Excerpt: 'Finding Chandra' By Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz

May 10, 2010— -- The national media was enraptured with the mysterious case of Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old Washington, D.C., intern who disappeared suddenly in 2001. After her body was discovered a year later and an affair with a Congressman came to light, the plot only grew thicker and the truth more elusive.

Washington Post reporters Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz covered the story in-depth in a 13-part series. Their book, "Finding Chandra," expands on their work on the tragedy that shocked the country.

Read an excerpt below, and then head to the "Good Morning America" Library to find more good reads.

On the slope of a steep ravine, deep in the woods of Washington'sRock Creek Park, Philip Palmer spotted an out-ofplaceobject resting on the forest floor. He saw a patch of white,bleached out and barely visible through a thin layer of leaves.Walking these woods was a ritual for Palmer, an attempt toflee the madness of the city. Each morning, the furniture makertried to lose himself in the nine-mile-long oasis of forests, fields,and streams twice the size of New York's Central Park that slicesthrough the center of the nation's capital. On this morning, May22, 2002, the sun filtered through the leaves of the poplar andoak trees shading the hillside off the Western Ridge Trail, a solitarylane that begins near a centuries-old stone mill and winds itsway north through the woods to the border of Maryland. Palmermoved closer to the object, his dog Paco by his side. The object,the size of a silver dollar, stood out against the leaves.Palmer's quest seemed unusual for a man of forty-two whowas raised in Chevy Chase, a neighborhood largely reserved forWashington's upper middle class on the northern edge of RockCreek Park. Thin and wiry, with a mustache, beard, and an earringin his left ear, he looked like someone who belonged in thewilderness of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. He preferred thesolace of the park to the bustle and affluence that surroundedhim, and he prided himself on knowing every trail and path andglen. As a boy, he would head alone to the woods after school, siftthrough the dirt and leaves, and look for bits and pieces of animalbones. On good days, he'd find a complete skeleton, a mouseor a rat, a vole, maybe a raccoon, prizes he would keep and cherish.The finest examples of his collection from forgotten placesin the park would later be carefully displayed on the shelves thatlined the sitting parlor of his Victorian home in one of Washington'strendier neighborhoods, Dupont Circle.

By the spring of 2002, the park had become even more of a refugefor Palmer. Eight months earlier, on September 11, Washingtonwatched as acrid smoke billowed from the Pentagon acrossthe Potomac River. People in the streets looked skyward for thelast of the four hijacked planes still trying to reach its Washingtontarget. Rumors coursed through the city. The White Housewas next, maybe the U.S. Capitol. Since that day, the city hadbeen under siege, awash in fear, prompted by security barricades,color-coded warnings, and police carrying automatic weapons.Congress rushed to create the biggest federal bureaucracy sinceWorld War II , the Department of Homeland Security. Thenation prepared for war in the Middle East. Washington bracedfor a second wave of terror: a dirty bomb, another anthrax mailing,a suicide attacker on the National Mall or in the tunnels ofthe Metro that carried hundreds of thousands to work every day.All that seemed a world away beneath the dark green canopyof Rock Creek Park. At the northern end of the park was apopular stable, its horses carrying riders along broad, leafy bridlepaths. During the day, visitors picnicked in meadows andon tables perched along the creek. At night, children gazed atthe stars near the only planetarium in the national park system.Founded in 1890, Rock Creek Park consists of 2,800 acresand is the country's oldest natural urban park. The heart of thepark, the original "pleasure ground" approved by Congress, iswhere Palmer spotted the object, between the National Zoo andthe border of Maryland. The park also includes Fort Stevens,the site of the lone Confederate attack on Washington. By theturn of the century, the park on the edge of the growing capitalprovided a cooling respite for city dwellers. They would ride in horse-drawn carriages, and relax on giant boulders in the middleof the creek. President Theodore Roosevelt took long walks inRock Creek Park.

The park remained a pleasure ground, but over the years it hadcome to symbolize something else. Like many other urban parks, ithad become the geographic dividing line of a racially polarized citywith its vast wealth, abject poverty, corrupt and incompetent localgovernance, and some of the most abysmal crime statistics in thenation. On the west side were the city's well-to-do, middle-class,and mostly white neighborhoods—the stately foreign embassies alongMassachusetts Avenue, the mansions of Georgetown, the soaringGothic arches of the Washington National Cathedral, and the exclusiveenclave of Cleveland Park with its Victorian homes and wraparoundporches. "West of the Park" had become a euphemism forgood schools and safe streets.

Southeast of the park were the city's museums and CapitolHill, but some of the neighborhoods were home to the city's mostimpoverished residents. Not far from where Palmer spotted theobject, the cityscape began to change, the street scene growingedgier with each passing block. The transformation started eastof Eighteenth Street, a thoroughfare lined with Cuban, Salvadoran,and Ethiopian restaurants and popular nightclubs in a sectionof the city known as Adams Morgan. Farther east were thelargely Latino and African-American neighborhoods of MountPleasant, Columbia Heights, and Shaw, the city's nearly all-blackpublic schools, and the dilapidated housing projects of northeastand southeast Washington, where guns and drugs claimed hundredsof lives each year, many of them young black men.

Dupont Circle, where Palmer lived, was a southern gateway tothe park. The three-story, turreted brownstone built in 1892 thathe shared with his wife, a Washington defense lawyer, stood outamong the rows of more traditional homes. Deer antlers and alarge peace symbol adorned the façade. To earn a living, Palmerbuilt and restored furniture in his workshop. He didn't watch television and he refused to take photographs. He wanted to livein the moment, and photographs, he thought, tarnished memoriesbecause they could only capture what things looked like, not thesmells or sounds or sensations that made them whole. He had asimple philosophy—"We're like animals, we come and go"—andhe was childlike in his wonder and fascination with the outdoors."You never know what you're going to find," he liked to say.May 22 was one of those mornings that would prove himright. At about 9 A.M., Palmer parked his truck at the top of a hillnear the horse corral of Rock Creek Park. He decided to walknear the Western Ridge Trail, which he hadn't been on for nearlyfive years. He noticed with disgust several beer bottles amid thethorny vines, patches of poison ivy, and mountain laurel that coveredthe forest floor. As he and Paco trudged farther into thewoods, off the trail and down the ravine, he spotted a piece of redclothing. He kept walking and a few moments later came to ashallow depression in the ground. The remote spot was less thanone hundred yards down the steep hillside from the top of thetrail. He could hear the cars along Broad Branch Road anotherhundred yards below him.

At first Palmer thought that the bleached-out object he spottedwas a turtle shell beneath the leaves. He bent down andswept the leaves aside. Then he abruptly stood up and backedaway. He marked the spot with Paco's blue leash, and his dogbounded after him as he scrambled down the hillside towardBroad Branch Road. At the bottom, Palmer hung his sweatshirtover another branch so he could find his way back up. Hecrossed the creek bed, clambered up the other side, and went tothe first house he saw. He knocked on the door. No answer. Hewent next door to a house that was being renovated and askeda construction worker if he could borrow his phone to call 911.As Palmer waited for the police, his mind raced, the tranquilityof the morning shattered by what he had seen: molars, missingfront teeth, dental fillings, a human skull.

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