The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  In front of 11 East 90th Street, dozens of reporters and photographers were ringing Phyllis Chambers’s doorbell, hoping to be able to snag an interview with her. But Phyllis wasn’t in her apartment. She was in a coffee shop on Madison Avenue with her old friend Barbara Dermont, where, terrified of being recognized, she was sitting far in the back and facing away from the entrance.

  She looked, Barbara fretted, crushed. Her lips were trembling and her eyes were red. The last time she’d seen Phyllis’s face show even a vestige of emotion had been back when she’d broken up with Bob. Now, as they talked about what had happened in the park—“the terrible accident,” Phyllis kept calling it—she looked devastated. And it wasn’t just Robert she was worried about. It was money.

  Litman didn’t come cheap. He charged between $250 and $350 an hour, depending on the case. If it was a long one, he billed at the lower end of the scale. But he also charged separately for the services of associates like Stavis—$100 to $150 an hour. And he charged for the services of private investigators and scientific experts. And for their travel expenses.

  Phyllis and Bob didn’t have the kind of money a big Litman-run case would cost. Nor would they ever have it. Eventually, Litman would end up receiving considerably less money from the Chamberses than he customarily got from clients. (He would never say how much.) And eventually Phyllis would raise money for Robert’s defense from various people she had worked for. Dorothy Hammerstein would contribute $20,000. But on this morning in August 1986, the money that was worrying Phyllis was not money with which to pay Litman but money with which to bail Robert out of jail.

  “Come with me to Litman’s office,” she said to Barbara, and explained that she was going down there to start organizing a letter-writing campaign and a fund-raising drive to ensure Robert’s bail.

  Barbara agreed to come. When they reached Litman’s office, Phyllis tore into action. She made a list of friends and contacts who might write character references for Robert. She made a list of people like Barbara who could serve as her delegates and do the actual legwork of getting the letters. And she made a list of people who might contribute money. “My friends will come through,” she told Barbara. “Even those who don’t have much money. They can take loans against their life insurance policies. Or even utilize the cash surrender clauses.”

  Barbara was impressed by her nerve. And by the fact that now that she was planning strategy, Phyllis no longer appeared devastated. Whatever she was feeling before, Barbara thought with a certain amount of awe, she’s over it now. She’s pushed it aside.

  Later that afternoon, Litman asked Barbara to come into his private office and have a chat with him. “How long have you known Phyllis Chambers?” he asked her once she sat down. The room was spacious and airy, with a view of the Statue of Liberty. Litman’s desk was a huge slab of thick glass, and in a corner was a chess set carved of green and white jade. “Several years,” Barbara said.

  “Are there people who will stand behind her?”

  “Yes, she has a small group of close friends who will stick by her even if the sky falls in.”

  Litman nodded. Then he said, concern spreading over his face, “Things could really get rough. From what you know of Phyllis, do you think she’s going to be able to survive all this?”

  “Phyllis can survive anything,” Barbara said.

  Litman looked surprised at her response. “I don’t think,” he said, “that she knows what’s hit her yet.”

  “She’ll be all right,” Barbara reassured him. But to herself she said, It’s you that may not survive. You don’t know what’s hit you yet.

  About four-thirty in the afternoon, Dr. Alandy put a block behind Jennifer’s back to elevate her torso, made a Y-shaped incision from the top of the shoulders to the mid-portion of the abdomen, and commenced her internal examination. She had discovered by then that one thing Robert had said in his confession was true. He hadn’t raped the girl. There was no trace of semen in—or even on—her body. Now she discovered that something else he’d said was also true. The girl had voided before being killed. There was no urine in her bladder. Still, not everything he’d said was true. In a short while she learned something that gave the lie to his story. It happened when she finished studying the abdominal organs and began examining the head. Sectioning Jennifer’s tongue and temples, Alandy found hemorrhages.

  They were different from the hemorrhages she had observed in the girl’s eyelids when she had examined her in the park. Those indicated that the blood flow to the brain had been curtailed. These were more substantial and suggested that the girl’s mouth and the sides of her head had been punched.

  The girl she was autopsying, Alandy concluded when her work was finished, had not just been strangled but beaten as well.

  In the early evening, Leilia Van Baker, who had left Vermont after learning that Jennifer was dead and returned to her home in New York, paid a condolence call on Steve and Arlene Levin. She arrived at their loft bearing a big turkey her mother had thoughtfully roasted for them. She sat with Steve and Arlene. She watched them eat some of the turkey. And she listened, pained, as they asked her why Jennifer had gone to the park with Robert.

  “Because she trusted him,” she said. “Because they already had a relationship.”

  The Levins asked, too, why Jennifer had had so many friends. The phone hadn’t stopped ringing all day.

  Leilia didn’t want to tell them what she really thought. It was that Jennifer had been desperate for attention and affection. Attention and affection she hadn’t gotten enough of at home. She let the question slide.

  While Leilia was visiting the Levins, Roger Stavis was outside Dorrian’s interviewing some of Robert’s friends. He was outside because the friends didn’t want to talk to him inside. There was too much press in there, they said. So he spoke to them on the sidewalk or took them around the corner for coffee.

  He didn’t get much from them. A lot of the kids said they hadn’t noticed anything at all, even though they’d been at Dorrian’s the night of the killing, and some said they just hadn’t been there. Maybe Jennifer’s friends would be more forthcoming. But they weren’t around yet. They always arrived late, he’d been told, and if he wanted to see them he’d have to hang around till midnight or so. He hated to do that after a grueling day. But he knew that the first twenty-four hours of a case were generally the most productive, so he went inside and waited.

  Fortunately he didn’t have to wait at the noisy bar itself. Jack Dorrian offered him his private office for his interviews, and he went and sat in there. And then after a while Dorrian came in and brought a couple of girls. Friends of Jennifer’s. And yes, they’d been at the bar with her on Monday night.

  Stavis spoke to them consolingly. Then he began asking them questions about how Jennifer had behaved that night. The girls said she’d been drinking and that she’d been pursuing Robert.

  Stavis had them sign written statements.

  He felt relaxed after that, pleased because Jennifer’s friends had not only confirmed Robert’s story about her having been hot to trot with him, but even said nice things about Robert. Said he was gentle. Said Jennifer said he was gentle. Which proves, Stavis thought as he cheerfully headed home to Queens with the statements tucked safely into his briefcase, how important it is to do your interviewing early. Later on the kids at the bar may break up into enemy camps—a camp for Robert, a camp for Jennifer—but tonight no partisan lines have as yet been drawn.

  Jack Litman had also worked late. He’d gone to night court and, with Robert at his side, argued in front of an arraignment judge that his client should be released from jail immediately, as he was guilty of nothing but an accident. “Mr. Chambers didn’t mean to hurt Miss Levin,” Litman said, and explained that he had killed her while reacting to the sexual pain she had caused him.

  Reporters who were listening to the argument were delighted. Litman was giving the story a whole new push. They leaned eagerly forward and whispered
among themselves that if the case ever came to trial it would be a dandy. The defense wouldn’t be the run-of-the-mill self-defense in which a defendant argues he killed his victim because he was reacting to the fear of annihilation. It would be something new. Self-defense in reaction to sex. Rough sex. The notion gripped the imagination of the newspeople.

  They were out in force. So were Robert’s preppie friends. Stylishly dressed, they sat on the edge of their seats, cheek-by-jowl with friends and relatives of night court’s usual catch of woebegone mostly dark-skinned hookers, pushers, and thieves, and seemed to be enjoying the atmosphere, as if night court were but a variation on the slumming that had drawn them to clubs like Area and the Palladium. Robert saw them and tossed them a thumbs-up sign.

  But the arraignment didn’t go well. “Far more than one blow was landed,” a prosecutor from the district attorney’s office told the judge. “We have reports that there were bruises and bite marks on the body.”

  The judge ordered Robert back to jail pending a grand jury investigation of the charges.

  “JENNY KILLED IN WILD SEX” and “SEX ‘GOT ROUGH’” screamed headlines in the New York Post and the Daily News the next morning. The Levin family was furious. But so was Jack Litman. He’d never used the words “rough” or “wild” sex, he shouted at a Post editor, demanding to know why the words had appeared in quotes and been attributed to him. The editor tried to calm him down. “My headline writer just took a bit of literary license,” he said.

  Litman wasn’t assuaged. The grand jury was about to meet to decide whether or not to indict Robert, and he was afraid they might be negatively swayed by the newspaper stories. Moving fast, he filed a request that the grand jury not be allowed to read about the Chambers case while they were sitting. But if granted, what good would the request do?—even if the jurors didn’t read about the case, how could they miss the headlines?

  New York, perhaps more than any other city in America, was a town where headlines were inescapable. Every major corner had at least one newsstand, sometimes two, side streets had coin-operated newspaper machines, and the subways were filled with riders clinging to poles with one hand and turning tabloid pages with the other.

  Mickey McEntee entered the grand jury room and immediately became self-conscious. There were three tiers of jurors staring down at him, and the room was so quiet that he feared the sound of his own voice would startle him.

  The quiet was unusual. He’d gone before grand juries often before. But he’d never encountered this kind of pervasive stillness. Probably it was because all the other times he’d been testifying about drug deals and the jurors couldn’t have cared less. They’d sat there rifling through their newspapers while he faced them, or even taking little naps, their eyes closed and tiny snores coming out of their mouths. He wished this grand jury was a bit more like the ones he was used to. Not that he liked disrespect. But he sure didn’t like the way the people out there looked ready to hang on his every word. Because he was worried about the words he was going to have to say. The words Robert had used and which he’d written down when he was taking his statement. Dick. Stick. Lick. How come so many of the words rhymed? And how was he ever going to be able to say them in front of those rows of neatly dressed middle-aged men and women?

  It was the women who bothered him most, he decided. He could say Robert’s words in front of men all right. But in front of women? When Steve Saracco, who was conducting the inquiry for the district attorney’s office, started to question him, McEntee avoided the eyes of the women and, directing his gaze toward a handful of distant male faces, began edgily to deliver his testimony.

  He got the words out. And he kept a straight face, too. Even though half the time he was talking he wanted to burst out laughing because the story was so preposterous. At the same time, it was crucial to be expressionless. “Chambers said that after Jennifer scratched him,” he said, trying to keep his tone even, “they made up, and she licked his dick. Kissed it.” The men he was staring at seemed mesmerized. “Then she hit his dick,” he continued, his face a deadpan. “Whacked it with a stick.”

  Those were the hard parts for him. After he’d said those parts, he relaxed.

  That wasn’t the end of his ordeal, though. When he was finished testifying, the jurors were shown the crime scene photos, and, to McEntee’s fury, one man snickered at them. Snickered and smiled to himself, as if Jennifer’s naked body was turning him on. The jurors’ questions were unbelievable, too. “Are there sticks in the park?” one man wanted to know, as if he’d never been in a park. “What did the panties look like?” another guy asked. “What style were they?”

  What’s he want me to say? McEntee wondered. Teeny-tiny? Lacy with a cotton crotch? This guy must be a panty freak. Shrugging his shoulders, he evaded the question. “White,” he said. “White panties.”

  When he left the room, McEntee felt wrung out, and all he could think was thank God the public doesn’t get to hear what goes on in grand jury proceedings.

  While the grand jury was sitting, members of the Dorrian’s set began to rally around Robert, who had been moved from his courthouse cell to Rikers Island. They worried about his treatment. “There’s nothing we can do for Jennifer,” said Nora Bray, in whose apartment Jennifer and Robert had made love. “We have to fight now for Robert’s rights.” They worried, too, about his accommodations. “I can’t imagine Robert on Rikers,” said Madelaine Hogue, the girl who had years ago dubbed him Romeo. “I can’t imagine anyone I know there. Our world just doesn’t go that far; it doesn’t go east of First Avenue or north of Ninety-sixth Street.”

  At first Robert’s supporters concentrated on praising him, telling one another what a great guy he was. How considerate. How generous. How slow to anger. But in a short while standing up for Robert took the form of putting down Jennifer, and hostile rumors about her began to circulate. She was wild, one Dorrian’s regular said, so wild that her father used to lock her in a closet to control her. She was exhibitionistic, another remarked, so exhibitionistic that she’d posed for photographs in the nude, surrounded by a group of clothed boys. She was provocative, a third sniffed, so provocative that she’d carried handcuffs with her on dates. And several of the college-bound chic who had been at Dorrian’s the night of the killing insisted that at least some of the marks that had been found on Jennifer’s body—in particular the marks on her breasts that the police had termed bites—would prove to have been made not by Robert but by other boys with whom she’d indulged in fierce sexual play.

  There was a wake for Jennifer on the evening the rumors began to fly. The Levin family and some of Jennifer’s closest friends went to view her body at a West Side chapel and tried to console one another. But their efforts were hopeless. The coffin was open from the waist up, and although Jennifer was dressed prettily in a mint-green cardigan and her lips and face were painted to give her a semblance of life, her family and friends could see bruises through the thick mortician’s makeup.

  Steve Levin wore dark glasses to the wake. Perhaps he was trying to shield himself from the sight of Jennifer’s mauled face, perhaps just to shield the rest of the family from his own tear-ravaged eyes, for he had been crying a lot. Indeed, he had been suffering in a new way today, suffering not only from the grief of losing his daughter but from the grief of reading about her in the newspapers. Later he would tell a reporter that having to read about her had been just about the worst experience he’d had since learning of her death, because reading about her had made him doubt his perceptions of his own child. In his perceptions Jennifer had been the kind of girl who’d had such a good self-image that she not only wouldn’t have engaged in kinky sex but she wouldn’t even have pursued a boy who didn’t want to be with her. She’d have simply walked away. The press coverage made Jennifer sound altogether different and made him have to ask himself if he’d gotten things wrong, seen his daughter wrong, and the self-doubt was devastating.

  The wake anguished Jennifer’s friends
. Betsy Shankin, who had served as go-between for Jennifer and Robert, shivered and screamed at the sight of the body. Margaret Trahill, who had gone to the party in East Hampton with Jennifer the weekend before she died, kept imagining that at any moment Jennifer might sit up and begin talking. If she did, Margaret thought, Jennifer would say, Get this ugly sweater and this horrible lipstick off me! Because Jennifer had had wonderful taste. She’d never have worn such an awful sweater or that hideous lipstick. But the worst thing for Margaret was seeing Jennifer’s swollen eye. It made her realize that the story Robert had told about not laying a hand on her except for his sudden accidental choke hold couldn’t be true. Jennifer’s eye looked as if it had been socked.

  When she got home from the wake, Margaret called up Nora Bray, who’d been quoted in the newspapers about getting their set together to fight for Robert now, and she screamed at Nora in language she blushed to recall. “You bitch,” she screamed. “You cunt!”

  Julia Zapata, the Colombian cook who had years ago longed to be Phyllis Chambers, had been thinking all day about calling her, but she hadn’t known what to say. At last she picked up the phone and made the effort anyway. It was a terrible experience. Phyllis sounded agitated and kept saying she didn’t know how she would be able to get through her calamity.

  “You have to accept it,” Julia soothed. “You cannot stop it. It’s like the water when it’s a storm. You just have to hold on and take one day at a time.”

  “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “You have to. And you have to count your blessings. The other parents, the girl’s parents, it’s worse for them. Their child is dead.”

  “God give them peace,” Phyllis said. “Give us all peace.” Then she started to cry.

  Julia tried to comfort her. “You’re lucky,” she said. “You’re lucky. Those other parents, their child is dead. But you’re lucky. You have your boy alive.”