Below The Beltway

After eight years, the Metropolitan Police Department has finally arrested someone in the murder of Chandra Levy:

Nearly eight years after Chandra Levy stepped out of her Dupont Circle apartment on a warm May day and disappeared without a word, D.C. police announced today they will charge an illegal immigrant from El Salvador with first-degree murder for killing her near a remote hiking trail deep in Rock Creek Park.

An arrest warrant was issued for Ingmar Guandique, 27, serving a 10-year prison sentence for attacking two other women at knifepoint in the park around the time of Chandra’s disappearance. He will be brought to D.C. within weeks and charged in the death of Levy, a 24-year-old federal government intern from California.

Levy’s disappearance in May 2001 triggered an international sensation because she had been having an affair with her local congressman, Gary A. Condit. He immediately fell under suspicion despite a lack of credible evidence implicating him in what would become one of the most famous unsolved homicide cases in Washington history.

Not only did Condit become the only suspect, the MPD never even bothered to continue investigate the case to determine if there might be another credible suspect like, say, the guy who had previously attacked two women on the same jogging path Levy used:

A 13-part Washington Post series last summer detailed a series of police mistakes and miscommunications that led investigators to focus much of their attention and resources on Condit, a married Democratic congressman from the Central Valley of California. While they investigated Condit and his romantic links to Levy and other women, they failed to focus on Guandique, who had attacked women in the park not far from where Levy’s body would eventually be found a year later on May 22, 2002.

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Guandique, a day laborer, came under the scrutiny of investigators months after Levy disappeared, but a series of delays and missteps allowed the case to languish. In 2001 — nine months before Levy’s remains were found in Rock Creek Park — an inmate came forward to say Guandique confessed to the crime while they were in jail, but the inmate’s account was dismissed after he failed an FBI-administered polygraph exam. A polygraph test taken by Guandique before he was sentenced in the two attacks was deemed “inconclusive.” Neither exam was administered by a bilingual polygrapher, even though both the inmate and Guandique spoke little or no English. Polygraph results can be skewed if there are translation problems, experts say.

From the time of Guandique’s arrest on July 1, 2001, it took police 13 months to interview his ex-girlfriend, who told The Post that Guandique choked her and bit her around the time of Levy’s disappearance. It took police 14 months to interview his landlady, who said Guandique looked as if he had been in a bad fight around the time Levy vanished. The landlady told police she had thrown out some of Guandique’s belongings that summer. Police also later learned that Guandique did not show up for work the day that Levy disappeared.

This is clearly a case of justice delayed thanks to incompetent police work. Meanwhile, one wonders what Gary Condit thinks now that we all know the truth.