A Congressman, A Murder And A Botched Police Investigation
Finding Chandra: A True Washington Murder Mystery
By Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz
Reviewed by Maggie Barron
In 2008, after the Washington Post published a thirteen-part serial on its front page titled “Who Killed Chandra Levy,” the paper’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, weighed in. “No investigation in my 2 ½ years here has provoked such sharply opposing reader comments,” she wrote, ranging from “Fascinating! Totally hooked! Riveting” to “Lurid! Appalling! A waste of time!”
The same adjectives come to mind in Finding Chandra, a repackaging of the Post series published almost exactly nine years after the Washington intern’s unsolved murder. Investigative reporters Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz, with the benefit of new interviews and confidential documents from inside the investigation, piece together the case step by step, trying to get at the answers that have eluded investigators for so long.
Chandra Ann Levy arrived in Washington, D.C. in 2000, as one of the city’s 20,000 summer interns. On the cusp of independence, Chandra found an internship at the Bureau of Prisons and her own apartment near Dupont Circle, but her parents still paid her cell phone bill. Incidentally, this was how they caught wind of their daughter’s affair with their Congressman, Gary Condit.
Condit, a rising star in Congress and a founder of the Blue Dog Democrats, had a habit of handing out his email and phone number to young women and spending campaign money on gifts for his constituents. He met Chandra soon after she arrived in D.C. and the affair began several weeks later. Chandra’s life in D.C. revolved around her secret relationship with Condit, and she had few other friends. That’s partly why, when Chandra disappeared in May, 2001, her parents instantly suspected Condit, especially when he denied knowing her very well.
Chandra’s parents knew that a media frenzy would keep pressure on the police to find out what happened to their daughter. But as the pressure increased, it may have allowed the true killer to evade authorities.
Condit’s denial of the affair, and his rather clumsy attempts to have the investigation point elsewhere, meant that no one, parents, police, or press, could possibly consider any other suspects. Condit submitted himself to several interviews, a DNA test, and an apartment search all in an attempt to clear his name. Each effort only reaffirmed that he was the prime (and only) suspect. How could it not be him? After months of scrutiny FBI investigator finally arrived at the more likely conclusion: “Condit simply didn’t care enough about Chandra to harm her or kill her.”
The tunnel vision may seem laughable now, but it is also tragic. As the press and the police hounded Condit, the critical window to find Chandra’s killer closed, clues disappeared, and a man by the name of Ingmar Guandique remained at large to assault several other women in Rock Creek Park. Guandique, an immigrant from El Salvador with a history of psychological problems, began his series of attacks on joggers around the time of Chandra's disappearance. The day after Chandra disappeared, his landlady noticed that he was covered in bruises and scratch marks. Yet it was only a year later, when a hiker stumbled across Chandra's skeletal remains in the park, that officials began to investigate him. By then, there was very little evidence left.
The book chronicles the media circus surrounding the Levy case, of course, but it’s the details of the error-riddled police investigation that are truly compelling. When Chandra’s parents filed a missing persons report, the D.C. Police Department had a record of solving only a third of the city’s homicides. Police forgot to check the surveillance cameras in Levy’s building before the tapes were deleted. Investigators in her apartment somehow interfered with her laptop before the FBI could analyze it. They chased after tips called in by psychics, but they did not think to search Rock Creek until months after her disappearance. Mistakes persisted even when collecting her remains. Investigators missed several large bones and blamed “woodland creatures” for making them difficult to find.
Despite the rich material, Higham and Horwitz are maddeningly vague on key turning points in the investigation. Why did it take the FBI over a month to search Chandra’s computer (where they found that she had looked at a map of Rock Creek Park trails right before disappearing)? Why did Park Police not think to notify investigators when known predator Guandique admitted to seeing Chandra in the park? Why, when they finally did search the park, did they search the roads but not the hiking and jogging trails, where her body would later be found? In the book, these issues are barely addressed.
These omissions are even more frustrating when the authors choose to sprinkle in entirely unnecessary details, like the kinds of animals a hiker used to find as a child, or the favorite TV shows of one of the investigators. In other cases, the authors fall back on shorthand and cliché in place of true characterization. Chandra ”was like the girl next door.” A U.S. Attorney is “a tough-talking Long Islander.” Mrs. Condit is simply “the consummate politician’s wife.”
The authors conducted hours of interviews, and yet the sources never really come to life. Condit, Levy’s parents, and the investigators are almost never quoted directly, so readers never hear their voice or their words. Instead the authors tie the narrative together seamlessly using many different interviews and points of view, but this makes it difficult to know whose version of events we are reading. I found myself constantly flipping back to the Notes section to verify.
So what have we learned from the case of Chandra Levy? Sadly, very little. There is no reason to think that the media would be more tempered in its coverage of a similar case today, or that investigators would be more focused, or that powerful men would start telling the truth earlier.
When the news is slow, very little can stop a media circus (in the summer of 2001, when the press wasn’t covering Chandra Levy, it covered shark attacks). It was only on the morning of 9/11 that the news trucks finally left the homes of the Condits and the Levys. The frenzy was over.
Almost a decade later, Ingmar Guandique is awaiting an October trial for what appears to be the entirely senseless, unmotivated murder of Chandra Levy. Though there are no other suspects, the authors admit that there is still very little evidence connecting Guandique to the crime. In fact, investigators took so long to find Chandra that they could not even discern a cause of death from her remains. In the first months of the investigation, it hardly dawned on anyone that Chandra’s death might not have been a titillating scandal but was instead a horribly random occurrence. In the end, people, including Chandra’s parents, wanted it to be Condit. The mystery of Chandra Levy remains unsolved because everyone wanted the story to be more sensational than it was.
