Who Killed Chandra Levy?

[Tylergal]

By Sari Horwitz, Scott Higham and Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 13, 2008
It was above 80 degrees, the start of another steamy summer day in Washington. At 8:58 on the morning of July 25, 2001, three D.C. police sergeants gathered 28 cadets along Glover Road in Rock Creek Park. They were looking for any trace of a government intern named Chandra Ann Levy.

The 24-year-old woman from California, with hazel eyes and a head full of unruly brown curls, had left her Dupont Circle apartment and then simply disappeared. She had been missing for 85 days, and the search for her had captivated the city and the nation. Her laptop computer's history showed that she was interested in visiting the vast 1,750-acre park on the day she vanished.


See a 360 degree view of the site where Chandra Levy's remains were found in 2002.Now, the line of cadets executed the order of the city's chief of detectives, Cmdr. Jack Barrett: Search 100 yards from the roads that crisscross the park. But someone had made a mistake. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey had wanted the cadets to search 100 yards off the park's trails. By limiting the search to the areas near the roads, the police would canvass a far smaller portion of the park and not go deep into the woods. Either Ramsey miscommunicated his order, or Barrett misunderstood it.

After 1 that afternoon, the sergeants called off the search, and the weary cadets boarded a bus and headed for another area of the park.

Off the Western Ridge Trail near Glover Road, beneath the dark green canopy of the forest, a pair of sunglasses rested on the ground. Not far away was a white Reebok sneaker trimmed in blue. A little farther, on the edge of a ravine, was a pair of black Pro Spirit stretch pants turned inside out, each leg tied in a knot. And nearby lay the body of Chandra Levy. It was 79 yards below the trail.

"We were unbelievably close, but we missed - we just missed her," Terrance W. Gainer, the second-ranking D.C. police official at the time, later recalled. "We were so darn close to finding that poor girl."


Enlarge Photo
D.C. police recruits search Rock Creek Park for Chandra Levy in July 2001. (Robert A. Reeder - Post)It would be another 10 months before Chandra's body was found. By then, the forensic evidence that might have identified a killer - blood, hair, fiber - would be gone.

****

The Chandra Levy case is the most famous unsolved murder in modern Washington, a mystery involving sex, power and secrets. At its center is a vivacious young intern who had crossed paths with a handsome, married congressman. The story triggered months of feverish worldwide media attention in 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks shoved it aside and the investigation stalled.

The Washington Post spent a year reconstructing the disappearance of Chandra Levy and the investigation into her death. Reporters interviewed police officials, investigators and suspects, many for the first time, and obtained details about dozens of previously unknown private conversations and events, including former Rep. Gary Condit's first interview with the newspaper in seven years.

The Post's examination of the case will unfold in a 12-chapter serial and epilogue in print and online. The serial will show how the sensational nature of the media coverage quickly overwhelmed the investigation. It will expose the fleeting acts that later loomed large and will reveal undisclosed clues, meaningful and false: a DNA swab in a dark parking lot, Chandra's last computer search, a conversation with a jailhouse informant who said he had the key to the case.

In the end, the serial will reveal how an enormous effort by the D.C. police, the FBI and prosecutors was undercut by a chain of mistakes, a misdirected focus and missed opportunities that allowed a killer to escape justice.

The case began on Sunday, May 6, 2001, with an urgent call about 4 p.m. to the D.C. police department's 2nd District stationhouse on Idaho Avenue in Northwest Washington. On the line was Robert Levy, a doctor from Modesto, Calif. He hadn't heard from his daughter, Chandra, for five days, not since she sent an e-mail listing Southwest Airlines fares for her planned trip back west. She should have been home by now.

She had been in Washington for seven months, interning at the Bureau of Prisons. She was supposed to graduate May 11 from the University of Southern California with a master's degree in public administration. She was a planner. She would have called or sent another e-mail.

The seemingly routine  missing-persons case was caught by D.C. Detective Ralph Durant in the 2nd District, a place so placid the cops there are jokingly called "squirrel chasers" by some officers in the tougher parts of town. The stationhouse serves the tony neighborhoods of Cleveland Park and Georgetown, and the threats are mainly drunks, burglars and petty thieves.

Durant, a journeyman with 33 years on the force, had little homicide experience. He wore parachute pants, cowboy boots and hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Durant took the information from Levy. That day, May 6, police went to Chandra's Dupont Circle apartment, No. 315 in the Newport Condominium at 1260 21st St. NW, and found no indication of foul play. Hospitals and the medical examiner's office were called.

Officers visited the apartment four days in a row, going inside with the help of an apartment manager, and opening Chandra's mailbox. The modern, third-floor studio was neatly furnished with a futon, sleek stainless-steel chairs and a glass coffee table. An open suitcase rested on the floor.

 

Back in California, Robert Levy and his wife, Susan, frantically sifted through Chandra's cellphone bills for clues. There was one number she called over and over. It turned out to be the office of Gary Condit, who represented the Levys' district in the Central Valley of California.

On May 6, the same day he called police, Robert Levy called Condit at his home in Ceres, a town on the outskirts of Modesto. The congressman's wife, Carolyn, took a message, and Condit returned the call about an hour later.

Levy told Condit he was the father of Chandra Levy, an intern in Washington. She was missing. Could he help?

Condit said Chandra was a friend of one of his former interns, and he pledged to do anything he could, even  contribute to a reward fund. After Levy got off the phone, his wife told him that she believed their daughter was dating the 53-year-old Condit. Robert Levy relayed that information the next day to Durant, who called the congressman.

On May 8, Chandra's aunt, Linda Zamsky, called Durant to say Chandra had confided in her about the affair.

Also that day, Condit returned Durant's call. He told the detective that Chandra called him occasionally for career advice. Condit said he had not heard from Chandra for about a week.

On May 10, police obtained a warrant and formally searched Chandra's apartment. They inventoried what they found: Two partially packed Ciao suitcases. A cellphone, credit cards and a driver's license in a purse. Dirty dishes in the sink. A refrigerator that was empty except for some leftover pasta and Reese's peanut butter cups. A Williams-Sonoma bag on the breakfast countertop containing dirty laundry: blue jeans, socks and panties.

Her telephone answering machine was full, with 25 messages. Several were from her mother and godparents. Two were from Condit; they were left on May 3, two days after Chandra disappeared. The congressman seemed concerned that he hadn't heard from her.

Chandra's blue Sony Vaio laptop was left open on a makeshift desk in a hallway nook of her apartment. A D.C. police sergeant who was not a trained computer technician turned it on and tried to find her last Internet searches. But he accidentally corrupted the search history on the computer. The mistake would set the investigation back because it would take technicians a month to produce an accurate list of the last Web sites Chandra visited.

On the day she disappeared, May 1, Chandra signed on to the Internet at 10:27 a.m. She went to Condit's home page, Southwest Airlines, Amtrak, Baskin-Robbins. At 11:26, she went to washingtonpost.com. She clicked on the weather report. The forecast called for fair skies.

At 11:33, Chandra clicked on a washingtonpost.com "Entertainment Guide" to Rock Creek Park. At the top of the page was the administrative address of the park: 3545 Williamsburg Ln. NW - the address of the Klingle Mansion, a three-story stone farmhouse that serves as park headquarters. A minute later, she clicked on a link for a map of the park. Her last search was at 12:24 p.m.

The detectives would later theorize that Chandra may have planned to meet someone at Klingle Mansion. Was it one of her friends from the Bureau of Prisons? More intriguing: Was it Condit, who didn't live far from Rock Creek Park? The Klingle Mansion theory quickly gained currency, and police would spend days searching the site.

But there was another possibility that was given less credence by investigators: The page with the Klingle Mansion address included information about the park's hiking trails. It also had details about the horse stables, the old Peirce Mill, and the Nature Center and Planetarium - all of them not far from where Chandra's body lay. She could have been looking for a place to walk on a beautiful spring day. She liked to exercise and she loved the outdoors, and she had just canceled her gym membership.

If she had gone to the park on her own, she could have been a victim of random violence.

And there was another piece of potential evidence the police missed.

Chandra's apartment building had multiple security cameras, which fed a tape that was recorded over every seven days. By the time police obtained the tape, it was too late. Gone were answers to several key questions: What time did she leave? Was she alone? The front desk clerk didn't know. And the detectives didn't have a clue.

[tcumom]

Tyler and other monkeys ~ What are your thoughts on Chandra Levy's murder AND Gary Condit?

[Tylergal]

I think she got in a big game where she was in over her head.  She took this game that so many were playing, i.e., Monica and Bill, Ted and Mary Jo, Spitzer and his harem, to mean that she had found a politician who was serious about her.  Unfortunately, she and others have paid the price.  Monica was fortunate to have the blue dress and a friend as a witness.    I think some may neglect to tell their children before they take off for Washington, that this is a game for those who can keep their emotions and their tongues still.  Obviously, Chandra was talking too much and knew too much.  I do think it was one of the foreign mafia's that our politicians do business with who did it, take your pick:  the Saudis or the Russian mafia who see women as just dispensable merchandise.  I don't even think one needs a lot of money to get this done, just a little encouragement and the right strings to pull.

[WhiskeyGirl]

It seems like the Chandra Levy story is back in peoples minds -

"What does Dick Cheney have to do with the murder of Chandra Levy?"

But we all seemed to know what they were up to by pretending to be friends anyway, which lead to him murdering her, even though when she went missing, Condit had an airtight alibi. He was with the Vice President of the United States. Yeah, that part always struck me as odd - how anyone could think he killed her, even though they had no idea she was dead until a year later, but even then, the secret service and Dick Cheney, as well as I’m sure hundreds of the best witnesses anyone could hope for, knew right where he was when she went missing. And no one has ever suggested Cheney, the secret service, and all the other people that must have known for a fact where he was when she went missing were part of a conspiracy to kill her because and then help him cover it up. But then none of them ever came forward and publicly declared that the guy had to be innocent because they knew he was nowhere near the scene of the crime either. Of course he was a Democrat and they are Republicans.

In fact even if they’d been having sex, which there has never been any hint of evidence that suggests they were, I’ve just never heard of that being a motive for murder, especially when there’s no way Condit could have murdered her since, like I said, he was taking care of the business of the people in his district at the time meeting with the Vice President of the United States. But if I was having trouble at home, which Condit wasn’t as evidenced by his gorgeous wife standing by him publicly announcing that she was absolutely sure there was nothing going on between her husband and Chandra Levy. And even now after all they’ve been through, they’re still together.

But the mere idea that Condit was in a secret meeting with the Vice President at the time of Chandra’s disappearance where would never have known who he was much less where he was when she disappeared if someone wasn’t trying to make it look like he had something to do with what happened to her. From my perspective, the shadiest character in the room when looking for suspects in Chandra Levy’s murder at this point would be Cheney. So I would want to know what Condit had to do with these shady dealings with the Vice President. It’s been my experience that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And there certainly seems to have been a lot of smoke coming from Pennsylvania Avenue at the time Chandra disappeared, we’ve just never been told what was burning, although a lot of people are wondering now that gasoline is over four dollars a gallon and the nations is falling apart. 

So what are the facts we do have regarding Cheney and his secret meetings. We know Enron has something to do with whatever Cheney doesn’t want anyone to know about, that it’s central to what he’s trying to protect from public scrutiny because he’s most viscous in his attempts to keep his energy task force records confidential when it comes to the Enron meetings. And we know Enron contributed more money to Bush’s presidential campaign than any other single source over the prior election year and wanted him to bail them out of all the trouble they were in.

This is important because at the time Chandra went missing, there were what was called “rolling blackouts” going on back in Condit and Levy’s hometown distract in California that we now know were being caused by Enron’s energy online traders who were gaming the energy market driving the price of their products up so they made billions of dollars they had no right to think they deserved while putting California through extremely  harrowing times to steal it. So of course you would expected Levy and Condit communicated closely over the issue being in Washington DC so far from everyone they cared the most about who were going through something that perhaps Condit was the only person that could do anything about.

read the whole story here -

http://pr.cannazine.co.uk/content/view/445/27/

[WhiskeyGirl]

The Washington Post has a series that started Sunday...

Chapter One: A Young Woman Disappears

By Sari Horwitz, Scott Higham and Sylvia Moreno
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 13, 2008; 8:48 PM

It was above 80 degrees, the start of another steamy summer day in Washington. At 8:58 on the morning of July 25, 2001, three D.C. police sergeants gathered 28 cadets along Glover Road in Rock Creek Park. They were looking for any trace of a government intern named Chandra Ann Levy.

The 24-year-old woman from California, with hazel eyes and a head full of unruly brown curls, had left her Dupont Circle apartment and then simply disappeared. She had been missing for 85 days, and the search for her had captivated the city and the nation. Her laptop computer's history showed that she was interested in visiting the vast 1,750-acre park on the day she vanished.

Now, the line of cadets executed the order of the city's chief of detectives, Cmdr. Jack Barrett: Search 100 yards from the roads that crisscross the park. But someone had made a mistake. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey had wanted the cadets to search 100 yards off the park's trails. By limiting the search to the areas near the roads, the police would canvass a far smaller portion of the park and not go deep into the woods. Either Ramsey miscommunicated his order, or Barrett misunderstood it.

After 1 that afternoon, the sergeants called off the search, and the weary cadets boarded a bus and headed for another area of the park.

Off the Western Ridge Trail near Glover Road, beneath the dark green canopy of the forest, a pair of sunglasses rested on the ground. Not far away was a white Reebok sneaker trimmed in blue. A little farther, on the edge of a ravine, was a pair of black Pro Spirit stretch pants turned inside out, each leg tied in a knot. And nearby lay the body of Chandra Levy. It was 79 yards below the trail.

"We were unbelievably close, but we missed - we just missed her," Terrance W. Gainer, the second-ranking D.C. police official at the time, later recalled. "We were so darn close to finding that poor girl."

It would be another 10 months before Chandra's body was found. By then, the forensic evidence that might have identified a killer - blood, hair, fiber - would be gone.

read more here -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/13/AR2008071301731.html

[Tylergal]

Tyler and other monkeys ~ What are your thoughts on Chandra Levy's murder AND Gary Condit?

TCU, I was afraid to respond to you in any intelligent way for fear the weird freaks would be drawn to the conspiracy theorists, instead of the simple solution of her being pregnant with Condit's baby and him having his Arab friends kill her, but you can never talk normal here without some who like to delve into the supernatural and idiocy.

[Tylergal]

Whiskey Girl, it will probably shock you to know this but it was not the Bush Whitehouse nor Dick Cheney who was aligned with Enron, but it was the Clinton Whitehouse.  If you ever got your conspiracy head out of the proverbial sand, you might be a good researcher, but you are a pawn for the fruitcake makers.

[San]

Tyler and other monkeys ~ What are your thoughts on Chandra Levy's murder AND Gary Condit?

He hired someone to killer her.

[A_News_Junkie_Monkey]

 Police are close to arresting an inmate they've already interviewed in the eight-year-old murder case of Chandra Levy and charging him in her disappearance, FOX News has confirmed.

Law enforcement officials said an arrest warrant will be issued for Ingmar Guandique, who is currently in prison in California.

Officials said Guandique will be served papers there and likely then flown to Washington, D.C., to hear the charges against him.

D.C. authorities submitted evidence to the U.S. Attorney's office to obtain the arrest warrant.
SNIP ------------->  click here for the rest of this story....
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,497964,00.html

[nonesuche]

thanks Anewsjunkie-

my hinky meter is still going off.........it will be interesting to hear Chandra's parents response to all of this?