By the time they had been working hard on The People v. Robert Chambers for several weeks, both Litman and Fairstein were aware that their respective cases would not be easy to win. Fairstein knew by then that Litman wasn’t going to introduce the idea that Jennifer had asked Robert to compress her neck in order to heighten her sexual pleasure. He was planning to stick by Robert’s own explanation of what had happened—that he’d strangled Jennifer while reacting to pain. Not that that made Fairstein’s job any easier. There were no witnesses to what had happened in the park so the only way to prove that Robert had intended to kill Jennifer would be to show, through medical testimony, that he’d choked her for enough time, whether minutes or seconds, to have considered his act and yet kept on with it.
Litman faced a similar yet altogether different task. To see Robert go free, he’d have to prove that Robert had held on to Jennifer’s neck for only a few brief seconds.
The problem for both lawyers was that there was no absolute way to establish the amount of time Jennifer had been throttled. Even skilled medical experts were offering not proof but merely opinion. And in the courtroom, Fairstein and Litman knew, one expert’s opinion might easily cancel out another’s.
The lawyers had other difficulties, too. Fairstein had no motive. Litman had no witnesses to verify Robert’s contention that Jennifer was sexually aggressive either in the park or in general.
One morning in October, Litman decided to see if he could get Fairstein to reduce the charges against Robert to manslaughter. He stopped by her office and said briskly, “C’mon, you know this isn’t a murder case!”
Fairstein didn’t bite. She realized she was going to have a hard time proving murder, but she believed that in the end she would succeed. The pictures of Jennifer lying dead in the park gave her that feeling. Whenever she thought about them, she could see them in front of her. Jennifer’s face puffy and smeared with dirt. Her breasts and her pubis left uncovered, disdained. Her neck blazing with scarlet bruises. She knew, whenever she thought about the pictures, that Robert had murdered Jennifer, and she was hopeful a jury would react the same way.
Litman was waging psychological warfare with her, Fairstein decided. Ignoring his remark, she changed the subject.
“Dear Ms. Fairstein,” Litman wrote to his opponent on October 21. “Pursuant to Article 240 and Section 200.95 of the Criminal Procedure Law, we respectfully request that you make available to us … the following ‘property’ without which the defendant cannot adequately prepare or conduct his defense.” He listed various items he wanted to see, including Jennifer’s journal. The little black spiral book in which Jennifer had written, among other things, feverish descriptions of sexual activity, had been given to the police by Alexandra LaGatta the day they came to her apartment, and they’d turned it over to the district attorney’s office.
Litman had heard tantalizing rumors about the book. He’d heard it mentioned Robert twice. He’d heard that some of its pages dwelled on sexual acts that were kinky and aggressive. And he’d heard that the journal contained a list of Jennifer’s lovers, a list in which she’d rated sexual prowess, drawing erotic symbols next to the names and giving exceptional performers extra symbols, in the way that critics gave stars to exceptional restaurants and movies.
He needed the book, Litman had decided. It might give him just what he was missing—the names of men who could corroborate Robert’s story that Jennifer was a sexually aggressive young woman. He was entitled to use the book to look for potential witnesses, he felt. Entitled, too, to examine whatever it was that Jennifer had written about his client.
“Dear Mr. Litman,” Fairstein wrote to Litman about the journal on November 7. “The requested property is beyond the scope of discovery under C.P.L. Article 240.”
Fairstein’s playing games, Litman thought. She’s the one who told me the sex acts in the journal were kinky and aggressive. He told Judge Bell this, and although he hadn’t made his initial request for the book public, a week after receiving Fairstein’s turn-down, he filed a copy of that request in court papers accessible to the press.
JENNIFER KEPT SEX DIARY: LAWYER, screamed the Post the next day. “SEX DIARY” KEPT BY JEN? said the News. And television news shows repeatedly referred to Jennifer’s journal as a “sex diary.”
Fairstein was annoyed. “There isn’t a sex diary,” she announced. “There is a school datebook, but nothing chronicling [Jennifer’s] sex life.” She denied ever having told Litman anything about what was in the book, and continued to refuse to let him see it.
A week before Thanksgiving she went out of town. The day after she did, her assistant, Tom Kendris, telephoned her and told her that Litman had grown even more importunate. He’d come to court and demanded that Judge Bell compel her to produce the journal. “That so?” she grinned. “Well, we don’t even have the book anymore. I gave it back to Jennifer’s father.”
She was amused at Kendris’s astonishment. And sure she’d made the right move. Now if Litman wanted the journal, he’d have to subpoena it from Steve Levin, and she knew the press well enough to know that if he went after the book from a grieving father he’d probably come off looking like a coldhearted monster. A male chauvinist, too, out to suggest that because a young woman had been sexually active she’d somehow been responsible for her own death.
Litman had suggested something similar to this in the Bonnie Garland case. He had introduced testimony about an affair Garland had had with a young man other than her killer, and afterward he had told an interviewer that he had purposely soiled Garland’s reputation. “It was necessary to taint her a little bit,” he’d said, “so the jury would not believe, as the parents wanted them to, that she was this ingenue who fell in love for the first time [with] this wily man.” Many voices had protested Litman’s tainting of Garland, and that trial in 1978 had been a milestone for a new social movement—the movement for victims’ rights.
Although newspaper readers and television viewers are titillated by the idea of Jennifer’s diary, Fairstein thought, public opinion will probably go against Litman for demanding it. And perhaps that will scare him into thinking twice before trying to use blame-the-victim tactics in the trial.
He had to see that diary, Litman decided two days before Thanksgiving. Had to see it no matter how bad going after it from Jennifer’s father was going to make him look. He spoke with Fairstein that day and mentioned he was afraid Levin might alter or destroy the book. She told him not to worry. “Mr. Levin knows the diary may be the subject of court proceedings,” she said.
“Did you copy it before you handed it over?” he asked.
“I Xeroxed the relevant pages,” she answered. “Including those pages on which your client’s name appears.”
Relevant pages? That made him furious. If Fairstein had considered some of the material in the diary so relevant that she’d gone to the trouble of Xeroxing it, then he damn well was entitled to a read.
On Thanksgiving Eve he personally delivered a subpoena for the diary into the hands of Steve Levin’s lawyer, Jeffrey Newman.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Newman said as he accepted the paper.
“Ein breirah,” Litman said. “I’ve got no choice.”
Thanksgiving weekend was a confusing time for Brock Pernice. He’d been up in Boston at college, but he’d come back to New York for the holiday, and a part of him almost expected to see Jennifer. As if she hadn’t died. As if the past few months without her had been just another of the many times they’d broken up.
“What was it like being with her?” an inquisitive reporter asked him over lunch at Pinocchio’s, an Italian restaurant a few blocks from Dorrian’s, on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Brock remembered many things, but one of them, he explained, was something that always made him sad. “I couldn’t open up with her. At least I couldn’t as much as she wanted me to.”
“What was she like?”
“Terribly attractive. And very fun-loving,” Brock said. But he also criticized her. “She was hyperactive. Always jumping around. Always getting mad about something. A handful.”
He’s angry at Jennifer for dying and thereby abandoning him, the reporter thought. But when she asked him about his final memories of Jennifer, she began to suspect there might be another reason: that Brock was angry at Jennifer for having hurt his pride by going out with Robert the night she got killed. “I’d gone away for the summer,” he was reminiscing. “And we’d broken up. But just before she died, I’d come back. I saw her out on the island. We confessed our flings. We said we were going to see each other again.” His face looked deeply puzzled, his voice sounded irritable. “I was back. Everything was good between us.”
A friend of Brock’s named Shane Keller was at the table and he, too, seemed to detect wounded pride in Brock’s words. As if trying to comfort him, to let him know that no matter whom Jennifer had gone off with, he still thought of her as Brock’s girl, Shane murmured, “Yeah, but if she hadn’t died that night, if she’d just fooled around with Robert, you’d have found out. It would have been just one more time you two broke up. But then you’d have gotten together again.”
Brock seemed soothed after that. He spoke more positively about Jennifer and implied that he might even have married her one day. “We could have solved our problems. Or the problems could have just gone away. People change. If I was ready to change, and to change her, I could have.” Then he began speculating about what had really happened in the park. “Robert must have gone temporarily insane. He’s got mental problems. The scene can give them to you.”
“Yeah,” Shane agreed. “Also, Robert kept a lot hidden. His robberies. His drugs.” He shook his head. “I can just see Jennifer trying to get to know him. You know, trying to get him to open up with her, the way she always wanted people to do. With him having so much hidden, she could have made him really mad by trying to find things out.”
Brock stared at him. And suddenly his slight body went rigid and he could no longer contain or mask his anger at Jennifer. “Why the hell,” he said, “did she want to find out anything about that idiot!”
Mike Pearl, who covered the courts for the New York Post, was in Atlanta that weekend. Pearl was a legendary figure among New York journalists, a man who had reported on trials for so many years that he had developed an intricate network of sources and spies and could be counted upon to sniff out a story even before its principals realized they were involved in one. Shortly before the weekend, he had stumbled on a curious piece of information: the prosecution now had a theory about why Robert had murdered Jennifer. Robert, Pearl’s informants told him, had been trying to rob Jennifer. The theory had been sparked by the long-ago observation of McEntee and other detectives when they first saw Jennifer’s body that her earlobes seemed recently divested of earrings. And it had been augmented by photographs newly obtained by Linda Fairstein that showed Jennifer partying at Dorrian’s shortly before she went with Robert to the park. In the photographs, her ears were alight with little fake diamonds.
Pearl hadn’t filed the story. He’d held back, planning to check it out further, and gone south for his holiday. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have dragged his feet. But who reads the papers over Thanksgiving weekend, he’d said to himself. Why waste a scoop?
Esther Pessin of United Press International was hungrier than Mike Pearl. She, too, had stumbled on the prosecution’s theft theory just before the weekend, but she didn’t sit on the information. She called Jennifer’s grandfather, Arnold Domenitz, to check it out, weasled a confirmation out of him, and filed her story. By Friday night it was all over the airwaves.
Linda Fairstein was livid when she learned that the theft theory had leaked. She’d meant to produce it only at the trial. And she hadn’t meant actually to say that robbery had been Robert’s motive for killing. There’d be no way to prove such an assertion. For one thing, Jennifer’s money and jewelry had never been found. For another, even if they had been, and even if by some remote chance they could be traced to Robert, he might not have killed her for them. He could have killed her and then decided to take her possessions. So what Fairstein had planned to do was just tease the suggestion of theft into the trial. Let the jury arrive at the idea on their own by looking at the photographs of Jennifer at Dorrian’s. But now, she realized, she probably wouldn’t be able to rely on the photographs. Litman would make a move to have them excluded, or at least ask to have them cropped so the earrings weren’t visible.
She’d lost something big, Fairstein thought. But she didn’t scold the Levins. She had become very fond of them in the months since she had first met them in her crowded office. And besides, the leakage hadn’t exactly been their fault. She hadn’t thought of warning them to keep her theft theory under their hats. Anyway, how could she be mad at the Levins? Especially right now when they were spending the weekend trying to decide what to do about the diary subpoena.
Shortly after the weekend, the Levins decided they would fight that subpoena. There was nothing in the diary relevant to the case, as they saw it, and besides, it would be obscene for the lawyer defending their daughter’s killer to paw through her private, innermost thoughts. Early in December they petitioned Judge Bell to quash the diary subpoena.
At the rectory in Washington Heights, Monsignor Leonard was trying to reform Robert. One of his efforts involved seeing to it that Robert ate dinner with him and his fellow priests every night. Meals were the beginning of civility, Monsignor Leonard reasoned. In ancient days they signified alliances. If you ate with the liege lord, you were putting yourself in his hands and he was putting his hands around you. He owed you something after you dined with him, and you in turn owed him. That’s what the manna in the desert in the Old Testament was all about. And what the Eucharist was about. These things symbolized an alliance between people and God.
But although Robert took his place at the dining-room table every night, chatting with the handful of priests who made their home in the rectory and dining on the same fare—concoctions whipped up by Leonard himself out of Pierre Franey’s Sixty-Minute Gourmet—the young man didn’t seem very different now from the Robert who’d first come to live at the rectory. He did the odd jobs he was assigned—a little painting here, a little carpentry there. And he did some reading about business, a topic he claimed to be very interested in. But he didn’t exactly knock down the doors of the church trying to get in. Nor did he seem to understand yet that even if he had killed Jennifer unintentionally, he still bore responsibility for her death.
This troubled Monsignor Leonard, who saw it as a sign of immaturity. But perhaps in time the young man would grow up. And perhaps the process would be speeded along by nightly exposure to the conversation and concerns of the rectory’s priests.
December’s days were growing colder and drearier. On one gray, sleety morning, Judge Bell shivered his way from the subway to the courthouse. He was just bypassing the gloomy facade, heading for the judges’ private entrance, when he saw a group of demonstrators shouting and parading. “Justice for Jennifer!” they were calling out. “No more blame-the-victim tactics!” Bell stopped for a moment to look at the demonstration. A woman gave him a flyer. A moment later he reached the judges’ entrance to the courthouse and boarded the private elevator.
People were staring at him, he noticed then. Staring at his coat. He looked down at his lapel and to his surprise saw a pin on it. The pin had a picture of Jennifer Levin and bright fuchsia lettering that read “Justice for Jennifer.”
The woman who had given him the flyer must have fastened the thing onto his lapel, Bell realized, and he quickly removed the pin from his coat. But although afterward he shoved the pin into the back of a drawer in his chambers and soon lost track of it, he was unhappy about having been made to appear, however briefly, a partisan in the case. He believed it was the judiciary’s job to stand between the accused and the mob. That’s how he saw his role, and he didn’t care if people didn’t like him for it.
A few days after the incident of the pin, Bell moved to resolve the diary dispute. The Levins had no right to refuse to produce the diary, he decided, and ordered them to do so at once.
Its relevance to the case was another matter. That was something he himself would decide, he ruled, once he had read it.
By mid-December, Linda Fairstein, who had interviewed the police who had questioned Robert and many of his former teachers, employers, and neighbors, felt she had a good fix on him. He was anti-Semitic, she suspected. He’d used that buzz word “pushy” about Jennifer, and told the police that Boston University was “very Jewish.” He was also, she suspected, a sociopath, the kind of youth who had no conscience and no moral rudder. That last idea made her feel better about having lost her fight to deny him bail, even though she now had a sociopath loose on the streets. Because in time, she believed, he would display his essential nature, would start using drugs again, or stealing or scamming. She looked forward to that occasion. If Robert was caught doing something illegal, she’d be able to cite his transgression when he was convicted and sentenced for killing Jennifer, and that would help see to it that he got put away for a long time.
She was thinking about this one afternoon as she shopped for Christmas gifts in Tiffany’s. She couldn’t help it, because as she pondered a display of golden earrings and silver cufflinks, she turned her head and saw a young man who looked surprisingly like Robert Chambers. She pondered the jewelry again. Then she looked at the young man again. And then she realized it was Robert Chambers.
He’s probably shoplifting, she thought. That’d be just like him. And as he loped past her, she sprinted after him, to see if her hunch was correct.
She was too late. The aisles were packed with Christmas shoppers, and at the elevators she lost him. Frustrated, she returned to the jewelry counter.
A half hour later she saw him again. He was exiting the store, a small Tiffany shopping bag in his hands. She felt a moment’s disappointment. He hadn’t stolen anything. Then, never mind, she told herself. I know this kid. And sooner or later he’s going to do something reckless and play right into our hands.
On another short December day Detective Mike Sheehan made his way along Sixth Avenue, where Salvation Army Santas were ringing their bells and the stores were ablaze with Christmas decorations. He entered the building in which Bob Chambers worked. He rode the elevator to the floor on which Bob’s company was located. And there he delivered a subpoena for Bob’s employment records.
Sheehan had completed his errand and was just about to leave the company’s offices when he spotted Bob Chambers himself.
“Hey! Ya look fantastic!” he called out.
“You think so?” Bob asked.
“Yeah. Since we were together, you drink nothing but club soda, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Good job.”
Sheehan would have preferred to leave things at that. But Bob asked if he would stay and talk to him awhile. Sheehan hadn’t talked to Bob since the August night Robert was arrested. But he’d seen him sitting in the courtroom during several of Robert’s hearings, and Bob always looked as if he was about to burst into tears. Feeling sorry for the guy, Sheehan agreed to a chat. The two men sat down on a bench near the elevators. “You know me, Mike,” Bob said.
“Yeah,” Sheehan nodded.
“Well, the kid was just starting to get his thing together. His life was just starting to work out. At least I thought.”
Sheehan felt a surge of unwanted compassion.
“I had so many problems with him,” Bob went on. “And then everything was just about to gel. And then this thing. There’s no breaks.”
Sheehan felt awful. “Bobby, that’s the way life is,” he murmured. “You just gotta keep on going. Tell yourself, The strong survive, and this too shall pass.” But the memory of his interview with Robert in the Central Park police precinct came to his mind, and the next thing he knew he was apologizing. “I’m gonna tell you this,” he said, “if I’d have known it was your son, I wouldn’t have continued on the case.”
The two men parted after that, but out on the street, amid the bell-ringing and the crowds, Sheehan got a choke in his throat. He couldn’t stop thinking how it was Christmastime, and Bob’s kid would probably be going upstate one of these days, upstate to one of those maximum security prisons, and, oh, Jesus, why do things like this happen to people, and God forgive me, but this could be me years down the line, I could have a son like that and how the hell would I deal with it. And then he went down the street and popped into a bar and, although he usually drank nothing but beer, ordered himself a scotch on the rocks.
The scotch didn’t help. He was two sips into it when he began thinking about the Levins. Jesus Christ, that was a tough thing there, too. The new year coming. Without a daughter. Yeah.
He finished the drink, so troubled by the confusion of sentiments swirling through his brain that he got up and called Linda Fairstein, and only after he spoke to her, and she told him she understood his ambivalence about the case, did he begin feeling better.
Fairstein’s first months on the case hadn’t gone smoothly. The diary fight had consumed a lot of her time and energy, and she’d had trouble getting Robert’s friends to cooperate with her investigation. Many had refused to speak with her, a few out of loyalty, others because they had things to hide. Drug use. Robberies. Credit card scams. Their parents had called her in terror when she tried to get in touch with the kids, and said they would fight her tooth and nail if she dragged their offspring into the case. She had promised the parents that their teenagers, however delinquent, would not be prosecuted. She had begged them to tell their kids to come down and see her. “My God,” she had said, “a child has been murdered. And your child can help us convict the murderer.” But the parents hadn’t helped. Agitated parents can be adamant.
She despised the lot of them. Especially one. A psychiatrist. “Please, let me speak to your son,” she’d implored him. “There are parents who are never going to see their daughter again, and your son could help us see to it that their pain isn’t made any greater.” The psychiatrist hadn’t cared about other people’s pain. He’d just kept saying that if the press got wind of his son’s relationship with Robert and put the family name into the newspapers, his patients would be distressed. That’s a psychiatrist? Fairstein had said to herself. All he thinks about is what’s bad for business!
She’d been discouraged. But right after the new year started, she learned through an informant that Robert had smoked dope at a New Year’s Eve party. Her spirits soared, buoyed not just by the information, but by the fact that a friend of Robert’s had delivered it. Perhaps she was rounding a corner, she thought, perhaps a tide was beginning to turn in her favor.
Fairstein was right. Jennifer’s diary need not be turned over to the defense, Judge Bell ruled at the end of January. He had closeted himself with the spiral date book, read and reread its scrawled impassioned entries, and come to the conclusion, as he wrote in a brief decision, that there was “nothing in the document which was relevant and material to the defendant’s case or which must or should be disclosed to the defendant pursuant to his due process right to a fair trial or pursuant to any other constitutional, statutory or common law right.”
Jack Litman was disappointed. He had cited scores of legal arguments to support his claim to the diary, had searched out precedents that went as far back as the trial of Aaron Burr. But he had lost the fight. And not only that, he had in the process garnered himself extraordinarily bad publicity. As Fairstein had anticipated, he had been painted as a blackguard, out to drag Jennifer’s reputation through the mud. The popular press had roasted him, and even The American Lawyer magazine had taken a dim view of his diary quest, granting him, in their first issue of the new year, a “Now You Know Why People Hate Lawyers” award.
He could make another try for the diary during the trial, Litman realized. But he’d have to think carefully before doing that. The way public opinion was going, any moves he made that could be construed as attacking Jennifer’s reputation might end up hurting Robert more than helping him.
Kitty Schoen ran into Robert at a party that February. She hadn’t seen him since her Valentine’s Day party the year before, the party to which she’d invited both him and Jennifer. The year before! It was hard to face, and hard to face him. She’d thought about Robert often, and seeing him standing in front of her now, she felt faint. “I can’t deal with this yet,” she told him.
Robert wandered away, and the party swirled around Kitty. But after a while she realized she wanted to talk to him, wanted to hear from his own lips what had happened to her friend. She approached him and pulled him away from the heart of the party into the quiet of the hostess’s kitchen.
“I’m sorry I ever met Jennifer,” he said when they were alone in the kitchen. “You know, she was flirting with me at Dorrian’s that night. She kept on doing it. She was becoming a pain in the ass.”
Kitty was surprised to hear him talk about Jennifer that way, but she didn’t say anything. Just listened to his whole account. Heard that Jennifer had begged him to come visit her at school and that he’d said he wouldn’t. That his refusal had made her freak out and scratch him. And that he’d killed her accidentally.
When he was done, Kitty didn’t know what to think. Parts of the story sounded believable to her, but other parts didn’t at all. She shook her head.
Her less than enthusiastic response to his story made Robert self-pitying. “Well, my life is over, too,” he said. “I’m going to die in jail.”
He’s being melodramatic, Kitty thought. “No you won’t,” she said.
“Yes I will. But I’d rather die in jail than be raped there by a big black motherfucker.”
Then Robert perked up. “I’ve got one thing going for me, though,” he boasted. “There’s this book and movie being done about me.”
“Movie?” Kitty was interested.
“Yeah. Some people are making a movie about me. If I let them, should I let Rob Lowe play me?”
Winter was nearly over, Judge Bell had set a date for pretrial hearings in May, and still Linda Fairstein had settled on no motive for Jennifer’s killing. She didn’t have to have a motive. The law didn’t require one. But jurors liked motives. Without one, they were loath to convict. Perhaps the FBI will help me determine the motive, she thought, and in the middle of March traveled to the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quântico, Virginia. The center was known for analyzing the clues in unsolved murder cases and helping local police forces determine who the killer was. “We know who our killer is,” Fairstein had said to an official at the center some months earlier, “but we don’t know why he did it. Would you be willing to work backwards? Take our killer and help us analyze why he killed?”
The FBI had said yes. She’d supplied them with a packet of her evidence. Crime scene photographs. Jennifer’s clothing. Background information about Robert. And at last she’d been informed that a group of experts were ready to give her the benefit of their experience.
She flew down with Tom Kendris to the futuristic-looking center—the buildings extended not skyward but many stories underground—and in a windowless room met the experts who had studied her material. There were eight of them, some of them detectives, some of them specialists in forensic pathology and psychology. She told them a bit more about the case—new information she’d received about Robert—and then listened avidly to the experts’ theories.
“Robert’s got the same kind of personality as that serial murderer Ted Bundy,” a psychologist said. “The charm, the deceptiveness. And the emotional vacuity that makes killing easy. Given that, he might kill again.”
An FBI detective argued strongly that Robert had killed Jennifer and then positioned her body and clothes in such a way that she would appear to have been raped. “He pulled up the skirt and blouse,” he said. “And he tossed her jean jacket over her arm. There’s no way that jacket could have landed the way it did if he flipped her off him the way he says he did.”
Another detective likened Robert’s remaining in the park after Jennifer was dead to the habit that arsonists had of watching the fires they set. “People who linger at the scene of their crimes get sexually aroused by what they’ve done,” he said.
Fairstein found all of this fascinating. But what about the motive, she wanted to know.
“Maybe Jennifer refused some sexual demand,” one of the experts said. “Or maybe she wanted sex, but not there, not in the park. Or maybe she wanted intercourse, and he wanted oral or anal sex. Any refusal could have triggered his rage.”
“Or maybe he was impotent,” another said. “We all know that impotence is common among drug and alcohol users. If he was impotent and she made fun of that, he could have become enraged.”
“Maybe he was trying to rob her,” said a third.
Fairstein took her leave of the experts warmly. An interesting day—but on the plane back to New York she knew she still didn’t have a motive. “Let’s just hope we have the kind of jury that can put two and two together,” she said to Kendris. “The kind of jury that reads Elmore Leonard.”
“Do you know the one about the prosecutor in the rural Tennessee court?” Jack Litman said the following day to an audience of young lawyers at the New York County Lawyers Association. He had come to the elegant building with its crystal chandeliers, thick red draperies, and portrait gallery filled with the austere faces of once-famous lawyers to lecture about his widely admired trial techniques. Like all good speakers, he began with a joke.
“The prosecutor is summing up in a hammering-to-death case,” Litman said. “Dutifully he’s doing what he’s been taught. Repeating what each witness said. By lunchtime he’s only gotten to Witness Number Seventeen. After lunch he’s gotten to Witness Number Twenty-two, and suddenly the worst happens! A juror falls asleep. At that moment the prosecutor realizes he’s got to liven things up. So he picks up the murder weapon and says theatrically, ‘Do you remember how the deceased was on his knees, begging for his life because of his two little children? And do you remember how the defendant here cruelly paid no heed and just picked up the hammer and brought it down on the victim’s head?’ As he says this, the prosecutor bangs the hammer down on the jury railing. And then suddenly the head of the hammer bounces up and hits the sleeping juror on the head. ‘Sir, are you okay? Are you okay?’ a court officer shouts. And the juror looks at him and says, ‘Hit me again! I can still hear that son-of-a-bitch lawyer a-talking.’”
When the laughter subsided, Litman at once turned tutorial. But he seemed, as he began to draw a lesson from his joke, to be speaking as much to himself as to his young audience. “Never forget,” he murmured, abstracted for a moment, “that what a trial really is is a dramatic incident in the confines of a courtroom.”
In April, Pat Fillyaw came to court with her father and watched David plead guilty to the burglaries he had committed with Robert and to the attempted murder of the Columbia student he had stabbed. Friess, the lawyer she’d hired and stuck with, asked the judge for leniency. “The defendant, at the time of these incidents, was not a person acting solely on the basis of his own free will,” he said. “He was a narcotics abuser, and on the eve of the Columbia incident he had been drinking. That he did what he did under the influence of these substances may not have legal merit, but the court should take it into consideration. Mr. Fillyaw isn’t a mean or vicious person. He’s a person who would not ordinarily have committed these acts were it not for narcotics and alcohol.”
The judge shrugged. “The reasons for the defendant’s activities were his own responsibility,” he said. “His use of drugs was self-induced. His use of alcohol was self-induced.”
Then he sentenced David to ten to twenty years imprisonment on the attempted murder, five to ten years on the burglaries, and two to four years on an additional charge of attempted assault. But, he said finally—perhaps because David had cooperated with the district attorney’s office and provided information about Robert—“the terms will run concurrently.”
Pat heard him and began to cry. Even with the concurrent terms, David would be a grown man when he got out of prison.
When she left the courtroom, her body leaning heavily on the arm of her father, she felt torn in half. Part of her kept saying it was only right that a person who commits a crime pays for that crime. Even if it’s my own son. But another part said, He’s the victim of a corrections system that never tried to help him. And of racism. He didn’t get bail, the way Robert Chambers did—even though his victim lived and Robert’s died. And I didn’t have the means that the Chamberses have, so I couldn’t risk letting him go to trial. She wasn’t sure she would have, even if she’d had the means. A crime shouldn’t go unpunished. But maybe she could have learned to live with the idea. Mrs. Chambers lived with it. She was okay with the fact her son was walking the streets, and that he might go free.
She kept trying to reconcile her mind and her heart. And three weeks later she was hospitalized for tachycardia—a racing, pounding heart.
“Are you the prosecutor in the Chambers case?” a police captain from the 19th Precinct said to Linda Fairstein over her home telephone on the first Saturday in May. “Yes,” she said impatiently. She and Feldman were going to get married that evening and her hairdresser was due to arrive any moment.
“Does the name John Flanagan mean anything to you?” the police captain pressed ahead.
“Yes. Why?” Flanagan had been one of Robert’s best friends.
“Because several hours ago, there was an accident at Flanagan’s apartment.”
This has to be a joke, Fairstein grinned. She’d kept her wedding plan a secret from most of the people she worked with, but someone in the Police Department must have found out about it and decided to play a practical joke on her. Tease her into a little turmoil before the wedding. It must have been someone who knew how hard she’d been trying to get Flanagan to talk to her, and how firmly and constantly he’d refused. “Yes?” she said, waiting for the joke to unfold.
But it didn’t. “Flanagan went out drinking with some friends,” the police captain was going on. “And then he and two of the girls he’d been with went back to his apartment and climbed up the fire escape to see the view from his roof. And then one of the girls tripped. Fell four stories. Landed on her head, fractured fifteen ribs, and ruptured her spleen. She’s on life support.”
Life support! Fairstein was amazed at the coincidence of another tragedy striking a member of the Dorrian’s crowd, and for a moment she was skeptical that the event had been an accident. “What about Flanagan?” she asked suspiciously.
“He acted right,” the captain said. “He covered her with a blanket and ran to Lenox Hill Hospital to get help. But he’s pretty worried. Our chief of detectives thought you might be interested.”
She was interested. Terribly interested. If she could get to Flanagan now, while he was scared, he might talk to her, tell her some missing pieces of information about Robert’s drug use and his scams. If anyone knew Robert, Flanagan did. “I’ll call the chief of detectives,” she said.
But although a part of her longed to race over to the precinct and interview Flanagan, the rest of her resisted. She had been immersed in tragedy for fifteen years. She had been eating, sleeping, breathing the Chambers case every day for nine months. She needed to be free of tragedy and of the Chambers case today. Needed to be a proper bride, with nothing but joy on her mind. Telephoning Tom Kendris, she asked him to handle the Flanagan matter for her. And that evening, standing under a tent on her mother’s Westchester lawn, her blond hair styled and her body resplendent in a pale pink sequined sheath, she married Feldman. But throughout the ceremony and throughout the fleeting hours of dancing afterward, she kept expecting a ringing phone and a brusque voice telling her the girl was dead.
Pretrial hearings were scheduled to begin the week after Fairstein’s wedding. They did, but Litman interrupted them by filing myriad motions. He lost most of them, including one asking to have Robert’s videotaped confession suppressed, but he succeeded in getting the hearings delayed. Delay is generally desired by defense attorneys. Evidence disintegrates. Witnesses disappear. The public forgets the animus it first felt toward the defendant. There are a host of reasons why defense attorneys like to delay trials—but they especially like to delay them when their clients are out on bail. Robert, out on bail, was having a pleasant spring. He had left the rectory and moved back home.
When the hearings finally resumed in June, John Dermont attended them. He sat in a back row of the courtroom and listened intently to Litman. He heard him argue that the statements Robert had made to the police the night he was arrested should be excluded from the upcoming trial for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons he gave was that although Robert had not told the police so, he had a lawyer at the time of his arrest—a lawyer his mother had retained in May of 1986 to represent him in a burglary inquiry.
A lawyer representing Robert in a burglary inquiry back in May of 1986? Dermont was startled to hear the date. When Phyllis had asked him and Barbara to write bail letters for Robert, she hadn’t mentioned that Robert had previously been questioned by police in regard to other matters. And when Robert’s burglary indictment had come down several weeks later, she had implied the charge was something brand-new, something the district attorney’s office had just cooked up in order to persecute Robert.
Phyllis was dishonest with me and Barbara, Dermont thought. She used us. But though angry, he forgave her. Poor woman, it wasn’t her fault that Robert kept getting into trouble. It was cheap psychology to blame parents for their offsprings’ failings.
Barbara Dermont disagreed. Parents did form their children, she insisted when they discussed it. And if a parent was a manipulator, his or her child was likely to become one, too. “You know the way Robert always sees himself as a victim,” she said to John one night in July. “The way he says Jennifer made him kill her. And Fillyaw made him commit the burglaries. Well, he is a victim. He’s Phyllis’s victim.”
The summer sped by. Almost a year had passed since Jennifer had died. Robert resumed doing painting and carpentry for his upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Murphy. He learned to use a computer. He played with his cat—a new one, for the Siamese that he’d claimed had scratched him the night Jennifer was killed had been put away—dressing it up with a little collar from which dangled a pair of tiny handcuffs.
He also dated girls.
They weren’t the kind of girls he had favored before Jennifer’s killing. They weren’t elegant blondes with the tinkle of money in their Chapin or Miss Hewitt’s School voices. The girls he hung around with now hadn’t gone to prep schools, or if they had, they’d gone to the less elite ones. There was a whole gang of them from York Prep. A few of the gang had been friends of Jennifer’s, but that didn’t prevent them from wanting to spend time with the notorious Robert. He had become a celebrity; to be with him was to feel oneself a part of history.
Even Kitty Schoen succumbed to the urge one day. She visited him at his apartment, and sat on his bed and leafed through his album of news clippings about himself. The room was tidy, decorated with religious pictures that Phyllis had hung up. Some were just little paper pictures of saints. Others were framed portraits of priests. Kitty pondered one of Archbishop McCarrick dressed in his fancy robes. It was autographed “To Robert, from Uncle Ted.”
Robert told Kitty he had grown more resigned to going to jail. The film star Matthew Broderick had got himself arrested for some kind of car accident, he pointed out. And a rock musician he liked was being sued for statutory rape. “Maybe we’ll be together in jail,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have this really good cell. And we’ll start a band.”
He seemed still quite casual about what had happened to Jennifer. But that didn’t make Kitty angry with him. Rather, a great sadness came over her. Robert wasn’t such a bad guy, was he? Okay, he’d gotten into drugs and all that. And yeah, he’d ended Jennifer’s life. But he was going to pay for that. He was going to jail. And that was sorrowful, too, because in some way what had happened to Jennifer hadn’t been entirely Robert’s fault. It was the fault of the way they’d all lived.
On the anniversary of Jennifer’s death, Steve Levin swam out into the surf near his summer home in Montauk and flung a bouquet of pink roses into the sea. The New York Post ran an editorial demanding Robert be brought to trial. “Chambers, now free on a $156,000 bond,” said the editorial, “should have gone on trial four months ago. The newest trial date is October 4, but it won’t be an enormous surprise if, at the turn of the year, Chambers is still waiting for his date with justice.” The article blamed the delay on Jack Litman for filing a mountain of motions, each of which had had to be argued and ruled upon, and on the inertia of the criminal justice system. “If the wheels of justice turned any more slowly in New York,” it observed, “they’d be turning in reverse.”
The New York Post was correct about the snail’s pace at which the case was proceeding. Summer passed. Autumn started. And still Robert did not come to trial. But his time was running out. Judge Bell set a date in late October for the start of jury selection. And he ruled that all of Robert’s statements to the police on the night he was arrested could be admitted into evidence at the trial.
Linda Fairstein was elated. Robert’s statements contained numerous remarks that he himself had eventually admitted were lies—among them that he had never gone to the park with Jennifer, and that it was not Jennifer but his cat and his neighbor’s sander that had injured him. When the jury hears all the lies he told, Fairstein thought, they’ll think as I do that he never came out with the whole story. That whatever he offered the police in his last statement, the videotaped confession, was just another lie.
The weekend before jury selection began, John Dermont received a disturbing phone call from Robert. “Can you come over here?” Robert said. “Come over and be with my mom?” Dermont didn’t know what was wrong, but he knew that something was, and he and Barbara hurried to Phyllis’s apartment.
They found her in bed. She was upset, she told them, because there was trouble brewing. The stepdaughter and son-in-law of Mrs. Murphy, for whom Robert had been working, were coming over soon, and when they got there they were going to accuse Robert of stealing from their aged relative. Phyllis didn’t want them to come. She didn’t want a confrontation. But Robert had insisted on it. And he’d already invited a half dozen of his friends to join him and witness it. They were out there in the kitchen now.
Barbara stayed with Phyllis, and John went out to talk to Robert. He found him drinking vodka and orange juice with his friends. “Let it go, Robert,” he said to him. “Forget about it. You’ve got more important things to worry about right now than Mrs. Murphy’s relatives.”
“No!” Robert shouted. “I want to have it out. These people went to Monsignor Leonard and accused me of stealing! I didn’t steal. I did work, and I billed Mrs. Murphy for it, and she paid me.”
“Then why are they accusing you?” Dermont asked.
Robert said he didn’t know. “Maybe because I went on doing work for Mrs. Murphy after they told me not to do it anymore,” he suggested.
“Why’d you do that?” Dermont inquired.
Robert was indignant. “Because a lot had to be done.”
When Mrs. Murphy’s stepdaughter and son-in-law arrived, they began a litany of complaints against Robert. He’d bilked their aged stepmother out of $7,000, he’d presented her with extraordinary bills for work done in her apartment, and he’d forged her name on checks to pay for it. If he didn’t stay away from their stepmother in the future, they’d go to the DA.
Robert got furious. “You people have one hell of a nerve saying things like that,” he yelled, “especially after all my mother has done for Mrs. Murphy.”
In the bedroom Phyllis grew hysterical. She was going to check herself into a psychiatric clinic, she told Barbara. No, she was going to throw herself out the window. She got as far as the balustrade.
“You people!” In the living room Robert’s face was dark with rage. John Dermont was growing frightened. The boy was shouting at the top of his lungs. “I’m sick and tired!” he was shouting. “Sick and tired of people shitting on me!”
Mrs. Murphy’s relatives, perhaps frightened, too, left after that.
Later Robert’s friends told him he’d been terrific, just great, and he calmed down and acted pleased with himself. But Dermont, who thought there might be some substance to the charges Mrs. Murphy’s relatives had made, remained uneasy and warned Robert, “You’d better do what those people said and stay away from Mrs. Murphy.”
“Why?” Robert said. “I didn’t steal from her. It’s my word against theirs, and my word is as good as anybody’s.”
Dermont couldn’t believe his ears. “Your word isn’t as good as theirs,” he said.” Your word isn’t as good as anyone’s right now.”
Robert shrugged. And Dermont thought, My God, this boy—he has no perception of the straits he’s in!
Jury selection started three days later, October 21, 1987. Concerned about all the publicity the case had received, Judge Bell laid down some unusual ground rules. The jurors would be examined one at a time, he decided. The lawyers would go about their questions in a slow and detailed fashion. And the examination would take place not in the courtroom, where a prospective juror’s remarks might be overheard by his fellows, but in the privacy of a small jury deliberation room.
All these decisions would prove of enormous significance to the final outcome of the case, but perhaps none more so than the one concerning the room. Because of its tiny size, the prospective jurors were placed cheek-by-jowl with Robert. They sat opposite him at a table, their chairs and his no farther apart than those of people about to have a friendly lunch together. He wore a preppie blue blazer, looked handsome as his photographs, and glanced at the people who might one day sit in judgment on him with polite attentiveness and, occasionally, a charming smile. By the time those people left the room, he had become for them not the kind of depersonalized defendant they saw on television trial shows, a person invariably seated distant and remote across a vast courtroom, but someone with whom they had shared hours of physical proximity, someone with whom they had experienced a closeness that bordered on intimacy.
Robert’s defense picked up other advantages during the uncommon jury selection process, too. Litman had the time not just to probe jurors’ reading habits, but the kinds of movies they went to and their attitudes about sex and child rearing. He also had the leisure to pursue a hidden agenda, to ask questions that laid out ideas that were essential for Robert’s defense but which he mightn’t be able to state directly during the trial. “You know, don’t you, the pain that is caused when a man’s testicles are squeezed?” he said to each and every prospective juror. “You understand, do you not, that while it may be morally wrong to tell a lie or to fail to seek help for an injured person, there is a distinction between morality and the law?”
He didn’t like the jury pool. Most prospective jurors seemed already to have made up their minds that Robert was guilty of murder. That’s what the press had been feeding the public for months. He didn’t want anyone who’d read too much about the case. And he particularly didn’t want anyone who’d read certain magazine articles that detailed Robert’s past. He got Fairstein to agree that if people admitted they’d read those articles, they could be automatically excluded, and he used a psychologist to help him screen out those who might be lying. The psychologist also advised him on other matters—suggested which prospective jurors seemed overly authoritarian, which were likely to identify with Robert’s plight, which had the kinds of personalities that would enable them to stand up for what they believed no matter what others told them.
Jury selection dragged on and on.
October. November. December. Hundreds of jurors were examined and hundreds turned away. The days grew shorter and out the windows of the jury selection room, a pale moon rode the skies in the middle of the afternoon. One dark December afternoon Bell insisted that the lawyers work late. He had been criticized by a court administrator for letting jury selection take too long.
Robert sighed at the new requirement. “I’ve got to get home so I can watch Wheel of Fortune,” he said.
Linda Fairstein, staring at him, thought that what she was looking at was, among other things, a big baby.
The next day Litman took Tom Kendris aside and began talking to him about letting Robert plead guilty to a lesser charge than murder. “Talk to Linda,” Litman urged. “Tell her to be reasonable. After all, Robert’s just a kid.”
When Kendris told her about the conversation, she shook her head in amazement. Litman must have seen the way I looked at Robert yesterday, she thought. He doesn’t miss a trick.
Pumping Kendris, she asked him what Litman wanted. “Manslaughter Two,” Kendris said. “With a three- to nine-year sentence.”
“Ridiculous!” Fairstein fumed. “I won’t even talk to him about it.”
It took nearly eight weeks to pick the jury, but at last, on December 14, after 486 people had been examined, the panel was complete. Sitting in judgment on Robert would be a clothes buyer, two bankers, several businessmen, a mortician, a subway conductor, a typist, a project director for an insurance company, a graduate student of anthropology, and an advertising copywriter. Four of the jurors were women, eight were men. Two of the men were black. And three-fourths of the jurors were in their twenties or thirties—ages at which they might presumably still be able to remember fairly clearly what it was like to be an adolescent and thus not be too judgmental about Robert and Jennifer’s behavior on the night of the killing. Both Litman and Fairstein wanted this.
Bell was anxious to get the trial under way, and as soon as a handful of alternates was also selected, he announced to the lawyers and the jurors that the case would be tried right after New Year’s Day 1988. He also informed the press that he would not permit the trial to be televised. Among his reasons was concern that “audiovisual coverage … may induce disruptive behavior.”
Nineteen-year-old Melissa Buschell gave a party that night. She invited several of her girlfriends, and she also invited Robert. He was an old acquaintance. She’d known him when she’d gone to York Prep.
Auburn-haired and lissome, Melissa had dreams of becoming a model or an actress, and she loved dressing up and having her picture taken. She also liked taking pictures, and had recently gotten a Panasonic Omnivision video camera and learned how to film home videos. Preparing for the party, she got out the camera and, when her girlfriends arrived, suggested they make a movie.
Her friends were delighted by the idea, and Melissa lent them costumes. Fancy underwear. Filmy negligees. Cute pajamas. Scantily clad, the girls pranced around the living room, and Melissa began filming them.
The girls were rocking and rolling when Robert arrived. With him was his newest girlfriend, Shawn Kovell, a flashy young woman with cascading coppery red hair. Shawn slipped into one of Melissa’s black nightgowns so that she could participate in the moviemaking, and Robert decided that he’d join in, too.
It was fun. The girls joined hands and, pretending they were still little kids, sang, “Ring around a rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, all fall down,” collapsing at the end of the song into a giggling heap. Robert lolled on the floor and let a girl in a bra and flimsy bikini underpants rub her cushy behind up against his shoulders. He also donned a big black wig, then pulled it off and thrust it obscenely between his legs. Between takes, some of the group drank beer and whiskey and smoked marijuana. And after they’d danced and mugged to their hearts’ content, they began performing little skits.
Several of the skits, some of them devised by Robert, had sadomasochistic overtones, plot lines that featured a hapless boy being taunted by, or having to obey the orders of, a cruel female. In one, Robert was commanded to kiss a high-heeled shoe and slip it onto the foot of an imperious girl. In another, he was threatened with a cigarette burn by a dominatrix of a “mother” garbed in a blue corset, garter belt, and black stockings. In a third, he played a naughty boy caught reading dirty magazines by his school librarian. “Give me your hand, mister,” Melissa, playing the librarian, ordered him, a stick with which to beat him swinging in her own hand. But then she suggested another punishment. “We’re going to the principal’s office,” she ordered. “Come on!”
Robert ad-libbed fast to escape her wrath. “The principal’s my daddy,” he said.
In all his scenes he managed to avoid threatened punishments. Sometimes he did so by producing lust in a would-be tormentor. He did this in the library sequence, where instead of dragging him off to the principal’s office, Melissa removed a prissy-looking outer garment, stripped down to her tights and undershirt, and tried to seduce him. But sometimes he avoided punishment by talking his way out of impending discipline. In a scene in which a girl threatened to expose something he’d done, he dissuaded her by uttering a line like many he had uttered in real life. “I’ll just say you’re lying,” he murmured. “And people will believe me.”
He said and did other things for the camera that drew heavily upon his real-life experiences. Pretending to be playing a game of charades, he mimed the title Death of a Salesman and acted out a choking scene, clutching his throat and swooning to the floor. And grabbing one of Melissa’s dolls, he held its little rubber body up to the camera and talked for the doll in the way that little children talk for toys. “My name is,” he began in a falsetto hiss, and then suddenly he gave a strenuous twist to the painted rubber head. The head started to come off. “Ooops, I think I’ve killed it,” he announced in his own voice. “Both its eyes are like …” Then he let his words trail creepily off.
Several of the girls at the party had been friends of Jennifer’s. They weren’t perturbed by this mocking allusion to their dead friend. Instead, they eyed the doll’s broken neck and burst into squeals of laughter.
Melissa kept the tape under wraps at first. She gave it to a lawyer who put it in a vault. But she liked to read spiritual books, and one day—it was after Robert’s trial—she read a passage in one of her books that seemed to be telling her to let the public see the tape. She knew David Colby, the reporter who had interviewed Robert on Rikers Island. Colby was working for the TV show A Current Affair. Melissa gave Colby the tape—receiving for it, according to a newspaper account, $10,000.