Obsession (20 page)

Whenever we profile an UNSUB in a crime of this nature, we always look for precipitating stressors—some factor or factors that help send the subject off the deep end. Certainly the argument with the other woman who threw the condoms in his face could have set off a volatile person like Robert. But there is usually something even deeper and more fundamental, something that affects an individual’s basic security or self-image that will help explain the ultimate crime. And we found that, too.

He had been living at home with his mother. He didn’t have a job. He was doing drugs, definitely on the skids, and his mother had given him an ultimatum:
get a job or get out. The night of August 25, all of the other kids in the bar were celebrating going back to school, Jennifer included. And Robert had no place to go and nothing to do, other than to steal to support his drug use.

Another telling aspect of the crime is the way the body was found, with the shirt pushed up above the breasts and the skirt bunched around the waist. This is quite typical of staging when the perpetrator wants investigators to think it was a sexual assault by a stranger. We have seen this over and over again in cases of domestic homicide in which a husband murders his wife but then tries to make it look as if an intruder has broken in and sexually ravaged her. In effect, it is what an inexperienced offender thinks a rape is supposed to look like, and when this sort of staging occurs, it is likely an individual who knew the victim.

When we add it all up, Robert Chambers does not make a good candidate for victim. So what made him do it? What made him kill Jennifer Levin behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, early on the morning of August 26,1986? The fact is, there are no clear-cut and easy answers. What there is, instead, is a certain personality type, a certain personal history, a certain relationship between two people, a certain set of general and immediate stressors, and then something happening in the mind of one individual that suddenly focuses all of the negative elements and brings them explosively to the surface.

We know, for instance, that he had been drinking heavy amounts of both tequila and beer that night. Investigators were told, though they were never able to prove, that he had also been using both marijuana and cocaine at the same time. Forensically, there was no evidence of seminal fluid on Jennifer’s body, clothing, or anywhere else at the scene, nor is there any
evidence of condom use. We can interpret all of this to mean that because of his impaired state, he wasn’t able to perform. And with a guy as vain about his image as Chambers, this might have brought his anger and frustration to the boiling point.

When we hear confessions or other suspect statements, we try to figure out what they are really telling us, much as an actor might search for the “subtext” in the dialogue he’s delivering. Keep in mind the kind of arrogant, controlling, generally predatory personality that Robert Chambers represents. So when he says that Jennifer enjoyed rough sex, what he might actually have been saying is that she liked to control the situation, which, for someone like Chambers, would have been an untenable affront to his masculinity. And then, if, in fact, he couldn’t get it up, the danger level could have reached critical mass quickly.

Linda Fairstein says, “I think what might have happened was that she taunted him about that and he ended up striking her. First, because she had the marks that not only suggested a blow to the mouth and a blow to the eye, but that she then tried to get away from him.”

There were two distinct parts to the crime scene: the area where Jennifer’s underwear was lying and the area where her body was discovered. What we believe happened is that the actual attempt at sex took place at the first location, and that she extricated herself and tried to run away from him. He took off after her and caught up with her before she reached the roadway, which is where he strangled her and where she died. The autopsy photographs showed bruises and lacerations all over Jennifer’s face. Her eyes are bruised shut. There are cuts around her mouth. There are petechial hemorrhages under her eyes, which are a hallmark of strangulation. There are also contusions covering her hips, thighs, knees, even ankles. Where
the hipbone juts out on the right side, the area has been rubbed completely raw. None of this is consistent with Chambers’s story of her being on top of him and his throwing her off. Moreover, while his chest was covered with her nail marks where she tried to fight him off, and her nails were, in fact, all jaggedly broken, his back was completely clear, bearing none of the abrasions we would expect to find if he’d been on his back, struggling on the grass as he described.

He claimed that an abrasion on his neck was caused when he reached up to pull her off him and inadvertently hit himself with his own heavy metal watchband. While this makes no sense in the context of the wound pattern, when I looked at the autopsy photos, I noted an impression on her neck that, to me, was clearly made by Chambers’s watch. He must have ground it into her neck by pressing on her throat with his wrist and forearm. This is a compression wound, not one caused by blunt-force trauma. Also, the autopsy revealed that the delicate hyoid bone in the neck was not broken, which is more consistent with this type of compression asphyxiation than it is with simple manual strangulation. Just looking at this photograph, I could visualize the struggle.

From all the evidence, it was clear to me that this young woman must have fought heroically before she was finally subdued.

The case had caused a media sensation in New York, which reached a fevered pitch as Chambers approached trial. Of course, there had to be a news handle, and with a guy as good-looking and “interesting” as Robert Chambers, that handle became almost inevitable: the Preppie Murder.

“The greatest disservice the media has ever done me was dubbing him the Preppie Murderer,” says Fairstein. “In fact, he was a drug-addicted burglar who had been thrown out of every school he’d gone to.
But to describe him that way in the press wouldn’t have been nearly as sexy. So that’s what we were fighting—the public perception that this clean-cut, nice kid had snapped in the park that night.”

This is another thing that we see commonly in the trials of sexual predators. By the time he’s in court, he’s so clean-cut and innocent looking that the jury says, “This nice young man couldn’t possibly have done that.” It’s why we recommend that the prosecution try to introduce his booking photo, to show what he actually looked like the night of the crime.

The trial lasted thirteen weeks, during which time Robert Chambers did not take the stand, allowing Fairstein no opportunity to show the jury what this man was really like.

Chambers was defended by Jack Litman, a distinguished criminal-trial attorney with many years of experience. Fairstein is still outraged about the way she feels he tried to drag the victim’s reputation through the mud in an attempt to win sympathy for his client. Unfortunately, this is all too common, virtually a standard technique in rape trials. But thanks to people like Fairstein, it’s starting to change; judges and juries won’t accept it nearly as readily.

Everyone is entitled to a vigorous defense, but neither Fairstein nor I can quite stomach the perceived need to revictimize someone who has already experienced the worst from the hands of the man now being given every conceivable benefit of the doubt. “You know, that’s one of the things that I will never understand,” Fairstein comments, “how you do something like that to another human being, no less somebody who’s dead and can’t defend herself. But that was one of the ugliest things about the defense in this case. And they didn’t just let it be there. They pursued it so aggressively.”

Fairstein’s summation lasted for four hours, during
which time she reviewed every aspect of the case and all the evidence that indicated Chambers had acted deliberately rather than as the result of a momentary, instinctual action. The jury stayed out for nine days, apparently unable to figure out what to make of the sympathetic preppie Chambers’s pleas of self-defense—in other words, how this young woman much smaller and weaker than him had managed to disable him with her underpants and so brutalized him that he was completely beyond himself and killed her by accident. When both sides faced the likely prospect that they’d have a mistrial on their hands and have to go through the entire ordeal again, they started talking. After consulting with Jennifer’s parents, Fairstein agreed to a plea bargain, reducing the charge of second-degree murder to first-degree manslaughter, which carried a lighter sentence of five to fifteen years. It was not the total victory she sought, but she was willing to do whatever she had to to keep him away from society.

“We had obviously played every card we had the first time, so it doesn’t generally get better.”

As we’ve made clear, I consider Robert Chambers a murderer, not a rapist, and not someone who killed for the sheer sexual pleasure of it. As such, interestingly, he may be less of a threat as a repeat offender than if he were a serial rapist. But I think the threat is still great. He is a predator, and his criminal record for non-sex-related crimes shows a complete contempt for the rules by which normal people live. If he gets out of prison and finds himself in a similarly stressful situation as the early morning of August 26, 1986, it would not surprise me if his anger would surface explosively and he could react exactly the same way again. For this reason, as well as the fact that I don’t consider ten or fifteen years sufficient punishment for
willfully taking the life of an innocent young woman, I, for one, don’t want to see him back out on the street.

Fortunately, it doesn’t look as if this is going to be a problem for a while. He’s been incarcerated in several prison facilities throughout New York State and is not exactly racking up a stellar record. Fairstein reports that he’s been sanctioned a number of times for possessing drugs. As of this writing, he is in the Green-haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County, where he was caught with a stash of heroin in a deodorant can.

As Fairstein comments, “He has come up for parole several times and it’s been denied. He’s doing more to keep himself in jail than I ever could, which is fine with me.”

Looking at Robert Chambers from the outside, it is easy to see him as Jennifer must have in order for her to be drawn to him. If you could get him off drugs and break his other bad habits (such as stealing), you’d be left with a good-looking guy, educated in all the best schools (at least, for as long as he could stay in one) and well-connected socially. The problem is, of course, that this was not a spoiled toddler who only needed loving, firm “training” to improve his behavior. Robert Chambers was a grown man who’d established a pattern of criminal behavior and chronic substance abuse. In some ways, he can be compared to Ted Bundy, who was also good-looking and even better “on paper,” but who was nonetheless irredeemably flawed in terms of character and conscience. Whatever else you are or do, if you intentionally assault or kill women for the sheer pleasure and satisfaction of it, you are a monster who has to be removed from society.

As it did the Chambers murder case, the dichotomy between the well-dressed, attractive gentleman in the courtroom and the vicious, violent offender at the
crime scene haunts many rape trials. Even where there is ample physical evidence connecting an offender to an obviously forced encounter, jurors sometimes confess they had trouble convicting the defendant because he didn’t look like someone who would have to resort to rape to get a woman. It just doesn’t make sense to them. Maybe he is a successful professional—a dentist or lawyer, perhaps. Other times he is more like Robert Chambers, someone with a criminal record for burglary, for example. But he seems so attractive on the surface that the juror may not understand the dynamics leading to rape. The situation is even more confusing when it is a case of acquaintance, rather than stranger, rape. And this is amplified further still in cases in which the defendant has a wife or girlfriend—with whom he has a consensual sexual relationship—who loyally sits behind him all throughout the trial.

He doesn’t look like he needs to rape to get a woman.

What we need to keep in mind, however, is that rape is primarily not driven by the goal to have sex, but to control and dominate a woman, whether to reaffirm the offender’s masculinity, assuage his anger, or satisfy a more complicated fantasy. The sexual act is secondary. To the extent that we can’t get that across to juries or the public, we haven’t lived up to our responsibility to the victim.

One case that brought together many of the difficulties involved in acquaintance-rape trials where the defendant is a handsome, popular member of the community was that of Alex Kelly. Unlike Chambers, Kelly was not a killer. But he was tried and convicted of rape after an eight-year run from the law that cost his parents $140,000 in posted bond and took him through fifteen countries, including Japan, Greece, and Sweden.

In February of 1986, Kelly was a popular eighteen-year-old senior at Darien High School, in the wealthy
Connecticut suburb of New York. Cocaptain of the school’s wrestling team, clean-cut and handsome, he looked like the kind of guy most high school girls would love to go out with. On February 10, he attended a party at a friend’s house following a school basketball game. As the night wore on, one of the girls began looking for a ride home. She was with a group of friends on break from St. Mary’s High School, a nearby all-girl Catholic school. She had turned sixteen just five days earlier and was anxious to make curfew. Alex Kelly offered to drive her home in his girlfriend’s Jeep.

As they headed through a light snowfall and came to a stop sign, Kelly tried to kiss her. She resisted his advances. When they got to her house, he didn’t stop but drove instead into a cul-de-sac. In this secluded setting, according to her testimony years later, “He grabbed my throat with his left hand. He squeezed as hard as he could. He told me that I was going to make love to him or he was going to kill me.”

Kelly pushed down the backseat, forced the girl into the back, told her to take off her clothes, and then raped her. She was a virgin and was left bleeding from the assault, staining the carpet of the Jeep. After threatening to assault her again and kill her if she reported the rape, Kelly dropped her off at her house, where she immediately told her sister and parents. They took her to a doctor and the police the next day. In addition to her emotional state, police noted bruises on the girl’s chest, neck, back, and buttocks.