I don’t know if you can describe this result as just, especially since Ms. Levy is lying in a tomb, separated permanently from everyone she’s ever loved. On the other hand, her murderer-like most illegal aliens living in this country-will now be enjoying a standard of living that he could never have hoped to aspire to in his homeland.
The fact that the mainstream media has consistently ignored the status of Chandra Levy’s murderer and his ties to a barbaric, Central American criminal network, even on the day he was convicted describing this criminal alien with the benign euphemism “immigrant,” only adds to the tragedy of her death. Newsbusters provides an antidote to the politically correct whitewash of Ms. Levy’s murder in its coverage of the Guandique verdict. Even so, don’t expect the gatekeepers in the mainstream media to explain to you the real culprit behind Ms. Levy’s death, i.e. our government’s continued indifference to the crimes of illegal aliens.
The best way to remember Chandra is to speak out against the crimes committed by those doing “jobs Americans won’t do,” which in Mr. Guandique’s case meant committing a vicious murder of a promising young women. Don’t let her death be in vain.
Sorry, Gerard, but there is NO credible evidence WHATSOEVER tying Ingmar Guandique to the death– and assumed murder– of Chandra Levy! The criminal case against him was a legal travesty, orchestrated by an avenging angel at “The Washington Post” named Sari Horwitz, who badgered her bosses there into letting her reinvestigate the disappearance and death of Ms. Levy– who, Horwitz admitted in print, reminded her of herself as a young woman (for reasons that one can only imagine!?!), and whose disappearance and death (as opposed to the more than a few others of either that have taken place in our nation’s capital in the past decade, and which remain unsolved to this day!) “haunted” Horwitz still (as of July 2008; I assume that she was still “haunted” when she published her book on the case, earlier this year– just in time to prime the pump of anti-Guandigue sentiment, before his criminal trial began in D.C.!?!).
Feel welcome to peruse the long string of comments at the so-called Reporter’s Notebook section of the on-line series that Ms. Horwitz, et al., did on the case in July 2008– including my own seemingly endless string of loquacious exegeses therein; after which, I would be happy to debate anyone– here or elsewhere, publicly or privately– on the matter.
In brief, the case came down to one convicted-and-still-incarcerated felon claiming that Guandigue “confessed” to him, because the latter was worried about being abused by other inmates, after a pending transfer, because he had been falsely accused of raping Ms. Levy. According to this alleged confession, Guandigue claimed to have murdered Ms. Levy, but not to have raped her. Since her remains were not found for a little over a year, there is no known forensic evidence that Ms. Levy had been sexually assaulted on (or after– since the actual time and place of death, likewise, are not established, other than by inference!) that May Day of 2001, when she went missing from her Dupont Circle apartment in D.C.
The prosecutors claimed that Guandigue also had confessed to several additional people– always other inmates, mind you!– over the years, and told the Court, at the beginning of the trial, that they would present more than one of those claimants. In addition to their reneging on that promise, the prosecutors failed to call ANY of the police detectives who had taken over the case in 2008, as a result of the “Post” series, to testify as to their investigation and evidentiary findings– a virtually unheard of omission in a murder case!
Likewise, the star witness of Ms. Horwitz & company’s “J’accuse!” in the summer of 2008– a Park Police detective, now (sort of) retired, named Joe Green– was also apparently not called by the prosecution to tell the judge and jury what he told the “Post” reporters: to wit, that Guandigue, while being interviewed in Rock Creek Park, by Green and two others, one a translator, after being quickly apprehended for his second mugging there, was shown a missing-person poster of Chandra Levy, and admitted there and then that he both had seen Ms. Levy in the park, on some unspecified day that previous spring, and had found her to be attractive. In its series, the “Post” never mentioned even trying to confirm that very belated, and wholly unbelievable, claim from Joe Green, and chose not to answer a direct question about that when answering several (fairly banal) questions from readers, as you may see for yourself at the paper’s Web site. Is it believable that Joe Green would not have been called by the prosecution, if they could substantiate his claim with either or both of the other two policemen– or even if it was facially plausible on his word alone?
I will leave the evidence (and profound lack thereof!) just there for now. Neither justice nor the victim’s grieving loved ones, however, are served by a miscarriage of justice that belatedly finds a convenient scapegoat, while under renewed-and-heavy pressure from the local Establishment Press, and railroads him with the flimsiest of evidence, produced from a fellow convicted felon– who is known to have lied under oath otherwise, no less, while on the stand then! (He claimed that a defense investigator came to see him dressed in a revealing outfit, in hopes of seducing pro-defense claims from him, and that that was why he had refused to talk to her!?! A federal prison official later testified under oath that such dress by visitors is simply not allowed in the federal penitentiary system!) Like the more-saintly ‘Sir Thomas More’ [cf. "A Man for All Seasons" (1966)], I would give the Devil himself the protection of the Law– just so that I may be sure that the Law would still be there to protect me, should the time and the need for it ever arise!
If Ingmar Guandigue did kill Chandra Levy, on or after May Day of 2001– as, I readily admit, is theoretically possible– he managed to do so without leaving any known forensic evidence or credible eyewitness testimony to that fact. As for his belonging to MS-13, the coverage of the trial was the first that I had heard of that development; it went wholly unmentioned in Ms. Horwitz’ umpteen-part “J’accuse!” in July 2008!?! Obviously, Guandigue, like so many other inmates in our horribly violent prison system, felt that he needed the protection that an ethnic gang lends to its members against their ethnic rivals inside of the prison walls. That sad and unfortunate fact hardly tells one anything at all about his whereabouts and behavior back on May Day of 2001, or about his culpability for the tragic and premature death of the ill-fated Chandra Levy.
1. Failed two polygraphs administered to him while in custody.
2. Imprisoned for other crimes when he was charged. Member of MS-13, this is the first time I’ve heard of there being a humanitarian reason for joining the bloodiest, most ruthless international prison gang on the planet.
3. Testimony from TWO cellmates of a confession to murder.
4. Attacked two other women in the same park.
The reason there wasn’t any DNA evidence is because the forensic investigators fouled up, not because it didn’t exist. That being said, the assumption that someone can’t be convicted of a crime based solely upon circumstantial evidence is completely misguided. There’s nothing untoward about it. However, if there is overwhelming evidence that this is some kind of frameup, which I doubt, I’ll gladly retract my post.
1) Aside from the fact that polygraph results are inadmissible in court, and therefore could not have been a consideration in the jury’s verdict in the recent Levy murder trial, Gerard, I do not know what your source(s) might be for your claim that Ingmar Guandique failed two polygraph examinations administered to him while in custody. Assuming that you do have at least one credible source for that very pertinent claim, however, I would very much appreciate your citing it (or them) here, so that I may check it (or them) out on my own. Thanks, if so, in advance!
Being a former resident of the D.C. area, and being a former attorney, with an interest in murder mysteries, I have followed the case fairly closely, especially at its inception, in May 2001, and during the “Post” series in the summer of 2008. I know of only one polygraph examination administered to Ingmar Guandique since he was taken into federal custody– in Rock Creek Park, on the evening of July 1, 2001, about forty-five minutes after his second known mugging there– a polygraph examination given to him by the F.B.I., on February 4, 2002, and which he passed! As far as I know, his defense attorneys advised him thereafter not to take any additional polygraph examinations– as, indeed, any competent criminal defense attorneys would have advised their clients, under similar circumstances– and he heeded their sound legal advice.
The Justice Department merely claims now that it does not trust the results– the primary (ostensible) objection or misgiving apparently being that the polygraph examiner himself was not bilingual; instead, an English-speaking polygraph examiner was used, along with a bilingual (English/Spanish) translator. That was the Justice Department’s own choice at the time– not Guandique’s!– and is standard operating procedure in such cases. Kristina Ament, the prosecutor in Guandique’s earlier federal trial, told the judge, in open court, that he had cleared himself with his polygraph results from February 4, 2002; that federal judge, Noel Anketell Kramer, replied that she “never for a moment thought that…he had anything to do with Chandra Levy.”
2) The two crimes for which Ingmar Guandique had been previously convicted, and given a quite stiff ten-year sentence, were a pair of muggings– neither of which resulted in a sexual assault, nor physical injury, nor even a theft. Although armed with a knife in each of those two instances– on May 14 and July 1, 2001– Guandique fled the scene both times (albeit neither quickly nor far enough, in the second instance, as he was arrested in the park, about forty-five minutes later), simply as a result of the women’s resisting him; he did not use the knife to cut or stab, let alone to kill, either woman, and he did not take anything from them– including the diamond engagement ring that one of them was wearing at the time that she was mugged!– prior to fleeing the scenes of the crimes.
There are no known similarities between those two muggings and the (presumably) earlier death of Chandra Levy, on (or after) May 1, 2001, because it is not known for certain either how she died or where she died (as opposed to where her remains were found, one year and three weeks later– which might or might not have been where she actually died), nor exactly when she died. Had she been mugged by Guandique on May Day 2001, one would have expected him to have used a knife, as he did in his two later muggings, on May 14 and July 1, 2001. If so, one would have expected him to use that knife to kill Chandra Levy, if that were what he either intended to do or simply ended up doing spontaneously. There is no known, available evidence, however, that she was either cut or stabbed. There were no knife holes in her clothes; there were no knife marks upon her skeletal remains; there were no blood stains, nor blood residue, found on her clothes, nor otherwise at the scene in Rock Creek Park where her remains were finally recovered, on May 22, 2002.
Instead, the hyoid bone in her neck was damaged, suggesting that she most likely died from asphyxiation by strangling. Since her running pants were found at the scene, with each leg oddly knotted, it has been speculated that her killer used the pants to strangle her. That someone with a knife would have bothered to do so– and that Guandique, in particular, who later fled both from two muggings and a petty burglary (on May 7, 2001), simply because he was resisted or, in the latter case, discovered on the premises, would have done so– is highly implausible, especially in light of any claims that an attack on Chandra Levy would have fit with Ingmar Guandique’s SUBSEQUENT “pattern” of two muggings in Rock Creek Park.
The truly bizarre theory of the successful prosecution of Ingmar Guandique for the alleged first-degree of murder of Chandra Levy, however, as recently argued by the prosecution in front of a jury in open court, is that Guandique DID NOT kill Levy on May 1, 2001, in Rock Creek Park; rather, the prosecution told the jurors in explicating its theory of the case, Gaundique merely tied Levy up with her own running togs, and left her lying there in Rock Creek Park, on a warm, sunny May Day afternoon. The prosecution argued that she died after some extended period of time– Zeus only knows how long!– and that she died from neither wounds inflicted by Guandique on May 1, nor by asphyxiation, purposeful or accidental, but rather from eventual exposure and/or dehydration!?!
Since the prosecution ended up dropping most of its charges against Guandique during the course of his trial, including one for felony murder, it is difficult to comprehend how that unlikely scenario, if somehow taken seriously, would have amounted to first-degree murder, as opposed to felony murder. The theory is not even that Guandique tied Levy to a tree, say, but merely that he left her lying on the ground, tied up– hands and feet both? …and with her mouth gagged? …all with only one pair of running tights?!?– and, yet, that she was unable either to free herself or to move herself to a spot where she would be spotted by any other park visitor(s) or employee(s), over the course of the days that it would be expected to take a healthy young women to die from exposure– in May, in D.C.!– or dehydration. It is all nothing more than an amazingly bizarre prosecutorial fairy tale!
Your snideness, Gerard, in suggesting that I had claimed that Ingmar Guandique joined MS-13 in prison for “a humanitarian reason” is frankly not appreciated by me. If you should feel, nonetheless, that you can afford to alienate the only person who appears to read your daily musing here regularly, so be it. If you are somehow unable to grasp why someone in Guandique’s dire circumstances would join a prison gang, in hopes of thereby increasing his own likelihood of surviving the brutally violent environment of a maximum-security federal prison, over the course of a long ten-year sentence, that failure surely says far more about your own knowledge and intellect than your snide remark implies about either of my own….
Regardless, there is no evidence that Ingmar Guandique had any involvement with any gang, including MS-13, prior to his incarceration. There is no evidence that he began his brief career as a petty burglar and armed mugger prior to losing his job at the beginning of May 2001. On May 7, 2001, he burgled a local apartment; when the owner returned in the course of that burglary, Guandique simply fled the scene, netting himself one ring. He was caught nearby, however, and charged locally in the case. While awaiting the disposition of that case in the D.C. courts, he carried out the two aforementioned muggings, neither of which netted him anything, and for which he later was sentenced to his current ten-year prison sentence in the federal penitentiary. The notion that any of that points to either sexual assault or murder in the case of Chandra Levy is ludicrous: Why would he have killed her– and, if he had, why would he have hesitated to kill either of the other two women, both of whom he had held briefly at knife point? It makes no sense; criminals tend to escalate in their crimes and violence, not deescalate.
What does make sense is that, as soon as he lost his job in May– for which, as an illegal immigrant, he was quite likely paid in cash, perhaps even on a daily basis– and no longer had any visible means of support, he turned to petty theft, in hopes of fencing personal jewelry, and other small goods, for cash to live off of, for the time being. Having been interrupted during his first burglary, and then quickly apprehended and charged, he likely decided that muggings in the park would present less of a risk of getting caught in the act again than would further residential burglaries, at which he had already failed on his very first try. Regardless, neither sexual assault nor murder fit in with the subsequent pattern of those three known robbery attempts committed by Ingmar Guandique, between May 7 and July 1, 2001.
3) No, Gerard, you are wrong. Although the government still claims that several different inmates heard “confessions” from Ingmar Guandique as to his having killed Chandra Levy, and although the prosecution explicitly promised the jurors in its opening statement that it would produce more than one such witness during the trial, it reneged and produced only one, Armando Morales. [cf., http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/11/25/1942695/for-key-trial-witness-a-new-beginning.html Morales reportedly came forward with his claim only after seeing a CNN report that his former cellmate, Ingmar Guandique, had been charged with the murder (etc.) of Chandra Levy.
If you believe that inmates who have not been charged with murders– murders which they have denied to authorities, under both police interrogation and polygraph examination by the F.B.I.– nonetheless are naive, foolish, stupid and/or reckless enough to go about confessing to those murders to their fellow inmates, for years on end, even though they know that they have been under the cloud of suspicion for those murders already, then your credulity takes one’s breath away– as does your unquestioning faith in the word of inmate Armando Morales (who was already a gangbanger, by the way, before he ever was convicted and sent away to the federal penitentiary), when it is convenient for you, as it is for the police and prosecutors who had had nine years’ worth of eggs on their faces, to accept his word, despite not only his known character and rap sheet, but even knowing that he had lied on the stand during the Levy murder trial about something else during the very same testimony!
There WAS a second cellmate who testified in Ingmar Guandique’s recent trial, Gerard; but, that inmate testified for the defense. He shared the same cell with Guandique and Morales, and he testified that Guandique never had made any such confession as Morales had claimed!
4) This point I discussed above. In addition, Chandra Levy did not fit the same physical profile as the two later mugging victims– which certainly would have been relevant, and arguably material, if one were assuming, as the prosecution did, that Chandra Levy had been sexually assaulted, and not merely mugged, before being “left to die” of exposure and/or dehydration, tied up in her own running togs!?!
5) You are wrong again, Gerard. There was DNA evidence recovered from Chandra Levy’s remains. (That you can state with such certainty that there had been other DNA evidence– i.e., from Ingmar Guandique– that existed in May 2001, at the scene where Chandra Levy’s remains eventually were discovered, in May 2002, that was no longer available at that later point in time, because of environmental degradation or contamination, is rank and self-serving speculation on your part.) Although DNA on Levy’s bra turned out to be from a lab employee (much as DNA in Linda Stein’s sink turned out to be from a police officer at the scene of her murder, on the night that her daughter discovered her mother had been beaten to death– by her personal assistant, Natavia Lowery, as it turned out– on October 30, 2007, in Linda Stein’s Fifth Avenue apartment), other DNA from an unidentified male was discovered on Levy’s running tights. Those who had access to the tights after the discovery of Levy’s remains would have been checked and cleared, as the lab assistant was vis-a-vis the DNA on her bra– meaning that the DNA was very likely there at the time of Chandra Levy’s death. That DNA might or might not have been from her killer; the two crucial points, however, are that (a) it was NOT from Ingmar Guandique, and (b) it DID apparently survive the 386 days during which Chandra Levy’s remains are assumed now to have laid there undisturbed in Rock Creek Park, prior to their discovery on May 22, 2002– contrary to your own convenient assumption that there had been DNA evidence from Ingmar Guandique that had failed to survive that intervening period of time in the out-of-doors!
As someone who graduated from law school over a quarter of a century ago, Gerard, and who was a licensed attorney for nearly fifteen years, before belatedly choosing to retire permanently from the practice of law, I may assure you that I need no lecture from you on the nature of either evidence (which Professor Aronson took care of) or criminal procedure (which Professor Junker handled). (By the way, Gerard, you do realize that DNA evidence is circumstantial evidence, do you not? You also realize that Ingmar Guandique’s own alleged confession to Armando Morales was direct evidence, albeit hearsay, do you not?)
Acquittal– which is not at all the same legal judgment as a dispositive finding of actual innocence (as was extraordinarily rendered by the Attorney General of the State of North Carolina, for instance, in the Duke Rape Hoax)– does not require “overwhelming evidence” of innocence, Gerard, much less of any nefarious “frameup” by some rogue authorities who actually know of the factual innocence of the criminal defendant whom they have charged and prosecuted. All acquittal requires, under our American system of criminal justice, is “a reasonable doubt”– as you must surely know, Gerard, whether or not you yourself actually appreciate or approve of that estimable burden of proof!?!