Sex, Lies, And Polygraphs

Congressmen don’t usually hang around on the House floor any longer than they have to. But for Gary Condit, it may be the only sanctuary left. On Thursday afternoon, as the campaign-reform bill was crashing to earth, so did the rest of his life. At the back of the chamber, the California Congressman leaned on the rail, chatting and joking with the men and women who still treat him as a colleague. As the others wandered away one by one, Condit lingered for a while, all alone.

It is easy to understand why Condit would be reluctant to go outside. It is now the third month of saturation coverage of the disappearance of Chandra Levy. While authorities seem no closer to finding out what happened to the 24-year-old intern, we seem to have learned a lot about the secret life of a preacher’s kid from Oklahoma who grew up to be a California Congressman. He once campaigned under the slogan “Setting a Good Example.” It was a dangerous boast for any public official to make, practically a dare to be proved wrong.

In the week after Condit finally admitted to police that he had had an affair with Levy, new and ominous information emerged–from investigators, from tabloid sludge to website Drudge, from the incessant talk-show tales told by another “other woman” (a flight attendant with fire-engine red hair) to the claims of a father who said his daughter’s fear of her former lover had driven her into hiding. The Condit legal team fought back, volunteering DNA samples, allowing searches, proffering a polygraph test. But the recriminations have not stopped, not from the cops, not from the press and certainly not from the Levys.

Even if Condit had nothing to do with Chandra Levy’s disappearance–police continue to insist that he’s not a suspect–his painstakingly tended image has been shattered and his political career declared dead. Democrats and Republicans are already scheming how to carve his conservative district to maximum advantage, or reapportion it out of existence. “If he’s smart, he won’t even run for re-election,” says A.G. Block, executive editor of California Journal, a magazine on state politics.

Most damaging of the accusations last week was that seven years ago, Condit had an affair with the teenage daughter of a Pentecostal minister in his district. It is the stuff of daytime soaps. The minister just happened to do landscaping work for the Levys. According to the Washington Post, while the Rev. Otis Thomas was caring for the roses by the Levys’ backyard pool, Chandra’s mother struck up a conversation about her daughter’s friendship with the Congressman. Thomas then confided that his own daughter Jennifer, now 26, had had an affair with Condit years ago, and that it had ended badly. Susan Levy immediately called her daughter to warn her. Like many moms, she was told to butt out. Chandra later assured her mother that Condit had “explained it all.” (Condit, through his chief of staff, denied the affair with Thomas’ daughter.)

The minister told the Modesto Bee that when news of Levy’s disappearance first broke, and Condit, through staff, expressed concern about his “good friend,” Jennifer Thomas had shouted at the television, “That’s a lie!” Her father also claimed that he had received an anonymous phone call warning him not to talk. When reporters showed up at the family doorstep the day his story went public, they were greeted with a handwritten note: “I never met that Congressman who’s involved in all this…I don’t even know how both me and my father got mixed up in this.” It was signed Jennifer Thomas. Was it really her signature? Had she had the affair, or was her father seeking the spotlight? The FBI took the claims seriously enough to question Otis Thomas.

If Jennifer Thomas was trying to fend off the media glare, flight attendant Anne Marie Smith was getting maximum exposure. She made the cable-network rounds and spent two days at FBI headquarters in Washington. Smith’s story has grown increasingly sinister. Her lawyer, Jim Robinson, told Fox News that Smith had found “neckties tied together underneath [Condit’s] bed, as if someone had been tied up,” and that Smith had grown disturbed near the end of their relationship at some of Condit’s “peculiar sexual fantasies.” The lawyer didn’t elaborate. On Friday night, on Larry King Live, Smith declared she had been attracted to Condit because of his personality. Then she said she would give no more interviews and wanted only to return to her life as a flight attendant.

As in all such sagas, fact and factitiousness mix indiscriminately. A friend of the missing intern’s told CBS News that when he asked Levy about a recent medical appointment, Levy became awkward. The friend took the silence to mean that she was “possibly” pregnant. Hence a whole new line of speculation. The Levys’ attorney, Billy Martin, told CBS News that he knows the truth about her pregnancy but will not give a clue. As for Levy’s father, he expressed “doubt” to the Associated Press that she was pregnant.

There is one accusation, however, that places Condit in immediate legal jeopardy. It is Smith’s contention that his representatives tried to persuade her to sign a false affidavit that he and she were not involved in a relationship. Condit has not disputed her contention that they had an affair but denies he pressured her to lie.

Whether or not he broke the law, Condit has hindered the investigation. That he first denied the affair–and that it took three interviews with police for him to admit his relationship with Levy–makes him look as if he were more concerned for his reputation than her life. Almost everything Condit did fueled suspicion that he wasn’t being honest. On June 28, Condit’s office gave ABC News a time line of his movements from April 28 to May 2, the five days surrounding Levy’s disappearance. On May 1, the time line indicated, Condit was meeting with a reporter at a “neighborhood coffee shop” at 6:30 p.m. The problem with that account was that the reporter in question happened to work for ABC as well and told her bosses the meeting actually occurred the following day. Asked for an explanation of the discrepancy–and for what actually happened at 6:30 on May 1–Condit’s office said the time line was only a draft and not complete.

An ABC News executive says ABC hasn’t been able to find out whether the police got the same mistaken time line and, if so, whether it was corrected: “The police have never called [us] to check on this discrepancy.”

The Condit team hopes its surprise announcement Friday that the Congressman has taken a polygraph administered by expert Barry D. Colvert, formerly with the FBI, would soothe critics. Condit, said his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, had truthfully answered no to the only questions that mattered: Did he have anything to do with Levy’s disappearance? Did he harm her or cause anyone else to? Does he know where she is? But neither police nor the Levys were satisfied. Assistant D.C. police chief Terrance Gainer dubbed the test “self-serving.”

Condit did comply with other requests. Shortly before dawn on Wednesday, he allowed police to search his apartment for more than three hours. Condit and Lowell were present as officers took folders and bags into an unmarked police vehicle; several items were sent to the FBI crime lab so that flecks of undetermined substances could be analyzed. Police with cadaver dogs also began searching nearby abandoned houses.

That nearly all their leads should be taking investigators toward Condit’s innermost life–to the point where the inside of his mouth was swabbed for his DNA–must be a peculiarly hellish torture for a man obsessed with guarding his secrets. The Hill newspaper quoted police sources as saying Condit had insisted that Levy not carry any identification when they were together–a detail that, if true, could have a connection to the fact that items such as credit cards, her driver’s license and other personal articles were left behind in her apartment when she vanished. Then again, she may simply have been running a quick errand. And police, while discounting suicide, have not ruled out the possibility that she disappeared intentionally. They released computer-generated pictures of how Levy might look if she had changed her distinctive hairstyle or other features.

For all the precautions Condit is said to have taken, and despite the wholesome image he projected at home in Modesto, the Congressman’s behavior has always been the subject of gossip among his legislative colleagues–first at the state capital, Sacramento, and later in Washington. “A flamboyant party boy who uses his prestige as an assemblyman to fuel a busy social life,” California Journal had written in 1988. The pattern continued when he reached Congress. “His looks and clothes are so important to him,” says a friend. “He so desperately wants to stay young.”

Few in Washington knew much about his wife Carolyn, who had stayed behind in Modesto; many had the impression that she was a near invalid. But an acquaintance who has known Carolyn Condit for decades told TIME that despite some health problems, she is a vivacious woman. (She has often made appearances on the Modesto political circuit in her husband’s stead.) “She was always out there,” the acquaintance says. “Even if he wasn’t there, she was there for him.”

No one, however, was in evidence Friday afternoon at the Condit family’s Modesto-area home, where an American flag hung from the front porch and the only message to passersby was a vividly colored sign: NO TRESPASSING. For Gary Condit, it’s far too late to hope for that.

–With reporting by Margaret Carlson, Viveca Novak, Michael Weisskopf and Mark Thompson/Washington, Laura A. Locke/San Francisco and Sean Scully and Chris Taylor/Modesto