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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before we get into today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Hidden history with Dr. Harini Bhat. Every Monday, Dr. Bhat goes where history gets mysterious. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bot treats these moments like open case files. Not myths, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. Hidden History drops every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, so you never miss a mystery.
- [00:52]
Crime House Announcer
This is crime house.
- [00:58]
Vanessa Richardson
In the summer of 2001, Washington, D.C. was consumed by one question. What did Gary Condit know? Every newspaper, every cable news channel, every dinner table conversation was pointed at the same target. A sitting congressman who'd been secretly dating a missing 24 year old. A man who'd lied to her parents, lied to the police, and seemed like he had very big secrets he wanted to keep. If you were looking for a guilty person, Gary Condit looked like one. But while the world was focused on him, something sinister was happening. Just a quarter mile from Condit's apartment in Rock Creek park, someone was attacking women on the trails, dragging them off the path, pulling them into ravines and leaving them, fearing for their lives. By the time anyone stopped to wonder if the same thing had happened to Chandra Levy, it was too late. Foreign. UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations and murderous doctors. These aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild and I want to hear what you think. At the end of each episode. Leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And for ad free access to all three episodes, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. This is part two of our series on Chandra Levy. Last time I took you through Chandra's life, her childhood in California's Central Valley, her long climb toward a career in Washington, D.C. the secret affair with Congressman Gary Condit and her disappearance in May of 2001. Today, the investigation, the media firestorm, the trial, and the moment it all fell apart. All that and more coming up.
- [03:16]
Crime House Announcer
You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. They make it super simple. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with coverage options tailored to your choices. Plus you'll see which discounts you may qualify for, like the online quote discount or savings for paying in full. In fact, 99% of Progressive Auto customers earn at least one discount. See if you could save when you switch to Progressive. You'll feel good about making a savvy choice. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little extra cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary this episode is
- [04:07]
Vanessa Richardson
brought to you by Prime Obsession is in session and this summer Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice off campus L every year after
- [04:22]
Katie Ring
the Love Hypothesis, Sterling Point and more
- [04:26]
Vanessa Richardson
Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can
- [04:29]
Katie Ring
feel through the screen.
- [04:30]
Vanessa Richardson
Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. When Susan Levy dialed that number and reached Congressman Gary Condit's voicemail, she could no longer keep her promise. She'd held on to Chandra's secret for weeks, but now her daughter's life was in the balance and Susan couldn't keep quiet anymore. She told her husband, Robert, everything. Chandra's affair, Gary Condit, the months of secrecy Susan had been keeping even from her own husband. Robert was stunned, but once the shock settled, he agreed they needed to get in touch with Condit. Robert found his local home number in the phone book and called it. Condit's wife, Carolyn answered. Robert was careful. He only said that his daughter was missing, that Condit represented their district, and that he was hoping the congressman might be able to help. Carolyn said she'd pass the message along. A few minutes later, their phone rang. It was Gary Condit. Robert kept his voice as level as he could. He explained the situation. Chandra was missing. One of her last calls was to Condit's office, and he was hoping the congressman could help in any way. Condit told him that he didn't really know Chandra all that well. She'd come to his office a few times, he'd given her some career advice, and that was about it. He had no idea where she was, but he would make some calls to the police. Robert and Susan sat there in silence. If Condit had nothing to do with Chandra's disappearance, fine. They weren't Expecting a confession. But he'd just described a woman he'd been secretly dating for six months as someone he barely knew. No emotion, no urgency, no detectable concern for someone he'd been spending two or three nights a week with for half a year. It made them wonder what else he was willing to say with a straight face, considering how that conversation went. The levies weren't going to wait for Condit to do anything useful. So they reached out to a nonprofit that specializes in helping families find missing loved ones, who told them the most powerful thing they could do was generate press, get visibility, keep Chandra's name in front of people. And a few days later, on May 14, 2001, Susan appeared on Good Morning America. Two days later, the levies flew to D.C. with cameras on them. Robert and Susan went to Capitol Hill. They met with California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. They met with the D.C. police Superintendent of detectives. One person who they didn't meet with, Gary condit. And by May 17, the Washington Post reported on a possible romantic relationship between him and Chandra. Condit's chief of staff denied it flatly. He told the paper any romantic relationship between them totally did not occur and that it was distressing for people to be focused on that rather than finding Chandra. It was a very confident denial. The problem was that Condit had already told investigators something different. Back on May 9, before any of this was public, the detective assigned to Chandra's case, Ralph Durant, had gone to Condit's apartment to take a formal statement. Condit had given Durant the same story. He'd given the levies. Career advice, a few office visits, nothing of note. But before that meeting, Durant had gotten a call from Chandra's aunt, Linda Zamski, the only person Chandra had trusted with the truth about her affair. Linda. Linda told Durant everything. The affair had started in the fall of 2000. It was serious enough that Condit had talked about leaving his wife, and they were still together when Chandra disappeared. When Durant finally sat down with Condit that night, the congressman was slightly more forthcoming. He acknowledged that Chandra had spent the night at his apartment. But when Durant asked whether the relationship was sexual, Condit wouldn't answer. But he really didn't need to. Durant's read was clear. If Condit was lying about one thing, he was probably lying about something else. The question was what? As it turned out, quite a lot. On May 18, 2001, the day after the Washington Post article ran, a woman in San Francisco called the local FBI field office. She Gave an alias, Janet. She said she had important information about the Chandra Levy case. Janet didn't know Chandra, but she and Chandra had something in in common. They both had secret affairs with Gary Condit. Janet had first met Condit in 1992, when she was 22, and her boyfriend at the time worked as one of Condit's aids. A year later, she and her boyfriend had broken up and Janet was living in la. He was still working for Condit and asked if Janet could give him a ride to an event. Janet said sure. And things between her and Condit ended up getting physical. The within months, she was working in his congressional office, had moved belongings into his apartment, and he was talking about leaving his wife and starting fresh somewhere small. He described a whole future for the two of them. She'd be a schoolteacher, he'd step away from Congress, and they'd build something quiet together. Sound familiar? And Gary was just as controlling with Janet as he was with Chandra. Extreme secrecy rules about what she could say and do. A ban on seeing other men. If Janet cried at work, she had to say she'd been through a breakup. And when his daughter Katie came to D.C. for a summer internship, Janet had to move her things out of his apartment and maintain the performance of being just a colleague, even as she and Katie became friends. Janet couldn't take much more of that, and she finally ended it for Good in 1996. She hadn't really thought about Condit since, but when she saw the news about Chandra, she was scared enough to call the FBI. And she wasn't the last. Shortly after Janet came forward, investigators got a tip about another woman, Anne Marie Smith, a flight attendant in her late 30s who had started seeing Condit in July of 2000, just a few months before he met Chandra. Anne Marie had met Condit on a flight from San Francisco to dc. He gave her his number before he got off the plane. She didn't even know he was a congressman until a colleague checked the passenger manifest. Anne Marie was charmed. They started seeing each other, and she had no idea he was already involved with someone else. By the spring of 2001, things were getting strange. Condit was pulling away. Anne Marie found a strand of long, dark hair in his bathroom, almost certainly Chandra's. And then on May 9, he called her out of nowhere and told her he had to disappear for a bit. She shouldn't try to reach him. Ann Marie didn't know Chandra was missing. She didn't know what any of it meant. But when the Washington Post story ran A week later, she understood. The FBI showed up at her door in June. Anne Marie had kept detailed notes about their relationship in a travel journal. She gladly shared them. And then she called Condit. Anne Marie told him she'd spoken to the FBI. He said she hadn't needed to do that and hung up. A few weeks later, a document arrived from Condit's lawyer, an affidavit stating that she and Condit had never had a romantic relationship. If she signed it, she could be sued for perjury if she ever said otherwise. Anne Marie refused. Instead, on July 2, she sat down with Rita Cosby at Fox News and told the world about the affair, the relationship, and the attempt to silence her. After that, the story exploded. Suddenly, everyone was asking the same question. What did Gary Condit do to Chandra Levy, including law enforcement? Under that pressure, Condit agreed to a third police interview on July 6, this time with the US attorneys overseeing the case. And for the first time after two months of evasion, he admitted what everyone already knew. He'd been having an affair with Chandra Levy. He should have said this on day one. He didn't. And even though there wasn't any concrete evidence that he had anything to do with her disappearance, that gap between when he knew she was missing and when he finally admitted it cost him everything. Four days later, at 11:15pm on July 10, a fleet of unmarked cars pulled up outside his building. Police officers and FBI agents went inside. Condit was escorted out to a waiting car. Reporters who'd been tipped off raced to the scene. They watched from the street as a black light swept through the windows of his fourth floor apartment. The question was, what would they find? Foreign.
- [13:41]
Katie Ring
Think about some of the cases that defined true crime in America. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart. The Karen retrial. Some crime cases are so shocking, they don't just make headlines, they forever change a country. I'm Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes. Each week I take on one of
- [14:00]
Vanessa Richardson
the most notorious criminals.
- [14:01]
Katie Ring
Criminal cases, whether it's unfolding now or etched into American history, revealing not just what happened, but how it forever changed our society. Serial killers who terrorized cities. Unsolved mysteries that kept detectives up at night. And investigations that changed the way we think about justice. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, released every Tuesday through Thursday. From the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came, came out, or didn't. These are the stories behind the headlines. Listen to and follow America's most infamous crimes available now, wherever you get your podcasts,
- [14:41]
Vanessa Richardson
The search of Gary Condit's apartment lasted until nearly three in the morning. Investigators turned Condit's apartment upside down. And when they were done, the sum total of what they had to show for it was a few stray hairs from one of his shoes and. And some lint from his dryer trap. No blood, no evidence of a struggle, no connection to Chandra's disappearance. Condit had actually consented to the search. It was, in theory, a gesture of cooperation. But for the reporters watching from the street, the evidence bags and the black lights and the midnight operation, it all made him look like the guiltiest man in Washington, regardless of what the bags actually contained. Two days later, the story got weirder. The Washington Post reported that hours before the search, a witness had seen Condit throw something away in a McDonald's trash can nearby. When the witness checked, they found the box for a TAG Heuer watch. No watch inside, but the manual and warranty card with the serial number were still there. Police traced it. It was a watch that Janet Condit's former girlfriend had given him as a gift years earlier. Now this man is under investigation in connection with a missing woman. His apartment is about to be searched, and his move is to throw away a watch box at McDonald's. Not the watch. The box. There was no scenario where that was going to be relevant evidence. And yet there he was, tossing it two hours before police arrived. It's the behavior of someone who's extremely paranoid and extremely bad at managing what they're paranoid about. Condit's public strategy wasn't going much better. The levies had been calling for him to take a polygraph. Of course, polygraph results aren't admissible in court. They measure stress responses, not truth. And even perfectly honest people can fail them. But they can help investigators decide if they're following the right track. So the police asked him to take 1. On July 13, Condit's lawyer called a press conference. He told reporters that his client had been asked three questions. Did he have anything to do with Chandra's disappearance? Did he cause anyone else to harm her? And did he know where she was? And the results, he said, showed Condit was not deceptive in any way. The catch? Condit had refused to let the police administer the test. He'd hired a private examiner, a respected former FBI agent, but still someone of his own choosing, and done the whole thing without informing law enforcement. The police had to take his word on the results. By this point in the investigation, that was a lot to ask. Around this time, the case changed hands. Two months in with no body and no meaningful leads, it was Transferred to the FBI's Cold Case Unit faster than usual because of how high profile it had become. The new agents were Brad Garrett and Melissa Thomas, both experienced and both notably less interested in Gary Condit than their predecessors had been. They interviewed Condit one last time on July 26. Their questions were different in tone. They weren't relitigating the affair. They wanted to know who Chandra was, her routines, her friendships, what she was like in those final weeks. And the subtext was clear. They didn't think Cond? Had killed her. He had an alibi for May 1, the day Chandra probably disappeared. He. He had lunch with Vice President Dick Cheney. He spent the evening with his wife. His apartment had been searched and found clean. There was no physical evidence connecting him to anything. In the FBI agent's view, the investigation had spent months chasing a man who was guilty of being a liar and a terrible person, but not guilty of murder. That was a frustrating conclusion because it didn't bring them any closer to knowing where what actually happened. But Condit still had a public image problem he thought he could solve. His team arranged an interview with ABC's Connie Chung, live, prime time with 24 million people watching. The idea was to finally get ahead of the story. Show remorse, answer the questions, reset. It did not go well. When Chung asked whether his relationship with Chandra was sexual. Condit said that he'd been married for 34 years, hadn't been a perfect man, and that out of respect for his family and a specific request from the Levy family, he preferred not to get into those details. Here's the thing though. The Levy family had made no such request. When Robert and Susan heard him say that it landed like a physical blow. He'd used their name on live television as a shield for his own evasion. The interview was a disaster. It confirmed to everyone watching that Gary Condit was still being dishonest. And now he'd made it personal for the levies in a way that was impossible to forgive. His congressional career was effectively finished. He would not survive the next primary. And then, just when it seemed like the investigation had completely stalled, a lawyer called the U.S. attorney's office with a tip. The lawyer represented an inmate at the D.C. jail named Ramon Alvarez, who was awaiting sentencing for armed sexual assault. Alvarez had been working out in their prison gym with another inmate, 19 year old Salvadoran immigrant Ingmar Guandike, while they lifted weights. Guandique had apparently told Alvarez something extraordinary he said he had killed Chandra Levy and Gary Kyle. Condit had paid him to do it. According to Alvarez's account, Condit had approached Guandique in the Adams Morgan neighborhood, offered him $25,000, handed him a photograph of Chandra, and told him where she liked to jog. Guandique had waited for her on a trail in Rock Creek park, attacked her, and hidden her body in the woods. But before I tell you what happened when investigators tested this new story, let me tell you who Ingmar Guandique actually was. Guandique had come to the United States from a rural village in El Salvador in March of 2000, borrowing $5,000 from a family friend to pay a smuggler. He was 18 years old. He moved to an apartment right at the edge of Rock Creek park, worked construction jobs for about $7.50 an hour, and was also supporting a son back in El Salvador. Salvador. By the spring of 2001, Guandique was in bad shape financially and drinking heavily. In early May, he was arrested for breaking into a neighbor's apartment. And on May 24, while he was out on bail, he attacked a young woman named Halle Schilling on a trail in Rock Creek Park. Guandique wasn't identified at the time. Then, about two months later, he dragged another woman named Christy Wiegand off a path in the city, same park, and pulled her down a ravine. She fought him off and escaped. Her report led to his arrest. So Guandique was already in jail for attacking two women in Rock Creek park when Alvarez claimed he'd confessed to killing Chandra. You can understand why investigators were interested when they brought Guan in for questioning. He denied everything. He said the only place he'd ever seen Chandra Levy was on tv. TV again. The authorities decided to perform polygraphs on both him and Ramon Alvarez. Alvarez was up first. The results came back badly for him. He was found to have been lying on both key questions. It was another dead end. Although Guandique was sentenced to 10 years for the attacks on Schilling and Wiegand, he was only listed as a person of interest in Chandra's case. That was as far as it went. The investigation had no body, no crime scene, no physical evidence, and no viable suspect. A full year had passed. The story faded. The public moved on. Then, on the morning of May 22, 2002, a man named Philip Palmer went for a walk in Rock Creek park with his dog. And everything changed. Changed. Hi, Crime House Community. It's Vanessa. Are you interested in the mysterious parts of history? Like when in 1518, an entire European city couldn't stop dancing. Or in 1908, when something flattened over 800 square miles of Siberian forest in an instant. I'm excited to tell you about a new show, hidden history with Dr. Harini Bhatt. Dr. Bhat has spent her entire career demanding evidence and asking, why. Now, every Monday on Hidden History, she goes where history touches the unknown. Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena and events that science still can't fully explain. Dr. Bott treats these moments like open case files. Not myths, not superstitions, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look. At the end of every episode, she'll tell you exactly what she thinks happened and ask, what if it happened today? Hidden History drops every Monday. Follow now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, so you never miss a mystery. Philip Palmer was a furniture maker who lived near Rock Creek park and loved to explore its trails with his dream dog, Paco. One of his hobbies was collecting animal bones. So that morning he was moving carefully along a secluded path called the Western Ridge Trail. Scanning the ground, he spotted something red on the side of a steep ravine. He climbed down to look. It was a piece of tattered red clothing. A little further down, something white, partially covered by leaves. He brushed them aside. It was a human skull. Palmer marked the spot with his sweater over a branch, found a phone, and called 91 1. He led U.S. park Police Sergeant Dennis Bosak back to the ravine. Bosak found more a Walkman, more clothing, and a T shirt that read Property of USC Athletics. Bosak knew about Chandra Levy. He knew she was a USC student. He called the D.C. police immediately. Within minutes, investigators were at the scene. A representative called the Levy family to tell them they might have found her. When Susan got that call, her legs went out from under her. She started crying so hard she could barely breathe. A medical examiner X rayed the skull and compared it to Chandra's dental records. It was a match. Six days later, her death was officially ruled a homicide after more than a year of searching. They knew what had happened, but they still didn't know how or by whose hand. The remains were too degraded to determine cause of death. A test of a neck bone that might indicate strangulation came back inconclusive. But Sergeant Bosak immediately thought of Ingmar Guandike. The location where Chandra's remains were found was consistent with how Guandique had operated, pulling women off trails in remote sections of the park, dragging them down into ravines. Christy Wiegand had survived Chandra had not. The case against Guandique started being built in earnest, but it was slow going. Guandique's lawyer wasn't making him available. The detectives had language barriers. Most of Guandique's circle spoke only Spanish. Interviews needed translators, and the awkwardness made them unproductive. What they pieced together circumstantially was genuinely damning. Guandique's girlfriend had kicked him out of their apartment in April 2001, right before Chandra disappeared. He didn't show up for work on May 1, the day Chandra was believed to have been killed. His former landlord, a woman named Sheila Phillips Cruz, told reporters that around the time Chandra went missing, she noticed Guandique had injuries she'd never seen. Exposure explained satisfactorily. A busted lip, a bloody blemish in his eye, scratches on his throat. He said he'd gotten into a fight with his girlfriend. But Sheila knew his girlfriend. She was small and the relationship was already over. The injuries didn't fit the story. But none of that was physical evidence. No arrest was made, and the investigation went quiet again. Then, In July of 2008, the Washington Post published a 13th part investigative series on the case, representing seven years of reporting. It revealed details the public had never seen. And it documented a set of investigative failures that made for genuinely painful reading. In the initial days after Chandra was reported missing in 2001, police failed to secure surveillance footage from her apartment building before it was automatically recorded over. The US Park Police, who'd responded to the Guandike attacks knew, never told the D.C. detectives working Chandra's case that Guandique had acknowledged seeing her before at Rock Creek Park. That information just sat there in a different agency's files, and no one connected the dots. When the park was Searched in summer 2001, the effort was disorganized. The area where Chandra's remains were eventually found went unsearched. And the polygraph test from 2001, the ones administered to Guandique and Alvarez, were given by examiners who didn't speak Spanish. Guandique's test, officially logged as not deceptive, had actually returned an inconclusive reading. The series created enormous pressure for a fresh look. By September 2008, new detectives were ready. They traveled to the Victorville Federal Correctional Institution in California, where Guandique was serving his sentence. They told him they'd found DNA evidence and asked him to submit a sample. He balked. He said if the evidence was that strong, they should just arrest him for it. He wasn't entirely wrong to push Back. Legally, police are generally allowed to misrepresent what they know. To prompt a response, the detectives kept pressing, why might his DNA be found on evidence related to Chandra's murder? Murder. And then Guandique said, quote, so what if I touched her? End quote. It wasn't a confession, but it wasn't nothing. The detectives kept going. They asked about the facial injuries he'd gotten around the time of Chandra's death. Guandique said two men had tried to rob him and he'd gotten beaten up. But the detectives knew he'd told his landlady a completely different story, that the injuries were from a fight with the his girlfriend. When they told him they knew that, he changed his account on the spot. He said that actually, now that he thought about it, the busted lip he'd gotten was from the robbery attempt, but everything else was from the fight with his girlfriend. The detectives felt like they were close to cracking him. And they had one more question to ask. Before the interview. They'd learned that Guan had a tattoo on his chest of a naked woman with long black hair, just like Chandra. They asked him whether it was meant to represent her. He smiled and laughed. And while the detectives were in the interview room, prison officials were searching his cell. They found a photograph of Chandra that Guandique had cut out of a magazine. After the interview, detectives tracked down multiple people who said Guandique had confessed to them in various forms over the years. One described him boasting that he and two friends had killed a young woman with dark, curly hair who'd been running alone on a wooded path. Another said Guan had written him a letter from prison acknowledging he was responsible for a woman's death in a D.C. park. In a recorded phone call, he'd mentioned the girl who's dead. And in early 2009, an inmate described Guan telling him the full story. He'd been high on drugs in the park when he saw a woman with dark curly hair running by with wearing a fanny pack. He needed money. He and some friends chased her and dragged her into the bushes. When she fought back, he strangled her and buried her under leaves. That was enough for the authorities to take action. On March 3, 2009, the D.C. police chief held a press conference. Flanked by the mayor, the U.S. attorney and the lead detectives, she announced that a warrant had been issued for Ingmar Guandique's arrest in connection with Chandra Levy's murder. Acknowledging the Levy family directly, she said the only thing she could offer them now was justice, and she hoped it brought Some peace. Gary Condit's name was not mentioned. He'd left Congress, moved to Arizona, and was still publicly denying he ever had a romantic relationship with Chandra. But the effect of affair wasn't what mattered now. It was getting justice for Chandra. Guandique's trial started in October 2010. Prosecutors still had no physical evidence linking him to Chandra's death. What they had was testimony. The two women Guandique had attacked in Rock Creek Park, Halle Schilling and Christy Wiegand, both testified. They described being grabbed on trails in remote sections of that park by a man with a knife, dragged down into ravines, and attacked. Both incidents happened in areas near where Chandra's remains were found. Their testimony established pattern and geography. The prosecution also had access to nine different inmates who claimed Guan had confessed to them in some form. Rather than parade all of them in front of the jury and risk the stories contradicting each other, they chose to call only the strongest, a man named Armando the Mouse Morales, who'd been guandique's cellmate in 2006. Morales testified that Guandique had been anxious because a rumor was circulating in the prison that he had sexually assaulted Chandra before killing her. And among certain gangs, inmates who commit sexual assault are targeted for violence. To defend his reputation, Guandique had told Morales the story of how he'd change. Chased after a woman running with a fanny pack and accidentally killed her when she fought back. Morales also told the jury he was receiving nothing in exchange for his testimony. No deal, no transfer. Nothing. Some reporters in the courtroom were skeptical. One predicted acquittal in under an hour. But the jury didn't come back in under an hour. It took three and a half days. And on November 22, 2nd, 2010, the four woman stood up in a packed courtroom and read the verdict. Guilty of first degree murder. Ingbar Guandike was sentenced to 60 years in prison. After nine years, the murder of Chandra Levy was officially solved. Except it wasn't. Five years later, during the appeals process, Guangzhou Guandique's attorneys discovered something significant. Armando Morales had offered testimony to prosecutors in other cases, meaning he had a history as a jailhouse informant. The prosecution had failed to disclose this information to the defense at trial. That kind of disclosure is required because it's exactly the kind of information that lets a jury evaluate a witness's credibility. A new trial was granted, scheduled for October 2016. And then, before it could start, the prosecutors dropped all charges. Someone had produced a recording of Armando Morales admitting that he'd made up his story about Guandique. Without that testimony, there's no case. Ingmar Guandique was a free man, but not in the us because he'd entered the country illegally. He was immediately handed to immigration authorities and deported to El Salvador. So here's where we are in the eyes of the law. Chandra Levy's murder is back to being officially unsolved. Gary Condit was never charged with anything related to her death. Ingmar Guandike was convicted and then exonerated. And whoever killed Chandra Levy has never been held accountable. A lot of people who followed this case closely still believe Guandique did it. The conviction collapsed on a technicality rooted in prosecutorial misconduct. A failure of disclosure. Not because the underlying circumstantial case against Guandique fell apart. The injuries on his face, the missed workday, the girlfriend kicking him out days before. The attacks on two other women in the same park that same spring and summer. The so what if I touched her? The tattoo, the magazine photo, his cell. Multiple people saying he confessed to them over the years. None of that went away when Armando Morales was discredited. Others aren't so sure. There are still people who think Gary Condit knows more than he ever admitted. That the affair wasn't just a personal scandal, but part of something more dangerous. That someone with everything to lose might have done more than just lie. And I want to ask you where you land on this. Do you think Ingmar Guandike killed Chandra Levy? Or does something about this case still not sit right for you? Drop a comment wherever you listen. I'd love to hear your thoughts. What I keep thinking about sitting with this whole story is how much damage secrecy does. Not just to the point person keeping the secret, but to everyone around them. Gary Condit's need to keep his personal life completely buried. That secrecy didn't just hurt Chandra while she was alive. It warped the investigation after she disappeared. Because he looked guilty. Every investigative resource pointed at him. And Ingmar Guanike, who was right there, who had already attacked two women in that same park, slipped through the cracks. Whether Guandique killed Chandra or not, that gap in the investigation is real. Those are real failures that real people made. And Chandra Levy's family spent years living inside the consequences of them. Robert and Susan Levy have never used the word closure. They've said explicitly they don't believe in it. Nothing will bring their daughter back. What Susan has said, and I think this is worth holding on to, is that Chandra would want people to go on living and enjoying their lives, to not let the horror of what happened to her become the only thing she was. If you have any tips on this case, you can reach the D.C. metro Police by texting 50411 Chandra Levy was 24 years old. She was the only girl to finish rock climbing camp as a kid. She went on ride alongs with the Modesto Police Department as a teenager because she wanted to understand the world. She moved to Washington D.C. to build something. She deserved the chance to do it. And that tragedy is what we will always remember. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richard Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll decode the episode together and hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media media rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode ad free plus exciting bonus content. We'll be back on Wednesday Day. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benidon, Natalie Pertovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Kaylee Pine, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
- [39:44]
Katie Ring
I'm Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes. Each week I take on one of the most notorious criminal cases in American history. Listen to and follow America's Most infamous crimes. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.