John Montgomery Presents This Week's	January 22, 2000	Creep Logo by Alan Fraser
	Michael Skakel
	World's Oldest Juvenile Delinquent

1975. Gerald Ford was president. OJ Simpson was a professional football player. Patsy Ramsey was a teenage beauty queen. Some other evil deviates were just starting to make disco music. Things were different back then. But at least one thing was the same. Rich and well-connected people could get away with murder.

This week, Michael Skakel, 39, was formally charged with beating and stabbing 15-year-old Martha Moxley to death with a golf club in October, 1975. At the time, Michael, who was also 15, was living with his family in Greenwich, Connecticut. Martha visited his house that night and then left to walk home, which was about 150 yards away. She never got there. They found her dead body and the golf club the next day in her yard. The 6-iron was matched to a set of clubs owned by Michael's mother.

Sounds pretty cut and dried, doesn't it? All the police had to do was find out who had access to the Skakel's golf clubs, ask a few questions and nail him, right? Well, life isn't so simple in the upper echelon. Michael's father, Rushton Skakel, is the brother of Ethel Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's widow. For a few months, Michael and his older brother Thomas were the prime suspects. Then Rushton, in a show of arrogance which made him a glowing role model for John and Patsy Ramsey, decided to stop cooperating with the police. Just like that. No thanks, officer, I won't be answering any more of your questions. I'll be getting back to my croquet game now, so please don't leave those dirty gumshoe tracks on my lawn. Have a nice day.

Of course, if you or I had tried something like that, the cops would slap the handcuffs around our wrists and haul us downtown to the station house where only a full, written confession and apology would save us from having 500-watt electric cattle prods shoved far up our asses. But the police backed off for the Skakels and the investigation petered out.

So finally, after nearly 25 years, they nabbed Michael for the crime. What are the prospects that he'll actually do some time for it? Pretty dim. Consider:

• As of now, Michael is being charged as a minor in Juvenile Court, because of his age at the time of the killing.  The laws in effect in 1975 required that juvenile offenders be released at age 21. According to legal expert David Rosen, senior research associate at Yale Law School, "The only thing this guy can be prosecuted for is being a juvenile delinquent."

• The most prominent person taking credit for cracking the case is former Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman, who single-handedly screwed up the prosecution's case against OJ Simpson by committing perjury at the trial. Mark wrote a book called "Murder in Greenwich'' which says that Michael killed Martha in a jealous rage after seeing his brother Thomas kiss her. Being accused of a crime by Mark Fuhrman does have some benefits. Michael's entire defense could be, "Your honor, my chief accuser is a bigoted, evidence-planting, woman-hating, perjuring pig!"

• The only real evidence the authorities have at this point is that Michael reportedly admitted to being the killer to fellow students when he was in drug rehab in the late 1970's. Would you be able to testify in court about a conversation you had while tripping twenty years ago? I can hardly remember what I did last weekend.

• Golf club? OJ Simpson? Need I say more?