WASHINGTON – How Chandra Levy died is still a mystery, but one thing is for certain: Gary Condit and his biker buddies didn’t dump her body in a cave or lime pit in Luray, Va.
Those who speculated as much last year are strangely silent now that her remains have been recovered from a park just a few miles from her apartment. Luray is about 80 miles west.
When Anne Marie Smith revealed one night on CNN that Condit called her around midnight, May 17, 2001, from a McDonald’s pay phone in Luray, it was perfect grist for the Condit-did-it crowd. My e-mail box was crammed with “leads” from amateur cyber-sleuths across the country.
I had to investigate, they implored. Why, Luray is a popular biker hangout, and Condit hangs out with bikers! The town is also famous for its caverns – there are “lime operations” there. Do we have to draw you a picture, Sperry? “Lime operations,” stressed someone who actually had motored out to the McDonald’s to poke around. What better place to dump a body! Another sent photos of a mysterious shed.
But there was more.
That same day, noted yet another Luray lemming, Condit missed House votes, something he rarely did. Therefore, he obviously was up to no good way out there in the Shenandoah Valley!
And don’t forget how Condit cryptically told Smith he couldn’t see her because he “had some business to take care of.” You know what that means!
Alas, no one at the time believed the simple explanation I offered for Condit’s apparently unscheduled and admittedly odd day-trip.
Just two days earlier, D.C. police detectives had interviewed the congressman at his Adams Morgan apartment for about 45 minutes. They had information that he was seeing Levy, a Justice Department intern. If the cops knew about the affair, it was just a matter of time before the Washington press knew. Condit no doubt figured it would be a good idea to get out of town and make himself scarce. A married man with a Boy Scout image, he was hiding from a burgeoning sex scandal; he wasn’t hiding a body. (I’m sure he had the same rationale for hiding evidence of a gift – the watch – from another woman.)
Of course, the Condit-did-it crowd thought the worst – that he felt a new urgency to hide Levy’s body in a better spot, now that the cops had tied him romantically to her.
A guy who fancies himself an investigative reporter was so convinced he’d solved the case, he took the working press and cops to task for not following up on his “sleuth-work.”
“The Luray connection to the Condit-Levy case, as detailed by this writer at EtherZone.com, continues to be underreported in the establishment media,” Todd Brendan Fahey huffed.
“If nothing more than to rub the noses of D.C. police and FBI in their own pathetic investigation of Chandra Levy’s disappearance and Gary Condit’s role in it, I will continue to do the sleuth-work that others are being paid well to do,” he puffed.
He went on to lay out his case on his “intelligent alternative” newssite that Levy’s body was in the Luray area, and suggested that Condit, with the help of his aides, “relocated her corpse.”
Even National Review Online bit on the Luray angle in a column by NRO Editor Jonah Goldberg’s mother, who quizzed Condit accusatorially: “What is there to do in Luray, Va., after sundown?”
That’s easy: Duck the Washington press.
Enough Luray lunacy. As I concluded last year, after wrestling with my own doubts about his innocence, Condit more than likely had nothing to do with Levy’s death. The guy who may have some answers, though, is in a federal prison in North Carolina.
Yet you don’t see Fox News cameras staked out there. Why? Because he’s not a Democratic congressman – he’s just a young Salvadoran immigrant. One who attacked a young woman in the same park two weeks after Levy disappeared, and who struck again some 45 days later. Both his victims, like Levy, were wearing Sony Walkman headphones when he jumped them from behind. Fortunately for them, they managed to escape (one of the women, a journalist, stands 5 feet, 10 inches, and is “real buff,” a former colleague told me). Levy, at 5-3 and 110 pounds, wasn’t so lucky.
In January 2001, roughly four months before Levy went to the park, a fourth woman was raped and murdered there.
Four attacks of female joggers in the same park in six months is a pattern. A man has confessed to two of the attacks. Hopefully, police are questioning him about the other two.
Levy may not have been a regular jogger, but she worked out on a regular basis. Recall that she had canceled her gym membership just before she disappeared (with only her apartment keys). In the few remaining days she had before returning home to California, perhaps she decided to take a jog at the big park up the street, and perhaps that’s why she looked up a map of the park on the Internet that afternoon. Her sunglasses were found with her remains, so she likely left for the park right after she got directions.
C’mon, her body wasn’t “dumped” there, either, nor did she meet anyone there (why take headphones if you expect conversation?). She went there alone, like the other women, to jog.
The Luray loons, for one, owe Condit an apology for their reckless speculation. There’s no doubt now that they were wildly wrong.
Others among the Condit-did-it crowd also will be eating crow, I suspect, just as soon as the real suspect is arrested. Hint: They’re the same ones – some of them big-name TV personalities, one of them a congressman-turned-columnist – who aren’t covering the Levy case round-the-clock anymore, and are no longer giving as much currency to Smith and her live-in-lawyer’s invectives.
Not because Levy’s body was found, but because they know Condit didn’t do it – or at least they know they can’t get away with suggesting that he did any longer.
And therein lies the real scandal: For some media, it never was about finding a missing girl or solving a murder mystery. It was about ratings. And so long as there was room to speculate that a popular sitting congressman was involved in a young mistress’ death, that was the story.
Getting to the truth, it’s now plain to see, was secondary.
Read WND’s exclusive Condit-Levy chronology
