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By Suzanne Smalley
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She was a recent graduate of a posh Manhattan day school, the bright-eyed, lithe and leggy daughter of a SoHo real-estate broker. He was a dashing, 6-foot-4 Romeo who attended Choate and came of age uptown, off Fifth Avenue.
THEY RAN IN the same fast crowd where cocaine and summers in the Hamptons were de rigeur, just a part of growing up pretty in the city. It was at Dorrian's Red Hand--still a watering hole of choice for Manhattan rich kids--that they met. And it was at Dorrian's, with its exposed brick walls, classic rock-fueled jukebox and little Italian-restaurant red-and-white-checked tableclothes that Jennifer Levin was last seen alive.
Today, more than 16 years after Levin's partially nude and badly bruised body was found in Central Park just blocks from Dorrian's, her killer, Robert Chambers, walked out of prison. Sixteen and a half years ago, Levin was a week or so away from starting college in Boston. Sixteen and a half years later, the man who pled guilty to her murder has amassed more than 60 college credits in correspondence courses completed in jail and has vowed to obtain his degree, according to his lawyer and family friend, Brian O'Dwyer. It's all too much for Jennifer Levin's family to bear. "If he happened to cross in front of my car, it would be hard to brake," Levin's sister, Danielle Roberts, told NEWSWEEK. "I very sincerely hope I never see his face. It's very uncomfortable for me that such an unrepentant killer is going free after killing my sister."
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Roberts may be seeing a lot of Chambers--at least on television. Chambers remains a media darling; as he walked out of the Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York this morning, the flash bulbs popped as if only months had gone by since that sleepy August 1986 day when he was first cuffed and booked. A decade and a half, one TV movie and several prison drug busts later, the tale of the so-called Preppie Murder--the now standard capitalization speaks to how iconic the case has become--still captivates America. Four other people were killed in New York City the day Levin was killed by Chambers, accidentally or not. Why does her death continue to entrance the city?
The answer may be in the details surrounding the Levin murder, which made it a sickeningly perfect end-of-summer potboiler. Her embroidered white panties were found yards from her tanned and naked lower body alongside a far-flung lipstick case. Did this tidbit capture our attention because so many of us were once 18-year-old girls who carried lipstick cases to trysts or because it suggested a struggle and an attempt to flee? Maybe both. Or maybe it was Chambers's graphic rough-sex defense that involved Levin using those same panties to tie his wrists together. Maybe it was that beautiful white women aren't supposed to be found nearly naked with limbs askew in the ritziest section of Central Park after having been murdered--not "Searching for Mr. Goodbar"-style by a stranger--but by one of their own. All of these things made this case prominent. But the real reason the Preppie Murder remains a story today is probably because Robert Chambers himself makes for such a fascinating villain--and the subject of cocktail conversation and Trivial Pursuit questions so many years later. Still genuinely good looking, Chambers' well-documented and brazenly cold-blooded demeanor is even more striking that his ice-cold blue eyes.
Chambers, with an outlandish number of prison violations and numerous failed parole-board appearances, has always fueled this story. Just before his trial for Jennifer Levin's death, Chambers was caught on videotape at a slumber party with a gaggle of scantily clad young women, one of whom, Shawn Kovell, remains his girlfriend even now, according to O'Dwyer. On the tape, which leaked to the press and aired on television just months after Chambers pled guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter, the so-called Preppie Murderer is seen twisting the head off a doll and declaring deadpan for the camera, "Oops, I think I killed her."
During the years he spent in prison, Chambers racked up 27 violations for everything from jailhouse heroin possession to assaulting a guard. He spent his final stretch of confinement in solitary, for his own protection. At a 1995 parole-board hearing, Chambers reportedly told an agape panel, "I guess I could give you the party line and say I have learned my lesson, I will never do this again. But that's not how I feel at this moment."
But as with all great pulp fiction, there is a familiar arc to this story. Chambers has changed. "When Monsignor Thomas Leonard [another family friend] and I were just there, Robert told us he had been clean and sober for these many years," O'Dwyer told NEWSWEEK. The priest, who presides over Manhattan's Holy Trinity Catholic Church, first reached out to Robert as a favor to another priest who was close to Chambers's devoutly Catholic mother. Leonard remembers visiting the baby-faced killer at Rikers Island in the immediate aftermath of his arrest. "Put yourself in his shoes," Leonard told NEWSWEEK. "He was scared, bewildered and didn't know what the future held. He was in that whole drug scene in the '80s, right when crack was exploding. There wasn't a sense that life would last long."
Leonard has visited Chambers many times over the years and remains close to his family. He believes Chambers has served his time and deserves to live an anonymous and happy life. The ingredients are there: Chambers's parents have stood by him. His mother met him at the Syracuse bus station today and his father will join them for a retreat far away from the city, Leonard and O'Dwyer said. Chambers will stay out of New York, according to both family advisers. While O'Dwyer talks wistfully of the time the Chambers family will spend "reconnecting" on their family retreat, Leonard focuses on how the whole sordid mess came to be to begin with. He blames the heady Manhattan lifestyle of the '80s for helping to create the tragedy and for sustaining the public interest in not only the murder, but also in Chambers's own flagrant self-destruction.
"Instead of releasing him right into the van this morning, they made him parade back and forth in front of the media," Leonard says. "Robert was stoic. Men are released every day without having to parade. But it's New York. It's the tag 'preppie.' And it's that time in New York. There was money about and that same sense as today, that 'I have to do everything before I die'." Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin seemed to live by that ethos back in the summer of '86 when they were young and thought they were indestructible. But Chambers may still get a shot at 'trying everything.' For Levin, trying everything--or even anything at all--ended on a grassy knoll in Central Park at dawn 16 and a half years ago.
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