In the winter of 2020, my neighbor in Sing Sing told me that there was a true crime documentary on TV about Robert Chambers. The Preppy Murder: Death in Central Park was an AMC limited docuseries that was playing for three nights on the A&E channel, which was part of the prison’s cable package. It had been a big case at the time. In 1986, Chambers, nineteen, strangled eighteen-year-old Jennifer Levin under an oak tree by a bike path in New York’s Central Park, after a night of drinking at an upscale bar nearby. The name resonated with me because for as long as I had been in prison, both prisoners and COs had been telling me that I looked like Robert Chambers.

In 1988, the trial was everywhere. At eleven years old, I remember hearing my mother talking to my aunt about the case, expressin

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