“Honey, we’ve had this bone in the burrow for months now and we haven’t done anything with it. Do you mind 
if I toss it out to make room for other edibles and bric-a-brac?”
This isn’t a quote from today’s Washington Post article on the Chandra investigation.
But pretty damn close!
The DC police seem confident that they didn’t actually miss Chandra Levy’s leg bone in their search of the apparent crime scene in Rock Creek Park a couple weeks ago. What they actually think happened is that some animal had the bone in his or her burrow and just now decided to toss it. Chief Ramsey told the Post that …
there was a “very strong probability” that an animal indeed had retrieved it, possibly from a burrow. That hypothesis is based on information the police received from the National Zoo, which told investigators that the animals making this part of the park their home could have abandoned the area during the search and may have been replaced by others after police left. Under this theory, the bone may have been uncovered by an animal cleaning out an old den.
Man, you can’t make this stuff up.
The new focus on animal burrows and dens places the police in the difficult position of explaining why these were not searched more thoroughly. Ramsey said search teams looked in burrows and sometimes poked around with sticks. But he said they saw no need to dig them up until the appearance of the tibia. “Animals got hold of the bones; they’re scattered all over. They’re pulling them out of burrows,” Ramsey said.
Damn animals!
Believe it or not this excuse may actually be more ridiculous than it appears on the surface. The idea seems to be that some animal had this bone in his collection for almost a year and then just in the mere week since the crack Chandra investigative team pulled out of his neighborhood he decided to toss it. Or perhaps he bugged out during the search and some new guy who moved into his den afterward decided he didn’t want the bone and decided to chuck it.
Yeah.
I mean, it’s not that this couldn’t’t have happened. But given what has come before, I think you’ve got to ask the following awkward but unavoidable question: Who has more credibility? The DC Metro Police? Or a small burrowing mammal?
The question pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it?
And further information from the Post article tends to confirm this. The bone was not found “in plain view. The bone was under a pile of leaves and embedded in the ground.” The fact that it was embedded in the ground makes the police/zoo geek hypothesis about its being a recent plant by a scofflaw animal seem pretty far-fetched, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it take more than a few days for a bone to get covered with leaves and imbedded in the ground?
A slightly less skeptical article in the Washington Times adds that Cmdr. Christopher LoJacono of the D.C. Police Forensic Science Division earlier said that the bone “substantial animal activity” and that police note the bone was found “within 3 feet of what appeared to be an animal’s den.”
What’s a bit sad about this is that I’ve always had the impression — and I still think this is true — that Chief Ramsey himself is a serious character. He was brought in from somewhere in the Midwest I think to shake the place up. But he’s only one man. And the ridiculousness of the DC Metro police is the combined work of many. The last graf of the Post article has Ramsey uttering this anguished lament.
“We’re working as hard as we can to find out who’s responsible for the murder of Chandra Levy,” Ramsey said at the news conference. “I wish we had found all the remains, but obviously we didn’t. . . . It’s easy for people to sit back and Monday morning quarterback.”
Buddy, you got that right.
