Posted on 06/17/2002 12:40:26 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
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.
I never speculated the shed had anything to do with Condit, I just found it odd.
Almost as odd as the Dukes of Hazzard convention I encountered at Cooter's up the road in Sperryville.
Sperry, like Mary Mostert, and Common Tator and/or his cut-and-paste source (Mikkelsonny, it is) drink too much Washington Kool-Aid.
I havn't been in D.C. for years but you are painting a perfect picture of JFK and RFK when they first hit the senate. But Gary is not in their class. I don't think Garry ever got movie stars to do him.
A few years back I came out of a campaign event to find a currently serving Congressman getting a blow job in my Radio Station Van. It was no big deal. He wasn't even embarrased. They young girl wasn't either. She was a news reporter supposedly covering him. I had to admit that she covered him well. But her coverage sucked.
You are incredibly naive. I was in the media for 5 years before I found out some men actually had to ask for sex. I thought all men had at least 5 females a day offer them sex. I knew they asked those of us in the media. All the politicans I covered got similar offers too.
My first day on the job as a supervisor a young female came into my office lifted her skirt and said,"See anything you like?" I told my boss that something strange had just happened. I described what she had done and paused. My boss said, "I don't have all day to listen to you prattle. What was it happened that was strange?"
Have you have always been clueless or did you take lessons?
1. Condit and Mikey last seen in Public at 12:50 leaving Cheney's office. At the same time, Chandra is getting off her computer.
2. Gary and Mikey have no alibi between 1 and 4 on May 1 except each other. In DC, a congressman who lives by the clock, it's almost impossible.
3. The mysterious doctor's appointment.
4. The blatant lying to Mrs. Levy and the with-holding of information from the police.
5. No calls to Levy after May 1 (They talked to each other every day).
6. The famous train story on the Chung interview.
7. The threats to the other mistresses.
8. The watchbox fiasco.
9. And that infamous phone call from Luray where there is a small airport. (Gary's name was on some kind of list there when I searched the site in 2001). I can only speculate that Lynch came in to settle Gary and Mikey down.
10. The private lie detector test.
11.And then there's the deafening silence from his buddies in Congress which now exists.
12. Somewhere there's a squeeler.
Right. I also believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. ;-)
There is nothing in what we anti-Condit posters say, that would require he took the body to Luray, or even indicate that. My own posts since 5/23 have said that I think he let it rot down for a time in a car trunk parked somewhere in DC, then had it thrown out in RCP.
But regardless of whether it was killed fresh in RCP, brought there fresh, brought there stale, or brought there after a time in Luray (even)...the fact is, Condidit!
This story is nothing but the classic propaganda line of taking some of the more obscure speculation on one's opponent's side, and making it look like everyone on that side believes it, OR THAT IT WOULD SOMEHOW BE NECESSARY for that obscure speculation to be true, for Condit to have done it!
If she was murdered right there on the slope in Rock Creek Park on 5/1, and never moved again at all, Condit still did it, and don't you forget it!
[After all, some rather far-out specs have been made by the pro-Condit people, too. M'gawd, why do we have to deal with THIS?]
Man, I definitely need to quit this gig as a software engineer.
"WE" do not have to explain Luray;--- CONDIT does! "EYE" wasn't in Luray, Condit was! Luray wasn't invented as some wild-eyed fiction in the mind of someone out to get Condit-- IT ENTERED THE DISCUSSION ONLY BECAUSE HE ACTUALLY WENT THERE.
It is the Conditista side that must explain it away, and one reason some wild ideas got bandied about, is because the Condit side has never come forward with Word One about it. Not one word, not one hint. Luray is not imaginary, friends. It does exist, and Condit was there. And he will not explain what he was doing, something pretty important to spoil one of the best attendance records in Congress!
One could also note in passing, that when the Levy family came to DC to start the PR ball rolling in their own campaign to find out what happened to Chandra, for some reason they did so with a kickoff quite far out in the Virginia suburbs, (from 5-15- to 5-19-01 IIRC) this despite Chandra's having both lived and worked only in the District.
They could easily have done this, and got if anything more attention and better news coverage, in DC itself, but for some reason it was done quite far out into the Va. suburbs. Why?
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