Curse of the Kennedys strikes again 27 years on

There was a quiet gasp as the verdict was read out in the non-descript Courtroom A in Norwalk, Connecticut, yesterday. The convicted man, a cousin of the Kennedy clan, did not sob or whimper. His greying hair plastered atop his ruddy face, Michael Skakel simply froze.

Denied bail by Judge John Kavenewsky and almost immediately restrained in handcuffs, Skakel, 41, will wake up in prison today to await a sentencing that will, pending any appeals, leave him behind bars for 25 years to life for the murder in 1975 of young Martha Moxley.

Few trials since the extraordinary saga of O J Simpson in Los Angeles have contained so many elements of surprise. The trial lasted a month, jury deliberation ran into a fourth day and only towards the end did a conviction seem likely.

The prosecutors faced a huge problem throughout the trial: they had no physical evidence tying Skakel to the night of 30 October 1975. But they finally persuaded the jury that it was Skakel, then aged 15, who accosted his friend of the same age, Ms Moxley, drove a golf club through her neck and left her body under a tree.

These were teenagers who lived in a secluded enclave of the upmarket town of Greenwich in Connecticut. The case became one of America's most enduring murder mysteries, ensuring years of agony for the Moxley family and most of all for Martha's widowed mother, Dorothy Moxley.

Ms Moxley told reporters after the verdict that she had prayed when she woke up yesterday. "This whole thing has been about Martha. I just feel so blessed and so overwhelmed," she said.

Above all, though, this was another Kennedy calamity. Skakel, who has a child of four, is the nephew of Ethel Kennedy, the widow of the late Robert Kennedy, who was slain during his run for the US presidency in 1968.

The passage of so many years since the crime and the absence of physical evidence must have encouraged Skakel's lawyer, Michael Sherman. But over the years, Skakel gave fragments of a confession to numerous people – to fellow students at the Elan School in Maine for troubled teenagers, to a barber, and to a taxi driver, to whom he said he needed to leave the country because he had done something terrible.

Mr Sherman worked to discredit those so-called confessions. One was recounted to a grand jury by Greg Coleman, a former Elan School pupil, who confessed later that he was a heroin user. He has since died. There were suggestions Skakel had been bullied at the school and might have been intimidated into saying what he did.

The defence was also helped by the bunglings of the Greenwich police and of state prosecutors. Skakel was not the sole suspect. First, prosecutors went after his elder brother, Tommy Skakel. Then their attention switched to Kenneth Littleton, a tutor hired by the Skakels who was in the house on the night of the murder and had changed his clothing.

The prosecution displayed its own arsenal in closing arguments on Monday, playing a tape of Skakel saying what he had done on that night to a man who was proposing to write a book on the murder. As jurors heard his voice, they viewed pictures of the beaten body of Ms Moxley.

In his summation, prosecutor Jonathan Benedict argued that Skakel acted out of jealousy because his brother Tommy was in a relationship with the victim. It was, he said, a case of "competing hormones".