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Guandique's Defense
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jane



Joined: 22 Sep 2002
Posts: 3225

PostPosted: Tue Nov 03, 2009 9:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

    Certainly prosecution appears to be very worried about any delay in the trial, and I think trying to push through the two coldest weeks of the year to inhibit jurors and public from being able to properly examine all the crime scenes is their overriding concern.

Plus the road construction sigsky mentioned. (If it's the way road construction is up here nowadays - seems to take a lot longer than it used to...)
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jane



Joined: 22 Sep 2002
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:34 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I am thinking about the importance for the defense to get across the difference between the sites where Guandique attacked the two joggers vs where Chandra's remains were found. I have a question for anyone who has visited Rock Creek Park to compare these sites: Do you think it would be possible for the defense to make a video tape that would make the difference clear?
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sigsky



Joined: 31 Oct 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 4:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Jane,

If I may play devil's advocate, the prosecutor will probably tell the jury that all the attacks were near a path with a hill that sloped down to a creek and the MO was to attempt to drag the victim into the woods. The reason that Levy's remains were so deep in the woods was that she was his only success. That's why I say there are certain similarities. I sense a video might do a better job of emphasizing the similarities rather than the differences. Video does not do a good job in showing changes in elevation which is crucial to understanding how different the sites really are.

I think a live visit is crucial to understanding how very different the attack locations were.
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rd



Joined: 13 Sep 2002
Posts: 9273
Location: Jacksonville, FL

PostPosted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 6:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I agree 100 per cent, sigsky.

Not trying to AOL here but can't add anything to that.

rd
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Rainbow



Joined: 29 Jun 2006
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 6:59 pm    Post subject: Walk the Walk Reply with quote

Hi, again!
I also think that the jury should walk the distance from Chandra's apartment in DuPont Circle to Rock Creek Park.
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rd



Joined: 13 Sep 2002
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Location: Jacksonville, FL

PostPosted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Amen to that. Never happen, but I want them to know what the Chandra Levy Jog in the Park Challenge is, and ask why not one of the prosecutors, police, or reporters who claim it was a "nice day for a walk in the park" don't recreate what they claim Chandra did.

The challenge is quite involved, if anyone were to ever make it up to Ridge Road (and the challenge requires wearing what Chandra wore, sports bra and Victoria's Secrets panties on the men optional) and only carrying what she had with her, and no police escorts, but should one of these "nice day for a walk in the park" people, who now must say jog in the park because the police have made it a jog to explain her attire and having nothing with her, actually make it up to Ridge Road, having started at 1 pm, they are then to start out cross country at grove 16 and circle round the No Horses trail until they come back around heading toward grove 18 where the sunglasses were found.

Then I want these dufuses to take a good look at where they are and explain the DC police contention that Guandique was standing there on a narrow strip of dirt that you can't even sit down on without sliding downhill waiting for a lone woman "jogger" to attack.

It would be priceless to get a video of their stupid faces explaining that to the jury.

Much more importantly, I want these "nice day for a jog in the park" people to explain why Chandra did this for her first ever known jog, as a person who never jogged, into a forest on top of the highest hill in DC (just the small portion of that entire distance is a run up Western Ridge horse trail from Broad Branch and Beach that makes it criminal to call it a "jog") into a national park she told her friends was dangerous and would never go there alone.

But even more importantly, I want these people to explain to the jury why Chandra was checking for phone messages constantly for days and searching for info on Condit until she just up and disappeared with no phone to keep checking for those messages when Condit left Vice President Cheney's office for a meeting he urgently requested the day before, to discuss nothing.

Sounds to me like she got her message. Tell the jury the whole truth and they will come to the same conclusion.

rd
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rd



Joined: 13 Sep 2002
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Location: Jacksonville, FL

PostPosted: Fri Nov 06, 2009 1:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I found a post I made during my visit to Rock Creek Park and finding the recovery site of Chandra's remains. I discuss Guandique back then, and it is more relevant than ever for this thread:

I am sitting at the picnic table at #18. Where Chandra was found is behind me and over the hill. The reporting has just been pathetic when you take a look at what she was supposed to have done to get here to be attacked, how isolated this spot is when the nature center is closed, and how many people, horses, and dogs would have had to be totally oblivious to the corpse over the side of the hill.

Let's just put it this way. I found out I'm not the only one who thinks she was brought back here and dumped after the searches ended.

More details when I have a chance. I'm going back down over the hill again to Broad Branch. I want to see what a turtle hunter and his dog would see from down there.

I found a map that has everything marked, this will do fine.





X1 marks the spot where Chandra was found, and where I found the orange stake. The green path is Western Ridge Trail, which is essentially a horse trail and hiking path up this steep hill off in the woods running alongside the park road to the Nature Center.

As you pass picnic area 18, there's a dotted line where the horse trail continues on uphill and Western Ridge Trail becomes hiking only, or No Horses. The trail dips downward just before turning sharply uphill. It is at that point, at X2, that Chandra was found straight down the side of the slope 238 feet. It is another 283 feet on downhill from where she was found to Broad Branch Road.

X7 is about at the top of the sheer rock cliff set back from the creek along Broad Branch Road. There is a large ravine running up the hill in between X7 and X1, and an even larger ravine on the other side in between X1 and picnic table 18. X1 is not the most inaccessible spot, for example, the area between X1 and 18 is very rough. But X1 appears to have been chosen based on the ability to drop downhill from the path and get back up fairly quickly. The more inaccessible sides of the ravines would take much longer to traverse.

The purple lines are walking paths up the side of the hill from Broad Branch. Path is a generous term here. It is little more than worn down footprints around logs and rocks. The start of the path is at X8 at the corner of Grant and Broad Branch. The creek channel running along Broad Branch is very wide and deep, but the water is that of a small creek. The path runs along the hill above the creek like walking on a wall above a sidewalk. The path is just wide enough to walk on and ten feet above the creek. It is also in plain view of traffic on the road.

One walks along the top of the creek for at least 300 feet before coming to the sheer cliff where the path goes uphill sharply. You can see another purple line coming up from the other side. This is coming up the side of the hill on the other side of the cliff. Notice how the path stops alongside the creek below X1. That is how inaccessible Chandra's site was from below at the creek.

At the top of the cliff the path heads on uphill at a slant across the side of the hill. It is not an easily seen path to follow. If X7 is where the sunglasses were found, then that would be near the top of the cliff in some bushes just off the path. It would be problematic, though, because she would have then have had to have been dragged down into a ravine and up a very steep, slippery side to the other side to X1.

If the sunglasses were found at X2, then they were lost as she was being pulled downhill off the main trail. This I would expect no matter how they were lost. I'm not sure what X7 marks, but whatever it is, it will be hard to explain.

I found scr's pictures of the site and will post them here. His info was invaluable to us understanding the news accounts of finding Chandra last year. Here are the pictures he posted:

the No Horses trail above




going down the hill




seeing the flags from below by the ravine




the log to the left where one flag is




a close look at the hollow where she was found



thanks for pictures, scr.

As far as Guandique goes, I think what we have to do is emphasize what the police have overlooked; that this location is based on ease of access by car to remote woods. There are more remote spots, but they aren't next to a backup drive for unloading horses as there is next to picnic area 18. Not only is this spot easy to drive up to, it is ideal for pulling off the road into the trees and unloading something unseen after dusk when the park is closed.

It is remarkable that the police didn't emphasize that aspect of where Chandra was found. It is as if they completely ruled out Chandra being dumped in the park. Statistics show that almost all bodies found in the park are dumped there. And this is next to the most convenient spot for driving up and dumping a body you could ever imagine.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't take any pictures. I took my camera with me but the battery was dead and I never ended up buying a replacement for it on the way. It turns out that I would have taken a whole bunch of pictures of the wrong places as I was lost half the time. It wasn't until I came up to picnic table 17 and reread searches on finding her body a second time that I was able to go back down and find the orange stake and flags, and that was only after I decided to search the ravines and saw the flags up above.

That dang Ramsey and his base of the cliff nonsense threw me off big time. I was all over that cliff thinking that it was meant to make her look like she fell off accidentally or jumped off to commit suicide, and quite frankly depending on what X7 is supposed to mark there still may be something to that as it looks like X7 is at the top of the 70 foot cliff.

rd
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lector



Joined: 07 Nov 2009
Posts: 38

PostPosted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 2:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

jane wrote:
    Certainly prosecution appears to be very worried about any delay in the trial, and I think trying to push through the two coldest weeks of the year to inhibit jurors and public from being able to properly examine all the crime scenes is their overriding concern.

Plus the road construction sigsky mentioned. (If it's the way road construction is up here nowadays - seems to take a lot longer than it used to...)

Do DC juries customarily visit crime scenes? Is there any guarantee that a jury would be taken to the relevant areas of Rock Creek Park in any weather?

I don't understand how these things work. I've served as a juror on a criminal trial from start to finish only once. In that case, we were not taken to visit the crime scene, and we were expressly forbidden by the judge from visiting it on our own. We were instructed to reach our verdict exclusively on the basis of the testimony presented in court.

This surprised me greatly at the time. Our inability to visit the scene of one incident worked against the prosecution's case & led to an acquittal on the most serious charge. Things might be different with Guandique's case, of course.

Since then, I'm pretty sure that I've seen news reports of jury visits to crime scenes in certain prominent cases. This all leaves me baffled on how this aspect of the law works. Does it vary from state to state? Does the judge decide the question for each case? Is it the general default practice that juries don't visit crime scenes unless the judge decides that there's a compelling reason for them to do so in individual cases?

I really don't know what to expect in the Guandique trial and am hoping that folks with more legal experience than I have can weigh in on these questions.
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jane



Joined: 22 Sep 2002
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi lector - sometimes juries are taken to visit crime scenes. I am guessing that it is more often the prosecution that requests this; however, in Guandique's case I think it is the defense that might request a visit to the recovery site as well as the sites of Guandique's attacks on two joggers. I am not surprised that the judge instructed the jury members not to visit the crime scene on their own in the case you were involved in, as juries are expected to base their findings solely on testimony and evidence presented at the trial. I have never heard of jurisdictions where visits to crime scenes are not allowed; however, I assume that the prosecution or defense could object to a visit and the judge could either sustain or overrule the objection. I am only basing this on true crime cases I am familiar with as a reader or viewer of documentaries...
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lector



Joined: 07 Nov 2009
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 9:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Jane, thanks for those insights. I guess we'll all see how it develops.

My jury service was illuminating in so many ways. I'm glad I had the experience.

Back to Rock Creek Park - I discovered that you can see quite a bit of the area with the Street View facility in Google Maps if you have a high-speed Net connection. You can "travel" up Broad Branch Road & look up the hillside to the east. You also "drive" up Ridge Road in the park and get a good look at the picnic areas, the points where the horse trail enters & leaves the woods, etc. You can't see the area in between the two roads, of course. Still, it's fascinating & kind of surreal to see what you can see in this way.
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rd



Joined: 13 Sep 2002
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Location: Jacksonville, FL

PostPosted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 6:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

wow, I never thought to try that, lector. I will give it a try and see what I can see and post my thoughts. I have used the Google street view a couple of times, once to look at my old neighborhood where I grew up and once to tell my brother and sister-in-law about it and we looked at their house street view with it.

We also have posted some aerial views with chapter Horse Trail put together by Grande over on http://helpfindthemissing.org/forum/showthread.php?t=6615&page=11

They give a pretty good indication of the elevations involved here but still difficult to understand how isolated it is up there and what a crock it is to say Chandra jogged there from Dupont Circle without experiencing it firsthand.

I have no doubt this prosecution will attempt to keep the jurors as iill-informed as possible. If the jurors are not allowed to examine the crime scenes in depth then it would be nothing short of a politically rigged trial.

I wouldn't be surprised if they know that and don't care if the verdict is overturned due to their actions, able to dismiss the result as we had our man but the justice system wouldn't let us convict him. End of story, Chandra's case goes into a deep freeze and DC gets their wish and goes away happy.

But for sure jurors can't do things like take virtual tours of the scenes on their own, so we have to hope that justice prevails and the jurors are allowed to be well informed enough to be able to come to a judgement with integrity.

That will require an indepth examination of a re-enactment of what the prosecution contends. I'm quite sure the prosecution will not provide such enlightenment so it will require the defense to show the jurors what a re-enactment of the prosecution's claims looks like.

It would take quite awhile. That alone should be clue enough.

While over on helpfindthemissing.org to get that link, I saw several posts I made both here and there on Guandique. Rather than bury this thread with those posts, I'll post them in another thead Guandique Murder Analysis. Everyone please feel free to add comments.

rd
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lector



Joined: 07 Nov 2009
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 1:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks for that link to helpfindthemissing. Those aerial views are good, they help fill in the picture.

BTW that map posted by Grande significantly misplaces the location of Chandra's apartment (or else I've misplaced it). I have the address of tha Newport as 1260 21st St. NW, which is a few blocks due southwest of Dupont Circle according to Google Maps. This map locates it way to the northwest. Not sure what's going on there.

The map apparently comes from still another site so it's quite a tangential issue.
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rd



Joined: 13 Sep 2002
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 10:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

yeah, I don't know who did that or where it came from. Chandra's apartment, the Washington Sports Club, and Chandra's remains markings are not even close. Condit's apartment and Klingle Mansion look reasonably close.

Chandra's apartment would be just off the map for that matter. Looks like someone was going for convenience rather than accuracy.

That sums up Chandra's case pretty well.

rd
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lector



Joined: 07 Nov 2009
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 12:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

rd wrote:

Looks like someone was going for convenience rather than accuracy.

That sums up Chandra's case pretty well.

rd


Heh. Well put.
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Rainbow



Joined: 29 Jun 2006
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 5:12 pm    Post subject: How convenient! Reply with quote

And how convenient was Mr. Geragos' prophesy regarding the time period he predicted that Chandra's remains would be discovered!

Quote:
Last night, Condit family attorney Mark Geragos appeared on "Larry King Live" and revealed he had been told months ago that Chandra's remains might turn up soon. Said Geragos, "My investigators had suggested-- if this was the work of a serial killer-- that based upon the two other young ladies that were found-- you might find that Chandra may turn up sometime in May."


http://telepixtvcgi.warnerbros.com/dailynews/extra/05_02/05_23a.html

Extratv.com--Daily News--May 23, 2002
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