A Killing in Central Park

Handsome bad boy Robert Chambers murders attractive young Jennifer Levin in the park.

The Jennifer Levin murder case captivated New York City and mesmerized the public with its sordid tale of "rough sex" and a freewheeling lifestyle among the city's spoiled youth. Fueled by the tabloids, which featured such titillating headlines as SEX PLAY GOT ROUGH, JEN'S SEX DIARY and the now notorious, HOW JENNY COURTED DEATH, the case dominated front-page news for two years.

The media turned Chambers into the victim, blaming a very young woman for her rape and murder. Jennifer Levin, 5 foot 3 inches and 120 pounds, roughed him up a little too much during sexual play behind Manhattan's Museum of Art. He said that he was forced to act in self-defense when he accidentally choked her to death.

Now "preppie" killer Robert Chambers is charged on multiple felony drug counts.

On a crisp, sunny morning in August 1986, a dedicated cyclist pedaled her way through Central Park in New York City near the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The path she rode led in an easterly direction, twisting through the trees and bushes that grow in the shadow of the museum. Several times a week, Pat Reilly, 34, cycled this route before she left for work. She guided her bike carefully through the area known as Cleopatra's Needle. It was a little past 6 a.m., the day's first light was just about making its way between the canyons of 5th Avenue and E. 82nd Street. Most of the time, the trip was safe and uneventful, but in the park, one had to be aware of the surroundings. As Reilly made her final turn approaching the museum, her eye caught the image of a person lying on the ground. It appeared to be a woman. Not such an unusual sight in the park, but what piqued her interest was the absolute stillness of her body.

She steered her bike over to the spot where the woman lay under a large, leafy elm tree whose branches hung low to the ground. She dismounted and had to walk in order to get closer. Reilly came to a halt about 20 feet away. She was already nervous and knew that something was very wrong. "Her clothes were around her waist and around her neck, but I knew that I was looking at the front part of a naked woman," she later said.

Pat Reilly saw that it was the body of a partially clothed girl. Her mini-skirt was pushed up past her waist and her bra and shirt were pushed above her chest. Nothing was covering her breasts. Her neck had large, red colored bruising on both sides of her throat. There were various items of clothing strewn about the scene. The young girl had short brown hair and looked to have a recent tan. And she appeared to be dead, though without checking her pulse, the cyclist could not be sure.

Pat Reilly quickly sped off and when she came upon a phone in the park, she stopped to call the police. She found all the phones in that area were ripped off their columns by vandals and thieves. She then went to 5th Avenue outside the park to look for the cops, but there were none to be seen. Finally she found a telephone at 90th and Madison Avenue and she was able to reach the police department to report what she found.

And so began one of the most sensational murder cases in New York City's history: the brutal killing of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin that came to be known as the Preppie Murder Case. Its lurid details of freewheeling sex among the city's privileged youth and the often-infuriating conduct of the accused killer and his legal defense kept New York City mesmerized for nearly two years. The city's ravenous tabloid press catered to an insatiable public who couldn't read enough about the ongoing drama that played out daily on the six o'clock news and in the city's courts where justice is frequently mangled. At the center of the storm was a man who told a ludicrous story of a sexual assault committed by a 5'4", 130-pound girl upon a 6'4", 200-pound man. A man who portrayed himself as the poor, unfortunate victim of an aggressive female who was so determined to have sex with him that he had to kill her in order to stop her.

The Scene
When the uniformed police from the Central Park precinct arrived at the scene on the morning of August 26, 1986, they found the body of a young, attractive girl who had the typical signs of being raped or sexually assaulted. Her legs were spread eagled, her clothes were mostly off or pushed out of the way and she had obvious neck wounds, which indicated strangulation. Detectives were notified and within minutes cops, forensic people and photographers invaded the area. Although a dead body found in a public place in Manhattan in the 1980s was truly no big news, (there were at least 1,592 homicides in NYC in 1986), because of the location, the event attracted attention. News reporters, who monitor the police radio frequency in New York City, quickly responded.

The girl was lying on her back. Her mini-skirt had been pushed up to her waist. Her bra and shirt were pushed up to her neck. Her panties, if she had been wearing any, were missing. There were no stab wounds or gunshot injuries, only the very obvious red marks on the girl's throat. She also had bruises, bite marks and cuts on her body, which indicated a lost fight for life. Most officers at the scene believed she had been walking or jogging in the park, which was very common, and came upon her attacker. Unlucky, but not so unusual.

A few hundred feet away, by a stone wall, pedestrians and joggers watched the police work the scene. Susan Bird, a local real estate broker and jogger who had just finished her morning run, stood by the wall. Next to her, within an arm's length, a young man sat on the rocky ledge. He was tall, had "a nice face" and appeared to be about 20 years old. She asked him what was happening. The man said he thought the police found a body. She asked him a few more questions but noted that the young man's responses seemed indifferent. They remained together by the wall for the next 15 minutes. Then Susan Bird walked off. The next time she would see this young man, his photograph would appear in the daily newspapers. His name was Robert Chambers.

As the N.Y.C.P.D.'s Crime Scene Unit (CSU) searched the body, they found a credit card identifying the dead girl as Jennifer Dawn Levin. A number of rings and bracelets were collected, along with her wallet. Several photographs were found in her jacket, which lay nearby. Investigators from the Central Park precinct soon arrived and assumed control of the scene. Detective Michael McEntee was assigned the case, his very first homicide investigation. As he searched the area around the body, he discovered a pair of white panties approximately 50 feet away. The underwear lay under another tree, crumpled up into a small, round lump. The panties appeared to have been rolled down when they were removed.

The Assistant Medical Examiner, Maria Luz Alandy, arrived at 9:45 a.m. By then, this area of Central Park was filled with senior-ranking cops, press people and hundreds of civilians who watched every minute of the unfolding drama. A veteran of more than 1,000 autopsies, Alandy made several observations about the girl. She saw that the eyelids had tiny points of bleeding called "petechial" hemorrhages. These injuries are usually an indication of interrupted blood supply to the brain. Although this condition can be found in other parts of the body, when they are found in the eyelids, it usually indicates death by asphyxiation: strangulation. Dr. Alandy also noted that rigor mortis, the stiffening of a human body after death, had already begun but not yet fully set.

Rigor mortis, long used by coroners to establish time of the death, is caused by the absence of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is needed by muscles to perform their contractions. Once death occurs, production of ATP ceases and the muscles begin to stiffen. Normally, rigor mortis begins within two to four hours after death, but it is not permanent. As decomposition begins, rigor mortis fades. Estimating time of death is a very inexact science because accuracy depends on a wide variety of shifting factors. Dr. Alandy estimated the time of death in this case as approximately 4 hours earlier.

Soon, detectives were able to trace the name of Jennifer Levin and eventually located her father, Steven Levin, at his office in lower Manhattan. Detectives responded and broke the news of his daughter's death. He called one of Jennifer's friends and found that she had been at a bar on the Upper East Side the night before called Dorrian's Red Hand.

Dorrian's Red Hand
The Upper East Side of Manhattan, along 1st, 2nd and 3rd Avenues are lined with bars, restaurants and clubs where young people gather to drink, party and meet each other. They crowd into these bars almost every night of the week, where underage drinking, drugs and sex are part of the scene, especially during the 1980s when the minimum drinking age was still just 18 years old. A certain image developed during that time, which portrayed these young people as affluent, spoiled and self-indulgent. They went to private schools and vacationed in the Hamptons. They drove their fathers' BMWs and coveted MBAs and law degrees. They wore designer clothes and knew all the right colleges. They hung around the East Side bars spending money they didn't earn and drinking booze they couldn't legally buy.

One of these bars was Dorrian's Red Hand at the corner of E. 84th Street and 2nd Avenue, which became a favorite of Jennifer Levin and her friends. During 1986, her group visited Dorrian's several times each week and they frequently met there both before and after they went out on dates or to the movies. The place was always crowded and they were sure to bump into someone they knew because everyone knew everyone else at Dorrian's. The owner, Jack Dorrian, was a familiar sight to the preppie crowd. He was sort of a friend and a father figure to lots of the kids, according to Jennifer's friends. The place was like their own private club. When parents called looking for their kids, they were relieved to find that they were at Dorrian's rather than some strange place somewhere else in the city.

During late August 1986, the bar was packed with high school graduates who were having a last summer fling, saying good-bye to each other before going away to college. They drank Summer Breezes and Rum and Cokes, which they bought with phony IDs, and made elaborate plans to meet again. It was here, at Dorrian's Red Hand -- where romances began and ended, where the partying seemed to go on forever and the illusion of youth stretched out before them like an endless carpet -- Jennifer Levin first laid eyes on Robert Chambers.

Robert Chambers
Perhaps because of her humble beginnings on a farm in County Leitrim in Northern Ireland, Phyllis Chambers had desires for a higher social standing. Later, when her son Robert was born, whom she believed to be talented and destined for bigger things, she focused all her attention upon him. She sent Robert to the very best schools that she could afford although she did not have a high paying job. Trained as a nurse in Dublin, she was able to get a job as a caregiver to affluent families in New York City. Her contact with the social elite of Manhattan made her strive even more for her son. Phyllis was upwardly mobile and never missed an opportunity to improve Robert's social skills. She enrolled him in the Knickerbocker Greys, an elite military drill group where the Vanderbilts and the Roosevelts had been members. It was a prestigious organization that could help his future and maintain the kind of image that his mother wanted for him.

Robert Chambers as a teenager was an attractive young man. Standing 6'4" and weighing two hundred pounds, he often towered over his friends at the bars. Girls were naturally drawn to him and he knew it. He had blue eyes and the well-proportioned features of a movie star. During those years, he attended a series of prep schools where he continuously ran into difficulties, mostly of his own doing. Either he had failing grades or behavioral problems that included rumors of stealing and drug abuse. After attending summer school to make up required work, Chambers finally graduated from York School in Manhattan. Ironically, his "bad boy" image probably improved his prospects with the impressionable girls at Dorrian's. Undaunted by his poor performance in prep school, his mother managed to get him accepted into Boston University in 1984. But still, his erratic behavior got him into trouble once again. Before the second semester began, Robert was asked to leave the college. He had gotten into a jam over a stolen credit card.

Once he arrived home, he couldn't hold a job. He was unreliable and never seemed to fit in. It soon became obvious to his friends that Robert Chambers was using drugs. He also did a few burglaries with an accomplice; breaking into apartments on the Upper East Side when he knew the owners weren't home. Later, he sold the proceeds in local stores and pawnshops. He was questioned by the police about the crimes but denied any involvement. A heavy drinker for years, his alcohol and drug abuse became severe enough for him to seek treatment at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota.

Nevertheless, when he returned to New York several months later, Chambers continued with his old ways. The police wanted him to stand in a line-up concerning the old burglaries and his mother was after him to get a steady job or get back in school. But he ignored them all. One night, after he left Dorrian's, police issued Chambers a summons for disorderly conduct when they found him screaming obscenities in the middle of the street. As they drove away, Chambers tore up the summons and yelled: "You fucking cowards, you should stick to niggers!"
During the summer of 1986, while Chambers was at Dorrian's with friends, he met Jennifer Levin. He had told one of her friends that Jennifer was "the best-looking girl in the world." Jennifer was elated. She had seen Chambers several times at the bar but had never spoken to him. She thought he was gorgeous. Jennifer's friend told her that he wanted to talk with her but his girlfriend was in the bar. That night though, she left Dorrian's with Chambers for the first time and soon, they had sex together.

Jennifer
Jennifer Levin was outgoing, pretty and had lots of friends. She was raised on Long Island and during the early 1970s, her parents, Ellen and Steven divorced. Jennifer and her mom soon moved to California but returned to New York in 1979. Later, Jennifer graduated from Baldwin School, a private school on E. 74th Street in Manhattan. During the summer of 1986, she worked as a waitress in football player Doug Flutie's Pier 17 restaurant on South Street. Although the work was tough, she managed to save some money for college in the fall. She planned to attend Chamberlayne College in Boston that September.

She eventually moved in with her father, a successful real estate broker, in a spacious loft in Soho, the region South of Houston Street in lower Manhattan. Because her parents were divorced, Jennifer may have craved love and attention, which is common among children from broken homes. She tended to fall in love easily and had sexual relationships with others before Chambers. She was extroverted, loved to have fun and go out with friends. She visited all the trendy spots in Manhattan, like Studio 54 and Hard Rock Café.

Though she was only 17, Jennifer looked older than her age. She had short brown hair, a freckled complexion and a wide engaging smile. She wore sexy clothes like ripped jeans and tight mini-skirts. But she always dressed well as a friend once said: "Nobody knows as much about style as Jennifer." People liked having Jennifer around and she frequently attended parties at the clubs in Manhattan and sometimes at the Hamptons, which she visited frequently during the summer months.

But her love life faltered. She went through several boyfriends who somehow always disappointed her. She felt rejected and used. "Boys are so strange," she told a friend, "When you haven't had sex yet, all they want is to get you to do it. But if you've had it, they're scared of you."

Throughout 1986, she and her friends hung around Dorrian's where they would meet up sometimes after they went out. They were well known there by all the bartenders, including John Zaccaro Jr., son of Rep. Geraldine Ferraro who would make history one day as the first woman to run for Vice-President. One night, before the summer began that year, she saw a tall good-looking guy standing at the bar. When she asked around, she learned he was Robert Chambers. She liked the way he looked, his body language, the way he combed his hair. So when he took notice of her, Jennifer was elated. "Maybe this time," she may have thought, "maybe this time I'll luck out."

The Interview
When Detectives Al Genova and Frank Connelly of the N.Y.P.D. tracked down Robert Chambers on the morning of the murder, they had no idea what to expect. They went to his home at 11 East 90th Street, just off 5th Avenue and next door to the Carnegie mansion, where Phyllis Chambers answered the doorbell. Det. Genova explained that a girl was missing and they needed to talk with Robert. When he emerged from the bedroom, the police were momentarily shocked at his appearance. He had scratches on his face and arms. And they were very fresh.

Det. Genova said that a girl was missing and that he would like to talk with Robert at police headquarters. Robert agreed. Within minutes, he and the two detectives drove over to the Central Park precinct. Phyllis, perhaps accustomed to dealing with the police, decided to wait it out at home after she was assured that Robert was needed to help the cops find the missing girl. It was just about 3 p.m.

The Central Park precinct, known as the "two-two" in the police world, was built in the 19th century to shelter horses for the park maintenance crew. During the 1920s, the building was converted to a police precinct and little by little, furniture, desks, communications equipment and the bare essentials for a police station were brought in. But the building itself retained its original design and charisma, which was unique in New York. It was constructed of dark, dingy brownstones and from the outside, it looks like a small castle from some distant era.

"Did you notice the scratches on Robert's face?" Genova asked Det. McEntee at the precinct. Everyone who saw Chambers that morning noticed the blatant injuries to his face and hands. It was a detail that spoke silent volumes of what may have happened the night before.

"How did you get those scratches on your face?" asked Det. McEntee."Oh, my cat scratched me," Chambers said."What happened to your hand?""I was sanding floors for a woman who lives upstairs from me, and the sanding machine jumped around and cut my fingers," replied Chambers without missing a beat.

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Chambers maintained his composure, exhibited confidence and seemed to be cooperating fully, even if some of his answers strained credibility.
At about 5 p.m. that day, in another room at the station house, a throng of reporters had gathered for a press conference about the murder. They had no idea that a suspect was being questioned a few feet away. But the story was already gaining momentum in the media.
By early evening, Manhattan North Detective Mike Sheehan and A.D.A. Steve Saracco joined in the interview. Chambers offered several explanations concerning his movements the night before. At first he said that Jennifer left Dorrian's without his knowledge and he never saw her again. Then he said that she walked across the street to buy cigarettes. But Jennifer did not smoke. After the detectives expressed doubt, Chambers said he walked outside the bar with her and she left for the night. Chambers changed his story several times to conform to the questions he was asked. Sheehan developed something of a rapport with Chambers and began to express sympathy for the young man. The seasoned detective knew that sometimes the best way to elicit a confession from a suspect is to express empathy. Chambers seemed responsive to Sheehan although he insisted that he last saw Jennifer when she left Dorrian's alone. Sheehan told Chambers that he had witnesses that placed him and Jennifer together leaving Dorrian's.

"Yeah, well I did leave the bar with her, I guess," said Chambers. For the first time, Chambers seemed taken aback. His eyes filled with tears. He shifted uneasily in his seat and seemed unsure of his words. It was the beginning of a long and detailed confession that would leave detectives speechless and shaking their heads in disbelief.

"The First Man Raped in Central Park!"
Soon, Chambers related what he said was the true story about how he had first seen Jennifer the night before in Dorrian's. A.D.A Saracco decided to tape the confession. In 1986, videotaping the statements of suspects was still new but not unknown. Sometimes the results of confessions on videotape can work against prosecutors. But at about midnight, in the presence of Det. Sheehan, Det. McEntee and A.D.A. Saracco, Robert Chambers gave his version of the death of Jennifer Levin.

Saracco read Chambers the Miranda warnings. Then, Chambers was asked how he came to be with Jennifer at Dorrian's the night before. He said that he was in the bar with friends when his girlfriend, Alex, began to argue with him in front of everyone. He said this embarrassed him and got him angry. Within a few minutes, Jennifer came over and said that she wanted to talk to him.

"I had a shot of tequila…and I did my shot and went outside and I met Jennifer. And then we started walking to 86th Street," Chamber said on the videotape. He said that he told Jennifer that he didn't want to see her anymore but she wouldn't hear of it. She wanted to go to the park.

"No, no, I want to go home," he said to her. In spite of his initial refusal to go to the park, Chambers said they both wound up in a grassy spot behind the museum. "I didn't even want to be with her," he said. Chambers described Jennifer as very sexually aggressive and he had to push her away several times. More than once, he said that he rejected her attempts at sex. They sat down on a bench and Jennifer disappeared into the bushes for a minute.

"The next thing I recall is she grabbed me from behind and tied my arms up behind my back with her panties," Chambers said.

"She started to take off my pants, she started to play with me. She started to jerk me off. She was doing it really hard. …And I-you know-I started to say, 'Stop it! Stop it! It hurts!" Chambers said. "She like sat on my face and then she dug her nails into my chest and I have scratches right here," Chambers said as he showed the cuts to the camera. "She was just having her way…I just could not take it…she was leaning forward, jerking me off and squeezing my balls and laughing, and I managed to get my hands free. So I kind of sat up a little and just grabbed her," Chambers said. "It-it was just really quick, she just flipped over and then landed, and she was kind of twisted on the tree. On her side." And that was it. That's how Jennifer died. That was the explanation offered by Chambers: she died by accident when he pushed her off of him after she tied him up with her panties, forced him down on the ground and groped his penis. In summary, he was defending himself against rape.

When the detectives expressed doubt on his story, Chambers became rigid and defensive. "She was having her way with me. Without my consent. With my hands tied behind my back," he said. But no matter how he tried to explain the event, Chambers could not explain the injuries to Jennifer's neck and body. He stuck to his story as improbable as it sounded.

After he saw that Jennifer was not responding, Chambers said he simply left the area and walked over to a nearby wall. "Then I went across and I sat on the wall and the lady with the bike came and then the police came and an ambulance came," he said. And after the killing, after he knew that Jennifer was dead? "And then I just walked through the park all the way up to Ninetieth Street…And I just, I went upstairs and got undressed and went to sleep," he said.
"I've been in this business for a while, and you're the first man I've seen raped in Central Park," Saracco said. The video ended and Chambers was formally placed under arrest and charged with the murder of Jennifer Levin. Before booking, he was allowed to visit with his father who was waiting out by the front desk. When he walked into the room, Chambers stood up and blurted out a statement that his father later said he didn't hear.

"That fucking bitch, why didn't she leave me alone?" he said.

"Wild Sex Killed Jenny!"
The campaign to demolish the reputation of Jennifer Levin began almost on the day of the murder. Press reports on the case, which reflected a blatant bias in favor of Robert Chambers, bordered on the hysterical. Headlines like "Sex Play Got Rough," which appeared in the N.Y. Daily News on August 28, two days after the murder, were typical of the tabloid's view of the crime. From the very beginning, the press embraced the idea that Jennifer somehow caused her own death by her irresponsible behavior and by her "teenage vamp" image that was promoted and sustained by the print media. Chambers was seen, strangely enough, as a victim who was on an equal plateau with the dead Jennifer. The killing was a tragedy, not a murder.

Within a few days of the crime, the majority of the press corps was inclined to accept at face value, the statements of Chambers who said that he was defending himself against a sexual assault. Of course, the fact that both victim and suspect traveled in circles that most city dwellers never see was also a part of a story that one reporter called "irresistible." A slaying in Central Park that revolved around young good-looking people, sex and the socialite class was the kind of event that newspaper editors dream about, a story that made its own headlines.
Stories about Chambers and Levin almost universally described them as gorgeous, rich and from an ill-defined upper level of society. Whether or not they were gorgeous is a matter of opinion. But they were not rich nor did their origins come from Manhattan's social register. The media's labeling of the event, as "The Preppie Murder," was also inappropriate since Chambers was not a "preppie." He had already attended college and was thrown out. His entire scholastic record was one of failure and disappointment.

Chambers, from the day he was arrested was described in the press as "handsome", "extremely good-looking" or "Romeo." His future was "promising" and "bright." The murder was perceived as almost a temporary setback for what he was to accomplish in his charmed life. Jennifer Levin on the other hand, was described in newspaper articles as " sexy," "worldly" and stories on her background focused mostly on how many boys she dated. References were made to her sexual past as if to say, "yeah, she's the kind of woman who would try to rape a guy."

On August 29, the N.Y. Daily News ran this headline: "How Jennifer Courted Death." There it was. It was now official, in a sense: Jennifer caused her own murder. The idea that was implanted in the public mind, and everything that followed afterwards, had to conform or in some way support this theory: a girl who drinks in a bar with a man late at night and goes to the park for sex, deserves what happens to her. Reporters from the city's newspapers, including the Times, who struggled to find some sort of moral lesson in the murder, followed this line of reasoning for months. And much of that reporting was the result of personal bias, as one N.Y. Times reporter said: "I felt so offended by the lifestyle that these kids lived." Robert Chambers received lots of good press. His arrest and indictment for the burglaries he committed, his past drug abuse and poor reputation among friends was conveniently ignored. In contrast, Levin's past was fair game for every kind of scrutiny and innuendo. It was only months later that stories began to appear that examined the negative past of Chambers.

But the damage was done. The groundwork was laid for a contentious legal battle that was at times, infuriating, hurtful and preposterous. On one side was a dedicated prosecutor, a champion for victim's rights and feminist causes. On the other was a brilliant trial lawyer, Harvard graduate and defender of the accused. And together, they would fight to a bitter end in which neither side could claim a total victory.

Battle Lines are Drawn
Jack T. Litman, 43, was hired to defend Robert Chambers. Litman was no stranger to New York's courts or controversy. He was already one of the city's most well-known defense attorneys and in years past participated in several high-profile trials. As a young graduate from Harvard Law School, his first legal job was as a prosecutor with the Manhattan D.A.'s Office where he developed a fine reputation, losing only one trial. But his heart was not in prosecutions. After several years, he left the D.A.'s office and went out on his own. He took several dramatic cases to trial involving police shootings, winning them all. Litman also defended several accused murderers who were convicted on lesser charges.

But Litman's most famous trial to date was the Bonnie Garland murder, a case that became known for its "blame the victim defense." Garland was a 20-year-old Yale University student in 1977 who was sleeping in her own bed at home in Scarsdale, New York. A man, later identified as fellow student Richard Herrin, broke into her room and bludgeoned her to death with a hammer. Herrin was a former boyfriend who was spurned by Garland. When the case came to trial, Litman offered the defense that Herrin was acting under a sort of diminished capacity because he was mistreated by Garland. Eventually, Herrin was convicted on a lesser charge of manslaughter. But Litman suffered through a great deal of criticism from an angry press and a fed-up public who saw his tactics as a further degradation of the victim. The Bonnie Garland murder was well remembered in 1986 and soon, protesters marched in the streets carrying signs that denounced Litman for his role in the Chambers case.

Linda Fairstein, 39, a veteran A.D.A. out of the Manhattan office, was named as the prosecutor. Fairstein was a graduate of prestigious Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the University of Virginia Law School in 1972. She spent most of her career in Manhattan prosecuting rape cases and, as a result, developed a genuine empathy for sexual assault victims. During the 14 years she was part of the D.A.'s office, the rape conviction rate rose from 10% in 1973 to almost 75% in 1985. Although she was widely respected in the courts, the Chambers case would be her first murder trial. But Fairstein was determined not to have Jennifer's name or memory dragged through the mud. In reply to Litman's motions, Fairstein said in court papers: "In more than 8,000 cases of reported assaults in the last ten years, this is the first in which a male reported being sexually assaulted by a female." Ironically, her very first job when she arrived at the Manhattan District Attorney's office was to assist a young prosecutor named Jack T. Litman. They remained in touch throughout the years. Of Litman, she once said, "He's a brilliant lawyer. Our passions are very different, and I'm glad I don't do what he does, but I certainly respect his right to do it."

On September 29, Litman asked the court for bail. In support of the request, he supplied the names of dozens of character witnesses including a letter of support from Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, New Jersey. McCarrick knew Phyllis Chambers and Robert from the time she worked as a nurse for Cardinal Cooke of New York. He wrote that Robert was an outstanding young man who surely would not hurt anyone. Although most murder defendants were denied bail, Judge Howard E. Bell was persuaded. He set bail at $150,000 and added one condition. If released, Chambers would have to report regularly to a Monsignor Leonard in a church in Washington Heights. Fairstein was outraged. In the Bonnie Garland case, the defendant was also released on bail and also placed under the supervision of the Catholic Church.

When Judge Bell announced his decision to grant bail, he told the court he was "deeply concerned about the families on both sides in this case. The court finds that bail in this case is appropriate." Ellen Levin burst into tears when she heard the ruling and ran from the courtroom. The Chambers family tried to raise the cash but could not get all the money together. Jack Dorrian, owner of Dorrian's Red Hand, posted the remaining bail. Concerning the propriety of providing bail money, Dorrian said, "At least his mother has the comfort of having him out of jail for now. I'm sure the mother of the victim would understand that." But, of course, she didn't. The vision of her child being viciously strangled in the darkness of Central Park obscured her ability to see things as clearly as others.

"Blame the Victim!"
In November of 1986, word leaked to Jack Litman that the prosecution had read a diary that belonged to Jennifer Levin. To make matters worse, it was rumored that the diary contained a detailed litany of Jennifer's sexual activity including the names of many different young men. Litman claimed that Fairstein first mentioned this diary to him and in doing so said there was an abundance of sexual material in its pages. Fairstein denied this allegation, but Litman submitted court papers asking that the diary be made available to the defense. He said that the diary contained information that could be beneficial to his client and therefore under the rules of evidence, he was entitled to it.

The press immediately dubbed the book the "sex diary." It became linked with Jennifer's name for the duration of the trial and helped to denigrate her reputation as well. Whatever image she had as a young and innocent college girl took a battering in the press who consistently referred to her as "rich," "bubbly," "sexy" and "privileged." Headlines that emphasized the sexual aspects of the case appeared daily in the city's tabloids and the N.Y. Times. Fairstein, trying to stem the tide of bad press, told reporters: "There isn't a sex diary. There is a school date book, but nothing chronicling Jennifer's sex life."

Ultimately, the contested diary was turned over to Judge Bell for a private review. After a reading, Litman's request was denied. Judge Bell wrote that the diary "contained no admissible evidence and nothing that was relevant and material to the defendant's case. He added that Chambers should not be permitted to take "an unrestrained tour of investigation." However, the diary issue was an ominous development for the prosecution team. They feared it was the opening barrage of what was to come in the weeks and months ahead. Would there be no limits to what steps the defense would take to exonerate their client?

An organization called "Justice for Jennifer" was formed by some of her friends and other interested parties who were outraged at the attempts to destroy the victim's reputation. They wore pins whenever they appeared in public and frequently spoke to reporters, condemning the tactics of Chambers' defense team. The spokesperson for the group, Rose Jordan, told the Times that women who are murdered "are victims of the same distortions to justify the violence against them." But there were supporters of the defense tactics as well. A law professor from N.Y.U. School of Law told reporters: "Not only is it not unethical to try to cast aspersions on the character of the victim, it's ethically the lawyer's duty to do that if it will succeed in a not-guilty verdict or conviction of a lesser charge."

But the specter of a "trash Jennifer" defense did not sit well with most people. Although in 1985 changes were made in the rape laws in New York, which restricted testimony into the sexual past of a victim, they did not apply to murder cases. And Jennifer was not around to take the stand in her own defense. The Village Voice said it best in an article titled "Who's On Trial?" when author C. Carr wrote: "The Chambers\Litman story is that of a 'bad girl' who gets what she deserves and a helpless man defending himself from her sexual voraciousness."

"I Think I Killed It!"
The case moved forward at a snail's pace. Chambers' videotaped confession was ruled admissible, though in a slightly edited version. Edited out was D.A. Saracco's sarcastic questioning on the night of August 26, 1986, in which he expressed obvious doubt about Chambers' responses. Statements made by Saracco such as, "If I was sitting here telling you this story, you'd be laughing" and "I really don't believe what you're saying!" would never be heard by the jury.

In the meantime, Chambers complained to many people that he would have to go to jail. To his family and acquaintances, he played the role of the victim. It was he who was being sent to prison, it was he who was being vilified and persecuted. This was the theme Chambers repeated over and over again. The entire year of 1987 went by while Litman filed motion after motion in Judge Bell's court. Each motion had to be addressed, argued and decided upon. This ate up a great deal of time. The press grew tired of the delay and said so in several editorials. But unknown to the public, Chambers did not stay at home and sulk while waiting for trial. He attended parties, went out to the local bars and often met with friends to socialize and talk about his future.

In December of 1987, Chambers attended such a party given by a friend who had once attended York Prep while he was a student. Her name was Melissa Buschell. She invited several of her girlfriends over and after drinking for a time; they came up with the idea of videotaping themselves. When Chambers arrived, he joined in the fun and Melissa taped the scene while the girls fooled around and performed comedy routines for the camera. Chambers began to roll on the floor mugging for the camera. He took a woman's wig and placed it on his head and in his crotch area as the girls giggled continuously. He choked himself with his own hands as he gagged loudly. He picked up a doll and held it close to the camera while he twisted its neck. Chambers spoke in a high female voice as he said, "My name is" The head to the doll suddenly came off the body. "Ooops," he said in a maniacal voice. "I think I killed it!" The room erupted in laughter. The girls, some who were Jennifer's friends, perhaps did not realize the symbolism of Chambers' wretched behavior. The tape was placed aside and forgottenfor a time.

The Trial
After months of pre-trial maneuvering and motions filed by the defense, New York's most anticipated trial opened on January 4, 1988. On the bench sat Judge Howard E. Bell, whose rulings infuriated both sides during the many legal questions prior to trial. The press reported every development in court and hardly a day went by that a newspaper editorial didn't condemn Litman for his "blame the victim" defense.

The prosecution began by putting the police officers and forensic investigators on the stand for the first few days. They detailed the crime scene, the location and condition of the body. But the handling and processing of the evidence at the crime scene was not perfect. At times, it was less than acceptable and Litman was able to cast doubt on much of the critical evidence offered by Fairstein concerning the crime scene.

A parade of young people who were friends of the victim, or who were at Dorrian's on the fateful night, took the stand to testify.

Medical Examiner Dr. Maria Alandy testified to the post mortem examination and stated that compression of the victim's neck had to be substantial in order to effect death. It was crucial testimony; for Chambers' explanation was that he grabbed Jennifer by the neck for a moment and threw her off of him. For her final witness, Fairstein put on a Dr. Werner Spitz, the chief medical examiner for the city of Detroit who would give his opinion as to the nature of Levin's injuries. But it was Litman who originally contacted Spitz to testify for the defense. The doctor had taken an immediate dislike for Litman and was not shy about it on the stand when Litman questioned him.

Q: We had a conversation two days in a row, don't you recall them?

A: No. I have no recollection of speaking to you more than once. I don't think I'll forget that phone call for a long time.

Q: In that call, did I convey to you ideas, suppositions, I had about this case?

A: It was a shouting match, and you paid no attention to what I said. You tried to influence my opinions.

Q: Do you remember my telling you things that Chambers had said?

A: Maybe, I don't recall. I felt bulldozed, and I completely turned you offI was on the phone, but I wasn't listening to what you were saying.

This contentious line of questioning continued for some time as Litman tried to elicit favorable testimony from the defiant Dr. Spitz. Essential was the estimate of time it took to strangle Jennifer and the two men argued, debated and screamed over that point for virtually the entire time Dr. Spitz was on the stand. And once, when Litman tried to get Spitz to agree to a point he was trying to make, the doctor became enraged.

Q: I'm challenging you, Doctor, to tell us how the blouse was tightened into a rope around her neck! Can you or can't you tell us which part was against the side of her neck?

A: I can't tell you.

Q: The fact is that you can't do it, can you?

A: If you want, I'll demonstrate to you right now, on yourself!"

On March 2, Jack Litman opened his defense. He had only five witnesses to testify for Chambers including Dr. Ronald Kornblum, chief medical examiner for Los Angeles, who refuted Dr. Spitz's observations as best he could. By March 10, the defense rested and the case later went to the jury.

For nine nail-biting days, the jury debated the issue of guilt or innocence. Reports indicated that the atmosphere in the deliberations room was tumultuous and undecided. At one point the vote was 8-4 for acquittal. A later poll was 9-3 for conviction on second-degree murder. One black juror complained that other members of the panel were racists. Several times, jurors asked to be excused because of the mounting pressures. In an interview with the N.Y. Times, Debra Cavanaugh, the jury forewoman, said, "Both sides proved their points. Both sides' stories could be true." Another juror said: "Our feelings went back and forth so much, I can't say what it was."

Chambers Cops a Plea
However, unknown to the jury, who was sequestered in another room, a deal was being worked out behind the scenes. Litman and Fairstein were talking about a possible plea bargain. Pivotal in the talks was the outcome of pending charges for the burglaries committed by Chambers in 1986. Those felony charges combined with a possible conviction on manslaughter could put his client behind bars for a long, long time. While the jury was completing its ninth day of deliberations, word leaked out in the courtroom that a deal had been struck.

Chambers, as it is said, copped a plea. He would plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter and faced a sentence of five to 15. He had to serve a minimum of five years. In addition, he had to plead guilty to one count of burglary for his thefts in 1986. The significance of that plea was important, since it made Chambers a two-time loser. If he should be convicted of a third felony sometime in the future, it would mean life in prison. The news swept through the courthouse like a tornado.

While the jury was out of the room, the plea in court began. Chambers stood with his attorney to hear Judge Bell ask the questions.

"Is it true, Mr. Chambers, that on August 26, 1986, you intended to cause serious physical injury to Jennifer Levin and thereby causing her death?" he said.

"Looking back on everything, I'd have to say yes, but in my heart I didn't mean for anything to happen," Chambers said as he stared at the floor. Fairstein interjected.

"Your honor we're asking about his mind and his hands, not his heart!" she said.

The judge repeated the question and this time, Chambers replied: "Yes, your honor." But he shook his head back and forth as if to indicate "no."

"Is there any question in your mind about causing her death?"

"There is no question, your honor," Chambers replied. He also had to plead out to the burglary charge. Sentencing was set for April 15. At 5:40 p.m., the jury was brought back into the courtroom and for the first time, they learned that a deal had been made. Judge Bell gave them the news.

"This matter has been disposed of. Thank you very much for your services," he said to the jury.
Some of the panel began to cry as they marched out of the box. The media crush was everywhere, trying to interview anyone who would talk. A few minutes later, outside the court, Ellen Levin spoke to the TV cameras.

"I don't think we could have withstood another trial," explaining her fears about a possible hung jury. "We could not have sustained that strain and tension for another year and a half." It was what a lot of people were thinking. For better or worse, it was over.

Epilogue
After the trial, as the excitement of the case subsided, the forgotten "party" videotape ignited passions again. The TV program Current Affairs heard rumors about the existence of a strange video recording in which Robert Chambers did some extraordinary things: like choking himself and tearing the head off a doll. There were young girls in their underwear on the tape too. And it all took place while he was awaiting trial for murder and under the bail supervision of the Catholic Church. Current Affairs tracked down the owner of that tape and it was reported that the owner was paid $10,000 for the recording though the price was never confirmed.

During April 1988, Current Affairs played the tape for its TV audience. The reaction was immediate. Again, Chambers caused a sensation. Outtakes from the video played on all the television networks. There was outrage and disgust at his behavior. Many saw it as a further denigration of Jennifer Levin. The image of Chambers laughing and mugging for the camera while young girls in their underwear cavorted in the background was too much for the public. Whatever support he may have had in the community turned against him. The press finally hammered away at Chambers.

In 1989, a TV movie called The Preppie Murder was made about the case. It starred Billy Baldwin as Chambers and Lara Flynn Boyle as Jennifer. Det. Mike Sheehan served as a consultant on the project. The Levins did not cooperate with the production of the film. Neither did Linda Fairstein. Jack Dorrian also refused any filming inside the Red Hand bar.

There was a $25 million dollar wrongful death suit filed by Jennifer's parents. Chambers did not fight the lawsuit and the Levins won a judgment against any of his future earnings. Since Chambers would surely be released from prison one day, he still had the potential to make money. To his supporters, he later wrote, "I came to the decision to plead 'no contest' to end this circus once and for all." But his troubles were still not over. While incarcerated, he violated prison rules several times including an incident where he was found to be in possession of marijuana. These infractions added time to his sentence and also affected his eligibility for parole. As of September 2001, Robert Chambers was still in custody at Auburn State Prison. He has a parole hearing scheduled in December 2002.

February, 2003 Update
Valentine's Day is for lovers. It is supposed to be a time of romance and candlelight dinners in secluded restaurants. But for the family of Jennifer Levin, murdered at the age of 19 by Robert Chambers in 1986, this year's holiday will likely be a difficult one. On February 14, Chambers, the misnamed "preppie killer" is scheduled to walk out of New York's Auburn prison a free man at the age of 36. He will have served his maximum sentence for Jennifer's murder: 15 years.
Actually, he is due out February 16. But because that date falls on a Sunday, he will be released the Friday before, Valentine's Day. Chambers could have been released as early as 1997, but he committed a series of infractions in prison that added to his time.

In 1986, the Jennifer Levin murder case captivated New York City. The killing in Central Park mesmerized the public with its sordid tale of "rough sex" and a freewheeling lifestyle among the city's spoiled youth. Fueled by the tabloids, which featured such titillating headlines as SEX PLAY GOT ROUGH, JEN'S SEX DIARY and the now notorious, HOW JENNY COURTED DEATH, the case dominated front-page news for two years. A home video, made by a friend of Chambers shortly after the murder trial, was shown on prime time news in 1988. It showed a smirking Chambers ripping off the head of a female doll and mugging for the camera. "Oops! I think I killed it!" he said in a high-pitched voice during the video. It was a disturbing reference to the actual murder. A TV movie was later produced starring one of the Baldwin brothers as Robert Chambers. The film generated a great deal of anger among citizens that has not yet totally subsided.

Ellen Levin, Jennifer's mother, recently described the agonizing ordeal of losing a child on "Larry King Live." "It was horrible," she said. "I felt like I was getting hit over the head over and over again. We all suffered. My whole family was in disbelief over what had happened." The Levin family attended the trial every day and sat a few feet away from her daughter's accused killer. "He took my daughter's life and I hate him for that," she said.

Over the years, she accumulated tens of thousands of signatures on petitions and showed up at parole hearings to make her feelings known about possible freedom for her daughter's killer. As for Chambers, he has never shown any public remorse for what he has done. At a 1995 parole hearing, he made the curious statement: "I guess I could also give you the party line and say I have learned my lesson, I will never do this again, but that's not how I feel at the moment."
During the murder trial, Chambers' attorney used a "blame the victim" defense. The 6-foot-4-inch Chambers claimed that Jennifer Levin, 5 foot 3 inches and 120 pounds, roughed him up a little too much during sexual play behind Manhattan's Museum of Art. He said that he was forced to act in self-defense when he accidentally choked her to death. To support that contention, Jennifer Levin's life and reputation were put under a critical microscope for the world to see. She was said to be promiscuous, drunk, spoiled and worse.

Chambers was frequently described as a "preppie," which he was not; "handsome"; "promising"; and deserving of an exciting future that was just out of his grasp. The more negative aspects of his past life, like drug abuse, thefts, burglaries and expulsions from several schools were rarely mentioned and never emphasized. But those tactics ultimately backfired. It brought the "blame the victim" strategy to the forefront of public attention. Many victim's rights groups were formed, and Ellen Levin spent the last 12 years working for changes in laws that emphasize the right of criminals. She has also counseled parents who have lost their children to murder.

In the meantime, Robert Chambers has been confined to the Auburn facility where he has been in involuntary protective custody confinement since April 6, 2002. Inmates that are high-profile, like Chambers, are susceptible to attack from other prisoners. As a precaution, they are frequently placed in confinement for their own safety. During his time at the facility, Chambers has been less than a model prisoner. A recent Associated Press report said that between July 1988 and June 1997, Chambers was docked for 75 months of good time due to seven violations of prison rules. He has spent nearly five years of his sentence in solitary confinement. All of that becomes history after February 14 when Chambers walks out of Auburn for the last time. Since he has served his complete sentence, he will not even be under parole supervision. Under the eyes of the law, he will have paid his debt to society in full for killing Jennifer Levin.

Phyliss Chambers, the mother of Robert, was an Irish immigrant who stood by her son during the 1986 trial. Before the murder, she was full of hope that her handsome son would become a successful businessman or perhaps a politician. She lobbied continuously with no success over the past 15 years for the release of her son. The Chambers' family attorney, Brian O'Dwyer, recently told CNN, "There will be no statements from the family prior to February 14." But for a mother who has endured the ultimate tragedy as a parent, the suffering will go on. "I think she's incredibly lucky to get her son back," Ellen Levin told the New York Daily News recently, "because I'm not getting my daughter back."

Preppy Killer Arrested
Nearly everyone in the upscale building on E. 57th Street in mid-town Manhattan suspected what was going on in the seventeenth floor apartment. For months, unfriendly strangers would show up at the front door at all hours of the day or night, enter and leave within a few minutes. Some of the visitors were sleazy and scary, and many seemed high on drugs. Neighbors in the high-rise complained about the suspicious activity, and police were summoned to the building on several occasions.

The show came to an abrupt end on the night of October 22, 2007, when police, armed with a no-knock search warrant, showed up at the front door of apartment 17-B. After breaking down the door with a battering ram, police entered and arrested two suspects, Robert Chambers, 41, and his girlfriend, Shawn Kovell, 39. They had been living there since 2003, when sympathetic landlord Connie Hambright let the couple rent the space though she suspected they couldn't afford it. At the time of his arrest, Chambers allegedly fought with police, injuring three cops in the struggle. The story might have attracted little attention, since this type of drug raid is performed every day by New York Police Department drug teams and Drug Enforcement Agency agents. Except Chambers wasn't an ordinary suspected crack dealer.

The once-handsome Robert Chambers may be better known as the Preppy Killer. In August 1986, he was arrested for the strangulation murder of eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin after a night of partying in Manhattan's trendy East Side bars. Coverage of the case reached remarkable heights of media frenzy, featuring lurid headlines such as "Sex Play Got Rough" and "How Jenny Courted Death." New York tabloids especially received a great deal of public criticism when some seemed partially to blame Levin for placing herself in harm's way by taking the fatal late-night stroll with Chambers in Central Park.

In his defense, Chambers claimed that Levin was the instigator and that he was trying only to defend himself from her aggressive advances. In the midst of a sensational trial, in which Chambers had as many supporters as detractors, he suddenly pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was released from prison in February 2003 and remained out of legal trouble until 2005, when he was charged with heroin possession and later served one hundred days in jail for the offense.

Inside the E. 57th Street apartment on Monday, police found what seemed the squalid crash pad of a drug abuser. The $1,800 a month dwelling was a shambles, filthy and littered. A mural of a lizard or a dragon adorned the wall behind the headboard of an unmade bed. Uneaten food and dirty dishes lay about the kitchen, and dirty clothes littered each room. According to news reports, police found crack pipes and several bags of cocaine, which may lead to additional charges. The New York Daily News reported that the apartment was the scene of "heavy drug traffic in recent months, and undercover cops bought a quarter-kilo of coke with a street value of $20,000." The New York Post differed in its assessment, reporting that "in all, they purchased nearly $10,000 worth of drugs during seven different sales."

"My heart is broken," Connie Hambright told Daily News reporters after the arrest. 'I think it happened out of desperation, financial desperation." Other neighbors, tired of the apparent drug activity on the 17th floor, were not so understanding. "It was absolutely horrible," one tenant said to reporters from the Post. "What can you possibly say about him, except, 'Put him away for good'?" said another.

Chambers was charged with multiple counts of selling drugs in the first degree; each charge is an A-1 felony in the State of New York and more than enough, given his prior record, to put him away for the rest of his life. Kovell, a long-time friend of Chambers, was also charged with drug sales. She was one of the pretty girls seen in the notorious 1987 video tape shot while Chambers was awaiting trial for Levin's murder. In the video, he was seen mugging for the camera with Kovell and her friends, ripping the head off a doll. "Oops!" he said in an affected voice. "I think I killed it!" When the news program A Current Affair broadcast the tape in April 1988, public outrage was immediate and vociferous.

When reporters tried to talk with him after his most recent arrest, Chambers seemed confused about what had happened. "I don't even know why I'm here," he said to a Daily News reporter. In court, Chambers told the judge that he did not know why he had been arrested nor what the charges were. His appearance was a far cry from the suave, cocky image he had projected throughout his 1988 trial, when young women packed the courtroom and swooned over the handsome, 6'5" defendant. When he appeared this week in Manhattan Criminal Court, Chambers seemed much older than his years, unshaven, dirty and thin. The promising future that once seemed his is long gone. The only future he seems to have left is one behind bars.

"I would expect he would spend the rest of his life in jail," said District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to Post reporters.

Source

The Killer Among Us

An arsenic poisoning sends a small New England church into turmoil.

By Max Alexander

Possible Food Poisoning
The potato fields that roll up to the edge of New Sweden were still dusted with snow on Sunday, April 27, 2003. Even by the standards of northern Maine it had been a tough winter, and the old furnace in the parsonage of the Gustaf Adolph Evangelical Lutheran Church was giving up the ghost. The church council had gathered after services to decide who would install a new heater.
Council member Dick Ruggles, a 64-year-old retired ironworker, grabbed a cup of coffee and headed into the meeting.

He lasted about five minutes. "I asked a question of one of the members," says Ruggles, "and before he could answer, I had to leave and go to the men's room." When the vomiting briefly let up, Ruggles staggered out to find his wife, who had been chatting over coffee in the kitchen with Erich Margeson. "Fran," he said, "I have to go home now!"

Home was a white clapboard farmhouse just up the road, but Fran had to stop the car twice for Dick. Once there, the violent nausea continued, and severe diarrhea added to Dick's woes. When Fran went into the bedroom to change out of her church clothes, she suddenly felt sick herself. "I didn't make it back to the bathroom," she says. "I just could not stop vomiting."

Sometime between three and four that afternoon, the phone rang. It was Erich Margeson's wife, Alana, calling to say she'd just taken Erich to the hospital. Erich, a 30-year-old potato farmer, was also violently ill. Soon came another call: Dale Anderson, who had been at church, was sick too. When Barb Bondeson called around five, Dick and Fran were too ill to speak. Barb called Fran's sister, Julie Adler, who had skipped church that day. She raced over with her son, who had to carry Dick to the car.

With a population that hovers just over 600, New Sweden has no hospital of its own. Fortunately, an emergency room is just eight miles away, in the town of Caribou. Staffers at the Cary Medical Center take pride in their high-tech, point-of-care service. But Cary's greatest asset is its close relationship with the community. Its doctors know their patients from the local cross-country ski trails, not the medical charts. With only 37 beds and a small staff of nurses, Cary is set up for car accidents and cardiac arrests -- not outbreaks of violent illness.

Yet an outbreak is exactly what Cary had by Sunday evening, as a total of 12 church members showed up retching and gasping. Patty Carson, the hospital's infection control officer, remembers, "My first thought was, 'Some poor old lady who made the potato salad is gonna be so upset.' " Thinking fast, Carson alerted the state's Bureau of Health to a possible food poisoning in New Sweden. Then she grabbed a notepad and headed for the patient wards, looking for answers.

It didn't take long for Carson to change her mind about the cause of the outbreak. The patients had eaten a variety of food in the church kitchen -- tuna sandwiches, sponge cake, banana bread with icing -- most of it left over from a bake sale the day before. The only common denominator was the coffee; every patient had sipped a cup, and they all recalled it tasted funny --"bitter," "metallic" or just plain "bad." And all got sick within an hour of drinking the brew. As a microbiologist, Carson knew that food-borne organisms typically take several hours or more to cause illness. And she doubted that any dangerous bacteria could thrive in the hot, acidic environment of a coffee urn.

Dr. Daniel Harrigan, the ER physician on duty, was coming to the same conclusion. "These people had blood pressures that were much lower than you would expect from food poisoning," he says. The most critical patient was Reid Morrill, the church's head usher and a beloved local character known for his homemade ice cream and for once hitting a hole in one at the Caribou Country Club. Morrill, 78, was still recovering from cardiac bypass surgery earlier in the year. Dr. Harrigan golfed with Morrill; now his links partner was hooked up to a ventilator. Recalls Harrigan: "I told Patty that this has to be a poisoning of some sort, and to call the poison center."

Morrill was one of four patients, including Fran Ruggles, admitted to Cary that night. Margeson and four others felt well enough after a few hours to go home. Convinced they were not contagious (and facing a shortage of beds), the hospital released them. Three additional patients, Dick Ruggles among them, needed more serious care but were stable enough to be transferred to the closest acute-care facility, Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, 170 miles south.

The Unthinkable
As the hospital in Bangor was preparing to receive the patients, another medical team was swinging into action at the Northern New England Poison Center in Portland, 300 miles downstate. The center's medical director, Dr. Anthony Tomassoni, had been studying the charts of all the New Sweden patients. It was a little after three o'clock Monday morning when he called Dr. Harrigan. "I'm thinking heavy metals," he said. The toxicologist thought some New Sweden patients were experiencing a condition known as acidosis, resulting from the body's inability to use oxygen effectively. That could be caused by lead or antimony (an element in batteries), but arsenic was at the top of his list. "At the same time," remembers Tomassoni, "we thought, jeez, arsenic in northern Maine, what are the chances?"

Plenty, it turned out. Arsenic was once commonly used in potato farming as a so-called topkiller. A week before the harvest, farmers would spray a dilution of inorganic arsenic on the plants' bushy green tops to kill them off -- allowing the potato skins to toughen. Today farmers use less poisonous herbicides, but it would not be unusual to find jars of powdered arsenic in barns around potato country.

Shortly after Harrigan and Tomassoni got off the phone, Reid Morrill died. Louise Beaupre, wife of another victim, recalled that only a week before, Morrill, still ailing from heart surgery, had said, "I don't know if I'm ever gonna feel okay." She had responded, "Of course you will." The next Sunday, she says, "He was all pink cheeks, smiling and laughing. I said 'I think somebody's feeling better!' And he said 'Yep, I am.' And I can still see him standing there with a cup of coffee in his hand."

Morrill's death triggered the attention of the state medical examiner, as well as the national news media. The case was gaining urgency.

Arsenic can be identified only with specialized equipment. The nearest lab with that capability was the state's Health and Environmental Testing Laboratory in the capital of Augusta -- 230 miles south of Caribou. Early Monday morning, a state trooper left Cary Medical Center with the patients' fluid samples, his siren wailing down Interstate 95. Also in the back of his cruiser was the coffee urn from the Gustaf Adolph Lutheran Church.

The results came back at about eight o'clock Monday night: Inconceivably high levels of arsenic were found in all the patient samples, as well as the coffee. Dr. Tomassoni was too shocked to congratulate himself on his diagnosis. "I never thought I would see something like this in my career," he says. That's when the state police were notified.

Lieutenant Dennis Appleton of the Maine State Police Criminal Investigation Division is not the type to jump to conclusions. Rather than assume the worst, he hoped his investigation would uncover an innocent, albeit tragic, explanation. On Tuesday, Appleton had the church sealed off and a team of detectives on-site. The search was unsettling. "After several days of examining the church from basement to attic," Appleton recalls, "we found nothing that would have contributed to an accidental poisoning -- no jar of arsenic in the cupboard that had been mistaken for the sugar bowl."

When Fran Ruggles heard she had been poisoned with arsenic, she assumed it was environmental: "We'd had a lot of rain and snow. I thought it must be in the water." Tomassoni knew otherwise, estimating the level of poison would have required "a fistful or two" of pure powdered arsenic dumped directly into the coffee urn.

Detectives began interviewing patients -- now victims -- about possible motives. None of them had a clue. Recalls Fran, "I just could not accept the fact that this was done deliberately."

She wasn't alone. In a state famous for insular small towns, New Sweden is in a class by itself. The community was founded in 1870 by 50 Swedish homesteaders, lured across the sea by the promise of free land and a new life. New Sweden is still largely populated by descendants of those settlers; about half of the 16 arsenic victims are Swedish. With its Midsommar celebration and fiskare frukosts (fisherman's breakfasts), the town retains closer ties to Sweden than to mainstream America.

Even tighter than the community is the congregation at the Gustaf Adolph church, built on a hill overlooking New Sweden by the original settlers in 1880. The picturesque chapel, with its steeple rising above farm and forest, is the oldest active Lutheran church in Maine. To many, the idea that a member of the small congregation (46 people attended church that Sunday) had poisoned them was unthinkable. Fran Ruggles echoed the feeling of the group when she told detectives, "You're going to have to prove it to me."

Doctors at Cary Medical Center had little time to ponder motivation. Once arsenic was diagnosed, all the patients who were released the night before had to be called back for additional treatment. And as the day progressed, new patients started showing up -- some who had sipped a tiny bit of coffee and not gotten sick (tests showed potentially fatal doses of arsenic in them as well), and others, like carpenter Lester Beaupre, 53, who initially thought he had the flu.

An Excruciating Ordeal
Beaupre, a Vietnam veteran who once spent nine weeks in the hospital with meningitis, wasn't about to go to the emergency room for a little stomach bug. He spent Sunday night at home, his wife, Louise (who has never tasted coffee in her life), keeping him hydrated with Gatorade. On Monday, says Louise, "when they called and told me about Reid's death, I said to Lester, 'Okay, this is it. Put your clothes on.' " On the way to the hospital, Lester remembers, the snowbanks looked purple. "That's when I knew this was serious," he recalls.

Arsenic travels rapidly to every organ in the body, where it slows the conversion of oxygen to energy. Without energy, the heart's electrical activity falters, lungs fill with fluid, kidneys fail, nerve tissue is damaged, and the brain starts to short-circuit. Arsenic can affect almost anything and everything in the anatomy, which is why symptoms can range from cardiac arrest to seeing purple snow.

The most effective proven antidote is a drug known as British anti-lewisite, or BAL. It attaches to the arsenic molecules, drawing them out of the bloodstream and into the urine. It's a nasty drug to administer; the only way to ingest BAL is by mixing it with peanut oil, then injecting the greasy solution directly into muscle tissue -- an excruciating ordeal.

It's also expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per dose. The price, and the rarity of arsenic poisoning, explains why BAL is not lying around on hospital pharmacy shelves. But with foresight that now seems miraculous, in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks Dr. Tomassoni had persuaded Maine's Bureau of Health to purchase BAL doses for the state's largest hospitals.

As the victims endured painful treatment and round-the-clock fluid testing, more bad news came on Friday: Church member Daniel Bondeson, a 53-year-old bachelor potato farmer, nurse's aide and high school ski coach, fatally shot himself in the chest. In his farmhouse, where he was discovered by his brother Carl, was a note in which he implicated himself in the tragedy, according to police.

The victims were stunned. "Danny was a friend of ours," says Dick Ruggles. Lester Beaupre had gone to high school with Bondeson; he still describes him as "probably the nicest person you'll ever meet."

Bondeson, a former member of the church council, was a quiet man, but active in the community. Dr. Harrigan had run in races with him. Another victim, Ralph Ostlund, often skied with him. Says Erich Margeson, "Danny was always interested in helping people if they had a problem." Louise Beaupre, who describes Bondeson as "pleasant but shy," says, "My feeling is he just snapped. There's no logical reason. It's beyond comprehension."

But why?

"We're all scratching our heads," Erich explains. Police have not released the text of Bondeson's suicide letter. But Alan Harding, an attorney representing Bondeson's estate, told local newspapers that in the note Bondeson said he wanted to give five church members a "bellyache" like they had given him. Harding also said the note indicated Bondeson did not know the poison was arsenic. Lieutenant Appleton won't comment on Harding's statements except to stress that the lawyer has not personally seen the letter. One theory is that Bondeson was angry because his family had given the church a communion table that wasn't being used. "There were some hurt feelings," says one church member. But arsenic? "It's hard to think about," says Erich Margeson.

As the community struggled to understand, police dropped another bomb: Bondeson, they said, without offering additional details, did not act alone. Church members say they have no idea why police would have come to this conclusion. Anyone could have entered the unlocked church kitchen during the Saturday bake sale or before Sunday service. When residents of New Sweden, many of whom didn't even own keys, were advised to start locking their doors, and a police guard was posted at the hospital, Alana Margeson says, "the air in the community was so heavy."

Months later, New Sweden hasn't lightened up much, and detectives are no closer to an arrest, although they say they have one or more suspects.

Meanwhile, doctors can only speculate on the survivors' long-term prognosis; elevated cancer risk is one scary possibility. Fran Ruggles had a painful outbreak of shingles that lasted weeks. Dick still has back pain that might be nerve-related. And many survivors deal daily with crushing fatigue. Lester Beaupre was the last victim to be released from the hospital, almost five weeks after the poisoning. The tubes that kept him alive injured his throat, and he had a tracheotomy during his hospital stay. He still feels numbness in his face and extremities.

The community is also numb. "We're not innocent anymore," says Louise Beaupre. Healing, in every sense of the word, will take time. On a bright summer Sunday four months after the poisoning, victims were again gathering with their neighbors to pray at Gustaf Adolph church. Fran Ruggles helped serve communion as sunlight filtered through the church's stained-glass windows. Erich Margeson, Lester Beaupre and other victims recited from the Book of Psalms: "Who among you loves life and desires long life to enjoy prosperity?" At the bottom of the day's prayer list was the simple line "For the arsenic victims." And resting on the counter of the adjoining kitchen, plainly visible from the pews, was a new coffee urn.

It is an uncomfortable reminder of the tragedy, but more visceral is the knowledge that Danny Bondeson's accomplice could be in the next pew. That makes worship understandably difficult, even for the most forgiving of souls. Admits Lester Beaupre, "You look around at church and wonder who did it."

Source

Joel Patrick Courtney

Vanished!
On the morning of May 24, 2004, Brooke Wilberger, a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed coed who had just completed her freshman year at Brigham Young University, was washing lampposts in the Corvallis, Oregon apartment complex managed by her sister and brother-in-law. One moment she was there, the next moment, she was gone. She left behind her flip flops, a pail of sudsy water, and no witnesses to her disappearance.

Brooke, an honor student, athlete, a devout Mormon and an integral part of her church community, was last seen wearing a hooded sweatshirt, a gray Brigham Young t-shirt, dark blue jeans, small hoop earrings, maybe a silver watch, and a ring with "CTR" engraved on it (Choose The Right—a Mormon tradition). She was 5'4" and weighed 105 pounds. She had a scar from a gymnastic accident that extended from her wrist to her elbow on her right forearm.

When police arrived at the apartment complex, they found her sandals askew, leading them to suspect a struggle. Her purse, keys and other personal items were left in her sister's apartment, and her car was still in the parking lot.

It was clear to everyone involved that whatever had happened, Brooke did not leave the parking lot willingly.

Only one man saw something. His name was Brian, and he called the police, saying he'd seen a green minivan driving erratically. Before he could explain further, the call was disconnected, and he never called back. It was a tiny bit of information, just one of too many tips from helpful citizens.

The Community Gets Involved
The community rallied. Brooke grew up in Veneta, a very small town of only 3,000 people, thirty miles south of Corvallis, itself a university town of only 50,000. Among friends, schoolmates, hometown folk and the LDS church family, within days, over four thousand flyers with Brooke's picture covered the area, and reached every state of the union. Being prepared for an emergency is one of every Mormon's goals, and they were certainly prepared to get the word out about Brooke.

Her photo showed up on huge bulletin boards by the Interstate, and on buses all over the county. Public Service announcements showed up on television. Every gas station, every café, every convenience store had her flyer in the window. They held vigils. They held press conferences. They went on America's Most Wanted television show. Brooke's parents were featured on Good Morning America. Local real estate agents and property managers searched vacant properties and outbuildings. They held self-defense classes for women. At nineteen, Brooke was too old for the Amber Alert system for missing children, but as several high-profile cases recently have shown us, media pressure keeps the case alive. And those who loved Brooke were prepared to keep the pressure on.

Police received over eleven hundred tips, including four hundred from psychics. Theories abounded, stretching to the idea of Brooke being kidnapped and sold into white slavery in some exotic location.

Six hundred and fifty volunteers searched four thousand acres of field and woodlands around the Corvallis area. They searched the rivers and wetlands in canoes and kayaks. They searched the mountains on horseback.

But Oregon is vast and relatively unpopulated. There are thousands of acres of woodlands. Thousands of acres of wilderness.

A website, www.findbrooke.com was established with a downloadable flyer in a variety of languages; in the first twenty-four hours, the site received 26,000 hits. Brooke's disappearance hit a nerve with Americans and news of her abduction spread like wildfire.

Police began to focus in on four "persons of interest," but in the tumult, Brian's tip, of seeing the erratic green minivan, was almost entirely overlooked.

A "Person of Interest"
Eventually, the eye of the hurricane focused on Sung Koo Kim, a thirty-year-old man living with his parents in Tigard, Oregon, eighty miles north of Corvallis. Kim, who graduated from Washington State University in 2001 with degrees in Genetics and Cellular Biology, had been arrested ten days before Brooke's disappearance on suspicion of stalking an Oregon State University student. Oregon State is located in Corvallis.

The female student of his obsession was a member of the OSU swim team and frequented the Oak Park Apartments, where Brooke was staying with her sister. At first glance, the swim team member looked much like Brooke. When he was arrested, Kim had a copy of the woman's photo and her bio from the OSU website, along with a bag of dryer lint from the Oak Park Apartments.

That wasn't all they found when police searched his room in his parents' home. They also found 3400 pair of women's panties, collected from seven different colleges in the state, 40,000 photos of violent pornographic pictures of women being tortured and raped, and 4,000 pornographic videos. According to Jeff Lesowski, deputy Washington County district attorney, while some of the pornographic images were of children, the vast majority were of women being raped, tortured, dismembered or killed.

Kim also had a file named "osu.doc" which detailed an apparent plan to rape, mutilate and strangle a girl.

Kim was out on bail when Brooke disappeared.

The Alibi
Kim said that he couldn't have been in the area of Brooke's abduction, as she was snatched between 10 and 11 a.m. on May 24. He has recorded proof that he executed a computer stock transaction at 11:14 a.m. He was also videotaped by security cameras at 12:30 p.m. buying a laptop with his father at Circuit City in Tigard.

Authorities challenged this flimsy alibi, saying not only did he have time to get from Corvallis back to Tigard in time, but that anyone could have executed that stock trade for him, as it was made from his sister's computer.

With a clear eye toward the Wilberger case, Kim was arrested on the underwear theft charges in Multnomah County, and his bail set at $10 million. Investigators in Benton, Washington and Yamhill counties, where the other colleges are located, pursued similar charges against him.
Yamhill county eventually set his bail for $4 million, $1 million in Washington county, and $100,000 in Benton county.

The shadow of Brooke Wilberger hung like a shroud over his head.

The Trail Grows Cold
Family and friends of Brooke never gave up hope, never gave up the search, but as the days, weeks and months went by, momentum was hard to sustain. Cammy and Greg Wilberger, Brooke's parents, asked the media to give the family some space, some privacy.

"Our lives have been changed forever," Cammy, a teacher in the Bethel School District, said in an interview with the Register-Guard in June, 2004. "Even when Brooke comes back, our lives will never be the same. The healthy thing for Brooke and ourselves is to try to be the best we can be. That includes trying to get back to some of our regular things.

"I always wondered how people could keep up hope for a long period of time," she continued. "But time fades and you don't even realize how much time has gone by. It seems like yesterday that Brooke disappeared."

The LDS church family surrounded the Wilbergers who credit their faith for sustaining them.
"We believe this life on earth is but a small part of eternity," said Marie Bell of Eugene, a former public affairs representative for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. "In the case of the Wilbergers, we believe the family is sealed together for eternity. Every fiber in my body says they will see her again."

And what kind of god could allow something like this to happen to a girl like Brooke?

Mormons, Bell said, believe God gives agency—free will—to people. "Given that, there are going to be people who use that agency in evil ways."

Cammy Wilberger said she hoped people keep their eyes open for any clues to her daughter's whereabouts, and said how touched she's been by the considerable attention and support from friends and strangers throughout the Willamette Valley.

The reward for Brooke's safe return hit $30,000 and kept growing.

Another Blonde Coed
On November 30, 2004, a foreign exchange student in New Mexico was grabbed at knifepoint and ordered into the back of a red two-door Honda with tinted windows. The assailant drove her to a deserted parking lot, and threatened to kill her unless she undressed and performed oral sex on him. He tied her ankles together with a shoelace, tied her wrists with a scarf, stuffed her panties into her mouth and pinned them there by tying another shoelace around her head.

Then he drove her to another parking lot. At one point, he stepped outside the car, and she wriggled her hands and ankles free and ran.

According to The Oregonian, Dana Finks, a waitress driving her three daughters to their grandmother's house in Albuquerque, was stopped at a red light when she saw a young blonde woman, wearing only an unzipped jacket with her underwear up around her neck, come running down the street. The young woman ran across traffic and into a Mexican Restaurant.

Ebony Finks, the seventeen-year-old daughter in the car, ordered her mother to pull into the restaurant parking lot, where she jumped out and met the naked girl coming out. No one inside the restaurant had offered to help her.

Hysterical, the woman got into their car and told her story in heavily accented English while Dana called 911 on her cell phone. Fresh knife marks on the woman's neck validated her story.

The red Honda drove slowly by them in the parking lot several times before the police arrived.

The victim took police to the parking lot where she was assaulted. They found a shoelace on the ground. When they interviewed neighbors, they were told that a man named Joe hung around there a lot.

With the details provided by the college student, Albuquerque police arrested Joel Patrick Courtney, a married father of three. After being treated at the hospital, the woman positively identified him as her attacker.

He was arrested and charged with first-degree criminal sexual penetration, kidnapping and aggravated battery.

Bad Actor
Joel Patrick Courtney of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, is no stranger to the law. Just five months before being arrested for this abduction and sexual assault, his twelve-year-old son called the police on him for domestic violence against Courtney's wife. But it had started long before.

Courtney, born June 2, 1966 in Beaverton, Oregon, attended both Beaverton and Sunset High Schools. He left school in 1984. In 1985, he was charged with attempted rape and first-degree sex abuse in Oregon's Washington County.

On the night of that assault, he'd been drinking beer, smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine with a female friend from school. She was driving him home when he started to kiss and fondle her. When she pushed him away and told him to stop, he punched her, yanked her out of the car, threw her to the gravel, and pulled off her jeans and panties and unzipped his pants.

She stopped fighting, and he lost interest.

She went to the police when she found out he had done similar things in the past. They were both eighteen.

He pled guilty to first-degree sex abuse and received a three-month jail sentence and five years of probation. He subsequently violated probation and spent two and a half years in state prison.

According to Dianna Rodgers, LCSW, adjunct professor at the University of Oregon, "Rarely is an offender caught the first time he offends. Chances are, he had quite a juvenile record of assaultive behavior with some sexual component to it."

His list of infractions are lengthy, including felonies, misdemeanors and various other violations, but the one that is of the most interest is his drunk driving violation in January of 2004.

A No-Show at Court
Courtney, at the time a supervisor for a construction cleaning company, was driving a green 1997 Dodge Caravan, a company vehicle, from Portland to Newport, Oregon, to appear for his drunk driving charge on May 24, 2004, the day Brooke Wilberger disappeared. He never arrived at court.

At 1:15 p.m., he called the court and left a message that he'd been delayed, was in Corvallis, and was on his way.

According to Dr. A. Nicholas Groth, in his book Men Who Rape — The Psychology of the Offender: "Rape is always and foremost an aggressive act. In some offenses, the assault appears to constitute a discharge of anger; it becomes evident that the rape is the way the offender expresses and discharges a mood state of intense anger, frustration, resentment, and rage. In other offenses, the aggression seems to be reactive; that is, when the victim resists the advances of her assailant, he retaliates by striking, hitting, or hurting her in some way. Hostility appears to be quickly triggered or released, sometimes in a clear, consciously experienced stage of anger, or in other cases, in what appears to be a panic state. In still other offenses, the aggression becomes expressed less as an anger motive and more as a means of dominating, controlling, and being in charge of the situation — an expression of mastery and conquest. And in a fourth vicissitude, the aggression itself becomes eroticized so that the offender derives pleasure from both controlling his victim and hurting her/him — an intense sense of excitement and pleasure being experienced in this context whether or not actual sexual contact is made. These variations on the theme of aggression are not mutually exclusive, and, in any given instance of rape, multiple meanings may be expressed in regard to both the sexual and the aggressive behaviors."

If Courtney were particularly stressed over his upcoming court date, perhaps he had an idea of what could take the edge off that anxiety.

Groth goes on to say about those who rape in anger: "Typically, such an offender reports that he did not anticipate committing a rape. It was not something he fantasized or thought about beforehand -— it was, instead, something that happened on the spur of the moment."

So that green minivan that Brian saw "driving recklessly" at or around the time of Brooke's disappearance took on a whole new meaning and a new priority level for the police.

A Routine Check
During a routine background check, Albuquerque police learned that Courtney had failed to show for his court date in Newport.

The Newport officials, upon hearing of Courtney's situation, and recalling the persistently public efforts of the Wilberger team, referred Albuquerque to the Benton County (Corvallis) police.
And there the link was made.

Sung Koo Kim was removed from investigators' list as a suspect. He is currently awaiting trial on myriad theft charges, as his relatives are suing two cities, a county and nearly forty police officers for $11 million, claiming their home was searched illegally.

In February, 2005, a judge in New Mexico granted Corvallis police a search warrant for Courtney's DNA—fingerprints, swabs of saliva and various hairs from his face and pubic area.
In May, Corvallis investigators asked the public for any information about a 1997 green Dodge Caravan.

They got it.

The van was recovered, though not in New Mexico and not in Oregon. Investigators are releasing no information about the van, fearing anything they say could compromise the case. No one wants this case compromised.

In July, the Benton County grand jury heard testimony from thirteen live witnesses, including Wilberger's family and investigators, and reports from three experts, including two FBI crime lab analysts and a physician. FBI forensic DNA examiner Rhonda Craig who works for the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, testified by report as did FBI DNA examiner Constance Fisher.

The grand jury returned a 19-count indictment accusing Joel Patrick Courtney, 39 years old, of 14 counts of aggravated murder, alleged in alternative theories (in other words, one count for every theory as to how he may have murdered her), two counts of aggravated kidnapping in the first degree, one count of first-degree rape, one count of first-degree sexual abuse and one count of first-degree sodomy.

In Oregon, prosecutors do not need a body to secure a guilty verdict. And, according to Benton County District Attorney Scott Heiser, his office is ready to "pursue the case aggressively. Oregon law doesn't require recovery of the body of a murder victim." He considered Courtney's arrest to be a milestone in the case, yet only a first step in what promises to be a long legal process.

The Current Status
Courtney, originally held on $100,000 cash-only bond, is now held in the Bernalillo, New Mexico county jail without bond. He refused to waive extradition, which required Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski to issue a warrant to have him delivered to Oregon for prosecution. Extradition papers are in the works, but Oregon will wait until the New Mexico assault charges are adjudicated before bringing him to Oregon for trial. Then prosecutors will have 120 days to put him on trial for Wilberger's murder.

Courtney's sister, still living in Beaverton, has cooperated with the police. In an interview with KOIN-TV, she claims that Joel suffered a troubled childhood and has a long history of drug and alcohol problems. "If he is found guilty," she said, "he needs to be held accountable. Justice needs to be served."

Bernalillo County, New Mexico District Attorney Kari Brandenburg said she thinks Courtney may be linked to some other disappearances and wants investigators to examine where else Courtney may have traveled and stayed between Corvallis and Albuquerque and "see if there are any unresolved cases."

Due to restrictions on information and evidence, little is known about the green minivan — where it was found, by whom, and what investigators found inside. One can infer from the DNA reports submitted to the grand jury and their subsequent indictments, that enough evidence was found in the van to change this case from a kidnapping to a murder.

At a press conference on August 3, 2005, local investigators thanked the community for their contribution of leads to the case, but said they would no longer need the public's help in terms of tips or information in the case.

Benton County District Attorney Scott Heiser would not release any information that might jeopardize what they consider to be a strong case. Heiser has never prosecuted a death penalty case, and would not say whether he would seek that punishment for Courtney. There are currently thirty inmates on Oregon's Death Row.

Back to Dianna Rodgers, who has treated sex offenders in Lane County, Oregon for the past 20 years: "Typically, violent offenders require escalating violence to satiate their escalating needs. Respites between episodes get shorter, the offenders take greater risks, and unfortunately, it is not uncommon for a sadistic rapist to eventually murder."

On August 5, Brooke's family posted a new message on the website, thanking those who helped to search for Brooke. "Our main goal remains to find Brooke and see that justice is served. We believe families are eternal and Brooke will always be a part of our family."

Brooke's body has not been found. A $6,000 reward is offered by the family for any valid information leading to its recovery, and a $15,000 reward is offered for the exact location of her body, leading to recovery.

Author & Source

The Mob's President: Richard Nixon's Secret Ties to the Mafia

by Don Fulsom

During the height of the Watergate scandal, Atty. Gen. John Mitchell's wife, Martha, sounded one of the first alarms, telling a reporter, ''Nixon is involved with the Mafia. The Mafia was involved in his election.''

White House officials privately urged other reporters to treat any anti-Nixon comments by Martha as the ravings of a drunken crackpot.

Time, however, has proved Mrs. Mitchell right.

Richard Nixon's earliest campaign manager and political advisor was Murray Chotiner, a chubby lawyer who specialized in defending members of the Mafia and who enjoyed dressing like them too, in a wardrobe highlighted by monogrammed white-on-white dress shirts and silk ties with jeweled stickpins. The monograms said MMC, because – perhaps to seem more impressive – he billed himself as Murray M. Chotiner, though, in reality, he lacked a middle name.

In this cigar chomping, wheeler-dealer, Nixon had found what future Nixon aide Len Garment called ''his Machiavelli – a hardheaded exponent of the campaign philosophy that politics is war.''

When Nixon went on to the White House, both as vice president, and later as president, he took Chotiner with him as a key behind-the-scenes advisor – and for good reason. By the time he became president in 1969, thanks in large part to Murray Chotiner's contacts with such shady figures as Mafia-connected labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, and Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen, Richard Nixon had been on the giving and receiving end of major underworld favors for more than two decades.

In his first political foray – a successful 1946 race for Congress as a strong anti-Communist from southern California – Nixon received a $5,000 contribution from Cohen plus free office space for a ''Nixon for Congress'' headquarters in one of Mickey Cohen's buildings.

And there was more to come.

In 1950, at Chotiner's request, Cohen set up a fund-raising dinner for Nixon at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles. The affair took in $75,000 to help Nixon go on and defeat Sen. Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom he had portrayed as a Communist sympathizer – ''pink right down to her underwear.''

''Everyone from around here that was on the pad naturally had to go,'' Cohen himself later recalled, looking back on the Knickerbocker dinner, ''… It was all gamblers from Vegas, all gambling money. There wasn't a legitimate person in the room.'' The mobster said Nixon addressed the dinner after Cohen told the crowd the exits would be closed until the whole $75,000 quota was met. They were. And it was.

Cohen has said his support of Nixon was ordered by ''the proper persons from back East,'' meaning the founders of the national Syndicate, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky. Why would Meyer Lansky become a big fan of Richard Nixon? Senate crime investigator Walter Sheridan offered this opinion: ''If you were Meyer, who would you invest your money in? Some politician named Clams Linguini? Or a nice Protestant boy from Whittier, California?''

Lansky was considered the Mafia's financial genius. Known as ''The Little Man'' because he was barely five feet tall, Lansky developed Cuba for the Mob during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, when Havana was ''The Latin Las Vegas.'' Under its tall, swaying palms, gambling, prostitution and drug trafficking netted the U.S. Syndicate more than $100-million-a-year – even after handsome payoffs to Batista.

In the mid-‘50s, Batista designated Lansky the unofficial czar of gambling in Havana. This was so Batista could stop some Mob-run casinos from using doctored games of chance to cheat tourists. A shrewd, master manipulator whose specialty was gambling, Lansky was also known among mobsters as honest. It wasn't necessary to rig the gambling tables to make boatloads of bucks. Lansky directed all casino operators to ''clean up, or get out.''

Lansky, in turn, was very generous with the Cuban dictator. As former Lansky associate Joseph Varon has said: ''I know every time Myer went to Cuba he would bring a briefcase with at least $100,000 (for Batista). So Batista welcomed him with open arms, and the two men really developed such an affection for each other. Batista really loved him. I guess I'd love him too if he gave me $100,000 every time I saw him.''

Lansky saw to it that his friends were generous to Batista too. In February 1955, Vice President Richard Nixon traveled to Havana to embrace Batista at the despot's lavish private palace, praise ''the competence and stability'' of his regime, award him a medal of honor, and compare him with Abraham Lincoln. Nixon hailed Batista's Cuba as a land that ''shares with us the same democratic ideals of peace, freedom and the dignity of man.''

When he returned to Washington, the vice president reported to the cabinet that Batista was ''a very remarkable man … older and wiser … desirous of doing a good job for Cuba rather than Batista … concerned about social progress…'' And Nixon reported that Batista had vowed to ''deal with the Commies.''

What Nixon omitted from his report was the Batista-Lansky connection, the rampant government corruption under Batista – and the extreme poverty of most Cubans. The American vice president also ignored Batista's suspension of constitutional guarantees, his dissolution of the country's political parties, and his use of the police and army to murder political opponents. Twenty thousand Cubans reportedly died at the hands of Batista's thugs.

Under Batista, Cuba was the decadent playground of the American elite. Havana was its sin city paradise – where you could gamble at luxurious casinos, bet the horses, play the lottery, and party with the some of best prostitutes, rum, cocaine, heroin and marijuana in the Western Hemisphere. Should you have been in the mood, you could also have watched ''an exhibition of sexual bestiality that would have shocked Caligula,'' according to Richard Reinhart in an article he wrote for American Heritage in 1995 entitled ''Cuba Libre.''

Cuba was only a one-hour flight away from the United States. And there were 80 tourist flights-a-week from Miami to Havana, at a cost of $40, round trip.

Three Syndicate gamblers from Cleveland — including Morris ''Moe'' Dalitz, a friend of Nixon's best buddy Bebe Rebozo — were part owners of Lansky's glittering Hotel Nacional in Havana. In fact, during the Batista regime, as recalled by Mafia hit man Angelo ''Gyp'' DeCarlo, ''The Mob had a piece of every joint down there. There wasn't one joint they didn't have a piece of.''

In a noteworthy reversal of that situation, the Cuban dictator owned part of at least one Mob-run gambling operation in the United States. Batista was partners with New Orleans godfather and future Nixon benefactor Carlos Marcello of a casino in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana called ''The Beverly Club.''

Another Rebozo associate, Tampa godfather Santos Trafficante, was the undisputed gambling king of Havana. Trafficante owned substantial interests in the San Souci – a nightclub and casino where fellow gangster Johnny Roselli had a management role.

The relationship between Nixon and Rebozo tightened in Cuba in the early ‘50s, according to historian Anthony Summers, when Nixon was gambling very heavily, and Bebe covered Nixon's losses – possibly as much as $50,000. Most of Nixon's gambling took place at Lansky's Hotel Nacional. Lansky rolled out the royal treatment for Nixon, who stayed in the Presidential Suite on the owner's tab.

As far back as 1951, Bebe Rebozo – the man who bailed out Nixon at the Nacional – had been involved with Lansky in illegal gambling rackets in parts of Miami, Hallandale, and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Former crime investigator Jack Clarke recently disclosed those operations, adding that Rebozo was pointed out to him, back then, as ''one of Lansky's people …When I checked the name with the Miami police, they said he was an entrepreneur and a gambler and that he was very close to Meyer.''

A bachelor, Rebozo was short, swarthy, well dressed and ingratiatingly glib. The American-born Cuban had risen from airline steward to wealthy Florida banker and land speculator.

Many Nixon biographers say Richard Danner, a former FBI agent gone bad, introduced Nixon to Rebozo in 1951. Danner was the city manager of Miami Beach when it was controlled by the Mob. Danner eventually became a top aide to Nixon's financial angel, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. And, years later, during the final act of the Watergate scandal, Danner delivered a $100,000 under-the–table donation from Hughes to President Nixon.

Nixon and Rebozo hit it off almost immediately. Their mutual friend, Sen. George Smathers of Florida, once said: ''I don't want to say that Bebe's level of liking Nixon increased as Nixon's (political) position increased, but it had a lot to do with it.''

The two men were almost inseparable from then on. Rebozo was there to lend moral as well as financial support to his idol through Nixon's many political ups and downs. He was there in Florida in 1952 when Nixon celebrated his election to the vice presidency; Rebozo was in Los Angeles in 1960 when Nixon got word that Sen. John Kennedy had edged him out for the presidency; he comforted Nixon after his 1962 defeat for California governor; and Rebozo and Nixon drank and sunbathed together in Key Biscayne after Nixon's political dreams came true and he won the 1968 presidential election. During Nixon's White House years, rough estimates show Rebozo was at Nixon's side one out of every 10 days.

Known as ''Uncle Bebe'' to Nixon's two children, Trisha and Julie, Rebozo frequently bought the girls – and Nixon's wife Pat – expensive gifts. He purchased a house in the suburbs for Julie after she married David Eisenhower. The Saturday Evening Post, in a March 1987 article, put the price at $137,000.

Rebozo came in and out of the White House as he pleased, without being logged in by the Secret Service. Though he had no government job, Rebozo had his own private office and phone number in the executive mansion. When he travelled on Air Force One, which was frequently, Bebe donned a blue flight jacket bearing the Presidential Seal and his name. (Nixon's own flight jacket was inscribed ''The President'' – as though no one would recognize that fact by just looking at him.)

Rebozo's organized crime connections were solid. For one, he had both legal and financial ties with ''Big Al'' Polizzi, a Cleveland gangster and drug kingpin. Rebozo built an elaborate shopping center in Miami, to be leased to members of the rightwing Cuban exile community, and he let out the contracting bid to Big Al, a convicted black marketer described by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as ''one of the most influential members of the underworld in the United States.''

Nixon and Rebozo bought Florida lots on upscale Key Biscayne, getting bargain rates from Donald Berg, a Mafia-connected Rebozo business partner. The Secret Service eventually advised Nixon to stop associating with Berg. The lender for one of Nixon's properties was Arthur Desser, who consorted with both Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa and mobster Meyer Lansky.

Nixon and Rebozo were friends of James Crosby, the chairman of a firm repeatedly linked to top mobsters, and Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank was a suspected pipeline for Mob money skimmed from Crosby's casino in the Bahamas. By the 1960s, FBI agents keeping track of the Mafia had identified Nixon's Cuban-American pal as a ''non-member associate of organized crime figures.''

Former Mafia consigliere Bill Bonanno, the son of legendary New York godfather Joe Bonanno, asserts that Nixon ''would never have gotten anywhere'' without his old Mob allegiances. And he reports that — through Rebozo — Nixon ''did business for years with people in (Florida Mafia boss Santos) Trafficante's Family, profiting from real estate deals, arranging for casino licensing, covert funding for anti-Castro activities, and so forth.''

If friendships enabled Nixon to craft links with the Mafia, so did hatred. Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa hated John and Robert Kennedy as much as Nixon did. Robert Kennedy had been trying to put Hoffa in jail since 1956, when RFK was staff counsel for a Senate probe into the Mob's influence on the labor movement. In a 1960 book, Robert Kennedy said, ''No group better fits the prototype of the old Al Capone syndicate than Jimmy Hoffa and some of his lieutenants.''

Because he shared a common enemy with Nixon, Hoffa and his two million-member union backed Vice President Nixon against Sen. John Kennedy in the 1960 election, and did so with more than just a get-out-the-vote campaign. Edward Partin, a Louisiana Teamster official and later government informant, revealed that Hoffa met with New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello to secretly fund the Nixon campaign. Partin told Mob expert Dan Moldea: ''I was right there, listening to the conversation. Marcello had a suitcase filled with $500,000 cash which was going to Nixon ... (Another $500,000 contribution) was coming from Mob boys in New Jersey and Florida.'' Hoffa himself served as Nixon's bagman.

The Hoffa-Marcello meeting took place in New Orleans on Sept. 26, 1960, and has been verified by William Sullivan, a former top FBI official.

Nixon lost the 1960 election, and Hoffa – thanks to Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy – soon wound up in prison for jury tampering and looting the union's pension funds of almost $2 million. But the Nixon-Hoffa connection was strong enough to last at least until Dec. 23, 1971 when, as president, Nixon gave Hoffa an executive grant of clemency and sprung him from prison. The action allowed Hoffa to serve just five years of a 13-year sentence.

Hoffa evidently bought his way out. In 1996, Teamsters expert William Bastone disclosed that James P. (''Junior'') Hoffa and racketeer Allen Dorfman ''delivered $300,000 ''in a black valise'' to a Washington hotel to help secure the release of Hoffa's father'' from the pen. The name of the bagman on the receiving end of the transaction is redacted from legal documents filed in a court case. Bastone said the claim is based on ''FBI reports reflecting contacts with (former Teamster boss Jackie) Presser in 1971.''

In a recently released FBI memo confirming this, an informant details a $300,000 Mob payoff to the Nixon White House ''to guarantee the release of Jimmy Hoffa from the Federal penitentiary.''

Breaking from clemency custom, Nixon did not consult the judge who had sentenced Hoffa. Nor did he pay any mind to the U.S. Parole Board, which had unanimously voted three times in two years to reject Hoffa's appeals for release. The board had been warned by the Justice Department that Hoffa was Mob-connected. Long-time Nixon operative Chotiner eventually admitted interceding to get Hoffa paroled. ''I did it,'' he told columnist Jack Anderson in 1973, ''I make no apologies for it. And frankly I'm proud of it.''

At the time, The New York Times called the clemency a ''pivotal element in the strange love affair between the (Nixon) administration and the two-million-member truck union, ousted from the rest of the labor movement in 1957 for racketeer domination.''

As one example of President Nixon's ''strange love affair'' with the Teamsters, in a May 5, 1971 Oval Office conversation, Nixon and his chief of staff Bob Haldeman pondered a little favor they knew the union would be happy to carry out against anti-war demonstrators:

Haldeman: What (Nixon aide Charles) Colson's gonna do on it, and I suggested he do, and I think they can get a, away with this . . . do it with the Teamsters. Just ask them to dig up those, their eight thugs.

President: Yeah.

Haldeman: Just call, call, uh, what's his name.

President: Fitzsimmons.

Haldeman: Is trying to get, play our game anyway. Is just, just tell Fitzsimmons...

President: They, they've got guys who'll go in and knock their heads off.

Haldeman: Sure. Murderers!

Veteran Mafia bigwig Bill Bonanno describes Nixon's clemency for Hoffa as ''a gesture, if ever there was one, of the national power (the Mob) once enjoyed.''

President Nixon did put one restriction on Hoffa's freedom: Hoffa could never again, directly or indirectly, manage any union. This decision, too, was the result of a financial incentive – from another wing of the Mafia. The restriction was reputedly bought by a $500,000 contribution to the Nixon campaign by New Jersey Teamster leader Anthony Provenzano –''Tony Pro'' – the head of the notorious Provenzano family, which, a House panel found in 1999, had for years dominated Teamsters New Jersey Local 560.

The Provenzanos, who were linked to the Genovese crime family, used Local 560 to carry out a full range of criminal activities, including murder, extortion, loan sharking, kickbacks, hijacking, and gambling.

During the Nixon administration, pressure from Washington eased off on other Mafia leaders, too, such as Chicago godfather Sam Giancana; long-standing deportation proceedings against CIA-connected mobster Johnny Roselli were dropped. Without going into specifics, lawyers from Nixon's Justice Department explained in court that Roselli had performed ''valuable services to the national security.''

A Giancana henchman, Roselli was an important contact man in the CIA-Mafia assassination plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro. (Roselli and Dallas gangster Jack Ruby – the killer of JFK assassination suspect Lee Harvey Oswald – are reported to have met in hotels in Miami during the months before the JFK assassination.)

Roselli was also apparently acquainted with longtime Nixon associate CIA agent E. Howard Hunt. Nixon and Hunt were secretly top planners of the assassination plots on Castro when Nixon was vice president. And later, Roselli and Hunt are reported to have been co-conspirators in the 1961 assassination-by-ambush of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. In the ‘70s, a Senate committee established that the CIA had supplied the weapons used against Trujillo. In 1976, Cygne, a Paris publication, quoted former Trujillo bodyguard L. Gonzales-Mata as saying that Roselli and Hunt arrived in the Dominican Republic in March 1971 to assist in plots against Trujillo.

Gonzalez-Mata described Hunt as ''a specialist'' with the CIA and Roselli as ''a friend of Batista'' who was operating on orders from both the CIA and the Mafia.

Mafia Trials

The Nixon administration intervened on the side of Mafia figures in at least 20 trials, mostly for the ostensible purpose of protecting CIA ''sources and methods.''

Nixon even went so far as to order the Justice Department to halt using the words ''Mafia'' and ''Cosa Nostra'' to describe organized crime. The President was roundly applauded when he boasted about his order at a private 1971 Oval Office meeting with some 40 members of the Supreme Council of the Sons of Italy. The group's Supreme Venerable, Americo Cortese, thanked Nixon for his moral leadership, declaring, ''You are our terrestrial god.''

As president, Nixon also pardoned Angelo ''Gyp'' DeCarlo, described by the FBI as a ''methodical gangland executioner.'' Supposedly terminally ill, DeCarlo was freed after serving less than two years of a 12-year sentence for extortion. Soon afterward, Newsweek reported the mobster was not too ill to be ''back at his old rackets, boasting that his connections with (singer Frank) Sinatra freed him.''

Sinatra had been ousted from JFK's social circle when the Kennedy Justice Department reported to the President that the singer had wide-ranging dealings and friendships with major mobsters. But the Nixon White House disregarded similar reports, and Sinatra went on to become fast friends with both Nixon and his corrupt vice president, Spiro Agnew.

In April 1973, at Nixon's request, Sinatra came out of retirement to sing at a White House state dinner for Italian President Giulio Andreotti. On the night of the dinner, the president compared Sinatra to the Washington Monument – ''The Top.''

In the summer of 1973, The New York Times reported that Nixon pardoned DeCarlo as a result of Sinatra's intervention with Agnew. The newspaper said the details were worked out by Agnew aide Peter Malatesta and Nixon counsel John Dean. The release reportedly followed an ''unrecorded contribution'' of $100,000 in cash and another contribution of $50,000 forwarded by Sinatra by to an unnamed Nixon campaign official.

FBI files released after Sinatra's 1998 death seem to confirm this and provide fresh details. An internal bureau memo of May 24, 1973, describes Sinatra as ''a close friend of Angelo DeCarlo of long standing.'' It says that in April 1972, DeCarlo asked singer Frankie Valli of ''My Eyes Adored You'' and ''Big Girls Don't Cry'' fame (when Valli was performing at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary) to contact Sinatra and have him intercede with Agnew for DeCarlo's release.

Eventually, the memo continues, Sinatra ''allegedly turned over $100,000 cash to (Nixon campaign finance chairman) Maurice Stans as an unrecorded contribution.'' Vice presidential aide Peter Maletesta ''allegedly contacted former Presidential Counsel John Dean and got him to make the necessary arrangements to forward the request (for a presidential pardon) to the Justice Department.'' Sinatra is said to have then made a $50,000 contribution to the president's campaign fund. And, the memo reports, ''DeCarlo's release followed.''

Frank Sinatra's Mob ties go back at least as far as Nixon's. In 1947, the singer was photographed with Lucky Luciano and other mobsters in Cuba. The photo led syndicated columnist Robert Ruark to write three columns about Sinatra and the Mafia. The first was titled ''Shame Sinatra.''
The Nixon administration's generosity toward top Mob and Teamsters officials was truly remarkable: To cite just a few other examples:

A few months after trouncing Sen. George McGovern in 1972, Nixon secretly entertained Teamsters chief Frank Fitzsimmons in a private room at the White House. Atty. Gen. Richard Kleindienst was summoned to the session ''and ordered by Nixon to review all the Teamsters investigations at the Justice Department and to make certain that Fitzsimmons and his cronies weren't hurt by the probes.''

In April 1973, The New York Times disclosed that FBI wiretaps had uncovered a massive scheme to establish a national health plan for the Teamsters – with pension fund members and top mobsters playing crucial roles … and getting lucrative kickbacks. Yet Kleindienst rejected the FBI's plan to continue taps related to the scheme. The chief schemers behind the proposed rip-off had included Fitzsimmons and Teamsters pension fund consultant Allen ''Red'' Dorfman.
From 1969 through 1973, more than one-half of the Justice Department's 1,600 indictments in organized crime cases were tossed out because of ''improper procedures'' followed by Atty. Gen. John Mitchell in obtaining court-approved authorization for wiretaps.

During Nixon's administration, the Treasury Department declared a moratorium on $1.3-million in back taxes owed by former Teamsters president Dave Beck.

In May 1973, the Oakland Tribune reported that Nixon aide Murray Chotiner had interceded in a federal probe of Teamsters involvement in a major Beverly Hills real estate scandal. As a result, the investigation ended with the indictment of only three men. One of the three — Leonard Bursten — a former director of the shady Miami National Bank, and a close friend of Jimmy Hoffa, had his 15-year prison sentence reduced to probation.

In June 1973, ex-Nixon aide John Dean revealed to the Senate Watergate Committee that Cal Kovens, a leading Florida Teamsters official, had won an early release from federal prison in 1972 through the efforts of Nixon aide Charles Colson, Bebe Rebozo, and former Florida Sen. George Smathers. Shortly after his release, Kovens contributed $50,000 to Nixon's re-election effort.

By contrast, the Kennedy administration's war on organized crime was highly effective: indictments against mobsters rose from zero to 683; and the number of defendants convicted went from zero to 619.

There's evidence Nixon later made an effort to cash in on the ''good deeds'' he had performed for his Mafia friends. Records reveal that FBI agents suspected the Nixon White House of soliciting $1 million from the Teamsters to pay hush money to the Watergate burglars.

In fact, in early 1973 – when the Watergate cover-up was coming apart at the seams – aide John Dean told the president that $1 million might be needed to keep the burglary team silent. Nixon responded, ''We could get that … you could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash, I know where it could be gotten.''

When Dean observed that money laundering ''is the type of thing Mafia people can do,'' Nixon calmly answered: ''Maybe it takes a gang to do that.''

It is suspected that most of the Watergate ''hush money'' distributed to E. Howard Hunt – who, during Watergate, was Nixon's secret chief spy – and other members of the burglary team came from Rebozo and other shadowy Nixon pals like Tony Provenzano, Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes, Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, and Lansky buddy John Alessio.

An ex-con, Alessio, the gambling king of San Diego, was one of the few guests at Nixon's New York hotel suite on election night, 1968. Alessio was rubbing elbows with Nixon and his family at a very special occasion – despite a mid-‘60s conviction for skimming millions of dollars from San Diego's racetrack revenues.

On May 20, 1972 an anxious Richard Nixon picked up the Oval Office phone and called Anthony Provenzano's top henchman, Joseph Trerotola, a key Teamsters union power broker in his own right. Perhaps the President had some laundered cash in mind to help keep the Watergate burglars quiet about their White House ties. We will never know for sure why Tony Pro's right-hand man was one of the first people Nixon called after the burglary. Scholars who try to listen to that recently released one-minute-long conversation at the National Archives will find that the tape has been totally erased. The Archives believes the tape was probably erased by mistake by Secret Service overseers of Nixon's taping system. But an Archives spokesman acknowledges that Nixon – or someone else – might possibly have tampered with the Nixon-Trerotola tape.

A short time before phoning the mobster, Nixon had an Oval Office conversation about Watergate with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. This is the famous tape that contains an 18 and one-half minute erasure. The president's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, publicly took the fall for the ''gap'' in the Nixon-Haldeman tape, saying she might have accidentally made the erasure.
Many historians suspect the president was the Eraser-in-Chief. Back then, the strangest explanation of all came from Nixon aide Alexander Haig, who publicly blamed a ''sinister force.''
Behind closed doors, however, Haig told Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski that the tape in question had been ''screwed with.'' At first, Nixon went along with ''the secretary did it'' story. But he later blamed one of his Watergate lawyers, Fred Buzhardt – after Buzhardt's death.

After Nixon left office in August 1974 to avoid being impeached by Congress for the illegal activities he supervised and concealed during the Watergate scandal, he spent more than a year brooding in self-exile at his walled estate in San Clemente, Calif. The very first post-resignation invitation the disgraced ex-president accepted was from his Teamsters buddies. On Oct. 9, 1975, he played golf at La Costa, a Mob-owned California resort with Teamsters chief Frank Fitzsimmons and other top union officials. Among those who attended a post-golf game party for Nixon were Provenzano, Dorfman, and the union's executive secretary, Murray (''Dusty'') Miller.

Tony Pro would later die in prison, a convicted killer. A key Mob-Teamster financial coordinator, Dorfman was later murdered gangland-style. Murray ''Dusty'' Miller was the man, records show, gangster Jack Ruby had telephoned several days before Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in November 1963.

In July 1975, Jimmy Hoffa vanished in a Detroit suburb, and his body has never been found. Some federal investigators believe he was shot to death after being lured to a reconciliation meeting with Provenzano, who never showed up. On at least two occasions, Tony Pro had threatened to kill Hoffa and kidnap his children. Investigators theorize Hoffa's body was then taken away by truck, stuffed into a fifty-gallon drum, then crushed and smelted.

Why does the Mafia sometimes dispose of the body of a hit victim? For one thing, if there's no corpse, it's harder to find and convict the killer or killers. For another, as Robert Kennedy Mob-fighter Ronald Goldfarb observes, disposal occurs when the Mob ''wants to add shame and disgrace to a murder by embarrassing the victim's family who are left with no body or funeral, no final end.''

Jimmy Hoffa was declared legally dead in 1982.

Newly released FBI documents show that, in 1978, federal investigators sought to force former President Nixon and Teamster boss Fitzsimmons to testify about events surrounding Hoffa's disappearance. The investigators concluded that such testimony offered the last, best chance of solving the Hoffa mystery. But they accused top Justice Department officials of derailing their efforts to call the two men before a Detroit grand jury.

The records also reveal that FBI agents suspected the Nixon White House of soliciting $1 million from the Teamsters to keep the Watergate burglars silent.

The disclosures are detailed in more than 2,000 pages of previously secret FBI documents — obtained by the Detroit Free Press through a Freedom of Information lawsuit. They show that Fitzsimmons had actually been a government informant on an unspecified matter from 1972 to 1974. Could Fitzsimmons's cooperation in that case have persuaded the Justice Department to turn thumbs down on the grand jury idea?

The records don't say. But they do show that the Detroit FBI office sent a number of memos to Washington stressing that Nixon and Fitzsimmons could hold the answers to the Hoffa case.

Robert Stewart, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Buffalo, N.Y., who helped lead the investigation into just how Hoffa vanished, said in another memo: ''The one individual who could prove the matter beyond a doubt is Richard Nixon.'' Stewart wasn't sure whether Nixon would cooperate, given that he had been pardoned by successor Gerald Ford for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. But the investigator added that Nixon ''must certainly appreciate that while the pardon may protect him as to whatever happened in the White House, a fresh perjury committed in a current grand jury would place him in dire jeopardy.''

In a separate memo to headquarters, Detroit FBI agents concluded, ''It would be a gross understatement to state that Fitzsimmons is the key to the solution of this case, and yet he represents the major problem encountered with the Department of Justice … Fitzsimmons should have appeared long ago before the federal grand jury in Detroit to answer questions about his association with Hoffa and any possible involvement he had in dealings leading up to Hoffa's disappearance. To date, the Department of Justice has refused to allow Fitzsimmons to testify.''

Fitzsimmons died three years later, never appearing before the grand jury. Of course, Nixon, who died in 1994, never appeared either.

Nixon first met Fitzsimmons when Jimmy Hoffa was still in jail and Fitzsimmons was in line to succeed him as Teamsters boss. The President and Fitz quickly colluded on a plan for Hoffa's release, and they started an alliance that was sealed with cold cash – huge payments involving the Mob. How much –in addition to the previously mentioned $300,000 in the black valise that Hoffa's son and Allen Dorfman allegedly delivered from Hoffa – is not known, but there are indications it was considerably more.

In 1997, a former Fitzsimmons crony named Harry Hall told historian Anthony Summers: ''Fitzsimmons figured he'd found an ally in Nixon. The Teamsters would help him financially, and Nixon ate that up … I was told they gave money to Chotiner that was to go to Nixon. I think it was close to $500,000.''

Hall added that the half-million was intended for Nixon's personal use; and that a similar amount was donated to the president's re-election campaign.

In return, a delighted Nixon privately praised the union's members to Fitzsimmons as ''stand-up guys.'' And the President did a big personal favor for the Teamsters chief – he had the Justice Department stop a probe of Fitz's son, Richard, who was accused of allowing his wife and children to use a union credit card to buy $1,500 worth of gas for their cars. One federal investigator said the case against Richard Fitzsimmons was dropped because of the ''love affair'' between Nixon and Fitz.

In a smaller favor, but one that meant a great deal to the golf-addicted Fitzsimmons, Nixon ordered aide Charles Colson to try to get Fitz into a prestigious Washington country club. Colson wrote a memo to his assistant, George Bell: ''Fitz wants Columbia because that's where (AFL-CIO union president George) Meany belongs. But if (Fitz) got into Burning Tree (where the President golfed) he could be one up on Meany, which would appeal to him – any way you have to, but do it somehow, whatever needs to be done. I suspect the President would write a letter (on Fitz's behalf) if needed.''

Colson wore horn-rimmed glasses and was a tall, heavyset, tough-talking ex-Marine who was ruthless with Nixon's enemies (he had a motto above his bar: ''Once you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow''). Yet Colson showed an amiable, even pliable side, when doling out favors to the President's mobbed-up labor allies.

A Jan. 19, 1972 Justice Department memo predicted that a Fitzsimmons Teamsters associate – a New York hoodlum named Daniel Gagliardi – would be indicted for extortion ''sometime next month.'' But Gagliardi knew whom to phone for help in the Nixon White House: Chuck Colson. He actually spoke with Colson's aide George Bell, who later told his boss in a memo: ''I talked to Gagliardi, who maintained complete ignorance and innocence regarding the Teamsters. (He) asked that he be gotten off the hook.''

Colson wrote back to Bell: ''Watch for this. Do all possible.''

Bell obviously carried out his assignment: Gagliardi was never indicted.

Nixon's and Colson's courting of Fitzsimmons paid off big-time at a July 17, 1972 meeting of Teamster leaders at the Mob-owned La Costa Country Club near San Diego. The union's 17-member executive board enthusiastically endorsed Nixon for re-election. Afterwards, the entire board traveled 35 miles up the California coast to the Western White House in San Clemente. There they delivered the good news to President Nixon and posed for individual pictures with him.

In October, Fitzsimmons issued a statement saying, ''The biggest weapon the American worker has to protect himself and his country is the ballot. This year we are going to use it to reject the extremism of (Democratic nominee Senator) George McGovern, and to re-elect a great American – President Richard Nixon.''

In November, Nixon scored a landslide victory over McGovern (who won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia) and prepared to give the nation ''four more years'' of his rather peculiar brand of ''law and order.''

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