What kind of woman would hitch her wagon to Robert E. Chambers Jr.?
Shawn Kovell as a club kid at Studio 54 in 1985, before she became the companion of Robert E. Chambers Jr.
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An evidence photo, supplied by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, of Robert Chambers and Shawn Kovell. The police conducted a three-month undercover operation before arresting them.
A tabloid fixture who became known to New Yorkers in 1986 when he was arrested in the death of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in Central Park, Mr. Chambers was called the “Preppy Killer” because he had attended, and been thrown out of, private schools in New York and Connecticut.
Like Mr. Chambers, Shawn Kovell had been raised on the edge of the Upper East Side and lived with a single mother. She met Mr. Chambers shortly before his trial in 1988 and fell in love with him.
She showed up at his trial — and in a home video in which Mr. Chambers seemed to make light of Ms. Levin’s killing. After Mr. Chambers went to prison upstate, she rode a bus to visit him nearly every week, a family friend said, and when he finally got out, after 15 years, she was waiting for him.
Though friends from her younger days remember her as a “knockout,” Ms. Kovell, now 39, was emaciated and looked haggard when she appeared in a Manhattan courtroom last week, hiding her face behind a stringy mop of blond hair.
She and Mr. Chambers, 41, were arrested on Oct. 22 in her apartment. She was charged with one count each of selling and possessing drugs and pleaded not guilty. It was her first arrest.
Mr. Chambers, charged with 14 counts of possessing and selling drugs and resisting arrest, faces a possible life sentence. They are now jailed at Rikers Island.
The story of Robert Chambers has been accepted over the years less as a crisis of unfortunate circumstances and the excesses of privilege, as it was initially perceived, and more as a simple case of a bad seed.
But Ms. Kovell’s life, as those who know her describe it, constitutes its own tragedy of hard luck and baffling choices, or at least one.
Ms. Kovell declined to be interviewed.
A friend of Ms. Kovell’s named David Cohen, who has visited her a few times at Rikers and attended her court hearings, said he had known her since they were teenagers but had lost touch with her in the past two years. He surmised that her longtime casual use of drugs had turned into addiction after Mr. Chambers’s release from prison in 2003.
“Right now, she’s dying,” said Mr. Cohen, who manages a car repair shop in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
On the August night 21 years ago when Mr. Chambers walked out of Dorrian’s Red Hand, an Upper East Side bar, with Ms. Levin and took her to Central Park, there had been a battle for his affection between her and a woman he had been dating. The other woman told Mr. Chambers she was through with him. The prosecutor said that fueled the rage that led Mr. Chambers to strangle Ms. Levin. (That girlfriend, Alex Kapp, went on to graduate from Dartmouth College and become an actress. Now Alex Kapp Horner, she appears as Lindsay in the CBS situation comedy “The New Adventures of Old Christine,” starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.)
During his trial for murder, Mr. Chambers claimed he accidentally strangled Ms. Levin while they were having “rough sex” in the park. With the jury deadlocked, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison.
Before the trial, a mutual friend took Ms. Kovell to a gathering at the apartment Mr. Chambers shared with his mother, and they hit it off.
Shortly after the trial, a video was broadcast on the tabloid television news program “A Current Affair” that showed Mr. Chambers at a slumber party with several young women, including Ms. Kovell.
During a game of charades, Mr. Chambers pretended to choke himself. In another sequence, he could be seen twisting off a doll’s head and saying, in a falsetto, “Oops, I think I killed her.”
As a teenager, friends recalled, Ms. Kovell spent many nights hanging out on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. She made the rounds of nightclubs, from Studio 54 to Palladium and the Red Parrot on rock-themed nights.
“She liked to party,” Mr. Cohen said. “She did what started out as recreational drug use.”
Paul Heyman, a wrestling manager who said he was friendly with Ms. Kovell through the nightclub scene, said: “She knew all the doormen when she was 17. She was famous to club kids.”
Ms. Kovell lived with her mother in a one-bedroom apartment on East 57th Street and never knew her father, friends said.
Her mother, Karline Kovell, who was known as Rusty, worked as a hat-checker at restaurants on East 45th Street, New York’s old “steak row,” and on upper Third Avenue, according to a former co-worker, Mary McGinnis.
Ms. Kovell and her mother “were the kindest and most loyal people you could meet,” Ms. McGinnis said.
“Shawn was so pretty, some girls who were jealous of her broke her arm, so her mother pulled her out of school when she was 16,” Ms. McGinnis said, adding that when Ms. Kovell met Mr. Chambers, she returned to her studies and obtained a general education diploma.
Ms. McGinnis said Ms. Kovell and her mother “would spend their last dime on rescued cats,” taking in so many that they eventually had to set a limit of four at a time.
“They wanted to think everyone was very nice,” she said. “They may have been a little naïve. When they met someone and decided they liked them, they were very loyal. Her mother got quite attached to Chambers.”
Ms. Kovell being taken to booking after her arrest last month on drug charges.
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The latest news and reader discussions from around the five boroughs and the region.
Mr. Chambers, who had served 15 years in prison for manslaughter, was led in handcuffs to his arraignment on Oct. 23 on charges of selling drugs and resisting arrest.
Shawn Kovell, going to Robert Chambers’s trial in 1988.
Mr. Cohen said that with her mother as her primary adult influence, Shawn Kovell lacked guidance. “Rusty was nice, but not very maternal,” he said. “She was very much an alcoholic.”
He said of his friend Shawn, “I really got the impression that she felt loved by Rob when she met him and, however ironically, she feels safe with him.”
When Mr. Chambers went to prison, Shawn Kovell worked a series of bartending jobs and comforted herself by painting a mural in her apartment of dragons amid colorful waves. “It’s partially complete,” Mr. Cohen said, adding, “The idea was that when everybody was back in her life it would be finished.”
Michael Sheehan, who when he was a police detective worked on Mr. Chambers’s murder case, said that several years after the trial, he unknowingly went to a bar where Ms. Kovell was working. She refused to serve him.
“She says to my friend, ‘He put my boyfriend in jail,’” Mr. Sheehan said.
“She looked great,” Mr. Sheehan added. “I say, ‘Talk to me. I hope to God you found a new guy.’ She said, ‘Look, I love him, and that’s the way it is.’”
Ms. Kovell took classes at Hunter College on and off from 1988 to 1999, an employee at the registrar’s office said, and eventually graduated with a double major in psychology and sociology.
Ms. McGinnis said Ms. Kovell’s mother died about four years ago of lung cancer.
“She was devastated, and that probably made her more dependent on Robert Chambers,” Ms. McGinnis said.
Mr. Chambers was released from Auburn Correctional Facility in February 2003, and sometime afterward, he and Ms. Kovell moved — first to Ireland, his mother’s native land, and then to Dalton, Ga., about 90 miles northwest of Atlanta, where they lived with a friend of Ms. Kovell’s mother.
He struggled to find work as a day laborer and took a job at a dye factory. After several months, they returned to New York because they did not want to relinquish Ms. Kovell’s rent-stabilized, one-bedroom apartment, which cost about $1,800 a month.
In August 2005, Mr. Chambers was sentenced to 100 days in Rikers Island after he pleaded guilty to possessing traces of heroin.
Authorities said that this year, after neighbors complained about the number of strangers coming by Ms. Kovell’s apartment, the police conducted a three-month undercover operation, buying about a half a pound of cocaine from them for $9,600.
On Oct. 22, officers used a battering ram to break down the door to the 17th-floor apartment and said they found crack pipes and several grams of cocaine. Mr. Chambers struggled with one officer and broke the man’s wrist, the authorities said.
Mr. Chambers has pleaded not guilty.
Ms. Kovell’s lawyer, Franklin A. Rothman, said last week that his client was going through withdrawal and needed medical attention.
“It’s a polysubstance abuse issue — crack, generic cocaine, primarily,” he said. “As I understand it, her issues have been getting more severe in the past couple of years. These are not profiteers. They are stone-cold addicts.”
Mr. Rothman said he hoped Ms. Kovell would not have to go to prison and would be able to enter an addiction treatment program.
“I think we’re heading toward that,” he said. “That would be a happy ending. But the unhappy ending is when she gets the tools for sobriety and her boyfriend goes away, and she spends another 15 years waiting for him to get out of prison again.”
