D.C. Sanctuary’s Dark Past Goes Far Beyond Levy

Rock Creek Park is a wilderness sanctuary in the middle of the nation’s capital, a natural preserve that defies the urban bustle around it, a harborage for deer chased away by the din of the city.

It is also one of the first places police thought to look last year when former federal intern Chandra Levy was feared dead. And it is there, in the park’s lush serenity, that her remains surfaced Wednesday.

The nearly 1,800-acre reserve--twice the size of New York’s Central Park--is a landmark with a sinister underside. A green haven for city-dwellers, it is also a dark hiding place.

“It’s a known dumping ground for bodies,” said Helen Morrison, a forensic psychiatrist in Chicago, as detectives worked to identify the human skull unearthed when a man walking his dog in a search for turtles kicked aside some dirt. “That park was searched more than once at the time Chandra Levy disappeared.”

Rock Creek is as central to this paved and marbled capital as Griffith Park is to Los Angeles; a place where it is possible to pretend you’re someplace else.

An urban jungle in the nicest sense, joggers run to the roar of lions waking up at the National Zoo.

Ronald Reagan escaped there for horseback rides, a little bit of his Santa Barbara ranch a stone’s throw from the White House.

At its rambling creek side, a city kid can be Tom Sawyer for the day, courtesy of rangers known to produce a stick, a string and some bait without ever being asked.

“It’s the Central Park of Washington,” said Ainsley Perrien, a mother of three who lives five minutes away and goes there several times a week. “It is so big and so sparse that you see other people but never feel overrun by them.”

The park sits in northwest Washington, home to the capital’s elite, but it serves as a diverse crossroads for every aspect of the city. Senators and Cabinet members jog there; kids of all backgrounds play there.

This park belongs to the nation, established by Congress in 1890 “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people of the United States.”

Officialdom had been looking for an alternative site for the White House when the beautiful stretch of untouched land extending from Georgetown to Maryland emerged as a candidate.

The mansion was never relocated, but lawmakers were persuaded to save the land, and just in time--Rock Creek was already being polluted with raw sewage from nearby runaway growth.

Today, it is a commuter path into the district on weekdays and a safe place for in-line skaters on weekends as police close huge stretches of road to traffic. It has possibly the highest density of raccoons in the country and a healthy population of red and gray foxes that people sometimes mistake for big cats, according to the National Park Service.

But it was Rock Creek’s grim face the country glimpsed Wednesday in the unfolding case of the missing intern whose relationship with Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) made her disappearance a global story.

“Really, violent crimes are very rare here. It’s a beautiful park,” said Sgt. Scott Fear, spokesman for the park police.

Even so, crime has been part of Rock Creek’s legacy for decades. In 1937, the Washington Post editorialized for a restructured police force to “stamp out the atrocities of perverts.” The 1948 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl there shook the rafters in Congress.

And this month, a man was sentenced to life in prison for the torture and murder of a 48-year-old woman in broad daylight at the park.

Such crimes committed elsewhere do not always make news, but when they happen within the leafy bounds of a local treasure, that’s something.

Indeed, it is fitting that a man on a walk with his dog would have found what police spent months searching for. The park is bisected by a two-lane road with acres of woods on each side. You can’t drive around it; to really see it, you have to hike.

“In Rock Creek Park itself you could be standing next to something and not see it, as thick as the woods are here--and they are very, very thick,” Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey said.

On Wednesday, though, an early hunch by law enforcement proved true as something majestic yielded something awful. And, at least for a day, it was hard for those who came to escape the madness of Washington to pretend they were anyplace else.