The Preppy Killer

The Preppy Killer

This article relates to A Gorgeous Excitement

A crime that occurred in the summer of 1986 in New York City inspired Cynthia Weiner's A Gorgeous Excitement. On August 26, a cyclist discovered 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in New York City's Central Park, dead due to strangulation and half naked behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, badly bruised and with cuts on her face. She had been days away from leaving to start college in Boston. Her killer was Robert Chambers, 19. Chambers said in his statements to the police that Levin pursued him sexually on the night of her death. He claimed she died of "rough sex," stating that she removed his clothes and was painfully aggressive towards him, and that he reacted in a frenzy to end the pain, thereby accidentally killing her.

Chambers met Jennifer Levin in the summer of 1986 at Dorrian's Red Hand on Manhattan's Upper East Side, on which the bar Flanagan's in Weiner's novel is based. The two had a casual summer fling, and several people reported having seen Levin leaving the bar with Chambers hours before her murder. Chambers later revealed he was hiding at the crime scene when detectives arrived. He was charged with and tried for second-degree murder.

Chambers' trial covered 13 weeks. The jury couldn't reach a verdict after nine days, and Chambers made a deal with prosecutors, agreeing to plead guilty to a first-degree manslaughter charge with a sentence of 5 to 15 years. (He served 15 years, was arrested on a drug charge not long after his release, and was released again in 2023.)

Reports detail how crime was rampant in New York City at the time, with a record number of murders that year. However, this case stood out among the rest due to Chambers' modelesque looks, which made for compelling cover stories combining wealth and privilege. The media nicknamed Chambers "The Preppy Killer," and his crime took the city and country by storm. It continued to resonate in mainstream culture in the following years, as in a 1989 made-for-TV movie called The Preppie Murder starring Billy Baldwin as Chambers and Lara Flynn Boyle portraying Levin, a 1990 Law & Order episode, and the 2019 TV mini-series The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park. In 2004, the rock band The Killers released "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine," which mocked Chambers' defense to authorities.

A Gorgeous Excitement is another example of how this crime has left an imprint on many people decades later.

Exterior of Dorrian's Red Hand Restaurant, 2023
Photo by DylanJKennedy, CC BY-SA 4.0

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to A Gorgeous Excitement. It first ran in the March 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.