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| Infamous 'Preppie Killer' Due Out of Jail |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 02/10/2003 |
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For 17 years, the family of Jennifer Levin has learned to live without the beloved teen who was strangled in Central Park: missed birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. This Valentine's Day, the Levin family must endure a new form of agony: the release of Jennifer's killer. Confessed 'Preppie Killer' Robert Chambers will exit an upstate prison on Feb. 14 after serving the maximum time on his manslaughter conviction for killing Levin on Aug. 26, 1986. 'Obviously, this is a very difficult time for the family,' said Linda Fairstein, who has remained close to the Levins since prosecuting the case against Chambers. 'Their child will never come home.' For the Levins, the prospect of Chambers returning to the city where he killed their 18-year-old daughter is overwhelming. 'I find that very unpleasant,' said the slain girl's mother, Ellen Levin, as Chambers' release became imminent. Levin's sister, Danielle Roberts, said she was 'haunted by a feeling of dread' over Chambers' departure from the Auburn Correctional Facility. The Levin slaying, splashed across the city's tabloids in the summer of '86, was a made-for-TV movie waiting to happen - a glimpse into the lives of callow youths on the Upper East Side bar scene. The suspect, a college dropout with a taste for cocaine, was Hollywood handsome. The victim was pretty, a private school student from a well-to-do family. And the defense - consensual 'rough sex' gone amok - was startling. 'Our lives became the media event of the year,' Steven Levin, Jennifer's father, said at Chambers' sentencing. Nothing that Chambers has done since going to jail in April 1988 has changed the negative perceptions of the 6-foot-4, dark-featured killer. Chambers, now 36, racked up an assortment of violations behind bars - heroin possession, assaulting an officer, weapon possession. His bids for parole were rejected five times, and he spent about a third of his time in solitary confinement. Shortly after his sentencing, a videotape surfaced showing Chambers snapping the head off a small doll. 'Oops, I think I killed it,' Chambers cracked, the doll's head in his hand. Chambers admitted strangling Levin after they met in Dorrian's Red Hand, an Upper East Side yuppie bar. Her battered, partially nude body was found under a tree behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the pair went after leaving the bar. At a 1995 parole hearing, Chambers expressed no remorse about the crime. 'I guess I could also give you the party line and say I have learned my lesson, I will never do this again,' Chambers said. 'But that's not how I feel at this moment.' |
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