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There has never been a young man who has squandered so much love and attention as Robert Chambers. Now under arrest for drug possession with intent to sell, the preppie killer may finally have run out of lame excuses for the emptiness in his soul. The mother who worked nights to send him to expensive preps schools, the woman who stood by him through a lengthy murder trial and prison term only to be arrested with him this week, the lawyers who fought the state to a standstill in the high profile murder trial and struggled to keep him out of jail since his parole, must all be wondering why they bothered.
Even after he killed Jennifer Levin in Central Park people leapt to his defense. I remember the harsh sound of a phone slamming down when I suggested to one of his defenders that maybe the handsome face hid a simple sociopath. Seeing him in person, though, was like looking at a mannequin. His eyes always seemed dead to me, his expression lifeless. I covered the Jennifer Levin killing and the prosecution of Robert Chambers in 1988, met his victim's parents, his friends, his priest; I even interviewed Shawn Kovell (the woman arrested with him this week) in the days leading up to the trial. He had the benefit of many supporters who simply knew he could not have killed intentionally killed that young woman. It was incomprehensible to them. Re-reading my account of the trial written for "The Art of Justice" he remains incomprehensible.
The young man looked across the courtroom with no trace of emotion or remorse. He was as good-looking as his photographs, his face conveying an almost feminine beauty. These were the same striking features he carried into Dorrian's Red Hand the night of the killing. The bar was a hangout for the privileged young teens of the Upper East Side and was packed with an end-of-the-Summer crowd looking for a final good time before dispersing to expensive colleges and universities up and down the East Coast. Jennifer Levin chose Robert Chambers as her partner that night. It was a fatal mistake. He sat there with that vacant look in his eyes while his lawyer insisted it wasn't his fault. The trial was like watching a train wreck of wasted opportunity.
Chambers had been on the city's TV screens and front pages for 17 months before entering the 13th floor courtroom at 100 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan as a defendant. The tabloids called it the Preppie Murder; 18 year-old Jennifer Levin was found semi-nude and lifeless in Central Park in August of 1986 only days before she was to leave for college. Chambers was a troubled recent prep school graduate nursing an appetite for drugs and alcohol. His once bright horizons were narrowing and he seemed to be struggling with the fact that he didn't really fit in with the high-rolling teenagers he grew up with. Young Robert lived with his mother, a nurse who worked hard to keep him in nice clothes and good schools. Detectives investigating the murder of the girl in the park quickly realized something that Jennifer Levin never did, that Robert wasn't what he appeared to be.
Chambers emerged as the prime suspect because so many people had seen him leaving the bar with Levin hours before the killing. Police found him at his mother's apartment apparently sleeping off the previous night's events in his bedroom. They noticed the scratches on his handsome face right away. He said the family cat had done it, but agreed to come in for questioning. During a marathon interrogation at the NYPD's ancient Central Park Precinct he finally admitted he'd been with the victim, had walked into the park with her, and had even been with her when she died. What threw the media into full frenzy, though, was his explanation for how it all happened. He claimed Jennifer hurt him during rough sex under the trees behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He flipped her off him as a reflex to the pain, noticed she wasn't moving, then panicked and left the scene returning briefly after sunup to watch the police begin their investigation. From Robert's point of view he was the victim. The girl, he said, had hurt him first.
Reporters jammed the seats in a packed courtroom that winter of 1988, but all cameras were banished to the press pens out in the hall. Courtroom artists sat on a front row bench normally reserved for lawyers and police officers peering at the proceeding over their works in progress, hands transferring the images before them to the soft paper portraits that would illustrate the day's news. The absence of cameras, though, did little to stem the media's appetite for the Chambers trial.
The three-month proceeding drew major news coverage every day it was held, which was unusual for any criminal trial. A lot of attention was focused on the families of the victim and defendant who would file into court each day and seat themselves on opposite sides of the aisle, almost as if at a wedding. In one tense and awkward encounter the two fathers, Bob Chambers and Steven Levin locked eyes across the courtroom, one man determined to stand by his only son, the other aching for justice and revenge for the death of his only daughter.
Jennifer Levin's parents were divorced, but Ellen and Steven Levin were on friendly terms. Jennifer resembled her mother. To look at Ellen, in fact, was to see the mature woman that Jennifer would never become. She often sat with Steven and his new wife Arlene, Jennifer's stepmother. The trio could be seen entering court with buttons that read "Justice for Jennifer" with the dead girl's picture on it. On Ellen it looked as if she were wearing a photo of herself as a teenager. After the trial she went on to become a major advocate for victim's rights.
Robert's parents were also divorced. Bob and Phyllis Chambers often sat together as well, but sometimes came to court on their own. Both were wary of reporters, and although always polite, almost never answered questions or offered any comments on the trial. In a cruel bit of irony Bob Chambers found a familiar face among the people who were prosecuting his son. Detective Mike Sheehan had regaled him once with cop stories at a city bar. Now, the story about Robert's arrest would be part of the bar talk for years to come.
A parade of witnesses helped DA Linda Fairstein paint a picture of Jennifer Levin's interrupted life. College sophomore Alexandra LaGratta sat in the witness box explaining how Jennifer was supposed to sleep over her house the night she died. Fairstein, a tall distinctive woman with a shock of blond hair stood out in the drab court setting like a ray of sunlight through a canopy of trees in the forest. She would later become head of the Manhattan DA's Sex Crimes unit and a as well as a best selling author of crime novels, but this was early in her career. She regarded Chambers as a hopeless sociopath unable to take responsibility for his own actions. Chambers seemed worried as he watched his old acquaintances from Dorrian's testify but the mood, apparently passed. The cold, vacant demeanor returned when his lawyer took over questioning.
Defense lawyer Jack Litman cross examined Jennifer's friend about the victim's fixation on Chambers, how she sought him out in an east side bar the night of the killing, how they left together. Litman was relentless, and he would privately express the belief that his client was a victim of circumstance in a tragic accident. Compact, and powerfully built, his quick movements were seemingly at odds with the thick glasses, myopic eyes and bookish way he'd examine documents before launching into loud fusillades of questioning. He had the head of a 98-pound weakling sitting atop the gym broad shoulders of an athlete, an intimidating courtroom brawler who referred to Chambers as "the boy," patted him reassuringly on the shoulders, and insisted every action he took after the crime was consistent with panic, not guilt. It seemed, at first, an impossible argument to make, until he fought the state to a draw.
The jury got the case in March, but after nine days was unable to reach a verdict. The DA's office thought they were headed for a mistrial, and offered a plea deal of First Degree manslaughter. Litman told Robert to take the deal. In a stunning finale Robert Chambers stood before Judge Howard Bell admitting he intended to harm Jennifer Levin the night she died in the park. His words were strained, though and he added that in his "heart" he "did not mean anything to happen."
Linda Fairstein insisted he start over. "No," she almost shouted, "ask him about his mind and his hands, not his heart." When the judge asked the question again Chambers simply said "yes, your honor", though, his handsome head swung back and forth as if denying it. Fifteen years later he left prison insisting he wasn't the monster people had made of him.
So we watched the Sands Hotel collapse into a pile rubble in Atlantic City last week and it was a lot of fun. 
Click here to watch.
But a thinking person has got to wonder about the economy that can toss a 21-story building into the trash bin, then spend cosmic sums of money to build a gaming complex on a sandy lot next to an entire city of gaming complexes. As a society we are so anxious to toss our money at games of chance that it seems almost no sum is too large for the opportunity to cater to our foolish impulse.
Here are a couple of line items from the budget of the absurd:
The Sands Hotel and Casino was purchased recently by Pinnacle entertainment for $250 million. That's a quarter of a billion for a chance to knock the thing down and start over. The Sands sat on Pacific Ave. and was connected to Atlantic City's famous boardwalk by a covered walkway. Pinnacle plans to fill the entire space with a new complex that will cost -- take a breath -- $1.5 billion! That's a price tag that goes with things like suspension bridges and nuclear aircraft carriers, but a casino? I couldn't help thinking that we must be mad, but there we were watching the old hotel fall and some on the street were shedding tears for all the great memories. One smiling man actually said he'd miss the place because of all the money he'd lost there. Miss it? One of the reasons I don't gamble that much is that I hate losing money. Is it really that much fun?
Years ago I shared an adult beverage with the manager of a large Atlantic City casino during a story about video surveillance. We'd just seen a shot of a guy winning a huge jackpot jumping around like a maniac on the casino floor. I asked what it was like to hand over a large sum of money to a customer. He smiled. "We never really give the money away," he told me. "We just let them hold it for a while." Remember that.
Casino gambling is so profitable because the customers are practically compelled to lose. We literally throw our money away chasing the fantasy of winning wealth. When Pinnacle demolished the actual casino at the Sands back in April they found some further evidence of that. Loose change, mostly quarters and some half dollars, had fallen into the cracks along the gaming floor. The coins had gotten under the carpets and under the flooring. Demolition workers picked it up and the casino counted it. In 27 years the gamblers at the Sands had let $17,000 simply drop out of their hands on its way to the slot machines! Most probably never even looked down to see where the coin had fallen. We really should be more careful.
Approaching the tunnel's mouth, the scene is at once alien and familiar. The tollbooths are there, but the EZ Pass gates are up. The police officers smile broadly as you pass. You look down at your running shoes stepping where you've driven hundreds of times, then up at the backs of the other runners bobbing in endless ripples along the long decline down to the seabed at the bottom of New York Harbor.
You are one of 23,000 in the first wave moving toward Manhattan.
The Tunnel to Towers Run is probably the most emotional 5K route in the world. It traces the steps New York Firefighter Stephen Siller took on the morning of September 11th, 2001: a man on foot in full FDNY bunker gear racing to join his unit at the burning World Trade Center. He parked his pickup truck in Brooklyn near the Battery Tunnel entrance and headed to Manhattan on foot. The tunnel was closed private vehicles, but he had a job to do in Manhattan. He died there.
I decided to join the race this year after meeting just three of the people who'd signed up. My bosses at CBS 2 asked me to do a story on participants in the Wounded Warrior project who were coming to New York to take part, so the week before the race I flew down to Washington to check up on the young men at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
A famous news outlet uses the words "Fair and Balanced" as its slogan. But words have meaning and the two terms, although often compatible, are NOT identical. In fact, I submit that the terms "Fair and Balanced," are sometimes mutually exclusive. Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University, deftly managed to demonstrate the difference while introducing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week.
He told a surprised audience that the smiling and outwardly affable President of Iran was exhibiting "all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," whose opinions about world history are "either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated." His introduction was decried by some as impolite; it was certainly not balanced, but it was eminently fair.
Columbia University stood up to the best traditions of free speech by inviting the Iranian President to speak and answer questions. Americans deserve to hear his comments and judge for themselves what this powerful world leader is really saying. But a platform for free speech is not a doormat. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited into a world of words and ideas where opinions are confronted. He was invited to live for a moment in OUR world, where even the powerful must defend their actions and comments, and reconcile any difference between the two. The appearance at Columbia did not require the veneer of false neutrality, or the artificial symmetry of diplomatic discourse. Such an approach might have been balanced, but would have been unfair to the truth which must be spoken to be heard.
The anti free-speech terrorists were outside, well meaning and dangerous, with their shouts and whistles trying to drown out the words of a man they loathe, insisting Ahmadinejad should not have even been invited to speak. What would we have learned, though, from the silence? New Yorkers got a pretty good peek at Mahmoud Ahamdinejad's character during his appearance at Columbia. The laughter alone that accompanied his there-are-no-homosexuals-in-Iran statement exposed the man for the clueless ideologue he is.
Lee Bollinger's introduction indicated to the world that while we will listen to anyone we also know that some arguments do not get automatic balance in the arena of public discourse. It wouldn't be fair.
While researching a book about courtroom art in famous cases I came across a drawing of O.J. Simpson trying on the bloody glove. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why there would even BE a courtroom drawing of the famous scene since it had been broadcast live on worldwide television.
The artist, my co-author, Marilyn Church, explained that a national magazine commissioned the drawing to accompany an article by prosecutor Christopher Darden. So there it is on the cover of the book now: Darden's big mistake. You remember defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran's mantra: "If the glove does not fit…."
Marilyn explained that the Ladies Home Journal thought the video and photos of the trial were so ubiquitous that they needed something special to cement the event in history. That was fortunate for me because how could you write a book about "infamous trials" and leave out the "Trial of the Century." I'd been out to L.A to cover the preliminary hearing for News York television, and was grateful to be able to write about the case in the book.
OJ's arrest this week sends us all back to check our memory about the case that made a famous man infamous. Perhaps you'd like to see it again through this New York eye.
O.J. Simpson
Trial of the Century
The two victims were found near the front door of a gated townhouse in west Los Angeles just after 12:30 a.m. on June 12, 1994. The man was seated on the ground; his back against a tree, his head and shoulders slumped forward. The woman was curled into a fetal position at the foot of the front steps. Both had been stabbed about the face and throat and the woman's neck had been sliced so thoroughly it looked as if someone had tried to sever her beautiful head from her trim, well-toned torso. She was the former wife of an American icon and her death was the opening act in a massive participatory soap opera known as the O.J. Simpson murder trial: The trial of the century.
Nicole Brown Simpson's murder immediately brought the attention of Los Angeles police to her famous estranged husband, the Hall of Fame football player turned genial sportscaster and TV pitchman. Nicole and O.J. had a volatile marriage that included domestic violence calls to 911, and a contentious break-up that had flared that very afternoon with a tense exchange outside a daughter's piano recital. She was killed on the front lawn of the home she shared with their two children. O.J. Simpson lived a short distance away, behind high walls with the grown children from a previous marriage.
The male victim, Ronald Goldman, was a waiter at a restaurant where Nicole had dined earlier in the evening. He had apparently been returning an item left at her table when, police theorize, he came upon the murder in progress. An envelope containing a pair of glasses was found at the scene.
When the bodies were discovered, O.J. was on a plane en route to Chicago, but he'd been in the neighborhood when the killings took place. The coroner put the time of death at about 10 or 11 o'clock the previous night. Simpson insisted he'd been waiting for a limo to take him to the airport during that time period and met the hired car about 11:15 outside his home. The limo driver said he'd been kept waiting and saw a shadowy figure arrive at the mansion moments before O.J.'s famous voice came on the intercom claiming to have overslept. It was conceivable the killer could have made the trip from the murder scene back to Simpson's mansion and changed clothes in time to leave for the airport. To the cops on the case, it also seemed likely.
Police had a lot of physical evidence to support their suspicion: bloody footprints leaving Nicole's were O.J.'s shoe size, a bloody glove matching one at the scene was found outside his mansion, there was blood in his S.U.V. that matched the victims, and a circumstantial set of movements that fit the post-murder actions of a killer trying to avoid detection. Before surrendering on the murder charge O.J. was driven around Los Angeles by a friend in a slow-speed police chase that was televised live from coast to coast. Simpson had a gun and the friend said he was threatening suicide. The case against him looked strong, but to some people Simpson could never look guilty.
O.J. was one of those personalities who populate the American comfort zone: Non-threatening, thoroughly affable in public, a role model admired on both sides of country's racial divide. Many Americans thought it inconceivable that the pleasant persona they'd come to know through television and film might be capable of such brute savagery. The seeds of reasonable doubt grew larger as problems began to surface with much of the state's evidence.
It became apparent during the trial that the LAPD's investigatory techniques were so sloppy as to compromise the value of some of the best evidence. Blood samples were collected and submitted to state-of-the-art DNA tests, but the chain of evidence wasn't always clear. A Blood sample taken from Simpson for comparison was carried back to the crime scene, and there were questions about the tiny amounts of blood found in Simpson's car that suggested it might have been planted. Police never found either the murder weapon or the clothes Simpson allegedly wore while committing the murders. Famed criminologist Dr. Henry Lee testified for the defense and told jurors there was "something wrong" with the state's evidence. Jurors were told of tests conducted at Simpson's home to detect the presence of blood in the bathroom fixtures, but they never heard about the results, possibly because those results were never confirmed with follow-up tests and could be considered inconclusive.
The most devastating blow to the prosecution came when audiotapes surfaced of Detective Mark Fuhrman, the cop who found the bloody glove at Simpson's home. The handsome California homicide detective was talking about his job to a would-be screenwriter. On the tape, Fuhrman told of manufacturing evidence, roughing up suspects, and referred to blacks as "niggers." Lead defense attorney Johnnie Cochrane saw the opening and ran with it the way O.J. might've run through a line of defenders on a football field in his prime. Fuhrman, he told the jury, was a "lying, perjuring, genocidal racist." The defense claimed Simpson was being framed.
Jurors took those words and weighed them against the backdrop of another crucial moment in the trial when prosecuting attorney Christopher Darden asked Simpson to try on the gloves apparently worn by the killer, one found at the scene, the other recovered by Fuhrman outside Simpson's mansion. O.J. made a show of pulling the stiff leather gloves over his large pass receiver's hands and held them up for the jury. They seemed to be several sizes too small. Cochrane made reference to the moment in his closing argument. "If the glove does not fit," he warned the jurors, "then you must acquit."
After nine months of nationally televised testimony, the jury of ten women and two men found Simpson not guilty in a matter of hours. Simpson left the courtroom, returned to his home and was granted custody of the children he had with Nicole. The country seemed divided in its opinion of the verdict along racial lines, and Simpson soon discovered that avoiding prison and returning to real freedom were two different things.
Stung by the result of the criminal trial, the relatives of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman brought a successful civil suit against O.J. for causing their death of the two victims. Under the less stringent "preponderance of the evidence" standard Simpson was found liable for millions in compensatory and punitive damages. New evidence at the civil trial included photos of expensive and highly distinctive shoes on Simpson's feet: the same type of shoes that had left bloody footprints at the murder scene. Simpson had earlier insisted he had never owned a pair. The images, taken by two different photographers at a football game the month before the attack, seemed to catch O.J. Simpson in a direct lie for the first time.
After losing the civil case, Simpson sold his mansion and moved away from Los Angeles, now more famous as a defendant than he had even been as a football player, considered by many as a man who had gotten away with murder. A sign on a neighbor's lawn read, "OJ, you're not welcome here."
