The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  10.

  The Trial

  The trial began on January 4, 1988. It was a dismal morning. Snow had begun falling the evening before and continued throughout the night. Jurors, chosen when russet leaves still clung to autumn trees, picked their way to the courthouse through sidewalks dense with city-gray flakes and gutters awash with slush.

  Inside, on the thirteenth floor, spectators jostled on a long queue and scores of photographers strained against wooden barricades with the ferocity of penned animals. They were struggling for the best views of the metal detector through which the trial’s principals would have to pass before entering the courtroom.

  When Robert arrived, flanked by his parents and Litman, flashbulbs lit the dim corridor like a night sky torn by lightning.

  The bulbs flashed again for Shawn Kovell, her red hair flowing and each of her fingers adorned with a ring. They flashed, too, for the Levins. Ellen Levin, dressed in black. Jennifer’s sister Danielle, seven months pregnant. Steve and Arlene, huddling close.

  In the courtroom, a high-ceilinged chamber with scuffed floors and hard wooden seats coated underneath with ancient clumps of chewing gum, the Levins sat down in a row reserved for them. It was but a few feet from the reserved row in which the Chamberses had just seated themselves, but the narrow aisle between them might as well have been a broad and turbulent sea; neither family acknowledged the other. Spectators, shoving, raced for their seats like hysterical children playing musical chairs. Reporters—there were four rows of them—began scribbling obsessively even as they waited for the judge to enter. Robert was in the well of the courtroom, seated between Litman and Stavis. One of his legs jounced nervously up and down, up and down. Then at last Judge Bell arrived, striding black-robed to his bench and taking his place beside a furled American flag and beneath gilt lettering that read, “In God We Trust.” The final “t” in the motto was crooked, had been that way for months.

  A few moments later the jury was called and the case on trial got under way. It would follow a hallowed order. Openings—prosecution, then defense. Next, witnesses—first for the prosecution, then for the defense. Finally, summations, the judge’s charge, and the jury’s verdict. Linda Fairstein rose and, her generally warm brown eyes heated, fiery now, began speaking. “Keep Jennifer Levin in your mind’s eye,” she said to the jury. “Think of her. Let her be in this courtroom through you.”

  Soon she put aside her avenging angel’s passion to coolly outline her case. The jury would learn, she promised, that Robert couldn’t have killed Jennifer where he said he did, for police witnesses would prove that the death had occurred elsewhere—in an area where the ground was disturbed and her panties had been found. They would also learn, she continued, that Robert had beaten Jennifer and dragged her through the ground, for photographs of her dead body would bear silent witness to her body’s scarring and the presence of dirt in her upturned nostrils. Then she turned eloquent once again, informing the jury that Robert had lied even about what he and Jennifer had been doing in the park. “There was no sex,” she said, her voice soaring. “Only violence. Only death.”

  Jack Litman doubted that Fairstein would be able to prove that assertion. Indeed, he doubted she’d be able to prove any of her assertions. The initial police investigation had been less than stellar. The police could have mishandled Jennifer’s body and thus scarred her skin and dirtied her face. They could have made up the story about the ground disturbance and the location of the panties. If he could get ideas like these across to the jury, there might be reasonable doubt about Robert’s guilt.

  Reasonable doubt. It was the pinion of the American justice system. When it was his turn to speak, he concentrated on its majesty. “The prosecution must prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt before you can convict Robert Chambers of anything,” he said. “Our Constitution says the state must produce the proof. It is what makes our country different from so many places in the world, places where you are charged and told, Now you go prove your innocence. Robert Chambers does not have to prove his innocence. They have to prove his guilt.” As he spoke, he wheeled and turned, bent into his statements, looked like a feline animal about to spring or a prizefighter entering the ring. “Probabilities may not amount to a conviction,” he explained. “Theories may not amount to a conviction. Only proof of facts which satisfy you conscientiously and morally will suffice.”

  He didn’t talk much about presenting witnesses, for he had few. He didn’t need to put on a show. That was the state’s job. All he had to do was fracture and fragment their story. Cast doubt on it through cross-examination and block it through interruptions and delays. His victory would depend on his making Fairstein’s story seem both incredible and hard to follow.

  “Your honor, I object to the introduction of these photographs,” Litman said on the second day of the trial. He was referring to blowups of the photographs of Jennifer’s dead body. “The originals of these photographs are sufficient. These blowups are lurid and inflammatory. They are an outrageous size.”

  Bell ruled against him, and the jury was permitted to see huge reproductions of Jennifer’s face and the front of her body as she lay dead in the park.

  Fairstein was pleased. Her first homicide trial—what was it of Litman’s? his thirty-sixth?—was off to a good start. Fairstein had believed from the beginning that the photographs would speak louder and more eloquently of murder to the jurors than would hundreds of hours of words. Blowups were even better.

  I’m going to wrest victory from defeat, Litman thought after losing the battle of the blowups. Stéphane Mallarmé once said that a word has power if you say it once, but loses its power if it’s repeated over and over again. The same should be true for pictures.

  From that time forward, he shoved the horrifying photographs at the jury, as if they were his evidence. Once he even supplied the panel with magnifying glasses so that they could examine the gore and dirt with scientific detachment.

  Fairstein spent her opening days presenting Nightwatch and Crime Scene Unit detectives, reasoning backward from the forensic traces they’d observed to the human drama that had caused them. But she kept having difficulties, for the police investigators she was producing as witnesses were used to working on cases that were defended by overworked public defenders; their methods weren’t standing up to Litman’s extensive preparation and intense skepticism. Time after time, when she put across to the jury a chain of inference, Litman snapped it in cross-examination.

  Did she get a detective to suggest that Jennifer couldn’t have been killed where Robert claimed, because the earth there was undisturbed, whereas fifty feet away it was raked up? Litman, cross-examining, pointed out that the Crime Scene Unit had failed to take photographs of the ground disturbance, and that therefore the “ground disturbance” might exist only as a policeman’s say-so.

  Did she get another detective to suggest that Robert couldn’t have extricated his hands from the bond of Jennifer’s panties and killed her right then and there, because her panties had been found far from her body? Litman, cross-examining, showed there was no evidence to prove where the panties had been found, for they, too, had not been photographed in the park.

  Did she get a whole parade of detectives to suggest that, based on their detailed observations at the crime scene, Jennifer couldn’t have died in an instant, but only after a prolonged fight? Litman showed that these same diligent detectives had been so derelict in their observations at the scene that they had even allowed one of their vehicles to park virtually on top of it, leaving distinct tire tracks on the grass.

  Fairstein was dismayed. Why hadn’t the cops photographed everything? Why, for that matter, hadn’t they used a video camera and taped the entire crime scene?

  What a comedy show, juror Eliot Kornhauser, an advertising account director, thought after the Nightwatch and Crime Scene police had testified. “I’m almost embarrassed to be a tax-paying citizen of New York.”

  Keystone cops, thought a
nother juror, Michael Ognibene, a young banker who was also a part-time wrestling coach.

  Bunglers, thought a third juror, Sheldon Forman, a computer hardware corporation executive. Weeks later during deliberations he would laugh when a fellow juror suggested—with the black humor that often alleviates jury-room tensions—that one reason the jury was shown only frontal views of Jennifer, but never pictures of her back, was because there were tire tracks on her back.

  “Do you remember telling Detective McEntee that Jennifer Levin told you she wanted to spend the night with Robert Chambers?” Litman, cross-examining, asked a nervous, lip-chewing Betsy Shankin on the seventh day of the trial.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “But you might have said that?”

  “I could have. I don’t remember.” Betsy looked on the verge of tears.

  “By the way, Ms. Shankin, Jennifer was taking diet pills that night, wasn’t she?”

  “Objection!” Fairstein shouted.

  “Overruled,” Judge Bell called out.

  “Ms. Shankin, was Jennifer taking diet pills that night?” Litman said again.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s something terrifically wrong with our legal system,” a woman from the Justice for Jennifer organization said to a reporter that evening.

  “What in particular?” the reporter asked.

  “That Jennifer Levin’s use of diet pills is allowed to come out during this trial, but Robert Chambers’s use of cocaine isn’t.”

  The reporter nodded. Where dependence on chemicals was at issue, it was far better to be a defendant than a victim—at least if the defendant didn’t take the stand in his own defense, which it appeared likely that Robert wouldn’t be doing. As long as he didn’t testify, the jurors would be allowed to hear nothing about his past, not his drug use, his petty thefts, even the fact that there was a burglary charge pending against him. That was the law.

  Alexandra LaGatta, eighteen and a sophomore at college now, testified four days later. Listening to Fairstein lead her through her memories of the night Jennifer was killed, Litman thought about what he was going to do when he cross-examined her. He was going to make her corroborate the videotape. He was going to get her to admit that—just as Robert had said—Jennifer chased him from the minute she got to Dorrian’s.

  When he began to cross-examine her, he said, “You knew that Jennifer wanted to stay at Dorrian’s when you left because Robert Chambers was still there, isn’t that right?”

  “I think that was one of the reasons she wanted to stay,” Alexandra said, resisting him.

  “Earlier, Jennifer had mentioned that she wanted to spend the night with Robert Chambers, hadn’t she?” Litman probed further.

  “I don’t remember her saying that,” Alexandra said coolly.

  Litman stepped up the pressure. “Did you ever tell anyone that at Dorrian’s that night Jennifer was physically flirtatious?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t think so.”

  Litman knew this was not true. Alexandra had said exactly that to a reporter from Mademoiselle magazine, and the remark had appeared in print. “Well, do you remember ever describing to anyone that Jennifer was physically flirtatious?” he rephrased his question.

  “Yes,” Alexandra had to admit.

  Litman smiled and kept going. “Had Jennifer told you that Robert was good sexually?”

  “Yes,” Alexandra murmured. That, too, had been in the article.

  “And did she tell you that she didn’t like him as a person?”

  “She had told me—”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  Good, Litman thought when he had wormed that final answer out of Alexandra. We have here a classic role reversal. We have Jennifer doing what guys are always accused of, viewing a member of the opposite sex as nothing but a piece of meat. That ought to tell the jury something about her.

  Just before Alexandra took the stand, he had tried once again to obtain Jennifer’s diary—and once again been rebuffed. Now that he’d insinuated to the jurors that Robert might have been just an ordinary guy who’d gotten into a bizarre situation with a strange, predatory girl, his yearning for the diary faded.

  I don’t really need it, he told himself. Not anymore. In fact, I won’t have to attack Jennifer myself. Her girlfriends will do it for me.

  Larissa. Edwina. They, too, had been with Jennifer in Dorrian’s, and they, too, testified about events at the bar.

  “To your observation, was Jennifer drinking?” Fairstein asked Edwina on direct examination.

  “No,” she said.

  A few minutes later Litman took over the questioning. “Now on August 26, 1986,” he said, “you were questioned by the police weren’t you? And they asked you to write out in your own words what you saw in the bar earlier that morning?”

  “Yes,” Edwina said uncomfortably.

  “And at that time did you tell the police you believed Jennifer was drunk?” He looked down at a police report in his hand. “Definitely drunk?” he said.

  Edwina squirmed, sighed, and said: “Yes.”

  What’s the big deal? juror Cole Wallace, a social worker turned marketing analyst, thought after hearing Jennifer’s friends testify. So Jennifer and her friends drank. I did, too, when I was college age. So did all my peers.

  If I had daughters, I wouldn’t let them do what those girls were doing, thought juror Gerry Mosconi, a computer graphics specialist.

  Mickey McEntee, togged out in a three-piece suit, got to court early on the morning he was due to testify and took a seat in the witness room. What a dump, he thought. The chairs are rows of chewed-up attached seats from some abandoned courtroom, the windows are filthy, there’s nothing to read, and even the pictures tacked up on the walls are boring. Just Pavarotti and a bunch of big fat sopranos. Whoever supervised this decoration has refined taste in music. But he sure ought to make the room a little more refined.

  He was growing painfully restless when at last Linda Fairstein arrived to brief him on his testimony. When she did, she threw him for a loop. “You can’t talk about any of the lies Robert told you when you first interviewed him,” she said. “You can only talk about his videotape confession and the story he told just before he made the tape.”

  “Ya gotta be kidding!” McEntee exploded. “The lies are the meat and potatoes of this thing. If Robert hadn’t told us all those lies before the final story, we might almost have believed him. What the hell’s going on?”

  “The judge,” Fairstein said. Just before the trial began, Bell had overturned his previous decision and informed her that Robert’s statements to the police would not be admissible. “He said we didn’t notify Litman about the lies in time,” she explained to McEntee. “It’s a defendant’s rights issue.”

  Judges, McEntee thought. Don’t they care what’s right? Or just about rights?

  When he took the stand, he obeyed Fairstein’s instructions in the main. He was a cop. He knew how to take orders. But several times, a mischievous grin playing on his lips, he snuck into his testimony indirect allusions to the fact that Robert had told a different story before his final one.

  Litman came down on him hard whenever he tried it. “Objection!” he shouted. “This is an outrage!”

  In the afternoon a television screen was wheeled in front of the jury. Robert’s videotaped confession was about to be played. It had been edited slightly. Litman had succeeded in persuading Bell that certain portions ought to be removed. Among them were several of Steve Saracco’s most intemperate remarks—the remarks he had inserted on the tape in the hopes of letting the jury that would someday hear the case know just how preposterous he’d thought Robert’s story.

  Also excluded was an allusion Saracco had made to the police having seen bite marks on Jennifer’s breasts. McEntee and other detectives had insisted the breasts had been bitten, but bite marks had not been detected by Dr. Alandy when she examined Jennifer’s body, n
or by subsequent medical examiners—whether hired by prosecution or defense—who had studied the autopsy slides and pictures.

  Litman was happy as the courtroom’s lights were dimmed. Back in May he had tried to have the tape suppressed. But he had since come to the conclusion that the tape, at least the edited version, wasn’t harmful to Robert’s case and in fact might even be helpful. After all, Robert had stuck to his story despite Saracco’s cynicism. And he’d never lost his temper, erupted into rage. At worst, the tape showed him as petulant, irritated at not having his word taken for granted. At best, it showed him as a frightened, candid teenager. The jury would see him that way, Litman believed. Just as groups of friends to whom he’d shown the tape had seen him.

  Steve Levin hadn’t watched the videotape before. He looked at it in the darkened courtroom with intense concentration, his body leaning forward, his head shaking from side to side. When it was over, he went out into the corridor, where a mob of reporters was waiting to hear his reaction. “It was a pack of lies,” he said. “I knew my daughter, and Jennifer would never have done any of the things that Robert said. She was not an irrational, crazy kid. I don’t even believe she would have gone into the park at four thirty in the morning. I believe she was taken there. And I don’t see how anybody on the jury can believe that videotape.”

  The tape rings true, juror Forman thought. Parts of it anyway.

  It’s so outrageous it comes across strong, juror Wallace thought.

  A female juror believed it utterly. Robert, she felt, had spoken with pained sincerity.

  Robert had listened to the day’s proceedings with a composed, untroubled demeanor. Dressed in his neat blue blazer, he had sat tall in his chair, paid close attention to the judge, occasionally penned a note on a pad of yellow paper, and for the most part comported himself like a well-behaved honor student attending a complex lecture course in a required but not particularly relevant subject.