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Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. Listener discretion is advised. A 24-year-old Washington, D.C. intern and graduate student who has hopes and dreams of working for the FBI suddenly vanishes.
disappears from her apartment, leaving behind her ID, purse, cell phone, and dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. The investigation into her disappearance would uncover a romantic affair involving a well-respected U.S. congressman, a congressman who was married in almost three decades her senior.
It would take investigators over a year before they had any solid answers in the case. What happened to that 24-year-old intern? And was a U.S. congressman somehow to blame for her disappearance? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 42, The Chandra Levy Story. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that discusses real, bone-chilling true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case. Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases remain unsolved.
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Another great way you can help support Forensic Tales is by leaving us a rating with a review. Now, let's jump right in to this week's episode.
Hey guys, thank you so much for joining me on another episode of Forensic Tales Podcast. The case we're covering this week is a case that is definitely in my list of top 10 all-time true crime stories. I knew I wanted to cover it on my show right from the beginning. It has always been on my content calendar.
And this is one where I've got an opinion on who I think the killer is. So be sure to stay tuned until the very end of the episode so you can hear who I think is the guy. But before we get into the case itself, I always think it's important to know about the victim and know who they were as people before they became a crime victim.
Chandra Levy was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but as a kid, her parents, Robert and Susan Levy, moved the family to Modesto, California, and that's where she attended high school at Grace M. Davis High School.
She grew up in a relatively religious household. Both her parents were active members at a local conservative Jewish synagogue. And by all accounts, Chandra lived the all-American life.
Many years later, in an interview with 2020, Chandra's mother, Susan, referred to her daughter as a woman that didn't like being told what to do. She was direct, she was independent, and she knew exactly what she wanted out of her life. After she graduated from high school, Chandra attended college at San Francisco State University where she studied journalism.
Once she finished her bachelor's degree, she started an internship with the California Bureau of Secondary Education in Los Angeles, California. That's when she decided she wanted to go back to school for her master's degree. So she was accepted at the University of Southern California, where she was going to pursue a master's in public administration.
During her final part of her master's degree program in the fall of 2000, Chandra moved to Washington, D.C. for an internship with the Bureau of Prisons. Her ultimate career goal was to work for the FBI, and this internship was a great opportunity for her.
She was assigned to work in the Bureau's Public Affairs Division, and by all accounts, she was very successful there. She was exactly the kind of person who would not only do well in school, but the kind of person who would end up getting a job working somewhere like the FBI.
She completed the internship in April 2001 and was supposed to return back to California to ultimately attend her graduation in May. And because her internship was over, she had to move out of her apartment in Washington, D.C.,
So in late April, early May of that year, Chandra was packing up her apartment and she was preparing to return home to her parents' house. But when her parents hadn't heard from Chandra, they don't have her travel plans. They don't even know when exactly she's coming home. Chandra's dad, Robert, started to call her, but he didn't get an answer.
He called again. No answer. Left a message. He called again. No answer. Finally, after a couple days of calling his daughter but getting no answer, he grew frustrated and left her a message saying, damn it, Chandra, please call me back.
When May 6th comes around and her parents still haven't heard from her, which it's now been over five days, Chandra's parents decide that they need to report her missing to the Modesto Police Department. Authorities in Modesto, California immediately picked up the phone and alerted law enforcement in Washington, D.C.,
who began searching local hospitals, thinking maybe Chandra had some sort of accident or something. They also dispatched officers to her apartment in DuPont Circle, which is a neighborhood right there in the center of the historic district in Washington, D.C. But they didn't find her in any of the local hospitals.
And they didn't find any signs of foul play inside of her apartment. Inside Chandra's Washington, D.C. apartment, police notice several half-packed suitcases. They found her ID, her purse, her cell phone, and they find dirty dishes in her kitchen sink.
Now, these are things that didn't appear like Chandra was going to be gone from her apartment for a very long time. Also, her answering machine was completely full of messages. Many of the messages were from her parents, her friends left messages looking for her.
But they also discovered two other voice messages on her answering machine. Messages from U.S. Congressman Gary Condit. Chandra's parents, Susan and Robert Levy, paid for their daughter's cell phone. So they began looking through her phone records to try and figure out who was she talking to around the time of her disappearance.
Susan noticed that there was a certain phone number that Chandra called repeatedly. One of these phone numbers caught her attention. Chandra called this phone number at all different times of day, sometimes in the morning, sometimes late at night. This same phone number kept popping up on the phone bill.
Now, Susan knew that her daughter was dating someone, but Chandra wouldn't tell her parents who this person was. Chandra had told her mom that she was dating some mysterious person, but she wanted to keep the relationship a secret. She didn't want the entire world knowing who she was dating.
Susan decided to call the phone number to find out who Chandra kept calling at all different times of day. Maybe this is this mysterious person that she was dating. And when she called, she learned that the phone number belonged to U.S. Congressman Gary Condon.
In 2001, Gary Condit was an extremely well-known and well-respected politician. He started his career becoming the youngest mayor of a city in California. And from 1972 through 2000, he never lost an election.
He was considered to be a relatively conservative Democrat and was a well-respected state representative of California. Gary Condit was also married with children of his own, and he was almost 30 years older than Chandra, who was only 24 years old back in 2001.
So Chandra's parents called Gary Condit and they even left him a message. And within moments, Condit called his parents back. Susan Levy asked him why there were so many phone calls between Chandra and him. Basically asking, why is my 24-year-old daughter, an intern, calling a U.S. congressman day and night?
told Susan that Chandra was simply asking him for career advice. He told her that he's helped many students get jobs working for the FBI. He admitted that he did in fact know Chandra, but claimed that he didn't know her very well. He also said that he didn't have any idea where Chandra was or where she might be.
Susan and Robert Levy left their home in Northern California and traveled to Washington, D.C. themselves to try and get some answers about where their daughter could be. And when they arrived in Washington, D.C., they brought a media firestorm with them. Almost overnight, Chandra's disappearance became national headline news.
In fact, an article I read reported that 63% of all Americans closely followed Chandra's case. That's well over half of our country. Americans watched the Levees go on national television crying for their daughter's safe return.
The family even provided the media dozens of home videos showing Chandra. It's absolutely gut-wrenching to watch any of these videos just looking at the emotion, at the pure and utter heartache this family was going through not knowing where their daughter was.
Now, pretty quickly into the investigation, the Levees told police the phone calls between Chandra and Congressman Gary Condit. So police contacted him, which instantly started a pattern of inconsistencies in his story.
And that's because Condit told police at first that he didn't know Chandra very well. This was a very similar story to what he told the Levees. When they asked him if they had an intimate or a romantic relationship, he said, and I quote, I don't think we need to go there. You can infer what you want about that. End quote.
Well, this wasn't exactly the type of response that law enforcement was looking for. If they wanted any information from Gary Condit, it wasn't going to be easy trying to get it. Chandra's aunt came forward to police and said Chandra had told her about her relationship with the congressman.
According to Chandra's very own aunt, she was in a romantic relationship with Condit and that it had to remain a secret. Chandra told her aunt that she was in love with Condit, that she hoped someday they would get married, that they would start a family together. In Chandra's very own words, they had a five-year plan together.
Chandra's aunt told authorities that just a couple days before her disappearance, Chandra had called her aunt and told her that she had some really big and exciting news that she wanted to share with her. But Chandra's aunt would never get the chance to call her back and find out what this really big and exciting news was.
Was this the big news that Chandra had? What was it before she disappeared? Was she possibly pregnant? We will never know. Authorities learned that in October 2000, Chandra went to Gary Condon's office with a friend of hers from California.
So Gary Condit represented the part of California where Chandra was from. So given her interest and her career path, she really wanted to meet with him. And during their visit together, Condit offered to give Chandra and her friend a tour of the capital. There's a, well, now very famous photo of Gary Condit, big smile on his face,
with his arms wrapped around Chandra and her friend during this visit. After a couple days from the visit to the Capitol, Chandra called Condon's office. A few weeks later, the affair began. Chandra was last seen or heard from on May 1st, and Washington, D.C. police were at Chandra's apartment on May 6th, May 7th, and May 8th.
Over the course of those three days, while they searched for Chandra and any sign of her, they failed to ask the apartment complex for any surveillance footage of the building. This is really important because the surveillance footage might be able to tell where Chandra left her apartment and where she might have been going.
At the very least, the bare minimum, it would have been able to provide some sort of insight into the day that she disappeared. But because the police didn't ask for the apartment's surveillance footage, all of the footage from the day Chandra was last seen had already been recorded over.
And that's because the cameras are programmed to record over themselves every seven days. Washington, D.C. police didn't ask for the surveillance footage until Chandra had been missing for weeks. And another huge setback in the investigation was Chandra's laptop computer. So her laptop was found inside of her apartment.
The problem was when an officer who was not trained in handling digital evidence turned it on and tried to search it. And he ended up corrupting the entire computer. Now, I don't know much about computers or laptops.
But even I have no idea how this officer could have corrupted her entire computer before they were even able to search it. So the search of Chandra's laptop was delayed for over a month until a trained person could uncorrupt the laptop files and finally get access to her search history.
The forensic search of the laptop had very important information from May 1st, the day that Chandra was last heard from. On the morning of May 1st, Chandra used her laptop and appeared to just be searching the internet.
She looked up some Southwest flights. She searched the web. She sent an email to her mom about the cost of the airline fares. There was nothing really out of the ordinary here. The only thing that stood out to investigators was that Chandra made searches for Kringle Mansion and Rock Creek Park.
This was the first big clue about where Chandra might have been on May 1st. Chandra ended her searches and turned off her laptop computer at 12.24 p.m. And that was the last sign of her. Rock Creek Park is a really large park near the Capitol. It's something like 1,700 acres wide.
We're talking twice the size of Central Park in New York. It's a place known for some nice jogging trails, but it also has a lot of brushy, kind of wooded areas. So when police find out about Chandra's internet search of Kringle Mansion and of Rock Creek Park, the Washington, D.C. police, along with the FBI, say,
Bring in an additional 50 police recruits to help in searching the park. Because we're talking a search area twice the size of Central Park. They needed a all hands on deck search. But after searching the park for weeks, it didn't turn up any new leads in the case. They found no sign of Chandra Levy.
When the initial search of Rock Creek Park didn't turn up any new leads, police question Gary Condon yet again on July 7th. This is now the third time police are speaking to him. This time, Condon finally threw in the towel and said, look, yes, I was in a romantic relationship with Chandra.
Now, I don't think this admission is really anything special. We all knew about the affair. It just took Condon three police interviews to finally be able to admit it. What married, middle-aged politician wants to admit on the world stage he's having an affair with an intern 30 years younger?
I think the obvious answer is that nobody. He probably really didn't want to admit it because, look, now the intern he was having an affair with has been missing for over two months. Your affair just got a thousand times worse. But it wasn't just Chandra Levy that Congressman Gary Condit was having an affair with.
Because several weeks after Chandra's disappearance, a flight attendant by the name of Anne Marie Smith came out and said that she was also having an affair with Condon. Anne Marie Smith even went on Larry King Live and said that Condon told her that his wife was sick and that they didn't really have a husband and wife type relationship together.
And right after Ann Smith went on Larry King Live, who else goes on the same exact show? Of course, Gary Condon did. Condon went on the show and pretty much denied everything Ann Smith said. And he said that whatever Smith was saying had absolutely nothing to do with Chandra Levy.
On August 23rd, 2001, now three months after Chandra's disappearance, Gary Condon finally agreed to sit down for a major television interview. And he decided to sit down with ABC's Connie Chung on 2020, maybe thinking that she was going to go easy on him.
Well, she did not go easy on him. In front of 24 million viewers who tuned in, Connie Chung was very direct with Condon, and it wasn't an easy interview. When she asked him about the affair with Chandra, Condon's answer surprised everybody, especially the Levy family.
He said that he didn't want to go into the details about the affair because the Levy family had asked him not to. This surprised Susan and Robert Levy because they never asked anything of Condon. The only thing they've asked him is where is Chandra?
Condon said in the interview that he only knew Chandra for about five months and that they never discussed getting married, never discussed having children together. They never had this so-called five-year plan together. What wasn't surprising about the ABC interview was that Gary Condon was how he always was when it came to Chandra.
He said he had no idea where she was. He didn't elaborate on anything. Now, this is not a political podcast, but we kind of witnessed a politician doing and acting like politicians do.
It was pretty much the worst interview he ever could have done. If he was looking to score any points in the eyes of public opinion, he got nothing. In fact, I would argue his interview with Connie Chung made him look even worse. And it turns out I'm not the only one with that opinion.
After that interview, Fox News and Opinion Dynamics took a poll of registered voters and 44% of people believed that Condon was somehow involved in Chandra Levy's disappearance. And 27% of voters thought that he should resign from office altogether, all just in the eyes of public opinion.
In the official police investigation, there was no evidence, forensic or otherwise, that suggested Condit had anything to do with Chandra's disappearance. It simply became a media sensation that we have a well-respected U.S. congressman having this affair with a grad student intern, and now she's gone missing.
On May 1st at 12.24 p.m., the exact moment Chandra signed off her computer for the very last time, Condit was in a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney. That has been validated and proven over and over again. Condit was nowhere near Chandra's apartment or even Chandra herself the day that she went missing.
A little over a year goes until authorities get a major break in the case. On the morning of May 22, 2002, a man was walking his dog in Rock Creek Park. The dog, walking a little bit in front of the man, went up a hill, a head, and then came back down to the owner with a bone.
A bone that appeared to be a human skull. The news about the human remains found in Rock Creek Park spread like wildfire in the media. Did the remains belong to Chandra? Did we finally have some answers in the case? The human remains were discovered around a tree at the bottom of a ravine.
The remains weren't along any major jogging trail or anything like that. And the bones appeared to crime scene investigators to be scattered. They didn't appear to have been buried. And along the bones, investigators recovered a tennis shoe, a sports bra,
a t-shirt that read, Property of USC Athletics, and jogging pants that were inside out with each pant leg tied in a knot. The remains were sent to the medical examiner's office in hopes that they could be identified through DNA and to determine if any valuable forensic evidence was left behind.
Because the remains had been exposed to the elements for so long, likely over a year, there was very little forensic evidence left. The only way the medical examiner could positively identify the remains was through dental records. And through those dental records, the remains were identified as belonging to 24-year-old Chandra Levy.
Besides the identification of the remains, the forensic pathologist wasn't able to determine much more. They couldn't find a cause of death, but based on what is known about the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, Chandra's death was ruled a homicide.
The only evidence from the remains that possibly suggested a cause of death was they found Chandra's hyoid bone. So this is a bone. It's a very small bone in the neck that when it's broken, often suggests that the individual was strangled. In Chandra's case, this bone in her neck was broken. So Chandra,
making some investigators believe that she may have been strangled. But it's important to note that this has never been confirmed in the case. After the discovery of Chandra's body, the Washington, D.C. police were highly scrutinized for their job in the investigation. The Washington, D.C. police admitted that they did not search the area where the remains were found.
And it's without question here that if the police and FBI did a better job of searching Rock Creek Park, the place they believed Chandra went that day, they would have found her body a year ago. It shouldn't have taken them months on months to find her.
This was just a clear example of a major law enforcement agency's failure to properly investigate a missing persons case. On top of corrupting the laptop computer, the failure to obtain surveillance footage of Chandra's apartment, this was a huge, huge failure by the Washington, D.C. Police Department. There's just no getting around that.
They should have been able to find Chandra's body right after she went missing. And if they did, we would have had a lot more forensic evidence in the case. The body would have been in much better condition. There's the possibility we could recover hair, DNA, fiber, anything from the possible suspect. But now...
Over a year later, all of that trace evidence is gone. So now that the police have located Chandra's remains in Rock Creek Park, the question becomes, what happened to her? Did this? And most importantly, why?
Did she decide to go jogging in the park? Did she go there to meet up with somebody? What happened to Chandra Levy? People close to Chandra said that she didn't like Rock Creek Park, that she actually thought the park was creepy.
Now, if this is true, the idea that she went out there on May 1st to go jogging seemed unlikely because finding the park creepy or unsafe, the trail she was on wasn't a jogging trail. It was a horse trail. So why was she even out there?
By this point, the Levy family was extremely frustrated with how the Washington, D.C. Police Department handled the case. Even after they located the remains and searched the area for additional evidence or forensic evidence that could possibly point to a suspect, they still weren't satisfied with the investigation.
So the Levy family decided to take things into their own hands. They ended up hiring a private investigator, Joe McCain, and they also hired a private attorney, a guy by the name of Billy Martin. They wanted to see what they could uncover about Chandra's murder on their own. They had very little faith in the police, and I don't think I can blame them.
The private investigator that the Levy family hired, Joe McCain, went out to the area in the park where Chandra's body was discovered. And in an interview with the television program, How Things Really Happened, the first thing McCain thought when he got to the area was,
How could the police have done a full search of the area with so many leaves on the ground? There were leaves everywhere. So he got a rake and just started raking the leaves to try and see what he could find. Within practically minutes, McCain discovered Chandra's femur bone.
Now, the femur bone is the largest bone in our bodies. So what he found wasn't just, you know, a pinky finger. He found her femur bone, something that was overlooked during the initial police search. So through the Levy's private attorney, they went public with this. It was yet another mistake made by the police.
So once again, embarrassed and with their tails tucked between their legs, the Washington, D.C. Police Department went back to conduct yet another search of the same area. And surprise or no surprise, on this second search, they found additional bones and more remains belonging to Chandra Levy.
The memorial service for Chandra Levy was held on May 28, 2002 in Modesto, California. Over 1,200 people showed up that day to show their support, to show their love for Chandra. Unfortunately, though, this wouldn't be the end of all the heartache that the Levy family would have to endure.
Because it would be several more years before police could name a suspect in Chandra's murder. In 2008, now seven years after Chandra went missing and was killed, a suspect finally emerged in the case. His name? Igmar Guandique.
a then 27-year-old Salvadorian immigrant with a very serious and lengthy criminal record. Guandique is a very scary man. By 2008, he had already been convicted of attacking two women in Rock Creek Park, the same park Chandra was found. But by 2008, Guandique
This wasn't the first time that investigators working Chandra's case had heard of him. He had been on their radar in Chandra's killing since 2001. Back in 2001, a jailhouse informant housed in a D.C. jail claimed to know who was responsible for Chandra's murder. This informant, whose identity has always been kept secret,
told the FBI that Guandique was the guy who killed Chandra. But not only that, this informant claimed that Guandique told him that Gary Condit paid him $25,000 to kill Chandra. Okay, so this sounded pretty good back in 2001. The only problem was...
It was completely false. It did not happen the way the informant claimed. Gary Condon never paid Guandique or anyone for that matter to have killed Chandra. Now, don't get me wrong. Gary Condon is a cheater, is an adulteress, is a liar, and is probably not the best overall guy, but
But cheating on your wife doesn't make you a murderer. So, Guandique just became a suspect who had been hiding in plain sight for the next seven years. And until 2008, no one even knew his name.
In 2008, Guandique emerged again as a suspect after the Washington, D.C. police established a new task force to serve as a fresh set of eyes on the case.
The Washington, D.C. police just got a new police chief, a woman by the name of Kathy Lanier, who right when she took her position, replaced the head investigator assigned to Chandra's case with three very experienced veteran investigators. And the very first thing they did was revisit Guandique's involvement in the case and
and basically figure out if he should have been ruled out or not back in 2001. And even though we know that Gary Condit didn't pay him to kill Chandra, but should Guandique have been completely cleared? This guy was serving time for attacking two women in Rock Creek Park.
He grabbed these women at knife point. Both women were white. They were both listening to music when they were attacked. This is a very similar M.O. to the Chandra Levy case. Guandique also has a long history of violence. He had a major drug and alcohol program. He failed to show up to work the day Chandra disappeared.
His former landlady reported that the same day of Chandra's killing, his face was very badly scratched and bruised, and he had a bloody eye. Possible signs that he was involved in a physical struggle or some sort of altercation that day. So this was enough information for authorities to go back and visit and question Guandique.
And in September 2008, authorities searched his federal prison cell. And right there, right there in the cell, they found a picture of Chandra Levy hanging on the wall. He was immediately arrested and the police start to grill him. Authorities showed him another picture of Chandra and he said yes.
He saw her in Rock Creek Park that day. They asked him if he thought she was attractive. He said yes. Here we have a guy who years earlier admitted to a jailhouse informant that he killed Chandra. He's in federal prison for two other very similar attacks in the same exact park. There's no other course of action here.
So on March 9th, 2009, Guandique was arrested and charged with killing Chandra Levy. Nine years after Chandra was killed, there was finally someone being held responsible for her death. And in October 2010, Guandique was on trial for murder. Even though he had a violent criminal record,
He'd already been convicted of two previous attacks in the same park with very similar circumstances. He had a picture of Chandra Levy inside his jail cell. He had confessed to a jailhouse informant back in 2001. He killed her. He pled not guilty. He said he didn't do it. He wasn't the guy who killed Chandra.
But there was one really, really big problem that Guandique would have to face at trial. And that was a guy by the name of Armando Morales. So Armando Morales took the stand as a prosecution witness during the murder trial.
Morales was a former cellmate of Guandique's, and Morales and him were also members of the same gang. Morales testified at trial that Guandique was scared that he was going to be transferred to another prison and that he was worried that a rape conviction on his record would make him subject to prison violence.
We all know that prison inmates, well, they don't like rapists too much. So Morales testified that Guandique admitted to killing Chandra, but he was very adamant by telling his friend that he did not rape her. This was it. This was really the only thing left that the prosecution needed to rest their case on November 10th, 2010.
The jury in the case deliberated for two days. They did come back in the courtroom once to ask the judge for clarification on one of the counts, but they went back to deliberation and then finally came back with a guilty verdict for first-degree murder for killing Chandra Levy. And he was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
And everyone thought this was finally some sort of justice for Chandra and the entire Levy family. It's been almost a decade since Chandra was killed. She would have been a young woman in her 30s by now. Her parents could finally experience a tiny amount of peace knowing that their daughter's killer is behind bars. But...
Just five years later, the case would take a completely unexpected and heartbreaking turn. Five years into Guandique's 60-year sentence, the district attorney received information that Armando Morales, the prosecution's witness and former cellmate, perjured himself on stand at trial.
This meant that the star witness, the witness that put Chandra's killer behind bars, is a big, fat liar. Morales had a long history of being untrustworthy and providing false information to prison officials. He was certainly not a credible witness.
Not a witness that should have been regarded as trustworthy or telling the truth about pretty much anything. I think if you asked Armando Morales what he had for breakfast the day of that murder trial, he would have lied about that too. And certainly the credibility of witnesses, especially during a first-degree murder trial, is huge. And huge might be an understatement.
If we're going to be taking away someone's freedom, even when it comes to a killer's freedom, we need the witnesses to be credible. They need to be telling the truth and they need to be telling it beyond a reasonable doubt. Now, with this new information sitting on the district attorney's desk, they have absolutely no choice but to vacate the conviction.
In July of 2016, the prosecution decided that they wouldn't seek a new trial against Guandique, that they would just have him deported out of the country. This decision, which obviously was not an easy one for anyone in the prosecution's office to make,
was largely decided because they really didn't feel like they had enough evidence. Without Morales' testimony that Guandique confessed to Chandra's killing, what other evidence did they really have? Of course, we know that Guandique is a very scary predator. He has attacked women in the past in the same area where Chandra was found.
But the two women he attacked were not killed. Chandra's case, by definition, is different. She was killed by her attacker. Now, does this completely rule Guandique out? Absolutely not. Physical or sexual assaults can absolutely lead to homicide, even when murder wasn't the intended outcome.
It's quite possible that Chandra put up a fight, a really good one, and it ultimately ended up in murder. We know that Guandique didn't show up to work that day. His face was reportedly covered in scratches and bruises, and he had a bloody eye. Those types of physical injuries don't just happen in your sleep.
Now, the biggest thing that the prosecution cited as their reason to not retry Guandique was the lack of forensic evidence linking him to the murder.
They didn't have blood. They didn't have DNA. There weren't any fingerprints. There was practically nothing in the way of physical or forensic evidence tying Guandique to Chandra in any way. Nobody saw him in the park that day. There's no evidence to suggest that they knew each other. The fact that the prosecution said they didn't have forensic evidence in the case shows
doesn't surprise me. Chandra's body, remember, was found a little over a year after she disappeared. Whatever physical or forensic evidence investigators would have gotten from her body, her clothing, her property, anything else was long gone or at the very least in very bad shape for analysis. If they wanted to obtain forensic evidence, they
that could either rule out or convict Guandique, they needed to find Chandra's body much quicker than what they did. It shouldn't have taken over a year to locate her. So we can go back to a lot of the mistakes made by the Washington, D.C. Police Department who were in charge of the investigation.
And then we can sit there and we can speculate or maybe even argue. And then again, maybe just sit there and feel frustrated that her body wasn't discovered sooner. Because that matters. That matters when it comes to locating and preserving any valuable forensic evidence.
Investigators could have recovered DNA. They could have found hair or fiber. They could have gotten blood underneath her fingernails. They could have collected semen if she had been sexually assaulted. Anything that could identify her killer. But with only skeletal remains, there's very little forensic testing that can be done here.
Now, I don't know what, if any, forensic testing was done on either her remains or on the clothing they found, but they didn't get anything that links Guandique or anyone else, for that matter, to Chandra's murder. So, on May 2017, 16 years after Chandra's murder,
Guandique was released from federal prison. He was deported out of the United States, but he was also free of any first-degree murder charges. It's unclear whether or not Guandique is the one responsible for Chandra's murder or if there's another killer out there. The Levy family remains hopeful that advancements in DNA studies
DNA testing can be done to help identify her killer. This DNA testing could be done on her remains, on her clothing, anything that can help either rule in or rule out a possible suspect. Okay, so what's my opinion? Who do I think is responsible? In the case of Chandra Levy, I think it's highly possible that
and highly likely that Guandique is the guy. I see no other suspects even coming close on this one. From a criminological perspective, he meets the offender profile that I would be looking at in Chandra's killer. He has the history. He has two prior convictions of attacking women in very similar manners of Chandra's.
This man is a serious and violent predator. I believe that he likely didn't intend to kill Chandra. I think it's possible that she fought back and the attack ended in murder. And I think his two earlier victims are extremely fortunate because this serial offender, this predator, would have killed them as well.
I'm not bothered by the lack of forensic or physical evidence in the case. I don't think this case needs forensic evidence to secure another conviction. I'm hopeful, just like the Levy family, that advancements in DNA testing will be done in which we can identify a suspect, if that's Guandique or not.
I think the circumstantial evidence in the case, at the very least, warrants a retrial. And then a jury can decide if the prosecution proves their case beyond a reasonable doubt. We may never know why Chandra went to Rock Creek Park that afternoon. Did she go out there for a jog to take a break from packing up her apartment?
Was she going out there to meet up with someone? If so, was that person the one who attacked her? Was she attacked before she was able to meet up with that individual? The only evidence we have are her internet searches, just minutes before she left her apartment. And without any additional evidence, I don't think I can give an opinion as to what really happened.
So here's the part where I want to hear from you. You are my co-counsel, my fellow investigators. Join me in this conversation, this discussion, and share with me what you think about Chandra Levy's murder. Do you think we will ever have a resolution? Do you think there will be advancements in DNA testing that can help identify a suspect? Do you think Guandiki is the guy?
Connect with the show on our website, ForensicTales.com. That is also the place where I always post pictures of that week's episode. You can also chat with us on Instagram at Forensic Tales or email the show at Courtney at ForensicTales.com. Okay, guys.
Thank you so, so much for joining me this week. Don't forget to please subscribe to the show so you don't miss a single episode. Thank you.
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