by Linda Wolfe
When the hearings finally resumed in June, John Dermont attended them. He sat in a back row of the courtroom and listened intently to Litman. He heard him argue that the statements Robert had made to the police the night he was arrested should be excluded from the upcoming trial for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons he gave was that although Robert had not told the police so, he had a lawyer at the time of his arrest—a lawyer his mother had retained in May of 1986 to represent him in a burglary inquiry.
A lawyer representing Robert in a burglary inquiry back in May of 1986? Dermont was startled to hear the date. When Phyllis had asked him and Barbara to write bail letters for Robert, she hadn’t mentioned that Robert had previously been questioned by police in regard to other matters. And when Robert’s burglary indictment had come down several weeks later, she had implied the charge was something brand-new, something the district attorney’s office had just cooked up in order to persecute Robert.
Phyllis was dishonest with me and Barbara, Dermont thought. She used us. But though angry, he forgave her. Poor woman, it wasn’t her fault that Robert kept getting into trouble. It was cheap psychology to blame parents for their offsprings’ failings.
Barbara Dermont disagreed. Parents did form their children, she insisted when they discussed it. And if a parent was a manipulator, his or her child was likely to become one, too. “You know the way Robert always sees himself as a victim,” she said to John one night in July. “The way he says Jennifer made him kill her. And Fillyaw made him commit the burglaries. Well, he is a victim. He’s Phyllis’s victim.”
The summer sped by. Almost a year had passed since Jennifer had died. Robert resumed doing painting and carpentry for his upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Murphy. He learned to use a computer. He played with his cat—a new one, for the Siamese that he’d claimed had scratched him the night Jennifer was killed had been put away—dressing it up with a little collar from which dangled a pair of tiny handcuffs.
He also dated girls.
They weren’t the kind of girls he had favored before Jennifer’s killing. They weren’t elegant blondes with the tinkle of money in their Chapin or Miss Hewitt’s School voices. The girls he hung around with now hadn’t gone to prep schools, or if they had, they’d gone to the less elite ones. There was a whole gang of them from York Prep. A few of the gang had been friends of Jennifer’s, but that didn’t prevent them from wanting to spend time with the notorious Robert. He had become a celebrity; to be with him was to feel oneself a part of history.
Even Kitty Schoen succumbed to the urge one day. She visited him at his apartment, and sat on his bed and leafed through his album of news clippings about himself. The room was tidy, decorated with religious pictures that Phyllis had hung up. Some were just little paper pictures of saints. Others were framed portraits of priests. Kitty pondered one of Archbishop McCarrick dressed in his fancy robes. It was autographed “To Robert, from Uncle Ted.”
Robert told Kitty he had grown more resigned to going to jail. The film star Matthew Broderick had got himself arrested for some kind of car accident, he pointed out. And a rock musician he liked was being sued for statutory rape. “Maybe we’ll be together in jail,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have this really good cell. And we’ll start a band.”
He seemed still quite casual about what had happened to Jennifer. But that didn’t make Kitty angry with him. Rather, a great sadness came over her. Robert wasn’t such a bad guy, was he? Okay, he’d gotten into drugs and all that. And yeah, he’d ended Jennifer’s life. But he was going to pay for that. He was going to jail. And that was sorrowful, too, because in some way what had happened to Jennifer hadn’t been entirely Robert’s fault. It was the fault of the way they’d all lived.
On the anniversary of Jennifer’s death, Steve Levin swam out into the surf near his summer home in Montauk and flung a bouquet of pink roses into the sea. The New York Post ran an editorial demanding Robert be brought to trial. “Chambers, now free on a $156,000 bond,” said the editorial, “should have gone on trial four months ago. The newest trial date is October 4, but it won’t be an enormous surprise if, at the turn of the year, Chambers is still waiting for his date with justice.” The article blamed the delay on Jack Litman for filing a mountain of motions, each of which had had to be argued and ruled upon, and on the inertia of the criminal justice system. “If the wheels of justice turned any more slowly in New York,” it observed, “they’d be turning in reverse.”
The New York Post was correct about the snail’s pace at which the case was proceeding. Summer passed. Autumn started. And still Robert did not come to trial. But his time was running out. Judge Bell set a date in late October for the start of jury selection. And he ruled that all of Robert’s statements to the police on the night he was arrested could be admitted into evidence at the trial.
Linda Fairstein was elated. Robert’s statements contained numerous remarks that he himself had eventually admitted were lies—among them that he had never gone to the park with Jennifer, and that it was not Jennifer but his cat and his neighbor’s sander that had injured him. When the jury hears all the lies he told, Fairstein thought, they’ll think as I do that he never came out with the whole story. That whatever he offered the police in his last statement, the videotaped confession, was just another lie.
The weekend before jury selection began, John Dermont received a disturbing phone call from Robert. “Can you come over here?” Robert said. “Come over and be with my mom?” Dermont didn’t know what was wrong, but he knew that something was, and he and Barbara hurried to Phyllis’s apartment.
They found her in bed. She was upset, she told them, because there was trouble brewing. The stepdaughter and son-in-law of Mrs. Murphy, for whom Robert had been working, were coming over soon, and when they got there they were going to accuse Robert of stealing from their aged relative. Phyllis didn’t want them to come. She didn’t want a confrontation. But Robert had insisted on it. And he’d already invited a half dozen of his friends to join him and witness it. They were out there in the kitchen now.
Barbara stayed with Phyllis, and John went out to talk to Robert. He found him drinking vodka and orange juice with his friends. “Let it go, Robert,” he said to him. “Forget about it. You’ve got more important things to worry about right now than Mrs. Murphy’s relatives.”
“No!” Robert shouted. “I want to have it out. These people went to Monsignor Leonard and accused me of stealing! I didn’t steal. I did work, and I billed Mrs. Murphy for it, and she paid me.”
“Then why are they accusing you?” Dermont asked.
Robert said he didn’t know. “Maybe because I went on doing work for Mrs. Murphy after they told me not to do it anymore,” he suggested.
“Why’d you do that?” Dermont inquired.
Robert was indignant. “Because a lot had to be done.”
When Mrs. Murphy’s stepdaughter and son-in-law arrived, they began a litany of complaints against Robert. He’d bilked their aged stepmother out of $7,000, he’d presented her with extraordinary bills for work done in her apartment, and he’d forged her name on checks to pay for it. If he didn’t stay away from their stepmother in the future, they’d go to the DA.
Robert got furious. “You people have one hell of a nerve saying things like that,” he yelled, “especially after all my mother has done for Mrs. Murphy.”
In the bedroom Phyllis grew hysterical. She was going to check herself into a psychiatric clinic, she told Barbara. No, she was going to throw herself out the window. She got as far as the balustrade.
“You people!” In the living room Robert’s face was dark with rage. John Dermont was growing frightened. The boy was shouting at the top of his lungs. “I’m sick and tired!” he was shouting. “Sick and tired of people shitting on me!”
Mrs. Murphy’s relatives, perhaps frightened, too, left after that.
Later Robert’s friends told him he’d been terrific, just great, and he calmed down and acted pleased with hi
mself. But Dermont, who thought there might be some substance to the charges Mrs. Murphy’s relatives had made, remained uneasy and warned Robert, “You’d better do what those people said and stay away from Mrs. Murphy.”
“Why?” Robert said. “I didn’t steal from her. It’s my word against theirs, and my word is as good as anybody’s.”
Dermont couldn’t believe his ears. “Your word isn’t as good as theirs,” he said.” Your word isn’t as good as anyone’s right now.”
Robert shrugged. And Dermont thought, My God, this boy—he has no perception of the straits he’s in!
Jury selection started three days later, October 21, 1987. Concerned about all the publicity the case had received, Judge Bell laid down some unusual ground rules. The jurors would be examined one at a time, he decided. The lawyers would go about their questions in a slow and detailed fashion. And the examination would take place not in the courtroom, where a prospective juror’s remarks might be overheard by his fellows, but in the privacy of a small jury deliberation room.
All these decisions would prove of enormous significance to the final outcome of the case, but perhaps none more so than the one concerning the room. Because of its tiny size, the prospective jurors were placed cheek-by-jowl with Robert. They sat opposite him at a table, their chairs and his no farther apart than those of people about to have a friendly lunch together. He wore a preppie blue blazer, looked handsome as his photographs, and glanced at the people who might one day sit in judgment on him with polite attentiveness and, occasionally, a charming smile. By the time those people left the room, he had become for them not the kind of depersonalized defendant they saw on television trial shows, a person invariably seated distant and remote across a vast courtroom, but someone with whom they had shared hours of physical proximity, someone with whom they had experienced a closeness that bordered on intimacy.
Robert’s defense picked up other advantages during the uncommon jury selection process, too. Litman had the time not just to probe jurors’ reading habits, but the kinds of movies they went to and their attitudes about sex and child rearing. He also had the leisure to pursue a hidden agenda, to ask questions that laid out ideas that were essential for Robert’s defense but which he mightn’t be able to state directly during the trial. “You know, don’t you, the pain that is caused when a man’s testicles are squeezed?” he said to each and every prospective juror. “You understand, do you not, that while it may be morally wrong to tell a lie or to fail to seek help for an injured person, there is a distinction between morality and the law?”
He didn’t like the jury pool. Most prospective jurors seemed already to have made up their minds that Robert was guilty of murder. That’s what the press had been feeding the public for months. He didn’t want anyone who’d read too much about the case. And he particularly didn’t want anyone who’d read certain magazine articles that detailed Robert’s past. He got Fairstein to agree that if people admitted they’d read those articles, they could be automatically excluded, and he used a psychologist to help him screen out those who might be lying. The psychologist also advised him on other matters—suggested which prospective jurors seemed overly authoritarian, which were likely to identify with Robert’s plight, which had the kinds of personalities that would enable them to stand up for what they believed no matter what others told them.
Jury selection dragged on and on.
October. November. December. Hundreds of jurors were examined and hundreds turned away. The days grew shorter and out the windows of the jury selection room, a pale moon rode the skies in the middle of the afternoon. One dark December afternoon Bell insisted that the lawyers work late. He had been criticized by a court administrator for letting jury selection take too long.
Robert sighed at the new requirement. “I’ve got to get home so I can watch Wheel of Fortune,” he said.
Linda Fairstein, staring at him, thought that what she was looking at was, among other things, a big baby.
The next day Litman took Tom Kendris aside and began talking to him about letting Robert plead guilty to a lesser charge than murder. “Talk to Linda,” Litman urged. “Tell her to be reasonable. After all, Robert’s just a kid.”
When Kendris told her about the conversation, she shook her head in amazement. Litman must have seen the way I looked at Robert yesterday, she thought. He doesn’t miss a trick.
Pumping Kendris, she asked him what Litman wanted. “Manslaughter Two,” Kendris said. “With a three- to nine-year sentence.”
“Ridiculous!” Fairstein fumed. “I won’t even talk to him about it.”
It took nearly eight weeks to pick the jury, but at last, on December 14, after 486 people had been examined, the panel was complete. Sitting in judgment on Robert would be a clothes buyer, two bankers, several businessmen, a mortician, a subway conductor, a typist, a project director for an insurance company, a graduate student of anthropology, and an advertising copywriter. Four of the jurors were women, eight were men. Two of the men were black. And three-fourths of the jurors were in their twenties or thirties—ages at which they might presumably still be able to remember fairly clearly what it was like to be an adolescent and thus not be too judgmental about Robert and Jennifer’s behavior on the night of the killing. Both Litman and Fairstein wanted this.
Bell was anxious to get the trial under way, and as soon as a handful of alternates was also selected, he announced to the lawyers and the jurors that the case would be tried right after New Year’s Day 1988. He also informed the press that he would not permit the trial to be televised. Among his reasons was concern that “audiovisual coverage … may induce disruptive behavior.”
Nineteen-year-old Melissa Buschell gave a party that night. She invited several of her girlfriends, and she also invited Robert. He was an old acquaintance. She’d known him when she’d gone to York Prep.
Auburn-haired and lissome, Melissa had dreams of becoming a model or an actress, and she loved dressing up and having her picture taken. She also liked taking pictures, and had recently gotten a Panasonic Omnivision video camera and learned how to film home videos. Preparing for the party, she got out the camera and, when her girlfriends arrived, suggested they make a movie.
Her friends were delighted by the idea, and Melissa lent them costumes. Fancy underwear. Filmy negligees. Cute pajamas. Scantily clad, the girls pranced around the living room, and Melissa began filming them.
The girls were rocking and rolling when Robert arrived. With him was his newest girlfriend, Shawn Kovell, a flashy young woman with cascading coppery red hair. Shawn slipped into one of Melissa’s black nightgowns so that she could participate in the moviemaking, and Robert decided that he’d join in, too.
It was fun. The girls joined hands and, pretending they were still little kids, sang, “Ring around a rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, all fall down,” collapsing at the end of the song into a giggling heap. Robert lolled on the floor and let a girl in a bra and flimsy bikini underpants rub her cushy behind up against his shoulders. He also donned a big black wig, then pulled it off and thrust it obscenely between his legs. Between takes, some of the group drank beer and whiskey and smoked marijuana. And after they’d danced and mugged to their hearts’ content, they began performing little skits.
Several of the skits, some of them devised by Robert, had sadomasochistic overtones, plot lines that featured a hapless boy being taunted by, or having to obey the orders of, a cruel female. In one, Robert was commanded to kiss a high-heeled shoe and slip it onto the foot of an imperious girl. In another, he was threatened with a cigarette burn by a dominatrix of a “mother” garbed in a blue corset, garter belt, and black stockings. In a third, he played a naughty boy caught reading dirty magazines by his school librarian. “Give me your hand, mister,” Melissa, playing the librarian, ordered him, a stick with which to beat him swinging in her own hand. But then she suggested another punishment. “We’re going to the principal’s office,” she ordered. “Come on!”<
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Robert ad-libbed fast to escape her wrath. “The principal’s my daddy,” he said.
In all his scenes he managed to avoid threatened punishments. Sometimes he did so by producing lust in a would-be tormentor. He did this in the library sequence, where instead of dragging him off to the principal’s office, Melissa removed a prissy-looking outer garment, stripped down to her tights and undershirt, and tried to seduce him. But sometimes he avoided punishment by talking his way out of impending discipline. In a scene in which a girl threatened to expose something he’d done, he dissuaded her by uttering a line like many he had uttered in real life. “I’ll just say you’re lying,” he murmured. “And people will believe me.”
He said and did other things for the camera that drew heavily upon his real-life experiences. Pretending to be playing a game of charades, he mimed the title Death of a Salesman and acted out a choking scene, clutching his throat and swooning to the floor. And grabbing one of Melissa’s dolls, he held its little rubber body up to the camera and talked for the doll in the way that little children talk for toys. “My name is,” he began in a falsetto hiss, and then suddenly he gave a strenuous twist to the painted rubber head. The head started to come off. “Ooops, I think I’ve killed it,” he announced in his own voice. “Both its eyes are like …” Then he let his words trail creepily off.
Several of the girls at the party had been friends of Jennifer’s. They weren’t perturbed by this mocking allusion to their dead friend. Instead, they eyed the doll’s broken neck and burst into squeals of laughter.
Melissa kept the tape under wraps at first. She gave it to a lawyer who put it in a vault. But she liked to read spiritual books, and one day—it was after Robert’s trial—she read a passage in one of her books that seemed to be telling her to let the public see the tape. She knew David Colby, the reporter who had interviewed Robert on Rikers Island. Colby was working for the TV show A Current Affair. Melissa gave Colby the tape—receiving for it, according to a newspaper account, $10,000.