The first 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: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define 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 Upper East Side prepster immortalized by tabloids, however a person ending a 19-year sentence for medicine, 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 City, within the worst approach. The circumstances had been sordid and sensational: two youngsters fueled by alcohol and cocaine, a hookup after an evening out at Dorrian’s Red Hand bar on the Upper East Side and a physique found beneath an oak tree.
For the general public, it was greater than a criminal offense; it was a parable about privilege and sexual deviance.
Lennon notes that the case “changed into a cautionary story concerning the ’80s, the period of extra and inebriation — younger folks within the throes of dependancy, uninhibited and numb.” In a yr when New York City recorded 1,309 homicides in its first 10 months, most in poor neighborhoods, the homicide of Jennifer Levin by a boy from the Upper East Side shook the notion that privilege insulated folks from violence.
Decades 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 best way true crime flattens difficult folks into archetypes.
Lennon had grown up in Brooklyn housing initiatives earlier than transferring 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 Times. That transformation gave him each credibility and suspicion amongst different inmates.
But if Chambers “was going to speak to any journalist, he wished it to be me,” Lennon recollects.
Pressed to explain the evening Levin died, Chambers — who cooperated with the guide, in keeping with the writer — faltered. “I stated, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ Then she didn’t transfer. And I checked out her and her eyes had been open. And then I freaked out, backing up, all the best way to the rock wall by the trail,” Lennon says he instructed him.
Chambers admitted that panic took over, that he hid. Lennon requested why, many years 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 performed.
“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’ll be able to’t consider you probably did?”
Even at 19, Chambers’ phrases betrayed denial. Arrested days later with scratches on his face, he instructed police they got here from a cat. Hours later, below questioning, he admitted they had been from playing around with Jennifer.
“I favored her very a lot,” he instructed detectives. “She was a really good individual. Easy to get together with. Easy to speak to. She was simply too pushy.”
Those phrases, recorded in transcripts, solid an extended shadow over how he was perceived. In the tip, prosecutors and protection minimize 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. Within a couple of years, Chambers was caught in a drug sting and sentenced to 19 extra years. Addiction outlined practically every little thing. “Even although I used to be, like, 36 after I bought out, I used to be nonetheless 19 in my thoughts,” he allegedly instructed Lennon.
Chambers struggled with regret. He instructed Lennon he envied the essay Lennon had as soon as written to the household of his personal sufferer. “I suppose I really feel like, how may I not have discovered how to try this?” Chambers stated. “I feel it was at all times one thing I felt like I wanted to earn.”
In 2019, AMC aired “The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park.” Younger inmates and correctional officers who had by no means heard of his case immediately noticed it splashed throughout the TV within the dayroom. For Chambers, it was a intestine punch. Prison had been, in its approach, a defend 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’ ‘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, medicine and energy.
“Everything was for the taking. But as soon as you are taking, you’ll give eternally,” Chambers wrote. One determine, a “Hitler in an Armani swimsuit,” delivered sermons of prejudice and greed. Chambers claimed he ran errands to Wall Street places of work, carrying envelopes he suspected contained insider data. At 15, he wrote, he had “secret cash, a secret condo, 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 terrified of her,” he admitted. “I liked her.” Fact or fiction, it painted the image of a youngster racing by way of Manhattan, consuming and consumed, his future already burning out.
When Lennon started writing about Chambers, pals and pen buddies warned him off. One feminine penpal remembered the case and instructed him that displaying empathy would break his status. Another, a French pal named Anne, watched the docu-series and visited him afterward. “You should have respect for Jennifer whenever you write this guide, John,” she stated, eyes watery.
Lennon doesn’t flinch from the tragedy. “Robert Chambers has so utterly absorbed the exterior media narrative about himself as an irredeemable determine that it’s exhausting to think about him discovering the wherewithal to ever turn 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.
“Countless 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.”
