Washington Post staff writers Allan Lengel and Sari Horowitz report. Excerpt:
Joe McCann, a private investigator who found one of Chandra Levy’s leg bones in Rock Creek Park this month, was happy to provide D.C. police detectives with details of the discovery.
But on Friday, during an interview at police headquarters, the detectives asked McCann if he would submit to a polygraph test and seemed to question the veracity of his story, according to sources familiar with the incident.
McCann, a former D.C. homicide detective hired by the Levy family’s attorney, was insulted by the request — and declined.
Yesterday, D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said it is standard procedure in major cases to ask witnesses with crucial information to take a polygraph. He said there was no reason to believe that McCann moved the bone to the spot or fabricated his account.
“We’re not trying to make a big deal” of this, Ramsey said. “The question was not meant to challenge his integrity. . . . We’re crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i’ and doing what we normally do. It’s just a standard question.”
But former law enforcement officials who know McCann said the polygraph request was insulting and a possible way to divert attention from the real question: Why didn’t D.C. police find the bone during an earlier search of that section of the park?
“It’s not routine” to ask for a polygraph in instances such as McCann’s, said defense lawyer Louis H. Hennessey, who headed the D.C. police homicide unit in the mid-1990s. “I think they’re looking like fools and they’re trying to cast aspersions on other people.”