Further Reading for Chandra Levy & Sylvia Likens
Finding Chandra: A True Washington Murder Mystery
Murder on a Horse Trail: The Disappearance of Chandra Levy
House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying
Episode: 16
Episode Link
Info
Chandra Levy (April 14, 1977 – c. May 1, 2001) was an American intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C., who disappeared in May 2001. She was presumed murdered after her skeletal remains were found in Rock Creek Park in May 2002. The case attracted attention from the American news media for several years.
Due to a miscommunication, the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD) failed to follow its own search parameters in Rock Creek Park, leaving Levy’s body to decompose for a year. Further, the MPD had been informed, but soon dismissed the information, that Ingmar Guandique, already arrested for attacking women in Rock Creek Park, had confessed to attacking Chandra Levy. The MPD instead put much of its focus on the revelation that Levy had been having an affair with Congressman Gary Condit, a married Democrat then serving his fifth term representing California’s 18th congressional district, and a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Condit had an overwhelming alibi (he was in meetings with the Vice President), was never named as a suspect by police, and was eventually cleared of any involvement in the disappearance. However, due to the cloud of suspicion raised by the intense media focus on the missing intern and the later revelation of the affair, Condit lost his bid for re-election in 2002.
Following a series of investigative reports by the Washington Post in 2008, the MPD followed up and finally obtained a warrant, on March 3, 2009, to arrest Ingmar Guandique, the illegal immigrant from El Salvador identified and dismissed by the MPDC eight years earlier. He had been convicted of assaulting two other women in Rock Creek Park around the time of Levy’s disappearance and was still in prison on those convictions when the arrest warrant on Chandra Levy’s death was issued. Prosecutors alleged that Guandique had attacked and tied up Levy in a remote area of the park and left her to die of dehydration or exposure. In November 2010, Guandique was convicted of murdering Levy; he was sentenced in February 2011 to 60 years in prison. In June 2015, however, Guandique was granted a new trial. On July 28, 2016, prosecutors announced that they would not proceed with the case against Guandique and would, instead, seek to have him deported. In episode 3 of “An American Murder Mystery” on the case, it is mentioned that in March 2017 Guandique lost his bid to remain in the United States and was deported to his native El Salvador on May 5th, 2017.
The murder of Sylvia Likens took place in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States in October 1965. The 16-year-old was held captive, abused and tortured to death over a period of three months by Gertrude Baniszewski, Baniszewski’s children, and other neighborhood children. Likens’ parents, who were carnival workers, had initially left Sylvia and her sister Jenny in the care of the Baniszewski family, paying Gertrude $20 a week to care for the sisters.
Baniszewski, her daughter Paula, her son John, and two neighborhood youths, Coy Hubbard and Richard Hobbs, were tried and convicted of torturing and murdering Likens. The case was described by the prosecutor in Baniszewski’s trial as “the most terrible crime ever committed in the state of Indiana”.