Back in 2001, when I was a reporter for the Washington Post, I started working on a story about a missing intern named Chandra Levy. For a while, I worked day and night, and even went to California for three weeks to work on the story. Then came Sept. 11, 2001, and the story vanished, only to resurface in May 2002 when her skeletal remains were found in Rock Creek Park in Northwest Washington. Now 9 years later, former colleagues Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz, who have doggedly pursued the story, have written a book on the case called “Finding Chandra: A True Washington Mystery”. Here’s part of the story, an adaptation of the book. Allan Lengel
WASHINGTON — The three D.C. detectives traveled 3,000 miles with a carefully crafted plan.
At a sand-colored, maximum-security federal prison on the edge of the Mojave Desert, they prepared to interview the man they suspected of raping and murdering Washington intern Chandra Ann Levy. It was Sept. 9, 2008.
For seven years, Ingmar Guandique, a Salvadoran immigrant with a penchant for violence toward women, had eluded the police and FBI as a viable suspect in the city’s most famous unsolved murder. The original detectives failed to connect him to the crime that captured the attention of the nation during the summer of 2001 with its subplots of sex and scandal and the possibility that a member of Congress might have been involved.
Now it was up to the new detectives. They put their plan into play. They took a sample of Guandique’s DNA and, bluffing, told him they expected it would match DNA collected during the murder investigation.
“So what if I touched her?” Guandique said.
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