On an August evening in 1986, eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin, decked out in a white camisole, a pink and white miniskirt, and little glass earrings that shone like diamonds, entered her favorite New York bar and began looking for nineteen-year-old Robert Chambers, a friend she hoped would be there. But the chic Upper East Side pub was crowded and she didn’t see him at first. She saw instead the usual masses of wealthy and sophisticated prep school students and graduates who had made the bar their home away from home all summer. Some thronged the old-fashioned jukebox, some sat two-to-a-chair at little gingham-covered tables, some were calling out their drink orders through a three-deep crush at the long wooden bar, some were pushing out through the narrow entranceway to smoke marijuana on the sidewalk. The noise was intense, and the air was filled with the festive abandon of the end of summer.
Jennifer joined in the spirit of the place. She frolicked with her friends, eventually found Robert, flirted with him, and late that night left the bar in his company.
Two hours later, as a warm and brilliant August sun began to rise, she was found in Central Park by an early morning bicyclist. She had been strangled. Her face and body were covered with bruises, one of her eyes was swollen, and her earrings and money, except for a torn dollar bill, had vanished. So had her underpants. She lay on the ground spread-eagled, her bra and camisole pushed up around her neck, and her miniskirt bunched up about her waist.
Someone had raped her, the police thought when they arrived at the scene. They speculated that the attacker had been an unconcerned, callous individual. He had left her breasts and genitals on view. A stranger, no doubt, they concluded.
Yet eighteen hours later, Robert Chambers confessed to having caused her death. It had been an accident, he said. He and Jennifer had decided to have sex in the park but she’d suggested kinky acts, and then gotten extremely aggressive. She’d hurt him, and when she wouldn’t stop and he couldn’t take any more pain, he’d unthinkingly reached up, put his arm around her neck, and flipped her off him. In the process, she had somehow died.
He spoke casually. “She was a nice girl,” he said. “Easy to talk to. She was just too pushy.” And he used—with an odd twist—the language of gothic romances. “She was having her way with me,” he explained. “Without my consent.” But what was most remarkable about his confession was not his words but his tone. He sounded sorry for himself, convinced that although he was alive and Jennifer dead, it was he who had somehow been the victim of the girl who now lay lifeless in the morgue.
In the next few days the killing in the park began to mesmerize New York. Here was flaming youth—and better yet, flaming rich youth. The girl and the boy involved in the tragedy had had all the advantages of being young and all the privileges that money can buy, and yet in the late hours of a single summer night they had lost everything. She was dead. He was in jail. And what had caused the tragedy? Sex, according to the headlines. In the prodigiousness of adolescent passion, newspaper accounts based on Robert’s confession implied, the boy and girl had simply lost control. The story struck a chord with the public, reinforced popular beliefs. That having a good time is dangerous. That young people can’t handle liquor and sex. And that the rich and the young are no better off than you and me—because look what happened to that pair.
By the time Jennifer Levin had been dead a week, people throughout the city were discussing the case at their breakfast tables, on their coffee breaks, on supermarket lines. And at parties and dinners the subject of what had actually happened between Jennifer and Robert was a principal topic of conversation.
The media fed the public’s obsession. What was quickly dubbed “the preppie murder” became front-page and top-of-the-hour news, and battalions of reporters marched forth to dig up any information, however peripheral, that would shed light on the principals and their circle of fun-loving pampered city teenagers. The group’s drinking, its drug use, its promiscuity, its extravagance—all were explored as if a new tribe, an anthropological phenomenon, had just been discovered.
In the next two years the preppie killing became one of the most widely covered murder stories in New York’s history. Yet still people wondered about it, for the story was haunting. It was particularly haunting to parents, who kept asking themselves if Robert and Jennifer could, but for the grace of God, have been their children.