Original subtitles

-Robert Chambers,

accused of strangling 18-year-old Jennifer Levin.

-He is the nicest.

He's friendly. He just wouldn't...

I just can't see him doing anything like that.

-He's a very good-natured young man.

What occurred here is completely out of character.

-Everyone believed that it was an accident.

-I put Jennifer's autopsy photograph down in front of him,

and I said, "Does this look like an accident?"

-We found out Robert Chambers was really a sneak thief,

and apparently what was driving this

was his addiction to cocaine.

-I am happy to be out of jail.

-He was out free walking on the streets.

Unbelievable.

-I got a call from a detective.

He was not the choir boy that Litman painted him to be.

-He killed her.

He...killed her.

Why?

♪♪

♪♪

-I grew up a block from Central Park on the Upper East Side.

This was our backyard.

We were here all the time.

I knew this area so well.

We played ball here.

♪♪

Maybe one of my first kisses was in this same area right here.

♪♪

This is where Jennifer's body was.

Her head was right about here right under the tree trunk here.

It's been a number of years

since I've been to this actual location,

but it's always the same emotions that come through you.

♪♪

I kind of say a silent prayer, you know, for Jennifer.

It's maybe 32 years ago, but let me tell you,

it's like it happened yesterday.

♪♪

-There was never any doubt that Robert Chambers killed

Jennifer Levin during a sexual encounter inside Central Park.

The question was whether the killing

was deliberate or an accident.

-Now awaiting trial, Chambers has been released on bond.

♪♪

-So Robert is out on bail.

Linda and I now have to put our heads together.

There's a tremendous amount of work to be done.

♪♪

So while we were looking into the various crimes

that Robert may have committed, Linda got a phone call.

♪♪

-A year ago, a detective had been investigating a burglary.

It was a felony burglary and larceny

because the amount stolen was in excess of $70,000.

-It was a lot of money.

All kinds of stuff was stolen.

This was definitely a big deal.

-And Robert Chambers' driver's license

was found on the fire escape.

♪♪

At that time, she had actually called Robert Chambers in

to interview him.

He claimed he had lost the license.

Somebody else must have found it.

She admitted she was taken by his looks,

by his background, no prior arrests.

♪♪

There were, in fact, latent prints,

fingerprints on the medicine cabinet

in the bathroom of that apartment.

We got Sheehan to have the latent-print unit

compare the fingerprints.

Robert Chambers' fingerprints were on that glass.

♪♪

It was a total gut punch.

♪♪

-He was involved not only in the murder of Jennifer Levin,

but he was a burglar,

burglar with an IZOD shirt, and he did...

There was a specific guy that he worked with.

-We connected Robert Chambers to David Fillyaw.

Robert was the white face, the good-looking guy.

He knew someone in almost every Park Avenue building

from kids he had gone to school with,

and the doormen knew him, recognized him.

He'd go up. He'd try doors.

David Fillyaw, because he was African American,

didn't have that kind of front-door access.

He was the guy waiting at the bottom of the fire escape.

Robert would take the belongings and throw them down.

Turns out Fillyaw was a monster,

was selling drugs to Columbia students.

He raped this girl and then went back to the room

stabbing her five times in the chest

certainly trying to kill her

and missed her heart by just millimeters.

And the fact that David Fillyaw was running

with Robert Chambers, I mean, it was nauseating.

It clicked.

Like, here is two kids into drugs,

both with a single violent attack on a young woman.

It was staggering to me to make that connection.

♪♪

And so we began to investigate open burglaries

that were similar in nature.

-Linda, at one point, I think, had 32 provable crimes

leading up to the trial,

and that doesn't play well in front of a jury.

-A couple weeks after Rob had been released on bail,

one of my colleagues indicted him for the burglary.

♪♪

-I was working for the "New York Post," and all hell broke loose.

He wasn't only a killer.

He was a serial burglar.

♪♪

-Preppies don't burglarize places.

Troubled people do.

-We knew that Jack Litman was preparing

Robert Chambers to testify.

We would be able to use the burglary

to cross-examine him to expose his sociopathy,

his ability to lie,

so we thought it would make a huge difference in this case.

♪♪

-It was a deep concern for us.

They were very serious criminal charges.

One of them at least that had fingerprints

and everything was a very strong case.

-Litman was really concerned about how the media

was dirtying his client

with references to the burglaries,

and so Jack Litman

arranged an interview from "New York Magazine."

♪♪

-I'd written about the kids that were involved in Robert's scene,

so they knew me and trusted me.

Most of my perspective on the story

came from the kids themselves.

I spoke to Jack regularly after I started the story.

Jack was very partisan.

He certainly was accessible.

Jack knew that he was drawing from a jury pool of New Yorkers,

so he wanted to paint a picture of Chambers

that was attractive as possible.

-I came to work, and Robert was in the office with a blue blazer

and a white shirt and, I think, a red tie,

and I said, "Jack, what are you doing?"

"Well, I think this is good for the case."

♪♪

-The comment everywhere

was that Robert looked like a male model,

and the "New York Magazine" article would imprint itself

on the minds of any New Yorkers

who wanted to believe in Robert Chambers.

-Robert Chambers was a very, very handsome kid,

movie-star handsome, beautifully coiffed, well-dressed.

♪♪

You couldn't see him as a cold-blooded killer.

-He was portrayed as this white symbol of beauty,

power, intelligence and money.

That's what that meant, that cover.

That's the message that it sends out.

♪♪

So whoever was running "New York Magazine" at the time,

probably some white male,

they elected to put that on the cover,

and that's men protecting each other.

♪♪

Well, guess what?

You still see this being played out today.

♪♪

-I've never discussed with Jack Litman,

but it was something that I thought

should never have occurred.

This is not a game. It's not a joke.

It's not a publicity stunt, nothing like that.

-I was in an airport, and I saw it on the newsstand,

and I completely freaked out.

♪♪

It's exactly the image Jack Litman wanted everybody to see,

and it was all choreographed by him,

all choreographed, and I hate to say it.

I think he did a really good job,

and I hated him as much as I hated Chambers for it.

-Some cases, there is an evident

and sometimes overwhelming public hostility

toward the individual accused, and I think the defense attorney

must stand between that public hostility

and the accused to deflect that.

This is not a beast I'm representing.

He can, given the circumstances, be someone that all of us know.

♪♪

-Jack Litman from the get-go planted a seed in the media

that Robert Chambers was a devout Irish Catholic,

that Jennifer Levin was fast and loose.

Bobby obviously is a saint.

Jennifer is a sinner.

-Jack Litman went right back into his routine

of blame the victim, dirty the victim.

There was this whole thing about the sex diary.

Wow, you know, forget about the jury.

This guy is going to poison all of New York against us.

[Horns honking]

♪♪

-In defending Robert Chambers and then preparing for trial,

we spoke to all of his friends,

but one of Jennifer Levin's friends said

that she kept a diary,

and the friend seemed to think that there were a lot of things

about Robert Chambers in the diary,

and if our client is in the diary,

then we felt that, in defending him,

we needed to see that, so we sought to subpoena the diary.

♪♪

-Suddenly, Jack Litman declares that he wants

to look at the sex diary

that Jennifer kept, and we're like, "What?"

"Jennifer keeps a sex diary."

That was the headline.

-Jack Litman could play the tabloid media.

He could play us all like a violin.

Believe me.

He suddenly will come on with, "Oh, I can't talk

to you about that. You know I..."

And then suddenly drop something like as if he made a mistake.

"Jennifer Levin, well, her, she kept a sex diary."

♪♪

-It was an old-fashioned date book,

the kind my mother kept.

It had days of the week.

It was so benign that it was kept

in the kitchen of the house,

and Jack Litman began to refer to it as a sex diary.

It was not a sex diary,

and I was not going to let Jack get his hands on it.

It's one piece of property that meant so much to the parents.

They had no privacy, and their daughter had been

turned into the worst human being on the planet.

♪♪

-We sought to enforce our subpoena.

The estate of Jennifer Levin sought to quash that subpoena,

and we had litigation.

♪♪

-This went on forever, and I finally said to the judge,

"Why don't you review it in chambers?

And if you agree with me that there's no sex in it,

no sexual references and that it is not a sex diary,

you will declare that in a ruling."

-In January, Judge Howard Bell ruled that Chambers' attorney

should not be allowed to use

Jennifer Levin's diary in his defense.

-Unfortunately, by dragging it out,

the words "sex diary"

became as well-known to the public,

to the potential jurors as rough sex.

-It was, like, choreographed.

Everything was made to denigrate my daughter,

even made-up stories like that.

♪♪

-For months, out of court, many New Yorkers have complained

that Chambers' defense argued in press accounts

and pretrial statements amounts to another crime,

an assault on the memory of Jennifer Levin.

-Supporters of Levin criticized Litman's portrayal of the victim

as a wild sexual animal.

-Just shows how much power lawyers like Litman

who use the tactic

of making the victim into the villain have,

and it's a real danger signal.

♪♪

-There were several very outraged women,

forward-thinking women, in the community.

One of them was named Rose Jordan.

-We are afraid that if there's a small sentence here

that there will be men out there,

and they're out there, we know they are,

who will then kill women and say,

"Oh, God, she raped me. I had to defend myself, okay?"

And we don't want that to happen,

and we're going to fight that all the way.

-She was so outraged

that she got Justice for Jennifer pins made up

with Jennifer's name on it.

-The little button, I wasn't allowed to wear it on TV,

but I would carry it in my bag

because I felt it had been so unfair for her.

-Everybody started getting vocal about it, very vocal about it.

-We disliked intensely what he did to Jennifer Levin.

We feel he murdered her a second time.

-How? -By murdering her reputation.

-We had the Guardian Angels.

-Yeah, we did.

They were wonderful.

-Back then, the Guardian Angels were a big presence.

New York City seemed lawless,

and a lot of people were concerned

about whether the police had enough resources

to fight crime in those days, and so the Guardian Angels

were riding the subways or walking the streets.

Now they got involved with the Jennifer Levin case

because they felt that she was being unfairly victimized.

-Murder, murder, murder, murder, murder!

-For months before the trial, they picketed outside,

marching, blaming-the-victim signs in front of...

in the courthouse, and that was very uplifting.

♪♪

-I do not accept that the defense of blame the victim

is somehow illegitimate

and designed to distract attention

and to take the focus away from the crime.

It's part of the crime.

We were going on what happened that evening.

♪♪

-A good criminal-defense lawyer must probe what happened

at the time of a particular event

because usually people do not for no reason

or unprovokedly assault somebody else.

There's usually a reason for it.

-She's having her way with me without my consent

with my hands behind my back hurting me,

and I just leaned up and grabbed her like this

from up around the neck, and I just yanked her.

-Before the trial started, we had been hearing

this rough-sex defense

and this blame-the-victim defense,

but when we saw the crime pictures,

we realized the evidence was a lot stronger

than what Robert Chambers admitted to,

so it raised a lot of questions like, what exactly happened?

-We had the right guy, and we knew he caused her death,

but there was no medical examiner we found

who could tell us exactly how Jennifer Levin had died.

He murdered her.

He took the life out of her with his bare hands.

We had to prove that.

♪♪

-I was preparing the case for months.

Our job with the defense was to corroborate

Robert Chambers' statement, but it took time.

-So I reached up like this and grabbed,

and I came down like that on my hand.

She came over this way and landed right there.

-We just went about proving that what he said was accurate.

♪♪

Of course there was a struggle between the two of them.

We didn't say that there wasn't, but I spent many, many hours

looking over and over and over again

at the homicide-scene photographs.

Jennifer Levin had marks on her neck,

but I didn't think that there was so much damage,

and I thought that the damage was consistent

with Robert Chambers' post-arrest statement.

♪♪

-The marks on Jennifer's neck,

unquestionably I think everybody agreed with this,

were repeated applications of force.

We wanted to suggest something to the jury as the murder weapon

that matched the physical evidence that we had

and matched the marks on Jennifer's body.

Early on, one of the most significant pieces of evidence

was a denim jacket.

♪♪

-Linda and I had actually looked at that jacket,

and we saw bloodstains on it.

-That jacket was visible in one of the photographs at Dorrian's,

but interestingly enough,

Robert Chambers never mentions it in his statement,

never mentioned what role it might have played.

-I don't know. I don't know if she had a bag.

I didn't notice.

I had a jacket, but I ended up leaving that at Dorrian's.

-No.

-I don't remember.

-The jeans jacket was lying there

next to the body at the crime scene.

Come on.

You can't be that stupid.

-Jennifer Levin was only bleeding from her mouth.

If in fact we could prove that the blood was Jennifer Levin's,

we could prove that the jacket had been put over her mouth

by Robert Chambers to stop her from breathing.

-That faded denim jacket shown here

over Jennifer Levin's shoulder

is crucial to the prosecutor's case.

The prosecutor claims that Robert Chambers used that jacket

to gag Levin and to muffle her screams for help.

-The biggest challenge became trying to prove

that the blood was Jennifer's.

The chief medical examiner in New York called me and said,

"There's something you need to consider exploring in this case.

It's DNA."

Remember, in the fall of 1986,

DNA had never been used in a criminal case in this country.

We called Quantico, Virginia, the FBI.

They said they were doing some DNA.

They wanted the results to be used in court

and for the stories to be spread,

so they liked very much that we had a very high-profile case.

We had Sheehan go to Quantico with the pieces of evidence.

-I hand-delivered the jeans jacket for an in-depth analysis.

-But to get a final DNA result,

they told me it was going to be six months.

In the meantime, both sides were searching for expert witnesses.

♪♪

-Who knows about choke holds?

Who knows about neck injuries?

Who knows about ligature strangulations?

One of the forensic pathologists who had done work in this area

was named Werner Spitz, and he was from Detroit.

-Werner Spitz, interestingly enough,

had been approached by Jack a day or two before me,

but he actually refused to work for the defense.

After examining all the evidence, Dr. Spitz

believed that Robert had taken the white cotton blouse

and thrust it up in Jennifer's neck,

and then the denim jacket, Spitz argued,

had been over her mouth, and so Dr. Spitz was my expert,

and a doctor from L.A. named Ronald Kornblum

who had written a lot about police choke holds

ended up being Jack Litman's expert.

-He could corroborate the statement

that Robert Chambers gave to the prosecutor

and to the detectives.

-I don't know. It seemed like an instant.

It was only seconds.

I mean, I wasn't holding it or anything like that.

-One of the things that definitely struck me

was that crazy idea that you put your arm around somebody's neck

for, like, 10, 20 seconds and that they're dead.

It doesn't happen.

Here is Jennifer, who is a young person

in very good physical condition.

That had to take some time.

♪♪

-I began to read and study asphyxial deaths.

Every doctor agreed if he just wanted to render her unconscious

and then he let go, she would recover.

She might have been injured, but she would have recovered.

He had to keep applying pressure,

keep preventing her from breathing

after she had become limp,

after she had become unconscious.

He had to continue to apply force to kill her.

That was intentional.

♪♪

This case was, like, the first chance in my life

and career to use DNA.

We got the preliminary result on the jacket

that indicated what we had hoped it would,

that there was blood from Jennifer

and saliva from Jennifer.

The denim jacket is the murder weapon.

♪♪

-This would've been in 1987, very, very early in DNA testing.

We moved to preclude that from the trial.

-We had a 3-week hearing.

I expected the judge to be completely taken

by this new technology,

this new science that would go on to revolutionize the system.

Instead, Judge Bell stunned us by saying,

despite all the scientific evidence he heard,

DNA isn't reliable. This will never fly.

So the jury would never hear the role DNA played

in matching the blood and saliva

to Jennifer Levin and Robert Chambers.

[Horns honking]

-Every one of these trials,

you have to start out with preliminary hearings,

which determine what can and can't be used at a trial.

-The denim jacket had a major significance in this case.

-We were shocked when Judge Bell ruled

that we couldn't use the DNA results as evidence.

Now the jury wouldn't know that Chambers had put the jacket

over her mouth to suffocate her.

♪♪

I don't know why to this day.

All I do know is that whatever we came up with

was not allowed into the court.

Were we frustrated?

Totally, totally frustrated.

♪♪

-Chambers' attorney, Jack Litman,

has been practicing the art of lawyerly delay since May.

He did it again this morning suggesting more pretrial motions

he may make that will have to be argued,

and the judge will have to decide

all before the jury can hear the case.

-In a criminal case, you make motions to exclude evidence.

It was over the summer of 1987

when we had those suppression hearings.

I think there was a movement to introduce the burglaries

as some sort of substantive evidence.

-We had a blow-up photo of Jennifer from that night,

which showed her wearing cubic-zirconium earrings.

She had the earrings on, like, 2 hours before she's, you know,

before she ever left Dorrian's.

When they found the body, all that stuff is missing.

Like, where did the jewelry go?

Did it vanish?

-I wanted to argue

that Robert Chambers had never left anything behind.

When he went into someone's apartment,

he took the credit cards.

He took jewelry that was sitting on top of a dresser.

I think he would've taken the earrings,

hoping they were diamonds that he could sell for drugs.

-I don't know the earrings, not earrings.

I don't know if she took them off.

I don't know where they were.

I do know that the crime scene was not preserved

the way that it's supposed to,

so if they were laying on the ground

and they weren't recovered, I don't know.

The prosecution was trying to prove that Robert Chambers

was actually robbing Jennifer Levin,

and I think it was a real reach.

-We were not allowed to introduce

that as evidence at the trial because we had no proof

that he even remotely involved in the theft of the jewelry

even though he had the exclusive opportunity.

-We had to cover Jennifer's ears with a piece of tape

so that the jury could not see the earrings

that were not present at the crime scene.

-It was above and beyond clear there were

some really stupid decisions made in my book.

[Indistinct conversations]

-The press started to nickname the judge Ding-Dong Bell

because they were frustrated by,

well, the way that he presided over that courtroom,

and that's why I did that story on the five things

the jury would not know about Robert Chambers.

-Chambers' videotaped statement

was the last of four different versions he gave police,

that Chambers is a suspect in at least a dozen burglaries,

that he had a serious drug problem,

that he told an emergency medical technician,

"I hit something very hard,"

when asked about how he hurt his hand,

that Jennifer Levin was missing around $70 in her wallet

and that the rhinestone earrings she was seen wearing that night,

which are covered in this picture, were also missing.

♪♪

-It was every day for, like, two years.

This became the top headline.

-Hurtful, horrible things.

It was burying her over and over again.

♪♪

My grandmother, God bless her, called me to say,

"They're doing Jennifer's story on this new show."

-Back in August of 1986 when Jennifer Levin's body

was discovered in Central Park a violent death...

-I started watching it, and it was a reenactment of that night,

and there were actors, of course,

but I was fascinated with almost me being there that evening.

You know, suddenly I was in a different world.

And it got to the point

where he suggested they go outside.

This is the show.

I ran to my terrace on the 29th floor of my apartment

and started screaming, "Don't go, Jen,"

and I just kind of lost contact with reality.

♪♪

Next day, I started seeing a psychiatrist, on medication.

That's the kind of hurt

all of this attention brought to our family.

♪♪

-That he made a mistake in those findings...

-It took quite a long time before it went to trial.

-Blood... -And I think everybody

couldn't wait to find out what really happened.

-Everybody was talking about it.

Why do you go kill a woman, a beautiful, young woman

who wants to have sex with you in Central Park?

What's that about?

-Prosecutors do not have to prove a motive

when they are trying a murder case,

and yet it's part of human nature.

It's the thing everybody wants to know.

-The jury wants to know, what was the motive,

money, jealousy?

Why did the person kill the other person?

And the prosecution in Robert Chambers

had to overcome the fact

that they could not come up with a motive.

-We were working from nothing.

We did not have a clear motive,

and you want to give the jury something.

-You know, so here we are. What happened?

What happened that night?

-We had the videotape statement of Robert Chambers.

-I just grabbed her neck as hard as I could,

and she just flipped over me and landed

right next to the tree, and then she didn't move.

-He did admit to killing Jennifer Levin,

but he admitted that he killed her during this sex

that they were having,

and that was his story, and that was our defense.

I don't believe that the prosecution knew what happened,

so they had to come up with plausible theories,

but the prosecution bears the burden of proof

beyond a reasonable doubt.

-Mike and I, we were trying to come up

with a theory of what happened.

We wanted to be able to suggest to the jury

things that were based on facts and evidence.

That's all we could work with.

♪♪

-So here we are. What happened?

What happened that night?

-We knew they had gone to the park together

to do something they had done before,

which was to have sex, so what went wrong?

♪♪

There was a pair of white underwear.

They were found far away from where the body was found

where I think the couple originally sat down to do

whatever they were going to do sexually and then part ways.

The place where they sat down where she removed her underwear

is where something started.

♪♪

One of the things I suggested was that she had started

to lecture him again about doing drugs,

and they fought over that.

Another idea was that he tried to perform sexually but couldn't

and that she had either made fun of that, frustrated him.

He got angry.

-One theory is that she goes to urinate

because she drank so much water.

That was her own private method of staying sober.

♪♪

We know that Robert Chambers was really a major sneak thief,

and apparently what was driving this

was his addiction to cocaine.

Now she comes back, and our theory is that

she now finds him rifling through her purse,

and now all of the stories

that she had heard came back to roost.

"Here I am in the park with this guy

who I really care for, and this guy is robbing me."

She realized that, you know, this guy was really no good.

♪♪

She probably threatened to go back to Dorrian's

and tell the entire crowd.

"What the hell is wrong with you, Robert, you know?"

And I think this would've been the last straw for him.

♪♪

She's got to be stopped.

His temper just exploded.

He was punching her in the face.

Left side of her face took the brunt of the blows.

Her left eye was completely swollen.

The fact that he broke the fifth metacarpal,

which is a small bone in his right hand,

it usually happens to a boxer

who doesn't tape his hand properly

or a guy who doesn't know what he's doing,

and he just throws a wild punch.

He gets on top of her.

He has her in a prone position.

She's defenseless.

Jennifer Levin is fighting for her life.

You imagine the desperation, gasping for breath,

and this guy who's twice your size is on top of you,

you know, he's in a wild rage.

That's why the strangulation marks were so intense.

The material on the denim jacket is extremely rough,

and it's going back and forth, sliding back and forth,

and that's what's creating the marks on the neck.

I mean, that's what happened. He lost control.

♪♪

We believe the beginning of the fight

between Jennifer and Robert happened here,

and then it ended up underneath that tree,

and that's where it culminated.

And when I spoke to crime scene,

they said that various items from Jennifer's purse or wallet

had been strewn or dropped along this area.

She was neatly laid out, legs spread, skirt hiked up,

blouse hiked up.

To me, it looked like somebody set that up.

♪♪

She was left in such a state so that,

to the untrained observer, the immediate response would be,

"Oh, my God. Look at this poor girl.

She was victim of a rape,"

when in fact there was no sex here at all.

♪♪

-One thing is clear --

He did not go to that park with any murderous intent,

and he had no desire to hurt her.

There was no preplanned activity creating --

It was something that developed during the course

of that evening, which led to this tragedy.

♪♪

-We knew what happened.

We thought the facts, the evidence,

the forensic evidence was consistent with his statement.

We were under tremendous pressure

but ready to go to trial.

-Jack Litman was an excellent trial attorney.

You got to be on the top of your game

if you're going to go in there and do battle.

-Jury selection for the trial of Robert Chambers,

the suspect in the murder of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin,

was scheduled to begin today.

-In any trial, it's the choosing of the jury that's so important,

what kind of a jury and who they are.

Picking a jury is everything, but there was more than a year

between Jennifer's body being found

and the trial starting.

[Indistinct conversations, camera shutters clicking]

-Jack Litman was a fantastic manipulator.

If he could poison the entire jury pool,

Linda and I would have a major problem.

-The guy is a white wealthy boy,

and they're using him as a scapegoat.

They're making an example of him.

That's how I feel about it.

-So you don't think it has anything to do with the crime

or the girl or... -No.

Things like this happen every day.

[Indistinct conversations]

-We knew everybody had heard rough sex.

They read it in papers. They'd seen it on TV.

There had been such a saturation of media

and so much of it misleading.

-In discussions with the lawyers, Judge Bell

decided to quiz the prospective jurors

individually in his robing room

with only two reporters present during the proceedings.

-The judge, Judge Howard Bell, was determined to see

that this was going to be a fair trial,

so we had actual individual interviews

of each prospective juror.

I was sitting at the same table as Linda Fairstein,

as Jack Litman and as Robert Chambers,

who was sitting next to me.

♪♪

-When people told us in that jury pool of almost 500 people

you know they didn't know about this case,

they didn't follow the news that closely,

you knew they weren't telling the truth.

You couldn't be in the city before trial

and not have known that this case happened.

-The very first prospective juror was a young woman.

She came in.

Robert Chambers is sitting at the table right next to me.

She was asked the question,

"Do you have any impressions of Robert Chambers?"

And she said, "He's really much better-looking in person."

Obviously, she was thanked,

and the next juror was brought in.

It went on that way for months

to find a fair and impartial jury.

[Indistinct conversations]

-It was honestly kind of scary.

I'd been living in New York forever.

I was born and raised in New York,

never really heard about the actual crime

until I was called for jury duty.

There's still people out there who are upset with the verdict,

so I really don't want people to see who I am.

And I was picked as juror number four.

We were never called by name.

We were referred to by numbers.

Took another two months to pick the rest of the jury.

There were some strange people in there.

You know, one said he's only there

because he wants to write a book.

One wanted to get out because he was leaving

to meet a boyfriend in London.

Everybody had their own agenda.

They did say the trial itself would take two to three weeks,

and that would've been perfect for me.

Unfortunately, it didn't take two to three weeks.

[Indistinct conversations]

-Hey, hey, hey!

-The momentum, it was building.

It was building.

[Indistinct conversations]

And I would say this.

Before O.J. Simpson, the Preppie Killer,

that was the trial of the century.

-It's no doubt that this will be a gut-wrenching,

emotional trial, and at the center of it all,

two families who have lost so much,

the Levins, who have lost their beloved daughter,

and the Chambers family, who have lost the son they once knew

and who will no doubt never be the same again

after the notoriety of this trial.

-This was probably one of the most high-profile trials

in New York history.

-Hey, hey, hey!

-The press were like swarms of bees.

They were all over the place.

They were on rooftops. They were in the street.

It just exploded.

It was like a tsunami.

-In the coming weeks, the agony for both families

will undoubtedly increase as sordid details of the night

Jennifer Levin was killed are released,

and all the while, the two families will sit

and listen as their children's private moments

are painstakingly revealed to an eager audience.

-I wasn't even thinking I could go to the trial

in the condition I was in,

and I went, and I saw Dominick Dunne.

He went through a horrible trial with the murderer

of his daughter, and he looked at me,

and he said, "Ellen, this is the last bit

of business you have to do for your daughter.

You have to be there,"

and he was right.

♪♪