My stomach dropped this morning, upon reading that Washington DC police have met "for the first time" with the brother of another dead, dark-haired, 20something intern, Joyce Chiang, who was also an attorney for Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), to tell him: "Your sister may have committed suicide."

As reported 31 August 2001 by WJLA TV, Channel 7 (an ABC affiliate), Roger Chiang--whose sister's decayed corpse was found along a stony embankment on the Potomac River, three months after she had gone missing at 1:00 AM from a Dupont Circle-area Starbucks coffeehouse--was summoned to a meeting with DC police. There, in their first meeting since Ms. Chiang's disappearance in 1999, Assistant DC Police Chief Terrance Gainer also had the temerity and recklessness to state to Mr. Chiang that "there is no connection between your sister's death and the disappearance of ChandraLevy."

Where I come from, and where I've been, this says to Mr. Chiang: "Son, stay away from this; you are not wanted here; go quietly and you'll be much better off."

Further, police sources are now trotting out the theory that Ms. Chiang was distraught upon the sudden breakoff of her relationship with an INS investigator, and that Ms. Chiang was spreading scurrilous information about her lost-lover (the Clintonian nuts-and-sluts routine rears its head again). (Recall, that, for a time, Chandra Levy told friends and relatives that she was dating an FBI agent, who, in fact, turned out to be Gary Condit.) Roger Chiang, who shared a Dupont Circle area apartment with his sister, stated recently to Greta Van Sustern on CNN that the relationship-in-question was an old one, that it had ended months before her disappearance, and that his sister displayed no signs of sadness in the recent days and up to the very morning of her disappearance, when he last saw her--nor was he ever interviewed by D.C. police, in the months following her disappearance.

Mr. Chiang, for his part, rejects police speculation of suicide,stating:

"One -- the tear in my sister's jacket; two -- the hair DNA samples that were found on the jacket, three -- the anonymous page she received from a pay phone at Dulles Airport the night she turned up missing," Chiang says. (Of this last point, on Joyce Chiang's beeper, which remained in her apartment after her disappearance, was a call which DC police eventually traced to a pay phone at Washington's Dulles International Airport; the caller was never determined.]

He also points to the message that was painted on the wall of a building behind the Dupont Circle Starbucks where Joyce was last seen.

"It reads, 'Good day J.C. May I never miss the thrill of being near you.' And Gainer didn't know about it," Chiang says. "I don't think that the analysis and investigation into my sister's case was good and thorough. And so that was what our meeting was about. And Gainer was very receptive." (italicized text via Horace Holmes, reporter, WJLCChannel 7)

Chandra Levy's body has not been found; FBI sources report that there are no new leads being considered in the Joyce Chiang death (read: The Case Is Closed), and DC police are confident enough about the outcome of these matters to be able to report to Roger Chiang that there is no connection between his sister's death (a bizarre disappearance of a vivacious young woman, who had just returned from dinner with friends and insisted upon being let out of the car, so that she could walk the rest of the way home, on a frozen January evening in DC; who stopped into Starbucks, intersection of Connecticut and R streets, to make a phone call and whose living entity was never seen again, the corpse being discovered by a paddling canoeist in Fairfax county months later).

Shattering the suicide theory:

--Joyce Chiang's government identification card and torn jacket were found in Anacostia Park the day after her disappearance.

--Ms. Chiang's office during much of her internship with Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) was directly adjacent to that of the office of Congressman Gary Condit.

--Chandra Levy was (also) told by Gary Condit to keep any identification off her person during their rendezvous.

No person with two functioning neurons left in his skull should ignore the glaring portion of Gary Condit's letter to constituents, which reads:

"I pray that she has not met the same fate as the other young woman who have disappeared from the same neighborhood."

Crime-TV show host John Walsh, whose son Adam was abducted and beheaded in the 1980s, has been trotting out the theory for weeks, that there is a serial killer operating in the DC area; and, in one of my recent columns on Gary Condit, I said that I agree.

Joyce Chiang deliberately asked to be let out of her friends' vehicle, after midnight, so that she could walk home alone, on a snowy January evening in Washington DC. She asked to be let out at a specific location--that of aStarbucks coffeehouse, on which a message was drawn, bearing her initials (J.C.). She was to rendezvous with someone, at a familiar meeting place. Her identification card is found the next day at a park not extremely near that of Starbucks, along with her jacket, which is torn. Her corpse, upon which are hairs and fibers of unknown (or undeclared) origin, washes up in the Potomac far downstream.

Joyce Chiang did not walk from Starbucks at Connecticut and R streets, to Anacostia Park to shed her winter coat and identification in the dead of winter, only to trudge, shivering, to a place over the Potomac River to jump in. Much more likely, as with his dumping of the watch case given to him by yet another mistress in an Alexandria, VA, trash can, just hours before FBI were to search his apartment for the first time, Gary Condit disposed of Joyce Chiang's ID, or had one of his aides do it for him. And DC police, FBI and probably CIA and NSA (pinpoint satellite mapping of the DC area, 24-hours a day) know it, conclusively.