The Linda Wolfe Collection Read online

  The Linda Wolfe Collection

  Five True Crime Classics

  Linda Wolfe

  CONTENTS

  Wasted

  Prologue: The End of Summer

  Part I: Jennifer and Robert

  Chapter One: New Lives

  Chapter Two: Coming of Age

  Chapter Three: Valentines

  Chapter Four: The Summer of ’86

  Part II: Woman Down

  Chapter Five: The Body in the Park

  Chapter Six: The Interrogation

  Chapter Seven: Rough Sex

  Part III: The People V. Robert Chambers

  Chapter Eight: Hopes and Prayers

  Chapter Nine: The Long Wait

  Chapter Ten: The Trial

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  The Professor and the Prostitute

  Introduction

  The Professor and the Prostitute

  Boston, Massachusetts · 1983

  From a Nice Family

  Dallas, Texas · 1981

  The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists

  New York, New York · 1975

  The Downward Drift of a High School Star

  Torrington, Connecticut, and New York, New York · 1981

  A Tragedy on Eighty-ninth Street

  New York, New York · 1980

  The Transsexual, the Bartender, and the Suburban Princess

  Rockland County, New York · 1981

  The Lady Vanishes

  Nantucket Island, Massachusetts · 1980

  Dented Pride

  New York, New York · 1983

  Dr. Quaalude

  New York, New York · 1979

  Double Life

  Prologue

  Part 1: A Family and a Fortune

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part 2: The Affair

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 3: “This Judge Is Either Crazy or Criminal”

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Epilogue

  Source Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  The Murder of Dr. Chapman

  1 Bucks County, Pennsylvania • June 1831

  2 Cape Cod and Philadelphia • 1804–1818

  3 Marriage • 1819–1828

  4 Lino • 1829–1830

  5 Bucks County, Pennsylvania • June 1831

  6 Betrayal • July 1831

  7 Departures • August–Mid-September 1831

  8 Friends and Foes • Late September-Early December 1831

  9 Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part One Mid-December 1831–Mid-February 1832

  10 Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part Two February 22–25, 1832

  11 “Yesterday I Was a Wonder” • April–June 1832

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Love Me to Death

  Part One: The Women

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Part Two: Ricardo

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Wasted

  Inside the Robert Chambers–Jennifer Levin Murder

  For my daughter, Jessica

  The outlaw of justice always keeps in his heart the sense of justice outraged—his crimes have an excuse and yet he is pursued by the Others. The Others have committed worse crimes and flourish. The world is full of Others who wear the masks of Success, of a Happy Family. Whatever crime he may be driven to commit, the child who doesn’t grow up remains the great champion of justice.

  —GRAHAM GREENE, Ways of Escape

  Prologue:

  The End of Summer

  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 actua
lly 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.

  PART I

  Jennifer

  and Robert

  1.

  New Lives

  In the late 1950s, a pale, skinny young Irish woman named Phyllis Shanley arrived in the United States, her mind ablaze with extravagant daydreams. She had been poor in Ireland, had grown up, the eldest of six, on a back-country farm in which the principal fuel for cooking and even for fighting the omnipresent dampness had been the peat her father and brothers chopped laboriously from bogs behind the house. She had escaped the farm, gone to Dublin to study nursing, learned in the city’s dreary Victorian hospitals how to deliver babies for women who couldn’t afford doctors and how to care for poor sufferers from tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. But her experience and training had not brought her prosperity. Prosperity did not come easily in Ireland.

  America was another story. In this new country she might flourish. Become anything she wanted to become. America was the land of opportunity, a place where what mattered was not what people had been in the past but what they made of themselves once they were here. And if they made of themselves something worthy, their children and grandchildren might never know hard times and might even, God willing, become rich and powerful. Even the children and grandchildren of Irish immigrants. By the time she arrived in the United States, people were saying the country might even have its first Irish-Catholic president soon. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts and a man but three generations removed from Ireland’s hardships, was going to run for the office. Learning the ropes in her new country, Phyllis dreamed classic immigrants’ dreams, imagining a golden life for herself and her as yet unborn heirs. And in her dreams she took literally the mythic American promise that on these shores a person could be the equal of any man or woman in the land.

  She was not averse to hard work, and she quickly began plying her profession here, taking a job at a large New York hospital and doing private-duty nursing as well while waiting for fortune to smile on her. In three years it did. At a lively dance sponsored by an Irish organization, she met a handsome young man who several times during the evening asked her to be his partner and eventually asked her to be his life’s partner as well.

  The young man’s name was Bob Chambers. Members of his Irish-English family had been in America for generations. One of his ancestors had even come before the Revolution. Bob’s parents owned a house in Westchester, a cabin on Lake Placid. They’d raised Bob genteelly and comfortably, sent him to private schools and then to Mitchell College in Connecticut and The American University in Washington, D.C. Four years after Phyllis met him—it was 1965—she married him. A year later she gave birth to her first and only child.

  The child, a boy, was beautiful, with sapphire eyes and a delicate pearly-white complexion. Phyllis gave him the first name Robert, after his father, and the middle name Emmet, after the great Irish patriot who had been hanged for plotting against the British.

  He was a docile infant, his temperament mild and malleable. And he was responsive, an early babbler and smiler. By the time he was a year and a half and had handily learned to talk and walk, taking his tumbles manfully, Phyllis was head over heels in love with him.

  She was not demonstrative. She didn’t hug and kiss him the way other mothers hugged and kissed their little boys. But she read to him and played educational games with him, and by the time he was three, she had taught him many things, among them to shake hands when he was introduced.

  They were living at the time in a vast apartment complex in Woodside, Queens. They didn’t have much money. Bob had a good but not especially well-paying job in the credit department of Dun & Bradstreet. Phyllis was still doing part-time nursing. Most of her patients lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, in sprawling apartments where the walls were hung with exquisite landscapes and family portraits and the rooms decorated with crystal, silver, and woods so highly polished they shone like gems. Woodside seemed depressing in comparison, and Phyllis dreamed of some day living on the East Side herself. Apartments were cheaper on the bourgeois West Side or in the raffish downtown neighborhoods of Manhattan. But the East Side was patrician and grand, its boulevards lined with palatial apartment buildings, its side streets with opulent town houses and discreet residential hotels. Bob’s grandmother lived in one such hotel. It had a posh dining room, and sometimes the old lady invited Phyllis and little Robert to dine there in splendor with her.

  After several years in Woodside, Phyllis and Bob left the area for a better apartment in Jackson Heights. It wasn’t the East Side of Manhattan, but Phyllis was pleased with the move. Husbanding her earnings, she decorated the new apartment tastefully and tended it zealously, often spending hours polishing her handsome dark furniture until it glowed.

  She was working at the time not just for the wealthy but for the extremely wealthy. And one day she got a nursing assignment that thoroughly stimulated her dreamy nature. She was hired by her new country’s most famous family to look after the nation’s most famous little boy, John-John Kennedy, while he recovered from a respiratory illness.

  The day after she started working for the Kennedys, Bob Chambers noticed that his wife was wearing a new expensive looking pair of sunglasses, and that she was wearing them not over her eyes but perched on top of her head, just the way Jackie Kennedy did.

  The job didn’t last—John-John got well—but its effects did. When Robert was four, Phyllis enrolled him in a prestigious Manhattan nursery, the nursery at the St. David’s School on East 89th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. St. David’s was a Catholic school, although it also took children of other faiths, and the Catholic families that placed their offspring at the school and in particular at the nursery were exceedingly prominent. The Hearsts, the Skourases, the Burkes had all sent children to the St. David’s nursery. A few years before Robert entered it, the sons of John F. Kennedy’s sisters, Mrs. Peter Lawford and Mrs. Stephen Smith, had attended. So had John-John Kennedy.

  On Long Island that year, two-year-old Jennifer Levin was growing up in a small ranch house in the commuter town of Merrick. Out back was a large tree-studded yard. In front of the TV, an undulating waterbed.

  She was the second daughter of Steven Levin and Ellen Domenitz, whose families were Jewish and who had themselves each been raised in green and homogeneous suburban towns, Steve in Massachusetts, Ellen on Long Island.

  They’d met in Boston while Ellen was going to a junior college and Steve was attending an acting school. Acting was in Steve’s blood. His grandfather, who’d emigrated to the United States from Russia in the early part of the century, had made his living in the shoe business, just as Steve’s father did after him, but the old man had always wanted to be an actor and toward the end of his life he had even become one, performing with a Yiddish theater group. Steve had his gifts for comedy, could do hilarious imitations, and had consequently set his heart on a theatrical career. But he gave up that ambition after he and Ellen married and went into real estate. By the time Jennifer was born, he and a partner had begun to have some success with a small real estate firm in Manhattan.

  Of the two little girls, five-year-old Danielle
was the beauty, the neighbors used to say. But Jennifer would be okay. She had personality. Was a live wire.

  She spent much of her time trying to join the games of Danielle and Danielle’s friends. They slammed doors on her, or ran giggling away on longer, swifter legs. She would howl, but doggedly keep after them, rattling doorknobs or clumsily tagging behind as the group raced ahead of her. And sometimes, miraculously catching up, she’d chant and sing and parade around the older children, and act so antic that they’d laugh and soften and let her play with them.

  St. David’s, where four-year-old Robert was daily escorted by one of his parents, was a beautiful school with Georgian-style architecture that suggested permanence and stability. It was also utterly different from the institutions Phyllis had attended as a youngster: Irish convent schools. Her teachers, black-garbed nuns, had focused on self-discipline and obedience as much as on academic subjects. The teachers at St. David’s, Catholic lay people for the most part, were gentle, lenient, and devoted to inculcating knowledge in their young charges.

  Phyllis was pleased that she’d decided to send Robert there, even though it was far from home and expensive. But her life was not altogether happy. Around the time Robert started at St. David’s, Bob, who was a drinker—he had started using alcohol when he was a teenager—began drinking more heavily. Sometimes he wasn’t home when he was supposed to be home and sometimes he wasn’t at the places he’d said he’d be at.

  His mother hit him with a strap when he was bad, little Robert told a teacher at St. David’s. The teacher thought that no doubt the mother was well-meaning, if a bit old-fashioned and strict.

  Cynthia White, Robert’s steady babysitter, also found Phyllis a strict mother. But a superb one as well. She had a lot of rules, but they were sensible. Robert had to do his homework before he did any playing, he couldn’t watch a lot of TV, and he had to go out of doors every day, no matter how inclement the weather.

  Cynthia admired Mrs. Chambers. And she was enchanted by little Robert, who was charming and polite and so obedient she didn’t have to tell him twice to put away his toys or go to his room and get ready for bed. But Cynthia was concerned about him. He didn’t see that much of his mother—she had started working full-time taking care of the aging Millicent Hearst, wife of the newspaper baron—and he had no friends. Was he lonely? Cynthia worried. And had Mrs. Chambers done the right thing in sending him to St. David’s? It set him off from the neighborhood boys, made him a bit of an isolate.