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Chapter 1 – Rough Sex

At six o’clock on the morning of 26 August 1986, Patricia Reilly was taking an early morning cycle ride in New York’s Central Park. She was cycling down the winding East Drive when, barely fifty yards behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she saw what she thought was a bag lady sprawled in the grass. She rode on. But about fifty yards past the obelisk – New York’s own Cleopatra’s Needle – she stopped and turned the bike around. Something was definitely wrong.

From about thirty yards away, at the foot of a large elm tree, she could see a body. It was not moving. As she walked closer, across the grass, she saw it was the body of a young woman, almost naked. Her blouse and bra were pushed up around her throat, exposing her tanned breasts. Her pink miniskirt was hiked up around her waist. Her legs were bare. Her panties were missing, though she still had her flat canvas shoes on. The body was twisted, the legs splayed. The young woman’s vagina was fully exposed. There is no dignity in death.

The girl’s white embroidered panties were found 45 feet from the body. They were twisted as if they had been rolled down when they had been taken off. Joggers had seen a tall young man in an Oxford shirt in the area. One thought he had seen a couple engaged in what he took to be sexual activity in the area at about 5.30 am.

Patricia Reilly ran to the Central Park boathouse to call the police, but the phones had been ripped out. She spotted a police truck. Its engine was running, but the doors were locked and there was no one inside.

She had to cycle as far as Madison and 50th before she found a pay phone that worked. She dialled 911 and reported the dead body she had found. The operator wanted to know exactly where the corpse was located. Reilly was told that each lamp post in Central Park carried a four digit number. The first two digits specified the number of the nearest cross street. But after discovering the body Patricia Reilly had somehow omitted to examine the nearest lamp post. All she knew was that the body was near the back of the Metropolitan Museum.

When the police arrived, they immediately concluded that the young woman had been the victim of a sex attack. A brown limousine with tinted windows had been seen in the area. The uniformed officers concluded that the woman was a prostitute. She had picked up a trick and been murdered elsewhere, then her body had been unceremoniously dumped in the park. But when the New York Police Department Detective Paul Chu turned up, he told them they were wrong. Apart from the outline of a high-cut bikini, the girl’s body had a California tan. New York prostitutes traditionally stay out of the sun in an effort to effect a look of pallid innocence.

Around the neck of the victim Chu noticed multiple red wounds. The girl, it appeared, had been strangled. Against all the rules in the NYPD handbook, Chu pulled down the blouse and the skirt, destroying much of the evidence of how she was killed, but giving the innocent victim some privacy in death.

There was no money on the victim, apart from one torn dollar bill. Her jewellery was missing too. But a credit card found in the pocket of the girl’s blood-splattered white Levi jacket gave Chu the victim’s name – Jennifer Levin.

Jennifer was just eighteen. At ten o’clock on the previous night she had met two of her girlfriends at Juanita’s Mexican restaurant on Third Avenue. They ordered margaritas. In New York State, it is illegal to serve minors under the age of twenty-one but no one asked for any ID. They had two cocktails a piece, then a man they did not know sent a bottle of champagne to their table. Soon after midnight, rather drunk, they took a cab uptown to Dorrian’s Red Hand on 84th Street and Second Avenue, an old-fashioned restaurant and bar that was a hangout for ‘preppies’, and where alcohol was served all night to underage drinkers. Jennifer knew that handsome nineteen-year-old Robert Chambers would be there. She had talked about him to her girlfriends earlier that night. When they arrived, she made straight for him.

Chambers was a regular at Dorrian’s, and was known as a cocaine user and trouble maker. Although Jennifer had a regular boyfriend she had also had sex with Chambers twice. That night, she went up to Chambers and told him straight out that he had given her the best sex she had had in her young life.

Chambers seemed offended by this. ‘Jennifer, you shouldn’t have said that,’ he admonished as he walked away.

But Jennifer and her boyfriend were going off to college in Boston soon and she wanted to see to Chambers again before she left. She inveigled a friend into asking him to meet her outside the bar in twenty minutes. Jennifer Levin was last seen alive leaving Dorrian’s with Robert Chambers at around 2.30 pm.

Early in the afternoon after the murder, Detective Frank Connelly and Al Genova from Manhattan North’s crack homicide squad visited the penthouse apartment on New York’s fashionable East 90th Street where Chambers lived with his mother. They told Mrs Chambers that they were on a missing person’s investigation and she let them in.

When Robert Chambers appeared, the detectives noticed that he had scratches on his face and cuts on the backs of his fingers. He agreed to accompany them to the precinct.

Although they read him his rights, he was still not considered a prime suspect at this point He said that after he and Jennifer left Dorrian’s, she had asked him for a cigarette. He did not have any. She went to a Korean deli to buy some, then headed off to see her regular boyfriend, Brock Pernice. He lived on the West Side, the other side of Central Park, Chambers said.

Chambers claimed that he had gone to a doughnut shop on East 86th Street, then walked home and watched The Price is Right on the TV. The scratches on his face and chest, he said, were inflicted by their pet cat that had jumped on him as he lay back watching TV. The cuts on his hands came from a neighbour’s sanding machine, which had jumped when he was sanding the floor, he said.

The police accepted this tale at first and Chambers stuck to it for five hours of interrogation. Then veteran detective Mike Sheehan asked what sort of cat did Chambers have – a mountain lion?

Chambers started fidgeting – and changed his story. He and Jennifer had walked two blocks west from Dorrian’s. At Lexington Avenue, they quarrelled and Jennifer had scratched his face. Then a friend of hers, a blond man in his twenties whose name Chambers did not know, came along and Jennifer went off with him.

While he was sticking to his original story, the detectives had given Chambers the benefit of the doubt. They liked him and did not think that he was a murderer. But once he changed his story, they were on him in a feeding frenzy. Within minutes, he admitted that he had killed Jennifer – but protested that it was not murder.

She had been a little drunk, he said. In Dorrian’s, she had pursued him. He had tried to give her the slip, but when he left, she had followed. She asked him to go to Central Park to talk. Once there, she had begun to get mad and had cursed and scratched him. She took off her panties to go to the bathroom, then said that he would look cute if he was tied up.

He let her tie his hands behind him with her panties, then she pushed him down and sat on his face. She scratched his chest, then grabbed his penis and began jerking him off very roughly. He begged her to stop it. She licked his penis, then slapped it and hit him with a stick. She squeezed his balls, hard. Chambers claimed that the pain was excruciating. Jennifer was laughing. It had made him mad.

Chambers said that he had managed to wriggle one of his hands free, then he grabbed her neck and had pulled her over. Before he knew it she was dead.

Chambers went on to claim that Jennifer was into kinky sex. She had taken nude photographs of him after they had had intercourse on the roof of a friend’s house. His attorney tried to subpoena her diary, which he alleged contained details of her kinky and aggressive sexual goings-on with other men. After studying the diary himself for more than three-and-a-half hours, the judge handed the diary back to the Levin family. It contained no details that might be pertinent to the defence.

Chambers claimed that he had been raped by Jennifer Levin – although no semen was found on the corpse. Throughout his three-month trial, he maintained that Jennifer had been the victim of rough sex that had gone too far.

The prosecution, Jennifer Levin’s parents and friends were outraged by this defence. They claimed that Chambers was blaming the victim for her own death. It was he that was on trial, not her. Outside the court-room, women protesters demanded ‘Justice for Jennifer’.

Inside the court-room there was more sympathy for the defendant though. Despite the charges against him, his notorious trial seemed to make the handsome Robert Chambers more attractive to women. Throughout the trial, the public gallery was packed with his groupies, eager to get a glimpse of the object of their desire. He even had an attractive new girlfriend, Shawn Kovell, who attended the trial every day.

In the end, the jury were not even allowed to decide whether the ‘rough sex’ defence was a good enough excuse – even if it was true. While they were out considering their verdict, the prosecution and defence cooked up a plea bargain. Chambers pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the first degree and was sentenced to five-to-fifteen years in the state penitentiary.

After he was sent down, a videotape shot by Shawn Kovell surfaced. It showed Chambers, Kovell and three of her posh Upper East Side girlfriends cavorting in their underwear. It was shot while Chambers was out on bail. In one scene, he was pictured playing with a doll. He twisted its head off, turned to the camera and said: ‘Oops, I think I killed it.’

The video was aired on Fox Television for two days, with record ratings. Public opinion, whidh had been behind Chambers and his ‘rough sex’ defence, dwindled rapidly.

England’s most notorious ‘rough sex’ case had happened forty years before in London. Then, just a-year after the end of World War II, the pubs and dubs of Britain’s capital were crowded with servicemen determined to live it up after six years of war. And women, deprived of their menfolk for six years and consigned to monotonous war work, were out to have a good time.

Ex-serviceman Neville Heath was certainly a man who went to great lengths to enjoy himself and 3l-year-old would-be film actress Margery Gardner was a certified good-time girl. Margery had left her husband and baby daughter in Sheffield to seek fame and fortune in London. She led a precarious existence in a succession of bedsits, occasionally sleeping with men in return for a meal and bed for the night Her companions were pimps, thieves, black marketeers and ex-officers on the make. In September 1945, she had been a passenger in a stolen car that had been chased by police through Hyde Park and she was on the files of the ‘Ghost Squad’ set up to investigate the post-war crime boom in London’s West End.

No one can be sure quite when she and Heath met, but on 23 February 1946, the manager of the Strand Palace Hotel burst into a bedroom to find Heath beating a woman with a cane. Heath had been registered as Captain James Cadogan Armstrong of the South African Air Force. An electrician heard the woman’s screams and had called the manager. Heath showed no embarrassment and demanded to know what the manager meant by his intrusion. The woman, later identified as Margery Gardner, refused to press charges and the two of them left arm in arm. According to her medical files, Gardner enjoyed being beaten and would offer her naked body for flagellation.

They met again on the evening of 20 June 1946. Heath had spent the day drinking with journalists in Fleet Street bars. His afternoon was spent at a private drinking club. Then, in the early evening, he picked up Margery in the Trevor Arms in Knightsbridge. They had dinner together in the Normandie Hotel and went dancing at the Panama Club.

Around midnight, they took a cab to the Pembridge Court Hotel in Notting Hill, where he was registered as Lieutenant-Colonel N.G.C. Heath. After tipping the taxi driver, he put his arm around the waist of his attractive young companion and let them into the hotel with his own key.

At 2 pm the following afternoon, the chambermaid knocked on the door of Heath’s room. There was no reply. She let herself in. The curtains were still drawn. Only one of the twin beds in the room had beer slept in. It was still occupied – and the occupant was not moving.

The chambermaid rushed downstairs to fetch the assistant hotel manager, Mrs Alice Wyatt. Back in the room, she pulled open the curtains. The empty bed showed traces of blood. Gingerly, Mrs Wyatt pulled back the covers from the motionless figure in the other bed. It was a young woman, naked. She was dead.

When the police arrived, they examined the severely mutilated body. There were the marks of seventeen lashes of a whip across the flesh – nine on her back, six on her breasts and belly and two across her forehead. Both her nipples and some of the soft tissue of the breast had been bitten away, and there was a seven-inch tear up through her vagina and beyond.

The woman had plainly consented to some sort of sexual activity. Her clothes were neatly folded on a chair. Her rings were still on her fingers and her handbag had not been touched. Inside, detectives found her wartime identity card giving her name as Margery Aimee Brownell Gardner.

In the fireplace, there was a short poker that Home Office pathologist Professor Keith Simpson said was responsible for her internal injuries. Severe though these were, they were not responsible for her death. She had died from asphyxiation either from a gag or from having her face pushed into the pillow.

The whip that had inflicted the welts on her body was nowhere to be seen. The marks showed the distinctive diamond pattern of a woven leather riding crop.

‘Find that whip and you’ve found your man,’ Professor Simpson told the police.

After a solid day’s drinking – it is estimated that he had drunk between 30 and 50 pints of beer – Heath may not have been in control of himself when he brutally murdered and mutilated Margery. But after the frenzy had subsided, he was ruthless and controlled. He washed the riding crop and packed it in his suitcase, along with the cloth he had used to bind Margery’s wrists and the scarf he had gagged her with Then he bought a first-class return to Worthing.

He phoned his girlfriend to say that he was in Worthing. They had met two weeks before at a dance in Chelsea. The following evening he had proposed to her in his room at the Pembridge Court and they were ‘unofficially engaged’. He asked her to give him an alibi. Heath said that he had lent his key to a friend called Jack, who had a woman with him. The police said that there had been a horrific murder, and he had been asked to prove that he had not been in his room that night. Unfortunately, he told her, his true alibi was one that Scotland Yard would never accept

This was not the story he told the police though. Two days after the murder, while a nationwide man hunt was underway, Heath wrote to Scotland Yard explaining that, after an evening with Mrs Gardner, she asked him if she could use his room until 2 am. After that, she intimated, she would spend the rest of the night with him. He agreed, but when he returned she was dead.

However, the police already knew that Heath had a long career as a conman. At eighteen, he had applied for a commission in the Royal Air Force. Within a year, he had been promoted to Flying Officer and was posted to No. ‘9 Fighter Squadron at RAF Duxford. There he began embezzling the mess funds and bouncing cheques. After winning his wings, he deserted. When the service police arrested him, he gave his word as a gentleman not to escape – then stole the sergeant’s car and drove off. He was caught, court-martialled and dismissed from the service.

By this time, he was set on a life of petty crime. In 1938, he appeared in the Old Bailey and was sent to Borstal. When he was released, he pined the Royal Army Service Corps and served as a captain in the Middle East. In the brothels of Cairo, he would pay to whip naked girls who were tied over a waist-high wooden bar. In 1941, he was cashiered for having two pay books and for bouncing cheques. On his way back to England, he Jumped ship in l )urban. There, he met and married Elizabeth Pitt-Rivers, daughter of one of the wealthiest families in South Africa. They had a son.

In May 1944, Heath was back in England, serving with Bomber Command. He forged his flying log to impress Wrens and wrote more worthless cheques. After being grounded, he returned to South Africa where he faced charges of fraud. By this time, the Pitt-River family were sick of him and paid him

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