The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Ellen Levin broke her silence that afternoon, and for the first time since Jennifer had died gave a brief television interview. “Jennifer was a great kid,” she said. “She was responsible, loyal, loving, and land. She had a gift for making people smile just by walking into a room. She was filled with life, and her zest and brightness touched everyone she knew—and even some she didn’t know. I hope her spirit will touch the jury as well.”

  Ellen also remarked, sighing, “I’d been told not to put too much confidence in the justice system. And sure enough, I watched in horror as one by one important pieces of evidence were ruled inadmissible because everyone—even Robert Chambers—is entitled to due process of law. Still, I think Linda Fairstein was able to overcome these limitations.”

  Then, her eyes hidden behind dark glasses, she hurried away from the cameras.

  St. Patrick’s Day. For Phyllis the date must have been rich with memories of the time when she had worked as a volunteer for the County Leitrim Society and planned festivities that would add to the glory of the great Irish parade up Fifth Avenue. She had always been surrounded by friends and relatives on St. Patrick’s Day, had once even sponsored, with the help of a brother in Ireland, a visit to the States of two hundred people from her home county. This St. Patrick’s Day, she was isolated. The friends who at the beginning of the trial had accompanied her to court and sat supportively in her row had ceased doing so… . Other friends had ceased calling her. But she wasn’t entirely friendless. An old acquaintance from the Greys, a woman who had not previously come to court, had done so this morning and after the judge had charged the jury, had asked Phyllis sympathetically if there was anything she could do to help.

  Phyllis had thought the question over and then suggested that it would be nice if her friend made her some food for dinner tonight.

  The friend had agreed, and toward dinnertime, Phyllis sent Robert over to her house to pick up the meal. When he returned with it in his arms, she unwrapped it and saw that it was corned beef and cabbage. And that all around the platter her friend had sprinkled shamrocks.

  “Should I tell the jurors they can have time off on Sunday to go to church?” Judge Bell asked Litman and Fairstein on Friday, the second day of deliberations. Out in the corridor, where spectators and members of the press were sitting cross-legged on the floor, sipping sodas, playing poker, or watching television on minute screens, there was a carnival atmosphere; but even inside the courtroom the usual solemnity and decorum had eased. Bob Chambers was sitting with his shoes off, his black-socked feet resting wearily on a magazine. The Levin family, enlarged by the presence of a host of peripheral relatives, was chattering animatedly.

  Litman seemed lighthearted, too. “No, Your Honor,” he said. “Don’t say anything about church.”

  “Why not?” Bell asked.

  “Because if you do, and they want to go,” Litman joked, “I’m going to have to know beforehand what the sermon is. I once had a jury go to church during deliberations, and the sermon was ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.’”

  Litman’s spirits stayed high all day. The jury had asked for a read-back of Dr. Garber’s testimony—testimony that was highly favorable to the defense—and when toward evening a court stenographer finished reciting Garber’s words, Litman avuncularly patted Robert on the cheek.

  Robert, too, seemed cheerful. He responded with a broad and happy smile.

  The Garber read-back didn’t help the jurors resolve their disagreement about whether Robert had intended to kill Jennifer. Nor did the fact that they kept playing and replaying his videotaped confession and carefully examining Jennifer’s clothes, her soiled, stretched-out-looking panties, her bra with its underwire and intricate stitching, her blouse with its buttons still intact—peculiar if it had served as the murder weapon Spitz had declared it to be. And soon the jurors began to realize that not only couldn’t they resolve the matter of what had been in Robert’s mind when he killed Jennifer, but they couldn’t even agree on how he had killed her. He had choked her with the blouse, Cole Wallace and the two black jurors, Wayne Gaston and Robert Nickey, believed. He had done it with his arm, Gerry Mosconi and two of the women jurors believed. He had done it with neither of those things, Juror Number Twelve, Guy Gravenson, insisted. Robert had used the bra, he said.

  To settle the question, they began re-enacting the crime, donning Jennifer’s clothes and twisting the blouse and the bra around one another’s necks. They also tried lying on the floor with the panties wrapped around their hands, to see how difficult it was to extricate an arm. And after a while, Mike Ognibene, who was slight, sat on the chest of Gerry Mosconi, who was about the same size as Robert, and, playacting at being Jennifer, hovered over Mosconi’s genitals and told him to try to flip him over his shoulder.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Mosconi said.

  “I’m a wrestler,” Ognibene reminded him. “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’ve done some wrestling, too,” Mosconi warned.

  “Don’t worry.”

  Mosconi lay back, his arms wrapped in the panties, and wriggled a hand free. He flung it forward. Then he reached for Ognibene. But nothing happened. With the bantam wrestler’s weight on him, he couldn’t raise his body high enough off the floor to make his arm go the distance to Ognibene’s neck.

  “Try it again,” someone called out.

  “Fling yourself up,” someone else said.

  Mosconi did. But it still didn’t work. Then on the third try he managed to raise himself higher. He shot his arm forward, it made contact with Ognibene’s neck, and the next thing he knew, Ognibene was flying over his shoulder.

  When he landed, he hurt his back.

  Cole Wallace wasn’t impressed. “Big deal,” he said. “He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

  By the fourth day of deliberations, the strain of waiting for a verdict was beginning to make Steve Levin feel virtually ill. “I should smile more,” he told a reporter, referring to the presumed beneficent health effects of laughter. “I haven’t been smiling enough lately.”

  That afternoon, while neither judge nor jury was in the courtroom, Steve noticed Robert standing at the defense table talking animatedly to his father. Other members of the Levin family noticed this, too, and one of them whispered to Steve in a startled, indignant tone, “Look! He’s smiling.”

  “He won’t be smiling long!” Steve exploded. Then he stood up, his back ramrod-stiff, and stared ferociously at his daughter’s killer. He maintained the posture for a long, chilling minute, until Robert noticed it and turned his back on him.

  Inside the jury room the jurors were bickering. “Listen to me!” Guy Gravenson shouted at Gerry Mosconi. He believed Robert was guilty of depraved indifference murder.

  “Why should I listen to you?” Mosconi snapped back. He believed Robert was guilty of manslaughter.

  Cole Wallace didn’t agree with either of them. He felt certain Robert was guilty of intentional murder. He began to argue and reargue his reasons.

  “Let’s move on,” one of the uncommitted jurors begged. “At this rate, we’ll be here till Easter.”

  “What if we are!” Wallace shouted. “You people! You people can’t see a drop of water for the sea!”

  The forewoman, Debra Cavanaugh, couldn’t stand the bickering. I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. If I don’t, I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.

  On the fifth day of deliberations, Arlene Levin felt drained from the stress of waiting for the verdict. “I don’t think I can take another hour of this,” she told a reporter. “But it’s worse for Steve. He feels he’s lost Jennifer. That the stress is making the little things about her disappear.”

  “We’re at an impasse,” several jurors said that day.

  “We’re not at an impasse!” Cole Wallace insisted. “Not until we decide how long Robert held onto Jennifer’s neck.” He was sure Dr. Alandy had said something about the neck’s having been squeezed for fifteen or twenty seconds—otherwise t
here wouldn’t have been pinpoint hemorrhages in Jennifer’s eyelids. If he could just get his fellow jurors to listen to that portion of her testimony, they’d see that Robert had squeezed Jennifer’s neck long enough to have intended to make her die. “Let’s get a read-back of Alandy on the pinpoint hemorrhages,” he said.

  “Why just Alandy?” one of his fellow jurors objected. “Why not Kornblum? How long did he say it took to form those hemorrhages?”

  “At least fifteen seconds.”

  “In general. But not always. He said sometimes they could happen in four or five seconds.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. But we can get it read back if you don’t believe me.”

  Few jurors wanted to sit through a read-back of two sections of complicated medical testimony at this point, so Cavanaugh solved the problem. She sent a note out to Judge Bell saying the group wanted the lawyers to stipulate how long Jennifer’s neck would have had to be compressed for pinpoint hemorrhages to have formed in her eyelids.

  Litman and Fairstein wrangled over the stipulation, but at last agreed on wording, and the next day the jury filed into the courtroom to hear the information they’d requested. They looked weary and wrinkled, and some of them—those who had thought the deliberations would end quickly and consequently hadn’t brought sufficient clothing—were wearing other jurors’ ill-fitting garments. “The lawyers have gone through the testimony you were asking about,” Judge Bell said as soon as they were seated, “and they have come up with a stipulation, which the court reporter will read to you now.”

  The jury sat forward.

  “The pinpoint hemorrhages in the lower eyelids of Jennifer Levin,” the court reporter said, “could have been caused in a period of time less than or equal to the amount of time it took to cause her death.”

  The faces of several of the jurors sagged, and Wallace looked apoplectic. When he got back into the jury room, he began agitating to have Dr. Alandy’s testimony read back in full.

  His suggestion inflamed some of the group. “Alandy was on the stand three days,” one juror pointed out. “If we have to listen to all of that, we’ll never get out of here.”

  “I don’t care what Alandy said,” another juror insisted. “I’ll never believe Robert Chambers capable of intentional murder. He’s too nice, too refined.”

  Arguments swirled through the room, and several frustrated jurors simply stopped talking to several others. But at last a note was sent out to Judge Bell requesting lengthy but specific portions of Alandy’s testimony.

  “What sign are you?” Gerry Mosconi said to fellow juror Jeanette Nielsen over dinner that night. They were sitting in the run-down dining room of the third-rate Staten Island hotel in which the court had placed them.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Nielsen told him. “Tomorrow, when we go back into the jury room, I’ll talk to you.”

  A few minutes later another juror, Elizabeth Bauch, sat down at the table and noticed that Nielsen was having chocolate cake for dessert. “How’s the cake?” she asked. “Any good?”

  “Get up and try it for yourself,” Nielsen snapped. “If I tell you what I think of it, you’re not going to believe me anyway.”

  Ellen Levin was at home. She opened her dishwasher, planning to put away the clean plates, and then suddenly she began flinging her dishes around the room. They smashed, shards skittering and splintering along the floor.

  The seventh day of jury deliberations was one of the worst in Judge Bell’s long life on the bench. He opened his New York Post to find himself excoriated for his handling of the Chambers case. He had conducted the trial in a secretive and un-American fashion, he read in an article by editor Jerry Nachman, had shown an “inexcusable disregard for the principles of open court.” But that wasn’t the worst of it. He was known “throughout the Criminal Courts Building,” he read, “as Ding-Dong Bell.”

  Was he? Bell was stunned. The attack, he felt, was vicious. But more than that, it was racist.

  Still, he didn’t want to get in any more trouble with the press, and as the day proceeded he tried to deflect further criticism. When the lawyers said they wanted to speak with him, he made them address him from their tables instead of in private, and he even invited several reporters to sit in the well of the courtroom so that they could hear better.

  But late in the day, while court stenographers were reviewing their notes on Dr. Alandy’s testimony so that they could give the jury the sections it had demanded, something happened that Bell felt he absolutely couldn’t let the press know about. One of the jurors—it was Gravenson—bypassed the forewoman and sent him a private communication, a note indicating he had some sort of personal problem with the way the deliberations were going.

  Bell immediately began worrying that the jury could fall apart. He had reason to worry. The forewoman had herself been importuning him to let her leave, and he had several times had to telephone her employers in England in order to get her to stay. Now there might be two recalcitrant jurors. He told Litman and Fairstein about Gravenson’s note unhappily—and in secret—knowing he would probably soon again feel the press’s wrath.

  Gravenson was examined by Bell and the two lawyers the next morning. It was the eighth day of deliberations. “I want to leave the jury,” Gravenson said. And then, hoping to ensure his dismissal, he not only insisted that the deliberations were making him physically ill but said the jury was tainted. A juror, he hinted, had lied about his background during the voir dire, and he knew about the lie.

  The man struck both judge and lawyers as emotionally overwrought. Fairstein wanted an alternate put in his place. Litman refused to agree. If he held out against an alternate, he believed, the case might end in a mistrial. He stuck to his ground.

  After a while Judge Bell told Gravenson, who was outside waiting to learn if he could be released, to compose himself, go back to his fellow jurors, and try to deliberate with them once again.

  Gravenson said he would try.

  “If there’s a mistrial,” Fairstein said to Litman after Gravenson returned to the jury room, “we’re going to prosecute Robert on the burglary charges immediately.”

  “Yes, I could hear the case right away,” Judge Bell said. “Next week maybe.”

  Something was wrong in the jury room, court officer Bill Alwang thought a few minutes later. The jurors weren’t just arguing. They were fighting. Physically fighting. Next thing he knew, he heard pounding on the door. He flung it open to see Gravenson standing in front of him, his coat on and a suitcase in his hand. “I’m getting out of here!” Gravenson screamed. “I’m leaving.”

  Court officer Alwang brought Gravenson out to Judge Bell and the lawyers again.

  I can live with a mistrial, Linda Fairstein thought after she’d listened to Bell calm Gravenson down once again, and once again return him to the jury room. I’ll just go ahead and try Robert over again. But she was worried about the Levins. She didn’t think they could stand the pressure of another trial.

  Maybe, she decided, if Litman comes to me and starts talking about a plea again, I’ll listen to him this time. It would have been great to have won a murder conviction. But getting Robert to plead guilty to manslaughter wouldn’t be a bad ending to her first homicide trial. At least if he pled guilty to manslaughter in the first degree.

  Litman didn’t like thinking of himself as an imploring attorney. “I don’t plead my clients out,” he was fond of saying. “Ask anyone who knows me.” But by the end of the day, he was beginning to suspect that a plea might be in Robert’s best interests. He knew that the DA’s office had solid evidence that Robert had been involved in the burglaries they’d charged him with, and he felt pretty sure that if the case came to trial, not only would Robert be convicted but he’d get a stiff sentence. Because he wouldn’t be an ordinary first-time burglar. He’d be Robert Chambers, the guy on whom the DA’s office had lavished thousands upon thousands of dollars and man-hours, and failed to convict of murder.
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  Maybe tomorrow he’d start negotiating, he decided. See if he could plead Robert guilty to second-degree manslaughter.

  On the ninth day of deliberations—it was the longest time a New York County jury had sat to consider the case of a single defendant—Litman and Fairstein, closeted in Bell’s chambers, began hammering out the details of a plea. Outside in the corridors members of the press were feuding over the accuracy of the Post’s latest attack on Bell—an article limning him as incompetent and ignorant—and one enterprising photographer was hawking T-shirts on which he’d embossed a picture of Robert. In the jury room a vote was taken. Nine jurors voted to have Robert convicted of intentional murder. Then the nine tried to persuade the holdouts to join the majority. But in the process of defending their views, the holdouts gained converts. When another vote was taken, there were only seven jurors in favor of intentional murder.

  Cavanaugh, convinced the jury would never resolve its difficulties, sent a hysterical note to Judge Bell. “I have given to my limit,” the note said. “I am planning to leave the country this evening.”

  Judge Bell and the lawyers knew about the commotion in the hallways and the imminent collapse of the jury. But they put aside worrying about these matters. They were rocketing toward resolution.

  Litman asked for the plea he wanted—manslaughter in the second degree. Fairstein asked for the one she wanted—manslaughter in the first degree. Bell pointed out that under the law a person accused of murder could only plead guilty to the next charge down, which in Robert’s case meant first-degree manslaughter, so Fairstein won the first round. Litman won the next. He obtained for Robert not the lengthy maximum sentence that was generally handed down for first-degree manslaughter, but a short sentence, one that was customary in cases of second-degree manslaughter: five to fifteen years.