The "tip"

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Tip puts a body at Army post

Details from the tip will be checked to determine whether a search is warranted.

By Michael Doyle

August 2, 2001 Fresno Bee

WASHINGTON -- Investigators and reporters scrambled Wednesday to check out a detailed but anonymous tip that Chandra Levy might be buried on an Army post south of Washington.

After a furious few hours that showed the enduring intensity of interest in the Levy case, law enforcement officials declared they still needed to determine the validity of the information before they could begin systematically digging into Fort Lee, Va.

"If the tip is deemed credible, appropriate investigative steps will be taken," Mary Johlie, spokeswoman for the FBI's Richmond field office, said in a prepared statement issued late Wednesday afternoon. "At this time, there are no plans to conduct a search in the Fort Lee area."

In slightly rolling terrain near Petersburg, Fort Lee is home to about 3,500 personnel and provides advanced individual training for soldiers. The base is 130 miles and normally about a two-hour drive from Washington.

Washington police, in their own statement, likewise emphasized that the three-page, single-spaced document provided via a privately operated crime-tip service was "but another of many unconfirmed tips circulating about the disappearance of Ms. Levy." The tip's geographic focus and the reference to a parking lot and construction did catch police attention beyond some of the many other tips received over the past three months.

"This is a little better than a tip like, 'I had vision last night she is in dark water,' " Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance Gainer told The Associated Press. "There is more specificity. And it is geographically accurate. But that is not necessarily unusual."

For a time, though, CNN, Fox News and others were carrying second-by-second accounts of the anonymous tip and the possibility that cadaver dogs might be sent to check a parking lot on the 5,000-acre Army post. Richmond-area television stations carried live overhead shots of the post, and the phrase "breaking news" scrolled across screens.

Kim Petersen, with the Carole Sund-Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation, based in Modesto, advised Levy's parents Wednesday that the tip was afloat after it became clear the media would be reporting on it.

"I thought, 'Oh, my God, I hope it's not true,' " Levy's aunt, Linda Zamsky, told The Bee Wednesday night, describing her feelings when she first heard the reports. "But if it is true, at least the parents will have closure."

The media scramble was somewhat comparable to what happened Tuesday, when a flock of reporters descended upon a Washington hardware store clerk who claims to have cut Levy a duplicate set of keys in early May.

Levy was last seen in public April 30 and sent her last-known e-mail May 1. After three investigators interviewed hardware store clerk John Woodfolk, his certainty about having seen Levy in early May rather than late April began to soften.

At almost the same time, though, investigators were starting to process the tip passed along late Monday by a private, nonprofit group called WeTip. The 29-year-old California-based group pays rewards of as much as $1,000 for tips that lead to arrests and convictions.

The tip received by the group, which takes tips by phone and through its Web site, claimed that Levy had been killed, placed in shrink wrap and buried in a parking lot that was under construction. The tip also was layered with many other details, few of which were made public Wednesday.

"The information was deemed to be very significant," David Eckert of WeTip said.

Washington police said that Fort Lee's military police would "coordinate the search and possibly use local cadaver dogs" if officials determined that a full search was warranted today.



-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), August 02, 2001

Answers

WeTip.com

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), August 02, 2001.

WeTip

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), August 02, 2001.

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