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Two girls thrown off of Ferris wheel at Louisiana fair

admin - Latest News - November 3, 2025
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Two girls thrown off of Ferris wheel at Louisiana fair



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Nov. 3, 2025, 10:38 AM ESTBy Corky SiemaszkoIt is, in many ways, a quintessentially American unsolved murder mystery.The victim was a rich and beautiful teenage girl found beaten to death with a golf club in a ritzy and supposedly safe Connecticut suburb. There was national news media frenzy followed by a stymied police investigation. And at the center of it all, there was murder suspect Michael Skakel, who also happens to be related to the fabled Kennedy family. Eventually, there would be celebrity cameos from another high-profile murder investigation in this unfolding drama.But 50 years after the 15-year-old was found dead beneath a tree in the backyard of her family home, there still is no definitive answer to the question: Who killed Martha Moxley?Undated photo of Martha Moxley released as evidence during the trial of Michael Skakel.Getty Images fileNow, for the first time since his conviction in the killing of Moxley was overturned in 2013, Skakel is speaking at length about the death in Greenwich that sent him to prison for more than 11 years.“Um, my name is Michael Skakel and why am I being interviewed?” he asks veteran journalist Andrew Goldman in “Dead Certain: The Martha Moxley Murder,” NBC News Studios’ new podcast that makes its debut Tuesday. “I mean, that’s kind of a big question, isn’t it?”On several occasions, Skakel and his brother Stephen Skakel were interviewed at the modest rental home they share in Norwalk, Connecticut, which is a far cry from the mansion in which they grew up.“For the first half of the 20th century, the Skakels were incalculably rich robber baron rich, a kind of wealth we now associate with the Koch brothers. Certainly richer than the Kennedys,” Goldman said. “Not so anymore.”The first five episodes of the podcast delve into the history of the murder case that transfixed the country after Moxley was found dead Oct. 31, 1975, setting off a hunt for her killer that continues to this day.Goldman is not new to the Moxley case; he ghostwrote “Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit,” a 2016 bestseller by Skakel’s cousin, now-Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After finishing his work on the book, Goldman continued to reinvestigate the case on his own for nearly a decade.But Goldman, in the podcast, admits he wasn’t initially sold on the idea of Skakel being innocent.“When I first met him back in 2015, to be honest, being in the same room with him made me physically uncomfortable,” Goldman says. “The media coverage of the case had convinced me I was shaking a murderer’s hand.”Skakel is the fifth of seven children born to Rushton and Anne Skakel, who were fabulously wealthy and ultraconservative Catholics. They were the nieces and nephews of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy. The Skakel children lost their mother to cancer in 1972 and their father struggled with alcoholism.The family lived across the street from the Moxleys in a Tudor-style mansion.Moxley was last seen alive Oct. 30, 1975, when she was hanging out with a group of friends that included then 15-year-old Skakel and his older brother Thomas Skakel on Mischief Night, which is the night before Halloween when children roam the neighborhood and pull pranks such as ringing doorbells and toilet-papering trees and yards.Described by friends as “joy on legs,” the vivacious teen was found dead the next day in the brush on her family’s property with her pants and underwear pulled down.An autopsy revealed Moxley had not been sexually assaulted, but had been bludgeoned and stabbed in the neck with a broken six-iron golf club that was traced back to the Skakel home.Skakel wasn’t the first person police suspected of killing Moxley. Thomas Skakel landed on investigators’ radar well before him because he was seen flirting with her before she died. Later, police focused on the Skakel children’s live-in tutor, Kenneth Littleton. Neither were charged with a crime.Skakel said in the podcast that his life was a horror show before Moxley died.Skakel said his father beat him at age 9 when he found him with some Playboy magazines and often beat him for no reason at all.“He was about as Orthodox Catholic as it got,” Skakel said of his father. “I just never knew when it was going to happen. I didn’t know why it happened.”During Skakel’s sentencing hearing in 2002, his lawyer submitted 90 letters from people close to him that included details of abuse he allegedly suffered at the hands of his father.Skakel said his mother was cold and left most of the child-rearing to the household help. When he broke his neck at age 4, he said, his mother barely visited him during his two-month stay in the hospital.“She wasn’t really touchy-feely,” he said.When his mother got sick, Skakel said his father blamed him.“If you only did better in school, your mother wouldn’t have to be in the hospital,” Skakel recalled his father telling him. “And I remember just going, ‘Oh, my God, I wanted to die. I just wanted to die’.”Skakel said he was around 12 years old when his mother died. And like his father, he sought solace in drinking. He was sent away to a private school in Maine after he was caught driving under the influence at age 17. He said he was subjected to beatings from his classmates at Elan School. The school, which aimed to help troubled teens, closed down in 2011.“They literally picked me up over their head and carried me downstairs like I was a crash test dummy,” Skakel said of one beating. “And when I was probably 10 feet from the stage, they threw me. And I thought I broke my, my back on the stage.”Skakel made it through reform school and rebuilt his life. He stopped drinking in 1982, got married in 1991 and later had a son. He earned a college degree in 1993 and competed on the international speed skiing circuit.Meanwhile, the long-stalled Moxley investigation was revived after another Skakel relative, William Kennedy Smith, was tried and acquitted in 1991 for an unrelated rape. Amid the tabloid frenzy of that case, an unfounded rumor emerged that he had been at the Skakel home on the night that Moxley died.The speculation around Smith went nowhere, but the media attention breathed new life into the stalled Moxley case. And that prompted Skakel’s father to fund a private investigation aimed at clearing the family name.That move backfired. The end result was a report that was leaked to the media, casting doubt on the alibis of Thomas and Michael Skakel.Among the revelations was Michael Skakel’s admission that on the night of the murder, he climbed a tree by Moxley’s house and tossed pebbles at her window. When she didn’t come out, he masturbated while sitting in the tree.Pressure to reinvestigate the Moxley killing ratcheted up further in 1993 when author Dominick Dunne published a novel called “A Season in Purgatory” based on the Moxley murder. That was followed five years later by “Murder in Greenwich,” which was written by disgraced O.J. Simpson detective Mark Fuhrman and which named Michael Skakel as Moxley’s likely murderer.Two years later, on March 14, 2000, Skakel, 39, was arrested after investigators secured testimony from two former classmates at the Elan School who claimed he confessed to killing Moxley.Skakel was arraigned on a murder charge in juvenile court because he was 15 at the time of the crime. The case was later moved to regular court. He said his lawyer, Mickey Sherman, promised him that he’d never see the inside of a courtroom.But two years later, Skakel was convicted of killing Moxley and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. He was released in 2013 after his conviction was overturned.The judge ruled that Skakel had been denied a fair trial because, among other things, Sherman had failed to contact a witness who could have provided his client with an alibi. And in 2020, the state dropped the case against Skakel saying it would not be able to prove the case against him beyond a reasonable doubt.“Mickey Sherman basically proved to be the anti-Nostradamus,” Goldman says in the podcast. “Every one of his predictions turned out to be dead wrong.”Corky SiemaszkoCorky Siemaszko is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital.
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Nov. 3, 2025, 10:41 PM ESTBy Gabe Gutierrez, Yamiche Alcindor, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, Dan De Luce and Abigail WilliamsWASHINGTON — A Fox News report prompted President Donald Trump to call out Nigeria over the killing of Christians and then threaten military action, setting off a scramble in the White House over the weekend, according to multiple U.S. officials.It’s still unclear what — if anything — the administration will do to counter Islamic militants in Nigeria, but precision drone strikes are among the preliminary options being considered, two U.S. officials said.A White House spokesperson declined Monday to offer any details on the plans under consideration.“At President Trump’s direction, the administration is planning options for possible action to stop the killing of Christians in Nigeria,” the spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, said in a statement. “Any announcements will come from the President directly.”A vendor sells local newspapers with headlines referring to US President Donald Trump’s comments about Nigeria, on the street of Lagos, Nigeria on Sunday.Sunday Alamba / APTrump’s first social media post on Nigeria came Friday night after he watched a Fox News report on violence in the West African nation, two administration officials said. The president asked his staff for more information about the situation and, shortly after, declared in a Truth Social post that he was designating Nigeria a “country of particular concern” over its failure to, in his words, stop the “mass slaughter” of Christians.Trump then went further in a Saturday post, directing the Defense Department to prepare for possible military action.“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump wrote. It’s not the first time the president’s rapid fire social media posts have moved faster than policy deliberations, with officials rushing to draft diplomatic and military options and allied governments taken by surprise. Experts and scholars who follow events in Nigeria say Trump’s portrayal of the security situation in the country as a “Christian genocide” is misleading and oversimplified, as Nigerians of all faiths have suffered at the hands of Islamist extremists and other groups.Trump’s posts even contradicted one of his own senior State Department advisors, Massad Boulous, who said last month that Muslims have died in larger numbers than Christians.“People of all religions and of all tribes are dying, and it is very unfortunate, and we even know that Boko Haram and ISIS are killing more Muslims than more Christians,” Boulos said while meeting with the Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in Rome, according to state media outlet, Voice of Nigeria. “So people are suffering from all sorts of backgrounds. This is not specifically targeted at one group or the other.”People walk past torched houses following an attack by Boko Haram in Darul Jamal, Nigeria on Sept. 6, 2025.AP FileSpeaking to reporters on Monday, Trump hinted that he was open to sending troops on the ground in Nigeria, but that seemed like a far less likely option as he has generally been loath to deploy troops to conflicts overseas, according to the two U.S. officials.A senior Trump administration official said the White House is in regular contact with the Nigerian government. “We hope that the Nigerian government will be a partner in the process of addressing this issue, and work with the United States to take swift and immediate action to address the violence that is affecting Christians, as well as countless other innocent civilians across Nigeria,” the official said. Nigeria’s government was taken aback by Trump’s statements, but officials cited the two countries’ friendly relations and called for a cooperative approach between the two governments to tackle the threat posed by Islamist groups.Daniel Bwala, an advisor to Nigeria’s president, told the BBC that any military action against the Islamist groups should be carried out jointly. Nigeria would welcome U.S. help in tackling the militants but added that it was a “sovereign” country.Insurgent groups like Boko Haram and Islamic State’s branch in West Africa sometimes use anti-Christian language, but their attacks are indiscriminate, targeting civilians, officials, and local leaders regardless of religion, according to Miriam Adah, an analyst with the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks conflicts and crises.“In Nigeria, the violence is widespread and complex. It involves insurgents, bandits, ethnic clashes, and land disputes — not a single campaign to eliminate Christians,” Adah said. “Both Christians and Muslims are victims.”The bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has pointed to violence against both Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, saying there are systematic religious freedom violations in the country. “Violence affects large numbers of Christians and Muslims in several states across Nigeria,” the commission said in a report last year.It also described the Nigerian government response to attacks on Nigerian civilians by “nonstate actors” as slow or ineffective.Islamist groups like Boko Haram are not the only actors behind violence in Nigeria, experts say.Apart from Boko Haram and an Islamic State branch in northern Nigeria, there is a separatist movement in the southeast, ethnic militant groups in the oil-producing Niger Delta, kidnapping gangs in the northwest and clashes between Muslim herders and Christian farmers in the Middle Belt fueled by climate change.Trump’s comments may have had more to do with domestic American politics than addressing a security threat in Nigeria, experts said. Some Republican lawmakers, aligned with elements of Nigeria’s Christian diaspora population in the United States, have long focused on the plight of Christians in Nigeria. And Trump may have been trying to deliver a message to his Christian supporters in the United States, experts said. “Republicans on the Hill in particular, for years, have been trying to frame Nigeria as ‘a Christian genocide,’ and they have strong allies in the Nigerian diaspora in the United States,” said Darren Kerr, dean of the School of Peace Studies at the University of California at San Diego.Nigeria’s population of 230 million is split almost evenly between Muslims and Christians, and the sectarian divide has triggered political violence in the past. Trump’s comments threaten to potentially “light a match” in an already fragile landscape, Kerr said. “To bring the weight of the United States solely on the Christian side and to frame things in a Muslim-Christian dimension is probably extremely unhelpful to both Christians and Muslims in Nigeria,” Kerr said.The United States does, however, have grounds to question how the Nigerian government is using the weapons and other assistance that Washington has delivered over the years, Kerr said.“Had the President been more measured in his comments to say ‘Nigeria, we give it all this money, what’s happened? That, I think, is a legitimate criticism on the part of the United States to say to the government, ‘Look, what are you guys doing? Where’s the strategy? Where’s the success, where’s the progress that we’re expecting?’”Gabe GutierrezGabe Gutierrez is a senior White House correspondent for NBC News.Yamiche AlcindorYamiche Alcindor is a White House correspondent for NBC News.Gordon LuboldGordon Lubold is a national security reporter for NBC News.Courtney KubeCourtney Kube is a correspondent covering national security and the military for the NBC News Investigative Unit.Dan De LuceDan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. Abigail WilliamsAbigail Williams is a producer and reporter for NBC News covering the State Department.
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