I
Rikers. Next the Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill. Then Sing Sing. Robert was moved around from prison to prison in the first few weeks of his incarceration, but eventually he was sent to the Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York, and there he settled down to spend the duration of his sentence. He would not be eligible for parole until 1993.
The prison was a maximum security facility, an aging gray pile of rock surrounded by gun-turreted walls thirty feet high and two feet thick. Few sounds of civilization could have penetrated the walls, even had there been much civilization nearby. The town of Comstock, if it could be called a town, contained a post office, a bar, and a handful of sagging wooden houses. Beyond the town, in the quiet distance, New York’s Adirondacks and Vermont’s Green Mountains made a wall around the prison wall, encircling it with rugged forested peaks.
Robert couldn’t see the mountains from his cell, a small room, eight feet wide by twelve feet long, equipped with a bed, a locker, a sink, and a toilet. He didn’t like being confined to the tiny space and after a while asked, even though he had earlier claimed to be frightened of what the other inmates might do to him, to be allowed to mingle with the general population. His request was granted, and soon he was working in the prison paint shop, playing baseball and volleyball in the yard, and lifting weights in the gym.
What went on in his mind? Did he think he was unfairly incarcerated? No doubt. One night in the spring of 1988 he told a prisoner in his cellblock, who later conveyed his words to a newspaper, yet another version of what had happened the night he killed Jennifer. “I was snorting cocaine,” he said. “I was blitzed out of my mind. I didn’t realize I had my hands on her neck so long. I didn’t realize I was strangling her, I was so high.”
The truth? Or just another story?
Phyllis visited Robert frequently that spring, no matter that the trip was a terrible ordeal. She had to rise in the middle of the night in order to catch the visitors’ bus, which departed from midtown Manhattan at about four in the morning and took close to five hours to reach its destination. Then she had to wait for several more hours until she was processed and passed through. But she didn’t mind. It was always good to see Robert.
One night she told John Dermont during a dinner at her home that Robert was getting on famously. “He’s on the baseball team,” she said. “He’s got a terrific tan. And in the fall he’ll be taking college classes. The professors come in from Skidmore, you know.”
Not long afterward, at another dinner—this time at a restaurant in the Armory, the scene of her glory days when she had headed up the Greys—she told Dermont that she had grown disenchanted with the Kennedys. “I’ve been reading a book about them,” she said, “and the book shows that they were power abusers, lawbreakers. I used to want my son to be like one of them. But I don’t any more.”
The Levins became active in the victims’ rights movement. They appeared at rallies and trials, and they brought a $25 million wrongful death suit against Robert. If they won, they announced, they would use whatever money the suit brought them to help victims. It would be a memorial to Jennifer.
Robert, who had received hundreds of communications of support, began answering them with form letters. In October 1988, he wrote to his well-wishers:
To my new family:
As many of you know, I have been involved with a civil lawsuit. Although the amount is tremendously high, I believe that my choice of not fighting the action was the best for all involved. After speaking with my parents and lawyers, I came to the decision to plead “no contest” to end the circus once and for all… .
As for my present situation, things here have also been troublesome. In the past couple of months there have been two disturbances in which no one was hurt. However, major changes came about overnight. A few hundred inmates were transferred to other facilities as a security measure. Unfortunately, one of my friends was found guilty, and will be spending the next ten months in the “Box”—a special disciplinary wing. Luckily, I was inside my cell when all of this happened, otherwise I, too, may have received disciplinary hearings.
Unfortunately, my luck ran out last month. I was on my way to the yard to play baseball and I had an extra pair of sneakers with me. I was bringing these to someone else who was also on the ball team. I was locked up for six days and found guilty of directive 106.10—Direct Order. You see, inmates are permitted [only] one pair of sneakers at all times.
The school semester began on September 12th, but I ran into a slight problem with the application. Next term begins in January. I am getting help with determining which courses will be best for me to take. So, things are starting to look up. After all, once one hits rock bottom there’s only one way to go—UP!
What was the sneaker incident all about? In January 1989, Esther Pessin, who had read Robert’s letter, ran into Bob Chambers on Broadway and asked him this.
“Oh, you heard? Just a mix-up, that’s all,” Bob said. “Robert told me he actually had permission to have the extra pair of sneakers with him. A guard had given him the permission. But when they asked him who the guard was, he got the name wrong.”
Same old Robert, Pessin thought. An excuse for everything. Same old parental cover-up, too.
II
Robert. And Jennifer. Jennifer and Robert. In the spring of 1989 as I was finishing this book, I kept hearing in my head the voices of their friends, teenage voices that were sometimes remarkably insightful, sometimes woefully banal, and most of the time given to recounting observations by reference to films, as if films gave the speakers breadth, made up for what they had not yet experienced in life. The voices made me sad, reminded me of how young Jennifer and Robert had been when the chain of events that prompted my book had occurred; they’d been adolescents, those creatures with adult bodies and passions, but the heads—the narrow perceptiveness and limited world knowledge—of children. Jennifer never got the chance to grow up, I thought often. Robert has. He’s nearly twenty-three.
How is he getting on? I found myself wondering one afternoon. To get an answer to the question, I called Linda Fairstein. There was no point in asking Jack Litman. Although many people thought he had done a remarkable job in defending Robert, his client himself didn’t seem to think so. He’d pulled away, hadn’t even sent Litman his form letters.
“Robert’s apparently doing fine,” Fairstein, who had become the godmother of little Samantha Jennifer, told me. “He’s made friends. And I even heard he had a protector. Pappy Mason.”
Mason was a black drug lord who had reputedly ordered the assassination of a New York policeman. “Robert,” I said, “always lands on his feet.”
“Yes,” Fairstein went on. “I heard Mason took him under his wing. Acted as his bodyguard.”
I wasn’t altogether surprised to be told that Robert had won an influential guardian in prison. Inmates, just like the rest of us, like celebrities. Besides, I thought, he had for years associated with members of the underworld, had used them to obtain drugs and to help him fence the goods he stole in order to buy drugs. He would know how to get on with his fellow inmates, sharing as he did with them both history and an essential meanness of spirit.
But I was to learn subsequently that while Robert was getting on well with his new associates, the story about his relationship with Pappy Mason was not true. It had arisen from a boast Robert had made to a visitor. Robert had always been boastful. Prison hadn’t changed him. He just boasted now about different sorts of things.
What would psychiatrists have made of him? They’d probably have labeled him a “pathological antisocial personality,” I decided. That’s the dry term that has these days replaced yesteryear’s more ominous-sounding “psychopath” or “sociopath.” His early use of alcohol and drugs, his vandalism and school failures, his criminal activities and disregard for the truth—all would have pointed to that diagnosis.
He could have been born with a tendency to the disorder. But he wouldn’t have turned into a full-blown antisocial personality if he hadn’t been raised where, when, and how he was. Predispositions are encouraged or discouraged by environment.
Robert’s environment served him poorly. His parents tried from time to time to control his drinking, drug use, and stealing, but just as often they made excuses for him, forgave him, took his word that he had mended his ways. Other adults, people who might have confronted him about his antisocial activities, chose to be lulled by his parents’ reassurances. But more important, his friends looked with favor on his behavior. To them, his drug use, drinking, and even stealing were not merely acceptable but glamorous. And why not? Many of them were doing the same things.
Robert, I knew, had always been looking to blame his own transgressions on someone or something outside himself. Thinking about the milieu in which he had come to manhood, I began to feel that in one sense something outside himself was to blame—that he was the by-product of the drug epidemic that swept through American youth in the 1980s. If so, then clearly Jennifer Levin was a victim of that drug epidemic. Because whatever happened in Central Park—whether Robert killed her because he wanted to steal from her in order to buy drugs, or because he experienced with her a drug-induced hallucination that she was attacking him, or because he wanted to have sex with her but was impotent as a result of the depressing action of drugs, or because something she did or said set him off into the kind of intense rage that drugs notoriously produce—one way or another, his use of drugs played a role in her death.
I didn’t feel that this excused Robert. What I felt was that, although I had listed and limned in my pages all the things that made him and Jennifer special, they were not, ultimately, unique. They resembled hundreds of thousands of American teenagers. And from their story it would be right on target to conclude that there, but for the grace of God and the reach of the epidemic, did go our own children.
But what of Jennifer? What would have become of her? One day as my mind was on summing up, my phone rang and there, out of the blue, was Kitty Schoen, calling to say hello. I was surprised to hear from her, for I hadn’t spoken to any of Jennifer’s friends in close to a year. “How are you?” I said. “What’s been happening?”
“I’m graduating,” Kitty said. “And after graduation I’m going to California. To get a job in TV or film production. I’ve even had one offer already.”
Kitty graduating college? The years of her and Jennifer’s chaotic adolescence flashed through my brain, and then unexpectedly I remembered my own, recalled them as vividly as if they hadn’t happened in the long-ago fifties, but last week, yesterday. They too had been chaotic, laden with rebellion and risk. Yet sometime during or after my college years I’d turned without even knowing it into a hard-working, level-headed adult. Would Jennifer too have undergone such a sea change? Would it have started by now, the way it seemed to have started in the graduating, future-planning Kitty? I thought it might have, but to check out the feeling I telephoned Leilia Van Baker. Jennifer and she had been so similar, Leilia had often told me, that they’d been like two peas in a pod. What was happening with Leilia?
When I reached her—she was twenty-one now and going to Bennington College—I asked what she was up to. “I’m majoring in art,” she told me. “I’m doing painting and graphics. I love it. I love it so much that I didn’t even want to take a break to go home on holiday this winter. I just wanted to keep working. Painting.”
“That’s great. That’s wonderful news.”
“There’s more,” Leilia said. “I have a boyfriend. I’ve been seeing him for eight months. If we stay together, who knows? We could get married. Have kids.” She giggled. “But meanwhile, I’m thinking that when school’s over I’ll go into business. Maybe open a gallery.”
Yes, I thought. Yes. I can sense now what Jennifer would have been like today, these days. She’d have been like Leilia. Bursting with news. Busy with new interests. New loves. Preparing for a career. For life.
It brought her death back to me. That death had always seemed a sad and terrible waste. Now it seemed an even greater squander.