Killing of Chandra Levy

Chandra Ann 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 feverish attention from American news media until the September 11th attacks.

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, causing them to not find Levy's body, which then decomposed for a year. Further, the MPD had been informed that Ingmar Guandique, already arrested for attacking women in Rock Creek Park, had confessed to attacking Levy, but soon dismissed that information. The MPD (and the media) instead put much of its focus on the revelation that Levy had been having an extramarital affair with Congressman Gary Condit, a 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 was never named as a suspect by police; he was eventually cleared of any involvement. 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-nomination in 2002.

Following a series of investigative reports by The Washington Post in 2008, the MPD followed up and obtained a warrant, on March 3, 2009, to arrest Ingmar Guandique, who had been identified and dismissed by the MPD 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 Levy's death was issued.