Shownotes Transcript
You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hello everyone and happy holidays. I cannot believe that we are at the end of 2023 and honestly a year into this show.
I just want to let you know, I have some exciting news coming in January, so stick around because you're not going to want to miss it. But until then, I'm your host, Peyton Moreland, and today we're diving into the mysterious disappearance and tragic death of Sandra Levy. This is a story that riveted the nation, a tale of a
a promising young woman whose life was cut short, her entanglement with a married congressman, and the subsequent investigation that left more questions than answers. Today, we'll explore the details of Chandra's life, the events leading up to her disappearance, the media frenzy surrounding her case, and the subsequent twists and turns in an investigation that may never be truly resolved.
So let's get into it. Chandra Levy was born in 1977 to Robert and Susan Levy, and she grew up in Modesto, California, a city about halfway between Sacramento and Fresno in the Central Valley. For many of its 200,000-odd residents, Modesto is a place where housing is affordable, public school education is top-notch,
and the sense of community and comfortable lifestyle make the city an ideal place to raise a family. Chandra Levy was part of a close-knit family and as the daughter of an oncologist, grew up in a
relative financial comfort. Described as bright, ambitious, and outgoing, Chandra had a promising future ahead of her. And when she came of age, she wanted to explore that future outside of Modesto. Because as wonderful a place as it may have been for her parents, she saw herself as a big fish in a little pond. And she felt there was a cap to how much of her ambition she would be able to realize there.
So she attended San Francisco State University where she earned a degree in journalism and her career path took a turn into politics when she went to grad school for public administration at University of Southern California down in L.A. And she took an internship with the mayor of Los Angeles.
As part of her final semester, Chandra relocated to Washington, D.C. for a paid internship with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where she was assigned to the Public Affairs Division.
And to be living and working in DC was exciting for this young woman who aspired to a life of adventure, of worldliness, and of authority. So in Washington, DC, Chandra began her internship and immersed herself in the world of criminal justice.
She was passionate about making a difference and contributing to society. She was intelligent and driven, and she aspired to one day work for the FBI and the CIA. And she was motivated by a desire to understand the intricacies of the system.
Her supervisor was particularly impressed with her work, especially the way she handled media inquiries around the execution of federal prisoner Timothy McVeigh, the man responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
But as her final semester ended and her master's degree requirements were fulfilled, her internship was terminated in April of 2001, and she began making arrangements to return to California for her diploma. Chandra planned to return home to California the first week of May. She called her father and broke to him the news that her internship had ended rather abruptly after
She explained it was because her requirements were fulfilled at the end of the previous year, so it was discovered she was no longer academically eligible to continue the internship. Washington, D.C. had been a brief but heady ride for her, and what came next for Chandra was up in the air.
But for now, she was eager to return home and see her family. She told her dad she was actually thinking about booking a train ticket home to California so she could decompress on the way back home with the most scenic train ride in America, which travels through the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevadas, and passes by a host of other natural landmarks.
It's a trip Chandra had always dreamed about taking, seeing the fullness of the American landscape in that way. And for a young woman who had just turned 24 and was embracing her independence, this was the perfect time in her life for a new adventure. And then, in the week leading up to her planned trip, Chandra's parents stopped hearing from her.
She had so many loose ends to tie up before her return, they just assumed she was probably busy in DC. Of course, it was uncharacteristic of her not to return their calls, and it was particularly odd that she hadn't updated them with her travel information. They didn't know if she was traveling back home to Modesto or directly to LA where her degree awaited her. Honestly, they didn't even know if she had decided to take the train like she'd been talking about or if she just booked a flight instead.
But in spite of this sudden lapse in communication, they tried to brush it off as she got sidetracked, and they told themselves they'd be hearing from her or maybe even seeing her walk through their front door any day. This forced sense of reassurance only carried so far, however. And when they still hadn't heard from Chandra by the end of the first week of May, they began to panic.
Susan, Chandra's mother, left increasingly worried-sounding messages on Chandra's answering machine, none of which Chandra returned. Robert, Chandra's father, took a more stern approach, one he reserved for rare occasions such as this one. Damn it, Chandra, call me back, was his simple, very direct message to her. When more time passed without a word from their daughter, the couple found themselves consumed with dread.
By May 6th, it had been a week since the Levees had last heard from their daughter. It was pretty apparent to them at this point that something was probably wrong. Chandra was a responsible young woman, a meticulous planner. To go more than a week without reaching out to her parents, leaving them hanging on her travel plans, was completely out of character for her. So Robert picked up his phone and placed a call to the D.C. police to file a missing persons report.
The response sounded like business as usual on the other end. It didn't leave Robert with much optimism. Chandra's mom and dad actually had her cell phone on a family plan and they paid the bill each month. So they went online and began looking through Chandra's phone records. And there were a couple of Washington numbers that kept popping up.
Chandra was regularly calling and receiving calls from these numbers, and they had no idea who these numbers belonged to. So they picked up the phone and dialed one, and it led to an answering machine announcing its location as the office of Congressman Gary Condit, a Democrat who represented California's 18th congressional district, which included Modesto.
Susan's hair immediately stood on end because just a few weeks earlier, she was talking to her handyman, a guy named Otis Thomas, and she'd mentioned how Sandra was doing well in Washington and how she had befriended a congressman. Otis's expression then darkened, and he told her a story about his own daughter who, seven years earlier, when she was just 18, had dated a congressman from their district named Gary Condit.
and when the relationship ended badly condit had warned her not to tell anyone about their affair and she became so scared that she went into hiding so after hearing this story from otis susan had asked chandra the next time they spoke if she was having a relationship with gary condit she's like okay you've said you're friends with him is it more than that and chandra was surprised how did you know she asked her mother
Her mother then relayed the story that the handyman had told her and then told Chandra that she was concerned for her safety. I mean, not only is she in a relationship with a congressman at a very young age, this congressman is also married.
And Chandra didn't appreciate what she saw as her mother meddling. Her tone stiffened and she told her mother to just mind her own business, reminding her that she was a grown woman and she could date whom she wanted. And then she insisted to her mother that she not say a word to anyone about this secret relationship.
Her mother, Susan, agreed and ended the call by telling Chandra to be careful. The following week, Chandra's parents traveled to the East Coast to celebrate Chandra's birthday. And while they were spending time with each other, Chandra reassured her mother that she had talked to Condit about the handyman's story and he explained everything to her. But that was as deep into it as she went and she offered no further details. So this was just chastity.
two weeks before her disappearance. So when she disappears, Susan was immediately thinking that Gary Condit had something to do with Chandra's disappearance. She feared, in fact, that Chandra was dead.
Images flashed through Susan's mind, images from books and movies about sinister politicians making people disappear, people who threaten their power and their political careers. She imagined that her daughter, Chandra, had gotten caught up with just this kind of man.
As Chandra's graduation day arrived and her family still hadn't heard a word from her, they took their concerns to the press. And the first stories about Chandra Levy's disappearance were carried exclusively in California newspapers. And then Susan decided to tell her husband about Chandra's affair with Gary Condit. As Robert listened to his wife, he saw red. His jaw clenched. He picked up the phone book and turned to see.
looking for Gary Condit's name. Condit lived in the town of Ceres, about 10 minutes away. And there he was in the phone book. So Robert Levy gave him a call and got Condit's wife on the phone with the news that Gary wasn't home. Gary called him back shortly after. Robert told the congressman that he was the father of Chandra Levy and that she was missing.
Condit told him he didn't know Chandra very well. She had just been a friend of one of his interns. They'd met in Washington while she was interning for the Bureau of Prisons. She visited his office and he gave her some career advice. But he claims he had no idea where Chandra could be and was sorry he couldn't be of more assistance, but said he'd be willing to help however he could.
Robert got off the phone with him and just knew he was lying. He could feel it in his bones. So he called the D.C. police again. And in this call, he made it known that Chandra had been dating a married U.S. congressman named Gary Condit. So now her father drops the news. And he suspected that Condit may know more about his daughter's disappearance than he was letting on.
So after getting off the phone with Robert Levy, an officer with the D.C. police drove to Chandra's apartment and got the building manager to let him in. Inside the apartment, the officer saw two open suitcases on the floor as though someone had been in the middle of packing. And Chandra's other personal effects were still inside the apartment. Her I.D. cards, her driver's license, her checkbook, credit cards, jewelry and even her cell phone.
Dirty dishes were in the sink and dirty laundry was in a bag on the countertop. This is not a good sign for a missing person, but they also found no indication of violence or foul play inside the apartment either. It was as though the young woman had just vanished.
After this information was relayed to Chandra's parents, her father picked up the phone and began calling hospitals around the D.C. area, hoping that maybe she just had an accident and was recuperating but incapacitated. But he had no luck there. Chandra was not a patient at any of the hospitals in the D.C. area.
On May 9th, detectives with the D.C. police met up with Gary Condit at the condo the congressman kept in Washington. It was time they confront him about Chandra. In his conversation with the investigators, Condit acknowledged that he had become friends with Chandra and that she'd even slept over at his apartment a couple of times. But he stopped short of admitting that the two of them had sex.
So the detectives asked him point blank if the two of them had an intimate relationship and Condit replied, quote, I don't think we need to go there and you can infer what you want with that. So I think the implications there were pretty clear. He went on to tell the detectives that he hadn't seen Chandra since the last week of April and nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary the last time they spoke.
She didn't seem distraught or upset about anything. A little bit uncertain about her immediate future, maybe, but her long-term goals seemed clear. She still wanted to work in the FBI or the CIA. And he had agreed to help her find a job in either of those organizations. In their last conversation, Chandra had talked to him about taking the train back to California. And that was all he could remember.
Before the detectives left, Conda asked them if he was a suspect, and their words told him no, but their demeanors told him that he was.
And shortly after, he decided to retain a defense attorney to help him navigate what he saw as a situation that might threaten his political career at the very least. So once word got out that the police had questioned Gary Condit in Chandra's disappearance, the story kind of began to spread beyond California. Okay, most beauty brands don't understand fine color treated hair, but...
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He told the press that Chandra Levy was a great person and a good friend. We hope she is found safe and sound. So he's describing to the press that she's a good friend. And this is quite the contrast from what he told Chandra's parents, whom he told he didn't really know Chandra well. And if we know, he told police that basically they were having an affair.
So meanwhile, Chandra's answering machine at this point was full, having reached its maximum capacity of 25 messages. Chandra's parents could no longer even engage in one-way communication with their missing daughter. So at this point, they boarded a flight and flew out to Washington.
On May 10th, police got a warrant to search Chandra's apartment. They collected her laptop, her cell phone, and even her dirty laundry. They also learned that back on April 30th, she had canceled her gym membership and ended her apartment lease, suggesting she might have been planning to return to her family in California, like she had said.
At the urging of the levies and based on the information they had, detectives began to probe Gary Condit's personal life a little more deeply. So they are still leaning in on this congressman. And they learned that Chandra was not the first much younger woman that the married politician had been sexually involved with.
About five years earlier, Condit had begun a sexual relationship with one of his junior aides, a 22-year-old woman he had dated for about three years. Detectives got in touch with the woman and she told them about how she was instructed to keep the affair a secret, but people in his office knew about it nevertheless and rumors began to circulate.
It just wasn't a good situation, she said. And she described Condit as manipulative and controlling. When she heard about Chandra Levy being missing and her connection to Condit, she was afraid for Chandra's welfare. Police also got in touch with a more recent affair, a 39-year-old flight attendant who first met Condit when he hit on her during a cross-country flight.
When she met up with him a few days later, she was apprehensive because he was married, but she couldn't resist his charm and his power. She described how Condit love bombed her with gifts and how he promised her that so long as she never told anyone about their relationship, it could last indefinitely. They would rendezvous at hotels and at his DC area condo, which was located in a hipster neighborhood and not the place congressmen typically lived in DC.
which kind of suggests that Condit's residence in D.C. was more of his sex pad away from home than his work residence in D.C., a place in a neighborhood that would make him appear hip and cool to the younger woman that he wanted to bed.
So the woman recounted to detectives how Condit had very recently, not long after police first questioned him, asked her not to call him for a while. And he wouldn't say why, only that he might have to disappear for a while. So this is highly suspicious words as police are now talking to her.
By May 18th, the story of Chandra's disappearance had become national news. Around this time, investigators were sifting through everything they collected during their search of Chandra's apartment. And among the missing woman's dirty laundry, they found a pair of women's underwear, Chandra's underwear, with a crusty stain on it.
The underwear was sent to the forensic lab and that stain was determined to be semen, which was immediately processed for DNA. Investigators also opened Chandra's laptop and began looking through web browser history.
Unfortunately, however, the police sergeant who conducted this search was not a computer technician and had no special training. So he pretty much didn't know what he was doing and he ended up accidentally corrupting the search history. It would then take more than a month for trainer computer techs to reassemble that file.
And when they did, what they found was that on the day she disappeared, she first began using the web browser just before 1030 a.m. So this is giving us a very good insight to what Chandra's day was like. She visited the homepage of U.S. Representative Gary Condit, then Southwest Airlines, then Amtrak, then
then Baskin-Robbins, she loved Baskin-Robbins ice cream, and then she checked the weather report on the Washington Post website. And after that, she checked the address for Rock Creek Park, followed by accessing a map to the park. This was at 1234 p.m. Investigators eventually came to believe that Chandra, who was an avid runner, was checking the weather because she was planning to jog around the 1,750-acre Rock Creek Park.
Based on the information they had, police shared their feelings with the Levees that one of three things was possible. Either A, Chandra had run away, B, she had taken her own life, or C, she was murdered.
This was hardly reassuring to the Levees, who knew that A and B were absolutely not possible. Chandra would never run away and would never kill herself. They were frustrated that police would even suggest these things. The police obviously did not know their daughter, and as the investigation progressed without any answers and without finding Chandra, the Levees had reached their breaking point.
They believe Gary Condit was not being forthright and they believed he knew a lot more than he was telling. So in mid-June, they held a national press conference in which they pleaded directly to Gary Condit to share everything that he knew. And you have to think about this.
This family of this 24-year-old girl who's missing and has been missing goes on national television to plead with a congressman to share what he knew about their daughter's disappearance.
And after mulling it over, Condit agreed to an off-the-record secret meeting with Susan Levy, Chandra's mom, in the presence of his attorney, of course. And so I think it's safe to say he's doing damage control at this point. Robert Levy, her father actually couldn't bring himself to face Gary Condit, so he sat outside of the secret meeting.
But the meeting, though it was to be discreet, wasn't an informal thing. The Levy's attorney and Condit's attorney first had to agree on what questions the Levy's could and could not ask. And once they settled on a list of questions, arrangements were made and Susan Levy met with Condit in a private banquet room at the Jefferson Hotel four blocks from the White House.
When they first came face to face, Condit reached his hand out to shake Susan's hand, but she refused. And this set a tone and made it clear to Condit that she couldn't be won over by his politician-like charm. They sat down for what would end up being a very brief meeting. Near the end of it, Susan asked Condit where her daughter was. Condit looked her in the eye and told her, Mrs. Levy, I don't know. Really, I don't.
Susan didn't buy it, and as she got up to leave, Condit asked her if she could give her a hug. Susan told him, "'Absolutely not.'
As more details began making their way into the news cycle, Condit would go on to meet with police again a short time later. He was upset that information and things he had said to police, namely his refusal to talk about whether or not he'd been intimate with Chandra, had somehow been leaked to the press. Condit talked to police for about an hour, and he went through how he first met Chandra, how their friendship had developed, all the way up to his last interactions with her.
He said she'd been to his apartment three, maybe four times, that they'd never exchanged any gifts, which police believed to be a lie because they'd gotten information from Chandra's aunt, whom Chandra kept more in the know about her relationship than her mother, that Condit had definitely given Chandra some gold jewelry during their time together. And when detectives asked him specifically about this, Gary Condit denied it.
As they pressed for more details about the nature of his relationship with Chandra, Condit's attorney intervened and shut down that line of questioning. Detectives then asked Condit to account for his movements on May 1st, the day they believed Chandra disappeared.
He told them he'd left his apartment at 11 a.m. and was at work until 6.30 in the evening and afterward had dinner at a restaurant in his neighborhood. And he added that earlier in the afternoon, he had met with then Vice President Dick Cheney. So he actually had a pretty rock solid alibi. As a congressman working on Capitol Hill, he had a pretty busy workday each day where a lot of people would see him and could vouch for his presence. So
So that complicated his candidacy as a suspect. Now let's flash forward at this point to July 25th. Chandra had been missing for nearly three months by this point, and police finally began searching Rock Creek Park with a directive from the police chief to search the area 100 yards from the trails that cut through the park.
However, there was a miscommunication and the searchers ended up only searching the areas 100 yards from the roadways that traveled through and around the perimeter of the park, rather than the trails that joggers used.
So the search covered a lot less ground than the police chief had intended. And by early afternoon, the first phase of the search was over and it had turned up absolutely nothing. But then after lunch, after searchers relocated to a different area of the park, they finally found something. It was a pair of sunglasses and then a short distance away, a single Reebok sneaker.
And then, farther into the forest, a pair of athletic pants turned inside out with each leg wound into a knot. Each of these items was later confirmed to have belonged to Chandra Levy. But where was her body? Little did anyone know at the time, her body was right there under their noses, just 80 yards below the trail, just out of the range they had searched.
Another 10 months would pass before her body would be found, by which time her remains would be skeletal and potentially valuable forensic evidence will have been wiped away. Wiped away by decomposition, animal interference, and the changing seasons.
So police dropped the ball already a few times. First, they accidentally corrupted the browser history, which set the investigation back a month. Then they overlooked Chandra's body after not searching the area where they found her other belongings thoroughly enough. And they also didn't learn about the security cameras in Chandra's building till months after the investigation began. By this time, the tapes had been recycled and the footage was lost.
So there was now absolutely no way to determine if Chandra had left the building alone or with someone or what time she had even left. The information was there just within their grasp and then it was gone.
All the while, from mid-May through late July, the story of Chandra Levy's disappearance had become the biggest story in the news cycle. Gary Condit repeatedly denied having had any affair with the young woman, and yet Chandra's family and friends knew otherwise. The fact that the married congressman wouldn't just come clean and admit it made him the public's number one suspect.
And even though investigators hadn't turned up a lick of evidence to suggest Condit had anything to do with Chandra's disappearance, law enforcement officials questioned him about his relationship with Chandra and the events leading up to her disappearance. The intense media coverage created an environment where public opinion swayed and Condit found himself at the center of the storm.
While the media circus persisted, the true mystery of what happened to Chandra Levy continued to go unsolved. And police were considering the possibility that Chandra may have been the victim of a random attack.
Some people, too, were speculating that a serial killer may have been responsible for Chandra's disappearance. But meanwhile, Gary Condit's political career was now in jeopardy. He was undergoing what we like to call a trial by media. The flight attendant he'd had the affair with went public with it on Fox News and revealed how she was given by Condit's reps an affidavit to sign declaring that she didn't have a relationship with Condit, which...
which she refused to sign because denying the affair would be a falsehood. The Levee's handyman, Otis Thomas, also went public with his story about his own daughter having dated Gary Condit. And then Chandra's aunt went public and confirmed that Chandra Levee, our murdered victim, and Gary Condit had been having an affair, which up until this point was only being speculated about in the news media.
And Condit and his reps had been denying it up until this point. So Chandra's aunt revealed some things Chandra had confided in her about the relationship, including that Condit made a so-called five-year plan in which he told Chandra he would leave his wife and start a family with the young woman in five years time. But up until that point, she was to keep a low profile and avoid being seen when she visited him.
It sounded like pure manipulation, the kind of thing older married men tell their presumably naive younger mistress to keep them tethered to them and accessible for sex. Condit then responded by refuting this story and claimed it was all made up and that these conversations never took place. But eventually Condit and his attorney would agree to sit down with investigators and he would begrudgingly admit to his relationship with Chandra.
because at this point it was there was just too much evidence he would detail when it began and how often they would see each other he even admitted to giving her the gold jewelry he denied gifting her in an earlier interview and ultimately he allowed the police to swab his cheek for dna and when that dna was compared to the dna from the semen stain on chandra's underwear it matched proving beyond doubt that condit did have an intimate relationship with chandra
But did that mean he had something to do with her disappearance? For prosecutors, this pointed towards yes, because he had not been forthcoming and that was a strong indicator he was guilty of something. But it wasn't proof and that's what they needed. Heck, at this point in the investigation, they still didn't even know where Chandra was. They didn't even have proof she was dead. Her body had not been found.
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So the next step in the investigation was they obtained a search warrant for Gary Condit's condo. And word about this somehow leaked.
So the street outside Condit's Washington condo was swarming with journalists and TV reporters as police officers and CSI pulled up to begin their search, which itself provided great footage for the evening news and images for the papers. The pale figures of CSI investigators visible through the windows, combing through the apartments, scanning surfaces with black lights,
It was imagery that only helped increase the public opinion that Gary Condit was guilty of more than having an affair. He was the number one suspect in Chandra's disappearance. In August, Condit's hometown paper and longtime supporter, the Modesto Bee, turned on him and called for the congressman's resignation.
the bee printed that condit had knowingly hindered the police investigation and that he had repeatedly put his own interests ahead of the effort to find levy his self-absorption had been a lapse not only of judgment but of human decency condit however refused to step down he appeared with his wife in people magazine and did an abc interview with connie chung denying that he killed chandra and also continuing his steadfast refusal to acknowledge he'd had an affair with her
His reason being, out of a specific request by the Levy family, it is best that I not get into the details of the relationship. However, the Levy family struck back in a statement of their own, claiming they'd never made any such specific request. This was just yet another lie from Gary Condit. And the spotlight on Gary Condit persisted mercilessly. That was until September 11th.
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, a new story took center stage in the news cycle, especially for politics. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. And this all but swept Chandra Levy and Gary Condit completely under the rug. His name being mentioned in newspapers...
drastically dropped and it only flared back up again in April of 2002 once Chandra Levy's skeletal remains were found in Rock Creek Park.
by a man walking his dog and looking for turtles. So at that point, the Chandra Levy case officially became a homicide investigation. And because she was just bones when her remains were finally discovered, it was impossible to determine exactly how she died. But there was one clue. Chandra's hyoid bone in her neck appeared to have been damaged, which is something often found in cases of asphyxiation. So it was quite possible, based on this, that
that Chandra had been strangled, strangled and hidden in the park, which this does seem to give some accreditation to the theory that maybe this was a random attack because this is definitely not the first time a young woman has been jogging alone in a park and has been attacked by a stranger. So,
There is some validation there. Even attacks happening in this exact park in D.C. In fact, in February of 2002, a man pleaded guilty in the two attacks on women joggers in Rock Creek Park. But he went back and forth whether or not he'd even seen Chandra and took polygraph tests and failed them.
Police were pretty confident that he had only attacked those two women and had not attacked Chandra. So then Chandra's remains, like I said, were found. And then the case goes cold for nearly seven years. There's just not enough evidence to charge anybody. Everything changed in 2007, however, when the Washington Post published a long form series on the Chandra Levy case.
And the result was renewed attention. A new investigator was assigned to the case and it actually led to that man I had talked about, the man who was charged with attacking two women in that exact park. It led to that lead being revisited. And this man's name was Ingmar Guandique.
So in September of 2008, Guandique's prison cell was searched by investigators and inside they found a photo of Chandra Levy that he'd cut out of a magazine and saved.
Acquaintances of Guandique were subsequently interviewed and it was learned that Guandique had repeatedly confessed in horrifying detail to killing Chandra Levy in letters he'd written to them. Remember, this was all visited way back when, years earlier, and he had said, yes, I did it. No, I didn't. Yes, I did it. No, I didn't. And police at that time felt like he had not done it.
But now, prosecutors felt that even though they had no physical evidence linking Guandique to the crime, they still had a strong enough case based on the information they had gathered. And in March 2009, Ingmar Guandique was formally charged with six counts connected to the death of Chandra Levy. Kidnapping, first-degree murder, committed during a kidnapping, attempted first-degree sexual abuse, first-degree murder committed during a sexual offense, attempted robbery, and
a first degree murder committed during a robbery.
He pleaded not guilty on all counts. Two of those charges, the sex-related charges, were dropped before the case was tried because one of the key witnesses, who was a former cellmate of Guandique's, who later testified that Guandique told him he'd killed Chandra, he said that he denied that he had raped her. The case went to trial in October of 2010, and after a three-week trial, the jury deliberated for three days, and Guandique was found guilty on all four remaining counts.
He was sentenced to 60 years in prison. The Levees accepted at this point that Guandique was responsible for killing their daughter, and they changed their position on Condit, concluding that he likely had nothing to do with it. That was that until 2015.
Police said...
even shown up to investigate the area but they didn't find anything out of the ordinary.
I don't know how this went missed until now. More importantly, though, this was hours before Chandra was using her Sony laptop to look up train tickets, Baskin Robbins maps to Rock Creek Park. This is according to her browser history. So that 4.30 a.m. scream may not have been relevant to the case, but either way, prosecutors ultimately decided to drop their case against Ingmar Guandique, and instead they had him deported back to El Salvador. And
And so the murder of Chandra Levy remains officially unsolved. The cloud of suspicion that loomed over Congressman Gary Condit gradually lifted, but the stink of the scandal never did. And he remained in office until January 2003 after he unsurprisingly lost his bid for reelection. And that spelled the end of his political career.
Afterward, Condit and his family moved to Arizona and they became franchise owners of two Baskin Robbins ice cream shops, which is kind of strange when you think that one of the last things Chandra Levy was known to have done in her short life was visit the Baskin Robbins website.
Condit's business was unsuccessful, however, and in the end, he was ordered to pay the company $98,000 in a breach of contract complaint. He later moved back to California, where he became a lobbyist with a Sacramento law firm.
Condit has publicly talked about the Chandra Levy scandal in the years since, and he has repeatedly outright denied ever having an affair with Chandra Levy, even though there's evidence that he absolutely did. Anyways, that does it for this week and concludes our cycle exploring high profile cases. I'll be back next week with a new case, an all new theme. So I look forward to meeting you then. Goodbye.