Presumed Innocent

Last Thursday night, more than a month after the intern named Chandra Levy vanished from Washington, California Representative Gary Condit traveled to the Jefferson Hotel (yep, Dick Morris slept there) to meet with Levy's parents and their attorney, Billy Martin (yep, he represented Monica Lewinsky's mother). The meeting lasted about 20 minutes and did not include Dr. Robert Levy. Dazed during an earlier meeting with the D.C. Police and a tour of its "Synchronized Operations Command Center," where tips are processed, the doctor couldn't face the Congressman who had called his daughter a "good friend," then had gone silent about her disappearance. Condit had never told the parents he had received repeated calls from Chandra in late April, just before she went missing from her studio apartment near Dupont Circle. What else hadn't he told them?

The meeting fell back on safe platitudes about family--Condit, 53, has two twentysomethings of his own--but did little to allay what a source calls Susan Levy's "controlled anger." Since the start of this case, Condit has drawn ever more attention to himself by so obviously trying to deflect it. He might as well walk down the Capitol steps with his jacket pulled over his head. There's good reason not to talk to the media--the beast gets hungrier the more you feed it. But is there any reason not to talk to the police? Clamming up makes you look like you're hiding something. After Condit's first attorney, Joseph Cotchett, blurted out that Condit's wife had been visiting the weekend of Levy's disappearance--a fact Condit omitted in his first "casual" interview with the cops at his condo--the police finally decided a second interview was in order. ABC News reported that the police knocked on the door of Condit's apartment in mid-June only to be brushed off. As of last Friday night, the police were still waiting for a convenient time.

With 1,500 unsolved homicides in the past decade, the D.C. police department will never remind you of Law and Order. By not grabbing the security videotape in Chandra's apartment building before it was automatically erased and taped over, cops missed the chance to see who came and went that crucial week. By not pressing Condit to tell them everything he knew about Chandra, they may have lost the chance to follow leads while they were fresh. Condit's side kept trying to steer reporters to a theory of a serial killer (several young women have disappeared from around Dupont Circle). Police have looked for similarities in the death of a government attorney named Joyce Chiang, 28, who was missing for three months before she turned up dead. They found the cases "unrelated." California Congressman Howard Berman, for whom Chiang once worked, moved heaven and earth to help the investigation, even pressuring FBI Director Louis Freeh. Two agents from the bureau's criminal unit are now working on the Levy case.