True Crime Campfire - Patreon Upcycle: Red Hand - The Murder of Jennifer Levin

Episode Date: November 26, 2021

Since it's Thanksgiving, we're giving you a sneak peek at one of our Patreon subscriber exclusive episodes this week! This one is the story of one of New York City's most notorious murders: A beautiful, privileged young woman brutally strangled in Central Park after a night out with friends. The crime initially looked to be sexually motivated, but the experienced detectives felt something was amiss--the scene was almost a caricature of a sex crime, as though the killer had staged it to look that way. What was this murder really about? Join us for a story of envy, greed, revenge and ego--one that illustrates the way media narrative can shape a murder case, for better or for worse. Sources:https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/news/a7587/jennifer-levin-robert-chambers-preppy-killer/#:~:text=Thirty%20years%20ago%20today%2C%20on,Central%20Park%20by%20Robert%20Chambers.&text=They'd%20walked%20into%20Central,marks%20of%20a%20violent%20struggle.https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/a29712185/robert-chambers-preppy-murder-central-park/https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/the-preppy-murder-how-robert-chambers-defense-victim-blamed-jennifer-levinDocumentary: "The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park"CBS "48 Hours," "The Preppy Killer"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/true-crime-campfire/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Hello, babies. And welcome to your January patron's only episode. The story we're telling you today is, pretty infuriating. Mostly, of course, it's about a young woman who lost her life for no good reason. But it's also about perception and how a media narrative can tap into our collective beliefs or prejudices or fears and change the outcome of a case. Would this case play out differently if it happened today? This is Red Hand, the murder of Jennifer Levin. So campers, for this one, we're in New York, New York, August 26th, 1986, at 6.30 in the morning. A cyclist discovered the body of a young woman under a tree in Central Park.

When investigators arrived a few minutes later, they were. found the young woman partially undressed, her legs spread. Her bare legs and arms and hands were covered in scratches and abrasions. Her face was swollen and she had angry red marks on her neck. Clearly she'd been beaten. This poor girl looked like she'd been in a mighty struggle for her life. The lead investigator on the case was Mike Sheehan, a veteran homicide detective with a CSI's neck for reading crime scenes. He just had an eye for it. He'd pick up on little details that other people missed. And right away,

she had noticed the contents of the victim's purse was strewn all around in the grass beside her body. One of the things he found was the victim's ID. Her name was Jennifer Levin. She was only 18 years old.

That hit Detective Sheehan pretty hard. He had a daughter and he kept imagining her lying there like that. He thought about her parents, probably wondering right now where their daughter was, why she hadn't come home last night.

New York was different back then. a lot more violent than it is now. There were almost 2,000 murders the year Jennifer was killed, and Central Park in particular was a dangerous place to be after dark. Did Miss Levin meet a dangerous stranger on her way home? It was odd, really. Jennifer didn't seem like a high-risk victim at all. She was very well-dressed, perfectly groomed.

She didn't show any obvious signs of drug addiction, like track marks or anything on her arms. She wasn't the kind of kid who typically ended up murdered in the park. This wasn't the kind of murder the police were used to seeing. So how did Jennifer get to this spot? What had she been doing in the park? Lead detective Sheehan has said about this case that, quote, to the untrained observer, you would look at this and you'd say,

oh my God, this poor girl was raped and killed in Central Park. That's what the killer wanted you to think. This is what it appeared to be. But from day one minute one, the whole scene felt off to him. For one thing, Jennifer's body seemed poised. almost like a caricature of a sex crime victim. Her underwear was gone, was later found about 50 yards away from the body,

and her skirt, bra, and shirt were all pushed up. It was a little bit over the top, just didn't feel like the genuine sexual assault scenes the investigators had worked before. Detective Sheehan had a growing suspicion that there wasn't any sex involved at all in this crime. It looked like a staged scene and pretty badly staged at that. The press were swarming,

all over the case almost immediately, and this put a lot of pressure on the police to solve it. As did the fact that, as it turned out, Jennifer came from a wealthy family. How gross is that, by the way, that there's more pressure when the victim is wealthy. Just, ugh. That's the kind of thing. It's just we have, we got to fix ourselves, y'all, because that is just wrong and ridiculous. Anyway, early media reports included such details as she was raped. Her body was dumped in the park, and a suspicious car was seen in the area. And this, by the way, as well, why it pays to wait a minute before you start forming any firm theories about a brand new murder that's all over the press because a lot of the initial info will turn out to be wrong or just a red

herring just completely irrelevant it's one of the frustrating things to me about true crime groups like people throw all these opinions out there and then they'll like defend them to the death when really we don't know shit yet you know we don't know anything and the thing that really bothers me is when they start accusing people you know unless it's just super obvious like I understand why people accused Chris Watts on day one because that was just so obvious from those ridiculous interviews he did. But like sometimes when there's really nothing at all to suggest that a particular person is involved and people are throwing out these theories, you know, these are real people, you know, like with real lives. So anyway, and we don't know anything yet. For me,

I kind of like to wait for the book to come out, you know, or at least a date line. Like, give me the 4-1-1, Uncle Keith. Yeah, nothing quite hits me. my rage button, like, seeing a comment on like an article about a crime being like, the police just aren't telling us anything. They're hiding something. I'm like, no, they're not. They literally cannot tell you stuff. Why would they tell us?

Why? Why would they want to tip the murderer off before they've caught them about what they know about a case? It is absolutely ridiculous. I know that drives me bonkers too. Your nosiness, Carol, does not make up for the fact that they need to keep details secret. But I want to know. I'm curious, okay?

And they always say, oh, we need to know because our community might be in danger. They would tell you if your community was in danger, Carol. They do tend to tell. Yeah, when there's like a mass shooter on the loose or a serial killer, that is information that they will generally, not always, and there have been serious screw-ups in that regard. But generally, they're going to let you know if you need to be like double-locking your doors. Serenity now.

Detective Sheehan managed to keep his victim's name secret just long enough to notify Jennifer's family. For any detective, this is the worst part of the job. Oh, yeah. Jennifer's mother Ellen rushed over to the park while the crime scene investigators were still working around her daughter's body. Oh, my God. She said the worst part of the whole thing was the media that surrounded the scene. I can't imagine how surreal and awful that would be. Oh, my God.

Her dad, Steve, hyperventilated on the phone when they told him. Oh, bless his heart. So who was Jennifer Levin? She sounds like a lot of fun to me. Friends described her as ballsy and hilarious and said she didn't take herself too seriously. She grew up on Long Island with her parents, Steve and Ellen Levin. Her family was well to do, and she'd had every advantage in life.

But she wasn't spoiled, not a lazy trust fund kid. She was smart and driven and ambitious, determined to chase after her goals until she tackled everyone. When her parents divorced, Jennifer had moved out of her mom's house on Long Island and in with her father in aloft in Soho. She wanted to go to high school in Manhattan, so her parents decided to send her to the exclusive Baldwin school. She'd done great there.

A friend said she owned that school. Everyone just seemed to flock around her. Jennifer had a way of cheering you up even when you were in your gloomiest mood. People appreciated her for that. She was into fashion. Her signature was wearing a long strand of pearls tied in a knot. So 80s. I love that. So 80s.

I actually own a necklace like that, like today. Awesome. She and her friends were into the stuff most teenage girls are into, you know, concerts, dates, parties. And Jennifer was a social butterfly. The kids in her scene were all well off, of course, and they were called preppies. I remember the preppies. Ivy League schools were in their future. High-powered careers.

It was a privileged existence. Picture Molly Ringwald and her buds in the breakfast club. Yeah, exactly. Or for the millennials and zoomers out there, Blair Waldorf from God. Gossip Girl. Oh, see, I never saw Gossip Girl. You, I was going to say you missed out, but you did not. That's why we're a good show.

Jennifer and her friends also hung out with kids from other New York prep schools, and the center of the preppy social scene was a bar on East 84th Street, blocks away from Central Park. A shishi neighborhood. The bar was called Dorian's Red Hand, because apparently, They were letting David Lynch name the bars back then. It is a weird name. Such a weird name. The owner of the bar had nine kids, all of whom were prep school kids on the Upper East Side.

So for some reason, I guess this made it seem okay to him to let underage kids drink in his bar. Oh, Jesus. Which is just a very bad judgment, my dude, but okay. It's probably the only way he could afford to send nine flipping kids. kids to prep school. Can you imagine how much that would cost? Like, the tuition on one of those kids is probably brutal. Nine. That's like approaching dougar levels, you know, except for the booze, obviously. Yeah, it's like, uh, it's half a dougar or one more than John and K. Plusy. That's right. You got to get all of the reality family families in on that.

For the kids, the crowd at Dorians was like a family. It was their teenage cheer. And Jennifer was the center of it all. And it was at Dorian's where she first noticed Robert Chambers. Robert was a couple years older than Jennifer. Tall, handsome, dark hair and ice blue eyes like a wolf. Cheekbones for days. He dressed well. He was well built.

He carried himself with confidence. A friend of Jennifer's described him as a country club style prep. Which is, by the way, the craziest thing that I've learned about this case, that there are different kinds of preps. So you got your country club preps. You probably got your goth preps. Are there got goth ones? Sure. I'm sure there are. Probably.

You got your budding serial killer preps, like Dennis Reynolds, right? Although those are probably just the country club ones or at least a subset of them. Maybe you had your redneck preps. I don't know. I was only nine. So I didn't notice. But, you know, I'm sure there were many subsets. So Jennifer zeroed in on Robert Chambers the first time she saw him and developed an instant crush.

She thought he was gorgeous, and it pains me to say this, but he really kind of was at the time, like yet another horrible person who gets to be pretty. But she admired him from afar initially, and it was about a year before Jennifer actually got to meet Robert. In June 1986, she was fresh out of a relationship, and she and some friends went to Dorians to help her get her mind off the breakup. Robert was there and he noticed her too and in fact he told one of Jennifer's friends that Jennifer was the best looking girl there I'm sure that was real fun for Jennifer's friend

like oh thanks asshole but she dutifully reported the information to Jennifer thereby greasing the wheels for a meeting teenagers man good God rude so rude so hey hey hey come here young lady young woman yes let me tell you that young woman over there your friend, she's hotter than you.

Just so you know, in case you were wondering. Thank you. I'm sure you don't already have. I'm sure you're not already riddled with insecurities about your looks like all teenage girls. Let me just help you with that. I'm going to cry in the bathroom before I give her the message, but thank you. By the way, can you imagine if people our age did this to get dates? Like, can you imagine like a 35-year-old going like, hey, hey, Brad, pst, come here. Hey, so you know my friend Trish?

Yeah. okay well just so you know she likes you i mean likes you likes you yeah so like you want to go out with her or what like what just take my word if there are any teenagers listening okay i promise you sitting from my perch of 43 what's sexy is confidence so don't get some other poor bastard to go and talk to your crush for you god's sakes just go right up to him and say hey you want to go out with me Friday night. Although obviously don't do it like that because I just sounded like a massive dork, but you get the point, right? Yeah. Confidence. All right. You can go and talk to somebody on your own. You do not have to have an emissary. So Jennifer and Robert hit it off right away.

They were both private school kids, both preppies, both gorgeous. They had mutual friends. They had their first date soon after this initial meeting. And as hormonal teenagers are want to do, they had sex that night. And then when Jennifer got home, that same night, she found several messages on her answering machine asking to get together again soon. Like, bro, she just left you. Can you chill? Like, red flag. But, you know, Jennifer was a kid and she was thrilled. She just took it as a sign that he was into her. So here's a little tip. If there are any teenagers again, open your ears. If he's blowing up your phone an hour after your first date, just asking and asking and asking when he gets to see you again, that's a red flag.

Shut that down. That's scary. That's creepy behavior. Yeah. And like I'm not one of those people that's like, oh, you have to, you can't contact them right after the first day. You've got to wait three days or whatever. No, no, no.

But several voice messages waiting for you when you get home. Mm-hmm. My dude. What did you need to say that you couldn't say in just one? Yeah. It's the fact that there were multiple ones. That was what was creepy. And that he had sent them all in the,

time it took her to get home. Right, no, no, no, shut it down. So after that first night, Jennifer and Robert began a summer romance. Jennifer's friends say she just viewed it as a summer fling. You know, both she and Robert were planning on going off to college in the fall, and she was pretty laser focused on that. She had a crush on Robert, but she wasn't the type to derail her plans for him or anybody else. Detective Sheehan began his investigation by interviewing Jennifer's father. He wanted to get a sense of what she'd been doing in the days and hours leading up to the murder. Steve told him Jennifer had planned that night to go out with several of her girlfriends and spend the night with one of them, so he hadn't actually expected her home that night. He gave the

detective his daughter's date book with all her addresses and phone numbers in it and the police began working their way through the list of Jennifer's friends. And slowly, friend by friend, they began piecing together what Jennifer had done that night. First, the girlfriends had gone to a Mexican restaurant for dinner and a few drinks. And then, a little after midnight, they went to Dorian's Red Hand to meet some more friends. Several friends said they'd hung out with Jennifer there for a few hours, and the friends had left the bar, one by one. Each one said that when they left, Jennifer had been with Robert Chambers. They hadn't planned to see him that night, but he'd shown up and Jennifer had seemed happy to see him. So it seemed that Chambers was the last of Jennifer's

friends to see her before her murder. Detectives went to Chambers' apartment, where he lived with his parents, to question him. He agreed to come down to the station for an interview. He struck them as affable and charming, but they immediately noticed something that made their antennae vibrate. Robert had angry red scratches all over his face. When they asked him how he got them, he said his cat had scratched him. He said he'd jokingly tossed the cat up into the eight.

air. And it had scared the cat when he came back down and Robert caught him. He freaked out and scratched him across the face. Okay, a couple things. First of all, do not toss your cat into the air. Jokingly or otherwise, you massive asshole, that is abuse. And second of all, okay, we got eight cats. And in my lifetime, I've probably had more than 30, okay? I've only been scratched in the face one time, okay, and I had it coming. They just don't usually go for the face, even when they're super pissed unless you've done something really ill-advised. And even then, they'll usually give you ample warning that you're about to get nailed. Yeah, and these scratches didn't look like cat scratches at all. They looked like fingernail scratches. And they looked fresh. When the investigators

told Robert that his friend Jennifer was dead, Robert freaked out theatrically. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And on and on and on. It was a pretty eye roll-worthy performance. He was chewing the Pretty good. Oh, yeah. But of course, some people do tend to react dramatically to bad news, so who knew? The investigator started a video camera rolling as they continued the interview. Robert told them he'd met Jennifer at Dorian's that night at 2 a.m. He said they talked about her leaving for college soon.

He said he'd told her he was interested in seeing other people. She was going away, and he didn't want them to be tied down to each other. The bar emptied out around 3.3.30 a.m. He and Jennifer were the last two people there. They left at around 4 a.m., he said. They said goodbye in front of the bar and went their separate ways. And that was the last time he saw her. Yeah. Detective Shean wasn't buying it. His spidey senses were tingling something fierce. Those scratches all over Robert's face were making his nose twitch. He kept pressing, and Chambers kept sticking to his story.

Sheehan made him tell the story again and again for 12 hours. Good gravy, 12 hours? People know that all they have to do is say, I don't want to talk anymore. I want a lawyer, and it stops, right? Like, that always just blows my mind. I guess it's just that people think they can talk their way out of it a lot of the time. Sure. And that if they just keep talking, they can convince.

the person and then they can just go home. And sometimes, of course, it's because the police are manipulative and they, you know, they make people feel like they can't leave any if they can. Right. But dang, 12 hours. Jeez. Finally, Chambers made a mistake. A teensy, tiny little inconsistency about the route he took home. He said he'd passed a particular donut shop on a particular street. And that didn't make sense if he'd left Jennifer in front of Dorians. It was a relatively minor thing, but Detective Shan pounced on it. He pointed out the inconsistency, and then he circled back around to the scratches.

He said, look, unless your cat is a mountain lion, you did not get those scratches from him. Where did you get those scratches on your face? Yeah, and finally, Robert broke. It was a little less than 24 hours since Jennifer's body was discovered. And sitting in the little interrogation room, Robert Chambers told his story. He said he'd been with her in the park. They'd started to have a sexual encounter. And then things had taken a turn.

She looked at me and she said, I'd look cuter tied up, he said. And I thought she must be horsing around. And she wrapped her underwear around my wrist so they were locked. And they were behind my back because I was leaning on my hands. And she just pushed me back like this, like miming being pushed backward. And then got on top of my chest. He finally admitted she was the one who scratched his face, and he claimed that she'd squeezed his balls hard. So hard, he said, that he couldn't take the pain.

The detectives were dubious. To an extent this is understandable. You know, that they didn't quite buy this right away, because Jennifer was a tiny little thing, probably about a hundred pounds soaking wet, whereas Robert was over six feet tall and pretty much built like a brick wall. But it's still super gross that one of the detectives laughed at his heart. story and said, are you telling us you were raped by a woman? Robert said, yes. The detective said, well, you're the first guy who's ever told us anything like that. And Chambers said, well, I'm sure it happens all the time because it happened to me. And the thing is, it does

happen that women sexually assault men. In 2014, the National Crime Victimization Survey reported that 38% of sexual assault victims were men, which is a much higher percentage than in previous surveys, and there's a pretty good chance that this is an underestimation, because a lot of victims of sexual assault of all genders don't talk about it, you know, even in an anonymous survey. People of all genders are more likely to experience abuse perpetrated by men, and specifically, when men are penetrated without their consent, the perpetrator is much, much more likely to be male. But multiple studies have found that when men report other kinds of sexual victimization, in those cases, the perpetrators are actually either as likely or more likely to be female, depending on the study.

So, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey, female perpetrators were reported in 34.7% of incidents with male victims, which that really blew my mind to read. I was really surprised it was that high. And a survey by the CDC found that when men are forced to penetrate someone else, the perpetrator is female, 79% of the time. Dang, right? So it does happen. Now, did it happen here? Well, we're going to get to that in a bit. But we just didn't want to let that pass because, you know, I think that was a really gross reaction of those detectives to just act like it was just ridiculous and impossible that a man might be raped by a woman because it absolutely does happen.

So Robert went on with his story, and he even kind of acted it out by lying back on the table. He said after Jennifer squeezed his balls, he managed to get one hand free. He said she was leaning on his chest, and he reached up and grabbed her and just kind of flipped her back to. over his head. And that was it, he said. She didn't move again. He said, I didn't mean to hurt her. She was a really nice person. She was just too pushy. And she liked me more than I thought. And he said, when he realized she was dead, he panicked. He just froze. He didn't even leave the part. He told him he was actually sitting on a stone wall watching when the crime scene investigators turned up and started working the scene, which just creeps me out like nobody's

business. Blah. So Robert was arrested. His family hired a high-profile attorney, Jack Littman, and his co-counsel, Roger Stavis. The first thing Lippman did was petitioned the judge for bail. He said this was an accident. Robert deserved to be free and lessen until he was found guilty at trial. Now, this guy, Lippman, was a peach, campers. According to many people who worked with him at the time, he was notorious for blaming the victim in rape cases. In fact, he had done it so often that there was a term other lawyers used for victim blaming.

They called it Lipmanizing. Wow, that's classy, right? Really something for a young attorney to aspire to, you know, at that law school graduation, having some despicable scumbag courtroom tactic named after you, you know? Great, good job, man. I'm sure your parents are proud. In my humble opinion, Litman deserves to be hung upside down by his ankles and shakin real hard until his puny sense of morality falls out and I can buy a carton of milk with it. I hate him so much.

Yeah, he seems like in his guy's bucket. Litman's narrative was that Robert Chambers had been relentlessly pursued by a sexually aggressive, promiscuous girl who got rough during sex and forced him to defend himself. I hate it. Stavis has said recently, in fact, that he and Littman were, quote, made pariahs because we were blaming the victim. Of course we were not blaming the victim. What we were doing was corroborating the circumstances as described by Robert Chambers.

We were doing our jobs as professionals. Oh, fuck off, Savas, whining about being a pariah. Fucking gross. Yeah, it reminds me of Mark Garagos. Remember in the Scott Peterson trial and how he said that the media attention around the Scott Peterson case reminded him of the lynchings in the Jim Crow South, which is just one of the grossest things I've ever heard come out of a lawyer's mouth. Just shut your flipping eye hole. You twat.

And also, self-defense is only legal if you respond with proportional force. Absolutely, exactly. Throwing a 90-pound girl so hard that she dies isn't proportional, not in this situation. That's something they teach you in self-defense classes, by the way. You can't just go ham on someone threatening you. There has to be a clear and present danger to your person, and you need to warn them. The first thing you should say before masing someone or defending yourself is back off, I don't want to hurt you loudly, so somebody else might hear it.

Anyway, as you can probably imagine, the tabloid press went bananas with this case. We will post some of the headlines for you on the Patreon page, stuff like, Ladies Man held in slaying. Jenny killed in wild sex. Preppy killer still blaming Jennifer. Basically, Jennifer was portrayed as a slut while Chambers was described as handsome and preppy. Yep.

Robert's lawyer made him very available to the media. And they shaped the narrative as this was rough sex that got out of hand. Chambers accidentally killed Levin during rough sex. And the media ate it up because everything is awful. Or at least it was especially awful in 1986. And while Jennifer's name got steadily more tarnished in the media,

Robert's image just got more and more polished. His friends described him as the nicest guy, friendly. Articles described how clean cut he was, how handsome, how charming. One headline, I shit you not, said, preppy suspect was the cream of the crop. Oh, wow. People said things like, I can't believe he'd have to force a girl to have sex,

as if rape is about sex and not power. Yeah, in case we need to say this, rape is not about sex. What's it about, Katie? Power. Yes. Meanwhile, Jennifer's image got more and more tarnished. One headline, in all caps, screamed,

How Jennifer courted death. She was described as a vamp. The idea that she'd asked for it, provoked it, and brought it on herself. And the case took on a name, the preppy murder. Littman and Stavis' little gambit worked like a charm, and on October 1st, Robert Chambers was freed on bail. I could only imagine what this was like for Jennifer's family and friends. Hell, I bet. Yeah, I don't know how they kept from burning down the world, but they kept it classy and they

fought for their girl. Trial was set for early January. The defense's strategy was clear. Jennifer was killed during rough sex. It was self-defense. Their relationship was kinky and consensual. To prove this, the defense petitioned for access to Jennifer Levin's date book. Her friends had told investigators that she kept track of her sexual liaisons in it.

To Littman, the date book was crucial evidence. he referred to it as a sex diary and the media quickly adopted this term. There was a headline that said Jennifer kept sex diary, lawyer. The prosecutor called this a sleazy tactic. Oh, you think? Yeah.

She argued that Jennifer's date book had no relevance to the case whatsoever. This was just the defense, once again, trying to dirty up the victim. so the judge was like okay let me see this thing and he kept the date book for about a week then he gave it back to the prosecutor

and said that this was by no means a sex diary he said the defense had grossly misrepresented it that way and he ruled it inadmissible so thank God for something right but of course in the court of public opinion this didn't do anything to undo the damage done to Jennifer's image and I wonder if that wasn't the point all along

part of the litmanizing tanked the jury pool right so as they prepare for trial, the prosecutor and Detective Sheehan started a deep dive into Robert Chambers' background, and boy, did they find some shit. Far from the clean-cut, cream-of-the-crop young man he'd portrayed in the media, Chambers had a long criminal history. But, but...

If man not good, why handsome? Hmm? Man has symmetrical face, so he good. Ugly people, bad. Pretty sexually active woman, bad. Oh, of course. Handsome man, good. Handsome man, good.

Yeah, it's very confusing. I don't know how to explain it. They found more than 30 burglaries and thefts in our boy Robert's closet. And as it turned out, Robert's preppy image was also a facade. Unlike the rich kids he hung out with, Robert's family was working class. His mother was a nurse who worked her ass off so Robert could go to private school. So Robert had grown up around these wealthy kids, but he didn't have any of that wealth himself, and it rankled the hell out of him. This was part of why he did the burglaries, but it wasn't the only reason.

The investigators also discovered that Robert had been a drug addict since he was 14. He had a pricey coke habit. He'd been to rehab a few times at his mom's insistence, but it had never stuck, and Robert had been thrown out of several different prep schools for his drug use, and then out of Boston University for the same reason. And by the way, his mom work in her butt off, work in multiple jobs so that Robert could go to private school, and this is what he does. To thank his mom for that hard work. That is just the worst.

So Jennifer and her friends knew that there were rumors about Robert being involved in some of this stuff, and I'm sure there was some bad boy allure there. But Detective Sheehan, who had never believed that a sex act had played any role whatsoever in Jennifer's murder, theorized that the murder may have started when Jennifer found Robert dipping into her purse, trying to steal money from her. Now, this was apparently something he had done before with other people. And remember, the contents of Jennifer's purse had been spilled all around the ground next to her body. Also, Jennifer's friends had told investigators that she'd had $40 in her purse that night, but it wasn't found in her wallet when her purse was recovered from the crime scene. So Detective Sheehan theorized that Jennifer had caught Robert with his hand in her bag.

possibly as they sat and talked under the tree in Central Park and confronted him about it, and he attacked her and strangled her to death. This scenario makes a lot of sense to me. For one thing, it would fit with her friend's characterization of her as ballsy and fearless for her to confront him. Did Jennifer maybe threaten to tell everybody what he'd done, and was this too threatening to Robert for his preppy friends to find out he'd tried to steal $40 from his richer friend?

The working class boy trying to pass as an Upper East Side prep? This wasn't cool. bad boy, this was just going to come across as kind of pathetic. It's a decent theory. And also supporting this theory is the fact that Jennifer's earrings were missing when her body was found. Did Robert steal them? Most likely, they would have bought him some coke. I think another decent theory is that contrary to what he told the police, he wanted more from their relationship than Jennifer did. She was about to head off to college, and

she considered their relationship a summer fling. Did Robert try to Talk her into a commitment? Did she say no? To me, this fits in with the three messages he left on her answering machine the first night they slept together. Three messages in the time it took Jennifer to get home from his house. It fits with him showing up at Dorian's and whisking her away from her girlfriends the night of the murder when they hadn't expected to see him. And she had plans to spend the night with her friend.

But we can't know for sure. So, anyway, they discovered all this different. disturbing stuff about Robert's background, his criminal history, his drug addiction, but the only way they would be able to use any of that in court would be if Robert took the stand in his own defense. They desperately needed him to do that. Defense attorneys tend to discourage their clients from testifying with good reason, and a defendant has the right not to take a stand. It's not supposed to influence the jury's decision whether the defendant testifies or not.

But realistically, it often does make a bad impression. Oh, yeah. Juries like to hear people say, I didn't do this. Would Robert take the stand to tell his version of events? They hoped so, but it remained to be seen. The prosecutor in this case later said that the jury selection for this case was one of the most disturbing she'd ever participated in.

The media coverage had so much. so badly tarnished Jennifer's image that they had to weed through almost 500 people to seat a jury of 12. Holy shit, that's crazy. Predictably, the trial was a media blitz. Chambers was charged with second-degree murder.

The state needed to prove that he'd attacked Jennifer on purpose. He, of course, claimed he'd flipped her over his head and she died by accident. It doesn't even fit how she died. Oh, anyway. We'll get to it. I'm getting ahead of us. It made no sense to the prosecution whatsoever,

or the medical examiner, as you said, who had conducted Jennifer's autopsy. Jennifer had a number of injuries, but the cause of her death was strangulation. She had multiple angry red marks around her neck, deep tissue injuries, and not just one. The ME found that these were repeated injuries to her neck, which meant the killer had repeatedly adjusted his grip and squeezed during a violent struggle. Yeah, and any adjustment you make is an opportunity to realize what you're doing and stop. Right? Whenever we see strangulation in movies, it's always really fast. It's like squeeze, squeeze, 10 seconds, death. But in real life, it is a lot harder than that. To strangle somebody to death, you have to continually apply pressure, and it takes minutes of that continuous pressure to kill someone, like several minutes at least. And there was evidence that Jennifer had been smothered, too. Not only that, but Robert said they'd been engaged in rough sex, but there was no evidence that any sex had taken place at all. Crime scene investigators believe that, that Robert staged the scene to make it look like a sexual assault, but Jennifer's body

showed no signs of sex, rough or otherwise. There were no body fluids, no pubic hairs, no bruising, no abrasions on her pelvic region, nothing. Bottom line, to a high degree of certainty, she wasn't sexually penetrated that night at all. And that alone pretty much kills Robert's story. Of course, the defense had a different narrative. They hired their own forensic pathologist who argued that the marks on Jennifer's neck could have come from an arm, not hands. Other marks could have come from the folds of Jennifer's shirt and the gold watch she was wearing, they argued. There were some tiny gold flecks on her neck, and they used this to bolster their theory. The defense scored some points when they got the state's

Emmy to admit that some of the marks on Jennifer's body could have been made by Robert's watch. However, the Emmy was adamant about her findings. Jennifer had been strangled and smothered, and there was no way it was an accident. There had to have been full minutes of press pressure and repeated repositioning of the hands. Now, unfortunately for the prosecution, the defense didn't call Robert to tell his own story, undoubtedly because they knew that this would open the door to his criminal history and drug abuse. And I'm bummed about this, campers, because I bet he would have eaten his own lunch so hard on that stand, and it would have been fun to make fun of how badly he bombed.

But we can't have everything, I guess. So the jury deliberated for more than a week, and usually it's a rule of thumb that the longer a jury stays out, the better it starts looking for the defendant. So I imagine there were a lot of sleepless nights that week for the Levens. And then on day eight, the jury sent a note to the judge saying they were deadlocked and didn't think they could reach a verdict. So the prosecutor sat down with the Levens and they had a long talk and they all agreed that if they allowed a mistrial and tried Robert again, the outcome might be exactly the same or it might be worse. He could be acquitted completely and just walk off into the sunset

and they could not stand the thought of that. So reluctantly, the Levens agreed to let the prosecutors offer Robert a plea deal. Manslaughter, the next most serious charge after second-degree murder. Robert took the deal. He pled guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

Robert had refused to speak during his trial, but part of his plea deal was that he had to admit he'd harm Jennifer intentionally. So Robert finally stood up in court and apologized for killing Jennifer. And then, he was sentenced to five to 15 years in prison, basically a slap on the wrist. Jennifer's friends and family were heart-sick, but it was the best they felt they were going to get.

A month after Robert's sentencing, in April of 88, the tabloid show A Current Affair, which was always value for money, broadcast a home video of Robert at a party he'd attended while he was out on bail. He was lolling around with four or five girls in lingerie laughing while pretending to choke him, himself and making fake gagging noises. At one point, he grabbed a Barbie doll and twisted its head off, saying in a creepy, sing-songy voice, my name is, oh, I think I killed it. Yeah, hilarious, dude, you ought to go on tour with comedy like that. And remember, Camper's, this is while he's out on bail for his manslaughter charge.

So, real smart, you sad clump of factory reject molecules. So finally, the public were getting an up-close look at the real Robert Chambers. Some of the jurors publicly expressed feeling sick about deadlocking. Public opinion in general shifted drastically. And I know this will stun you. In prison, Robert's true colors continued to shine through. He racked up infractions. Guards found heroin in his cell.

He assaulted corrections officers. He was caught with weapons. Unsurprisingly, this did him no favors, and he ended up serving his full 15-year sentence. He could have been out in five if he had. behaved himself, but he was clearly unable to do that. So, you know, eh. In an interview with the show 48 hours after he was released in 2003, he lied about his prison record saying he'd never had any infractions while incarcerated. Yeah, because they can't, you know, check that or anything. Jeez, Louise. Sure, Jan. And he also maintained his story that Jennifer's death was an accident,

that she'd attacked him, that he'd only been defending himself. Obviously, our boy had learned nothing. So like Katie said, he was released in 2003 after serving 15 years, but then in 2007, he was caught selling coke to undercover cops. And for this, he was sentenced to 19 years, which is four more years than the maximum end of the sentence he got for murdering a young woman in cold blood, which is just the most bass-acquards thing I have ever heard, but there you go.

That's our war on drugs for you. How's that going, by the way? Oh, you know, it just got us the prison industrial complex. We're an 18-year-old charged for smoking weed gets a longer sentence than a rapist. It's going great with me. So, Robert's back in prison now, having squandered his second chance at a life. Now, if this case happened today, would we do better? Would the story be reported differently?

Would we have ended up with a hung jury? I don't know. I would like to think we've come a long way since 1986. And I think we have in some ways. But then we see cases like Brock Turner, and we see how Jasmine Eland was treated online when she came forward with her allegation of sexual assault on a nightclub floor. You remember that a couple of years ago? What that girl went through? Yeah.

But at the same time, there are flickers of hope. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein have finally had to face justice for decades of predatory behavior. Victims of sexual assault and abuse are speaking out more than ever. The Me Too movement has drawn attention. to this issue in a way that's never happened before. So I hope things are getting better. And you know, the really sad and ironic thing about this case is that Littman and Chambers made it about sex and they made it about sex assault. And in reality, there was no sex involved.

This was either a case where it was a simple robbery and then she caught him at it and he killed her. Or like you suggested, it could be a romantic issue where he was. was, you know, trying to get her to stay with him and she didn't want to stay with him because she was going off to college. I don't know which, but it certainly was not a sex assault or a sexual encounter or rough sex gone wrong or any of that. So it had nothing to do with it. And yet, that's all the media coverage wanted to talk about.

And, of course, in doing so, they had to go and make Jennifer look like she was nothing but trash, you know, and like you said, focus on his handsome cheekbones and all. It was just absolutely crazy. because the case was not about that at all. No, it wasn't. So it really sucks. And, you know, like I said, it's just ridiculous to think that he got more time for selling Coke to an undercover cop than he got for killing Jennifer Levin. It's just, it's bonkers.

And I'm sure her family still miss her. And if you look at pictures of her, you can see that she was one of those people that just had a lot of life in her, you know. And who knows what she would have done? She was 18 years old. I think he was a little older. He was 20 or 21, I think. at the time. So watch that 48 hours interview with him.

It's really infuriating. Like he totally wouldn't take any responsibility still. And I feel so bad for his poor mom who wanted so much for him and like, you know, was sending him to those good schools and he just, you know, frittered it away. So it just started raining patrons. So I guess we'll have to wrap up this little impromptu discussion here at the end. But that was a wild one, right? And you know we're going to have another one for you next month.

But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and see. Stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. Thank you so much for supporting us. We love you to the moon and back. Love you.