Looking back, I can't find any evidence that Chambers' family or friends asked for leniency for the 19-year-old based on his 'bright future' or his 'good' background, though certainly the fact that he was an altar boy and a private-school kid was mentioned ad nauseam. 'I have always believed that if he had gone to jail for the credit-card theft and the thousands of dollars he illegally charged or had stayed for the required amount of time at Hazelden, then Jennifer Levin would have been alive today,' Linda Fairstein, the retired head of the Manhattan DA's Sex Crimes Unit who prosecuted Chambers in Levin's death, told the Post. She knew he'd stolen before and abused drugs, but she protected him, as so many others had. Chambers's mother talked the friend out of pressing charges, and promised Chambers would go rehab instead. His good looks and his charm and his address and his friends with even better addresses made people give him the benefit of the doubt again and again and again.ДЇive months before he killed Levin, according to the New York Post, Chambers had stolen a friend's credit card and used it fraudulently. And of course his privilege had abetted his menace. It captured exactly the blend of menace and privilege that Chambers came to embody. It was a genius sobriquet, like so many of those tabloid monikers. The nickname the 'Preppy Killer' perfectly captured the blend of menace and privilege that Chambers came to embody. That moment could happen to any of us, to me. I thought a lot about Jennifer and the moment when whatever was happening to her went from okay-manageable if not exactly fun-to horrific, a fight for her life. But Jennifer Levin's death was the grim flip side to those fantasies. On the cusp of adolescence, I had imagined all the ways that romance might be wonderful, just begun to hope that one day I might be with a tall and handsome boy.

And even then there were victims' advocates who argued that no 18-year-old girl can be held responsible for her own murder, regardless of what she wore or drank or where she went with a boy.ДЄll I could think about at the time was how terrified and alone Jennifer must have felt. All this was surely meant to paint a picture of someone who'd put herself in harm's way. It was noted, too, that she liked to drink and go to parties, that she had a boyfriend in addition to Chambers and that the night she died wasn't the first time she and Chambers had sex.

Levin was always described as pretty and vivacious, dark-haired and funny and fun. This was my first, terrifying window into what else might be happening in there-what it meant to be 18 and on your own in the city. Central Park was a place where I went to the zoo, past the playgrounds I'd only recently outgrown. Plenty of kids who grew up on the Upper East Side (as I and Chambers had Levin lived in Soho with her father) were startlingly sharp and sophisticated by the beginning of sixth grade, but I was not. She was on the other side of high school, someone who went to bars and clubs and had boyfriends. That's nothing really, but at the time it seemed like a vast difference. They had engaged in consensual rough sex, and as Chambers told it, Levin had started to hurt him and he'd pushed her off him, killing her in the process.ДЄt 18, Levin was seven years older than I was.

Jenny infamous first light