Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Chandra Levy

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

When a political intern goes missing, all eyes turn towards her hometown congressman. But when that lead dries up, and other women are being attacked, who is really to blame? For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-chandra-levy/    

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Anyone who gets our newsletter and reads our recommendations knows that I love me a good political scandal. And the case I'm covering today was one of, if not the biggest scandal to hit DC that involved murder and affairs. And of course, I'm talking about the case of Chandra Levy. I remember this being really big when it happened and following it for a while. But I just kind of stopped, and I'm not really sure why. I don't even remember if there was any resolution.

I remember the exact same thing. Like, I can see Chandra's pictures all over the tabloids, and I remember everybody talking about it. And then it seemed like overnight it was gone. And the reason that is, is because 9-Eleven actually ended up overshadowing her case. So this happened right before that, and after that, it didn't quite pick up steam like it did before. So there is a conclusion.

Well, it may be a conclusion. It depends on if you agree with the findings or not. But let me give you the rundown, and then you can decide. In May of 2001, Chandra Levy was a 24-year-old graduate student who was from Modesto, California. And at the time of this story, she was living in DC because she was finishing up an internship at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Like I said, though, her internship was coming to an end. So she had actually let her landlord know that she would be moving out either the 5th

or 6th of May, again, we're talking about 2001. And she had gone and canceled her gym membership on April 30th. She's slowly starting to pack up her things and get ready for this move. Well, the 5th comes, and it goes, and Chandra's parents are really surprised that they haven't heard from her. They know she's supposed to be coming home either that day or the next day, but they haven't heard anything specific. So they start to call her, and call her, and call her landlord, but there's no response,

no one has seen her. And when they can't get a hold of her on the 5th, they call the DC police and report her missing. The police actually go to her apartment on the 6th to do a welfare check, and they get her landlord to let them in. And what they see is a really normal scene to the officers, but very eerie in hindsight. The apartment looked as if she had just walked away moments ago. There were dirty dishes in her sink, there were suitcases that were half packed, like

she was in the middle of something, and then just left her apartment and never returned again. Her parents are naturally freaking out at this point, and they know something isn't right. So while the police have this missing persons report, the family do anything they can to try and track down Chandra. And they start with her cell phone. She was still on their plan, so they pull the records and see a number that she had called many, many times.

So not skipping a beat, her dad calls this number. And the call goes to an answering machine. When the message plays, they learn that this is the office of congressman Gary Condit. This isn't even just any congressman out in Washington. This is their congressman for where they live out in California. So they immediately recognize the name. And her parents are like, what on earth is she calling a congressman so much for? Her internship really didn't have anything to do with congress, so it's not like it

was work related. So then her dad gets an idea, forget leaving a message. Condit's family home is in the same town that they live in. So he just pulls out the phone book and sure enough, the guy is listed. So he calls his home phone and gets him on the line. On the phone, the family's wasting no time with pleasantries. Immediately they're like, okay, listen, our daughter is missing. She called you like a zillion times when she lived in DC.

Why was she calling you and where is she? And Gary basically says, listen, I don't know your daughter. I met her a couple of times and I was kind of mentoring her in DC. He said she's very lovely, but I have no information about where she is. And they don't love this answer. And probably something to note is I guess Chandra had a thing for older men and she had even had an affair with an older married man in the past. So I don't know if Gary's nonchalantness was giving them bad vibes or if they just knew

it was very likely that maybe they were more involved based on Chandra's history. Or even Chandra wanted to be more involved. Exactly. Either way, they decide to call the police and tell them about what they found in the phone records. Police start looking into Gary and they find that his DC condo is just minutes from Chandra's rental. So they go to visit him and he kind of gives police the same spiel.

Like yes, I met her. I met her once. Her and a friend came to my office and I gave them a tour around the capital. I became kind of a mentor to her. And he said Chandra would often come to him for career advice and he would try to guide her. But other than that, they didn't have any involvement together. And he said they were not intimate in any kind of way.

And he had no idea where she was. Police decided at this point to get a warrant to search Chandra's place and maybe there were some clues around there that would help guide them to where she was. Now I think at this time, this was like over a week from May 1st, which is the last day that she was seen and the day they think she went missing. When they search her place, they find that she's left everything behind. Her wallet, her ID, the only thing she seems to have taken with her were her keys. Now she does have a personal computer, which they try and search.

But as they're looking through it, the computer crashes. What? Yeah. I mean, like what are the odds? So they have to take it to their experts and hope that they can get it back up and running. Now another roadblock they run into, and it's really kind of their fault, is the surveillance. Chandra's rental, like where she was renting her place, had surveillance footage and they kept it for a week.

But the day that they went to go do that welfare check on the 6th, they didn't ask for any kind of surveillance video. And now the time that they're going back to do this full search, it's been over a week. So any surveillance video has been totally wiped. So they have no idea, like if Chandra left her place alone, if she left, like, distressed, how did she look? What was she wearing? They have none of this information.

So at this point, they've struck out twice. So they keep taking things from Chandra's place, different items that could be used as evidence. And they also notice that she has some messages on her machine. So they play them. And most are from her family, but there are two from a man, and it's a man whose voice they recognize. At 6.30, I haven't heard from you, so maybe you're out of the country or something. Anyway, give me a call to pick up this message.

Give me a rundown on kind of what your schedule is. Things are looking pretty good for me today. Anyway, bye. So police know for sure it's clear that these messages are from Gary Condit. Now, while none of these messages were necessarily scandalous in nature, it seems odd that a congressman who's just mentoring, like, can you feel the air quotes, who is just mentoring this girl is calling her apartment not once, but twice, asking when she's going to be around because his schedule is clear.

While police are doing their thing, Chandra's parents are in the media nonstop doing TV, radio, papers, anything they can do to get Chandra's name out there. And in so many of these interviews, Chandra's mom is begging Gary to talk to police and to cooperate. You see, he is denying being close with her, but the family knows that there was an affair. And it's more than just like, oh, Chandra had a history of liking men like this. They now know Chandra was actually really close with her aunt. And the aunt had told the family that Chandra had confirmed she was having an affair with

Gary Condit. She had told her about it. He had given her gifts. Chandra said that she was totally madly in love with him. She wanted to have children with him. She wanted him to leave his wife and be with him like crazy in love. And she had also told her aunt that Gary had insisted on complete secrecy of their relationship. And more than just like, hey, don't tell anyone, he would make her jump through some crazy

hoops to be with him. Like they couldn't go out anywhere around DC. Like if they were going to go out together, they would go out somewhere far away where no one would recognize them. Anytime they would go out, he wouldn't let her bring her ID with her, which is super freaking weird to me. So I don't know if it's just like if they were to get carted, like he doesn't want anyone connecting their names together, but he always told her to leave her ID at home.

And he even went so far as to say if she was going to visit him at his condo, if she was in the elevator and someone else got on the elevator, she was supposed to get off on another floor that wasn't his so that nobody could connect her getting off on his floor. Yeah, I mean, he was going above and beyond to make sure that nobody ever found out that they were going to be together. And he did this because he had a lot to lose. He was a rising political star. And there were even whispers at the time of him eventually running for the presidency.

It coming out that he was having an affair with an intern could ruin his career, especially when that intern is now missing. And it doesn't help that he kind of dug his own grave because he was one of the most vocal people in the Democratic Party when the affair between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky broke. He went out and publicly said that basically Bill needs to come forward with like every scandalous detail because there's no way for us to trust him unless he like airs everything out and admit that what he's done is wrong.

Right. Right. Nice double standard there. Right. Like that's what I'm saying. And the craziest part to me is to this day, Gary Condon will not say that he had an affair with Chandra. Like this guy is a hypocrite, like to the nth degree.

Now there's no doubt in anyone's mind that they had an affair. They had her aunt confirming it. They had friends of Chandra's confirming it. And they had confirmed it by finding sperm in a pair of underwear at Chandra's house that matched his DNA. And of course the tabloids get ahold of these kinds of stories and everyone is going crazy over this in 2001. I'm not the only person who can't look away from a scandalous affair in government.

People were eating it up and the whole country was watching as police would sweep the city looking for Chandra. They're searching her condo. They're searching in dumpsters. They're searching in alleyways, vacant properties. At this point, it's been two weeks now with no sign of her. So police are realizing that they're likely looking to recover a body and not a living girl with no sign of her in their searches.

They start trying to talk to Chandra's inner circle. Profilers in this case really thought that this would end up being the work of someone who knew her because stranger attacks like this were just so unlikely. And there was one guy they looked at who was friends with Chandra. And it seemed like he wanted to be more, but he was very much like friendzoned. And they ended up ruling him out as a suspect, but he was one of the people that corroborated the story about Chandra's affair with Gary Condett. Now on June 23rd, Gary finally agrees to meet with investigators to do an official interview.

The day she went missing, he had pretty good alibis for most of the day. His wife was actually in town. He spent the morning with Dick Cheney in some like stuffy meeting. Then in the afternoon, he was in his office where a bunch of people could vouch for him. And then he was with his wife. By July 10th, they actually get a warrant to search Gary's DC condo. They're there for hours, removing pieces of carpet, removing chunks of his wall, literally looking for any sign of something sinister happening.

But when they process everything, it all comes back clean. However, a couple of days after the search, a guy comes forward with an interesting story. He says on the night of July 10th, the same night that they go to search Gary's place, just a couple of hours before they got there. He saw Gary down by the dumpster. And of course, Gary kind of spent the news all over the place. So you see this guy by a dumpster, you're taking notice. And he says he sees him like push something way far down into this dumpster.

So police go back and realize they haven't collected trash yet. So they're like digging through this dumpster. And they finally retrieve what it was that Gary was hiding down there. When they pull out what Gary had put in there, it was just an empty watch container. But they know it has to mean something. So they're able to track down where this watch was sold. And when they find out who it was sold to, it leads them to a new clue. It was sold to a woman named Jolene.

She tells this crazy story that she had actually worked in Gary's office and they had a very long term affair. And she had given him this watch as a gift. So she said eventually, Condit just placed crazy amounts of pressure on her to keep everything so secretive that she ended up breaking off the relationship. And she said during their time together, he was very manipulative and very controlling. Now this watch that another woman gave him doesn't by any means prove that he had anything to do with Chandra's disappearance.

But if he went through all of this hassle to hide a watch box from a gift that he got seven years ago from a mistress, what else could he have hidden that actually could have linked him to Chandra? And this is what police are thinking. It's just super, super fishy. Because even a watch box is something that they probably wouldn't have looked too hard at if he wasn't shoving it down into the dumpster. Right, yeah.

So with this, another woman comes forward to say that she too had an affair with Gary. And her affair was actually going on the same time as his affair with Chandra. She said that after Chandra went missing, he actually broke off the affair and his staff tried to get her to sign this affidavit preemptively saying that they never had any kind of relationship before anyone was even like snooping around. Okay. Yeah. Again, just like super fishy and unnecessary.

So to add to the growing case against Gary, another friend of Chandra's comes forward and says that Chandra was growing anxious about the relationship. She wanted to get married. She wanted to have a baby. And before the weekend that she went missing, this friend says that Chandra was pushing Gary to confront his wife while she was in town that weekend. And Chandra's aunt said that she had talked to Chandra just a few days before she went missing and Chandra said that she had some really big news, but she wanted to wait until

she saw her aunt in person. No. I'm going to harken back to crime junkie rule number two. If you have something big or a secret that you want to tell somebody and you want to wait, just tell somebody, even if it's not the person you really want to tell. Tell anybody, yes. But she didn't tell. So we still to this day have no idea what that news was.

And Gary promised her that he was going to say something to his wife and he was going to leave her wife and they were going to be together. There were a lot of rumors in the tabloids and just people speculating that Chandra was pregnant, but there's never been anything to prove that. So meanwhile, back in the investigation, forensic techs have gotten her laptop up and running again and they find that she was on it the last day that they think she was home that May 1st. She logged on at 1027 and visited several sites and she was on there for a couple of

hours, I think, and what she had visited over and over was Condit's homepage. But then one of the last sites she was on was a website for some running trails around Rock Creek Park. So no one really knows why she was looking at this. There's a couple of theories and one of them is that maybe she was going to meet someone there. A lot of people said that she didn't like to jog alone, especially in areas where she could be vulnerable.

She was very aware of her surroundings. But if you remember, she had also just canceled her gym membership because she's getting ready to move home. So maybe it was out of the ordinary for her, but everything was kind of out of the ordinary because she was just about to shake up her life and move. So she either went there to meet somebody or she truly just did go there for a jog. So police do a search of Rock Creek Park to find her, but they don't find anything at all.

I'm sorry. Like I said, I didn't follow this case super, super, super closely for a very long time, but Rock Creek Park sounds really familiar. Isn't that where they found her body? Yeah, that is where they found her body. So but when did they just miss it the first time? So we don't find this out for many, many years. But basically what had happened is they only, whether they misunderstood their instructions

or the instructions were never given, we don't really know. But they searched a hundred feet off of all of the roadways surrounding Rock Creek Park. But what they should have done and what people said the intention was is for them to search a hundred feet off of all of the trails, which are two totally different things. Yeah, very different things. Yeah. They were eventually found within a hundred feet of a trail. So if they would have done this right then, they would have found her body right then.

But instead they do this search off of the roadways and come up with nothing and no one realizes this mistake for many, many years. And just like that, in a blink of an eye, no one is talking about Chandra Levy. No one is talking about Gary Condit anymore because it's September 11th, 2001. The media doesn't care about one girl anymore because they're dealing with 9-11. They're dealing with terrorist attacks. With no media, all of the leads dry up and the DC police refocus their efforts on stopping attacks and the case goes cold so quickly.

And no one really talks about it again until May of 2002, when 911 gets a call from a man who's walking with his dog in Rock Creek Park when he finds a skull off of one of the paths. When the crime scene technicians arrive, there are bones scattered everywhere and there are various personal items with the body like sunglasses and clothing. But the clothing is actually turned inside out and these running pants or running tights that she had were actually knotted on both legs. So they can tell right away that there's no way that this was some kind of accident. Yeah, you don't really hit your head, then take off all your clothes and knot them together.

Now the medical examiner already had her dental records for comparison so they were able to confirm what they suspected. They had in fact found Chandra Levy. And like I had said before, she was less than 100 feet off of the path. So if they had done the search correctly the first time, they would have found her 10 months ago. 10 months ago there could have been more physical remains, maybe even DNA or at least some kind of tissue that would show cause of death.

Because there were just bones, the medical examiner wasn't even able to determine how exactly she died. But they do rule it a homicide. Now about this same time, Gary is up for re-election and the press has basically chewed him up, spit him out, everyone's over him, nobody likes him and everyone thinks he's a liar and a hypocrite but he just won't quit. So he or somebody that works for him gets the brilliant idea that they're gonna do an interview to clear his name once and for all and repair his mistake.

And this was a huge mistake because Gary does an interview with Connie Chung who at the time was on ABC and it was watched by 24 million people and 24 million people collectively hated him even more. Can you describe your relationship? What exactly was your relationship with Chandra Levy? Well I met Chandra last October and we became very close. I met her in Washington D.C. Very close meaning?

We had a close relationship. I liked her very much. May I ask you was it a sexual relationship? Well Connie I've been married for 34 years and I've not been a perfect man and I've made my share of mistakes but out of respect for my family and out of a specific request from a Levy family I think it's best that I not get into those details about Chandra Levy. She goes in circles the whole time and literally repeats that last line about not talking due

to respect out of his family and due to a request from the Levy family over and over. Later Connie Chung said it was like he was a robot who would just press a button on his forehead and those words would just come out over and over. He was going in circles, they weren't getting anywhere, he wouldn't admit to a relationship with her, it was bizarre. At the end of the day this was a PR disaster because he ended up losing the election by 20% and his political career was over. To try and help with the investigation the investigators bring in a geographical profiler

which I didn't even know was a thing and they have this person look at the area to help them understand what about this scene contributed to the crime happening there and what this person did is the first thing they looked at is okay how common are attacks in this area? What are the statistics? In Rock Creek Park apparently it was like super, super rare which almost leads more towards it was somebody that she knew, however there were two attacks on female joggers in a short time following Chandra's disappearance and so they dive into the details of these two attacks.

The first one was just a couple of weeks after Chandra went missing. A woman named Hailey went for an early evening run and when she gets to the park she says that she sees this Hispanic man in the parking lot and something about him made her really uneasy and I even heard in one place that she actually picked up a stick and was like running with this stick because she was so fearful of him. Running with a stick I feel like that isn't helpful like run to where people are run home confront the guy maybe I don't even know. Don't even go running at all like you saw him in the parking lot get back in your car

girl like you have these feelings for a reason. Trust your instincts exactly. Right well it gets even worse you trust her instinct even less as she's running she keeps looking back over her shoulder and she sees him running behind her and so what she does is this is like you talking yourself out of this she keeps like speeding up and slowing down trying to like confirm in her mind like is he keeping pace with me is he actually following me. Why would you question it if you think someone might be following you just act like they're

following you and get the heck out of dodge. Exactly like be weird be rude stay alive girl but she should have just gotten away because eventually this guy grabs her from behind and ends up throwing her down to the ground. What he didn't know is she had been taking self defense classes and she's able to get him off of her and get away she runs to police and ends up reporting the attack soon after another woman is attacked in Rock Creek Park and this time it's even bolder I think she's actually out running with her fiance so they're running together and I guess was super usual that he would run a little bit faster so he pulls ahead and runs off and he's running

a little bit farther and a little bit farther till finally she can't see him but they're on the same trail when all of a sudden she hears someone running behind her and it's not super weird but she you know does the over the shoulder and it's this young Hispanic man and he's gaining on her and she tries to outrun him she does feel like something's up so she tries to book it but he gets her from behind as well and he takes her down and they fall into this ravine and he has a knife this time and somehow she fights for her life and fights him off of her and he's not trying to take anything she's like he is just attacking me trying to kill me but she breaks his grip runs back find somebody

on the trail and they call police and police are very aware of the attack that had just recently happened so they're really quick to respond and they search the area and when they do they find this young Hispanic man hiding in the bushes and this guy's name is Ingmar Guandike he is in DC from El Salvador and it seems he'd come to get work to send money back to his impoverished family but after he got here he soon fell into a life of like drugs and alcohol addiction so both victims identified him as their attacker and he confesses and is sentenced to 10 years in prison but he says he wasn't trying to rape them he says that he was just looking for money to feed his drug addiction.

Did he try to take anything from the women? It sounds like it was just a blatant attack. Right and that's like what police kind of point to over and over the one girl had like a big engagement ring they both had walkmans and both women said when they were attacked like he didn't ask for anything he wasn't going after their belongings they said that they felt like he was trying to rape them he was trying to kill them they both felt just physically threatened so because of this geographical profiler they now have this really good suspect and when they look into him for Chandra's case he gets even more suspicious looking he has a history of violence with his girlfriend it turns out that he missed work on

May 1st the day that she went missing and that same day his landlords said he came home with like scratches and bruises all over his face so they interview him about Chandra and he says that he has nothing to do with her murder they give him a polygraph and the results are surprising he actually ends up passing now they had to use a translator for this polygraph so when he passes they say that you know we can't trust the results they're skewed because we had to use a translator and also you can't trust a polygraph well yes but also if like you are if you knew that a translator would skew the results like why even do it in the first place you know what I mean because I bet if he would have failed I don't think anyone's going to be like oh he failed but we can't trust

that because we use a translator I think they were looking for something very specific right now they don't have any evidence to link him to Chandra the investigation into him basically just dies off after this polygraph and the case goes cold again until 2008 when the Washington Post does an article like a reinvestigation about how the case was so poorly handled and this is when everyone in the public learns about the mix-up with the search like searching off the road versus searching off the trails and this article also points the finger at Gondike as the perp and they even found a woman who said that she was on the trails the same day that Chandra went missing and she had run from him because she thought he was going to attack her and this girl ran from him

didn't get attacked because she was listening to her instincts and girls staying alive this article reignites the investigation mostly because the police needed to make themselves look better they start looking at bringing a real case against him and they get one of their best prosecutors to start building the case and she tells police why don't you go talk to him again and when they get to his cell like you aren't even going to believe this he has a picture of Chandra Levy hanging over his bed what right and and he has what looks like a photo of Chandra tattooed on his body like a photo of her face uh not cool not cool it is making you look real bad and so investigators set up kind of a sting operation basically they try and catfish him

with prison letters so one of the investigators poses as a woman and tries to get him to confess but through all of the letters he denied having anything to do with Chandra's case then out of nowhere a man approaches the prosecutors with information he is a jailhouse informant and he says that he shared a cell with Gondike and they had some kind of like similar gang affiliation so they would look out for each other and he said basically one day Gondike told him that he was the one who killed Chandra Levy like he confessed everything to him so i'm a huge skeptic of like jailhouse niches why would why would he confess to this guy so he comes up with kind of a reason because i think they asked him that as well and he says that

Gondike had come to him and he's like you know i've always heard that if somebody's a rapist they will often try and rape them in jail and he's like listen i want everyone to know that i did not rape Chandra Levy like i was responsible for her death but i'm not a rapist so he says that's the way it came out in the confession which is like more believable than him just being like need you to know i killed this girl now one piece of information that he brings forward is he says that Gondike told him that he had stolen her fanny pack and this is actually really plausible and something that was never told to the public and so when they hear this they're like there's no way he would have known this unless he actually talked to somebody who

who had killed her now i don't know how like it's 2008 like people have fanny packs she had keys she didn't want to run with him it could have been something that was guessed it could have been something that was fed to him or it could be like legit and this guy could have actually told him with this informant and that extra bit of knowledge they indict Gondike on first degree murder in may of 2009 and they take him to trial he pleads not guilty and there isn't a ton against him it's literally all circumstantial there is zero physical evidence but the prosecution has a really good strategy the first thing they do is they bring gary kondit to the stand before the defense can even suggest that maybe he's a suspect and of course gary has the same story he won't admit to

any kind of affair he says he has nothing to do with it he had no reason to murder her because they were like barely knew each other they were friends kind of acquaintances slash mentor whatever his story is and when the defense tried to like counter and ask if he had a sexual relationship he's like listen i don't have to go into this i told you that we were friends but i don't have to go into like my marriage and all of that stuff because i'm not on trial no charges have ever been brought against me and he's right the judge agrees with him doesn't make him answer any questions about like any kind of affair which totally diffuses that whole like side of the investigation that whole line of questioning the next thing the prosecution does is they put the two other victims

on the stand the two other women who were attacked by gondike and that he had served time for and confessed to and both of them get up there and talk about how scary it was being attacked by this man when they were alone in the woods how vulnerable they felt one of them starts breaking down crying on the stand and this really made the jury feel what shondra might have been feeling the last day that she was alive it was in a very very effective strategy and then the last thing they do is they put this snitch on the stand and he gets up and he's an awesome witness he basically says like yes i was in this gang but i've turned my life around in prison i've never been an informant before and i'm just doing this because i want to help and he said basically gondike told me

he was high on drugs he needed money and he went to go attack shondra to get money to like steal from her and he said something happened there was like a scuffle and she becomes unconscious so he ran and he said gondike didn't know she was dead but he ran and she ended up dying so he you know maybe that wasn't like i wasn't trying to murder her but it was like accidental and he's still responsible now when it's the defense's turn they don't have much but they do introduce some things that we had never heard before apparently in the wee hours of the morning before shondra vanished somebody in her building had called 911 because they had heard a scream from her apartment but this was never really investigated at the time and to this day we

have no idea what that means we have no idea who made the scream we had no idea like what was from was it shondra was it someone in her place no clear so no one came out and investigated it no at least from what i can say i don't know if like they stayed on the phone and like it got diffused or i don't know if they came out knocked on the door and everything seemed to be fine there's no follow-up to this i have no idea also apparently before the levy's had even reported her missing when they were just calling around to locate her they had called the building manager and asked him to like slip some notes under her door so that way when she got home she could know that her parents were really worried and apparently when the police came in to do that

welfare check that one time there were several notes and you would you would expect them to be right under the door where the guy had slipped in but apparently the notes were all over the apartment and it looked as if they were scattered around like somebody was in there after the notes were left and before police got there right before like everyone knew she'd actually disappeared and so the theory i think that they were trying to push forward is like there's this scream in the middle of the night maybe somebody killed her came back the next day and then went back into the apartment to like clean up or to take away anything and make it look like they were there at all now it was an interesting theory but not interesting enough for the jury because after three

and a half days they found guandike guilty of shandra's murder and they sentenced him to 60 years in prison his defense eventually appeals the conviction and when they do a woman comes forward who says she has made friends with that guy who had actually been the snitch she says that he told her he lied on the stand and she's like i have a recording of him telling me this now she had recordings of a lot of their conversations but it turns out that that particular sentence the one sentence that they need was never recorded however because of everything else that she had it made him a bad witness because basically it came out that he was still involved in gang activity he did not actually turn his life around like he said on the stand and he had said on the stand that he

had never been an informant before but he lied about that as well he had snitched before because he was really all the prosecution had and now they didn't have him for the second trial guandike's conviction gets overturned and then the prosecutor decides not to refile charges and just deport him instead so guandike went back to el salvador in may of 2017 and at least the last i heard the levees still think he's responsible at least they did the time of the trial there was an interview done with him over the phone from prison right before he went to el salvador and he still says that he has nothing to do with it and as far as geary he went on dr phil like in 2015 and he is still like i said to this day denying the affair and like it's almost like it's like the longer it

goes the less he pretends to know her because on this he said quote i saw her one time outside of the office at a restaurant and she came by my condo once maybe twice yeah i think it was twice she came by like it is really hard to believe him when he says in one breath he had nothing to do with her murder and in that same sentence he's saying maybe i saw her once or twice when that's clearly a super big fat lie you know yeah and i could see some people even saying that maybe she had made the fair up but the account of the hoops that he made her jump through are so similar to the other woman who came forward it's super unlikely that she just fabricated this whole thing well and again they have his dna like in her apartment on her and i can't that's why i

can't wrap my brain around why he's pretending like it never even came close to being a sexual relationship so at one point the levees had actually hired a private investigator and he says that he is 100% sure he's satisfied in his mind that he knows who did it and it's not guandige he says that he's got his whole theory and actually the first thing he points to is that the trail that she was found off of wasn't actually a jogging trail it was a horse trail and he said it was covered with rocks and roots and he's like there's no way somebody would jog on that you would easily twist your ankle so he's like there's no way she was jogging i think that she went out there to meet somebody and he said there was something weird in her apartment like a blanket that was

just thrown inside the front door and for whatever reason i don't know if he knows it had just been cleaned or something he thinks that she was in some kind of hurry to get out so she like pulled it out of the dryer left it on the floor went to meet this person and whoever she went to meet killed her and he said in his mind he has the name of somebody that he think did it but he can't prove it so he'll never like say the name out loud because he doesn't be responsible for like slander liable stuff like that now i don't know who he's thinking but as far as i know there've only been two like real suspects and if it's not guandike i have to imagine maybe he's talking about gary condit now police are no longer working on this case like i said they they're satisfied they had

their trial they got their conviction it got overturned but in their mind it's closed guandike did it like i said at the time of the trial the leavies were satisfied that guandike did it i think gary i don't know that he did it i think he's just a super shady liar like bad dude and he every time he opens his mouth he makes himself look worse yeah and i mean we've all seen scandal right he didn't have to have done it to have done it exactly thank you guys so much for listening to this week's episode we hope you enjoyed it we would love to hear from you on twitter at creme drake podd and on instagram at creme drake podcast and our group on facebook is always full of theories and different ideas on the cases that we cover

if you go to facebook just search crime junkie podcast discussion group we would love to hear your theories there and of course we have our profit of the month segment at the end of this episode so stay tuned after the credits to listen to a story about boxy crime junkie is written and hosted by me all of our sound production and editing comes from brit pray what and all of our music including our theme comes from justin daniel crime junkie is an audio chuck production so what do you think chuck do you approve oh my god brit look at that dog it is so cute he's got its big nose or big fur i like big mutton i cannot lie you other owners can't deny when a dog walks in this gonna be a

thing where you sing yes let me finish when a dog walks in looking all kind of breeds you get down on your knees and cuddle oh my gosh it's my favorite i do it all the time anyways you need to enjoy it with me okay that's gonna show up all over social media again good job big mutton i cannot lie all right so who's our big mutt today today we are talking about roxy um and i love it's i'm gonna give you a heads up it is kind of a senior dog but it's a really sweet song okay and she's still alive good i need that that's why i told you so our listener crystal said that they had been wanting to adopt a dog for a long time for like four years and she finally like cornered her boyfriend and was like they have a clear the shelters event and they went in like newbies

not expecting to find a dog that had like the particular requirements that they were looking for time out nobody ever goes in like that's how i have charlie seven years ago i went to an adoption event at pet smart for a shelter just to look and seven years later a zillion dollars in vet bills like guys no you're going into look but you're coming out with the dog just know what you're getting into okay but crystal and her family had a lot of various specific requirements so they live in a kind of small apartment so they knew they couldn't get a really big dog and some like quote unquote aggressive breeds were probably out they didn't want a puppy which same and they didn't want a really yippy dog either and crystal especially didn't want

an older dog because she was worried about having to deal with the dog aging and her kids and having to explain that which i don't blame her totally and obviously had to be good with children and cats because they have two cats so they go through the whole facility and there are so many cute pit bulls which there always are um and her sons really wanted them but she had to explain that their apartment one let them have one and they actually put inquiries in about three dogs um and one was the sweet little beagle and they couldn't see the beagle because they were the beagle was sick that day but as the volunteer was walking the beagle to the vet clinic roxy came into the cage next to the beagle and crystal is serious when she says it was love

at first sight she flagged down the volunteer and said i need this dog i got cute the romantic comedy music it's such a meat cute um they so crystal looks at the bio and it said good with kids and cats but she was a little bit older than what they had wanted but at that point crystal was how old so they originally went in saying that they didn't want to adopt a dog older than five five but roxy was seven that's a real senior proper right there they were getting the paperwork together roxy was around and crystal realized that suddenly they were the most popular people at the event and all the volunteers were like oh my god you're adopting roxy roxy's going home today you're getting roxy and everyone was super excited and it turns out roxy was surrendered

to orphans of the storm which is the shelter when she was two oh my god so she'd been there for five years she had been at the shelter for five years because it had been so long there's like rumors that she had been actually adopted out once before but they brought her back monsters so crystal sitting there and doing the math and that whole time she was just sitting there waiting for them oh my god so roxy is the most beautiful obedient dog she has never had an accident which is mind-blowing to me ever she said ever what a little preppy god they can let her out without a leash and she just walks right next to them no and they actually hate leashing her because she does way better without it and this august so appropriate prepper of the month is there one

year roxy anniversary oh my god happy roxy anniversary you guys and here's like one of my favorite things is in addition to this perfect match of crystal's family and roxy they get home and find out that one of the main volunteers who walked roxy lives eight minutes away from them come on it was meant to be it really was so the volunteer actually comes over and hangs out with roxy she dog sits for crystal and her family when they go out of town and we actually have a picture of christin dog walker with roxy to put on our put on our blog so keep an eye out for that and crystal just wants to remind everybody that adopting older animals is so rewarding puppies are cute and adorable but her heart really loves old animals you guys i'm the same way it's so

devastating so many people get puppies and then they return them and then they just become older dogs and shelters that nobody wants but like those are the little puppets that need the love the most and they appreciate it the most because they've spent so much of their life in a kennel oh my god everyone go adopt a senior dog right now i like them real thick and slobbery oh my god we're ending this right now