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Notes -
I doubt his immigration status was relevant to the story fading away. It was a liberal organization, the Washington Post, that led the charge to get the DC police to take a closer look at the guy. More importantly, though, when these things are done, they're done. When the FBI released their final report in the Gaby Petito investigation last January, it made the news, but the interest wasn't nearly as big as it had been last fall. The New York Times ran over ten stories about the Petito disappearance during September and October of last year, and the story of the FBI report is the only one they've run since then. That's not quite a 1 to 1 comparison because the Petito mystery was solved and the Levy mystery wasn't, but people move on from popular crime stories easily.
If liberals really couldn't cope with an illegal immigrant being the perp, they wouldn't have blocked it out, but focused on what a terrible case it was. The only real evidence the police had against the guy was the testimony of a jailhouse snitch who had a history of telling stories to curry favor with law enforcement. The initial story the informant gave police (back in 2001) was that Condit had paid the perp $25 grand as a hit job on Levy. The assertion is ridiculous for reasons I shouldn't have to explain, and the DC police rightly told the guy to pound sand until the Post started asking questions years later. When it was revealed post-conviction that the informant had perjured himself on the witness stand the prosecution was forced to drop the charges, since the guy had no credibility at this point and the rest of the case was garbage. Not that anyone could have known all of this in 2008, but cases that revolve around jailhouse informants and other questionable kinds of evidence are generally pretty shoddy.
As for the Ogaden War, I apologize for getting the year wrong; I knew it was the Carter Administration but whiffed on the exact date. Anyway, one year ago today we were in the midst of the Gabby Petito obsession and, as I alluded to earlier, the Times mentioned Petito's name in 16 articles, though some of these were bare mentions (e.g. "While most of us are obsessing over Gabby Petito, the Yankees are still in a pennant race", etc.) and others are only peripherally about her (e.g. articles about other missing people), so I'd say there were at least ten depending on what you count and as high as 18 if you count every article that mentioned her name, ever. In the first 2 months of the Ogden war, July and August 1977, the Times ran over 50 articles about the conflict. Granted, some of these were world news briefs, and the Times traditionally focuses more on hard news and less on popular crime stories, but the difference is still stark. I don't want to suggest that this war was on everyone's mind to the same extent the Petito case was (what the Times didn't provide was more than made up for by the tabloids), but it had serious Cold War implications and was certainly a big deal at the time.
I suppose the report didn't reveal any further juicy details?
I have to say that sounds genuinely surprising. Maybe his legal status was only confirmed by the authorities later?
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