It looks like Chandra Levy is going to die twice. Missing now for more than three months, she is quite possibly dead. And now she's getting killed again in the media.

Her poor parents, already suffering deadly anguish, are destined to suffer further as the story shifts from what actually happened to Chandra -- and there's a limit to that, since nobody seems to have any facts -- to larger media musings on the 24-year-old's life and times. And journalists, moreover, will inevitably "cover" the Chandra story through the often-narcissistic prism of their own experiences.

Of course, some might argue that scribes and scribblers might as well write what they feel because they know so little. A flurry of apparently inaccurate reports has fluttered across screens and pages in recent weeks: Levy was videotaped at a convenience store, she was seen having keys duplicated, she was buried -- after being shrink- wrapped -- in a parking lot.

In the meantime, cable news outlets fill their 24/7 maw with hours of talk on the subject. CNN's Larry King and MSNBC's Geraldo Rivera have been holding virtual reunions of O.J. Simpson-era talking heads on their shows. And the Fox News Channel featured psychics to "help" with the search and then, as a seeming antidote, featured a psychic debunker.

Now comes the coup de grace to Levy's reputation: The new Talk magazine offers an article depicting Levy as a scheming would-be homewrecker. The piece quotes Levy "friend" Sven Jones saying that she was "not the type of woman who was going to be the little mistress waiting home on the couch" for her paramour, Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif.). Levy was going to force the issue, Jones remembers her telling him, because "I've invested too much in this."

And how can the Levys, meanwhile, respond to such charges? After all, the people making the charges are alive and well, while the defendant, most likely, is not.

Other writers have been more self-indulgently venturesome, even cruel, toward the Levy family. In the pages of the latest issue of the New York Observer, the well-known writer Anne Roiphe recalled with no small pride her own career as a sexually active Jewish female and then wandered over to the Levy case: "I don't want to be flippant about Chandra Levy. Her Jewishness is not the point of this gripping story, this tragedy. But as a side note, it tells us that yes, Jewish girls can be sexy." That's the ticket. Say you don't want to be flippant, and then be flip.

Some content-providers mask cruelty, however slightly, in mockery.

The Onion, an online humor magazine in the tradition of the old National Lampoon at its cruelest, "reported" the following last month: "The Centers for Disease Control issued a warning today to all physicians born of Jewish descent that their daughters could be 1,000 times more likely than non-Jewish doctors' daughters to become slutty, sexually-charged adultering whores." Citing, if that's the word, doctor-daughters Heidi Fleiss, Monica Lewinsky and now Chandra Levy, it warned that SDS (Slutty Daughter Syndrome) was breaking out.

Others have been merely cruel, period.

Debbie Schlussel, WorldNetDaily columnist, wrote last week, "I'm very proud to be a Jewish American. And I'm sick of the Levys shamelessly dragging my religion through the mud, in their star- struck, new-age attempt to find their daughter." Continuing her pose of moral superiority, Schlussel added, "I, too, was one of those interns and behaved myself with the utmost decorum."

Yet even the utmostly decorous Schlussel seems to enjoy having it both ways. The slug of her column reads, "Debbie Does Politics," which is a clear play on the famous porn movie from the '80s, "Debbie Does Dallas."

Like other celebrated cases, such as those of O.J., JonBenet Ramsey and, of course, the Clinton impeachment, the Levy case affords the ever-expanding media opportunity to unspool their own opinions and obsessions yet again.

Maybe that's what people want.

The media include an ever-expanding share of the population as more and people figure out some way to make themselves seen, heard or read. So, even if the mystery of Chandra Levy's disappearance is solved, the story is likely to continue. And so, in a way, Chandra Levy will be immortal. Of course, that's probably not what Chandra would have wanted. But, then, nobody asked her.