<em>The Preppy Murder</em> Unpacks a Tabloid Frenzy

Before Jeremy Meeks gazing soulfully out of a mugshot issued by the Stockton Police Department in 2014, before Dzhokhar Tsarnaev peeked through tousled curls like a teen idol on , the American media fell in love with Robert Chambers. In August 1986, the body of an 18-year-old girl named Jennifer Levin was found in Central Park. Within days, detectives had traced her final movements, established that Levin had last been seen leaving an Upper East Side bar with the 19-year-old Chambers, and arrested him for her murder. The evidence seemed clear: Chambers’s face and torso were covered with fresh scratches, and he admitted responsibility for her death, although he insisted, unbelievably, that Levin had sexually assaulted him and that he’d accidentally killed her while trying to defend himself. “I thought, ,” the investigating detective Mike Sheehan tells the camera in the . He was wrong.