In Levy’s Modesto Hometown, Hope Dissolves Into Anguish

For more than a year they waited, hanging yellow ribbons up and down Chenault Street, neighbors making weekly visits to the Levy front door in the middle of the block with home-baked turkeys, cakes and pies.

Early Wednesday, Joanne Tittle answered a knock on her door and found Robert Levy, her good friend, neighbor and the father of missing federal intern Chandra Levy. He was shaking and crying.

“Bob said they found a body. ‘I’m afraid it’s Chandra,’ he said. He was very shaken up and crying.”

“I thought they had searched that park long ago,” Tittle said. “How could they miss her? How could it take a year?”

The long wait was over and the crush of media had returned to the quiet block of upscale houses in a subdivision called Golden Estate Acres. Here on the outskirts of Modesto, in a neighborhood skirted by fruit orchards and nut groves where horses are hitched out back, the Levy family sat in seclusion trying to absorb the news they always feared would come.

Deidre Wolfley, who has lived 20 years on the block, said it is better to know Chandra’s fate than to live in an endless state of uncertainty. “Maybe now there can be some closure, not only for the family but this neighborhood.”

The mystery of the 5-foot-3, 110-pound student with a mop of black curly hair has kept this neighborhood on vigil since May 1 of last year. Even as they feared the worst, neighbors worked to bolster the spirits of the Levys--beloved oncologist Robert, 55, wife Susan, 54, and son Adam, 20.

“This is very sad,” said neighbor Jamie Cruz, 18, who recalls Susan Levy helping her with a skinned knee when she was a child. “Before, when I’d see a crime story on television I’d feel for the victim, but it was still someone I didn’t know. Now it hits home, very personally.”

Modesto Mayor Carmen Sabatino ordered city flags flown at half-staff.

“In the context of tragedies occurring all over the world,” Sabatino said, “this may seem relatively insignificant, except it’s been tragic for two families in our community, the Levys and the Condits, and the community is more sensitive.”

Levy’s relationship with local congressman Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) turned her disappearance into tabloid news, as investigators kept questioning him even though he denied knowing anything about her disappearance.

“It’s been a year now since she vanished, but that hasn’t changed what people think about Condit,” said John Adams, a retired Modesto marketing manager. “The way he handled everything, I don’t know if he did it or not, but he sure looked suspicious. I just hope they find whoever’s guilty.”

Billie Gilmore, 66, a retired bank worker, said most folks felt that Chandra was dead because “she was a good girl. She wouldn’t have stayed away from her family this long without any word.”

But as the community grieves, Gilmore said the body’s discovery will not necessarily mean renewed finger-pointing at Condit. “Deep down, I don’t feel he did it,” she said. “Sure, he was messing around with her, but he didn’t kill her.”

Angie Smith, a mother of two daughters in their 20s, said the discovery of Levy’s body is particularly tough on Modesto parents, even those who don’t know the family.

“I have two daughters, and I couldn’t imagine not knowing if something ever happened to one of them. It would destroy me,” she said. “I think everyone in the country feels bad about this. I went to my daughters’ college graduation and I feel terrible that the Levys never got that chance with their daughter. It’s a national tragedy.”

Back on Chenault Street, neighbors talked of how the Levys--before their daughter’s disappearance--were always there to help.

Susan Levy had spent a lot of time working with residents and sheriff’s deputies organizing the Neighborhood Watch. She also served as the community conscience, neighbors said, collecting money for earthquake victims in South America and other causes. Robert Levy devoted long hours to saving the lives of cancer patients.

Here in the middle of California’s sweeping farm belt, a world away from the streets of Washington where the 24-year-old Levy vanished, the Levys watched their daughter grow into a young woman with promise.

She had come a long way from the little girl who spent so much of her youth locked in her bedroom poring over statistics of her favorite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, and dreaming of the day when she might cover them as a reporter.

“Look out sports world, here I come. I cannot wait to write about you,” she vowed in the back of her high school yearbook in 1995.

Six years later, as she boarded the plane to Washington for a final semester of graduate work in government studies, there was nothing wide-eyed or naive about her.

She had traveled the world with her daring parents, from the ghettos of Jamaica to the black markets of the Middle East. They Levys had taught Chandra to trust her gut.

The young woman who later set her sights on becoming an FBI agent was a born cop, family and friends say. She had a sixth sense for danger and how best to avert it.

“She was a cool cookie, very sophisticated, very directed and very strong,” neighbor Tittle said recently. “She wasn’t someone who trusted strangers and she wasn’t easily led into danger.”

Times staff writers Bettina Boxall and John M. Glionna contributed to this report.