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Appendix VII.With Levy Case Going Nowhere, Chance Stepped In

 
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 18, 2005 5:52 am    Post subject: Appendix VII.With Levy Case Going Nowhere, Chance Stepped In Reply with quote

from www.washpost.com (fair use)

With Levy Case Going Nowhere, Chance Stepped In
By Steve Twomey and Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 26, 2002


Terrance W. Gainer, working through two scrambled eggs and orange juice, was hunched in a booth inside the venerable Reeves Restaurant and Bakery downtown late Wednesday morning. The No. 2 cop in Washington had no optimism to share about the most chronicled missing person in America, Chandra Ann Levy, telling his booth-mate -- a reporter -- that the hunt was so stalled it would take serendipity's intervention to restart it.

Either "somebody dimes somebody out," Gainer said, "or we find the body."

In mere moments, as the executive assistant police chief nibbled away, the pager on his belt vibrated. Gainer did not stir, politely pursuing conversation. The pager quaked again. He finished his meal and headed outside to his marked car -- and to the thunderbolt revelation that luck had finally descended upon his cold case.

A body was in the tangle of a Rock Creek Park slope.

In the United States at any moment, thousands of men, women and children are missing, but the disappearance of only one had morphed into national melodrama, because only one disappearance had ensnared a congressman, a married man whose political career soon imploded amid police searches, television interviews and evidence accumulation.

On the first of May last year, Levy, 24, was just days from leaving Rep. Gary A. Condit behind, from flying to her commencement at the University of Southern California after an eight-month federal internship in a capital that thrilled her and, family members said, brought her romance with a man more than twice her age.

Sitting at a computer in her $1,400-a-month apartment near Dupont Circle that day, the packing of her bags already underway, Levy dispatched an e-mail to her mother, listing fares on Southwest Airlines. She journeyed to several travel Web sites. And she went to the home page of Rock Creek Park -- an odd electronic destination, given that her family and friends say the young woman had fears about the urban oasis, however popular it is with runners, hikers and bikers.

At 1 p.m., Levy shut off her computer.

Then she vanished.

Now, nearly 13 months later, as Gainer headed to breakfast at 13th and G streets to pronounce the search moribund, a man was exploring western Rock Creek Park with his dog.

On this bright if cool Wednesday, the man was looking for turtles -- just looking, he told police later. People sometimes illegally take turtles, usually box turtles, from the parks of Washington. Some want a pet for themselves, but "most of these turtles are going into the pet shop business," said Einar Olsen, the chief ranger in the capital region for the National Park Service.

Man and dog were canvassing a place not many go, though it is but 200 yards or so from paved roads and dirt trails. The land slopes sharply. The tree canopy filters much of the sun. An off-the-beaten-path walker must negotiate a considerable thicket. The dog stopped, its curiosity piqued by something in the leaves on an incline. The man, whom police have declined to identify because he is a witness, pushed away debris to find a skull.

A continent away, at about that moment, Robert L. and Susan Levy, he an oncologist and she a sculptor, were in their white-brick ranch house in an upscale Modesto neighborhood in the flat agricultural world of California's Central Valley, preparing to talk via satellite with Oprah Winfrey, who was taping her nationally syndicated show in Chicago.

Since first pleading to the nation on June 15 for help in finding the older of their two children, the Levys had been unstinting in sharing their anguish, in the hope of a tip, a break, anything. One day last summer, the D.C. police had called and asked for Chandra's dental records. "Did they find my daughter? Did they find her?" Susan kept asking, friends said.

They had not. They merely wanted to be ready, if and when they found a body that might be Chandra's. The searching had gone on, even leading to an Army base in Virginia in August, where a malicious or misguided tipster had said Levy was buried beneath a parking lot.

Sept. 11 and all that followed had robbed the Levys of the country's fascination, but at least, on Wednesday, Oprah was still willing. The timing turned out to be a surreal, heartbreaking coincidence.

"We really hope that she is alive," Robert told Winfrey. But over time, the Levys had inched closer to accepting that cases of young women who disappear often do not end well. Chandra probably wasn't alive, probably hadn't simply gone off on her own without a word to her folks. "Under the circumstances," Robert went on, "it doesn't seem likely. But as parents, we have to maintain that hope."

Do you think, Winfrey said, that Gary Condit knows what happened?

"Oh, yes," Susan said. "I think he does."

The show, given what was about to happen, did not air.

Leaving the skull behind, the man hiked out of the woods to Broad Branch Road near Brandywine Road NW, where workers were renovating a house. From there, at 9:29 a.m., he telephoned the U.S. Park Police. At 9:50, a Park Police sergeant arrived; the man led him to the site and pointed at the skull and other items scattered about. A flood of uniformed officers began washing over the thicket on the hillock. Gainer's pager went to work.

"Things have changed a little bit since our morning conversation," Gainer said in voice mail message he left for his breakfast companion at 12:07 p.m. But the media already knew. Soon, a score of its members was camped at Condit's House office in the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill, waiting for word.

Condit, 54, whose visage Levy likened to Harrison Ford's, is in the last months of a congressional career that began in 1989. Police have never declared him a suspect. And, publicly, he has said he and Levy were merely "good" friends. But the young woman's family believed differently, and police had said that Condit, in one of four interviews, told them of an affair. They had searched his Adams Morgan apartment and asked for and gotten a DNA sample and personal records.

Condit was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury last month, but by then he was a lame duck, having lost the Democratic primary in California in March, largely because of allegations that he was not forthcoming with authorities about his relationship with Levy.

Linda Zamsky, her aunt, had said that the young woman spoke of a romance in which she and Condit spent many weekends together, but in which secrecy was paramount, at least to the congressman. "The plan was: Live with him, be there for him, kind of in a secret relationship for the next five years," Zamsky had said. "And then in five years . . . she said, they had talked about getting married and having a baby."

In April 2001, Levy's $27,000-a-year internship at the federal Bureau of Prisons ended, and her quest to land at the FBI was still up in the air. "I'm planning on packing my bags in the next week or 10 days," she said in a message on Zamsky's answering machine April 29. "Heading home for a while. Don't know what I'm going to do this summer. And I really have some big news. . . . Call me."

Levy disappeared two days later, without sharing whatever it was.

At the Rayburn Building on Wednesday, there was no Condit sighting. But elsewhere, his lawyer, Mark Geragos, said that Condit, who has offered a $10,000 reward in the case, wanted Levy returned safely and was "praying every day" for that resolution. He said Condit hoped the remains in Rock Creek Park were not Levy's.

By then, the Levys knew there were bones, but not whose. No one did yet. Reflecting the extraordinary altitude her case had attained, it was Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey who telephoned the parents at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time to tell them that remains had been found and that police were checking to see if they were Levy's. About 2 p.m., as investigators photographed and picked, Ramsey called again to say that police still were uncertain and that he would keep them posted.

The skeletal remains had been scattered, perhaps by the weather, maybe by animals. They were surrounded by the minutiae of someone who might have been intent on exercise, perhaps a run or brisk walk. There was a jogging bra. There were two Reebok tennis shoes. There was a Walkman-like radio. There were running tights tied in a knot, suggesting that this unknown human being might have been bound and killed. There was a sweat shirt.

It bore the name of the University of Southern California.

Often in the previous year, police had spoken of how thorough was their hunt to find Levy, alive or dead. A corpse can tell investigators whether a crime has been committed, or whether someone simply fell victim to accident or illness. A body can help determine how a killer did it, when he did it and who he is. Perhaps he left behind fingerprints or DNA. A body reduced to skeletal conditions is problematic, but forensic science can still find answers. A bone might show the impact of a knife or a bullet. A skull might display the impact of a brick or bat.

Drawn by the computer files that showed Rock Creek Park had been of some interest to Levy, police had tromped much of the more than 1,700 acres that lie within the District, using police recruits and dogs. Their probes had come within a couple hundred yards of where the sweat shirt and the rest would be found, Gainer said later. But normal search patterns called for penetrating only as far as 100 yards or so from parking lots or trails.

"The bottom line is," Ramsey said afterward, "if she was there, we didn't find her."

The D.C. medical examiner's office is on the grounds of D.C. General Hospital in Southeast Washington, and on Wednesday afternoon, the medical examiner himself, Jonathan L. Arden, brought back the single most important find from the Rock Creek Park site, the skull. Teeth do not decompose. And they are practically as unique to a person as fingerprints. The root canals, the spacing, the fillings and the crowns add up to a personal signature.

Arden X-rayed the skull. He hung the exposed film on a light screen, beside the X-rays collected months ago from the Levys. He stepped back, then stepped forward, then stepped back again, comparing the two jawlines, comparing the fillings. Then Arden turned to the half-dozen police and federal investigators who had crowded into his small office.

"It's her," he said.

Staff writers Petula Dvorak and Allan Lengel contributed to this report.
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