Focus on One Suspect Leaves 2nd Unnoticed

Condit's performance was uniformly criticized as evasive. Robert and Susan Levy were appalled -- they said they had made no "specific request" that Condit be discreet about their daughter. Political party leaders and major newspapers called for him to step down.

"I knew within a couple weeks my career was gone," he recalled in The Post interview.

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While the world was focused on Condit, a Salvadoran immigrant was sitting in jail, charged with attacking women at knifepoint in Rock Creek Park. Chandra had searched the Internet for something to do in the park on the day she disappeared; the man in jail would seem to be a prime suspect for the detectives looking for her. But after the man's arrest on July 1 by the U.S. Park Police, 19 days passed before D.C. detectives in the Chandra case said they heard about the man.

On July 20, the detectives would later note, they got a tip that a Hispanic man had exposed himself to a woman named Karen Mosley nine weeks earlier in Rock Creek Park. The case had been investigated by the Park Police.

Toward the end of May, Mosley, 29, was walking with her dog along a path in the park that began at the old Peirce Mill when she saw a young Hispanic man exposing himself. He ran off when her dog snarled at him. Mosley ran back to the mill and called police from a pay phone. A Park Police officer told her she was lucky: There was a predator in the park who had attacked a woman jogging on a nearby trail.

On July 24, when D.C. detectives contacted the Park Police for additional details about Mosley, they said, they learned for the first time about an attack in the park. Ingmar Guandique, the Salvadoran, was being held for assaulting Christy Wiegand on July 1.

Detectives later noted that police called Mosley the day they received the tip, July 20, but Mosley said no one from the D.C. police contacted her that summer.

"That didn't happen," she later recalled. "I would have remembered that."

As Chandra's disappearance turned into a round-the-clock news story in mid-July, Mosley grew frustrated by the intense coverage of Condit.

"It was making me crazy," she recalled. "The entire focus was on this guy. I kept saying to my friends, 'They're not focusing on this guy in the woods.' "

Detectives in the Levy case would not pursue the information about Ingmar Guandique for another two months.

Mosley said she wasn't interviewed by D.C. police until the first week of September, more than three months after the incident. By then, she was unable to identify the suspect.

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

Tomorrow: A jailhouse informant tells an extraordinary story.