CHANDRA LEVY
http://www.msnbc.com/news/606595.asp?cp1=1

Nonexistent Phone Calls (and Other False Tales)

Was Chandra Levy frantically trying to reach Rep. Gary Condit in the days before she disappeared? A flurry of last-minute calls has been widely reported—but it didn’t happen. Last week sources with access to Levy’s cell-phone records reviewed them for NEWSWEEK. The records show after Levy and Condit began their “friendship” last December, the intern frequently called a special phone line used by Condit to retrieve messages. (Investigators have dubbed this “the foo-foo line” because the callers heard a message tape that played, instead of Condit’s voice, melodious background music.) Then within an hour or so of making the call, Levy would start calling her home message machine, sometimes up to six times in a row, apparently to see if Condit had returned the call.

But the calls to the foo-foo line tail off in mid-April. Levy called the line on April 13 when she was with her parents in Hershey, Pa. As for the crucial last week in April, the cell-phone records show no calls at all to Condit’s foo-foo line, or to any other number used by the congressman, the sources say. (The last call Levy made from the cell phone, in the early afternoon of April 29, was to a friend at the Bureau of Prisons, who was out of town and didn’t return to D.C. until late on the afternoon of May 2, after Levy is believed to have disappeared.) Law-enforcement sources say that Levy’s home-phone records also show no phone calls to Condit during this period. “I don’t know where people are getting this stuff,” said one law-enforcement official.

Ironically, the phone records are slightly at variance with Condit’s own account of their last few conversations. He told police that after seeing Levy in his apartment on April 24, he returned a call from her on April 29. Assuming Condit’s account of a conversation that day is accurate, police say, it is possible she first called him from a pay phone or that he actually initiated the call. Either way, the available evidence points to no emotional crisis between Condit and Levy before she disappeared. Other widely circulated accounts are also inaccurate. The police have found no evidence that Levy was pregnant. Media speculation that a substance found in Condit’s apartment might have been Levy’s blood turns out to be entirely false, according to the FBI crime lab.

None of this means that Condit is off the hook. The Feds are still investigating whether Condit tried to dissuade two women friends from talking to the cops. But the relevance to the case is far from clear because neither knew Levy. As for what happened to her, police say that after three solid months of searching, they still haven’t a clue.

—Michael Isikoff