Chandra Levy's Remains Found in Park By Dog

The bones were very deteriorated and had no tissue or hair, the sources said. The skull, which was not complete, was cracked, although the cause was unclear. All the bones that were discovered were found within five yards of the skull.

Police would not identify the man who led them to Levy's remains, but said he was hunting for turtles about 9:30 a.m. when he noticed his dog sniffing vigorously at a spot on the side of a bluff that, while not far from Broad Branch Road, is "very inaccessible," Ramsey said.

"The man rubbed some earth off it, saw it was a skull and walked over to a nearby construction site to call," said Sgt. Scott Fear, a spokesman for the U.S. Park Police.

Investigators, joined by top officers of the department, quickly found other bones, as well as a jogging bra, panties, tennis shoes, sweat pants and a portable radio.

Police recruits last summer searched 1,700 of Rock Creek Park's 2,820 acres, including the area where the remains were discovered. The park was a focus then because investigators checking Levy's computer records had learned that on May 1, 2001 -- the last day she was heard from -- she looked up the location of Klingle Mansion. The mansion, a three-story Pennsylvania Dutch-style farmhouse that was built in 1823, is a popular destination for dog walkers, bikers, hikers and joggers.

It is about a mile and a half from where her remains were found.

"It's possible to search and not find," Ramsey said.

Condit's attorney suggested on CNN last night, however, that the police had not done a thorough enough job searching for Levy. He noted that the remains were found near a jogging path that is on a direct line between Levy's Dupont Circle area apartment and Klingle mansion.

"Obviously, given some of the initial information, they have been in this area, they have been in this park before," Geragos said, referring to the police. "I'm sure there will be a lot of second-guessing whether or not they could've done something earlier, whether or not they missed a lot of things."

Although police cannot tell yet how long Levy's remains had been at the site, Ramsey said it looked as if the skeleton had been there for considerable time. The skull and other remains have been exposed to almost every type of weather, but experts in dental forensics said that has almost no impact on their ability to identify someone.

Teeth are "the hardest mineral in the body, harder than bones," said Jeffrey Burkes, chief dental consultant to the New York City Office of the Medical Examiner, who has been involved in the identification of World Trade Center victims.

Burkes said that teeth "are very distinctive and very individualistic" and that identifying a body by comparing dental X-rays taken both before and after death is as accurate as DNA samples, which take much longer to process.