000. He was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison following a trial in which two of his former classmates at an abusive reformatory school in Maine testified that he had confessed to the murder. (One even claimed he had said, “I am going to get away with murder. I am a Kennedy.”) A lengthy appeals process began, with Skakel’s new legal team eventually convincing a judge in 2013 that his original defense counsel had been inadequate, after which he was released on bond and granted a new trial. More legal challenges followed from the state, which at last relented in 2020, declining to retry Skakel.
Goldman’s advantage over commentators including Fuhrman and Dunne, he explains, is that with Skakel’s conviction vacated, he could delve into “his entire case file,” including police reports, interview recordings, and other evidence used in the prosecution. “In high-profile murder cases like this, writers are going to be sort of constrained by their sources, and they’re never going to have the full picture,” he says of the copious, often sensationalized media coverage leading up to and during Skakel’s trial. “I had access to much, much more information. The information is so vast that I think it’s impossible for one brain to handle it all.”
“I think it’s impossible not to become obsessed with this story,” says Alexa Danner, executive producer of Dead Certain, which premieres on Nov. 4, with new episodes available weekly. “Every time you uncover one piece of information, you’re pulled in a different direction.” She notes that contrary to most true crime sagas, “the trial is almost the midpoint in the story,” which includes “sources of interest that span five decades and multiple generations,” making for endless rabbit holes and baffling twists, not to mention a daunting pool of potential suspects.
While younger listeners unfamiliar with the case will find themselves utterly absorbed in its multiplying leads and maddening resistance to any kind of resolution, those who remember the events will find their impressions challenged, particularly those about Skakel. Though routinely depicted in the press as a rich, spoiled brat, Goldman successfully humanizes him as someone who survived a tough upbringing, addiction, and institutional abuse before he was charged with a crime he continues to insist he didn’t commit.
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Whether you believe him about that depends, of course, on your own point of view, and Dead Certain wrestles mightily with the unknowable, questioning our ability to ever get to the truth. Goldman has studied the Moxley murder with an intensity that few if any have ever matched, and even he can’t be sure what really happened back in 1975.
“This one keeps me up,” Goldman says. “After 10 years of working on it, I’m still changing my mind about things.”
