Linda Fairstein, America’s foremost legal expert on crimes of sexual assault and domestic violence, led the Sex Crime Unit of the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan for 25 years, during which time she was prosecuting attorney on the Robert Chambers trial. A Fellow at the American College of Trial Lawyers, she is a graduate of Vassar College and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her nine bestselling crime novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her nonfiction book, Sexual Violence, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her new novel, Lethal Legacy, goes on sale on February 10, 2009. She lives with her husband in Manhattan and on Martha’s Vineyard. For more information visit her website at www.lindafairstein.com.

Early on the morning of August 26, 1986, the partially clothed body of a young woman sprawled beneath the leafy overhang of a tree behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art was spotted by a cyclist from the roadway in Central Park. Dozens of cops and detectives responded to the scene by daybreak, identifying 18-year-old Jennifer Levin from the license in the pocket of the denim jacket that had been used to suffocate her to death.

Police feared the killer would be impossible to find. Jennifer was the needle in the city’s proverbial haystack. They assumed she was a “dump job” — that she had been murdered elsewhere by a stranger and thrown out of a car in the middle of the deserted park. It was not expected that forensic science could solve the crime in those days. Although I had headed the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for more than a decade by then, I had never heard of DNA analysis, which a short time later revolutionized the criminal justice system.

Within hours, cops learned that Jennifer had intended to spend the night at the home of a girlfriend after an evening of celebrating with other kids who, like Levin, were headed off to their first year of college within the week. By two in the afternoon, they knocked on the door of Robert Chambers’s home, told by others that he was one of the last of the group to see Jennifer alive.

Chambers’s mother awakened him to speak to the homicide detectives, and when the six-foot-five-inch 19-year-old came to the hallway, the first thing they noticed were the deep red scratches on both sides of his face. Chambers denied any knowledge of Jennifer’s whereabouts and claimed he parted from her in front of Dorrian’s Red Hand, a popular hangout on Second Avenue, known best for serving liquor to underage kids. At the stationhouse during questioning, never breaking a sweat, he held to his story that his wounds were caused by his cat. Nothing changed until one of the cops returned to Robert’s home to determine the animal had been declawed.

By midnight, Chambers’s story finally changed and the cops realized they had their killer. No one involved in the investigation imagined that Jennifer Levin had walked into the park with the person who took her life — a friend, in fact, with whom she had been intimate. The story he told was chilling: how Jennifer liked Chambers and pursued him that night, although he wanted to be with another girl who stormed out of Dorrian’s in a huff; that he and Jennifer left together to find a quiet place to talk — in the park — but that her sexual advances were so aggressive he had to beat and suffocate the slim girl to extricate himself from her grip. And then, instead of getting help, he repositioned her body and sat on the stone wall next to the roadway, watching as police arrived and Jennifer’s badly bruised remains were placed in a body bag for delivery to the morgue.

The tabloid media couldn’t have gotten the case more wrong. Headlines dubbed Chambers the “Preppy Murderer,” and the name stuck. In fact, there was nothing preppy about him. Although his mother — a registered nurse — worked hard to get him into the best schools (St. David’s and Browning), he was thrown out of each for stealing to support a drug habit that had resulted in his addiction by the age of 14. When he finally graduated from high school, he was kicked out of Boston University for theft and drug possession, and was an unemployed addict at the time he killed the vibrant girl who wanted to help him stop abusing cocaine and Ecstasy. Throughout the months before Jennifer’s death, Chambers had been breaking into Park Avenue homes of acquaintances, stealing jewelry, furs and other valuables to support his habit. He would better have been described as a "bad seed" — like the adolescent character in the William March novel of that name, who killed a schoolmate with the same cold calculation that marked Chambers’s act. As I got to know Chambers, I believed he was born evil, a sociopath whose actions were underscored by deceit and manipulation, a persuasive pattern of total disregard for other people. The "preppy" nickname by which the public related to him masked the killer’s self-destructive behavior with its benign and completely inaccurate title.