by Linda Wolfe
Litman faced a similar yet altogether different task. To see Robert go free, he’d have to prove that Robert had held on to Jennifer’s neck for only a few brief seconds.
The problem for both lawyers was that there was no absolute way to establish the amount of time Jennifer had been throttled. Even skilled medical experts were offering not proof but merely opinion. And in the courtroom, Fairstein and Litman knew, one expert’s opinion might easily cancel out another’s.
The lawyers had other difficulties, too. Fairstein had no motive. Litman had no witnesses to verify Robert’s contention that Jennifer was sexually aggressive either in the park or in general.
One morning in October, Litman decided to see if he could get Fairstein to reduce the charges against Robert to manslaughter. He stopped by her office and said briskly, “C’mon, you know this isn’t a murder case!”
Fairstein didn’t bite. She realized she was going to have a hard time proving murder, but she believed that in the end she would succeed. The pictures of Jennifer lying dead in the park gave her that feeling. Whenever she thought about them, she could see them in front of her. Jennifer’s face puffy and smeared with dirt. Her breasts and her pubis left uncovered, disdained. Her neck blazing with scarlet bruises. She knew, whenever she thought about the pictures, that Robert had murdered Jennifer, and she was hopeful a jury would react the same way.
Litman was waging psychological warfare with her, Fairstein decided. Ignoring his remark, she changed the subject.
“Dear Ms. Fairstein,” Litman wrote to his opponent on October 21. “Pursuant to Article 240 and Section 200.95 of the Criminal Procedure Law, we respectfully request that you make available to us … the following ‘property’ without which the defendant cannot adequately prepare or conduct his defense.” He listed various items he wanted to see, including Jennifer’s journal. The little black spiral book in which Jennifer had written, among other things, feverish descriptions of sexual activity, had been given to the police by Alexandra LaGatta the day they came to her apartment, and they’d turned it over to the district attorney’s office.
Litman had heard tantalizing rumors about the book. He’d heard it mentioned Robert twice. He’d heard that some of its pages dwelled on sexual acts that were kinky and aggressive. And he’d heard that the journal contained a list of Jennifer’s lovers, a list in which she’d rated sexual prowess, drawing erotic symbols next to the names and giving exceptional performers extra symbols, in the way that critics gave stars to exceptional restaurants and movies.
He needed the book, Litman had decided. It might give him just what he was missing—the names of men who could corroborate Robert’s story that Jennifer was a sexually aggressive young woman. He was entitled to use the book to look for potential witnesses, he felt. Entitled, too, to examine whatever it was that Jennifer had written about his client.
“Dear Mr. Litman,” Fairstein wrote to Litman about the journal on November 7. “The requested property is beyond the scope of discovery under C.P.L. Article 240.”
Fairstein’s playing games, Litman thought. She’s the one who told me the sex acts in the journal were kinky and aggressive. He told Judge Bell this, and although he hadn’t made his initial request for the book public, a week after receiving Fairstein’s turn-down, he filed a copy of that request in court papers accessible to the press.
JENNIFER KEPT SEX DIARY: LAWYER, screamed the Post the next day. “SEX DIARY” KEPT BY JEN? said the News. And television news shows repeatedly referred to Jennifer’s journal as a “sex diary.”
Fairstein was annoyed. “There isn’t a sex diary,” she announced. “There is a school datebook, but nothing chronicling [Jennifer’s] sex life.” She denied ever having told Litman anything about what was in the book, and continued to refuse to let him see it.
A week before Thanksgiving she went out of town. The day after she did, her assistant, Tom Kendris, telephoned her and told her that Litman had grown even more importunate. He’d come to court and demanded that Judge Bell compel her to produce the journal. “That so?” she grinned. “Well, we don’t even have the book anymore. I gave it back to Jennifer’s father.”
She was amused at Kendris’s astonishment. And sure she’d made the right move. Now if Litman wanted the journal, he’d have to subpoena it from Steve Levin, and she knew the press well enough to know that if he went after the book from a grieving father he’d probably come off looking like a coldhearted monster. A male chauvinist, too, out to suggest that because a young woman had been sexually active she’d somehow been responsible for her own death.
Litman had suggested something similar to this in the Bonnie Garland case. He had introduced testimony about an affair Garland had had with a young man other than her killer, and afterward he had told an interviewer that he had purposely soiled Garland’s reputation. “It was necessary to taint her a little bit,” he’d said, “so the jury would not believe, as the parents wanted them to, that she was this ingenue who fell in love for the first time [with] this wily man.” Many voices had protested Litman’s tainting of Garland, and that trial in 1978 had been a milestone for a new social movement—the movement for victims’ rights.
Although newspaper readers and television viewers are titillated by the idea of Jennifer’s diary, Fairstein thought, public opinion will probably go against Litman for demanding it. And perhaps that will scare him into thinking twice before trying to use blame-the-victim tactics in the trial.
He had to see that diary, Litman decided two days before Thanksgiving. Had to see it no matter how bad going after it from Jennifer’s father was going to make him look. He spoke with Fairstein that day and mentioned he was afraid Levin might alter or destroy the book. She told him not to worry. “Mr. Levin knows the diary may be the subject of court proceedings,” she said.
“Did you copy it before you handed it over?” he asked.
“I Xeroxed the relevant pages,” she answered. “Including those pages on which your client’s name appears.”
Relevant pages? That made him furious. If Fairstein had considered some of the material in the diary so relevant that she’d gone to the trouble of Xeroxing it, then he damn well was entitled to a read.
On Thanksgiving Eve he personally delivered a subpoena for the diary into the hands of Steve Levin’s lawyer, Jeffrey Newman.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Newman said as he accepted the paper.
“Ein breirah,” Litman said. “I’ve got no choice.”
Thanksgiving weekend was a confusing time for Brock Pernice. He’d been up in Boston at college, but he’d come back to New York for the holiday, and a part of him almost expected to see Jennifer. As if she hadn’t died. As if the past few months without her had been just another of the many times they’d broken up.
“What was it like being with her?” an inquisitive reporter asked him over lunch at Pinocchio’s, an Italian restaurant a few blocks from Dorrian’s, on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
Brock remembered many things, but one of them, he explained, was something that always made him sad. “I couldn’t open up with her. At least I couldn’t as much as she wanted me to.”
“What was she like?”
“Terribly attractive. And very fun-loving,” Brock said. But he also criticized her. “She was hyperactive. Always jumping around. Always getting mad about something. A handful.”
He’s angry at Jennifer for dying and thereby abandoning him, the reporter thought. But when she asked him about his final memories of Jennifer, she began to suspect there might be another reason: that Brock was angry at Jennifer for having hurt his pride by going out with Robert the night she got killed. “I’d gone away for the summer,” he was reminiscing. “And we’d broken up. But just before she died, I’d come back. I saw her out on the island. We confessed our flings. We said we were going to see each other again.” His face looked deeply puzzled, his voice sounded irritable. “I was back. Everything was good between us.”
A fr
iend of Brock’s named Shane Keller was at the table and he, too, seemed to detect wounded pride in Brock’s words. As if trying to comfort him, to let him know that no matter whom Jennifer had gone off with, he still thought of her as Brock’s girl, Shane murmured, “Yeah, but if she hadn’t died that night, if she’d just fooled around with Robert, you’d have found out. It would have been just one more time you two broke up. But then you’d have gotten together again.”
Brock seemed soothed after that. He spoke more positively about Jennifer and implied that he might even have married her one day. “We could have solved our problems. Or the problems could have just gone away. People change. If I was ready to change, and to change her, I could have.” Then he began speculating about what had really happened in the park. “Robert must have gone temporarily insane. He’s got mental problems. The scene can give them to you.”
“Yeah,” Shane agreed. “Also, Robert kept a lot hidden. His robberies. His drugs.” He shook his head. “I can just see Jennifer trying to get to know him. You know, trying to get him to open up with her, the way she always wanted people to do. With him having so much hidden, she could have made him really mad by trying to find things out.”
Brock stared at him. And suddenly his slight body went rigid and he could no longer contain or mask his anger at Jennifer. “Why the hell,” he said, “did she want to find out anything about that idiot!”
Mike Pearl, who covered the courts for the New York Post, was in Atlanta that weekend. Pearl was a legendary figure among New York journalists, a man who had reported on trials for so many years that he had developed an intricate network of sources and spies and could be counted upon to sniff out a story even before its principals realized they were involved in one. Shortly before the weekend, he had stumbled on a curious piece of information: the prosecution now had a theory about why Robert had murdered Jennifer. Robert, Pearl’s informants told him, had been trying to rob Jennifer. The theory had been sparked by the long-ago observation of McEntee and other detectives when they first saw Jennifer’s body that her earlobes seemed recently divested of earrings. And it had been augmented by photographs newly obtained by Linda Fairstein that showed Jennifer partying at Dorrian’s shortly before she went with Robert to the park. In the photographs, her ears were alight with little fake diamonds.
Pearl hadn’t filed the story. He’d held back, planning to check it out further, and gone south for his holiday. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have dragged his feet. But who reads the papers over Thanksgiving weekend, he’d said to himself. Why waste a scoop?
Esther Pessin of United Press International was hungrier than Mike Pearl. She, too, had stumbled on the prosecution’s theft theory just before the weekend, but she didn’t sit on the information. She called Jennifer’s grandfather, Arnold Domenitz, to check it out, weasled a confirmation out of him, and filed her story. By Friday night it was all over the airwaves.
Linda Fairstein was livid when she learned that the theft theory had leaked. She’d meant to produce it only at the trial. And she hadn’t meant actually to say that robbery had been Robert’s motive for killing. There’d be no way to prove such an assertion. For one thing, Jennifer’s money and jewelry had never been found. For another, even if they had been, and even if by some remote chance they could be traced to Robert, he might not have killed her for them. He could have killed her and then decided to take her possessions. So what Fairstein had planned to do was just tease the suggestion of theft into the trial. Let the jury arrive at the idea on their own by looking at the photographs of Jennifer at Dorrian’s. But now, she realized, she probably wouldn’t be able to rely on the photographs. Litman would make a move to have them excluded, or at least ask to have them cropped so the earrings weren’t visible.
She’d lost something big, Fairstein thought. But she didn’t scold the Levins. She had become very fond of them in the months since she had first met them in her crowded office. And besides, the leakage hadn’t exactly been their fault. She hadn’t thought of warning them to keep her theft theory under their hats. Anyway, how could she be mad at the Levins? Especially right now when they were spending the weekend trying to decide what to do about the diary subpoena.
Shortly after the weekend, the Levins decided they would fight that subpoena. There was nothing in the diary relevant to the case, as they saw it, and besides, it would be obscene for the lawyer defending their daughter’s killer to paw through her private, innermost thoughts. Early in December they petitioned Judge Bell to quash the diary subpoena.
At the rectory in Washington Heights, Monsignor Leonard was trying to reform Robert. One of his efforts involved seeing to it that Robert ate dinner with him and his fellow priests every night. Meals were the beginning of civility, Monsignor Leonard reasoned. In ancient days they signified alliances. If you ate with the liege lord, you were putting yourself in his hands and he was putting his hands around you. He owed you something after you dined with him, and you in turn owed him. That’s what the manna in the desert in the Old Testament was all about. And what the Eucharist was about. These things symbolized an alliance between people and God.
But although Robert took his place at the dining-room table every night, chatting with the handful of priests who made their home in the rectory and dining on the same fare—concoctions whipped up by Leonard himself out of Pierre Franey’s Sixty-Minute Gourmet—the young man didn’t seem very different now from the Robert who’d first come to live at the rectory. He did the odd jobs he was assigned—a little painting here, a little carpentry there. And he did some reading about business, a topic he claimed to be very interested in. But he didn’t exactly knock down the doors of the church trying to get in. Nor did he seem to understand yet that even if he had killed Jennifer unintentionally, he still bore responsibility for her death.
This troubled Monsignor Leonard, who saw it as a sign of immaturity. But perhaps in time the young man would grow up. And perhaps the process would be speeded along by nightly exposure to the conversation and concerns of the rectory’s priests.
December’s days were growing colder and drearier. On one gray, sleety morning, Judge Bell shivered his way from the subway to the courthouse. He was just bypassing the gloomy facade, heading for the judges’ private entrance, when he saw a group of demonstrators shouting and parading. “Justice for Jennifer!” they were calling out. “No more blame-the-victim tactics!” Bell stopped for a moment to look at the demonstration. A woman gave him a flyer. A moment later he reached the judges’ entrance to the courthouse and boarded the private elevator.
People were staring at him, he noticed then. Staring at his coat. He looked down at his lapel and to his surprise saw a pin on it. The pin had a picture of Jennifer Levin and bright fuchsia lettering that read “Justice for Jennifer.”
The woman who had given him the flyer must have fastened the thing onto his lapel, Bell realized, and he quickly removed the pin from his coat. But although afterward he shoved the pin into the back of a drawer in his chambers and soon lost track of it, he was unhappy about having been made to appear, however briefly, a partisan in the case. He believed it was the judiciary’s job to stand between the accused and the mob. That’s how he saw his role, and he didn’t care if people didn’t like him for it.
A few days after the incident of the pin, Bell moved to resolve the diary dispute. The Levins had no right to refuse to produce the diary, he decided, and ordered them to do so at once.
Its relevance to the case was another matter. That was something he himself would decide, he ruled, once he had read it.
By mid-December, Linda Fairstein, who had interviewed the police who had questioned Robert and many of his former teachers, employers, and neighbors, felt she had a good fix on him. He was anti-Semitic, she suspected. He’d used that buzz word “pushy” about Jennifer, and told the police that Boston University was “very Jewish.” He was also, she suspected, a sociopath, the kind of youth who had no conscience and no moral rudder. That last idea ma
de her feel better about having lost her fight to deny him bail, even though she now had a sociopath loose on the streets. Because in time, she believed, he would display his essential nature, would start using drugs again, or stealing or scamming. She looked forward to that occasion. If Robert was caught doing something illegal, she’d be able to cite his transgression when he was convicted and sentenced for killing Jennifer, and that would help see to it that he got put away for a long time.
She was thinking about this one afternoon as she shopped for Christmas gifts in Tiffany’s. She couldn’t help it, because as she pondered a display of golden earrings and silver cufflinks, she turned her head and saw a young man who looked surprisingly like Robert Chambers. She pondered the jewelry again. Then she looked at the young man again. And then she realized it was Robert Chambers.
He’s probably shoplifting, she thought. That’d be just like him. And as he loped past her, she sprinted after him, to see if her hunch was correct.
She was too late. The aisles were packed with Christmas shoppers, and at the elevators she lost him. Frustrated, she returned to the jewelry counter.
A half hour later she saw him again. He was exiting the store, a small Tiffany shopping bag in his hands. She felt a moment’s disappointment. He hadn’t stolen anything. Then, never mind, she told herself. I know this kid. And sooner or later he’s going to do something reckless and play right into our hands.
On another short December day Detective Mike Sheehan made his way along Sixth Avenue, where Salvation Army Santas were ringing their bells and the stores were ablaze with Christmas decorations. He entered the building in which Bob Chambers worked. He rode the elevator to the floor on which Bob’s company was located. And there he delivered a subpoena for Bob’s employment records.