Greentown by Timothy Dumas

Author:Timothy Dumas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2012-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Eventually the detectives conclude that there’s not much beneath the surface of Littleton’s waywardness. “I don’t think most of these were done maliciously,” Carroll says about his petty thievery. “This is why we kind of ruled him out. It would usually happen after he’d been drinking. He’d get off work and stop and have a few beers, which is normal for a young guy. And then walking home—Nantucket is not all that big, and he didn’t live far outside the town—he’d pick these things up walking by somebody’s house. He was getting his jollies. Getting a rush. And then, burying them, he was eluding the police.”

Nonetheless, on their way home, Lunney and Carroll stop in Belmont, Massachusetts, to visit Maria and Kenneth Wayne Littleton, Sr. The detectives ask about their son’s history, and the Littletons are guarded. Ken has never said much about the Moxley murder—only that he had been at the Skakels’ that night and the police had questioned him.

The Littletons seem poorly informed about their son’s recent life. It is the detectives who tell them of the failed polygraph. Carroll reports: “Mrs. Littleton was still under the impression that her son was working at the Brunswick School and would be getting out of school for Thanksgiving vacation.”

Littleton was living then in a house on Sherwood Place in Greenwich, a stone’s throw from the Brunswick athletic fields. For a while, he had no work. Rush Skakel had fired him from his tutoring chores, for no clear reason. “I never understood why he turned against me,” Littleton later tells Greenwich Time. “I think he wanted to separate himself and his family from me when the police began pressuring me.”

Then parents and police squeeze him out of his Brunswick job. Littleton gets part-time work at Saint Luke’s School in New Canaan, teaching math and English to high school seniors, in the winter of 1976. But the detectives come calling, and headmaster Richard Whitcomb, though he regards Littleton as an excellent teacher, can’t chance having a murderer among his boys. He’s forced to let Littleton go.

“Jimmy Lunney and I were responsible for him losing I think three jobs,” Steve Carroll says. “Not that we meant it that way.”

Early in 1977, Littleton, his teaching prospects shattered, returns to Nantucket to answer his burglary and larceny charges, and a deal is struck: Littleton will be sentenced to seven to ten years in Walpole Prison, but the sentence will be suspended. He’ll serve no jail time. The court gives him five years’ probation. Finally, a break. One curious thing, though: Littleton would have got a far better deal had he agreed to return to Connecticut and submit to a truth-serum interrogation. He adamantly refuses.

Littleton gets work as a commodities trader, but there’s a nervousness, a touchiness, that has crept into his character and deepens with the passage of time. The detectives in Greenwich keep up with him through his probation officer, John Quinn, who describes Littleton as cooperative but distant.

Quinn gets Littleton on the phone

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