The primary time John J. Lennon set eyes on Robert Chambers — the person notoriously branded the “Preppy Killer” by the media — he was slouched in an outsized prison-issue inexperienced shirt and soiled Skechers, simply one other convict at New York’s now-shuttered Sullivan Correctional Facility.
Lennon was struck by the distinction.
“He was hardly the image of privilege I’d seen on TV,” he writes in “The Tragedy of True Crime: 4 Responsible Males and the Tales That Outline Us” (Celadon Books), out Tuesday. Then 54, Chambers was, Lennon says, nonetheless tall and broad-shouldered, his jawline sharp, however his thick hair was grey and thinning.
What Lennon noticed was not the Higher East Facet prepster immortalized by tabloids, however a person ending a 19-year sentence for medication, a conviction that had adopted the 15 years he served for killing Jennifer Levin in Central Park in 1986.
That killing had electrified New York Metropolis, within the worst manner. The circumstances have been sordid and sensational: two youngsters fueled by alcohol and cocaine, a hookup after an evening out at Dorrian’s Crimson Hand bar on the Higher East Facet and a physique found beneath an oak tree.
For the general public, it was greater than against the law; it was a parable about privilege and sexual deviance.
Lennon notes that the case “changed into a cautionary story in regards to the ’80s, the period of extra and inebriation — younger folks within the throes of habit, uninhibited and numb.” In a yr when New York Metropolis recorded 1,309 homicides in its first 10 months, most in poor neighborhoods, the homicide of Jennifer Levin by a boy from the Higher East Facet shook the notion that privilege insulated folks from violence.
Many years later, Lennon met Chambers not as a journalist parachuting in however as a fellow convict.
His vantage level was uncommon: a person serving his personal life sentence for homicide, who had turned to writing from jail and knew firsthand the way in which true crime flattens sophisticated folks into archetypes.
Lennon had grown up in Brooklyn housing initiatives earlier than shifting to Hell’s Kitchen, the place he fell in with the Westies and hustled on the streets. In 2001, throughout a drug-dealing dispute, he shot and killed a person from his previous neighborhood.
Convicted of second-degree homicide, Lennon was sentenced to twenty-eight years to life. He arrived in jail in his twenties, and slowly reshaped himself right into a author, publishing essays and articles in shops like The Atlantic, Esquire and The New York Occasions. That transformation gave him each credibility and suspicion amongst different inmates.
But when Chambers “was going to speak to any journalist, he needed it to be me,” Lennon recollects.
Pressed to explain the night time Levin died, Chambers — who cooperated with the e book, in line with the writer — faltered. “I mentioned, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ Then she didn’t transfer. And I checked out her and her eyes have been open. After which I freaked out, backing up, all the way in which to the rock wall by the trail,” Lennon says he advised him.
Chambers admitted that panic took over, that he hid. Lennon requested why, a long time later, he couldn’t merely personal it. Chambers went silent. To Lennon, it appeared as if Chambers nonetheless couldn’t totally comprehend what he had achieved.
“My finest guess is that he nonetheless can’t perceive how one minute he was strolling into the park and speaking with Jennifer, after which, minutes later, strangling her,” Lennon writes. “How do you clarify one thing you may’t consider you probably did?”
Even at 19, Chambers’ phrases betrayed denial. Arrested days later with scratches on his face, he advised police they got here from a cat. Hours later, underneath questioning, he admitted they have been from playing around with Jennifer.
“I appreciated her very a lot,” he advised detectives. “She was a really good particular person. Straightforward to get together with. Straightforward to speak to. She was simply too pushy.”
These phrases, recorded in transcripts, forged a protracted shadow over how he was perceived. Ultimately, prosecutors and protection reduce a deal: a plea to first-degree manslaughter. He served the total 15 years. When he walked out in 2003, he did so “an untreated addict,” Lennon notes.
Sobriety by no means took maintain. Inside a number of years, Chambers was caught in a drug sting and sentenced to 19 extra years. Dependancy outlined almost every thing. “Despite the fact that I used to be, like, 36 after I received out, I used to be nonetheless 19 in my thoughts,” he allegedly advised Lennon.
Chambers struggled with regret. He advised Lennon he envied the essay Lennon had as soon as written to the household of his personal sufferer. “I assume I really feel like, how may I not have found out how to do this?” Chambers mentioned. “I feel it was at all times one thing I felt like I wanted to earn.”
In 2019, AMC aired “The Preppy Homicide: Loss of life in Central Park.” Youthful inmates and correctional officers who had by no means heard of his case all of the sudden noticed it splashed throughout the TV within the dayroom. For Chambers, it was a intestine punch. Jail had been, in its manner, a protect from the relentless protection. Now the story adopted him even behind bars.
Chambers as soon as tried to elucidate himself in writing. In 2018, in a Sullivan school class, he allegedly turned in a essay referred to as “Lust within the Clutches of a Dreamsleep.” Lennon describes it as “an East Coast model of Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘Much less Than Zero.’” The piece evoked a shadowy secret society, the Seven Silver Keys, the place adults anointed chosen youngsters with guarantees of cash, intercourse, medication and energy.
“All the pieces was for the taking. However as soon as you’re taking, you’ll give without end,” Chambers wrote. One determine, a “Hitler in an Armani swimsuit,” delivered sermons of prejudice and greed. Chambers claimed he ran errands to Wall Road workplaces, carrying envelopes he suspected contained insider data. At 15, he wrote, he had “secret cash, a secret house, and extra secrets and techniques of the who’s who of politics and finance than I knew what to do with.”
He described a seven-month affair with an older married lady who whisked him to MoMA, McSorley’s and the Hamptons. “I used to be fearful of her,” he admitted. “I beloved her.” Reality or fiction, it painted the image of a teen racing by Manhattan, consuming and consumed, his future already burning out.
When Lennon started writing about Chambers, buddies and pen buddies warned him off. One feminine penpal remembered the case and advised him that exhibiting empathy would break his status. One other, a French pal named Anne, watched the docu-series and visited him afterward. “You need to have respect for Jennifer once you write this e book, John,” she mentioned, eyes watery.
Lennon doesn’t flinch from the tragedy. “Robert Chambers has so fully absorbed the exterior media narrative about himself as an irredeemable determine that it’s onerous to think about him discovering the wherewithal to ever change into greater than his crime,” Lennon writes.
On July 25, 2023, Chambers walked out of Shawangunk Correctional Facility with a commissary examine, $40 in launch money and a bag of socks and underwear.
“Numerous tabloid tales, prime-time specials, made-for-TV motion pictures, books … Rob’s internalized all of it,” Lennon writes. “And so, I think about, have the Levins.”
