The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Dorrian felt sorry for her. He couldn’t help picturing what it would be like to have his own two sons in trouble the way hers was.

  He knew a bit about jail. Back in the 1970s he’d been falsely accused of possessing stolen merchandise certificates from Gimbels and using them to make a purchase. He’d been tried and acquitted, but before he was cleared he’d spent a night in the Tombs. They’d put him in a room with maybe a hundred people standing up. You couldn’t sit down. There was no toilet paper. There were flies and cockroaches. And there was one big animal there. The guard. A kid gave the guard five dollars to get him cigarettes, but when he asked for his cigarettes the guard said, “What five dollars?” Dorrian had felt like a creep when he got out of there, overcome by disgust for mankind.

  Maybe it was that experience that made him decide that afternoon to help Robert out. Or maybe it was just Phyllis Chambers’s tears. Whatever the reason, by the time he left her apartment he’d decided to put up his $600,000 East Side town house as partial collateral for the bail.

  That night he telephoned Steve Levin to prepare him for the news. He’d offer his condolences, too, he planned. Tell Levin that death is really just a continuation of life and that everyone has to go over that way sometime. Most religions saw death that way, he’d say. Judaism. Catholicism. Whatever. We’re all just preparing to see God later on.

  But he didn’t get to deliver his philosophical ruminations. Levin cut the conversation off as soon as he heard about the bail.

  Robert was at Litman’s office, where he’d just given a press conference. “Get him and his folks out of here,” Litman told Roger Stavis right after the conference. “And don’t let the media see where you’re taking them. They need some private time before Robert goes to Monsignor Leonard’s rectory.”

  Stavis got Robert and his parents down to the building’s garage and into his car without their being observed by the press. But as soon as he pulled the car onto the street, he saw camera lights flashing. He threw a blanket over Robert’s head, told him to slump down, and sped the car through the crowd. But a moment later he realized he was being tailed. A TV van was right behind him.

  Stavis was confident he could shake them. He’d take the FDR Drive, get a few car lengths in front of them, and that would be that. His mind made up, he sailed onto the drive and immediately swerved and changed lanes. It didn’t help. The van was still behind him.

  Had his passengers noticed? Not yet probably. “Now don’t you worry,” he said. “It’s just I’m in a hurry,” and he changed lanes again.

  He wasn’t a very brave driver. His friends teased him about his caution, called him Mr. Safe. But now he stepped on the gas and zigzagged crazily from lane to lane. His new boldness paid off. The van fell behind. But then it zoomed right up behind him again.

  All right, I’ll fix ’em. I’ll get off the drive and I’ll head to Queens, Stavis decided. They’ll never be able to find me there, because I know Queens like the back of my hand and Queens doesn’t exist for the media. These guys have probably never been to Queens once in their whole lives.

  He followed his plan, gunning across the Queensboro Bridge, and with the van still hot on his trail suddenly swerved to the right at the Long Island City exit. Did it!

  Off the exit, he turned down a deserted street, made a quick turn onto another, and, heart pounding, pulled the car over. There was no one behind him. Whooping with pleasure, he turned off the lights and parked.

  “I don’t think they’ll find us here,” he said to the Chamberses.

  He stayed where he was for fifteen minutes. Then he drove the family to a nearby Italian restaurant. He was as excited by winning the car chase as he’d ever been about winning a legal battle.

  At the restaurant he communicated his excitement to Litman over the telephone. “Bet you didn’t know when you hired me that you were hiring a wheelman, didja?” he said exuberantly.

  Litman had no time for small talk. “The press is swarming around Monsignor Leonard’s church,” he said. “You can’t take Robert there. We’ve got to find someplace else.”

  Monsignor Wilders, Phyllis’s old friend from the church of St. Thomas More, found a church-run home in Brooklyn in which Robert could stay until the coast was clear at Leonard’s rectory. Wilders had been helpful to Robert’s cause in another way, too. He had given the family $21,000 of his personal savings for bail money. He considered doing so an act of mercy. Hadn’t the Lord said, “Come you, blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the foundation of the world because I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink, I was sick and you came to see me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

  Besides, he believed Robert’s story, believed that, although the sex Robert had described having with Jennifer was sordid and shocking, it was a mutually agreed upon activity. The kind of thing that kids today did, because kids today were always after new thrills.

  The problem with Kids today was, parents didn’t discipline them. Not properly, not the way they did when he was a youngster. Take his mother. When he was growing up in the north Bronx, he and his brother used to play stickball in the street before dinner and one night they dawdled and their mother came to the door and called out, “You better come home, it’s six o’clock, time for dinner,” and his brother called out, “Wait, I have to get my licks,” and his mother said, “If you don’t get in here in one second you’ll really be getting your licks.”

  That’s what parents were like in the old days. They gave discipline. And kids respected them for it. Not anymore.

  John Cardinal O’Connor, New York’s highest prelate, wasn’t altogether happy about the role some of his priests had played in getting Robert out of jail. It was true there was a Gospel basis for aiding prisoners. But Archbishop McCarrick and Monsignors Leonard and Wilders had received hate mail from Jews because of their activities on behalf of Robert. And the cardinal himself had received an angry letter from the Levin family—Jennifer’s Jewish mother and father and her Catholic stepmother. In the cardinal’s view, the priests’ intercession had the potential for inflaming the city. It was being perceived as a move on the part of the Catholic Church to exert pressure on behalf of a Jew-killer.

  A week after Robert was freed from jail, O’Connor attempted to avert incipient religious strife by anticipating it. “I am worried,” he wrote in an open letter to a Catholic newsweekly. “I am worried that mercy toward a Catholic boy could be perceived as callousness toward a Jewish girl. I am worried that the Catholic ‘Establishment’ will be seen as rallying around its ‘own,’ seeming to protect and defend its own, while a Jewish girl lies dead and her family is shattered with grief… . I worry that some Catholics will fail to recognize the potential for resentment on the part of some Jews. I worry even more that some other Catholics will recognize the potential for resentment, but attribute it to Jewish ‘paranoia.’ Either reaction would be unfortunate.”

  Jack Litman was stunned by the cardinal’s open letter. Why had he written it? he wondered. And why was he suggesting that the case might divide the city along religious lines? There was no such issue—but now there might be. He put the letter down with sadness and apprehension.

  “People are going nuts,” a Catholic reporter said to a Jewish colleague the day after the cardinal’s letter appeared. “The radio stations have been getting calls all day saying Jewish girls are whores and the Catholic Church loves murderers.”

  “It’s the cardinal’s fault,” the Jewish reporter said. “He shouldn’t have mixed in.”

  “He was just trying to calm the waters,” the Catholic reporter said.

  “No. He stirred them up. Talking about ‘Jewish paranoia.’ I resent that ‘Jewish paranoia.’”

  “Maybe the Levins wrote him a paranoid letter,” the Catholic reporter said. “Maybe they said the Church was being anti-Semitic.”

  “So he rebukes his priests?” The Jewish reporter whistled. “Now that’s what I
call Catholic paranoia.”

  District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau wasn’t known for his expansiveness. A reserved man, he found small talk tedious. But on the morning of October 15 he held a press conference in his paneled, flag-draped office and engaged in a bit of banter with the reporters and camera people who were milling around him. “Don’t get too carried away by what I’m going to tell you,” he said. “Don’t go rushing off for the phones. Because the phones are down. And no, it isn’t because we haven’t paid the bill.”

  The newspeople laughed, and he laughed too, a thin smile playing on his austere face. He was in good spirits. He was about to reveal that his office had just won the burglary indictment against Robert. The indictment would give his staff good leverage in Robert’s murder trial. And it would go a long way toward molding public opinion about the so-called preppie. Litman would have a hard time passing Chambers off as an altar boy after this.

  When the newspeople stopped jostling each other and jockeying for better positions, Morgenthau got down to business. He read them the indictment and explained that David Fillyaw, who was under indictment for attempted murder, was Chambers’s co-defendant in the burglaries.

  “Why’d it take a year to get this indictment?” a reporter asked.

  “These are difficult cases to solve,” Morgenthau said.

  “How did you solve them? What evidence do you have?”

  “I don’t want to discuss the evidence,” Morgenthau snapped. Then he relented. “Well, I’ll tell you this,” he said. “The media attention paid to Chambers for the killing of Jennifer Levin made some people more willing to cooperate in this investigation.” He looked around the room and smiled his thin but happy smile again. “So I guess,” he said, “that the press isn’t so bad after all.”

  Pat Fillyaw was in a rotten mood that night. For hours the press had been ringing her up and banging on her door, trying to get her to talk to them about her son. How had he met Robert Chambers? they wanted to know. How close was their relationship?

  She didn’t tell them anything. Why should she? The press hadn’t been the least bit interested in talking to her when David had been arrested for stabbing Sarah. They hadn’t wanted to hear what it was like trying to raise a child drug-free in coke-ridden New York. They hadn’t wanted to know that she’d sent David to private school or that once upon a time he’d been talented and full of promise. No, they’d simply called him an “ex-con” in their headlines, and implied that he hadn’t been reared but just thrown up. Hatched. Well, now they could go to hell. They and that assistant district attorney Linda Fairstein, too. Pat had heard her quoted on the radio. She’d heard Linda Fairstein say David represented the evil side of Robert, or proved that he had an evil side.

  That wasn’t the way Pat looked at it. To her it was clear that Robert was the evil one. Because David hadn’t blamed Sarah for making him stab her, the way Robert blamed Jennifer for making him kill her. It wasn’t her son who’d said, “A girl hurt me, did nasty things to me, raped me, so I had to get her.”

  David had known better. He’d been raised better. He knew if he blamed the girl for what he’d done to her, his mother wouldn’t have stuck by him the way Robert’s mother was sticking by Robert. He’d known that if he said the kind of garbage Robert was saying, his mother would have cut him out of her life.

  A week passed. And then another. The two lawyers buckled down to familiarizing themselves with the case, investigating witnesses, and inquiring about the lives that Robert and Jennifer had led. They were shocked by some of the things they discovered, appalled by the extent to which flippancy, promiscuity, and drugs marked the Dorrian’s crowd. Litman blamed the crowd’s problems on the tendency of upper-class parents to want to satisfy their offspring’s every desire. “In this country,” he told a French friend one night, “l’enfant est roi. But you know, when you’re a king, you can also be abandoned.”

  Linda Fairstein was equally critical. She had talked to Jennifer’s friends and found herself singularly unimpressed: there were girls who were giddy and given to hysteria, boys who were ignorant and arrogant. One had come down to see her and, trying to explain the atmosphere at Dorrian’s, boasted that all the guys who hung out at the bar, himself included, were rich and good-looking, and consequently able to have sex with a different girl every night if they chose to do so. Then he’d asked her to reimburse his taxi fare and handed her a cab receipt from the week before. Trying to rip off the district attorney! “This kid, he’s just like Chambers,” she told a reporter privately. “Grows up with all the advantages life can afford. Goes to the fanciest schools. But what was he taught?”

  Late that autumn Leilia Van Baker, who had been thinking steadily about Jennifer’s last hours, at last telephoned Robert from Vermont to tell him what she thought of him. She dialed him at home and got his mother.

  “Robert’s not here,” Phyllis said. “But I’ll get your message to him.”

  Not long afterward Leilia’s phone rang and she picked it up to hear Robert. At the sound of his voice, she got frightened. But she started speaking at once. “I want to know why you killed Jennifer,” she said.

  “Do you think I did it intentionally?” Robert asked.

  “Damn right I do. You murdered her.”

  Robert said nothing for a while. Then he asked, “Why’d you call me then?”

  Why had she? The whole idea seemed stupid now.

  “Because we used to be friends,” she said. “Because you once told me you wanted to come stay with me up here. Because I wanted you to know that I’m totally glad you’re not here.”

  But somehow it wasn’t enough, wasn’t what she’d meant to say at all. She decided to end the conversation. Decided she’d never speak to him again. “Well, listen man,” she said, “like, good luck, but I’m glad you’re not in my life.”

  Over on Roosevelt Island, Pat Fillyaw was having second thoughts about the man she and her husband had hired to represent David. He was Alan Friess, a lawyer who had been a judge until he’d been barred from the bench for frivolous conduct, including deciding the length of a defendant’s sentence by tossing a coin. Friess had been advising David to plead guilty to the various charges against him. And he’d persuaded Pat it was a good idea. But ever since Robert had received bail, she’d begun to have doubts. And recently she’d called the fiery black activist lawyer C. Vernon Mason for advice. He’d suggested letting Friess go and hiring a different lawyer. One who might take the case to trial. He knew of one such fellow, he said, and recommended him. He was smart and sharp. But very expensive.

  “Maybe we should do it,” Pat said to her husband.

  “It’ll cost,” he said.

  “I know. We’re talking life savings.”

  “And the little one’s college fund,” her husband said, alluding to their younger son, who would be graduating high school next year. “Still, do it if you want. Take the money out of the bank. Take all the money.”

  Pat thought she would. And then she thought, No, better not. How could she risk the family’s entire assets on what, according to Friess at any rate, was a terrible gamble. Sure, David could win a trial, he’d said. But he also could lose. Probably would lose. And if he loses, he’ll go to jail for a helluva longer time than he will if he pleads.

  She didn’t want that to happen, and she decided to stick with Friess.

  Marilei, agitated, scurried around Phyllis’s apartment and laid out wine and sandwiches. Phyllis had invited a group of ladies to have lunch with her and get their fortunes told for twenty dollars a head.

  A soothsayer was coming, and Marilei wasn’t altogether sure she approved of soothsaying. Phyllis was clutching at straws, she fretted. She was looking for someone, something, anything that would make her feel good. Of course, she’d always been that way. Once, she’d even dragged Marilei off to some woman in Queens who diagnosed people’s diseases by looking into their eyes and cured them by administering vitamins. But now Phyllis seemed even more needy
than before. She was even considering worshipping at that Tabernacle Church where they’d prayed for Robert. And her a good Catholic!

  When the soothsayer arrived, Marilei went to have a look at him. He didn’t seem like a fortuneteller at all. He was a big man, and he was wearing a well-tailored expensive suit.

  Phyllis’s guests liked him. He told them wonderful, positive things. Your future looks bright. You’re going to have good luck. Your wishes will come true.

  He had spoken similarly to Phyllis, too, on another occasion. That’s why she’d asked him over. He’d told her that everything was going to be all right, and that Robert was going to be a great and famous man. He said the same sort of things to her today, too.

  Downtown, about that time, Linda Fairstein hung up a picture of Robert in her office. A Post photographer had snapped it while Robert was off guard. It showed him leaving the place he was living in now—Monsignor Leonard’s rectory in Washington Heights—a gym bag over his shoulder, a Walkman around his neck, and an open-mouthed smile stretching his lips. No one who’s killed someone else has the right to look this relaxed, Fairstein steamed. She tacked up the photo and said to herself, I’m going to look at this every day to remind me how unfair the world is, and I’m going to keep it hanging here till I put this guy back in jail.

  9.

  The Long Wait

  By the time they had been working hard on The People v. Robert Chambers for several weeks, both Litman and Fairstein were aware that their respective cases would not be easy to win. Fairstein knew by then that Litman wasn’t going to introduce the idea that Jennifer had asked Robert to compress her neck in order to heighten her sexual pleasure. He was planning to stick by Robert’s own explanation of what had happened—that he’d strangled Jennifer while reacting to pain. Not that that made Fairstein’s job any easier. There were no witnesses to what had happened in the park so the only way to prove that Robert had intended to kill Jennifer would be to show, through medical testimony, that he’d choked her for enough time, whether minutes or seconds, to have considered his act and yet kept on with it.