A 29-year-old immigrant charged with murdering Chandra Levy was found guilty on Monday, nearly a decade after the former Washington intern disappeared after leaving her apartment to go for a jog.
After four days of deliberations that followed a lengthy trial, a Washington, D.C. jury found Ingmar Guandique guilty on two counts of first-degree murder. Guandique could face a punishment of up to life in prison without parole.
Following the verdict, Levy’s mother addressed reporters outside the D.C. Courthouse where the trial took place.
“I’m not sure if it’s a sense of peace, but I can only tell you, it ain’t closure,” Susan Levy said. “The result of the verdict may be guilty, but I have a lifetime sentence of a lost limb missing from our family tree. It’s painful, I live with it every day.”
Levy was a graduate student at the University of Southern California and had just finished an internship in Washington with the Federal Bureau of Prisons when she went missing. After her disappearance, family members revealed that she had developed a romantic relationship with former Democratic Rep. Gary Condit (Calif.), who represented Levy’s home district. The affair and subsequent media scrutiny led to Condit’s defeat in his 2003 bid for re-election.
Levy was 24 when she vanished in May of 2001. Her remains were discovered more than a year later in Rock Creek Park, a vast, wooded area which runs through the District.
Prosecutors struggled to find physical evidence linking anyone to Levy’s death, but charged Guandique in 2009 after an inmate who served time with him in federal prison told authorities that the El Salvadorian had confessed to killing her. At the time, Guandique had been serving a ten-year sentence for assaulting two women in Rock Creek Park around the time Levy went missing.