Quote of the Day (Teresa Carpenter, on ‘Crime As Entertainment’ in the Eighties)

“It would be no exaggeration to call the ’80s the decade of Crime as Entertainment. An epoch where fascination with ‘reality’ permeated every nook and crevice of television. The first and most visible manifestation of the phenomenon was the unprecedented number of miniseries and movies-of-the-week based loosely upon true tales of mayhem. In 1981, there was Murder in Texas recreating the demise of Texas heiress and equestrian, Joan Hill. The following year brought The Executioner’s Song based upon Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the felonious life and ultimate electrocution of Gary Gilmore. Nineteen-eighty-four was a bloody year, giving us both The Burning Bed and Fatal Vision, followed close upon by the following year’s extravaganza, The Atlanta Child Murders. Nineteen-eighty-seven produced not one, but two, network miniseries on the rather minor case of Frances Schreuder, a demented Mormon heiress who induced her son to kill her father. And, of course, in the closing months of the decade were offerings fresh off the newsstands: The Preppie Murder and Howard Beach: Making the Case for Murder.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Teresa Carpenter, “1980-1989: Crime as Entertainment,” The Village Voice, Jan. 2, 1990

Forty years ago today, the crime referred to in the above paragraph, “The Preppy Murder,” occurred in Central Park. In the attempt to create “entertainment” out of a story, the media’s use of “preppy” represented a misnomer. 

That would not be the only distortion involving the case. To the shame of the American legal system, the next one perpetuated sexism that violated female victims all over again.

It has infuriated me that, though account after account eventually got around to the exact background of the accused, Robert Chambers, the words “preppy killer” and “privilege” appeared to leach out these subtleties. 

His mother was an Irish-born private nurse who struggled to scrape together enough to pay (with the help of scholarships) his way into several private schools, including York Preparatory School. Though trying to pass in the circles of wealth, Robert possessed neither the affluence nor the self-assurance that came with the term “preppy.”

Thank God the press didn’t have an equivalent term to latch onto in the early 1900s, when Chester Gillette, a poor relation of an industrialist, took his pregnant girlfriend on a lake in upstate New York, clubbed her while out alone on their boat, and left her to drown. 

In fact, Gillette briefly attended a prep school in his youth, but in all the subsequent accounts of the case—the breathless newspaper reports as well as, in fictional form, Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy and the Montgomery Clift film A Place in the Sun—that aspect of his life was not emphasized, unlike the Chambers case. (I examined that earlier crime in this blog post from 18 years ago.)

What did come up was the moral vacuity that led the social-climbing Griffith to that point. 

It is that same soul emptiness, it seems to me, that lies unaddressed, after acres of newsprint and hours of news footage, in the story of how Chambers ended the life of Jennifer Levin, the 18-year-old with whom he left the Upper East Side bar Dorian’s a little after 4 in the morning. Less than two hours later, she was found dead in Central Park, strangled.

It would, then, have been fine to call the person who took her life “The Central Park Strangler,” as some news outlets did, because that's exactly the act that occurred. 

But editors needed a way to convey the morbid fascination with a tall, well-dressed, handsome youth. “Preppy” did the trick.

Then Chambers—first in accounts to the police quickly picking apart his story, then through his attorney Jack Litman—began with a contortion act of his own. While engaged in intercourse with him in the park, she had “hurt” him, he claimed, and an “accident” occurred when he tried to disengage.

The shamelessness of the statement was breathtaking: not only was her capacity to “hurt” him limited because she was nearly a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter than Chambers, but the scratch marks on his face indicated that she had engaged in a desperate struggle against him—and now, being dead, the victim had no way to dispute his story.

Litman employed the same defense he used nearly a decade before in staving off a murder conviction for client Richard Herrin for killing ex-girlfriend Bonnie Garland—i.e., insinuate that the victim, in her relationship with the defendant, was responsible for her own death.

The judge in the Central Park case dismissed Litman’s motion to introduce Levin’s diary as evidence at the trial. But the lawyer had already characterized it to the press as a record of her encounters with other young men.  Moreover, for a New York Magazine cover story about the case, he made sure to contrast Chambers’ past as an altar boy with Levin's dating history.

Litman sowed enough doubts about Levin’s character to induce a jury deadlock for more than a week on the second-degree murder charge against Chambers. Rather than put the Levin family through the trauma of another trial, prosecutor Linda Fairstein agreed to Litman’s proposal that Chambers plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

Then, with the trial over, a video emerged that depicted the former altar boy in a rather different light: out on bail, at a party surrounded by women, twisting the head off a doll before pronouncing, in a high-pitched voice, “I think I killed her.”

It was too late to affect jury deliberations, though it certainly may have led some members of the public to rethink their fascination and even support for the clean-cut young man. It certainly would have lent credence to the charge that he displayed depraved indifference to human life.

Even after serving the full 15 years of his sentence, Chambers was not done with the law. Arrested again in 2004, this time for drugs, he served 100 days in Riker’s Island, then was arrested a third time in 1907, for drugs again. He did not leave Sullivan Maximum Security Correctional Facility in upstate New York until three years ago.

Ironically, he spent more time as an involuntary guest of the state for his substance abuse problems than he did for taking Levin’s life.

After seeing her daughter traduced by the defense and the media, Ellen Levin became a victim’s-rights advocate, lobbying for “rape-shield” legislation that limited defenses’ attempts to discuss a victim’s prior sexual history.

Unfortunately, today, even after the MeToo movement—and perhaps as backlash to that social phenomenon—defense lawyers still resort to smearing victims, justifying it, as Litman did 40 years ago, as part of their responsibility to represent clients, no matter how unpopular those defendants or those tactics might be.

In that sense, the “crime as entertainment” that Carpenter noted 36 years ago remains a staple of the court system—only this time the drama is a legal horror show. And the public fascination with good-looking defendants continued with Luigi Mangione in the first months after his arrest for murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

I experienced the same sense of deja vu when I read the title of a YouTube video from Australia about the latter case: "What would drive a young, privileged white man to kill?"