12/16/01 Detective Dies; Helped Revive Moxley Case - NY Times

The police detective credited with playing a crucial role in investigating the long-unsolved killing of Martha Moxley, a 15-year-old girl from Greenwich, Conn., died of cancer on Wednesday at Greenwich Hospital.

The investigator for the Greenwich Police Department, Stephen X. Carroll, 70, has been credited with reviving interest in the case of Miss Moxley, who was found beaten to death with a golf club in her own backyard on Oct. 31, 1975. She had been beaten so badly that the golf club had broken into three pieces, and she had been stabbed in the neck with the shaft.

Michael Sherman, the lawyer for Michael C. Skakel, 41, the man facing trial in Miss Moxley's killing, has complained that the case is so old that key witnesses are dying, making it difficult to try the case.

Mr. Carroll helped revive interest in the case by cooperating with Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles police detective and witness in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, who wrote the 1998 book ''Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley?'' Mr. Carroll contended that investigators had made mistakes early on because of inexperience. Before 1975, the department had not handled a murder in 20 years, he said.

The murder of Miss Moxley stood out in part because she and her friends had spent the evening of her disappearance with Michael Skakel, then 15, and his brother Thomas, 17, two nephews of Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

After Mr. Fuhrman's book was published, interest developed in the case, and Michael Skakel was arrested after former classmates came forward to say that he had confessed to the murder of Miss Moxley while a student at Elan, a residential school for troubled young people in Poland Spring, Me.

In January 2000, Mr. Skakel was arrested and charged as a juvenile because he was 15 at the time of the killing. A judge later ruled that he should stand trial as an adult, and the trial is expected to begin in State Superior Court in Stamford next year