Cause of death? Unknown

Clint Van Zandt • Profile • E-mail

Five months before the 9/11 attack on America, you could not find a cable television news show that wasn't consumed with reporting on the mysterious disappearance of 24-year-old Washington, D.C., intern Chandra Levy.  Her April 30, 2001, disappearance had all the elements of a true crime mystery.  Young, intelligent, and attractive, Levy went missing when she shouldn't have.  A high profile suspect, or so called "person of interest," then-U.S. Congressman Gary A. Condit (D-Calif.), was suspected of being romantically involved with the missing victim.  The more Condit denied the relationship, the more suspect he became, and the more the media pressed for any detail of their alleged intimacy.

We've witnessed many modern day missing person cases pre and post Chandra Levy.  Union boss Jimmy Hoffa has been MIA for over three decades.  Elizabeth Smart, taken from her Salt Lake City home June 5, 2002, was found alive March 13, 2003, having been kidnapped by a former family handyman and semi-crazed indigent.

But it was Levy's April 2001 disappearance that created a media following, almost a feeding frenzy, second only to the ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway.  Few do not know that Holloway's been missing for six months, having disappeared during a high school graduation trip to Aruba.  In both the Levy and the Holloway cases the television media has provided its viewers with the likely suspects.  For Levy, then-52-year old Congressman Condit was alleged to have had an ongoing romantic relationship with the missing woman.  Before her believed final jog, Levy had searched the Internet for information on both Congressman Condit and on nearby Rock Creek Park.  Levy was supposedly preparing to leave for her family home in California at the time she disappeared.  In fact all her bags were packed in her room, she had already given up her apartment, and she walked out of it the day she disappeared dressed only in jogging clothes.

But a second person of interest emerges in the Levy case.  Ingmar Guandique, a Salvadoran immigrant, and, since July 2001, a federal prison inmate, attempted to assault two female joggers in the same area of Rock Creek Park where Levy's body was ultimately found.  Both of the other victims were tall and athletically built, whereas Levy, while physically fit, was at 5'3''and 110 pounds, petite.  The other two victims were attacked by Guandique on May 14 and July 1, respectively.  Characterized by the court as highly dangerous, Guandique evidently lay in wait in the park, and then ran behind each of his two victims, knocking them to the ground and threatening them with a knife while choking at least one of the women, both of whom were able to fight him off.  One victim said, "I do not doubt for a minute that he purposefully stalked me as a hunter tracks his prey," while the second said, "He was strong and a bold and practiced attacker who waited until he thought [I] was fatigued from running and then attacked [me] next to a deep ravine."

Chandra Levy's body was ultimately found in a similarly remote area of the same park, near the bottom of a deep ravine. 

In the case of Natalee Holloway, it has been almost 200 days since she left the now-famous bar and watering hole in Aruba with three young local men and stepped into a kind of black hole from which she has not returned.  Her three companions that night, brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, and everyone's favorite suspect, teenager and now Dutch college student Joran van der Sloot, are still at the top of the list as persons who must know what happened to Natalee that fateful night, but will not tell. 

Joyce Chiang
One of the hundreds, really thousands of other unsolved missing persons cases from around the country, like the case of Chandra Levy, also originated in the Washington, D.C., area.  Two and one half years before the disappearance of Levy, a former congressional intern and, later, a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) attorney, 28-year-old Joyce Chiang, was last seen alive on her way to a Starbucks near her Washington, D.C. residence.  Chiang's badly decomposed body was found in the Potomac River on April 1, 1999, almost four months after her mysterious disappearance.  Two attractive victims (Chiang and Levy) , both living and working in the D.C. area, and both former Capital Hill area interns had disappeared under circumstances that challenged both conventional reasoning and the police.  (Note: Chiang worked for the government and Levy had interned for the Federal Bureau of Prisons and had submitted an application to the FBI.) 

A little over one year after she disappeared, Levy's skeletal remains were found approximately four miles from her D.C. apartment in a heavily overgrown area of Rock Creek Park.  Cause of death?  Unknown.  This same unknown finding was also provided by the medical examiner's office for Joyce Chiang.  Years have passed and suspects have come and gone, but for the Levy and the Chiang families, no closure has been provided.  Both families once had a daughter with the whole world ahead of her one day, and the next day she was missing without a trace.

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