Susan Levy has, in fact, told a lot of different stories to the media. She appeared on "Good Morning America" May 14, two weeks after Chandra disappeared, holding a toy duck good-luck charm and sitting with her daughter Chandra's good friend Jennifer Baker, who, it was later revealed, was also an intern in Condit's office.

At this point, while Condit had offered $10,000 to help find his "good friend," no one was romantically linking his name to Levy directly. "GMA" host Diane Sawyer asked only about "a mysterious boyfriend in politics" who had been mentioned in an e-mail from Levy to a friend, and reported in the Levys' hometown paper, the Modesto Bee. "I do know that she had mentioned to me that she had a boyfriend in November," Susan Levy said. "Actually, I don't know of any particular boyfriend," she said. "But she's a young lady and knows a lot of different people. And that's all I can say."

Two days later, Baker was quoted in the Washington Post saying that Levy had told her she had a boyfriend in the FBI, but that the two never spoke in any greater detail about him. A day later, Susan Levy told reporters that she was unaware of any relationship between her daughter and Condit, while Condit's chief of staff told the Post that a relationship "totally did not occur."

By that point, the Levys had hooked up with the Sund/Carrington Foundation, a local group formed in the memory of three women who were abducted and murdered near Yosemite National Park two years ago. The group's executive director, Kim Peterson, became a ubiquitous presence, part media coach and media coordinator. ("We have the Washington Post at 6:30 p.m., 'Dateline' at 8 and someone else at 9," she boasted to a reporter May 18.) She also, say reporters who have interviewed the Levys, would step in when they pressed too hard for details.

The Modesto Bee broke the news May 18 that Levy had e-mailed a friend that "my man will be coming back here when Congress starts up again. I'm looking forward to seeing him." In the same e-mail, she admits to lying to another friend that her boyfriend was in the FBI "so she wouldn't ask questions." (That friend turned out to be Baker, the Condit aide, who had told reporters that Levy had told her she was dating someone in the FBI, and has nary been heard from since.) Susan Levy reacted by saying, "It's not a comforting thing to hear these stories. It makes me feel nervous."

After the Post broke the news that Levy had slept over at Condit's apartment, Condit's own bizarre mishandling of the situation, with uncoordinated messages coming from both his chief of staff, Lynch, and new lawyer, Joseph Cotchett, guaranteed sustained coverage. Increasingly, while Cotchett blanketed media organizations with letters warning them about reporting that Levy had spent the night at Condit's home, his denials were parsed -- he said Condit never told law enforcement officials about a Levy overnight, not that one never occurred -- and succeeded in raising questions about Condit's relationship with Levy, not dispelling them.

Never shrinking from view was Susan Levy, whose rhetoric toward her local congressman was slowly beginning to heat up. During an interview June 11 with Fox's Bill O'Reilly, she answered the question of whether she knew Condit by saying, "Well, all I can say is that Gary Condit said we -- we're -- he's friends of our family. And I could only say that I never met the man."

But she still was unwilling to tell everything she knew. After the Post quoted an unnamed Levy relative saying that Condit's denials did not correlate with what Chandra Levy had previously told the relative, reporters asked Susan Levy to comment. Levy confirmed the unnamed relative's doubts about Condit's denials, which was quite reasonably construed by reporters to mean that Levy was confirming her daughter had been involved with Condit.

But when questioned by Fox's Paula Zahn on June 14, she denied that's what she was doing. "No, no, I did not confirm. I said that a relative may be right about what she's reporting, but I did not confirm in the sense of they're saying that indeed I'm admitting that she had an affair with anyone."

Got that? "So it was like misconstrued," she continued. "And immediately, they ... are saying that Mrs. Levy confirms that, yes, indeed her daughter definitely had an affair with Gary Condit, as if I had spoken that way. Well, it was nothing that I said."

But a day later, that was exactly what she was saying. She finally told the Post that, having learned from a relative the details of her daughter's relationship with Condit, she had asked Chandra about it in April. "When I asked her that," according to Levy, "Chandra said, 'How did you know?'"

The Levys also released a home video last week, reportedly made last December, which captures Levy's father, Robert, joking that "[Chandra] told us all about her adventures in D.C., the Bureau of Prisons, and her congressman friend," which would suggest they knew something about the relationship before April.

Levy also recently described how, after getting hold of Chandra's cellphone records in late May and after seeing about 20 calls to the same number, she dialed it and "listened to the soft music and instructions to punch in her number. When she did, she says, she wasn't surprised that California Representative Gary Condit phoned back," according to Time magazine this week.

In the Time story, presumably filed last Friday, Susan Levy recounted that she merely had an awkward exchange with Condit, and then hung up. But on Tuesday she told the Washington Post that she actually confronted Condit at the time, asking him if he was having an affair with her daughter, which he denied.

And before both the Time and Post stories appeared, Levy had always insisted to reporters that she had not spoken to Condit since May 6, when she complained that the D.C. police were not working fast enough.

Of course, it's perfectly understandable that a mother would want to keep the world from knowing that her daughter was having an adulterous affair with a politician. And it's difficult to be critical of Susan Levy for her evolving stories, since she's presumably motivated by what she believes is in her daughter's best interest. She will clearly say or do anything to keep the pressure on the police, and now on Condit, to help solve the case.

But despite the increased heat on Condit and the police, thanks to the repeated misinformation coming from all quarters, we may still be a long way away from learning the true story of what has happened to Chandra Levy.

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