Obsession (19 page)

Gill got Chambers to repeat the story about how they’d parted company outside of Dorrian’s, he for doughnuts, she for cigarettes. Only Gill had had time to get some information from several of the friends, and one bit was crucial. By the time he talked to Chambers, he knew that Jennifer Levin didn’t smoke. That was the first crack in the dam.

Okay, then maybe she hadn’t actually gone to buy cigarettes, Chambers revised. Maybe they’d actually walked together for a while before they parted, from Second Avenue to Lexington, when she got into a cab. Gill then confronted Chambers about the scratches, asserting that the medical examiner would be able to
tell the difference between feline scratches and human scratches. The first thing they would do was examine the cat.

Okay, well, actually, Chambers admitted, the cat had been declawed for apartment life. Jennifer had scratched him after a spat as he was about to go into the doughnut shop (which was an admission that they’d been together longer than he’d said, even in his amended story). Gill claimed he knew someone who worked the late shift at the doughnut shop and he’d remember any lovers’ quarrel vociferous enough to produce deep scratches.

Did he say Eighty-sixth and Lex? Chambers back-tracked again; he meant the doughnut shop at Eighty-sixth and Park. But that was enough. The other detectives returned to the room to have it all out. When they asked him to take off his shirt, they saw deep scratches on his torso as well. Chambers admitted that he and Jennifer had walked to Central Park together. A few minutes after revealing this, he confessed that he’d killed her. But it was an accident, an accident she’d provoked during an episode of the wild and rough sex he claimed she liked so much and in which he became a hapless participant.

Now there are several ways we can go with such a case at this point. One way is to believe the subject that it really was an accident and get all the corroborating details. Another way is to assume he took her into the park for no good—that is, with the idea of raping her, and that the sexual assault had degenerated into a killing. And a third way is to figure that what we were dealing with was not a sexual assault at all, but an outright murder. So what would have had to happen for that to be the case?

One of the critical aspects in any profile or behaviorally based criminal investigative analysis is victimology. What was the victim like? Was she high risk or
low? How would she have reacted? What kind of behavior would her responses have provoked in the subject?

From all accounts, Jennifer Levin was a bright, popular, precocious girl, often the center of attention, who relished the exciting social life of Manhattan. By the time she was seventeen, she and her girlfriends were frequenting the East Side bars. After graduating from high school, she was planning to go to art school. She was popular with boys, but Fairstein’s meticulous investigators found absolutely no evidence of Chambers’s claim that she liked “rough sex.”

“She was absolutely not wild at all,” says Fairstein, based on her in-depth research. “She was never a discipline problem. And very loving, very much a family kid. She had a lot of friends and she liked being with people.”

She had met Robert at Dorrian’s the previous fall and was taken with his dark good looks, his commanding six-foot-five height, and intrigued by his mystique and the somewhat shady past her friends warned her about. He was said to make a practice of stealing things from the homes to which he was invited for parties. When word got back to Jennifer through another friend that Robert thought she was really good-looking, she was thrilled. They had their first sexual encounter shortly thereafter and had sex together periodically throughout the winter, spring, and summer.

What was Chambers’s side of what happened in the early-morning hours of August 26?

He said that Jennifer had actually been pursuing him that evening but that he was involved with another young woman who interested him more, and it happened that there was some truth to that. It’s what he claimed the scratching incident was about. According to several accounts, Jennifer had seemed upset that she was apparently more interested in him than
he was in her. The roguish Robert was always being seen surrounded by other attractive young women, she knew he was sleeping with at least some of them, and when she saw him in a public setting, he was often aloof or wouldn’t even acknowledge her presence. She didn’t appreciate being trifled with and wanted a clearing of the air. So she went to Dorrian’s on the night of August 25 to have it out with him. According to people who were there that night, the two of them talked intently for quite a while, and whatever the nature of the conversation, they did end up leaving the bar together.

After they left Dorrian’s, Jennifer and Robert went into the park, where they’d agreed to have sex. So the first thing we have to accept is, however the crime might have seemed, this was not a rape, and this is an important point to establish.

According to Chambers, they had picked the spot under the tree, near Park Drive and the obelisk, away from potential prying eyes. She told him she was going some distance off to pee. When she returned, she was apparently carrying her panties, because she surprised Robert from behind and bound his wrists together with them, immobilizing him. He’d been leaning back on his hands, so they were convenient to her.

Remember what we’re talking about here: a five-foot-eight girl “overpowering” a six-foot-five guy and, in an instant, efficiently tying him so tightly with her cotton underpants that he couldn’t get his hands free.

This allowed her to initiate the rough sex she’d been relishing. She opened his pants and began stroking his penis. At one point, according to Chambers, she squeezed his testicles and kept squeezing them harder and harder until he couldn’t stand the pain. This gave him enough strength finally to break free of his wrist bindings and reach up forcefully to pull her off him. He grabbed her around the head or neck and flipped
her over him and onto the ground. In the process, he must have struck his own neck with the edge of his watch, which accounted for one of his more telling bruises. He told her to get up, that the sex was over and it was time to go home, but she didn’t respond. That was when he realized he must have accidentally killed her.

He staggered away in a daze, eventually coming to rest seated on the stone wall where he waited for someone to find the body and report it. In fact, videos taken by several onlookers later revealed Chambers among the crowd when the police had come to investigate.

Of the several problems with this story, not the least was the idea that this young woman could so easily physically dominate this big, strong guy. But there were even bigger problems, the most important of which was that the wounds on Jennifer Levin’s body did not even closely correspond to what Robert Chambers said had happened. Then there was the actual manner of death, which the ME determined to be strangulation, and for which her neck bore the marks. Chambers denied having put those marks there, perhaps implying that his victim previously had engaged in some kind of autoerotic asphyxiation games.

But again, fate, in the form of irrefutable visual evidence, intervened. Just hours before her death, Jennifer and two girlfriends were photographed, posing joyfully with their arms around each other’s shoulders. It is a beautiful picture, made almost unbearably poignant by the events of a few hours later. Each girl seems to be reveling in the others’ company and happily looking off into the bright future each had a right to expect. Jennifer is seen wearing the same denim jacket in which she was later found. With the scoop-neck top she was wearing in the photo, it is abundantly
clear that her neck and upper chest are completely unmarked.

From that moment when the photo was taken until she disappeared with Chambers, Jennifer’s where-abouts can be completely accounted for, so there is no chance the injuries occurred before her encounter with him.

Finally, the discrepancies in Chambers’s story bring up an advantage we investigators have on our side. Crimes are committed in the heat of the moment, and it is difficult, even for the cleverest or most experienced offender, to make physical evidence fit a story and logic he imposes after the fact. If you “stage” a crime scene—that is, try to make it look like some other event took place, such as a man killing his wife and staging it to look like a robbery gone bad—you’re giving us an awful lot of behavioral evidence to work with. And the more you show us, even in an attempt to mislead us, the more you’re going to point to your own crime and profile.

Chambers told detectives that Jennifer must have choked when he flipped her off him and onto the ground. But perhaps he hadn’t seen as many strangulation murder cases as they had. Because anyone who’s handled a few and talked to the medical examiner knows that you don’t normally asphyxiate in a split second; you have to keep hard pressure on the air passage for some considerable period of time. The marks on her neck clearly demonstrated
repeated
applications of force rather than any sort of single blow.

While there were these distinct marks on Jennifer’s neck, there were no ligature marks on Robert’s wrists, which we certainly would have expected to see had he been bound as tightly as he said he was and broken free with so much force that the resulting action was enough to kill her.

“There was a broken bone in one of his fingers,”
Fairstein recalls, “which our orthopedic man testified was what’s called a boxer’s fracture, because it results from a glancing blow that breaks the finger. And there were bite marks on his hands from where we believe he had covered her mouth. And in typical asphyxiai fashion, there were scratches of her own on her neck, from where she was trying to free herself.”

Unmistakable conclusion: There is no way Jennifer Levin could have died in the manner Robert Chambers described. In the various detectives’ opinions, in Linda Fairstein’s opinion, in my opinion, Chambers could only have killed intentionally. Intent can be formed virtually instantaneously, and whether he planned to kill her earlier in the evening (which I doubt) or a moment before he did it, he did it on purpose.

Forensic evidence notwithstanding, the one consistency throughout Chambers’s account is that he was the victim—that Jennifer Levin died accidentally as a result of her own actions and aggression toward him. So if he claims to be a victim, we said, let’s do some victimology on him, just as we would investigate any other victim in a case brought to us. Linda Fairstein wants to know why he did it. Okay, let’s analyze his background and try to figure it out.

On the surface, Robert Chambers had it all. He was tall and handsome, well-spoken, magnetic to women, and apparently sufficiently well-off financially to travel in sophisticated and elite circles. He went to prep schools, including Choate, giving rise to the moniker that would haunt Linda Fairstein throughout the trial and the long months of preparation. But the real story was far from the surface one. He may have once technically been a preppie, but he didn’t graduate from Choate. In fact, he never did well there and dropped out fairly soon after he arrived. And while his father had a steady, respectable job, the Chambers family
was not rich, so he was decidedly less well-off than most of the people he liked to hang around with.

Robert therefore supplemented his income by stealing, mainly from the houses of his friends’ parents when he was invited to parties. Jennifer Levin wasn’t the only one to be warned about his practice. The word went out that you never left Robert alone at a party, because something would always be missing. He was thrown out of one school for helping to steal a teacher’s purse and lost a summer job his mother had gotten him working on a wealthy Mend’s yacht for stealing cases of liquor. After finally making it out of high school, he took courses at Boston University, but didn’t do well there either and was expelled for stealing a credit card. Then in September of 1985, he enrolled at Hunter College in New York, but attended classes only rarely, continued to steal, and continued another pattern already well established—taking illegal drugs.

As Fairstein puts it, “He was running in a crowd where he didn’t have the money to keep up with these other kids and began using drugs. He was the bad-boy connection. He would do the burglaries and get the money to get coke for the other kids who wanted it, so they wouldn’t rat him out.”

What was his attraction for Jennifer? Certainly there was the physical aspect, the intriguing fact that he was so popular with other girls, but there was more to it than that, Fairstein believes. “She was a very good kid, and one of the things she saw in Robert was wanting to get him off drugs. She drank, she liked to have a good time. She was a very vibrant, vivacious kid. But she didn’t do drugs. And one of the things that she was trying to do that may have backfired that night was to save him—in the big sense. I mean, she thought she could do him a big favor and get him off
drugs, without having any sense of how far gone he was. This was not an amateur job.”

Nor did Jennifer apparently comprehend the depth of his rage and animosity. Fairstein explains, “He had gone to the bar that night to see somebody else, with whom he had a fight because Jennifer was hanging out, expressing her interest in him that night. And the girl he had come to meet ended up throwing her packet of condoms at him and saying, ‘Use these with her! I’m leaving.’ So he was angry at Jennifer for having thwarted that.”

Fairstein also believes her investigation supports a strong anti-Semitic bias on the part of the Waspy Robert toward the Jewish Jennifer. “I think he didn’t like her. I think he didn’t like anything about her, in part because she was Jewish. But as his friends described it, he would rather have sex with someone. It was better than going home and masturbating. He was willing to have a quick sexual encounter with her and then leave her, but he didn’t want to wake up to have her in his home in the morning, or go to where she was staying that night, at a girlfriend’s house, and have to wake up with her. And that’s why, I think, they went to the park.”