STAMFORD, Conn. — The man at the center of Michael Skakel's bid for a new trial described his whereabouts on the night of Martha Moxley's murder in a taped interview played in open court Wednesday, saying he and two other men encountered several people on the night she was killed.

Gitano "Tony" Bryant claimed in a videotaped interview that he, Adolph Hasbrouck and Burton Tinsley stopped at the home of Belle Haven resident Neal Walker and also saw Skakel's sister, Julie, and others who later testified at Skakel's 2002 trial.

The interview was recorded in August 2003 by a private investigator working for Skakel. It was played for Superior Court Judge Edward Karazin Jr. by Skakel's lawyers, who claim the statement and other evidence discovered after Skakel was sentenced to 20 years in prison are grounds for a new trial.

"I think they were definitely involved," Bryant said, referring on the tape to Hasbrouck and Tinsley. "There's no doubt in my mind they were involved."

Martha Moxley was beaten to death on Oct. 30, 1975, with a golf club, which was traced to the Skakel home in the exclusive Greenwich neighborhood of Belle Haven.

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Hasbrouck, who lives in Oregon, and Tinsley, who resides in Bridgeport, Conn., deny involvement in the killing. All three men refused to testify at the hearing, invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Lawyers for Skakel, 46, say intermediaries tried to get Bryant's information to the prosecution and defense right after Skakel was convicted of Martha's murder in June 2002, but because Bryant would not allow his name to be disclosed, the matter was dropped.

His story was resurrected and investigated in February 2003 when Kennedy's first cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., learned Bryant's identity and convinced him to cooperate for several months with Skakel's appellate team.

Crawford Mills, who attended the private Brunswick School with Skakel, Bryant and Hasbrouck, testified Wednesday that he honored Bryant's demand for anonymity until he was fired from CBS News.

According to Mills, he was fired for upsetting Martha's mother, Dorthy Moxley, when he informed her of Bryant's claims in a TV studio while getting her ready for a television appearance after Skakel's conviction.

"She didn't seem to have any knowledge of this story at all, so I quickly gave her a thumbnail sketch of what Tony told me," Mills said.

Gitano 'Tony' Bryant appeared in a taped interview played in court.

During cross-examination by prosecutor Jonathan Benedict, Mills, who wrote an ill-fated screenplay loosely based on the case, said that he never remembered either Hasbrouck or Tinsley talking about Martha, or even being in the same room with her. According to Bryant, Hasbrouck had a crush on Martha and talked about going "caveman" on her during the ride to Greenwich from New York on the night of the killing.

Bryant now claims that he became uncomfortable with the conversation and returned to New York by himself.

Another witness for Skakel, Neal Walker, testified Wednesday about his contact with Bryant, a childhood friend, in 2001 and 2002. Although the defense called Walker to support its claim that Bryant's claim could not have been investigated until after the trial, Walker helped the prosecution's contention as well.

Walker contradicted Bryant's claim that Bryant, Hasbrouck and Tinsley stopped at Walker's house on the night of the killing while he and his family had dinner. Prosecutors plan to call other witnesses to testify that they never saw the three men, who are black, in the predominantly white neighborhood that night, and would have remembered if they had.

"Have you ever come across anybody who can put Martha Moxley and Adolph Hasbrouck in the same room?" Benedict asked defense investigator Vito Colucci Jr.

"No," Colucci said.

Skakel, who was 15 at the time of the killing, was charged with the murder in January 2000 and convicted on June 7, 2002. The jury rejected his alibi defense, and relied on statements he made about the case while in a reform school in the late 1970s and to a book writer in 1997.

In order for Karazin to grant Skakel's motion for a new trial, he will have to find that Bryant's statement is reliable, legally admissible, relevant and contains information that the defense could not have uncovered before the trial.

Testimony resumes Thursday at 10 a.m. ET. The hearing is being streamed live on Court TV Extra.