NORWALK, Conn., May 20 (UPI) -- The prosecution could wrap up its case this week at the homicide trial of Kennedy kin Michael Skakel.
Skakel, 41, is accused of killing Martha Moxley in 1975 when both were 15 years old and neighbors in a fashionable section of Greenwich, Conn.
Much of the prosecution's case hangs on the testimony of former students at the Elan School for troubled teens in Poland Spring, Maine. Skakel attended the school in the late 1970s.
Two former students alleged that Skakel confessed to the killing while others said he made statements incriminating himself in the crime. Other former students have said Skakel never confessed to the killing but said he may have blacked out while drunk and didn't know what happened on Oct. 30, 1975, when Moxley was killed with a golf club belonging to his late mother.
One of those who alleged Skakel confessed was Gregory Coleman, a heroin addict who died last year.
Prosecutors began reading a transcript of Coleman's pretrial testimony on Friday, and the reading was to resume Monday.
Coleman had testified that Skakel said, "I'm going to get away with murder because I'm a Kennedy." Skakel is Ethel Kennedy Skakel's nephew.
Coleman said that when he asked Skakel what he was talking about, Skakel told him he had killed a girl who had rejected his advances. "He said he drove her head in with a golf club," Coleman had testified.
Jurors were told last week about the brutal abuse Skakel faced while at the school. Among other things he was forced to wear a sign for six weeks reading: "Confront me on why I murdered Martha Moxley."
Former student and staff member Alice Dunn testified that Skakel initially denied he had killed the girl.
"He was saying, 'I didn't do it, I didn't do it,' " Dunn said. "And every time he would say, 'I didn't do it,' he would be put in the boxing ring" where he would be pummeled by other students.
Defense attorney Michael Sherman has said the beatings conditioned Skakel to stop saying he didn't do it and coerced him to start saying he didn't know whether he did.
Another former classmate, Elizabeth Arnold, testified that Skakel "didn't know what happened that night. He was very drunk and had some sort of a blackout," and didn't know if he or his brother, Tommy, 17, had done it.
Arnold offered jealousy as a possible motive for the killing, saying Michael believed Tommy "stole his girlfriend."
