My heart goes out to Susan and Robert Levy. I fear they will come away from the murder trial of their daughter, Chandra, with broken hearts — again. For three weeks they listened to federal prosecutors try to pin the murder of their only child on Ingmar Guandique; they also heard Guandique’s defense attorneys blast holes in the government’s case. The jury began deliberations Tuesday. No matter whether they find Guandique guilty or innocent, the process of achieving justice in the case has been badly botched.
Why do I believe that? Two reasons:
The Metropolitan Police Department did a horrible job of investigating Chandra Levy’s murder. “Incompetence” does not do justice to the mistakes they made.
Secondly, law enforcement officials in the nation’s capital have no forensic laboratory. The crime lab is suspect; beyond that, we’re at the mercy of others.
In a day when viewers across the country glue themselves to TV screens to see hip scientists on cop shows take the tiniest speck from a crime scene and turn it into incriminating evidence, we in D.C. ship our evidence out of town.
If D.C. evidence technicians can come up with a hair or a bloodstain or a spent cartridge, they bag it and send it to an FBI lab in Virginia. The feds store it in a room — and get to it when they can. My sources tell me the feds are sitting on perhaps hundreds of rape kits from D.C. that might identify a serial rapist.
Let’s revisit the Levy crime scene. The intern for the Federal Bureau of Prisons goes missing May 1, 2001. She’s 24. Susan and Robert Levy alert the cops. D.C.’s finest dally. When they begin to search, they trace her to a running path in Rock Creek Park. They comb the woods. The cops come up empty. A guy walking his dog more than a year later discovers Levy’s bones in the park. A cold case, indeed.
The result is prosecutors came to court with no evidence. None. Take DNA “recovered” from her clothes. D.C. cops sent it to the FBI. The FBI farmed it to a private lab. DNA from a lab employee turned up on her bra; her black tights had DNA from an unidentified male. The medical examiner could not determine a cause of death.
Prosecutors had neither an eyewitness nor a firsthand confession.
So Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Haines had to tell jurors in her closing statement they had no idea how Chandra Levy died. But it must have been Guandique, an illegal immigrant who had attacked other women in the park.
“Fiction,” said Guandique’s attorney, Santha Sonenberg.
How embarrassing for the feds; how sad for the Levy family. How depressing for D.C. residents who expect serious investigations and perhaps even a forensic lab.
The city has broken ground on a new lab east of the Smithsonian. It might be up and running by the end of 2011. But that will be cold comfort for a father and mother still mourning the loss of their daughter.
