NORWALK, Conn. — At the end of a morning break, Jonathan Benedict walks back into the courtroom and drops a stack of thick, hardcover law books onto the prosecution table. The thud reverberates around the chamber. Sitting down with the ramrod straight posture of a former military man the 55-year-old prosecutor pulls out a blank white legal pad and waits for jury selection to continue in the highest-profile murder trial of his career.

Michael Skakel, whom Benedict hopes to convict of the murder of teenager Martha Moxley more than a quarter century ago, sits alone at the defense table, his arms folded. Michael "Mickey" Sherman, Skakel's lawyer, is late coming back from the break. Again.

"Mickey's outside giving another press conference," Benedict says to his prosecution teammates, just loud enough for reporters to hear.

Benedict occasionally fields reporters' questions outside the courtroom, but — in contrast to Sherman, a self-described media hound — the media-wary Bridgeport state's attorney pointedly avoids the construction barrier "pen" corralling reporters and camera crews outside Norwalk Superior Court.

Benedict prefers to try cases in front of judges and juries inside courthouses in the county where he was born and raised.

The self-described "gym rat," who looks younger than his years despite a head of white hair, stays in shape by running, swimming and bicycling — he has competed in New England triathlons for about 15 years. Stamina and endurance have served Benedict well since he became Bridgeport state's attorney in 1997 and inherited the Moxley investigation, which had dragged on since her brutal killing in 1975.

Like a long-distance runner, Benedict set his sights on the goal of bringing Martha's killer to justice. He managed to convince a three-judge panel that a grand jury investigation, a rarity in Connecticut, was needed to compel reluctant witnesses to give statements under oath. Then he used that testimony to support a warrant for Skakel's arrest 28 months ago. Then Benedict successfully transferred the case from juvenile to adult court and convinced a judge that Connecticut's murky statute of limitations for murder during the 1970s did not run out in 1980 as Skakel's lawyer contended.

Now the veteran prosecutor will need to summon all his reserve energy and patience to convince a jury, largely with circumstantial evidence, that Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, murdered the popular and pretty girl next door with a golf club on the night before Halloween in 1975.

Honor thy father

At the time of Martha's murder, Jonathan Curtis Benedict was a 29-year-old associate in a small Fairfield, Conn., law firm that had the name of his father, a partner, on the door. His father, Howard Benedict, never pushed his son toward a career in law but set an example that the second of his four children wanted to emulate from an early age, the prosecutor said.

"He was a serious, ethical and straightforward lawyer and was not a lawyer to hide things. That's the kind of lawyer I try to be," Jonathan Benedict said. "I try to be ethical in a difficult business."

Benedict graduated in 1964 from Fairfield College Preparatory School, a private Jesuit high school associated with Fairfield College. The school's fight song includes these lyrics: Send your cheer on high, When there's a victory to be won, Fairfield men are never done.

Benedict went on to Lafayette College in Easton, Penn., about 70 miles west of New York City, where he earned his bachelor's degree in history in 1968. The Vietnam War delayed his plans for law school. Benedict was drafted into the Army, where he rose to the rank of first lieutenant and was leading a platoon by the end of his tour. Benedict said his unit served mostly a supply duty, and he was glad he was not an infantryman on the front lines.

Upon his honorable discharge in 1971, Benedict immediately enrolled in St. John's University School of Law and earned his doctor of jurisprudence degree in 1974. That same year, David Moxley moved with his wife, Dorthy, and teenaged children John and Martha from California to the exclusive Belle Haven section of Greenwich, Conn.

Benedict was in private practice with his father's firm the following year when Martha was savagely beaten and stabbed to death with a golf club, later traced to the home of neighbor Rushton W. Skakel Sr., brother of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's widow, Ethel Skakel Kennedy.

Benedict became a Connecticut prosecutor in 1976 and joined the staff of Fairfield County State's Attorney Donald Browne in the following year. Browne's office was overseeing the Moxley investigation in Greenwich, but it would be 20 years of starts, stops and dead-ends before the responsibility for prosecuting the crime would be passed to Benedict.

'Tiger from the get-go'

When Browne retired in 1997, Supervisory Assistant State's Attorney Jonathan Benedict was appointed chief prosecutor for the Judicial District of Fairfield, which has its seat in the crime-plagued Connecticut shoreline city of Bridgeport. Browne stayed on the Moxley case as special prosecutor for six months after Benedict succeeded him as head honcho, but Browne quit abruptly in April 1998 when the third of three books about the Moxley case was published.

Newspaper reporter Tim Dumas' book, "Greentown," raised as an issue — but then shot down as unlikely — suggestions that Browne could have been "paid off" by the Skakel family. Dumas told Courttv.com that Browne completely misunderstood his intentions, but nonetheless Browne was out and Benedict was in.

Browne declined to be interviewed but issued a statement in which he described Benedict as a "compassionate," competent and professional career prosecutor.

Two months after Browne resigned as special prosecutor, Benedict called the first of 53 witnesses to testify at a closed-door grand jury proceeding that led to Michael Skakel's arrest on Jan. 19, 2000.

"He wasted no time going for a grand jury. I think people were surprised at how quickly Benedict went for it," Dumas said. "Everyone who wanted a resolution to this thing was pleasantly surprised by that. He seemed to be a real tiger from the get-go."

No one was more pleased than Dorthy Moxley, who by 1997 was widowed and living in northern New Jersey. Moxley recalls retired Greenwich police detective Frank Garr, Browne's investigator since 1991, telling her that the new boss seemed eager to close the murder investigation with an arrest.

"Frank Garr told me the new state's attorney was interested and he was talking to him about it," Moxley said during an interview. "I remember feeling bad about Mr. Browne leaving that way, the way that he did. I remember wondering, 'What will this new fellow do? Will he better? Will he be worse?' I knew nothing about Mr. Benedict."

A solid record

Before being thrust into the national spotlight with the Moxley case, Benedict was well known in Bridgeport and within Connecticut's tight-knit legal community, but few outside of Fairfield County were familiar with his work. In 1992, Benedict won a conviction in the first Connecticut murder trial to rely heavily on DNA evidence. Although it was only 10 years ago, courts still required then that full hearings on the admissibility of the still-evolving science be held before it was allowed.

Benedict used DNA evidence to convict house painter Tevfik Sivri of killing 22-year-old masseuse Carla Almeida. The victim's body was not found until years after the trial but traces of blood recovered from the trunk of Sivri's car had similar genetic makeup of Almeida's parents. An error by the trial judge forced a retrial in 1995, but Benedict prevailed again.

Connecticut does not keep win-loss statistics for individual prosecutors, but Benedict estimates that he won a solid majority of the more than 40 murder cases he took to trial.

But his record isn't perfect. In March 2001, a jury acquitted 25-year-old Adrian Peeler of capital felony and murder for the 1999 execution-style killings of an 8-year-old boy and his mother in their Bridgeport home.

The jury convicted Peeler of conspiracy to commit murder but concluded that there was reasonable doubt as to whether Peeler actually pulled the trigger of the gun used to kill Karen Clarke and son Leroy "B.J." Brown. The child was a witness to a drive-by shooting Peeler's brother, Russell, committed that precipitated a murder in a Bridgeport barbershop.

Stamford attorney Bruce Koffsky, one of Peeler's lawyers, said he was impressed with Benedict's courtroom style.

"Jon may be affable and pleasant but he still has a professional poker player's demeanor," Koffsky said. "He's not going to tell you how he is going to try to win and you do know he's going to try to win."

Although most lawyers and journalists who know Benedict use words like "gentleman," "professional" and "nice guy" to describe the veteran prosecutor, Koffsky said hard-fought murder trials can bring out another side in even Mr. Congeniality-types like Benedict.

"During the Peeler case, he was extremely professional and pleasant, but he was not gracious," Koffsky said. "It's not expected that you are going to be gracious at a murder trial, particularly a death penalty trial. I have seen him become outraged both at the court and at opposing counsel. He is not by any means a wallflower."

'Intense,' 'deliberate'

Testimony in the Skakel case begins May 7, but jurors have already been given a sense of Benedict's courtroom style. Leaning over frequently in whispered huddles with co-prosecutors Christopher Morano and Susann Gill, Benedict emerges like a quarterback calling the plays.

He's seasoned and it shows in the courtroom. Morano and Gill, for example, sat on the edges of their seats ready to pounce on every objectionable question Sherman asked potential jurors. Benedict mainly remained firmly seated in his chair, content to let Judge John Kavanewsky Jr. to be the one to tell the defense lawyer when he was on shaky legal ground and rising only when absolutely necessary.

In an unusual tactic, Benedict told prospective jurors about the weaknesses of the state's case, telling them that the prosecution's circumstantial case is almost 27 years old and the crime occurred in a bygone era when police had not even heard of genetic identification. Other prosecutors might not have revealed upfront that there would be no eyewitness testimony, recorded confessions or case-solving DNA discovery. It remains to be seen whether this approach will work to the state's advantage, but one of the most important observers — the victim's mother — has no doubts about Benedict's strategy.

"He reminds me very much of my husband," Dorthy Moxley said. "My husband was intense and Jon Benedict seems intense in what he does. Almost everything he does is deliberate ... I really feel blessed about the way things are working out."

Jonathan Benedict lives in Orange, Conn., just outside New Haven. He and his wife of 32 years, educator Rosemary Benedict, have three adult sons.

The oldest Benedict child, 26-year-old Matthew, plans to start law school this fall.