The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

Sheehan had completed his errand and was just about to leave the company’s offices when he spotted Bob Chambers himself.

  “Hey! Ya look fantastic!” he called out.

  “You think so?” Bob asked.

  “Yeah. Since we were together, you drink nothing but club soda, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good job.”

  Sheehan would have preferred to leave things at that. But Bob asked if he would stay and talk to him awhile. Sheehan hadn’t talked to Bob since the August night Robert was arrested. But he’d seen him sitting in the courtroom during several of Robert’s hearings, and Bob always looked as if he was about to burst into tears. Feeling sorry for the guy, Sheehan agreed to a chat. The two men sat down on a bench near the elevators. “You know me, Mike,” Bob said.

  “Yeah,” Sheehan nodded.

  “Well, the kid was just starting to get his thing together. His life was just starting to work out. At least I thought.”

  Sheehan felt a surge of unwanted compassion.

  “I had so many problems with him,” Bob went on. “And then everything was just about to gel. And then this thing. There’s no breaks.”

  Sheehan felt awful. “Bobby, that’s the way life is,” he murmured. “You just gotta keep on going. Tell yourself, The strong survive, and this too shall pass.” But the memory of his interview with Robert in the Central Park police precinct came to his mind, and the next thing he knew he was apologizing. “I’m gonna tell you this,” he said, “if I’d have known it was your son, I wouldn’t have continued on the case.”

  The two men parted after that, but out on the street, amid the bell-ringing and the crowds, Sheehan got a choke in his throat. He couldn’t stop thinking how it was Christmastime, and Bob’s kid would probably be going upstate one of these days, upstate to one of those maximum security prisons, and, oh, Jesus, why do things like this happen to people, and God forgive me, but this could be me years down the line, I could have a son like that and how the hell would I deal with it. And then he went down the street and popped into a bar and, although he usually drank nothing but beer, ordered himself a scotch on the rocks.

  The scotch didn’t help. He was two sips into it when he began thinking about the Levins. Jesus Christ, that was a tough thing there, too. The new year coming. Without a daughter. Yeah.

  He finished the drink, so troubled by the confusion of sentiments swirling through his brain that he got up and called Linda Fairstein, and only after he spoke to her, and she told him she understood his ambivalence about the case, did he begin feeling better.

  Fairstein’s first months on the case hadn’t gone smoothly. The diary fight had consumed a lot of her time and energy, and she’d had trouble getting Robert’s friends to cooperate with her investigation. Many had refused to speak with her, a few out of loyalty, others because they had things to hide. Drug use. Robberies. Credit card scams. Their parents had called her in terror when she tried to get in touch with the kids, and said they would fight her tooth and nail if she dragged their offspring into the case. She had promised the parents that their teenagers, however delinquent, would not be prosecuted. She had begged them to tell their kids to come down and see her. “My God,” she had said, “a child has been murdered. And your child can help us convict the murderer.” But the parents hadn’t helped. Agitated parents can be adamant.

  She despised the lot of them. Especially one. A psychiatrist. “Please, let me speak to your son,” she’d implored him. “There are parents who are never going to see their daughter again, and your son could help us see to it that their pain isn’t made any greater.” The psychiatrist hadn’t cared about other people’s pain. He’d just kept saying that if the press got wind of his son’s relationship with Robert and put the family name into the newspapers, his patients would be distressed. That’s a psychiatrist? Fairstein had said to herself. All he thinks about is what’s bad for business!

  She’d been discouraged. But right after the new year started, she learned through an informant that Robert had smoked dope at a New Year’s Eve party. Her spirits soared, buoyed not just by the information, but by the fact that a friend of Robert’s had delivered it. Perhaps she was rounding a corner, she thought, perhaps a tide was beginning to turn in her favor.

  Fairstein was right. Jennifer’s diary need not be turned over to the defense, Judge Bell ruled at the end of January. He had closeted himself with the spiral date book, read and reread its scrawled impassioned entries, and come to the conclusion, as he wrote in a brief decision, that there was “nothing in the document which was relevant and material to the defendant’s case or which must or should be disclosed to the defendant pursuant to his due process right to a fair trial or pursuant to any other constitutional, statutory or common law right.”

  Jack Litman was disappointed. He had cited scores of legal arguments to support his claim to the diary, had searched out precedents that went as far back as the trial of Aaron Burr. But he had lost the fight. And not only that, he had in the process garnered himself extraordinarily bad publicity. As Fairstein had anticipated, he had been painted as a blackguard, out to drag Jennifer’s reputation through the mud. The popular press had roasted him, and even The American Lawyer magazine had taken a dim view of his diary quest, granting him, in their first issue of the new year, a “Now You Know Why People Hate Lawyers” award.

  He could make another try for the diary during the trial, Litman realized. But he’d have to think carefully before doing that. The way public opinion was going, any moves he made that could be construed as attacking Jennifer’s reputation might end up hurting Robert more than helping him.

  Kitty Schoen ran into Robert at a party that February. She hadn’t seen him since her Valentine’s Day party the year before, the party to which she’d invited both him and Jennifer. The year before! It was hard to face, and hard to face him. She’d thought about Robert often, and seeing him standing in front of her now, she felt faint. “I can’t deal with this yet,” she told him.

  Robert wandered away, and the party swirled around Kitty. But after a while she realized she wanted to talk to him, wanted to hear from his own lips what had happened to her friend. She approached him and pulled him away from the heart of the party into the quiet of the hostess’s kitchen.

  “I’m sorry I ever met Jennifer,” he said when they were alone in the kitchen. “You know, she was flirting with me at Dorrian’s that night. She kept on doing it. She was becoming a pain in the ass.”

  Kitty was surprised to hear him talk about Jennifer that way, but she didn’t say anything. Just listened to his whole account. Heard that Jennifer had begged him to come visit her at school and that he’d said he wouldn’t. That his refusal had made her freak out and scratch him. And that he’d killed her accidentally.

  When he was done, Kitty didn’t know what to think. Parts of the story sounded believable to her, but other parts didn’t at all. She shook her head.

  Her less than enthusiastic response to his story made Robert self-pitying. “Well, my life is over, too,” he said. “I’m going to die in jail.”

  He’s being melodramatic, Kitty thought. “No you won’t,” she said.

  “Yes I will. But I’d rather die in jail than be raped there by a big black motherfucker.”

  Then Robert perked up. “I’ve got one thing going for me, though,” he boasted. “There’s this book and movie being done about me.”

  “Movie?” Kitty was interested.

  “Yeah. Some people are making a movie about me. If I let them, should I let Rob Lowe play me?”

  Winter was nearly over, Judge Bell had set a date for pretrial hearings in May, and still Linda Fairstein had settled on no motive for Jennifer’s killing. She didn’t have to have a motive. The law didn’t require one. But jurors liked motives. Without one, they were loath to convict. Perhaps the FBI will help me determine the motive, she thought, and in the middle of March traveled to the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in
Quântico, Virginia. The center was known for analyzing the clues in unsolved murder cases and helping local police forces determine who the killer was. “We know who our killer is,” Fairstein had said to an official at the center some months earlier, “but we don’t know why he did it. Would you be willing to work backwards? Take our killer and help us analyze why he killed?”

  The FBI had said yes. She’d supplied them with a packet of her evidence. Crime scene photographs. Jennifer’s clothing. Background information about Robert. And at last she’d been informed that a group of experts were ready to give her the benefit of their experience.

  She flew down with Tom Kendris to the futuristic-looking center—the buildings extended not skyward but many stories underground—and in a windowless room met the experts who had studied her material. There were eight of them, some of them detectives, some of them specialists in forensic pathology and psychology. She told them a bit more about the case—new information she’d received about Robert—and then listened avidly to the experts’ theories.

  “Robert’s got the same kind of personality as that serial murderer Ted Bundy,” a psychologist said. “The charm, the deceptiveness. And the emotional vacuity that makes killing easy. Given that, he might kill again.”

  An FBI detective argued strongly that Robert had killed Jennifer and then positioned her body and clothes in such a way that she would appear to have been raped. “He pulled up the skirt and blouse,” he said. “And he tossed her jean jacket over her arm. There’s no way that jacket could have landed the way it did if he flipped her off him the way he says he did.”

  Another detective likened Robert’s remaining in the park after Jennifer was dead to the habit that arsonists had of watching the fires they set. “People who linger at the scene of their crimes get sexually aroused by what they’ve done,” he said.

  Fairstein found all of this fascinating. But what about the motive, she wanted to know.

  “Maybe Jennifer refused some sexual demand,” one of the experts said. “Or maybe she wanted sex, but not there, not in the park. Or maybe she wanted intercourse, and he wanted oral or anal sex. Any refusal could have triggered his rage.”

  “Or maybe he was impotent,” another said. “We all know that impotence is common among drug and alcohol users. If he was impotent and she made fun of that, he could have become enraged.”

  “Maybe he was trying to rob her,” said a third.

  Fairstein took her leave of the experts warmly. An interesting day—but on the plane back to New York she knew she still didn’t have a motive. “Let’s just hope we have the kind of jury that can put two and two together,” she said to Kendris. “The kind of jury that reads Elmore Leonard.”

  “Do you know the one about the prosecutor in the rural Tennessee court?” Jack Litman said the following day to an audience of young lawyers at the New York County Lawyers Association. He had come to the elegant building with its crystal chandeliers, thick red draperies, and portrait gallery filled with the austere faces of once-famous lawyers to lecture about his widely admired trial techniques. Like all good speakers, he began with a joke.

  “The prosecutor is summing up in a hammering-to-death case,” Litman said. “Dutifully he’s doing what he’s been taught. Repeating what each witness said. By lunchtime he’s only gotten to Witness Number Seventeen. After lunch he’s gotten to Witness Number Twenty-two, and suddenly the worst happens! A juror falls asleep. At that moment the prosecutor realizes he’s got to liven things up. So he picks up the murder weapon and says theatrically, ‘Do you remember how the deceased was on his knees, begging for his life because of his two little children? And do you remember how the defendant here cruelly paid no heed and just picked up the hammer and brought it down on the victim’s head?’ As he says this, the prosecutor bangs the hammer down on the jury railing. And then suddenly the head of the hammer bounces up and hits the sleeping juror on the head. ‘Sir, are you okay? Are you okay?’ a court officer shouts. And the juror looks at him and says, ‘Hit me again! I can still hear that son-of-a-bitch lawyer a-talking.’”

  When the laughter subsided, Litman at once turned tutorial. But he seemed, as he began to draw a lesson from his joke, to be speaking as much to himself as to his young audience. “Never forget,” he murmured, abstracted for a moment, “that what a trial really is is a dramatic incident in the confines of a courtroom.”

  In April, Pat Fillyaw came to court with her father and watched David plead guilty to the burglaries he had committed with Robert and to the attempted murder of the Columbia student he had stabbed. Friess, the lawyer she’d hired and stuck with, asked the judge for leniency. “The defendant, at the time of these incidents, was not a person acting solely on the basis of his own free will,” he said. “He was a narcotics abuser, and on the eve of the Columbia incident he had been drinking. That he did what he did under the influence of these substances may not have legal merit, but the court should take it into consideration. Mr. Fillyaw isn’t a mean or vicious person. He’s a person who would not ordinarily have committed these acts were it not for narcotics and alcohol.”

  The judge shrugged. “The reasons for the defendant’s activities were his own responsibility,” he said. “His use of drugs was self-induced. His use of alcohol was self-induced.”

  Then he sentenced David to ten to twenty years imprisonment on the attempted murder, five to ten years on the burglaries, and two to four years on an additional charge of attempted assault. But, he said finally—perhaps because David had cooperated with the district attorney’s office and provided information about Robert—“the terms will run concurrently.”

  Pat heard him and began to cry. Even with the concurrent terms, David would be a grown man when he got out of prison.

  When she left the courtroom, her body leaning heavily on the arm of her father, she felt torn in half. Part of her kept saying it was only right that a person who commits a crime pays for that crime. Even if it’s my own son. But another part said, He’s the victim of a corrections system that never tried to help him. And of racism. He didn’t get bail, the way Robert Chambers did—even though his victim lived and Robert’s died. And I didn’t have the means that the Chamberses have, so I couldn’t risk letting him go to trial. She wasn’t sure she would have, even if she’d had the means. A crime shouldn’t go unpunished. But maybe she could have learned to live with the idea. Mrs. Chambers lived with it. She was okay with the fact her son was walking the streets, and that he might go free.

  She kept trying to reconcile her mind and her heart. And three weeks later she was hospitalized for tachycardia—a racing, pounding heart.

  “Are you the prosecutor in the Chambers case?” a police captain from the 19th Precinct said to Linda Fairstein over her home telephone on the first Saturday in May. “Yes,” she said impatiently. She and Feldman were going to get married that evening and her hairdresser was due to arrive any moment.

  “Does the name John Flanagan mean anything to you?” the police captain pressed ahead.

  “Yes. Why?” Flanagan had been one of Robert’s best friends.

  “Because several hours ago, there was an accident at Flanagan’s apartment.”

  This has to be a joke, Fairstein grinned. She’d kept her wedding plan a secret from most of the people she worked with, but someone in the Police Department must have found out about it and decided to play a practical joke on her. Tease her into a little turmoil before the wedding. It must have been someone who knew how hard she’d been trying to get Flanagan to talk to her, and how firmly and constantly he’d refused. “Yes?” she said, waiting for the joke to unfold.

  But it didn’t. “Flanagan went out drinking with some friends,” the police captain was going on. “And then he and two of the girls he’d been with went back to his apartment and climbed up the fire escape to see the view from his roof. And then one of the girls tripped. Fell four stories. Landed on her head, fractured fifteen ribs, and ruptured her spleen. She’s on life support.”<
br />
  Life support! Fairstein was amazed at the coincidence of another tragedy striking a member of the Dorrian’s crowd, and for a moment she was skeptical that the event had been an accident. “What about Flanagan?” she asked suspiciously.

  “He acted right,” the captain said. “He covered her with a blanket and ran to Lenox Hill Hospital to get help. But he’s pretty worried. Our chief of detectives thought you might be interested.”

  She was interested. Terribly interested. If she could get to Flanagan now, while he was scared, he might talk to her, tell her some missing pieces of information about Robert’s drug use and his scams. If anyone knew Robert, Flanagan did. “I’ll call the chief of detectives,” she said.

  But although a part of her longed to race over to the precinct and interview Flanagan, the rest of her resisted. She had been immersed in tragedy for fifteen years. She had been eating, sleeping, breathing the Chambers case every day for nine months. She needed to be free of tragedy and of the Chambers case today. Needed to be a proper bride, with nothing but joy on her mind. Telephoning Tom Kendris, she asked him to handle the Flanagan matter for her. And that evening, standing under a tent on her mother’s Westchester lawn, her blond hair styled and her body resplendent in a pale pink sequined sheath, she married Feldman. But throughout the ceremony and throughout the fleeting hours of dancing afterward, she kept expecting a ringing phone and a brusque voice telling her the girl was dead.

  Pretrial hearings were scheduled to begin the week after Fairstein’s wedding. They did, but Litman interrupted them by filing myriad motions. He lost most of them, including one asking to have Robert’s videotaped confession suppressed, but he succeeded in getting the hearings delayed. Delay is generally desired by defense attorneys. Evidence disintegrates. Witnesses disappear. The public forgets the animus it first felt toward the defendant. There are a host of reasons why defense attorneys like to delay trials—but they especially like to delay them when their clients are out on bail. Robert, out on bail, was having a pleasant spring. He had left the rectory and moved back home.