The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  He generally appeared that way in court, even though at night, when testimony and tangled arguments were over, he went carousing with his friends, drinking and partying as he had done for years. On the night the videotape was played, he was particularly merry. In the red-eye hours he visited the West Side building of a well-known female drug dealer whom he used to frequent in his palmier days and whose phone number had been in his address book the night he was arrested.

  Detective Sheehan testified early in February. His barrel chest hulking forward, his powerful arms long and dangling, he strolled to the witness chair, leaned back, and let Fairstein lead him through his experiences on the day Jennifer’s body was found. Bob Chambers was sitting in the third row on his left. But he didn’t look at Bob. He just directed his gaze at Fairstein or the jury, and kept a good-natured expression on his face.

  He was different when Litman began to cross-examine him. Warier. Tougher. And when Litman began trying to shake his testimony, he wouldn’t budge an inch. Especially when Litman tried to get him to say that he hadn’t seen dirt on Jennifer’s face when he saw her body in Central Park, or that if he had, it was because the detectives who’d arrived before him had mishandled the corpse and lain it face down on the ground. “I saw dirt,” he kept insisting.

  Litman got frustrated and grabbed a handful of photographs. “You saw dirt on her face you say?” he asked again, waving the photographs in the air.

  “Yeah.” Sheehan nodded.

  “But there isn’t any dirt on her face in these pictures,” Litman said, triumphantly flinging the pictures down onto the arm of the witness chair. “And these pictures were taken before you arrived at the scene.”

  Sheehan studied them with his lips compressed. Then, “I see dirt,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  Litman grimaced, twisted his mouth as if he’d just bitten into raw garlic. Then he looked at the jury with an aggrieved expression that seemed to say, This guy is lying, see for yourself, and distributed the pictures to the panel.

  Sheehan didn’t care that Litman was trying to make him out a liar to the jury. He was happy he’d rattled him. Dismissed from the stand, he paraded the courthouse corridor proudly. “Didja see Litman’s expression when I told him I saw dirt?” he said to a reporter. “Jeez! It was something! I got to him!”

  He may have recommended Litman to the Chamberses. But he wasn’t, he seemed to be saying, going to take any defense attorney’s shenanigans lying down.

  She had to be allowed to show the jury the photographs she had of Jennifer at Dorrian’s just hours before she was killed, Linda Fairstein argued during a bench conference that week.

  It wasn’t fair, Litman said. Jennifer was wearing earrings in the photographs. He had long ago persuaded Judge Bell not to permit the prosecution to suggest during the trial that Robert had robbed Jennifer, on the grounds that there wasn’t any evidence of theft. Now Fairstein was going to circulate pictures of Jennifer wearing earrings! It wasn’t fair. Some juror might start wondering why she had on earrings before she was killed and none when her body was found.

  Fairstein desperately wanted the jury to see the pictures. It wasn’t just because of the earrings—though that was a big part of her wanting to show them. It was also because the pictures made a point about Jennifer’s appearance before she was killed. They showed a vibrant, beautiful Jennifer, her eyes shining, her lips parted expectantly, and above all her neck swanlike and unscarred. The pictures were absolutely necessary to her case, she shouted at Litman.

  Judge Bell settled the fight. The jurors could see the pictures, he decided. But bits of tape would be pasted over Jennifer’s ears. And he would admonish the jury not to speculate about what might be under the tape.

  “Step up.” “Approach.” “Let me hear your reasoning.” The lawyers were always bringing up matters that Judge Bell decided required private conferences. Sometimes he conducted the conferences on the record, court reporters taking down the arguments. Sometimes he held them off the record. Sometimes he conducted them at his bench. Sometimes—many times—he sent the jury to its little deliberation room, rose from the bench, and withdrew with the lawyers to his robing room, where not just the jury but the press, too, could not overhear what was being discussed.

  Bell felt that privacy was essential, that the conferences addressed extremely sensitive issues which both sides appropriately wanted kept secret from jury and press. But in fact some of the conferences concerned routine matters, the kinds of issues that other judges handled in open court. And some of them, precisely because of the freedom that secrecy affords, became marathon sessions, long-winded, repetitive, tautological debates that filled almost entire days.

  Not all the jurors minded. Behind the courtroom in their tiny deliberation room they napped and played cards and computer games. But some jurors were resentful of the delays. Every time these lawyers waste an hour arguing, juror Forman thought, they’re wasting an hour of my life. I’ve got to get out of here, forewoman Debra Cavanaugh thought, and they’re making it impossible for me to do so. She was a buyer in the fashion industry, and shortly before the trial had started she had accepted a new job with a company in England, promising to start in March.

  If the mushrooming private conferences irritated some members of the jury, they utterly infuriated the press. “I’ve never seen a trial conducted with so much secrecy,” one experienced courtroom reporter complained to a colleague on a day the judge’s bench remained empty for hours. “You see that American flag behind the judge’s chair?” a newscaster erupted bitterly on another such day. “Well, it doesn’t belong there. This sham isn’t being conducted like an American trial at all.”

  Judge Bell didn’t know the degree to which the private conferences were angering the press. Nor did he know that some reporters had started a game called “Judge Bell’s Quote of the Day.” The purpose of the game was to list Bell’s occasional malapropisms and inadvertent self put-downs, such remarks as “I think as I go along,” and “I frankly could not understand most of what Mr. Litman was saying.”

  Bell had made the remarks lightly and unguardedly. But they were hung up on a bulletin board in the courthouse pressroom along with a ballot on which reporters voted for their favorite among the forewoman’s ever-varying and ultrachic outfits.

  Dr. Maria Alandy testified on the twentieth day of the trial, describing the myriad bruises she had seen on Jennifer’s body, including the one inside her mouth—the laceration that had made her think that the girl might have been gagged and then beaten. When she was done, she speculated about how long Robert might have exerted pressure on Jennifer’s neck. “Compression of the neck in this case,” she said, “would have been applied at least twenty to thirty seconds. Or possibly even longer.”

  “Are you able to say with a degree of medical certainty how much longer?” Fairstein asked.

  “Judging from the presence of deep abrasions on the neck, and the irregularity and prominence of the abrasions,” Alandy said, “the pressure could have been maintained even more than a minute.”

  Showtime, juror Robert Nickey, mortician, said to himself when Litman stepped up to cross-examine Alandy. Like a majority of the jurors, he found most of the trial exceedingly dull. Except when Litman rose.

  Alandy’s changed her tune since she testified before the grand jury, Jack Litman thought as he started to question her. She told the grand jury the pressure on Jennifer’s neck might only have been applied for fifteen seconds. I’m going to bring that out right away. He gave her a dismissive glance, the look one delivers to a liar, and said accusingly, as if he’d caught her out in some dire malpractice, “In the grand jury, you said this strangulation would have taken a minimum of fifteen to twenty seconds, didn’t you? And that was the day after you had examined the body.”

  “Yes. But—” Alandy said.

  He gave her no chance to explain. “Is that right, Doctor?” he snapped.

  “Yes,�
�� she admitted.

  He was satisfied after that, and moved on to other matters. Among them was the suggestion that contact with cloth, such as the long sleeves of a shirt, might have made the abrasions on Jennifer’s neck look as prominent as they did. “Do you agree, Doctor,” he asked, that many of the marks you saw on Jennifer’s neck might have come about because of friction between cloth and the neck?”

  “Yes.” Alandy nodded.

  Litman didn’t say Robert had been wearing a long-sleeved shirt. What Robert had been wearing when he killed Jennifer was never established.

  “In the Chambers trial Defense Attorney Jack Litman today revealed that a long-sleeved shirt could have caused some of the marks on Jennifer Levin’s neck,” Marilei Lew Lee heard on the radio that night. She thought back to the clothes she and Phyllis had carried to Mrs. Hammerstein’s house the day after the killing. There’d been no long-sleeved shirt in the pile of laundry. Just short-sleeved ones. Including the bloodied baseball shirt she’d held to the light and examined before turning on the washing machine.

  The thought of doing that batch of laundry made her remember something else that had happened months ago. Just before the pretrial hearings Phyllis had told her she looked sick and ought to go home to Brazil for a while. She’d said she wasn’t sick, and besides, she didn’t have the money to go home. And then next thing she knew, Mrs. Hammerstein, who was extremely generous—she’d given Phyllis a big check for Robert’s defense—was saying she’d heard from Phyllis that Marilei wasn’t feeling well and handing her a round-trip ticket to Brazil.

  “Don’t hurry back,” Phyllis had said when Marilei got the ticket. “Stay the summer.”

  Why did Phyllis hustle me out of the country? Marilei wondered now. Did I know something I wasn’t supposed to know? Was it anything to do with the shirt?

  She thought about getting in touch with Linda Fairstein, who had left messages for her all fall. But she was afraid to return the messages. Phyllis had told her that if she went down to the district attorney’s office she might get in trouble with Immigration.

  One of Fairstein’s most important witnesses testified several days later. He was Dr. Alan Garber, the jogger who had told McEntee the day after Robert’s arrest that he’d seen a couple he presumed to be Robert and Jennifer rocking or humping in the park. Since that time, he had changed his story, decided that what he had seen had not been sexual activity but the prologue to or aftermath of a killing.

  Fairstein intended to use him to prove her contention that Robert and Jennifer had not had sex in the park. If she could prove that, she could cut a huge hole in Robert’s entire version of the events on the night he killed Jennifer.

  “Dr. Garber,” she said as the doctor, a plump-faced specialist in internal medicine, took the stand, “would you describe to us please what you saw in the park as you approached the area behind the Metropolitan Museum?”

  “As I was running,” Dr. Garber said, “I noticed two figures. One person was shaking the other person. Leaning over the other person and shaking. The person on top seemed like a white man.”

  “Could you tell us exactly what you were able to see that led you to the impression that the person on top was a white man?”

  “I could see a light shirt and broad shoulders and hair that looked like Caucasian hair.”

  “Was it shoulder length?”

  “No, it was not.”

  “Could you tell us please what you were able to observe about the second person?”

  “The second person appeared to be lifeless.”

  A few moments later Dr. Garber revealed that despite having noticed what appeared to be a lifeless person, he’d ignored what he’d seen, exchanged a few casual words with a fellow jogger, and continued exercising. He’d jogged completely around the reservoir, and only then, some fifteen minutes later, returned to where he’d noticed the startling sight.

  “Would you describe what happened as you came back?” Fairstein asked him.

  “As I came back, I saw the two people in the same position. The top person was shaking the bottom person.”

  Fairstein sat down satisfied. She had told the jury during her opening that there had been no sex between Robert and Jennifer in the park. “Only violence. Only death,” she had said. Garber had substantiated her remark.

  Litman couldn’t wait to get his chance at Garber. He was on his feet the second Fairstein moved toward her chair. “Now, sir, is it correct that you told Detective McEntee, when you spoke with him on August 27th, 1986, that the person you saw on top was rocking?” he demanded of Garber.

  “Yes, I did,” the internist admitted. His plump face looked nervous and his hands were trembling.

  “Now, you were running.” Litman said. “You stopped at some point behind the Museum. You looked over and you saw silhouettes. Is that right?”

  “No. I saw them as I was running,” Garber said. But it wasn’t whether the doctor had been running or standing still that concerned Litman. “Did you see silhouettes, sir?” he demanded.

  “What do you mean by ‘silhouettes’?” Garber hedged.

  Litman frowned angrily, his expression trying to inform the jury that a man’s life was at stake and the witness was pussyfooting with words. “When you spoke to the prosecutor,” he said, “did you use the word ‘silhouettes’?”

  “I may have,” Garber said. Then: “Yes.”

  “So why don’t you tell us what you meant when you used the word,” Litman continued, his voice contemptuous. “Silhouettes. Outlines for bodies. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And would it be fair to say that it was dark at the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there were no streetlights on at the time?”

  “Yes. That’s correct.”

  Litman had succeeded in casting doubt on Garber’s ability to see anything at all, let alone on whether he had seen that the person on top was a male. Now he moved in for the kill. “You kept on running. Is that right, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the next morning, which was August 27th, 1986, you read an article in the New York Times that mentioned that a woman had been strangled in the park. And you called Detective McEntee. And you told him that you believed they were doing something sexual. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Garber sighed.

  Fairstein tried to rescue the situation. “Dr. Garber,” she asked on her redirect examination, “did you observe the two people you saw in the park doing anything sexual?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “Then would you tell us the reason you told Detective McEntee they were doing something sexual?”

  “I wanted to minimize what I had seen.”

  “Would you explain to the jury what you mean by the word ‘minimizing’?”

  “I had seen someone shaking another person and, I don’t know why I didn’t do anything, but I didn’t,” Garber replied lamely. “When I first spoke to someone, I just wanted to report that I had seen something.

  A few minutes later, Fairstein, afraid the jury would look unfavorably on a medical man who had seen an act of violence under way and failed to report it, got him to amplify on his answer. “I minimized what I saw because of fear,” Dr. Garber said. “My wife was pregnant and about to have a baby. And I don’t know why else.”

  I have a problem with Garber’s suddenly changing his story, juror Kornhauser thought. I don’t buy that “my-wife-was-pregnant” nonsense.

  Garber didn’t minimize anything, juror Forman thought. How can he say he minimized something when he went out of his way that first day to telephone the police.

  He’s a sniveling little coward, juror Mosconi thought.

  He’s honest, compelling, and moving, juror Wallace thought.

  Dr. Werner Spitz, the chief medical examiner of Detroit, was the last and most important prosecution witness, a stooped, gnomish white-haired man with bombastic Napoleonic self-assurance. Under Fairstein’s questioning, he to
ld the jury that there was only one way that Jennifer’s neck and chin could have gotten the maze of scrapes that marred them. Her assailant must have choked her with her own blouse, must have grabbed her by it, twisted it, and shoved it up under her throat with his fist so that it became, in effect, a noose. Still, he said, the girl had at one point gotten free of the noose. There were telltale marks on her neck to show she’d done so. But although her moment of freeing herself should have given her attacker at least a few seconds in which to reconsider his violence, the assailant hadn’t done so. Intending to kill, he had resumed his deadly efforts, tightened the noose again, and compressed his victim’s vulnerable neck for at least thirty seconds and possibly as long as several minutes.

  Under cross-examination, Spitz never wavered. But he was so stubborn and so vituperative toward Litman that several jurors began to dislike him and as a result to put little faith in his opinion.

  Ellen Levin had kept her head down during much of Spitz’s testimony, and eventually she left the courtroom. But she was not as miserable as she had been during many of the previous weeks of the trial. A true miracle had occurred. A child had been born. The child was Samantha Jennifer, daughter of Jennifer’s sister, Danielle. Samantha Jennifer would never replace Jennifer, Ellen knew. But she was a kind of resurrection.

  Ellen had seen the baby in the hospital right after she was born and marveled at her beauty. She had a little fringe of dark hair that made her look like a monk, and an expression on her face that seemed almost like a smile.

  Seeing the baby in the nursery had been pleasure enough. But then there’d been something even more wonderful. A real tribute. Danielle had asked Ellen to stay with her for a few days when she took Samantha Jennifer home. Ellen had been terribly pleased. But she’d also been worried. Because she didn’t know that much about babies. Because in her day everyone had used nurses when they came out of the hospital. But then things had come back to her. Little things. Like that babies like to sleep on their stomachs. And that if they don’t suck properly, you can put a little sugar and water on the nipple. Which was a great thing to remember, because the baby didn’t suck properly when they got her home. But Ellen told Danielle about the sugar and water, and Danielle said, “Oh, I forgot! They told me that in the hospital. And they gave me a little bottle of glucose to take home with me!” So Danielle went and got the glucose, and the baby sucked and began to take the nipple, and Ellen felt a tremendous, restful, nurturing joy.