No Landfill Hunt in Levy Case

As search teams again picked through dense park foliage Tuesday for clues in Chandra Levy’s disappearance, District of Columbia police officials scuttled their plans to search the city’s landfills. The ambitious search would have been too costly to mount--nearly $32 million, a police spokesman said.

“It turned out to be just not practical for us,” said D.C. Police Sgt. Joe Gentile.

The decision to scale back was the first sign that the all-out police and FBI investigation into Levy’s disappearance has run into budgetary constraints.

Police officials still intend to conduct a two-week search of four parks around the D.C. area and have largely completed a hunt through abandoned buildings, 80 in one police district alone. But officials did not offer any plans beyond those searches.

“There are limits to everything,” Gentile said.

After laying plans to burrow into four sprawling landfills outside the city limits, police were told by the waste management firm that runs the landfills that the cost of the search would be staggering and the amount of time needed prohibitive.

The cost of digging up the landfills would set the city back “between $6 million and $8 million” per landfill, Gentile said. And officials of Waste Management Corp., the firm that runs the landfills, estimated that a thorough search of each landfill would take up to a year, Gentile said.

“We would’ve had to go through 70 feet of compact trash and hundreds of acres at each site,” Gentile said.

Teams of police cadets found more items at Rock Creek Park as they foraged through thick underbrush for a second day.

In the Piney Branch Creek section of the park, officers found a white plastic bag containing a pair of running shoes and a utility knife. A scattered haul of bones found Monday were determined to be animal remains, the D.C. medical examiner reported.

Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance A. Gainer said Tuesday that police plan to issue a list of all the Web sites and home pages that Levy scanned in a three-hour period May 1, the day after she was last seen in public.

Police reported that Levy’s laptop computer had been used that morning. Investigators have determined by the e-mail sent to and from Levy’s mother, Susan, that Chandra Levy was almost certainly the person using the computer.

Levy was “looking at air travel, train travel, a variety of newspapers, some sites, including Modesto,” Gainer said.

Levy also had scanned Web sites for the House Agriculture Committee and several other congressional committees that, Gainer noted, “the congressman [Gary A. Condit] was on.”

Condit (D-Ceres), who has reportedly admitted to police that he had an affair with Levy but has denied any knowledge of her disappearance, appeared at an Agriculture Committee hearing on a farm bill Tuesday.

Meanwhile, police also said they had received results and raw data from a privately arranged polygraph exam taken by Condit last week. The results, an official said, were sent to the FBI crime lab in Quantico, Va., for analysis.

Condit’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said last week that the test, administered by a former FBI polygraph expert, indicated that the congressman was not deceptive when asked if he was involved in Levy’s disappearance.

Results from a consensual search of Condit’s residence last week had still not been completely analyzed, Gainer said. However, he added that “when they come in, we hope to keep them close to the vest.”

Meanwhile, about 50 people demonstrated outside Condit’s Modesto office, demanding his resignation. Some demonstrators held signs reading, “Condit country? Not anymore!” and “Where IS Chandra?”