“Washington’s In Cold Blood, expertly and marvelously told by two of
journalism’s greatest investigative reporters.”
—Bob Woodward
FINDING CHANDRA
A TRUE WASHINGTON MURDER MYSTERY
by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz
FINDING CHANDRA: A True Washington Murder Mystery (Scribner, May 11, 2010) is the story of how two Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters, Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz, spent a year trying to find the real killer in Washington’s most famous unsolved murder. Their work prompted a reexamination of the murder case by the police and led to the arrest of the man they pointed to as the most likely killer, a Salvadoran immigrant who was attacking women in Washington’s Rock Creek Park at the time of the 24-year-old intern’s disappearance. His trial is scheduled to start in the fall.
In FINDING CHANDRA, Higham and Horwitz document how the police, the FBI, and the news media went so wrong by focusing undue attention on Levy’s lover, Congressman Gary Condit, while less glamorous leads went largely ignored. The book also provides a window into the darker side of the nation’s capital – journalists rushing to judgment, politicians living double lives and preying on young interns, and the tunnel vision of the police who had a congressman squarely in their sights.
FINDING CHANDRA contains never-before disclosed details about the case:
- One of Condit’s girlfriends kept an intimate diary of her affair. In it, she describes how she was betrayed by him and worried that harm may have come to Levy.
- A second Condit girlfriend went to the FBI because she feared something might have happened to Levy. In FBI interviews, she detailed her three-year-long affair with the congressman and said she considered suicide because she was so despondent over the way he had treated her.
- Unexplained male DNA has been detected on a piece of Levy’s clothing in Rock Creek Park and it doesn’t belong to Ingmar Guandique, the man charged with her murder. Prosecutors believe a crime scene technician touched the pants, but the new DNA has allowed Guandique’s defense team to argue that it belongs to the true killer, someone possibly connected to Condit. This and other critical issues in the case will be argued during a May 14 court hearing.
- Ingmar Guandique, who has a Levy-look-alike tattoo on his chest and kept a magazine photograph of her inside his cell, made a confessionary statement to police about coming into contact with Levy in the park. His lawyers are fighting hard to bar his remarks from the trial in October.
- While the press feasted on the Levy story during the summer of 2001, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather threatened to walk off the set during a staff revolt over his decision not to air pieces about the case. Rather got his way, and CBS steered clear of the story.
FINDING CHANDRA is an exploration of the fraught relationship between journalism and justice and the tremendous power and responsibility that reporters and criminal investigators wield and sometimes misuse.
Purchase Finding Chandra at Amazon today!
More praise for FINDING CHANDRA:
“A well-reported, well-written chronicle of a botched criminal investigation and its disturbing aftermath.”
—Kirkus Reviews
About the authors:
Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz are reporters for the investigative unit of The Washington Post. They have collaborated on several projects, including an examination of the deaths of disabled children in the D.C. foster system, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and The Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize for reporting on the disadvantaged. Horwitz also shared in the 1999 Pulitzer for Public Service and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. They both live in the Washington, D.C., area.
ABOUT SCRIBNER
Scribner is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., part of the CBS Corporation. Simon & Schuster is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for consumers of all ages, across all printed, electronic and multi-media formats. Its divisions include the Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Digital, and international companies in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com.
