It's July 25, 2001, 8.
28 police recruits stand alongside Glover Road. One of the streets that cuts through Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC. Huge Park. Twice as big a central park in New York City. Three sergeants line up the recruits shoulder to shoulder near a picnic area called Grove
Seventeen. It is already more than 80 degrees, the start of another humid summer day in Washington. The team is out looking for Shondra Levy. Black Creek Park is Dr. Typical Urban Park. It's got a huge creek running through it.
It's not rocky areas and areas that are just pure wilderness. It is extremely difficult to do a complete search of every single inch of it. The command from police headquarters was to search 100 yards from roads and trails.
“But many of the search team that day heard it as 100 yards from the roads only a key distinction.”
So that is where the recruits and the sergeants walk. The open ground near the pavement, beating the brush along the edges of the road, calling Shondra's name. It is a far cry from the trails which run much deeper into the park along the ridge lines and down toward the creek where the land drops away into ravines thick with vines
and fallen trees. No one covers that ground. By one o'clock it's 91 degrees and feeling hotter. The search team is dripping with sweat. The sergeants call off the search along the lever road.
The recruits climb onto a bus and ride to another park of the park. Ten months from now, Shondra Levy will be found on this very hillside.
On ground this search never reached.
The area the sergeants and recruits are leaving. Just 79 yards below the western ridge trail near Glover Road. The difference will come down to a lapse in communication. Search the roads and trails versus just the roads. This is the summer of the search for Shondra Levy.
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While the country watches congressman Gary Condett, the investigation behind the cameras is quickly coming apart. Across the country in Medesto, California, Shondra's parents' wheat, Bob and Susan Levy do with their advisers tell them, speak to the press when publicity might turn up a lead, step back when it might bury one, and keep their daughter's name in front of the public
however they can. But Susan cannot simply wait in California. She flies to Washington to meet with investigators, press police for answers, and make a public appeal for Shondra's return. "I want my daughter home, and I want her alive, and I want the truth to come out."
"You're wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person, which is the best of us. What are you doing? I want to have faith that she will come back." At the airport, television cameras film her, holding one of Shondra's stuffed animals, a small yellow chick.
Back in Medesto, Susan starts a support group for the families of missing loved ones.
At first, it helps, but as her daughter's case grows and gets so much news coverage,
“it crowds out missing loved ones of the others, at least that's how some members of the”
group feel. The other families whose own missing children draw almost no attention at all, begin to pull away, and the meetings stop. "It couldn't just trust that the police could do all the work, because a lot of work. We needed to find as much as we can.
We needed someone out there that could do more investigation."
Restrated by the pace of the official investigation and determined to have so...
Washington working solely for them, the Levi's hire Billy Martin, a former federal prosecutor.
“Martin brings in two private investigators, both retired DC homicide detectives, Joe”
McCann, and Duane Stanton. They interview Shondra's friends and co-workers, they retrace her movements, set up their own tip line and post a reward. More than a hundred calls a day come in, and the two of them have to sort the real from the worthless, the mistaken sightings, the dead ends, the psychics who say they can see
where Shondra is. "We need to come in at all the time, and talk us down many, many different paths. This one particular night is just me and my partner. The 800 number reigns. We answer the phone, there's a gentleman on the other end of the phone.
He doesn't want to give us this name, but he's got this story to tell about Shondra being in California, and as we listened to it, it did sound credible. He was just looking for 15 minutes of fame. He courseed just a lot of effort, and so I was pretty annoyed, pissed off at him. There was just nothing that was really nothing about Shondra."
The PI's are working around the city's own detectives, not with them. Officers who quietly keep McCann and Stanton in the loop are reprimanded for it. "A lot of people who followed it, remember how crazy it was. You couldn't pick up a newspaper, a magazine, listen to a TV show, the media was talking about it.
It was every day, it was every night, it was nonstop."
“To understand how a case this big goes cold, you have to understand the department working”
it. In 2001, Washington DC police are climbing out of a brutal decade. The nation's capital has had one of the highest homicide rates of any major American city for years. 1500 killings from the 1990s remain unsolved. In 2001, police clear fewer than half of the city's homicides, just 48.5%. The DC medical examiner's office is overwhelmed. The city morgue is full, police case files are a mess and trust between the public and
the department is thin at best. The DC police chief Charles Ramsey had been brought in from Chicago three years earlier to reform a department battered by scandal, low morale, and the decade of unsolved murders. But the leavey case does not land with a seasoned murder
squad. It lands in the second district, one of the quieter, wealthier parts of town,
with a detective named Ralph Durant, who has spent decades on the force but little of that time working homicides. It is an almost every respect, a department unready for the story about to break over its head. Start with the surveillance tapes. Sean Rosbilding, the new port, is secure with a guard on duty around the clock and 13 cameras recording every face that comes and goes, but the system records over itself every seven days.
Police officers come to the building on May 6th, on May 7th, on May 8th, and each time they leave without asking anyone to save the recording. By the time someone thinks to ask the video from May 1st, the day Sean Dervanished has already been taped over. Gone with that recording, what time she left, what she was wearing, whether she was alone. Any one
of those 13 cameras might have answered the first question every investigator asks. Instead,
there is nothing. Former FBI agent Brad Garrett called out this last ABC News in 2017. Things like surveillance cameras unless you go and initially grab them or tell the
“management to hold them, they erase or disappear. And unfortunately, that's what happened”
in this case. Then there's the laptop. Sean Dervan left her computer open on a makeshift desk in the Hall of Her apartment and on that computer are her last internet searches. A police sergeant named Ronald Wyatt, who is not a trained technician, turns her laptop on in an effort to retrace her steps and the hard drive corrupts. Simply turning a computer on should not do that. And years later, a trial, a computer expert still cannot
fully explain what went wrong. What he can't explain is the cost. It takes federal forensic examiners nearly two months to recover Sean Dervan's browsing history from the damaged
drive. When they do, they can finally see where her last hour online was spent. From
trained schedules and airfares to California to a Washington Post guide to Rock Creek Park, and then to a map of the park's trails. Investigators initially focus on a web address for
The park's headquarters at Klingel Mansion.
but find no evidence Sean Dervan there. What receives less attention is the page
“Sean Dervan opens minutes later, the broader map of Rock Creek Park. It is that map once the FBI”
has pulled it off the damaged drive that finally sends the investigators into the park. It is
what puts that search party of 28 recruits and three sergeants along Glover Road on July 25th, the team that worked the roads, but not the trails. Because the search was only limited to that area off the roads, the area where her body was ultimately found was not searched. The search that was supposed to be the big break instead it became one more thing, the investigation got wrong. Former DC Chief of Detectives Jack Barrett remembers it this way.
This is something that we all have to live with as they may have been DNA evidence that all that was lost because of the fact that we were unable to locate her remains during the time
“that we was searching the park. While the police are losing the trail of Shandra Levy,”
a few miles away, another story is unfolding, one no one thinks to connect with Shandra's. Two weeks after Shandra vanishes, on the evening of May 14th, a tall woman named Hally Shilling, is attacked on a trail near the old pure smell in Rock Creek Park. She's a jogger, 30 years old, and a journalist, a man follows her into the woods and tackles her. She fights him off and she runs straight to park police and reports it. No one thinks to connect it to Shandra.
Seven weeks later, it happens again. On the evening of July 1st, a young woman named Christy Wygand is running in Rock Creek Park. She's not running alone. Her fiance pulls a head of Christy on the path as he usually does. Before long, he is out of sight and Christy is alone on the trail.
“Wygand is 25, a lawyer, and seven weeks from her wedding. It's raining. The road through that”
stretch of the park is closed to cars and the trail is nearly empty. Christy turns her head and notices a man behind her, gaining. Then he has her, an arm locked around her from behind, hauling her off the path and down into a ravine. There is a knife. He puts a hand over her mouth so she cannot scream. Christy is certain in that moment that she will die on this hillside. A Christy Wygand is a former college roar and she is bigger than the man holding her.
She fights. She twists and kicks and makes enough noise that the man gives up and runs off into the forest. She is a difficult victim. She claws her way back up the slope and flags down the first
person she sees. He never reached for her engagement ring. He never touched the radio clip to
her waist. Whatever he wanted from Christy in that ravine, it wasn't money. This time the man does not get away. Wygand's description goes out over the police radio. The park police spin up a helicopter and flood the trails and within about 45 minutes too officers find the man not far from where Christy was attacked. He is wet, streaked with dirt and leaves and exactly matches the description she gave, a Hispanic man wearing a white t-shirt baggy shorts and sneakers.
Police take him to the small stone station house inside the park and run him through the system. Go back now to fall of 2000. A few miles from Shondra's apartment near Rock Creek Park, a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador, is trying to establish a life in DC. He's been in the country illegally for a little more than a year. Taking whatever work he can find without legal status, hard, low-paid jobs, earning $7.50 an hour. In his free time he often goes to the
park with his girlfriend. By the spring of 2001 their relationship becomes violent. He beats her, he drinks heavily, using whatever drugs he can get and scaring the people around him. His girlfriend's family begins to fear him. He kicks indoors, he keeps hitting his girlfriend. He bites her, hard enough to leave marks. The man from El Salvador starts telling her that if he cannot have her, no one will. He takes to carrying a six-inch knife wrapped in a red cloth. That spring he breaks into
an apartment on his own block steals a gold wedding ring and is arrested. He promises to appear
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with a second officer and a Spanish interpreter. Guandike agrees to talk without a lawyer.
Leaning the questioning is Joe Green, a big, balding detective who has 30 years on the job. He starts with the assaults. Green does not accuse. He offers the man an easier story.
“One where the whole thing was just a misunderstanding and the prisoner takes it. DC Metro Detective”
Jim Trainham described the dynamic this way to investigation discovery in 2017. When they asked him about the attack, he denied it. But they used a different attack and asked him if maybe he just accidentally brushed up against somebody in the woods and he gave them this story about oh yeah, he was running their jogging and wasn't colliding with the woman by accident. And so they knew that at that point that they had the right guy.
Guandike describes bumping into Christy Wygans on the trail, trying to help her up and her screaming instead. Then he gives Green the same kind of account of a second woman weeks earlier, a tall jogger. Two attacks, he admits to, dressed up as accidents. Then Green tries one more thing. Sean Releavey's face is on flyers all over Washington that summer. Green slides one of the flyers across the table, her photograph on it and asks a simple question, has he ever seen this woman
in the park? Yes, Guandike admits. He has seen her once, near the parking lot by the old
pier smell. He thought she was pretty. He never saw her again. Green writes up the two assaults.
He does not write down what Guandike said about Sean Releavey. Green is park police. The detectives chasing Sean Releavey are DC police, separate forces, working the rest of the city. And at that moment the DC police are chasing a congressman. The answer to a question, no one else had thought to ask, goes into a drawer and stays there. A man who hunts women on these trails sitting in a locked room in July of 2001, telling a detective he had seen Sean Releavey
in the park and found her pretty. It will be years before anyone working the Leavey case hears a word of it. The Sean Releavey story is still the biggest in the country through the morning of September 11th, 2001. By that afternoon it's gone. For our family we were shocked. But we were not most know like most people because we've already felt 9/11 happened to us. The attacks in New York and at the Pentagon change every priority in Washington. The cameras
leave Gary Conditz door. The federal agents who had been working the Leavey case are pulled into terrorism task forces. The tip line goes quiet. For the private investigators hired by the Leavey's, the effect is immediate. We didn't get the media attention anymore and there go a lot of beliefs. So things start to dry up. Even after the initial shock, the 9/11 attacks cast Paul
Over the case.
the state legislator Dennis Cardosa. Washington's most watched man the previous summer
“is now finished in politics of zero interest to the public and Leave's DC with Sean Releavey still missing.”
On May 22nd 2002 more than a year after Sean Releavey disappeared, a man named Philip Palmer walks his dog in Rock Creek Park. Palmer is a furniture maker who has collected antlers and animal bones since he was a boy, so he thinks nothing of leaving the trail and working his way down a slow. That morning he sees a scrap of red fabric and something pale and rounded in the Leave's about the size of a silver dollar. He brushes the Leave's away. What he finds is a human skull.
He ties his dog's blue leash to a branch to mark the spot, climbs back to a nearby road,
borrows a phone from a construction worker and calls 9/11. Here's a bit of that phone call. I was walking my dog in a witness morning and I came across a human skull.
“At the Washington Post a reporter named Sorry Horowitz is at breakfast with a police source at the”
exact moment the call comes in. I arranged a breakfast with a police official and during the breakfast his pager just started going off and when he came back he had to stand look on his face and he said you're not going to believe this but I just got a call and they think they found Sean Releavey's remains in Rock Creek Park. The remains are 79 yards below the western ridge trail down a wooded slope so steep that in some places it falls away at 45 degrees.
It is the ground the recruits had walked right past but not through the summer before. What remains of Sean Rock is surrounded by items a year of weather and animals have left. Her sunglasses are running shoe, a gray property of USC athletics t-shirt, a small radio and something odd. A pair of black stretch pants turned inside out with each pant leg tied in a knot at the ankle. When they found her leggings they were like box and loops and the legs.
If she fell down at that ravine and knocked her head and died by accident there's no reason
to remove her pants. The first officer down the slope recognizes it at once the isolated ravine
the radio the knotted clothing because he had stood at a similar scene the previous summer at one of two jogger attacks. Here's former detective Trenum again. When you're looking at the scene bones are scattered everywhere and that's normal for this sort of scene if there's a body that's out in the elements it begins to decompose and then animals and other scavengers attack the body. They actually take the skull to the medical examiner's office with red lights and siren they
were in such a hurry. The medical examiner had already obtained Sean Rudd's dental records so he was able to match up the various fillings. The examiner Jonathan Arden holds the x-rays up against the records steps back and forth between them and says two words "it's her." Well after they identified her they call us up and told us that was just really bad I mean it's
“just that's what was bad as if anything could be. Six days later on May 28th Arden rules”
Sean relieves death a homicide but the body has been left abandoned out in the open for more than a year and the bones cannot tell him how she died. No bullet holes no stab marks nothing left of her throat to say whether she was strangled. It is possible he tells reporters that no one will ever know the specific injury that killed her. When a reporter asks the DC police chief Charles Ramsey how a search the summer before could have walked past her, Ramsey does not flinch.
It's possible he says to search and not find. Word of her discovery travels fast to Medesto that same day a thousand people gather for a memorial in Sean's hometown. At the doors someone has set out silver bowls of Reese's peanut butter cups, Sean's life-long favorite. Now they know for sure how short her life really was. Then comes the detail that says the most about the search. Two weeks after Sean's remains are recovered the family's own investigators
Joe McCann and Duane Stanton go back over the released crime scene themselves on their hands and
Knees with garden rakes because they do not trust that the police have done i...
An hour and a half in McCann's rake catches on a bone. The search teams had left in the dirt
“about a foot long. It is Sean's left tibia. The department's first response is to suggest that”
animals must have carried the bone back in after the search was done. A Washington Post columnist named Mark Fisher mocks them in print and suggests the chief invest in a good heavy duty garden
“rake. When detectives call McCann in they ask him to take a polygraph examination he refuses.”
Ramsey furious that his technicians missed a foot long bone sends the teams back into the woods. Over the next 19 days they found more of Sean's remains. Bones from her hands and her feet
“her back, her femur, the largest bone in the body. One of them 170 feet from where her skull was found.”
Two retired detectives with garden rakes had found with scores of officers had missed. For the livis, the call they had been dreading was an excruciating end to the saga of their missing daughter. McCraight. Yeah, Crosby. Yeah. You can't imagine to have your child laying out there and it seems so unfair. For 13 months the biggest missing persons case in America had been all about a congressman. Now it is about a body on a wooded slope. In the park, Sean Releavey had looked up
on her computer the morning she vanished. On the ground, a class of police recruits never touched.
The question is no longer where is Sean Releavey? From here on, it is who killed her. When investigators finally go looking for an answer, they will turn to a man they already have in hand. Next time on MK confidential, the woman who fought off a killer on those trails and lived
and waited seven years for a call that never came and a prisoner with a story to tell.
