Preppy killer's girlfriend: 'He's the love of my life'

Ellis Henican: November 20, 2007

Shawn loves Robert. She loves the guy.

Before we go one step further - to the drugs, the undercover buys, the "Preppy Killer" history and the unexpected legal wrangling over whether a stranger can post a felony defendant's bail - that much has to be established: Shawn Kovell loves Robert Chambers, no matter what anyone else might think.

"And he loves me, too," she was quick to add yesterday afternoon as she sat in a nearly empty visiting room at the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island.

She wore jail-issue sandals and a regulation gray Rikers jumpsuit. Her hair is blond and remarkably thick. She hasn't been eating much, she said. But she does look healthier than during her perp walk. It was her first interview since she and her infamous boyfriend were busted on coke charges Oct. 22, dredging up ancient memories of one of most sensational criminal cases of the 1980s.

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"He is nothing like the way he's made out to be," Kovell said of the man she calls "Rob" and has stuck by for nearly 20 years. "He is sweet. Soft-spoken. Kind to everyone. Generous. Compassionate.

"My friends warned me about him. They'd heard all the sensationalism. Five minutes after meeting him, they said I was right."

He's 41 now. She's 39. But there was a certain inevitability in the pairing of Robert and Shawn.

They both grew up on the fringes of the Upper East Side, in, though not quite of, Manhattan's upper echelon. He got bounced from various prep schools. She was raised in foster care and by a heavy-drinking, often absent single mom who worked in nightclubs. Both young people had a taste for drugs from very early ages.

When the two of them met, Chambers had already been charged with strangling 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in Central Park. Kovell managed to look beyond that - through the murder trial, the manslaughter plea and 15 years in prison. She visited virtually every week Chambers was in.

"He was amazed that I stuck it out for 15 years," she said. "It never occurred to me not to. That's exactly where I wanted to be."

After a desperately insecure childhood, this pretty but troubled young woman finally found her security. In a man the public saw as pariah, she found a love she'd never had. "When no one cares about you," she said, "it's hard to care about yourself."

Chambers, she said, was the one who encouraged her to get an education after she'd skipped the seventh, eighth, 10th, 11th and 12th grades.

"He said, 'Why don't you go get your GED?'" she said. "For me, it was, 'Somebody cares.' He was the encouragement for that."

She passed the high-school equivalency test without any remedial courses. She began taking classes at Hunter College, earning her bachelor's degree in psychology and sociology.

"A 3.9 GPA," she said. "Life member of the Golden Key Honor Society. Dean's List five times. While working as a bartender. Going every weekend to see Rob. Taking care of my mother, who was dying. And studying on the bus upstate. I had a very busy schedule."

When he got out of prison, they tried to make a life for themselves. They moved together to Georgia, then back to her late mom's apartment on East 57th Street. Work was hard to come by. Drugs were easier.

Then police came crashing through the door.

Chambers was clearly their target. Held now on Rikers without bail, he's charged with 14 counts of cocaine possession and sale, to one of each for her. She's at Rikers on $25,000 bail.

And there she sits, while her lawyer, Frank Rothman, tries to arrange drug treatment instead of prison, and drug-law reform activist Randy Credico of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice keeps trying to post her bail.

None of this is going quickly.

"I'm very hopeful Shawn will get the attention that the issues in her life have prevented her from getting before," Rothman said yesterday.

At Rikers yesterday, Kovell spoke with quiet determination. She's already begun to detox, she said, and is eager to get medical attention for a growth below her abdomen. "You can see what the drugs have done," she said. "They put me in here."

But didn't she ever wonder, on those 12-hour bus rides to various prisons upstate, if the renowned "Preppy Killer" was really the guy for her?

"No," she said, "never wondered. I knew. I just knew in my heart that is where I wanted to be. It never occurred to me not to do it. He's my life. He's the love of my life. He's everything to me."

Her love was surely tested.

"The 15 years seemed to go by slowly from day to day," she said. "But it seemed to go by very quickly, just having him in my life."

Where he will stay? Whatever comes next?

"Yes," she said. "I know he will."

As she looks ahead, what are Shawn Kovell's hopes?

"To be able to get through the rest of my life clean and sober," she said. "To be able to deal with things in a better, stronger way."

And "hopefully, Robert and I starting all over again from scratch and doing it the way we wanted to the first time," she said. "And we're definitely not going to be in New York the next time."

For now, she said, she's feeling a little bit lonely. "This is the longest I've gone without talking to him."