You're Wrong About - The Preppy Murder

Episode Date: April 18, 2019

Sarah tells Mike how an aspiring rich kid became an emblem of a world he didn't belong to. Digressions include drill teams, prep schools and eating disorders. The p-pops are worse than usual. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

Yeah, we should tell people about the curse. Yes. Because it's like every time we go to record, this has happened the last five times. It's like everything is fine and then suddenly a piece of equipment doesn't work. And like the more I think about it, the more this just seems like Lee Atwater

would be petty from beyond the grave and he would do it because I talked about his human feelings. I think that's the most plausible explanation. Welcome to your wrong about the only podcast haunted by Lee Atwater. Welcome to your wrong about the show where we give, well, actually a good name.

We're doing our best. That was a listener suggestion. We have the best listener suggestion. Right? All of our listeners have way better ideas for taglines and like show topics than we do. I would not go that far. I think that theirs and mine are equally good,

but I understand that you're into the art of self-desecration. I am Michael Hobbs. I am a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm researching a book on the satanic panic. And before we get started today, we have a announcement.

Yeah, I don't even know how to preface this, but so we started a Patreon page. You sound so guilty about this here and you have to maintain a good energy for the children when you tell them about how they're gonna live somewhere else on the weekends now. I feel deeply weird about doing this.

Let's talk about like the weirdness that we feel about this. Cause it is weird and like that's okay. I get that this is the way that the world works now, but I also, I know this is gonna sound like a job interview answer of like, what's your greatest weakness? Like I work too hard,

but I like doing this show so much. And it's such a nice break from reading about current events and sort of in the churn of what is happening this week. It's such a treat to look back on things that happened decades ago, but it feels weird to ask people for support for doing it. Oh, you feel that it's not really labor because you enjoy it.

Yeah, like we said, when we started the show, we set out to record a couple of test episodes and then we just kept recording them every week. Like this was never something we thought of was gonna last this long. We never thought this was gonna be this fun to do. We never thought, we don't have tons of listeners, but like I'm amazed that we've had as many listeners

as we do and as many emails we get every week and as many great ideas for taglines and episodes as we do. And also that like every listener that we attract feels like someone who's thoughtful and insightful and can bring us some perspective that we never would have thought of and would have reached without them. I mean, we have somehow cultivated the kind of listener base

that still to this day sends us fun facts about Mike Dukakis. And that makes me so happy that those are the kind of people that we have found and that they have found us. That's a really good description of our listenership is that the people who have found the show are like people who are capable of loving Michael Dukakis

as much as we are. And so the way I feel about this is that I wanna raise money so that we can do some more ambitious stuff that we've talked about down the line. And like, look, if we raise 25 cents, it won't matter. We will keep doing this show until we are husks. As far as I can tell, like we don't know how to stop. Like it's gonna be maybe more erratic

than we would like of a production schedule, but like no one, you know, not fire or rain or sleet or the dark of night or the ghost of Lee Atwater is going to stop us. This has turned somehow into a threat. I mean, I think the thing to say is that we're setting up a Patreon. It's patreon.com slash you're wrong about.

And if that's not your jam and you don't wanna give us money, you're not gonna miss out on anything. Or if you want to, but you like don't have money lying around to give to a couple of millennials. Yeah, but so anyway, now you know it's there. We feel weird about it. Maybe you feel weird about it too.

We're not gonna spend a lot of time every episode talking about it. Did you know that for the price of a cup of coffee, you could buy Michael Hobbs a cup of coffee. And also I would say there's no greater friend of the show than you can be. If you're here and you're listening to this right now, then you're a part of this.

And you're not gonna be more a part of it. If you give money, you're not gonna get more episodes. You're not gonna get more access to anything. You're here. You're already implicated. See you in court. I'm glad that this has become very unpleasant by the end. It's nice to prove that there's no one

who can make this more uncomfortable than we already have. So that's nice. And on that note, we should go to the actual thing that we're gonna talk about today, which is the preppy murder. The preppy murder. Yeah, tell me about, what do you know about this case? When you first told me you were gonna do it,

I literally had not heard of it. You told me it was one of the early episodes of law and order, which I have. I am ashamed to admit I have never actually seen an entire episode of law and order. I feel like that makes you like someone who's never been exposed to a common cold. Like you're just like a prize specimen of some sort.

Like you're untouched. But my understanding of the case from what you have told me so far is that it's essentially a very preppy upper crust dude killed a preppy upper crust lady. And this became a massive target of the tabloids in New York City for months and months and months. Years.

Years. That's the nice thing about having a case that's really big in the news and then takes a long time to go to trial. Yeah, so this is a story that was sold in headlines as being about two out of control young rich kids. The most interesting way that the story differs from the headline version that we remember later on

is that these were two people who were essentially outsiders in the group that they were in. Like they had kind of wormed their way inside of this very, very old school preppy upper east side, old names, old New York world. I first heard of this case when I was a 10th grade girl and was like, what the fuck was that? The basis of all good journalism.

What the fuck? What the fuck was that? Yeah, so what do we know about Robert Chambers' upbringing? He's gonna be the one, he turns out to be the killer eventually, but what do we know about his life leading up to it? I love how you say that as if it's weird for me to wanna talk about what someone's life was like

before they killed someone. As if I do anything else with my time. So Robert Chambers was born in 1966, the year after his parents got married. His mother's name is Phyllis Shanley and she grew up in rural Ireland in a home where they cooked with and heated the house with a stove that burned peat that they used to go

into the bog and they would hack peat out and then take it in and burn it. Jesus. And she emigrates to New York in the late 1950s. She seems to have had that view that a lot of people do of like being accepted by a particular elite stratum of society like is survival. Cause the way that she oriented her life around this

is just it all went in to becoming part of this specific world of like New York City, Upper East Side society. And so she started working as a private nurse and quickly started working for patients who were embedded within society who were very wealthy. And so she could kind of, once you know one of them and they trust you

in those circles, then you develop that kind of cache. You can get jobs working for them. She, and so she goes to work doing that. She works long hours. She meets a guy named Bob Chambers, who's Irish American. He has a white collar job. He works in media and electronics

and is doing well when they get married. He fairly soon becomes a pretty heavy drinker and this is what ultimately destroys the marriage. So one of the crucial things that happens, for example, is that she gets a job working as a private nurse for John F. Kennedy, Jr. as he's recovering from an illness. And she's, this makes a big impression on her

as it would inevitably. And so she decides, you know, Robert has to go to the same nursery school that John and John went to and that's on the Upper East Side and then eventually they do move to the Upper East Side. And like, who knows what this marriage was like. But you do get the feeling that like at least in terms of what Robert would say later

and what other people would observe that she was really the one who was kind of the visionary of who he needed to be. Right, and he is the implement that she is using to get into this world. And I think there's also that thing, this idea that like your child can be the one who truly has the thing that you can never truly have.

Like she couldn't be born in America. She couldn't really get into this world at a young age. Like she couldn't be truly of it by being part of it for so much of her life. But he could do it. She was very focused on him. Her life was really oriented around him but she was pretty disciplinarian.

She punished him with a strap when he misbehaved. He was a very obedient little kid. Like babysitter said that you did not have to tell him to do anything twice. He didn't really have friends of his own age. And for when he was three, he knew to shake hands with anyone that he was meeting for the first time. So he's like one of those little kids that you see

like wearing a suit. Yes. One of these events like, isn't it cute? But then inches behind that, there's the parent who is working their butt off to maintain that illusion for their child. Yeah. And that he is being put through these paces

from a very young age of being trained to be a little grown up. Right. And then when he's eight, he joins the knickerbocker grays. What? Can you guess what this might be? Is this, I'm thinking it's either a soccer team

or like the Freemasons. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It's like a drill team. They do marching and drill routines. They learn quote leadership. Who the hell knows what that ever means when kids are supposed to be learning leadership from stuff. They wear their sort of military costumes

and parade around. They have practice in Central Park after school and it's just, it's not something that personally I understand the appeal of, but it's something that was once an organization that was only for the highly fortunate sons of New York City's most wealthy and prominent families. Right.

And by 1974, which is when Robert joins, like there are enough Park Avenue limousine liberals that it's not necessarily the most prestigious thing for one of their kids to be doing militaristic after school exercises. We see this over and over again that once we have a marker that's associated with people who make it,

things like a college education or being bilingual or whatever it is, we think, oh, if you do X, you're really gonna make it into financial security. Then that idea starts to spread to lower and lower income levels. And then people at the higher income have to redefine what it means to them, right?

So I can see how something like this would have been a reliable marker of upper classness. But then once it becomes available to the upper middle classes and even the middle classes, then the actual upper crust has to then go define something else that defines membership in that group. Yeah, and you're never gonna get there on time. Like if you go there after it becomes accessible to you,

then by definition, it's no longer a value in the same way it once was. It's like once I have heard of a band, it is not cool anymore. And this is Phyllis Shanley Chambers' entire fucking life. Like it's just like she's the Greyhound chasing the rabbit. And so Robert, he joins the Greys. This is a very useful thing because then she takes on,

is able to take on a leadership role of the Greys and establish yet more connections. And all of this is gonna be very useful later when he needs to be released on bail. Because another issue is that the Chambers has never really made that much money. Like there were, as Robert was growing up, their combined annual income is something like $80,000,

which is like a lot of money. It's a lot of money in the 80s. It's not a lot of money by the standards of the people whose company they are trying to keep and who they're trying to keep up with. Right, it's not like where furs and have a live-in staff money. No.

It's like you can reliably fake that, but you can't actually achieve that. Right, it feels like it's just enough money to maintain the illusion. She's shops at Upper East Side consignment stores and she's always really well-dressed, but it's just like a season out of date. Like she's almost there.

Like everything about her life is almost there. Robert is the one who can be all the way there. If only he would stop stealing. Oh. Which is something he starts to do around the start of the Knickerbocker Greys years. Oh. It seems like is how his rebellion kind of begins.

He starts stealing from other kids. What does he steal? A guy who was interviewed about him after the murder recalls that Robert was invited to his 10th birthday party. He'd been a classmate of his. And then after the party checks his piggy bank and all $20 worth of change

that he's been squirreling away is gone. And then the next day Robert has $20 for some reason. Oh. And this is like a habit that he gets into early and that just grows and grows and grows for him. Wow. So he will take money or credit cards out of girls' purses. He also starts drinking heavily and frequently

by the time he's 13, potentially earlier. Holy shit. When Robert is 14, he brings a girl over to his house and the girl's like, wow, there's like a huge portrait of you in your own house. And Robert's like, yeah, my mom had that. Oh.

Bummer, dude. Yeah, what do you think of that? He must have been aware at some level that his mother was trying to ride his coattails into this world in a way that, most people like their parents expect them to get good grades or maybe go to college. But for your parents to expect you to be in this

upper echelon and in this tiny chance of success, it must have just felt like a treadmill that he was on that he could never do enough. Right, because that's the position that she's put herself in. Right. If you begin your life knowing like, okay, I'm an outsider, I have to act exactly right.

I have to learn these manners. I have to wear these clothes. I have to master. I have to find my way into this world that essentially doesn't really want me and prove myself. You're also setting yourself up for a life of failure because you're never going to have,

you will never have been born into that world and that is a world that will always let you know that. It's like pageant parents, but real. Pageants get pretty real. At least with pageant kids, you can turn it on for 15 minutes and walk up and down the stage. But if that's your whole life.

Right, and then your whole life is a performance. So does anybody ever notice the stealing? I mean, I guess he's stealing from people that are rich enough that they don't necessarily notice 20 bucks missing and don't necessarily care. This is the interesting thing about it. He's stealing from other rich kids.

And the way this escalates is that he, so he gets later on a job at a restaurant where he's stealing the credit card numbers off of all of the credit cards of the patrons and then using those to like get cash and he's later on as a teenager we'll start talking his way into the buildings, Upper East Side Apartment buildings

where like the doorman knows him or like the doorman can call them maid in one of the apartments. And she's like, oh yeah, buzz Robert in. Because it's like one of his girlfriends lives there or yes they recognize him or he looks like someone who lives there or something. And so if you are Robert Chambers

walking briskly into a lobby and you're nice, you know, your Oxford cloth shirt and your double breasted blue blazer, which is a hard phrase to say that I've been practicing, what he essentially does is he will go into the building and then go to whatever apartment he feels like burglarizing which he can reach by going into potentially the apartment where they know him or getting onto a fire escape somehow

and then climbing into the apartment that he wants. And then we'll steal thousands of dollars worth of valuables and furs and electronics and whatever. People also talk later on about when he steals from other kids' lockers or when he's stealing from other teenagers' wallets or whatever, he's just, you know, fuck preppies, fuck these preppies, I don't fucking care.

So he also like has completely unsurprisingly a lot of animosity toward this population that he's trying to get approval from. I 100% had that in middle and high school but I dealt with it by just having crushes on all of them that never went anywhere. I don't know if mine is better or his, probably his. He is a teenager, has a friend named David Philia

who's black and who is his accomplice in a lot of these burglaries. And when they are brought in for a police questioning because the cops do notice things occasionally, he's like, oh, you know, David did all the actual stealing, the black kid did all the stealing and he intimidated me into it. I'm the victim here.

And the cops are like, well, that doesn't sound super persuasive but like, who's it gonna harm if we like let you out? I mean, the power of white skin and a collared shirt cannot be underestimated, right? Two extra inches of fabric. Yeah, so like people notice and he also starts getting in trouble

for substance abuse when he's a kid because he starts drinking at least, by the time he's 13, he starts using cocaine when he's 14. He starts free basing by the time he's in college. So he's pretty out of it for a lot of his teenage years. He is one of those people, if they are offered an altered state, we'll take it, anything but sobriety.

So Robert starts a show in 1977, which is a very fancy prep school in Connecticut where Michael Douglas among other people went and they're like richer and preppier people than Michael Douglas, but I feel like Michael Douglas embodies the sort of like lipless mugness that I associate with the most unsavory element of that class.

And also when he's 14, he comes home from break and Phyllis is saying like, I've had it. I've had it with Bob's drinking. His parents have kind of reached one of many breaking points. And so Robert's dad storms out and Robert who has to go back to Chote in a few hours like goes out looking for his dad and doesn't find him

and then has to go back to school. Oh wow. Buddy gets to be picked up from school and taken back to New York in a limo. Heartbreak doesn't feel that much better in a limo. I mean, it just reminds me of that old Oscar Wilde coach I'm probably gonna butcher, but something along the lines of being in the upper classes

means spending money you don't have to buy things you don't want to impress people you don't like. It just feels like this endless cycle of doing all these things for show when it's not clear even getting them would even make you happier. Because you'd always be looking over your shoulder.

Yeah. You can work so hard at performing that identity that you don't ever actually ask like, what do I want? Right. It's funny, like I read this past week, I think the first book published for a mainstream American audience on eating disorders is called The Golden Cage.

And the author Hilda Brooke is like, there's this allegedly paradoxical thing where this is a disease that afflicts the privilege, the well-educated girls with very prominent and successful families. Like, isn't it such a weird thing that it's happening to like this privileged subset of society? And of course, she's like, it actually makes total sense

because the language that they use over and over again talking about how they feel and why they seek this control over themselves that also combines with masochism is that they don't know who they are. They have been acting to fill a role that they understand to be expected of them for their whole lives.

They know that their parents have pretty specific ideas of how they need to be successful. They're often used as emotional airbags in their homes and are like the good obedient child who like emotionally attends to the mother and makes the bad marriage bearable or like is daddy's obedient daughter even when the other kids are being rebellious?

Like, she's the good one. She's the one who has been so obedient and so perfectionistic for her whole life that her parents think that everything has been fine when actually the hyper obedience was a warning sign. But we assume obedience is healthy in America. And then finally, like the only way that she can gain what feels like some control

over herself in her life is to secretly start starving or start binging and purging or both. And you know, and that this is all that's left to you. You know, I was reading that this week just doing some like furious underlining and then thinking about Robert Chambers. It's like, this is not that different. We all exhibit like pretty similar behaviors

where all humans were not that different from each other. He wasn't a girl, he was a boy. And so the way that he felt that he could exert some control over his life, where he like he was like being the person that his parents apparently needed him to be, but like he was high the entire time. No one knows that on the inside,

like I'm in control of my psyche, fuck all of you. I'm just really glad that my parents never wanted anything for me. So how does this lead up to the murder? I mean, does he start escalating from drugs to violence? Yeah, I mean, you know what's funny is that he really doesn't. The thefts become riskier and for more money. He goes to Chote for a year.

He is, I think, asked to leave in the parlance of this world because he's just like, he's not a good student. He doesn't care. He doesn't have really the mental wherewithal to be doing the work that, you know, you're supposed to do in this like, cause like you have to at least put on a good show of work hard, play hard.

You like a solid B minus. Yeah, he's not conning the system in the right ways exactly. So he comes back to New York and goes to school there. He goes to Boston University for his first year of college, but he gets kicked out for, among other things, stealing his roommate's credit card information.

Oh my God. So it's like he is continually given opportunities that he like really doesn't want and doesn't know what to do with and then does really, and just like really stupidly self-sabotages in the way of someone who wants to get caught. I mean, one of the interesting things too

is that like there are never consequences for him. You know, he gets sent to rehab. He gets kicked out of school. There's a period when his mom like sends him to live in the basement of the building until he gets his act together. You know, he like gets jobs and he steals people's financial information

or he steals in other ways or he just is a bad worker and he gets fired. You know, he can always get another job. And there's never a lasting repercussion. And obviously like I am the last person who would make the argument that punishment is good for us. But I do think there's something about living in a world where like we're in some way you can't do wrong

because it's like he keeps fucking up but he keeps being asked to keep playing the game. Like no one will take him out of the game. Right. We tend to see consequences for some groups as devastating and for other groups as necessary. And he fell into the group that, you know, we couldn't possibly send him to jail.

He has such a promising future ahead of him. And it's like, no, he doesn't. What if the consequence for him was ending up like not in a punitive system but in a world where like it didn't matter how nice eviction he had or how much he looked like a Kennedy. What if he just had to go to a world where like

he was not rewarded for the illusions that he projected. Right. You know, if anybody had really asked what his wishes were he might have excelled like really excelled at something but being, you know, mashing his cubicle little face into this round hole just created all this pressure. Yeah.

And also like his mom still like after this like at this time it's like, well, maybe he can go to Oxford. Maybe he can go to Harvard, you know, like Phyllis, like you are not doing your child any favors. Yeah. Meanwhile, as he has been, you know, flailing around Jennifer Levin, I guess I don't like to make the transition from like this young woman who we're going to talk about.

And then later on we're going to know her as, as the victim in the newspaper. There's no good transition to that, right? But she's, she is the woman whose path crosses with Robert. And so she meets him at the start of the summer of 1986. She's in with kind of his crowd. They're both hanging out at Dorian's Red Hand, which is the bar where all of these teenagers

are basically playing a grown-up. What do we know about her? She was a striver too, right? She was a striver. Yeah. She was born and spent her first years on Long Island. Her parents worked in real estate. They slowly made their way up the ladder.

So did she. She lost her virginity when she was 16. She described it as her birthday present to herself. She found a guy who she like wasn't in love with, but liked and had feelings for and had, you know, what she felt to be like pretty good sex. And she was like, I did it. Like I had sex and I'm ready to have sex with other people.

Her friends described her as being prone to impossible crushes. Her dad had remarried and her mom was kind of more like a contemporary than a mother for her. So she was also in a little bit of a parent void. She was never going to have an uncomplicated relationship to like the sex she was having as a teenage girl. And I think we can't ask her to have been using it

in a totally balanced and healthy way. Cause like I don't think humans really do that typically. So like she was getting some like nutrients that she needed from like parental approval or secure love like from these, you know, relatively fleeting encounters with guys. But she was enjoying herself. She loved her life.

She had good friends. She spent a lot of time feeling awkward about the fact that she was Jewish and she looked Jewish and she was not going to fit in. Like with these like blonde, skinny, limbed, waspy girls who were like the thing that she was, you know, had been kind of trying to be. Like she, she'd struggled with her weight.

She went on little crash raw veggie diets cause she like weighed it like a healthy weight and wanted to weigh like a wasp weight. She wanted to be at the, you know, chablis and olives diet weight that is so coveted among Upper East Side types. The book that I really got the biggest sense of Jennifer from is wasted by Linda Wolfe.

She just paints this picture of a girl who like had a sense of freedom and pride and like she'd been dating this guy named Brock on and off for a long time, but like they had a pretty open understanding. And so he was spending the summer in Europe and she, the summer after they graduated high school. And so she met guys and if she liked them,

she would get something started with them. And one of the guys that she met that summer was Robert Chambers. And he of course had other irons in the fire as well. They were Dorians and he saw her across the room. And they're in this bar where like everyone knows everybody else, this is all the same crowd. They're all kind of like surveilling each other, right?

So he asks one of Jennifer's friends to tell her to meet him outside. And he tells her that she's the most beautiful girl he's ever seen. Playing the hits, it doesn't get much better than playing the hits. And so they meet and she finds him like so handsome, so dashing and they go to bed.

And she tells her friends that he is her first orgasm. God, just like Joey, but if you go, this is a theme for us. Yes. Wow. Don't get too attached to the man who gives you your first orgasm of your teenage girl. If you've been having sex with teenage boys exclusively to this point, like you're going to have a very specific idea

about the abundance or scarcity of orgasms in this world that like might not be entirely accurate. Yes. And this is the part where I'm gonna ask you to look at a picture of this guy because no one in any of these accounts can stop talking about how handsome he is. Okay, Robert Chambers.

Yeah, he looks like Donkey Kong 64. He's all polygons. He's these big blocky polygons. Like he has a big rectangular head and big triangular shoulders and little crash bandicoot legs. He just is like this cartoon figure. He was also very tall.

He was like 64. Oh, really? Yeah, he was like a tall, not stocky, but like a solidly built guy. And he's got this great like prince charming hair. I mean, in most of these pictures, he's wearing a suit. Yeah, you do not see pictures of him in like tabloids at the time.

And like, if you look at this case's legacy now, you will not find a picture of him in a jumpsuit. Right, on Google image, there's a picture of his perp walk and he's wearing a Lacoste polo shirt. And is it a perp walk if you're wearing Lacoste? This is a question for legal scholars more qualified than we. It's not so much that he's so magnetic or so handsome.

He looks like a certain type of man. Yeah, a man who's tall and white and in a suit and has perfect hair doesn't actually have to be that handsome or that smart for people to project that onto him. So him and Jennifer start getting hot and heavy. Well, he and Jennifer go to bed once. And then essentially she spends the rest of the summer

kind of hoping that they'll get more stuff started. They see each other a couple of times. You know, they did not have a relationship. He was someone who she really liked, or actually, I should not say that because this is kind of mysterious. Because she definitely pursued him, but a couple of her friends have also said

after the fact that she told them, it wasn't that she liked him as a person, it was just that he was like good at sex and she liked having sex with him. Right, okay. There's this interesting thing too where the last night of her life, like she went to Dorian's, Robert was there too.

And he was kind of trying to avoid her and she really pursued him that night. So what happened was that he was basically trying to get back into the good books of his girlfriend, Alex. One of the reasons that his girlfriend has pissed at him, this is just a classic Robert Chambers. He stole 50 bucks out of her pocketbook. Oh, from his girlfriend?

From his girlfriend. This is just, you look at that and you're like, this guy was not strategic. He was not planning anything out. That's such a stupid, addictive thing to do. You stole cash from your girlfriend. I mean, that's opportunistic. That's like lizard brain thinking of just like,

hey, there's cash in front of me, I'm gonna snatch it. Yeah, so he took money out of her wallet. She's, as one of the long-suffering main squeezes of Robert Chambers, is like, obviously we can flirt with other people, whatever. We're two very sophisticated teenagers. But just don't flirt with other people in front of me. That's the only thing that I don't want you to do.

Just not in front of me, please. Of course, at the bar that night, Jennifer, she sees him, she goes over, she tries to talk to him, he kind of ignores her, she goes away, she comes back, she makes another attempt. It seems as if also it kind of bothered her just to be ignored. And like, she was like, excuse me, like pay attention to me.

She's talking to Robert and tells him like, I just want you to know that like, you're the best sex I've ever had. Oh, wow. And of course, his girlfriend hears and comes over to him and she has this bag that has some condoms in it and she throws it at him. And it's like, you know, use these on somebody else

because you're not going to use them on me. Holy shit. This is like real housewives stuff. Yes, this is teenagers acting like a bunch of drunk 40 year olds. I have read and kind of seen true crimey TV accounts of this where it's like, and then Jennifer like thwarted his relationship and then he had to take it out on her.

And it's like, there was no cause and effect here, I don't think in that way. Like it's not as if this relationship was like the last thing he was holding on to or like that it was so crucial. It was just like, he was not a healthy person for other people to be around in any way. And that had been true for a while. I just hadn't always been true this dramatically.

I think we really struggle to convey, there's a lot of people in your life and most of them don't mean that much to you. You know, everyone knows probably 250 people and maybe 10 are central relationships in your life. Parents, best friends, romantic relationships, et cetera. And there's a lot of people in your life that are great and fine, but if you lose those relationships

or they move to Cleveland or whatever, you're not bereft. This seems like the kind of story that nobody is central to each other's lives in it. These are all sort of orbiting satellites. It's so often with crime, I feel like this is a story about people who didn't really see each other deeply as human beings. Like they saw each other playing roles in each other's lives.

Like if she were alive today, she might not even remember him. She would be like talking with one of her friends and they would be like, remember that guy, Robert Chamber? She'd be like, oh yeah, oh that fucking guy. What happened to him? And then he would look him up and he'd be like managing like a blockbuster in Bayonne.

I think this is also part of why this became such tabloid fodder because in 1986, there were 1,582 homicides in New York City. Oh wow, that's a lot. You can see equivalent of four per day. And this one was in news four years, right? And it's not as if this was the most brutal or the most weird or the most inexplicable murder in New York.

But it I think was a saleable narrative because it was about allegedly very rich, very unaccountable people, although neither of them really were at least very rich, doing awful things to each other, which is a story that always sells. Also because we love this idea of like, I loved her so much I had to kill her.

Like the somehow this thing where like the passion between two straight people rolls into violence somehow inevitably because we understand that like, toxic masculine sexuality in America like is so connected to violence in a way that we like to think of as just like, that's just part of love is violence. And it's like, no,

it's part of American masculinity is violence. We like the story of passionate intensity rather than the story of just kind of being a bit meh about each other. Yeah, but so Jennifer decides she's like, I am going to try and wait this one out. And so she and Alex, Robert's girlfriend are both like at the bar and he's off, you know,

in another part of the bar and Alex eventually leaves. And so then it's basically just Jennifer and Robert. And at like 430 in the morning, they leave the bar together. And that's the last time that anybody sees her. And so they go to Central Park, which at the time is still thought of as a place where like, if you go there at 430 in the morning, you're asking to get murdered.

And Jennifer's body is found a couple of hours later. It's spotted first by a jogger who later will testify that he like saw two people doing something together and assumed that it was sex. But then, you know, it kept on jogging because he was worried about getting involved. This is another classic New York story element, you know, and then another passerby actually comes by and sees Jennifer

and is like, oh, this is not sex or something ambiguous. This is a young woman and she's dead. And the police come and initially are like, okay, like this was some random attack. This was some random rape carried out by some, you know, Central Park, Riff Raff, whatever. But they quickly figure out that Jennifer left the bar with Robert a few hours ago.

And so they go to his house and interview him and he has scratches on his face and on his chest, what look like defensive wounds from Jennifer. And he's like, ah, a cat scratched me. Oh my God. Cause he's a bad liar. Yeah, Jesus. So it's really obvious from like minute one

that this is the prime suspect. Yeah, this is why this would have been, why if they'd actually played it straight, it would have been a bad law and order episode because Robert is like the guy they would see in minute four and it's a viewer. You'd be like, this is not satisfying. And so they take him in and he doesn't ask for a lawyer.

And after a few hours, he confesses. So Robert is being questioned by Detective Sorako and he tells him that they get to the park. He sits down on the ground facing the Metropolitan Museum with his hands behind him and Jennifer goes off to pee and then comes back and he says, I didn't see her. And she came up behind me. She started to give me a massage saying how cute I looked

and that I would look cuter if I were tied up. And then he says, she scooped my hands with both her arms and like held them together and took her underwear. And she wrapped up her underwear around my wrists so they were locked and they were behind my back. Okay. And she just pushed me back and then got on top of my chest and she was facing my feet.

And she started to take off my pants and she started to play with me. She started jerking me off and she was doing it really hard and it really hurt me. And I started to say, stop it, stop it, it hurts. And she kind of laughed in a weird way like more like a cackle or something. And then she sat up and she sat on my face

and then she dug her nails into my chest and I have scratches right here from where she scratched. And he says, and she seemed to be having a great time. She was laughing and giggling and making weird kind of laughing type sounds while digging her nails into me. And she's sitting on my face and I'm trying to get away by wiggling all over and I'm screaming. And at this point, a jogger came by

and Sarako says at three o'clock in the morning and Chamber says, yeah, it was a jogger. And he yelled out, you know, is everything all right? And she was like, oh. And then the jogger left and she began to jerk me off again. And then she squeezed me, she squeezed my balls and this really hurt. And I couldn't take it anymore.

And I was screaming in pain and I managed to get my left hand free. She's sitting up on my chest leaning forward and I just leaned up and grabbed her like this from around the neck and I just yanked her. I was still lying down kind of and I sat up and grabbed her and pulled her. And when I came down, I landed on my knuckle.

And I just pulled her and she kind of flipped over on the side near the tree. And then he retells this several times because Detective Sarako can't really understand the physics of this. Yeah, I don't think I do either. Yes, this. Yes.

Detective Sarako says, did she groan or say anything? Or, and he says, nothing. No, it was just really quick. She just flipped over and then landed on her side. And then he goes over to check her and she's dead. What? Yeah, what do you think of that? I mean, I think maybe like 6% of that is plausible.

Which 6%? If she was into him, it makes sense that she would go off to pee. He's alone. She comes back, starts massaging his shoulders and kind of trying to get something going in that moment. The first two sentences of it. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. I have been that person like drunkenly walking home wanting to make something happen with somebody who's like, not that into me like this is something. Yeah, and why is, and I feel like, does anyone ever offer anyone a back rub, like not in a trying to make something happen that's probably not context like that's the B move.

Totally, yes. But then the thing with the taking off your underwear and putting it around the wrist. I mean, again, we get into this all the time with the show, but it's like the logistics of that. Well, and he says that like she's come back from peeing. So she like has it out. But the other thing is that this guy is like 6'4".

Yeah. Like 200 pounds. Like the idea that his wrists are gonna be immobilized by a pair of girls underwear. Right. And I can see him like actually in the conversation that we have so often about just the complexity of consent, but rarely about men.

Like I can see him going along with like having sex with her just because he's used to kind of doing what happens. And then deciding midway through like, I don't wanna be doing this or like, or that unearthing this aggression. To me, this all falls apart just physically where he says he like loops his arm around and like grabs her by the neck and sort of throws her off him.

And then in that tiny window, in those few seconds, like she is strangled to death. Right. That's not how strangulation works. Right. And if you're gonna kill someone by strangulation, like that's a fair amount of force. It's a fair amount of time.

It's something that often appears in conjunction with sexual violence. It's a very intimate form of force. Right. The media runs with Robert's side of the story in a sense after this becomes news. What so they believe this reverse cowgirl gymnastics accidental strangulation story?

They're kind of having their cake and eating it too. Cause they're not treating his, what he says is credible. So the post headline, the first post headline is Jenny killed in wild sex. What? Right. I mean, this seems like if you're gonna fudge it, just call it a rape and murder.

We didn't know the word rape in 1986, evidently. Man. You know, with that headline, it can be like, you know, we're not saying that she sexually attacked him. We're not saying that she quote molested him, which is what he says. Okay. But we're just saying there was wild sex

and when you have wild sex, someone can get murdered. Right. And that's, I guess, what happened here. And it's just like, this was not about sex and how like sex is a dangerous enterprise. Right. This guy for whom there was no accountability and who was acting destructively in every way he could

toward everyone around him. And to whom no one had apparently ever said, like, you know, you don't have to succeed. You don't have to be special. You don't have to be this thing. You're trying to be just like, find a way to live your life where you don't have to hurt people all the time.

Right. Like, why don't you focus on that? Right. This is the way that his world was functioning. Right. For a long time. I think that she just wandered into it. Yeah.

And the language she uses, you know, even after this confession is, you know, she made me do it. Like, she made me go to the park. She made me have sex with her. Like, she made me do all this stuff. And a friend of his mother's in Linda Wolfe's book has quoted as saying like, he's accusing Jennifer of that

and she wasn't making him do anything. His mother was the one who made him do everything. Yes, like his life was about being ruled by the desires of someone else and having to be someone that he was never gonna be and feeling that he had no control over his life. And when we feel robbed of control, we don't take that on the person whose fault we feel it is.

We take it out on the person who is vulnerable before us. And that was Jennifer. I mean, also, I don't know if anyone pointed this out at the time, but based on the physical evidence, it just as easily could have been that he talked her into going to the park. He talked her into having sex. And then he just strangled her during the sex.

I mean, if the only person that's talking about this is him, I don't see any reason to even believe his story of like the back rub and stuff. Like, why not? He gave her a back rub and she said, no, I'm not in the mood for this. You stole $50 from your girlfriend. And then he just kept, like, there's no reason

why we have to take any of his story at truth value. Yeah, and also, and I think this is an argument that very few people in the media had really considered in 1986, New York City. You can be a teenage girl who enthusiastically and assertively pursues a sexual encounter with someone. And at no point will you be asking to be murdered. Yeah.

And obviously there was some catalyst for the way that he responded. Something about being pursued, something about his frustration that night, something that we have no idea what it was. And then maybe he doesn't know what it was that he was just set off by something. I mean, one of the things that strikes me is

this murder seems actually much more typical of American murders than most true crime podcasts seem to suggest that because as narratives, who done it are much more interesting and mystery stories are much more interesting, it gives us this impression that the majority of murders in America are mysterious and difficult. When my understanding is it's over 80%,

possibly over 90% are murders like this, where there's a dead girl and there's a boy covered in scratches. It's actually good to have a couple of these stories in the bloodstream because it corrects this myth that everything requires like bones level CSI forensics when oftentimes it's like you're kind of dumb and things got out of hand.

And he after the fact proves himself to be basically incapable of telling the truth, which is what he's been doing for a long time. He's also like, maybe I will go to Harvard, maybe I'll be a model, like maybe things will all work out for Robert inexplicably because God knows the only choices are to like somehow become perfect and extraordinary or just fade into the abyss.

So I have to find a way to ignore these problems in some way. So what is the trial like? Oh boy. I think the biggest media frenzy of the trial comes when Robert's lawyer, guy named Litman, who to his credit is only doing his job, basically requests access to the journal

that Jennifer was keeping that summer are doing that it's contains potentially exculpatory information and is therefore accessible to him based on basic rules of discovery. Oh my God. What could possibly be exculpatory in that thing? Well. Like Dear Diary, I deserve to be strangled

by whoever happens to strangle me. Dear Diary, I'm having sex on purpose, which actually you can go to the heteropatriarchal phrase book and translate that to I deserve to be strangled in Central Park. Jesus. Yeah. And I have to assume that Robert's lawyer

is at least aware of this as a possibility and a potentially fruitful one that the media seizes on this because they're like Jennifer's sex diary. Jennifer's sex diary is gonna, the defense wants Jennifer's sex diary and that forces her parents to have to, they're the ones who are fielding all of this media obsession and are trying to grieve their child.

And the narrative becomes that it was like, it was a diary of her aggressive sexual conquest. Oh my God. But this becomes kind of the public's view that like it's going to be exculpatory for Robert because it'll show that she had this pattern of sexually abusing guys her age. So this does actually end up going public.

This does go into the record. The journal doesn't because the judge rules like, no, like there's no sex diary, fuck off. Okay, good, okay. But the point is that it's like, that's a bell that can't be unwrung as far as the public is concerned. And Jennifer is the one who's on trial here

is what it essentially turns into. Right. Did she have sex or didn't she? Did she like it? Did she do it on purpose with like people more than one? And it's like, yes, she did. She was living her life. Like she was an 18 year old woman

who was having sex on purpose. Like I don't think this is mitigating. Yeah. So one of the stories you hear about people that were like hit by a truck crossing the street and it's like, oh, well, it turns out she was wearing earbuds. And it's like, ah, you know,

the truck was going 40 miles an hour in like a crowded city. I'm not sure that actually means anything. It's just something that happened to be going on at the time. Exactly. You know, a conversation about how maybe we need to deal with how the hollow symbols of prosperity allow extremely dangerous men to pass as healthy

and even desirable. We're allowed to circumvent that and be like Jennifer was having sex, I think. Yeah. And it's like, it's just, it's another great diversion. It sounds like it's like his story checks out. And the way that this all ends is that this goes to trial.

The jury deliberates for eight days. Eight days? Yeah. And one of the things that they find themselves debating about a lot is how long was Robert strangling Jennifer for? Oh. For them, like one of the questions is like, how long can you have your hands around someone's neck?

The four you can gauge their intent to kill that person, essentially. Okay. They deliberate for eight days. On the ninth day, he withdraws his not guilty plea and enters a first degree manslaughter plea. Manslaughter? Which is accepted.

So first degree manslaughter or a voluntary manslaughter is you had the intent to kill in that time, but you didn't have prior intent. There's no premeditation. There's no planning. Okay. He has given a deal where he will go to prison for five to 15 years.

Okay. And as he pleads guilty, he has to admit guilt to the judge. It's one of the conditions the judge asks, did he intend to cause serious physical injury? And he says, looking back, I have to say yes, but in my heart, I didn't mean it to happen. Okay.

And the judge asks him again, and he says yes, because this is what you have to do. You have to say yes, I did. Yes, I did do it. And he says yes, but as he says yes, he shakes his head no. I mean, sure. We don't know what he felt at that moment. And I think one of the biggest reasons

that we'll never know is that he is incapable of knowing. Right. And then he goes to prison and is writing these optimistic letters to his family about, this is where he's gonna really turn things around. Oh, man. And it's just like the only script that he knows is the sort of character that he's been playing

for his whole life. And not even prison can really disrupt that for now. His mother must be devastated. Oh, God, poor Phyllis. Yeah. I mean, Phyllis made some mistakes, but it's like Phyllis. This is a story about when you have your child and you hold them in your arms for the first time

and you look down into their beautiful little eyes. He just, I think it's helpful to think to yourself, like I will love you unconditionally. I don't care who you are. I don't care what you do. And people always do the thing of, I wouldn't care if he was a murderer. I wouldn't care if he whatever.

It's like, tell yourself that you would love your child just as much if they fulfilled none of your dreams for yourself. Right. And don't put them in clothes that white people find overly trustworthy for some reason because that can lead them into some weird areas. I mean, so what's the epilogue to this?

How much did he, how much did he serve? So he serves the full 15 years. Wow. Because he's not as a prisoner prone to good behavior. He's released on Valentine's Day of 2003. Okay. After he gets out of prison, he gets busted a couple of times for possession

of heroin and cocaine. Okay. And then in the fall of 2007, the police raid his apartment where he and his girlfriend have been trafficking cocaine. Oh, wow. The following summer he pleads guilty and is sentenced to 19 years.

Whoa. He got 15 years for manslaughter and 19 years for drug trafficking. And so he is in prison now. He is at Sullivan Correctional Facility, which is also where David Berkowitz, the son of Sam, is incarcerated. And he will be released if he behaves himself

in early 2024 and if not in the fall of 2026. Wow. I mean, as always, you've done a really good job of like creating an interesting story out of this. Thank you. But the actual facts of the case are, you know, a man walked out of a bar with a woman, she turned up dead, he turned up covered in scratches.

This is a pretty open and shut one. It's like, it's not exceptional. It's exemplary. Yeah. The only thing that makes it interesting is he's a little dude wearing a suit. That's really it. It's the world they were in.

It's the same thing we see with Ted Bundy, you know, because the reason he was such catnip to the media and we're like, how could this exemplary white man who is like succeeding in by all the metrics that we've created as a society, how could he exhibit sexual violence? And it's like, once again. Right.

Right, a person who's never experienced any consequences. How could he do this one impulsive thing? And a person who's succeeded in a world that rewards dominant behavior, taking control of women, not regarding them as people. It's like, how could someone who's succeeded in a society that dehumanizes women literally kill a woman? It's like, I don't know.

How could I a person who eats a big bowl of pesto pasta with garlic every night be kept awake by heartburn? There is a cause and effect here. It's that I just put a little more garlic on. I do think that we're also really, we are compelled by these stories where the answers are hiding in plain sight where we are able to draw really close

to the answers to the problems that we're trying to solve but not actually to witness them. Cause the answer is here. The answer is like, someone needed to keep this kid accountable. Right. Someone needed to show him that there were consequences for the way he was living and someone needed to burst

the bubble of all these insufferable rich people who felt that they were making good choices in their life because they had the right cuffs. And if we're upset with the way that case was handled in the media, we need to work on creating a world where we don't act as if an 18 year old girl who sexually liberated is as dangerous as someone who's compulsively stealing and consuming

and eventually selling drugs and has so little ability for self insight that he at a certain point is going to lash out at somebody in a disproportionate way. Cause that does tend to happen to the unself aware. Yeah, it's important to never trust anyone with good hair. It is important listeners to trust the asymmetrical featured which I know you cannot see either of us, but trust me, yes go to the asymmetrical.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha, ha.