A couple reporter friends

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A couple reporter friends and I made a trip this morning up to the part of DC’s Rock Creek park where the remains of Chandra Levy were found a few weeks back. The quick and dirty story I can tell you pretty quickly: we didn’t see much.

Admittedly, I was hoping we’d maybe find a bone or maybe a Vote Gary! button or something. But ever since the Levy family investigators found Chandra’s shin last week (after it had — if you believe the DC Metro police — been planted there by a dead-beat racoon), the cops have been back in force cordoning the place off and not letting anyone get anywhere near it.

Why this matters exactly — since everyone and his brother had the run of the place for a week — isn’t exactly clear. But that’s how it is.

Anyway, a few observations.

First of all, we could not get close enough to see the specific area where the remains were found. But we could see enough to get a sense of the sort of area in which it happened, how dense the foliage is, how steep the incline is — stuff like that.

And here’s the deal, the foliage is really dense. The place in question may be as little as a few hundred yards from residential homes but you might as well be in the middle of a forest. Scratch the word ‘park’ from your consciousness when you think of the scene and replace it with the movie title ‘Deliverance.’

Second, there aren’t a lot of people around. My friends and I spent a while driving around that section of the park trying to find an access toward the crime scene that wasn’t blocked by a police car with a couple cops kickin’ it, working on a donut, or playing solitaire on the on-board laptop. In maybe twenty or thirty minutes of driving around the different little roads and by the numbered picnic grounds we saw a total of two people. One was a guy parked on the side of the road with a van. I had the sense that he was probably also dumping a body. So he wouldn’t have given anyone much grief. The other guy was either a homeless guy or a jogger. Or maybe he was a self-improving homeless jogger. It was a little unclear. Anyway, point being, we were there in the late morning. And I think you probably could have done a lot at that time of the day and not have worried that people were going to see you.

Third, there were a lot of cops tight around the crime scene. But it was hard not to get the sense that the reason they were there was that it was so *&$%@#& embarrassing to have missed the leg bone that they pretty much just had to go there and hang out for a few days and put up a lot of tape just to live the whole thing down.

Fourth, this is pretty speculative. But having seen the lay of the land here is what occurred to me. In the area in question there is basically a plateau where there are some picnic areas and some other places to hang out and either have a picnic, throw a ball around, have sex, or kill someone. Then sloping down from that plateau is a ravine that’s quite steep — in many places 45% or greater. And at the bottom is a tiny brook. Chandra’s body was found a bit more than half-way down one of those ravines. You can see most of this on this map from the Post.

From seeing the terrain, one thing that’s very clear is that no one took her body up the ravine. It’s just too steep and that would be the one place where someone could potentially see you. What sort of made intuitive sense to me, though, is that someone may have basically shoved the body over that ravine and then it rolled down to the approximate area in which it was found.

This is morbid, I admit. But that seemed to me like the most logical supposition.

One other point, from various circumstantial evidence, I think it’s quite clear that she went there to meet someone she knew. But we’ll get to that later. And I still have a hunch — and a bit of information — that tells me this case is going to blow open sooner rather than later.

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