Discovery Shifts the Focus From Where to How

Finding the body, investigators say, is everything.

With the positive identification Wednesday of the skeletal remains of Chandra Levy, a stalled missing person case quickly became an active death investigation.

The task now at hand: finding the cause of death of the 24-year-old intern who disappeared with barely a trace more than a year ago.

“There is no question we still have a lot of work to do in determining what exactly happened to Chandra Levy,” said Channing Phillips, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office here. “And if it’s determined it was by foul play, by whom?”

But solving that puzzle--despite the body’s decomposed state and the long time it appears to have been exposed to the elements--became exponentially more possible, experts say, now that criminal investigators actually have a body.

“The energy goes from looking for her to looking for who did it,” said Christopher Evans, who was the Orange County prosecutor in the murder case of Denise Huber, a Newport Beach woman whose bludgeoned corpse was found in a freezer in Arizona three years after she disappeared.

“It’s a challenge, but even in the most unusual of cases there have been clues found,” said Evans, who is now in private practice. “There’s fiber evidence, fingerprinting evidence, DNA evidence, ballistic evidence, tool-mark pieces of evidence on bone that can be isolated from animal markings, all of which can lead you back to the original crime scene, or a slayer, or an accident.”

Washington police worked into the evening Wednesday setting up lights in the isolated section of the city’s sprawling Rock Creek Park, where a man out walking his dog stumbled on Levy’s remains earlier in the day.

The location, now considered a crime scene, is being guarded while investigators meticulously comb the area, searching for clues that might help them prosecute a killer, if it is determined Levy was murdered.

Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI agent who helped track down convicted Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski, said that crime scene technicians will sift the ground where the body was found “cupful by cupful of soil.”

What they are looking for, he said, ranges from signs that a fight took place to minute traces of evidence left in the deeply wooded park.

Van Zandt said that other details about the heavily wooded area where the body was found also might help investigators come up with a better picture of a suspect, if the medical examiner determines that the cause of death was something other than an accident, suicide or natural causes.

For instance, investigators will be attempting to determine whether the body was left in the open or if it was buried, and whether she died where she was found or was moved there at a later time.

If it is determined that she was killed at or near where she was found, investigators would ideally be able to find signs that she was either lured there or happened upon the site, possibly while out jogging or walking. There still may be signs that she put up a struggle, despite the significant passage of time.

But the fact that more than a year has passed since Levy’s disappearance complicates efforts.

Van Zandt said investigators are likely considering several possible scenarios, comparing the physical evidence to each possible circumstance.

“It could have been a totally unknown offender who knew that lone women ran in the area. He’s sitting there, sees her, picks up a weapon of convenience, hits her in the head or chokes her,” Van Zandt said.

However, the fact that her body was not easily found despite extensive police searches of the area raises other questions, Van Zandt said.

“The challenge of the random attacker theory,” Van Zandt said, “is that type of offender normally doesn’t dig a grave or bother to hide the body.”

Evidence of efforts to cover up a murder, Van Zandt said, is usually an indication of an “organized offender,” someone who to some degree planned the crime and who is either a serial attacker or is possibly someone who knew his or her victim.

The discovery of articles of clothing and other items might help law enforcement officials, who have continued to question potential witnesses in the case in an attempt to better determine a timeline leading up to Levy’s disappearance.

But it remains to be seen how much difficulty the medical examiner will have in assigning a cause of death, experts said--a crucial determination that will shape where the Levy case goes from here.

If there are little more than bones and clothing remnants left at this point, some veteran law enforcement officials cautioned Wednesday that it might be impossible to conclude how Levy died. If she was choked, for instance, there may be no traces of the attack left to document.

The Washington medical examiner was unable to determine a cause of death in the case of Joyce Chiang, a 28-year-old lawyer who was missing for three months before her body was found on the banks of the Potomac River in northern Virginia in April 1999.

The cases of Chiang and Levy, who both lived in the same Dupont Circle neighborhood, have been compared by many in Washington, including Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres), who has acknowledged a close friendship with Levy. In a letter to constituents last year, he suggested that the two women might be victims of the same serial murderer.

Experts are hopeful that Levy’s remains will yield her cause of death. Even without soft-tissue remains, forensic specialists said, signs of blunt trauma--such as a knife wound or heavy object, or even a gunshot wound to the skull or other bones--could still be apparent.

If all else fails, said Dr. Philip J. Levine, chief dental forensic expert for the medical examiner’s office in Pensacola, Fla., and an authority on identifying human remains, investigators can turn back to the teeth--the same source that allowed officials to positively identify Levy in a matter of hours Wednesday.

“When little else remains of a body, the teeth may still help us determine if the person drowned,” Levine said.

“Recent chips might indicate a trauma to the mouth and, if they aren’t worn down from chewing, be evidence of an attack or fall close to the time of death.

“They begin putting things together and reaping the results--it’s absolutely astounding at times how much modern science can find out.”