Epilogue
CLOSEGarrett retired last year and is running a private investigative firm in Alexandria. He married Assistant U.S. Attorney Elisa Poteat, whom he met while working on the Levy case. Poteat still works as a federal prosecutor.
![[Photo]](http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/specials/chandra/images/ep_photo_5.jpg)
Only Gainer, the former executive assistant chief of the D.C. police, continues to think that Guandique is not a suspect. "At that time I was satisfied, and I am today satisfied, that he wasn't the offender," said Gainer, who is now the sergeant at arms of the U.S. Senate. "They interviewed him, and they were very convinced that he was not the guy. You have to have faith in your detectives, and we did."
Barrett, who directly supervised the detectives, disagrees with his former boss about Guandique. "I think he did it," Barrett said. "It was the right time frame that he was attacking these other women." But without a confession, Barrett added, the investigation has reached "a dead-end street." It is now assigned to the department's cold-case squad.
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With no resolution of the case, Condit and his wife have fought a difficult battle to reclaim his reputation. They filed lawsuits against the National Enquirer and Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne. Both were settled out of court. Another lawsuit against Dunne was recently thrown out of court.
In Arizona, Condit got into a dispute with Baskin-Robbins and no longer runs the two franchises in Glendale. Once a rising political star as a conservative Democrat and leader of the party's Blue Dog faction, he said he now invests in businesses and does "a little bit of consulting."
In February, he broke his silence in an interview with a magazine called California Conversations magazine. He singled out critical police mistakes and lashed out at the news media.
"You have an innocent girl who possibly something bad has happened to, and you're following me around asking me if I had sex with someone," he said. "Why aren't you following around the police chief, the FBI guys and asking them what they were doing?"
Condit conducted a wide-ranging interview with The Post on June 30, in the offices of his Los Angeles attorney, Mark Geragos.
"I know that Chandra and her family are the victims," Condit said. "And I get that. But I could not even imply [back then] that I was being victimized at the same time. I felt like my reputation was being raped. That I was being assaulted physically and I could not defend myself. It was the equivalent to me of a rape. I've never been physically raped, but I've been emotionally. And my reputation has been raped. And just like probably with a physical rape, you probably never recover from those emotions or those scars. And I don't want to take anything away from Chandra and her family because I know they're the real victims. They lost someone."
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In Modesto, Calif., Robert and Susan Levy are trying to keep their balance. Robert spends long hours treating cancer patients and delves into spirituality. Susan belongs to a singing group and tries to comfort other parents who have lost children. The Levys' son, Adam, is in college on the East Coast. For the first time in a long while, the couple took a trip together last fall, traveling to Thailand for a month.
Returning home was not easy. Chandra's bedroom feels like a museum. In the closet hangs her Modesto Police Explorer uniform, an early symbol of the attraction to official power that eventually drew her to Washington. On the shelves are boxes filled with hundreds of sympathy letters from around the world. On the walls are photos of Chandra as a little girl and as a young woman.
Her mother has turned Chandra's old table into a shrine. She has laminated it with cards from her favorite sport, baseball, and wrappers from her favorite candy, Reese's peanut butter cups.
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Guandique has broken his public silence as well. In telephone interviews and in letters written to The Post from prison, he denied any knowledge of Chandra's disappearance.
"Regarding the case of the girl, Chandra Levy: I don't know anything about that case. In 2001, the FBI went to see me when I was in the [D.C. jail]. That was when I learned about that girl," Guandique said. "Before that, I had never seen her and I don't understand the reason why the police started to suspect me. ... I have nothing to do with the death of that girl. I am innocent and I am not afraid of the police investigation."
Now 26, he is serving a 10-year sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary-Victorville in Adelanto, Calif., for assaulting Halle Shilling and Christy Wiegand. It has been 8 1/2 years since he left a dirt-poor hamlet in El Salvador and followed thousands of other illegal immigrants to Washington in search of a better life.
He faces deportation upon his scheduled release, on July 31, 2011.
