Sarah: Yeah, we should tell people about the curse. because it's like every time we go to record, this has happened the last five times. Everything is fine and then suddenly a piece of equipment doesn't work. And like the more I think about it, the more this seems like Lee Atwater would be petty from beyond the grave and he would do it because I talked about his human feelings.
Mike: I think that's the most plausible explanation. Welcome to You're Wrong About the only podcast haunted by Lee Atwater. Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the show where we give, ‘well, actually’ a good name.
Sarah: We're doing our best.
Mike: That was a listener suggestion.
Sarah: We have the best listener suggestions, right?
Mike: All of our listeners have way better ideas for taglines and show topics than we do.
Sarah: I would not go that far. I think that there’s and mine are equally good, but I understand that you're into the art of self-desecration.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I am a reporter for the Huffington post.
Sarah: I am Sarah Marshall and I'm researching a book on the Satanic Panic.
Mike: And before we get started today, we have an announcement. Yeah. I don't even know how to preface this, but. So we started a Patreon page.
Sarah: You sound so guilty about this. You have to maintain a good energy for the children when you tell them about how they're going to live somewhere else on the weekends now.
Mike: I feel deeply weird about doing this.
Sarah: Let's talk about the weirdness that we feel about this, because it is weird and that's okay.
Mike: I get that this is the way that the world works now, but I know this is going to sound like a job interview answer for what's your greatest weakness. 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, that it feels weird to ask people for support for doing it.
Sarah: Oh, you feel that it's not really labor because you enjoy it.
Mike: Yeah. When we started the show, we set out to record a couple of test episodes, and then we just kept recording them every week. This was never something we thought was going to last this long. We never thought this was going to be this fun to do. We never thought. We don't have tons of listeners, but 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.
Sarah: And also that 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 wouldn't have reached without them.
Mike: We have somehow cultivated the kind of listener base that still to this day sends us fun facts about Mike Dukakis. It makes me so happy that those are the kinds of people that we have found and that they have found us.
Sarah: 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 want to raise money so that we can do some more ambitious stuff that we've talked about down the line. And 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. We don't know how to stop. It's going to be maybe more erratic than we would like of a production schedule, but no one, 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.
Mike: I think the thing to say is that we're setting up a Patreon. It's patrion.com/yourewrongabout, and if that's not your jam and you don't want to give us money, you're not going to miss out on anything.
Sarah: Or if you want to, but you don't have money lying around to give to a couple of millennials.
Mike: 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 going to spend a lot of time, every episode talking about it.
Sarah: Do you know that for the price of a cup of coffee, you could buy Michael Hobbes a cup of coffee? And also, I would say there is 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 going to be more a part of it if you give money. You're not going to get more episodes, you're not going to get more access to anything. You're here. You're already implicated. See you in court.
Mike: I'm glad that this has become very unpleasant by the end.
Sarah: It's nice to prove that there's no one who can make this more uncomfortable than we already have. So that's nice.
Mike: And on that note, we should go to the actual thing that we're going to talk about today, which is the preppy murder.
Sarah: The preppy murder. Yeah. Tell me about, what do you know about this case?
Mike: When you first told me you were going to 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 am ashamed to admit, I have never actually seen an entire episode of Law and Order.
Sarah: I feel like that makes you someone who's never been exposed to a common cold, you're just a prized specimen of some sort. You're untouched.
Mike: 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.
Sarah: 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. They had wormed their way inside of this 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. I was like, what the fuck was that?
Mike: The basis of all good journalism. What the fuck?
Sarah: What the fuck was that?
Mike: Yeah. So what do we know about Robert Chambers’ upbringing? He turns out to be the killer eventually. But what do we know about his life leading up to it?
Sarah: I love how you say that as if it's weird for me to want to 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. And she emigrated to New York in the late 1950s. She seems to have had that view that a lot of people do of being accepted by a particular elite stratum of society is survival. Because the way she oriented her life around this is it all went into becoming part of this specific world of New York City, Upper East Side society. And so she started working as a private nurse, and quickly started working for patients who are embedded within society who are very wealthy. And so she could, once you know one of them and they trust you in those circles, then you develop that kind of cachet. You can get jobs working for them. 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. This makes a big impression on her as it would inevitably. And so she decides Robert has to go to the same nursery school that John 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, at least in terms of what Robert would say later and what other people would observe, that she was really the one who was the visionary of who he needed to be.
Mike: And he is the implement that she is using to get into this world.
Sarah: And I think there's also that thing, this idea that your child can be the one who truly has the thing that you can never truly have. She couldn't be born in America. She couldn't really get into this world at a young age. She couldn't be truly of it by being part of it first 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. Babysitters said that you did not have to tell him to do anything twice. He didn't really have friends of his own age. And from when he was three, he knew to shake hands with anyone that he was meeting for the first time.
Mike: So he's like one of those little kids that you see wearing a suit and it’s 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.
Sarah: Yeah. And that he is being put through these paces from a very young age of being trained to be a little grown up. And then when he's eight, he joins the Knickerbocker Grays. Can you guess what this might be?
Mike: Is this, I'm thinking it's either a soccer team or like the Freemasons.
Sarah: 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. 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. And by 1974, which is when Robert joined, there were 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.
Mike: 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 going to 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. So I can see how something like this would have been a reliable marker of upper class-ness. 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.
Sarah: Yeah. And you're never going to get there on time. If you go there after it becomes accessible to you, then by definition, it's no longer of value in the same way it once was.
Mike: It's like once I have heard of a band, it is not cool anymore.
Sarah: And this is Phyllis Shanley Chambers’ entire fucking life. It's just a chase. She's the Greyhound chasing the rabbit. And so Robert, he joins the Grays. This is a very useful thing because then she is able to take on a leadership role of the Grays and establish yet more connections. And all of this is going to be very useful later when he needs to be released on bail. Because another issue is that the Chambers have never really made that much money. As Robert was growing up, their combined annual income was something like $80,000. Which is a lot of money. It's a lot of money in the eighties. It's not a lot of money by the standards of the people whose company they're trying to keep and who they are trying to keep up with.
Mike: Right. It's not wear furs and have a live in staff, money. It's, you can reliably fake that, but you can't actually achieve that.
Sarah: Right? It feels like it's just enough money to maintain the illusion. She shops at Upper East Side consignment stores. And so she's always really well-dressed, but it's just a season out of date. She's almost there, everything about her life is almost there. Robert is the one who can be all the way there. If only he would stop stealing, which is something he starts to do around the start of the Knickerbocker Grey's years. This is how his rebellion begins. He starts stealing from other kids.
Mike: What does he steal?
Sarah: 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, he checks his piggy bank and all $20 worth of change that he has been squirreling away is gone. And then the next day, Robert has $20 for some reason. And this is a habit that he gets into early and that just grows and grows and grows for him. 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. When Robert is 13 or 14, he brings a girl over to his house and the girl's like, wow, there's a huge portrait of you in your own house. And Robert's like, yeah, my mom had that done. What do you think of that?
Mike: He must've 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, you know, get good grades or, you know, 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've just felt like a treadmill that he was on, that he could never do enough.
Sarah: Right. Because that's the position that she's put herself in. If you begin your life knowing, 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 will never have been born into that world. And that is a world that will always let you know that.
Mike: It's like pageant parents, but real.
Sarah: Pageants get pretty real.
Mike: 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.
Sarah: Right. And then your whole life is a performance.
Mike: So does anybody ever notice the stealing? I guess he's stealing from people that are enough that they don't necessarily notice $20 bucks missing and don't necessarily care.
Sarah: This is the interesting thing about it. He's stealing from other rich kids. And the way this escalates is that he later gets 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 get cash. And he's later on as a teenager, will start talking his way into the buildings, Upper East Side apartment buildings, where the doorman knows him, or the doorman can call up the maid of one of the appointments. She's like, “Oh yeah, buzz Robert in”, because one of his girlfriends lives there or they’ll recognize them, or he looks like someone who lives there or something.
And so if you are Robert Chambers walking briskly into a lobby in your nice Oxford cloth shirt and your double breasted blue blazer - which is a hard phrase to say that I've been practicing - then what he essentially does is he will go into the building and then go to whatever apartment he feels like burglarizing where 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 will steal thousands of dollars’ worth of valuables and furs and electronics and, you know, 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 like, fuck preppies, fuck these preppies, not caring. So he also has, completely unsurprisingly, a lot of animosity toward this population that he’s trying to get approval from.
Mike: I 100% had that in middle of 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.
Sarah: He as a teenager he has a friend named David Philia, who's black and who is his accomplice and a lot of these burglaries. And when they are brought in for a police questioning, because 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 who's it going to harm if we let you out?
Mike: Oh, the power of white skin and a collared shirt cannot be underestimated. Two extra inches of fabric.
Sarah: Yeah. So people notice and he also starts getting in trouble for substance abuse when he is a kid, because he starts drinking at least by the time he is 13, he starts using cocaine when he's 14. He starts freebasing 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, will take it. Anything but sobriety.
So Robert started at Choate in 1977, which is a very fancy prep school in Connecticut where Michael Douglas, among other people, went. And they're richer and preppier people than Michael Douglas, but I feel like Michael Douglas embodies the sort of like lipless smugness 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, “I've had it, I've had it with Bob's drinking.” His parents have reached one of many breaking points. Robert's dad storms out. And Robert, who has to go back to Choate in a few hours, goes out looking for his dad and doesn't find him, and then has to go back to school. But he gets picked up from school and taken back to New York in a limo! Heartbreak doesn't feel that much better in a limo.
Mike: It just reminds me of that old Oscar Wilde quote, which I'm probably going to 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 that even getting them would even make you happier because you'd always be looking over your shoulder.
Sarah: Yeah. You can work so hard at performing that identity that you don't ever actually ask, what do I want? It's funny, I read this past week and I think the first book published for a mainstream American audience on eating disorders, it's called the Golden Cage ,and the author, Hilda Bruch, says 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. Isn't it such a weird thing that is 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 emotionally attends to the mother and makes the bad marriage bearable. Or is daddy's obedient daughter, even when the other kids are being rebellious. 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, the only way that she can gain what feels like some control over herself and her life is to secretly start starving, or start binging and purging, or both. And that this is all that's left to you. You know, I was reading that this week is doing some furious underlining and then thinking about Robert Chambers. This is not that different. We all exhibit pretty similar behaviors. We're all humans. We're 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 was 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 I'm in control of my psyche. Fuck all of you.
Mike: I'm just really glad that my parents never wanted anything for me. So how did this lead up to the murder? Does he start escalating from drugs to violence?
Sarah: Yeah. You know what's funny is that he really doesn't. The thefts become riskier and for more money. He goes to Choate for a year. He is asked to leave in the parlance of this world because he's not a good student. He doesn't care. He doesn't have the mental wherewithal to be doing the work that you know you're supposed to do. Because like you have to at least put on a good show of work hard, play hard.
Mike: Like a solid B-.
Sarah: Yeah, he's not conning the system and 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. So he is continuously given opportunities that he really doesn't want and doesn't know what to do with, and just like really stupidly self-sabotages in the way of someone who wants to get caught.
One of the interesting things too, is 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 sends him to live in the basement of the building until he gets his act together. He 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 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 in some way you can't do wrong. Because he keeps fucking up, but he keeps being asked to keep playing the game. No one will take him out of the game.
Mike: Right. We tend to see consequences for some groups as devastating and for other groups as necessary. And he fell into the group that we couldn't possibly send him to jail. He has such a promising future ahead of him.
Sarah: And it's like, no, he doesn't. What if the consequence for him was ending up, not in a punitive system, but in a world where it didn't matter how nice of a chin he had or how much he looked like a Kennedy. What if he just had to go to a world where he was not rewarded for the illusions that he projected.
Mike: Right. You know, if anybody had really asked what his wishes were, he might've excelled, really excelled at something, but mashing his cubicle little face into this round hole, just created all this pressure.
Sarah: Yeah. And also his mom's still after this, at this time she’s like, well, maybe he can go to Oxford. Maybe he can go to Harvard. Phyllis, you're not doing your child any favors. Meanwhile, as he has been flailing around Jennifer Levin, I guess I don't like to make the transition from this young woman who we're going to talk about and then later on, we're going to know her as the victim in the newspaper. There's no good transition to that. But 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 his crowd. They're both hanging out at Dorian's Red Hand, which is the bar all of these teenagers are basically playing as grown up.
Mike: What do we know about her? She was a striver too, right?
Sarah: Yeah. She's born and spent her first year 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 for herself. She found a guy who she wasn't in love with, but liked and had feelings for, and had what she felt to be pretty good sex. And she was like, I did it, 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 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 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. Because I don't think humans really do that typically.
So she was getting some nutrients that she needed from parental approval or secure love from these 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 with these blonde, skinny limbed, WASP-y girls who were the thing that she had been trying to be.
She struggled with her weight. She went on little crash, raw veggie diets, because she weighed a healthy weight and wanted to weigh a WASP weight. She wanted to be at the Shibley 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 Wolf. She paints this picture of a girl who had a sense of freedom and pride. Like she had been dating this guy named Brock on and off for a long time, but they had a pretty open understanding. And so he was spending the summer in Europe 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 at Dorian's and he saw her across the room and they're in this bar where everyone knows everybody else. This is all the same crowd. They're all surveilling each other. 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.
Mike: Playing the hits. It doesn't get much better than playing the hits.
Sarah: And so they meet, and she finds him so handsome, so dashing, and they go to bed and she tells her friends that he is her first orgasm.
Mike: God, just like Joey Buttafuoco. This is a theme for us.
Sarah: Don't get too attached to the man who gives you your first orgasm if you’re a teenage girl. If you've been having sex with teenage boys exclusively to this point, you're going to have a very specific idea about the abundance or scarcity of orgasms in this world, that might not be entirely accurate. And this is the part where I'm going to 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.
Mike: Okay. Robert Chambers. Yeah, he looks like Donkey Kong 64. He's all polygons. He's these big blocky polygons. He has a big rectangular head and big triangular shoulders and little crash bandicoot legs. He is just this cartoon figure.
Sarah: He was also very tall. He was like 6’4”. He was really tall, not stocky, but a solidly built guy.
Mike: And he's got this great, Prince charming hair. In most of these pictures, he's wearing a suit.
Sarah: Yeah. You do not see pictures of him and like tabloids at the time. If you look at this case’s legacy now, you will not find a picture of him in a jumpsuit.
Mike: On Google image. There's a picture of his perp walk and he's wearing a Lacoste polo shirt.
Sarah: 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.
Mike: 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 he and Jennifer start getting hot and heavy.
Sarah: Well he and Jennifer go to bed once, and then essentially, she spends the rest of the summer hoping that they'll get more stuff started, and they see each other a couple times. They did not have a relationship. He was someone who she really liked. Or actually, I should not say that because this is mysterious because she definitely pursued him, but a couple of her friends have also said after the fact that she didn't like him as a person, it was just that he was like good at sex, and she liked having sex with him.
There's this interesting thing too, where the last night of her life, she went to Dorian's. Robert was there, too. And he was 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 is pissed at him, this is just a classic Robert Chambers. He stole $50 bucks out of her pocketbook.
Mike: Oh, from his girlfriend?
Sarah: From his girlfriend. 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.
Mike; That's opportunistic. That's lizard brain thinking of just, Hey, there's cash in front of me. I'm going to snatch it.
Sarah: Yeah. So he took money out of her wallet. She, as one of the long suffering main squeezes of Robert Chambers, is like, you know, 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 ignores her. She goes away. She comes back. She makes another attempt. It seems as if it also bothered her just to be ignored. She was like, excuse me, pay attention to me. She's talking to Robert and tells him, I just want you to know that you're the best sex I've ever had. And of course his girlfriend overhears and comes over to him and she has this bag that has some condoms in it, and she throws it at him and she’s like, you know, use these on somebody else cause you're not going to use them on me.
Mike: Holy shit. This is like Real Housewives stuff.
Sarah: Yeah. This is teenagers acting like a bunch of drunk 40 year old’s. I have read and seen true crime-y TV accounts of this where it's like, and then Jennifer thwarted his relationship and then he had to take it out on her. There was no cause and effect here I don't think in that way. It's not as if this relationship was the last thing he was holding onto or that it was so crucial. He was not a healthy person for other people to be around in any way. And that had been true for a while. It just hadn't always been true this dramatically.
Mike: 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. 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 where nobody is central to each other's lives in it. These are all orbiting satellites.
Sarah: As so often with crime, I feel like this is a story about people who didn't really see each other deeply as human beings. They saw each other playing roles in each other's lives. If she were alive today, she might not even remember him. She would be talking with one of her friends and they'd be like, I remember that guy, Robert Chambers. She'd be like, oh yeah, that fucking guy, what happened to him? And then he would look him up and he'd be 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.
Mike: Oh wow. That's a lot.
Sarah: So the equivalent of four per day, and this one was in the news for years. And it's not as if this was the most brutal or the most weird, or the most inexplicable murder in New York. I think it was a salable 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 because that’s a story that always sells. Also because we love this idea of, I loved her so much I had to kill her. Somehow this thing where like the passion between two straight people rolls into violence somehow, inevitably, because we understand that toxic masculine sexuality in America is so connected to violence in a way that we like to think of as that’s just part of love is violence and it's like, no, it's part of American masculine is violence.
Mike: Passionate intensity. We like the story of passionate intensity rather than the story of just being a bit meh about each other.
Sarah: Yeah. But so Jennifer decides she’s going to try and wait this one out. And so she and Alex, Robert's girlfriend, are both at the bar and he's off in another part of the bar and Alex eventually leaves. And so then it's basically just Jennifer and Robert. And at 4:30 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, if you go there at 4:30 in the morning, you're asking to be 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 saw two people doing something together and assumed that it was sex. But then kept on jogging because he was worried about getting involved. It's another classic New York story element.
And then another passer-by 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 in initially are like, okay, this was some random attack. This was some random rape carried out by some 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 looked like defensive wounds from Jennifer. And he's like, “A cat scratched me.” Because he's a bad liar.
Mike; Jesus. So it's really obvious from minute one that this is the prime suspect.
Sarah: Yeah. If they'd actually played it straight, it would have been a bad Law and Order episode. Because Robert is the guy they would see in minute four. And as 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 Sirocco, 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 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, 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 laughed in a weird way, more like a cackle or something. And then she sat up and she sat on my face and then she'd 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 a weird kind of laughing type sound 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 Sirocco says, “At three o'clock in the morning?” And Chambers says, “Yeah, it was a jogger and he yelled out, you know, is everything all right? And she was like, shh. 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 around the neck and I just yanked her. I was still lying down, 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 Scirocco can't really understand the physics of this.
Mike: Yeah. I don't think I do either. Yes. This, yeah.
Sarah: And Detective Sirocco says, “Did she groan or say anything?” 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.
Mike: What?
Sarah: Yeah. What do you think of that?
Sarah: I think maybe 6% of that is plausible.
Sarah: Which 6%?
Mike: 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 trying to get something going in that moment.
Sarah: The first two sentences of it.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I have been that person, drunkenly walking home, wanting to make something happen with somebody who's not that into me.
Sarah: Yeah… Does anyone ever offer anyone a back rub, not in a trying to make something happen that's probably not- context. That's the move.
Mike: Totally. But then the thing with taking off your underwear and putting it around the wrist. Again, we get into this all the time with a show, that it's the logistics of that.
Sarah: Well, he says that like, she's come back from peeing, so she has it out. But the other thing is that this guy is like 6’4”. 200 pounds. The idea that his wrists are going to be immobilized by a pair of girl's underwear. And I can see him actually, and the conversation that we have so often about the complexity of consent, but rarely about men, I can see him going along with having sex with her just because he's used to doing what happens and then deciding midway through, I don't want to be doing this or like, or that unearthing this aggression.
To me, this all falls apart physically where he says he loops his arm around and grabs her by the neck and sort of throws her off him. And then in that tiny window, in those few seconds, she is strangled to death. That's not how strangulation works. And if you're going to kill someone by strangulation, 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 and the media runs with Robert’s side of the story, in a sense, after this becomes news.
Mike: Wait so they believe this reverse cowgirl, gymnastics, accidental strangulation story?
Sarah: They're having their cake and eating it too. Because they're not treating what he says as credible. So the Post headline, the first Post headline is, “Jenny killed in wild sex”.
Mike: What? It seems like if you're going to fudge it, just call it a rape and murder.
Sarah: We didn’t know the word rape in 1986, evidently. With that headline, it can be like, you know, we're not saying that she sexually attacked him. We're not saying that she “molested” him, which is what he says, but we're just saying there was wild sex. And when you have wild sex, someone can get murdered. And that's what happened here and it's just, this was not about sex and how sex is a dangerous enterprise. This was about this guy for whom there was no accountability and who was acting destructively and every way he could toward everyone around him and to whom no one had apparently ever said, 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 find a way to live your life where you don't have to hurt people all the time. Right? Why don't you focus on that? This is the way that his world was functioning for a long time. And I think that she gets wandered into. And the language he uses, you know, even after this confession is, you know, she made me do it. She made me go to the park. She made me have sex with her. She made me do all this stuff.
And a friend of his mother's in Linda Wolfe's book is quoted as saying, “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. His life was about being ruled by the desires of someone else and having to be someone that he was never going to be and feeling that he had no control over his life. And when we feel robbed of control, we don't take that out 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.
Mike: 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. If the only person that's talking about this is him, I don't see any reason to even believe his story of the back rub and stuff. 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 going. There's no reason why we have to take any of his story at face value.
Sarah: 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. And obviously there were some catalysts 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, right?
Mike: Yeah. 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. Because as narratives, who done-its 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 Bones level CSI forensics, when oftentimes it's dumb and things got out of hand,
Sarah: And he, after the fact, proved 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. Maybe things will all work out for Robert inexplicably because God knows the only choices are to 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.
Mike: So what is the trial like?
Sarah: Oh boy, I think the biggest media frenzy of the trial comes when Robert's lawyer, a guy named Litman, who to his credit is only doing his job, basically requests access to the journal that Jennifer was keeping that summer. Arguing that it contains potentially exculpatory information and is therefore accessible to him based on basic rules of discovery.
Mike: Oh my God. What could possibly be exculpatory in that thing? Dear diary, I deserve to be strangled by whoever happens to strangle me.
Sarah: Dear diary, I'm having sex on purpose, which actually you can go to the hetero patriarchal phrasebook and translate that to, I deserve to be strangled in Central Park. And I have to assume that Robert's lawyer is at least aware of this as a possibility and a potentially fruitful one and the media seizes on this, because they're like Jennifer sex diary, Jennifer's sex diary. The defense wants Jennifer’s sex diary. And that forces her parents to field all of this media obsession and are trying to grieve their child. And the narrative becomes that it was a diary of her aggressive sexual conquests, that this becomes the public's view. It's going to be exculpatory for Robert because it'll show that she had this pattern of sexually abusing guys her age.
Mike: So this does actually end up going public? This does go into the record.
Sarah: The journal doesn't because the judge rules, no, there's no sex diary. fuck off.
Mike: Okay. Good.
Sarah: But the point is, that's a bell that can't be un-wrung as far as the public is concerned. And Jennifer is the one who's on trial here, is what it essentially turns into. Did she have sex or didn't she? Did she like it? Did she do it on purpose? With people more than once? And it's like, yes, she did. She was living her life. She was an 18 year old woman who was having sex on purpose. I don't think this is mitigating.
Mike: Yeah. It's like those stories you hear about people that were 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 and like a crowded city. I'm not sure that actually means anything.
Sarah: It's just something that happened to be going on at the time. 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. It's another great diversion.
Mike: It's like his story checks out.
Sarah: And the way that this all ends is that this goes to trial. The jury deliberates for eight days.
Mike: Eight days?
Sarah: Yeah. And one of the things that they find themselves debating about a lot is how long was Robert strangling Jennifer for. For them, one of the questions is how long can you have your hands around someone's neck before you can gauge their intent to kill that person, essentially. They deliberated for eight days. On the ninth day he withdraws his not guilty plea and enters a first degree manslaughter.
Mike: Manslaughter.
Sarah: Which is accepted. So first degree manslaughter or a voluntary manslaughter is, you have the intent to kill at that time, but you didn't have prior intent. There's no premeditation. There's no planning. And he has given a deal where he will go to prison for 5 to 15 years. 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. And the judge asked him again, and he said, 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. 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. And then he goes to prison and is writing these optimistic letters to his family about his is where he's going to really turn things around. And it's just the only script that he knows is this sort of character that he's been playing for his whole life. And not even prison can really disrupt that for him.
Mike: His mother must be devastated.
Sarah: Oh God, poor Phyllis.
Mike: Yeah. Phyllis made some mistakes, but it's like Phyllis.
Sarah: 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 they're beautiful little eyes. I think it's helpful to think to yourself, 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 did, whatever. Tell yourself that you would love your child just as much if they fulfill none of your dreams for yourself. 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.
Mike: So what's the epilogue to this? How much did he serve?
Sarah: He serves the full 15 years. Because he's not, as a prisoner, prone to good behavior. He's released on Valentine's Day of 2003. After he gets out of prison, he gets busted a couple of times for possession of heroin and cocaine. And then in the fall of 2007, the police raid his apartment where he and his girlfriend have been trafficking cocaine. The following summer, he pleads guilty and is sentenced to 19 years. 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.
Mike: Wow. As always, you've done a really good job of creating an interesting story out of this. But the actual facts of the case are, 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.
Sarah: It's not exceptional. It's exemplary.
Mike: Yeah. Well, 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.
Sarah: It's the same thing we see with Ted Bundy, because the reason he was such a catnip to the media is they’re like, how could this exemplary white man who is like succeeding by all the metrics that we've created as a society, how could he exhibit sexual violence? And it's like, once again-
Mike: A person who's never experienced any consequences, how could he do this one impulsive thing?
Sarah: And a person who's succeeded in a world that rewards dominant behavior, taking control of women, not regarding them as people. How can someone who's succeeded in a society that dehumanizes women literally kill a woman? And 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. I just put a little more garlic on. I do think that we're also really 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. Because the answer is here. The answer is someone needed to keep this kid accountable. 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's 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 had at certain point is going to lash out at somebody in a disproportionate way. Because that does tend to happen to the unself-aware.
Mike: Yeah, it's important to never trust anyone with good hair.
Sarah: It is important, listeners, to trust the asymmetrical featured, which I know you cannot see either of us, but trust me. Go to the asymmetrical.