Tony Bryant Speaks Again

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Default terms at mintmobile.com In the days after Michael Skickle's trial, Martha Moxley's mother Dorothy made the rounds in the media, expressing gratitude and certainty about the verdict. A youre sure that Michael Scagel killed your daughter? Do you have any doubts at all? I have not one tiny thread of doubt that Michael Scagel did this. No question in my mind whatsoever none Absolutely none . Who would deny a mother this kind of closure? She had, after all, suffered from And following her husband's death in nineteen eighty eight, taken up as her life's work the quest to bring Martha's killer to justice. But not everyone felt quite so resolved as Mrs. Moxley did about what had just happened in Connecticut Superior Court. And, as fate would have it, on her press tour, Mrs. Moxley would run smack into someone who felt very strongly that the wrong man had been convicted for her daughter's murder. One morning in June 2002, Dorothy arrived at the General Motors building in Midtown Manhattan to appear on CBS's The Early Show. A handsome, 40-year-old network audio engineer came over to attach a small microphone to her blouse. As he fiddled, he introduced himself as Crawford Mills from Old Greenwich. A third generation of Mills with the same name, he went by trace, three in Spanish. Mills had gone to school at Brunswick with the Scaco boys and knew the core group of Bellhaven teens. His name even appeared a few times in Martha Moxley's diary. He was close friends with Neil Walker, the younger brother of Martha's best friend Margie Walker. Here's Margie. Crawford was one of my brother's best friends. Um, he was so brands student also, and he was in all the school plays . Growing up, he was sort of an actor, considering himself actor, writer, that type of thing. In fact, Mills told Mrs. Moxley that morning at CBS, Margie had written her a letter mentioning him several months before the trial. Mills asked if she'd read it. Dorothy shook her head, confused . Mills, who'd been waiting for such an opportunity, launched into an explanation. There was another suspect in Martha's killing, he said. Actually, two of them. Mills told her that he'd been trying to get investigators to listen to his claims, to no avail. As he told his story, Dorothy Moxley looked understandably stricken. She'd likely not expected to be confronted on set by a stranger pushing an alternate theory about her daughter's mur der. Immediately after her morning show apear, Mills said she complained to his bosses about what he'd done. Here's Mills in a recorded telephone conversation that would later become an exhibit at one of Michael Scakel's appeals. Again, the audio isn't perfect. Shortly after his encounter with Dorothy Moxley, Mills said, he got kicked out of the building. That is, fired. Mills was at his wit's end. For the last year, Mills had felt like the invisible man. He'd later claim he'd reached out to both prosecutor Jonathan Benedict and defense attorney Mickey Sherman, even to the judge, trying to get their attention. None of them had followed up, and now his efforts to share the story had apparently cost him his job. In one last Hail Mary, he reached out to the press. I called the New York Times. Mill said the Times interviewed him, but when he tried to follow up, the papers stopped responding. You know, at this point I threw up my hands . It was perhaps understandable. As far as most people, the media, law enforcement, the public were concerned, the case was closed. So many people w anted it to finally be put to rest . But then, in January 2003, six months after Michael Scakeel was found guilty and Crawford Mills was escorted out of CBS, Michael's first cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, as you learned in the last episode, had bonded with Michael in the 80s over their respective recoveries, authored a long piece in the Atlantic Monthly called A Miscarriage of Justice, decrying the verdict and arguing that Ken Littleton was the far more likely killer of Martha Moxley. In the late 1990s, Michael had sworn off his Kennedy Ken entirely, but Bobby had attended Michael's trial briefly and eventually emerged as one of his staunchest advocates, writing in the Atlantic, quote, I support him not out of misguided family loyalty, but because I am certain he is innocent. Crawford Mills devoured the Atlantic Peace. Bobby Kennedy, he thought, had gotten one major thing right about the case. Michael Skickle hadn't killed Martha Moxley. But Mills was sure it wasn't Ken Lyttelton either. I'm Andrew Goldman. From NBC News Studios and Highly Replaceable Productions, this is Dead Certain, the Martha Moxley murder . In his apartment in Lower Manhattan, a few blocks from the pit where the World Trade Center had stood just eighteen months before, Crawford Mills typed a fax address to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The fax machine in the New York offices of the Atlantic Monthly Word . The coversheet pleaded. Will you please be kind enough to see that Mr. Kennedy receives the enclosed statement? I have been trying to make this information known for over a year now. Mills Facts to Bobby read. I realize that what I'm about to tell you may at first sound absurd, but if you will take 30 seconds to read this letter, I'll be succinct. I went to school with Michael Scakel. We shared many friends. One of those friends, Mills wrote, was Tony Bryant. You may have heard of his cousin, Kobe Bryant. Mills wrote that Bryant, Tony, not Kobe, though I've not been able to formally confirm theed family connection, had recently confided in him that he had been in Bellhaven on October 30th, 1975, along with two of his friends. And Bryant was certain that he had unreported evidence leading straight to Martha Moxley's killer. Or rather, This Tony Bryant, who'd given Mills the tip, in addition to being close with Mills, had also back in 1975 spent a lot of time with the Bellhaven teens. Definitely knew Tony Bryant. He was a frequent visitor at our house and you know really nice guy with a big smile and g you know gentle nature . Bryant had been a star athlete while at Brunswick, had graduated from undergrad and law school, and was currently a small business owner in Miami with a wife and young family . In the fall of 2001, a few weeks after 9-11, Mills got a concerned call from Bryant. He hadn't heard from Bryant in years, but Mills lived near the World Trade Center, and his old friend wanted to check in. They caught up and discussed the upcoming Scakel trial, which was much in the news. Now that the case has been transferred to adult court, this may be the first time we hear Michael Scakel officially plead not guilty. Mills mentioned that in the late 1980s, he'd actually written a screenplay about the murder called Little Martha, but had little luck selling it. That he'd worked as an entertainment lawyer in Hollywood, and a script that he'd written for the Chuck Norris series, Walker Texas Ranger, had made it to air. So Mills asked Bryant, would you be interested in giving notes on or even collaborating on Little Martha with the hopes of selling it? Bryant said, sure, send it to me. Mills did and waited for the Hollywood gears to crank up. Bryant never did do any work on that script, but he called Mills back sometime around Christmas. Your screenplay got it all wrong, Bryant told him, and then said he knew who really killed Martha Moxley . What Bryant had to say was a totally new theory of the case, involving not one but two suspects. He believed the two friends he'd been with in Greenwich the night of Martha's murder were the killers. Turns out Mills had actually met these two guys. He'd been introduced to them in Greenwich right around the time of the murder. One of them had given him the creeps. Mills would later say he had a dead eye, you know? There was something wrong with the kid. And all you had to do was look at him He's a scary kind of guy . As soon as he heard Bryant's story, Mills decided he had a responsibility to get the word out. If Michael Skickle wasn't Martha's killer, that meant an innocent man was just months away from being tried for murder. But there was one problem . Tony Bryant didn't want to come forward. He'd later say that he thought there was no way Michael Skickle would be convicted, and he wanted to protect his business and family. Keep my name out of it, he told Mills. Mills agreed at first. But as Michael Skickle's trial date approached, he began sharing Bryant's story and his name with anyone who would listen, including Neil Walker, who in turn shared it with his sister Margie. So I said, somebody should know about this, and you know, is it okay if I talk to them? Though Margie didn't testify at Michael's trial, she says prosecutors periodically called or questioned her about the case as they were preparing for it. And so I went and told the uh prosecutors at the time. I know this sounds quite That about a month before Michael's trial began, she personally took the story to both Inspector Frank Garr and Michael's defense attorney Mickey Sherman. She said Gar was dismissive. As for Sherman, based on earlier episodes, it might not surprise you to learn how he reacted. And he said, Oh no, no, you know, don't worry about it. I'm defending Michael and uh that's just extra information that I don't need to get into. At Mill''s urging, Margie even wrote a letter to Dorothy Moxley, the one Mills would later mention that fateful morning at CBS. But Dorothy never responded . Nobody listened. Seemed like no one ever would. The train to convict Michael Skagel had already left the station. And then, in early two thousand three, Crawford Mills faxed that letter to Bobby Kennedy. Bobby wasted no time calling Mills, who vented his frustration that Bobby was the first person to pretty dar disturbing that nobody wants to even investigate this . Sure it sound like an idiot like no one would listen to me, but that's not the point. I mean the point is this is this is the first story I've heard of anyone saying they've done it, and they don't want to hear about it. For Mills, Bobby taking an interest must have felt like being handed a cold drink after a two-day desert hike. On the phone with Bobby, Mills explained that he considered Tony a friend. He was so hell-bent on getting the story out because he believed him. Why wouldn't he? I don't understand why Tony would tell me this unless it's like you know, why why would anyone say this unless they wanted some kind of strange uh uh attention, you know. Mills finished his tale and waited. Then he heard Bobby ask. So do you think that uh Tony Bryant would be willing to talk to me? Mills said he thought so. Less than a week later in Miami, Bryant's cell phone rang. Tony, the voice said, This is Bobby Kennedy. Bryant, though still reluctant to get involved, shared his story with Bobby. Bobby was stunned. What Bryant told him was game changing. Bobby immediately called Michael's appeals attorney, Hope Sealy, who enlisted Vito Callucci, Mickey Sherman's investigator, whom you heard from earlier in the series, to travel down to Miami to get an official interview. This was August 2003, only a little more than a year after Michael's trial. The Scakels and their attorneys thought that if they could get this story on the record, they could use it to appeal Michael's conviction. But Bryant was not particularly enthusiastic about talking with Callucci. He didn't want anything to do with the case. He said he didn't like Michael Scacel . He said his mother didn't want him to get involved in it. Finally he agreed to meet with me when then a couple of times he would call me and cancel and um I kept saying, you know, we gotta do this, we gotta do this. Finally, Bryant agreed to a date. Sunday, August 24th, 2003, at the Wyndham Grand Bay Hotel in Miami . Calucci waited in the lobby for Bryant to arrive. A half hour pass ed. Then another half hour. And then yet another. He was now about an hour and a half late, and I'm saying, oh, is this guy canceling again? This is ridiculous. But then there he was in the lobby. Callucci finally got a look at this elusive Tony Bryant. He was a tall, over six feet and good-looking, 42-year-old with a distinctly athletic bearing. He looked prosperous. didn't want it videotaped. I finally convinced him. He said, Well, I guess it's all gonna come out anyway fine. I told him, I said, y you you help yourself by having a videotape so nobody can prove you said something differently and he agreed to do that. The conversation that unfolded would later become a centerpiece of Michael Scakel's appeals. Callucci began with the basics. Can you please state your full name and spell it, please. Hitano Pierre Bright. You're here today because you have information in regards to the Martha Moxley murder case that goes back to the 1970s. Uh, is that correct? That is correct. And then over the next hour and four minutes, out came the story. Tony Bryant grew up in Chicago, the son of Barbara Bryant, a single mother of seven, and a successful producer of educational films. Back when the Oscars had a category for them, Bryant won one. In 1971, Tony spent a school vacation week in Greenwich with friends of his mother and attended classes at Brunswick. Tony liked it. Brunswick liked him and his talents on the baseball and football fields. So, starting in the fall of 1972, Tony moved in with the family friends and enrolled in the sixth grade. Went to Brunswick for approximately three years. When Barbara Bryant moved from Chicago to Manhattan, her son left Brunswick and moved back in with her, enrolling as a freshman in the Charles Evans Hughes High School on West 18th Street in Chelsea, an institution which couldn't have been more of an adjustment from Woodsie Preppy Brunswick. School in New York. We're not talking about uh Greenwich, Connecticut. There were Boy Scouts at the school, and if they were, I didn't know what they meant. He's not exaggerating. In 1980, a student was shot in the buttocks in front of Hughes in a gang incident Not long after, the city closed the school entirely when teachers picketed over having to do daily battle with kids in a school with such rampant disciplinary problems. In the fall of 1975, 14-year-old Tony began hanging out with two fellow Hughes students, Adolf Hasbrook and Burr Tinsley. Like Michael Scakel, Hasbrook was 15, Tinsley a little old I was probably the smallest of the three yet, six feet, maybe hundred and sixty, hundred seventy pounds. How about the other two guys? About they were bigger than you? Yes. Yes. Uh bird was probably six two , six-3 and Adolf was 6-3-6-4 . Now an important question. Adolf is a black fella, that is correct, right? Um how about Burr? Burr is a uh I would say he was a mixed descent, um probably Indian and Caucasian, or there may be some Asian blood. How did the three years come about to let's say hang around the Greenwich area? Uh well it it 's all initiated through me. Okay. Um I still had friends in uh Greenwich and uh one weekend we decided to go up to Greenwich and hang out and they liked it and they met some people that they liked and so we made it sort of like almost a weekly th ing. Bryant introduced Hasbrook and Tinsley to his Greenwich pals, including Crawford Mills. They also became friendly with a younger kid, Jeff Byrne. As you may remember, it was 11-year-old Jeff, who, along with Helen Ix, slinked out of the Skakel Yard on mischief night after Martha and Tommy's driveway flirtation became uncomfortable. Bryant said Adolf Hasbrook first laid eyes on Martha in September 1975. I think the first time he met her was when uh they have uh a street fair in Greenwich at the end of uh middle or the end of September. Okay. And they close off the main street and they sort of have a street fair.. Okay AF always had a thing. He had met Martha previously. And he had a thing for her. He really liked her. Do you remember him ever approaching her to ask her either out or make a play for her or anyt Okay. Do you remember any kind of uh responses that Martha would give to him? Um she was always sort of cordial, but she sort of blushed him off real kind of nicely. Okay. You know, we' allre friends here, blah blah blah. And she was always that way. She wasn't that would let you down hard. She'd let you down gently. Bryant said that Martha's gentle rebuffs did not deter Hasbrook, who seemed particularly fixated on making something happen with her. Seemingly whether or not she was interested. Uh it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. Could these chilling words have been uttered by one of Martha's real killers? Chine is changing the way people bank with fee-free banking built for you. No overdraft and monthly fees , up to $1, 150 in annual rewards. And with a chime card, you get 5% cash back in a category of choice, like gas or groceries. Chime is not just smarter banking. 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That's ramp.com slash trial To realize the future America needs, we understand what's needed from us. To face each threat head-on . We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines In his 2003 videotaped interview with investigator Vito Callucci, Tony Bryant said that as the fall of 1975 wore on, Haswork became increasingly graphic describing his yearnings. A warning to listeners, some of the language that follows is both misogynistic and violent. Now let me ask you now and you know, we need you to to the best of your recollection to say what you remember him saying, no matter how vocal it was. Because this is important . When the f the sh and he went to go game So you mentioned before something about getting her from behind and dragging her? Yes. Uh are you saying dragging her by her hair or what? Definitely by her hair. That's what the whole concept is saying this. Yeah, but going caveman meant, you know, grabbing and pulling off and not just picking up is pulling off . Late on the afternoon of October 30th, 1975, Bryant said. He and his two New York friends met up at Grand Central. We left from New York on a train. Uh we went into Bell Haven. Probably got there 630, 64 0 . Tony said they stopped at a house in Bellhaven, that he knew how to stock refrigerator in the garage, and collected some refreshments to go . Okay . Okay. And uh we we we took about three six packs that banged. Okay. Maybe a little bit more. Okay . At this point, the group's numbers began to swell. The Burns lived across the street right here. This is the Burns house. Okay. And we went by there and we picked up Jeff. That's 11-year-old Jeff Byrne. And then uh we started to do a little issue. We had toilet paper and shaving cream. We smashed pumpkins. We threw toilet paper over the lines. We shaved and soaked up some windows. How many of you were were doing this? Oh gosh. Do you remember anybody else like any of the girls in the area? Well we saw some of the girls. Then we it was like sort of a revolving door. Right. We sort of ran into them in the back of there's a big mead behind this house here. The mead, Bryant told Callucci, was an undeveloped lot in Bellhaven that abutted the Skickle property . That was sort of like our collection place to sit and smoke cigarettes, smoke some marijuana and drink beer. Okay . The parents couldn't see but it was a big enough space to where if someone did cle get close she could scatter and run and no one could catch you really . Bryant began sketching out the area on a piece of paper. I've seen the aerial maps. What he called the mead absolutely existed in 1975 . Bryant's recall of its size and location relative to Bellhaven houses isn't perfect, but it's impressively accurate. The mead, Bryant said, allowed for concealment and evasion. And if the woman I uh I'm trying to remember the police and police patrol uh uh Bell Haven, I can't remember his name exactly. But he we we would get there because we would position ourselves because we knew when he made his round so we would sort of hide off and go off behind the walls or into the bushes so he couldn't see He said that at this point, another major character from the crime scene had made its entrance. The possible murder weapon. The group had walked through the Skagel's yard on their way to the mead . I think you mentioned in one of these uh reports something about the golf club. Golf . Everybody touched that club. I should say those clubs. Everybody in Bell Avenue touched those clubs. We used to uh hit balls behind the house. Okay. And we used to also hit balls in cars. Whose clubs were these? Skakkel's clubs, okay. Well where would you get them from? Just pick them off the back porch. They're just laying around. You can walk in triple or whatever . This is important. Exactly one source, the Skagles handyman, Franz Watin, had told police in April nineteen seventy six that there were no clubs on the lawn on October 30th. He said he'd been out and seen none. But several of the Bellhaven kids I've spoken to have noted that the Skakels Yard, ball field, and pitch for a near feral brood and their friends was consistently littered with sporting equipment, golf clubs among them. I asked one time Bellhaven teen Peter Kumar Swami about the possibility. You might remember Kuma from earlier episodes, describing the Skakel Boys and how magical a girl Martha was . So it seems like the idea that this could have been a weapon of opportunity seems plausible to you that somebody could have picked up a club from from the lawn. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean there was probably literally I'm surprised there weren't four or five clubs laying around the freaking yard. I may have critiqued Greenwich Police Chief Stephen Barron for his handling of the case in its earliest days. to think so. That night that Martha died, did anybody walk around with a golf club? I picked up one, right. Byrne picked up one, Adolf picked up one, Jeff Burns picked up one, and we were like goofed around. They they were using 'em as uh as sort of like walking sticks. Bryant said that as he and his New York friends got drunker and higher out there in the mead, the more uncomfortable he became. It was also getting late, close to 9 p.m. I know in some of your comments to Bobby Kennedy something triggers where you want to get away from these guys. Well I had been in trouble last summer. Okay. And I gotten arrested in Greenwich for uh being a a little ali en. So my mother told me that I had to catch the last train. Bryant, along with a group of other teams, had been arrested for an incident that involved pulling down signs along the road. He knew he couldn't get in trouble again. And they had made some statements also that, you know, we just gotta get into something. I'm I'm not going out of here unsatisfied. Who said that? Very it ain't off. What did you tend what did what did that mean? That's sad as well we've been talking about this night. We've been talking about the caveman. Okay . And so this is the night that Martha died. This is the Martha. She died that night and this is the the the kind the kind of uh conversation that's been going on since we got on the train. So three or four hours already. Okay. Both both when you were s uh sober and now and the got a little bit more exacerbated because they were like where are the bitches? Okay. And so they got a little bit more out of hand. Bryant said that shortly af ter nine, increasingly uneasy with the conversation and expected home, he announced that he was gonna catch the last train into the city. home. Is it because your mother said you have to be home a certain time or is it because of the actions of these two other guys? I had to go home regardless, but their actions helped me make my decision a lot easier. Did Adolf and Burns stay in Bellhaven that night? Yes, they did. They stayed with the Burns. They did. Yes, you know that for a fact? I know that for a fact. You could stay in their house and they would never know though. Okay. The parents would never know. Okay. It was a huge house. They told you they stayed there? Yes. They did. And Jeff told me that they'd also spent the night that day. Okay. So Jeff told you that they stayed there and Adolph and Bird told you they stayed in Bellhaven at the Burns house. That's correct. Before I left, they were like, I said, what you guys gonna do? Well we're gonna stay at the burns . Okay, I'm out. Bye. See you. In that Miami hotel room, Tony Bryan had just recounted that less than an hour before Martha Moxley was last seen alive, he left two high school friends , Adolph and Burr, in Bellhaven, drunk, high, and talking about taking a girl by force. Vito Callucci pressed him for more details. Okay, so you just said I'm out of here and you left. I left. Okay . When was the next time you saw them? I saw them that Monday. The following Monday. Okay. And uh it was it was not a pleasant experience because there was overtures made about well I got mine . Okay . And who said that? Uh Anoff said it to me that day and then Byrne aroundabout way says, Yeah, we we did what we had to do and blah blah blah. You gotta expand on that. It's it's it's tough. Uh I mean whatever it we did. We we we achieved the came in. They said that. Yes both of them? In different situations, yes. Okay . So do you believe that they killed her? Either the two of them? Or possibly uh I think they were definitely involved. Okay. Adolph and Burr. Yes. There's no doubt in my mind that they were involved. I think they Well we know they they were there. Oh no. There's no no d , they were there when the murder took place. Colucci then posed the question, I imagine you're probably asking right about now. Through all those early years, why didn't you come forward to anyb ody ? For one thing, I was afraid of being automatically pinned in as a suspect. My family didn't have money to defend me from a lawsuit that, you know, it'd be easy. If they could convict Michael's fake on circumstantial evidence, I think I would be an easier conviction than Michael. My mistake in judgment is uh I mean I I sat on this story the whole time during the trial because we there's no way there's no way we ever thought that Michael Skinker would get convicted. Bryant would later claim that in the days after the murder, he shared the story with his mother. Keep your mouth shut, she told him. Neil and Tony have talked over the years and Tony's mother seemed to verify the story that he was out there and um she was terrified of what was going on and and didn't want Tony to ever go back to Greenwich or anything. Could Bryant's story be true? When Callucci and I spoke in 2023, I asked him if Bryant seemed credible. Oh he seemed very credible because he he named specifics. And for me, just as a side note, of all the statements that I've taken over the years, both as a cop and man manyy, as a private detective, it was the best statement that day. But Bryant didn't just sound credible. There were also some tantalizing hints in the police reports and interviews that back up Bryant's story and suggest whats you might call some real there . After Martha was found, her body was removed from the scene wrapped in two blue sheets. The Connecticut State Police scanned those sheets for trace evidence and discovered a few hairs, which they sent to off the FBI's crime lab. On December 5th, the lab weighed in officially on one of the collected hairs like this quote, a dark brown to black head hair possessing Negroid characteristics. There was a logical explanation for the presence of a hare having black characteristics on that sheet. One of the pair of youth officers who was first to respond to the crime scene was black, Daniel Hickman. So naturally, Csop sent a sample of Hickman's hair to the FBI, as well as hair from the son of Ethel Jones, the Skakel's black cook who lived in servants' quarters. But the FBI ruled out Hickman and Jones as the source of the unidentified hair. So whose head had it come from ? And there was another mysterious hair recovered on the other blue sheet, one that had never been reported in the press. When the state crime lab sent it off for analysis before trial in 2002, the scientists reported back that the donor had an Asian background. Recall Bryant said he thought Tinsley might have some Asian ancestry, although that's never been confirmed, and obviously Tinsley didn't of his DNA for testing in the case. Then there was the crime itself. Not only did the attack suggest great strength, but Martha was dragged 80 feet to be deposited under the tree in the corner of her property. Could this even have been accomplished by a solitary attacker ? Greenwich investigators wondered this themselves for a certain period of the investigation, according to Martha's friend Helen Ix, who sat for numerous interviews with cops over the years. The police told us that at one point they knew for sure it wasn't one person who did it because it was so brutal and it would take extraordinary strength. Tell me about that. Wait, when when did that Solomon and Gar or Yeah it was Solomon? Solomon for sure. Helen's husband Dan sitting in on the interview also weighed in. Yeah, and they said it was definitely two people. Do you remember when the when that meeting might have been? Uh late eighties. Yeah, I would say late late eighties, early nineties. Yeah. And they sat you down and they were reinterviewing you and they said Yeah, they said it was definitely two people. Definitely. And they had experts, you know, confirm that. There was no possible way that one could have done it . By the time the grand jury was convened in nineteen ninety-eight, the multi ple suspects' theory seems to have been breezily dismissed. But for years it was the dominant thinking about the case. Both Dorothy Moxley and Dominic Dunn had said so in media appearances in the years before Michael Scakeel's arrest. Do you think two people were involved here? I think at least two. I mean it could have been more. Martha Moxley, once killed, was taken from one location and put into another. Very hard to do with one person.. Mrs Moxley and Dunn, of course, were hinting at some combination of Skackle Brothers and Ken Littleton, not Tony Bryant's friends from the city. But the point stood. The brutality and ferocity of the crime suggested more than one person's involvement. As for the identity of these multiple potential suspects, other details left by Martha herself seemingly corroborated elements of Tony Bryant's story. In a diary entry from September of 1975, she mentioned going to a block party on Greenwich Avenue, which sounded a lot like the party that Bryant said was where Hasbrook first got a look at Martha. Tony is mentioned in other entries, as are Tony's friends. Still, none of this really proved anything. Ultimately, Tony Bryant's account was just one guy's story. On a Wednesday afternoon, two weeks after his interview with Tony Bryant, private I Vito Callucci rolled up to a modest single-family home in a working-class neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Adolph Hasbrook's house. Riding shotgun was Chris Steele. Remember him? Pop star Michael Bolton's one-time bodyguard, who Mickey Sherman used as security during the Stackle trial? Callucci and Steele had grown tight during the trial, so Calcluci started bringing in Steele to help with investigative work. They knocked on the door. A man answered, invited them to talk on his stoop. Steele might be a sweet guy, but man, the description of Hasbrook in the report he wrote was brutal. Appearance: 6'4 , 2 75 pounds, black, pear-shaped, and sluggish looking. Pure steel. Yeah. Not a gentleman who looked like he was uh happy with life. Uh very, very slu ggish. Talked very slow in his communications. Over an hour, Callucci did most of the talking. At some point, Callucci told Hasbrook of Tony Bryant's allegations. They didn't tape the conversation, even surreptitiously. Connecticut requires both parties to consent to being recorded, and the pair didn't want to unnerve their subject by whipping out a recorder. What we do have is Steele's typed report of the interview, which states, Adolph was remarkably calm when Vito told him of the accusations Tony Bryant made against him. He didn't demand Tony's telephone number. He never called Tony a liar . In fact, according to Steele's report, Adolf Hasbro said something that only served to cement Callucci's and Steele's suspicions that Tony Bryant might be onto something. That afternoon in Bridgeport , he admitted he was in Bellhaven on October 30th, 1975 . Hasbrook did not, however, admit to being in Bellhaven at 10 p.m. , the alleged time of the murder. Not exactly. According to Steele's report, Hasbrook was all over the place, changing his account three times when describing when he returned to the city. First, he told them he left Greenwich around noon. Then he said he left in the afternoon before nightfall. And then finally, he said he returned to the city at 9 or 930, noting that his mother would have quote, tanned my hide had he stayed in Bellhaven overnight. Colucci asked if he might consider taking a polygraph. Hasbrook told the investigators that he's a nervous guy and he suspected he'd fail it. Steele's conclusion in his report? From speaking with him, it was obvious that he was not being straight with us. Steele's notes of the meeting are far from exhaustive, and Callucci never wrote a report of his own. But both men are adamant about what they heard. I asked them both a number of different ways. I want to ask you again, Chris, is there any possibility that you misremembered whether he acknowledged that they were there. Is there any is there any none whatsoever? I remember getting back in the car and Vito and I going, Holy cow, this guy said he was there. Vito Callucci concurred. Are you absolutely a hundred percent positive that he admitted that he was in Bellhaven on October thirtieth, nineteen seventy five when you interviewed him on that porch? Oh yes. Didn't Chris Steele say the same thing . He did . Yeah, myself and Chris Steele heard that . Yeah. Exactly one week after their September 2003 interview, Steele got Hasbrook back on the phone. Again, he didn't record the call. Steele's goal? To convince Hasbrook to provide his DNA and allow them to record a videotape statement. This time, according to Steele's report, Hasbrook was telling a different story. He was now adamant that in fact he'd not been in Bellhaven on October thirtieth, nineteen seventy five. And his mother would have never let him go to Greenwich on a school night. Tony Bryant, he told Steele, probably had something to do with the murder . It went similarly with Bert Tinsley, as Vito Callucci would later testify. Callucci said that he got Tinsley on the phone at home in Portland, Oregon, in September 2003, and that day Tinsley confirmed that he'd been in Bellhaven on October 30th, 1975, only to reverse himself on a subsequent call, saying he 'd checked the 1975 calendar and said he'd goofed in saying so, that he wasn't there after all . With Tony Bryant's story in hand, Bobby Kennedy was sure he'd cracked the case. He shared his findings with the media. In the fall of 2003, news trucks descended upon Bryant's house in Miami, but he was done talking. The cat was out of the bag, though, and Michael's lawyers quickly seized on Kennedy's discoveries , telling a Stanford judge that they had newly discovered evidence of Michael's wrongful conviction. In 2006, a pair of PIs hired by the Skakel family tracked down Tony's mother, Barbara Bry ant outside of her apartment building in Manhattan. According to their report, she said that her son had indeed been in Bellhaven the day of the Moxley murder with Hasbrook and Tinsley. She also told the P.I.s that the two boys had stayed in Bellhaven that night . In 2007, remember how slow those wheels of justice move? Michael was granted an appellate hearing. We talked a bit about this hearing in an earlier episode. Michael's attorneys brought up potential Brady violations by the prosecution, but another big part of their argument was that new evidence had been uncovered in the form of Bryant's story and the interviews conducted by Callucci and Steele. Over the course of a week, Bobby and 21 other witnesses testified. Notably absent from the witness list, Tinsley, Hasbrook, and Bryant. All three declined to appear, citing their fifth amendment rights . The judges watched Tony Bryant's recorded interview with Vito Callucci, but without his and the New York guy's testimony, they were not convinced . In the court's decision, Judge Edward Kar azen wrote: The testimony of Bryant is absent any genuine corroboration. It lacks credibility and therefore would not produce a different result in a new trial. Michael, who had by then served five years in prison, would remain there for the foreseeable future. While Michael might have lost his appeal, Bobby Kennedy refused to give up the fight. In fact he doubled down, continuing to investigate on his own, making media rounds, and ultimately publishing a book about it all. The one I helped him write, entitled Framed. After it came out, he repeated his convictions about the case in an interview with Dateline. I believe that the facts demonstrate that these two men murdered Martha Moxley. They admitted being in Greenwich that night. They knew the characters, the people. Bobby was asked, didn't Hasbrook and Tinsley later change their story and deny being there? Yes. And they took the fifth amendment when it came time for them to testify at Michael's hearing. If they're innocent, they should sue me. Pretty convincing, right? And I want to say this now. I realize he's controversial, but I have good memories of Bobby Kennedy. He was easy to work with. When I was helping him put together his book in 2015, we talked several times a week, often several times a day. I wouldn't consider Bobby a friend, but we did some stuff friends would do. He drove me around Southern California in his seriously beat-up minivan. We hiked with his dog. I went to his Kennedy memorabilia-filled house in Malibu, watched him shower his emu with a garden hose, met his famous wife, Cheryl Hines, who I subsequently read was regularly attacked by said emo. As a result, she was eventually shown the door. The emu, not Cheryl Hines. Whenever anyone asks me about the project, I always start by saying, I really like Bobby. But, but, but. This story has so many sizable butts in it, you might mistake it for a Sir Mixalive video. But while Bobby wholeheartedly believed he'd solve the Moxley case, I had some serious questions, concerns even, about some of his methods and his conclusions. Bobby called the chapter about the New York guys the killers. He echoed Mark Furman's earlier play to pressure the state into action, writing, Using the evidence I have cited in this book, prosecutors have sufficient cause to indict Burton Tinsley and Adolph Hasbro ok for Martha Moxley's murder. And he basically tried them without a trial, writing: In my opinion, that evidence suggests that the two men are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I didn't write that part of the book, nor would I have. Based on everything I'd seen, I had some doubts. Sure, the story of the New York guys was intriguing. Arguably, it should have been looked into when it was brought to investigators by Crawford Mills and Margie Walker before Michael's trial began. It would have been easy to do. Hasbrook's house is literally a 10-minute drive from Frank Garr's office in Bridgeport. Considering the stakes, a short drive to knock on Adolf Hasbrook's door seemed merited. But the authorities weren't interested in pursuing the lead. So Bobby took matters into his own hands. In 2015, as we were writing the book, Bobby and I tried to get in touch with Tony Bryant, but not long after those cameras showed up at his house in 2003, Bryant had seemingly vanished into thin air. Even years later, as I was working on this series, I couldn't track him down . Turns out there's a reason for that There are moments that define who you are and who you're becoming, and when those moments arrive, what you drive should rise to meet them. The Range Rover Sport commands attention from the very first glance , every line, every detail, engineered for impact. 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The fights we must win . The future we must secure together for our nation . This is what's in front of This determines what's next for all of us . We are Marines . We were made for this . Earlier in the episode, I described Tony Bryant as a law school educated business owner. And that's true. What's also true is that by the time Michael's habeas appeal rolled around in 2013, some pretty serious cracks had started to appear in that clean-cut fac ade. According to court testimony from a former colleague, around 199 1, Bryant landed a job with an Austin law firm with documents suggesting he'd pass the Maryland and Washington DC bar exams, which he hadn't. Hired on the condition that he passed the Texas bar, Bryant didn't let the firm know when he failed it. He was ultimately fired. One year later, in 1992, Bryant was apprehended in Beverly Hills after an armed robbery, where he and two others pretended to deliver flowers to a woman only to steal more than $100,000 in jewelry while holding her at gunpoint. Originally, Bryant told cops he'd been kidnapped by the other men, but eventually pleaded no contest to being an accessory to a felony larceny, which earned him six months of house arrest. In September 2003, two weeks after Bryant sat down with Vito Callucci, the New York Times ran an article revealing that Bryant's tobacco importing business had been shut down by state regulators. Later, I would discover that right around the time Bobby and I were searching for him for the book, Bryant, already on probation, found himself back in legal hot water for grossly underpaying taxes on imported cigars. On December 19th, 2016, five months after Framed was published, Bryant pleaded guilty to a single count of mail fraud. Unlike his prior scrape with authorities, this one came with a hefty price tag, four years in prison, and a $9.4 million restitution bill . Back in the early 2000s, when Bobby first reached out to Tony Bryant, Googling someone's entire life history was not yet really a thing . Bobby didn't initially know the extent of Bryant's legal troubles. Bryant didn't mention them when they first spoke in early 2003 . But even after he found out that Bryant was less than squeaky clean, Bobby was unmoved. If I had to boil down his justification for continuing to believe Bryant until at least 2016, when I last spoke with him about the case. It's contained in the phrase that my wife sometimes uses to address the fact that humans shouldn't be judged on isolated mistakes. Pobuddies nerfed. Bryant might have been extremely par from um furfect, but Bobby still found his story about the two New York guys 100% believable. They met Martha Moxley. They planned her murder and order her what her assault . And on the way up on uh Halloween Eve, they picked up golf clubs from the Skategle Yard, killed Martha Moxley . Only Tony Bryant saw them that night. When I started reinvestigating the case on my own, I still wasn't quite sure what to make of Bryant or his story. The dings to his credibility were undeniable. But did they automatically mean he wasn't telling the truth about Martha's murder? I brought it up to Stephen Scakeel one day in early 2024. What do we think of Tony? Do we know where he is right now? I don't know where he is. He is I mean the interviews that that Vito did with him are very compelling. His story is beyond compelling, considering that one of the hairs uh you know that they sent for testing was an African American hair, which would fit into Tony's rendition of events. I proposed to Stephen the times being what they were in nineteen seventy five. If there had been reports of any black strangers in Bellhaven, the Greenwich Cops, as inept as they were, would likely have been all over it. He seemed to think I wasn't giving Greenwich teens enough credit for being colorblind, nor Tony Bryant enough credit for being stealthy. It got dark early . Tony, see it was easy. You knew where to hide. You knew where the police were making the rounds. You knew her places on you know by stonewalls and stuff you could easily hide. And to think I don't think anybody there really cared. Nobody was looking, oh you know, is your friend black or not? The difficulty of Tony's story is basically the partying in the in the mead and nobody being able to remember if there's like a dozen people that they couldn't have find somebody. Well you've also got Steve Harding and Maria Kumershwamy talking about a group of unknown teens at the end of Wals ling . Stephen's right. During Michael's 2007 appeal, his attorney spoke to a few of the neighborhood kids, now well into middle age, about what they had seen in nineteen seventy five. On the stand, the little sister of Bell Havenite Kumo, who you heard from earlier in the episode, did report seeing large amorphous blobs of teens that she didn't recognize or couldn't remember . And back in their 1975 police interviews, a few other Bellhaven teens mentioned seeing a lot of kids and a crowd near Walsh Lane. At the time, cops didn't press them for more specifics. When I asked Michael about all this, he mentioned that he'd seen several unidentified men on Mischief Night 1975. And porch glassed in with a with a fireplace. When I walked into the room from our library, I looked out, and there's two of the biggest apple trees you've ever seen. And I saw three large men walk one under another and then up our hill, head up our hill to towards a garden and a tennis court. So why not tell this to police back in 1975? Like many of the interviews the Greenwich Cops did with the Bellhaven teens, Michaels was perfunctory at best. But Michael says he did share this story when he sat down with writer Richard Hoffman in nineteen ninety eight, three years before Crawford Mills and Tony Bryant came out of the woodwork I said on the tapes with Richard Hoffman, I saw three large men walk by our pool through the floodlights and up to our hill. My point is, is that I have a crystal ball? How would I know that? But even if Michael did see three strangers that night, there's no proof they were Tony and his friends from the city . Over the years, I uncovered several other tantalizing clues that would seem to suggest there might be something to Bryant's story. Like the 1975 police interview of 11-year-old Jeff Byrne, whom Bryant described to Vito Callucci as a key figure in the story. He's the one I mentioned earlier in the episode who fled the Skakel Driveway after Tommy and Martha got flirtatious . Turns out, when police asked Jeff to review what he'd done that night, he replied, quote, We went to the He had made mention to me several occasions that you know something bad happens with bad guys and what's you know he was sort of reaching out to me to help him and I said Jeff I can't do anything to help you. What am I gonna do? Right. What am I gonna do? What do you know that I don't know? Right. And was this after the murder ? He's like, just Tony, you gotta stay clear, they're bad guys. Okay . Jeff didn't mention this to police in his nineteen seventy-five interview, nor did he specifically mention Adolph, Burr, or Tony. Did you see anyone attack Mark? No . Do you suspect anyone of getting her? No . Do you know for sure who get her? No . Did you hit her ? But then I stumbled upon this portion of the interview. Anything else you want to tell us that maybe we haven't asked you and you think it might help us in some way? Have you pretty much been thinking about this for the past two weeks? Nothing's come into your your mind where you have no suspicion on anybody. Nothing that we Not really anymore. Not really anymore. We mean anymore. Not really anymore? Could the eleven year old have known more than he was letting on ? Obviously I,'d love to hear him elaborate. Sadly, asking Jeff about this or anything else was going to be impossible. One weekend in 1981, the Walker family was going skiing in Vermont, and Jeff Byrne, now 17, was planning to drive up with his brother and join them. Margie Walker remembers the call from Jeff's brother. What did he say? That you know that he had passed that they found him in the morning that he had passed away. What happened? I don't really know . A horrible tragedy . And one that meant that Jeff would never get to confirm his version of events on Mischief Night . Twenty-three years later, while investigating the story to present new evidence to earn Michael an appeal, Bobby Kennedy called Jeff 's sister Daryl and related the tale of Hasbrook and Tinsley bunking in her house in an attempt to substantiate Bryant's claims. Unlikely, she thought, but said she'd ask her mother to weigh in. When she called Bobby back, she had this to say . She said she was absolutely joked . There's absolutely no way ever . And she said we did an expression with what I In those days there was no project that was . And for someone to say that you think it would have been something. I mean it would have been so So highly unusual that they would have said something . But, but, but. When Bobby Kennedy had talked to Bert Tinsley in 2003, he seemed to have a surprising amount of detail about what the inside of the Byrne family house supp osedly looked like. Tinsley described how immense it was with its two kitchens, and described in detail a refrigerator like he'd never seen before, with a single button you pushed that would make the door pop open like something from a sci-fi flick. His description of the home matches those of other Bellhaven kids who had spent time in the Byrne Mansion. Margie Walker, though she doesn't recall seeing Tony or the two New York guys on Mischief Night does remember meeting them in Greenwich. Aaron Powell I had met them at least one time, and that's when we were at in the fall in September, they would have sort of a just like a community gathering, like a pumpkin fest or a fall fest Margie also remembers the Burns Tudor mansion the way that Tony Bryant described it. A house so big that parents might never know who was staying there. Jeff lived in this very large house that had a lot of kind of secret rooms and places that they used to go in the coal shaft underneath the front of the house that you could access and there was a iron door and you could crawl in through there Jeff Burns' mother, like many of the Bellhaven parents of the era, may not have been totally attuned to the particulars of her son's social life. And given the sprawling floor plan of their home, the Burns could perhaps be forgiven for simply not noticing Hasbrook and Tinsley hanging around . There was someone else who would be invaluable to speak to about all this. Crawford Mills, who was responsible for outing Tony Bryant and his story in the first place. But like Jeff Byrne, Mills is another one of those people in the orbit of this story who met early and tragic ends. Margie Walker told me that Mills had a host of problems. Around the time he testified in Michael's appeal, he was diagnosed with cancer, which everyone suspected was related to him living so close to ground zero. But his slide had really begun when he got fired from that CBS job and had to move back to Connecticut and take a job with a local cable company. The Moxley thing is part of what happened to Trace. Trace, of course, being Crawford Mills III . In October 2008, at age 47, Mills took his own life. About seven years after he thought he'd learned who killed Martha Moxley, and one year after a judge dismissed the story, he'd worked so hard to to bring light. There are stubborn, not easily dismissed aspects to Tony Bryant's story, which seemed so credible because it was so packed with details. But details, as we know, is the name of the town where Satan keeps a condo . With Bryant having vanished into thin air, I assumed all of this would forever remain a mystery. Then, on Tuesday, November 12th, 2024, Stephen Skakel called me. You're never gonna guess who I was just talking to, he said. Tony Bryant, now three years since his release from federal prison camp Pensacola, had called Stephen out of the blue. He explained he'd lost all his contacts while in prison. He asked for Bobby's email. I found the timing of the call interesting. It was exactly a week after Trump's second term victory. Trump had installed Bobby on his transition team, which was tasked with making cabinet recommendations. And by November 12th, when Bryant reached out to Steven, press reports made it look increasingly likely that Bobby would be nominated to serve as Trump's health secretary, as he was officially two days later. Pending Senate confirmation, Bobby would soon be one of the most powerful men in Washington. Did Bryant want something from him? Turns out, I would get to ask him myself. Mud, sand, snow , the track, places where excuses don't work . Where capability is something you prove one race at a time. Off-road racing. 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When we learn the power of hope, recovery is possible. Find out how at startwithhope.com. Brought to you by the National Council for Mental Well-being, Shatterproof and the Ad Council In December 2024, Tony Bryant joined me on a video call from his home in Florida. It had been 21 years since Bryant sat with Vito Callucci, almost 50 years since Well let's talk about let's talk about October thirtieth, nineteen seventy five. As he told Calucci, Bryant said that after he and his friends arrived in Bellhaven, they joined with other mischief seekers in the Mead. I remember going back across the street and going down into the Mead and drinking, smoking. There's a bunch of people coming and going though . So at one point in time , Martha had come in into the like the group, into this little circle. Back in 2003, Tony had told Callucci that some of the girls who'd been in the mead, Martha included, didn't stay long. Do you say that some suggestive comments were made that made some of the girls in the circle uncomfortable? Oh, of course. Suggestive comments made by Al and were they getting into the sexually aggressive language, like the caveman stuff and all that? They were getting into that and then, you know , gestures and just things that are inappropriate in mixed company. And I think that you said that they left, right? The circle? Yes. That's what I'm trying to tell you. There were people were coming intentionally because we were hanging out and then after the conversation they were listening to this conversation like, what the hell? And they're like, I I'm out of here. And I don't blame 'em This detail has always perplexed me. Two unfamiliar teens making Bellhaven girls uncomfortable with sexually suggestive remarks just yards from the murder sc ene. After Martha's death, Greenwich was in a state of panic, yet none of these girls ever reported that encounter to police. Police would have maybe encountered somebody who would have said, Well, there were these guys that were being kind of gross . No . I don't know what happened. I don't seriously. I really don't know what happened with this whole thing. Yeah. And I don't know why they never I mean at least call my mom and say listen is it okay if you and your son come and we have a conversation because we understand that he may have been in Greenwich. And it just doesn't none of it makes sense. He's right, it doesn't make sense. But how would Greenwich police have known to reach out to him since no one specifically reported seeing him or his two friends on mischief night? As to why Tony didn't consider coming forward to law enforcement, he says his mom had reservations. It's in the the papers, and she's like, you need to tell me everything that you know . And we had that conversation, and she's like this is the problem because uh ad olf is black i'm black burr is a mixture . We're the three minorities . My mom's saying thinking okay, this is gonna fall on one of you three. His mom may have worried that their race could put Tony and his friends in police crosshairs. But on the subject of being black in Greenwich, Tony seemed to fall squarely into the Stephen Scakel school of thought. One of the things that's been said about this case is uh any black people in Bellhaven would stick out like a sore thumb and attract the attention of everybody. Uh that uh it's bizarre that we're even talking about this because why is it why do you say it's bizarre? Because unfortunately that constru ct exists in certain people's minds and it's just how you see people. I mean, everybody knew that we were in Greenwich. Well we were in Bellhaven. Not in Greenwich, we were in Bellhaven. Even if you didn't see us there that night, you know that we existed. We would be there during the day. We'd be at the Bellhaven um at the at the club. I mean it's just it doesn't mean the same as it means now. Back in two thousand three, Tony had been adamant that Jeff Byrne, along with Burr and Tinsley, all said the New York guy slept at the Byrne mansion after the murder. But when I asked him about it, Tony waffled. And how did you find out that they stayed with Jeff? They didn't come back. So they had to stay with Jeff. So did Jeff ever say, oh, the guy stayed with me that night, or is this something you just intuited? It's just I I know that's where they were. Because they had no place else to go unless they're sleeping on the street. Yeah. So they didn't say or Jeff didn't say they slept at my place. It was just something you knew. Yeah, it's just something I knew This particular detail had evolved from something that Tinsley, Hasbrook, and Jeff Byrne had expressly told him into something that Tony just knew. Tony also told Vito Callucci back in 2003. But when we spoke, Tony told me that Jeff had never made any such ominous pronounc ements. And there was another discrepancy. Bryant had told Vito Callucci that he remembered bumping into Hasbrook only once after leaving Hughes High School. I saw Adolff . I was with my mother . We were at the Bombay Palace, which is an Indian restaurant, and my mother and I were leaving, and he was the dormant at the movie theater, and I just sort of and my mom's like, you you were shocked. You were you you looked like you were about to urinate on yourself. Why? Because of this murder? Because of the murder, because of their uh they were just they were unpredictable . The Indian meal came up again when Tony and I spoke, but with a significant and I would venture pretty memorable detail changed. It was Bombay Palace and we walked across the street and as we were walking we ran into Adolph and he was living in Central Park. He was homeless. His mother had thrown him out and put him out in the street. So my mom gave him some money. Uh we got him some food and we said our goodbyes. And she looked at me and she's like , What What the hell was that? I remember you saying you bumped into him. Was he also working at a movie theater or is that a different time? That's a different time. It's possible that Tony's shifting stories were just a by product of time distorting his recollections. Memory and its disintegration over time is a recurrent theme in this case. Or was there something else going on? During Michael's twenty thirteen habeas proceeding, prosecutor Jonathan Benedict had flown in one of Tony's former colleagues, an attorney, who testified that Tony had lied about passing multiple bar exams. My opinion of his veracity, the attorney testified, is that he cannot be trusted. I asked Tony about this. You know, the guy in Austin came up and said that he lied about being in the bar. Not only did you not pass the bar in Texas, but you hadn't passed the bar in either Maryland or DC. I never took the DC bar, I never took the Maryland bar. They went on a recommendation . I never placed it on my resume. In twenty thirteen, Bryant's Austin colleague had testified otherwise. Bryant spent a bit of time explaining to me that his alleged lies were just a misunderstanding, but ultimately he admitted I did not pass the Texas bar because I was I mean I I took it while I was working with them and I I failed. And then when the notification came, I went to them and said I didn't pass. I failed in my personal responsibilities to to study. I was too interested in doing my job. I put my aspirations over my qualifications. That was my mistake. Mistake or not, it wasn't the only blemish on his record. It's hard to see how you could go from starting an entertainment division of a firm in Austin to being the following year sitting in a van while while two of your buddies rob somebody at gunpoint. How does that happen? I don't know. And it happened. I think um when I when I left Austin I I was I wasn't I wasn't doing well and uh I made a lot of bad choices. I made choices that I'm just putting to rest right now. Did the desire to put his choices to rest, I wondered, have anything to do with the timing of his coming out of the woodwork after all these years? Uh are are you looking you hoping for a pardon on the federal charges ? No . No. No . I mean you do know somebody in and you have friends in high places now. Nah, I don't know. I would never put my friendship my friendship is not something that it that I'm looking for any type of um