As Condit portrayed it, no matter what she decided to do, their secret romance would continue. Before long, the two parted for the day. Condit had committee meetings and votes on the House floor that afternoon. It was the last time they would meet. In his three interviews with investigators, Condit said there was nothing remarkable about the meeting. During the last interview, he was asked if they were intimate that morning. According to two sources, Condit told them he couldn’t recall.
His version of events is part of an escalating battle between the Condit and Levy camps as the search for the missing intern goes on. The Levys believe the congressman failed to tell them the truth early on, and that he may still be a key player in solving the mystery; Condit and his team are eager to emphasize that they have now cooperated, and want the spotlight to move away from the lawmaker. The certainly sad, possibly tragic, story of a young woman gone missing is being played out in a uniquely–some would say depressingly–American way, a media frenzy with witnesses testifying on “Larry King Live,” police officials walking the 24-hour cable news beat and each side trying to use the press–the Levys to keep the pressure on, Condit to turn the pressure off.
The congressman, whom police say is not a suspect in what is still considered a missing-persons case, believed that telling investigators about his affair would do just that. He stressed to police that there was nothing in his and Levy’s last few conversations that would have caused Levy emotional distress–no breakup or tiffs that might have caused her to harm herself or go into hiding.
After their last meeting, sources said, the two spoke on the phone nearly every day. The last time was April 29, two days before Levy disappeared. Like always, she dialed his private answering service and left her number, a routine Condit insisted she follow whenever she wanted to reach him. Then Condit, whose wife had come to Washington the day before, called her back. When was she leaving? Condit wanted to know. In the next few days, she told him. She said she’d call him from California. Levy prepared to leave town. On May 1, she logged on to the Internet at a little after 9:30 a.m. and spent the next three and a half hours sending e-mail and looking up travel Web sites. Then she vanished.
Investigators now say they think it’s unlikely the congressman had a hand in Levy’s disappearance. Yet they still aren’t convinced that he has told them everything. “If you believe everything he says, everything was hunky-dory between them, and he’s shocked as the next guy when she disappears,” says one law-enforcement official, with more than an edge of sarcasm. But the police also have no evidence to the contrary.
The mistrust between the congressman and the cops worsened last week, when Condit’s lawyer Abbe Lowell caught police by surprise by announcing his client had passed a private lie-detector test. Lowell resorted to the polygraph, and the belated admission of Condit’s affair to the police, as part of a larger attempt to rehabilitate his client’s reputation. From the beginning, the Levy family, aided by Washington lawyer Billy Martin and PR giant Porter Novelli, had kept Condit and Lowell on the defensive, launching a carefully timed barrage of allegations about the congressman’s personal life. The PR team promoted the claims of flight attendant Anne Marie Smith, who told of a longtime affair with Condit–and claimed the congressman had pressured her to sign a false affidavit denying the affair. (Condit denies the charge.)
Then the Levy team brought out Chandra’s aunt Linda Zamsky, who told The Washington Post that her niece had confided in her about the affair. Before Zamsky went public, Martin dispatched a team to “check out her credibility,” says one source familiar with the case. They then waited for just the right moment–when “we felt we needed to ratchet up the pressure,” says the source–to have her tell her story. Zamsky’s account, this person says, forced Condit to tell police about the affair.
Under siege, Lowell hastily arranged the polygraph last Thursday night, hoping to reverse the tide of negative press. Lowell told reporters the test proved once and for all that Condit had told all he knew. But Lowell’s maneuver irritated D.C. Assistant Police Chief Terrance Gainer, the man in charge of the investigation, who denounced the test as a meaningless media stunt. Gainer had been quietly trying to get Condit to sit for an FBI polygraph. Lowell had refused, charging that the exams were unreliable. The lawyer offered to send the results to the police, but Gainer publicly cast doubt on the validity of Lowell’s test. “We appreciate the slickness of what Abbe Lowell did,” Gainer told NEWSWEEK. “I know the police are frustrated at not being able to find clues about Chandra Levy,” Lowell shot back, “but there’s a vicious cycle here that is taking attention and resources away from questioning others who might have information.”
By their own admission, the police are still utterly baffled by the case. After two and a half solid months, they are seemingly no closer to finding Levy now than they were on day one. “It’s weird,” Gainer says. “Usually in a missing-persons case you’ve got something–a breakup, a gambling debt, a pregnancy.” In this case, says one senior FBI source, “we’re nowhere.”
The police have even been unable to obtain Levy’s medical records. The only doctor they could find for Levy was her father, an oncologist who had prescribed her birth-control pills. When police went to Dr. Robert Levy, one source says, “we were told there were no medical records.” The Levys could not be reached, and their lawyers had no comment, a spokesman said.
The police are still following up potential Condit leads. Last week, NEWSWEEK has learned, investigators scoured the interior of a small red Ford owned by a Condit aide, looking for evidence that Levy might once have been inside. Condit, who doesn’t have a car, sometimes drove his aide’s vehicle to pick up his wife at the airport. To keep up the pressure, investigators also took a volunteer DNA sample from the congressman’s mouth and conducted an extensive search of his apartment–though they are skeptical about finding anything noteworthy. “We have something that looks like red,” says one law-enforcement source. “We don’t know whether it’s blood, paint, dye or ketchup.”
Last week police with cadaver-sniffing dogs conducted a door-to-door search of abandoned buildings near Levy’s and Condit’s apartments, but came up empty. Police interviewed a man in Levy’s building who had been arrested four times on assault charges. Yet his criminal record showed the charges were dropped each time, and police have found no evidence connecting him to her disappearance. Investigators are also revisiting the death of 28-year-old Joyce Chiang, a lawyer for the INS whose body was found in the Potomac River in April 1999, four months after she went missing. The FBI never solved the case, and eventually concluded it was probably a suicide. Now, law-enforcement officials are taking another close look, on the possibility–remote, they admit–that somehow the two cases could be connected.
Last Saturday investigators had a rush of gruesome anticipation. A body had been discovered in rural Maryland. Rumors shot through the Metropolitan Police Department’s Command Center. Then the word came down: the deceased was an older, heavyset woman. And so the dogs went back out, sniffing, desperately, for clues.
