Missing intern still a mystery

Ms Levy's parents still haven't given up hope

Kevin Anderson BBC News Online, Washington

It has been a year since 24-year-old Chandra Levy disappeared in Washington and became the focus of endless media coverage during the sleepy summer before the 11 September attacks.

Authorities still do not know what happened to the 24-year-old woman and say they have few leads.

But the story captivated Washington and the media until the suicide attacks on New York and Washington refocused the country's priorities.

One year on, few questions about Ms Levy's disappearance have been answered. The only certainty is that her disappearance helped end one man's political career.

Sex sells

Chandra Levy had just finished an internship at the Bureau of Prisons last April and was getting ready to return to home state of California.

Print-shop posters of Chandra Levy blanketed downtown Washington last summer

She was last heard from on 1 May when she e-mailed her parents about her travel plans. Three days later, after repeated attempts to contact her, Ms Levy's parents alerted the Washington police that their daughter was missing.

Her story caught the attention of the Washington press corps and party gossips much the way that the Blair Witch Project became an underground hit - guerrilla marketing.

Shortly after her disappearance, copy-shop posters began appearing in the Washington neighbourhood near her apartment asking for information about her whereabouts.

But that alone did not guarantee the saturation coverage that the Chandra Levy case elicited last summer.

It was estimated at the time that a few hundred women disappear in Washington every year. No, it took something to catch the imagination of editors and news directors.

It was not until reports surfaced that she was romantically linked with Congressman Gary Condit did the case of a missing woman become the focus round the clock coverage.

Mr Condit passed a lie detector test and said he was not connected with Ms Levy's disappearance

Publicly, Mr Condit, a married 54-year-old member of Congress from California, has never admitted to an affair, saying only that they shared a "close" relationship.

Summer can be a quiet time in Washington, and last summer was especially so. To some in the media, the story was a godsend.

It had the potential of missing sex, infidelity and foul play, and the media spent much of last summer trying to fill in the blanks in the story.

The story became a favourite topic of conversation at summer parties with a wide range of theories about the fate of Chandra Levy.

Mr Condit soon found himself the focus of scrutiny from the Levy family and its legal team.

Both sides hired public relations firms to tell their story and, in Mr Condit's case, to provide political damage control.

End of a career

The appetite for the story seemed insatiable, at least from the media's point of view.

Mr Condit's political career is most likely at an end after he was linked romantically with Ms Levy

But the 11 September attacks knocked the Chandra Levy story from the front page.

One television presenter even publicly pondered how the country could have been so captivated by something that after the attacks seemed so trivial. The story never made it back to the front pages.

And for Mr Condit, his political fortunes never quite recovered from the undesirable public attention.

The Democrat became a political liability for his party and a pariah in his relatively conservative district.

He lost the primary election in March, ending a 30-year string of electoral successes.

He still finds himself under a cloud of suspicion. A grand jury reviewing the case is trying to determine whether Mr Condit or his aides obstructed the investigation. Mr Condit and his aides have steadfastly denied such allegations.

Ms Levy's parents still hold out hope that she will be found or at least they will find out how she disappeared.

"We're hoping and praying that somehow we'll get answers and someone will help us," Sue Levy said.

Private investigators are still following up leads for the family, and Washington police department continues to work on the case.

Billy Martin, the Levys' lawyer, said: "We just need a break. We need somebody to come forward and give us the missing piece of the puzzle."