A chronology of the Chandra Levy story, updated as news breaks. Click here to read the whole story from the beginning.
Monday, July 2: Washington, D.C., police now believe Chandra Levy was in her apartment “for most of the afternoon on May 1–a little less than 24 hours after she was seen canceling her membership at a health club,” the New York Post reported Sunday, July 1. (The information was first reported Friday, June 29, by Washington’s NBC affiliate, WRC-TV.) The police came to this conclusion after analyzing Levy’s cell-phone records and her computer hard drive, including e-mails sent from that computer. Detectives are “investigating the possibility that Levy was a victim of foul play in her apartment building,” the Post reports.
The police are operating with three theories: 1) Chandra Levy was abducted or murdered. 2) Chandra Levy is in hiding. 3) Chandra Levy committed suicide. (The New York Post says a “high-ranking police official” proffered a fourth theory, that Chandra Levy lost her memory after getting injured.) The Washington Post reported Saturday, June 30, that investigators have ruled out the possibility of a serial killer or any ties to the unexplained death of Joyce Chiang, the lawyer who disappeared from Dupont Circle in January 1999. (Chiang’s body was found on the banks of the Potomac four months later. To learn more about the case, read thisLos AngelesTimes article.) D.C. Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance Gainer told the Washington Post that police are exploring threads from any similar disappearances of young women from the Dupont area. The Post says two full-time detectives are on the case, along with two FBI agents.
Levy’s parents, neighbors, and an ex-boyfriend believe that theories 2) and 3) are preposterous, the Los Angeles Times reports. And the New York Post reported that police have begun shifting their focus away from those possibilities. Cadaver-sniffing dogs are being used to investigate landfills in the Washington area. The dogs have already searched Levy’s neighborhood, D.C.’s riverbanks and parks, and the neighborhood of Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif. Police say this is a normal expansion of a missing person’s investigation. (In a sign of internecine warfare among D.C. government agencies, a Washington Public Works Department official told the New York Daily News it would be almost impossible for a body to disappear into a dumpster. The contents of dumpsters are sorted at a waste transfer center before heading off to landfills.)
Both the D.C. police and Condit’s staff dispute Wednesday’s Fox News report that Condit told investigators during his June 23 police interview that he “broke off his close friendship” with Chandra Levy two days before she disappeared. Assistant Chief Gainer called the report “balderdash,” and Condit’s Modesto, Calif., chief of staff said it was “invented out of whole cloth” and that “the police sources or the reporter were smoking something.” Fox has stood by its story.
Investigators are still trying to arrange an interview with Condit’s wife, Carolyn. Gainer told the Associated Press that police think there’s “more to know” about Condit’s relationship with Chandra Levy. “We want to get her impression of the congressman’s friendly relationship with Miss Levy,” Gainer said. The questioning will likely be carried out by FBI agents on the West Coast. According to Fox News, investigators want to double-check Condit’s “stated whereabouts the week Levy disappeared,” and they want “to ask whether Mrs. Condit saw or talked to Levy while in Washington.” The Modesto Bee reports that the “on again, off again” efforts to interview Mrs. Condit “have not yet borne fruit but have caused irritation,” and the efforts have not “seemed to engender much sense of mutual trust.” An interview was set up last week, but a representative from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington called to cancel a half-hour before it was scheduled to begin.
The reward fund dedicated to finding Chandra Levy has grown to $45,000 with the addition of $5,000 Thursday, June 28, from the publishers of the Journal of Women’s Health and Gender-Based Medicine.
