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If you’re a new reader of TPM you may be surprised to know that in addition to regime change and Iraq and George Orwell and the South Dakota Senate Race, TPM also has a bizarre but abiding interest in the Chandra Levy case. He was sort of an early adopter, you might say.

(Don’t criticize: everyone has their failings.)

Today the Washington Post published an article — expected for some time — reporting that DC police have refocused interest on an El Salvadoran immigrant named Ingmar A. Guandique.

Guandique attacked two women in Rock Creek Park not long after Levy disappeared. And he was later sentenced to ten years in prison under a plea bargain under which he pled guilty to attempted robbery. While awaiting trial a prison inmate told police that Guandique had confessed to the crime. But the snitch failed a polygraph and Guandique passed one. So in the absence of other evidence police scratched him from the list.

Now, according to the Post, police are considering Guandique again after questions were raised about whether the polygraph should have been administered by a bilingual examiner rather than through a translator. Perhaps imprecision in translation led to a bad test result. (Others who’ve followed this case speculate that questions were just getting asked about why the *#$% the DC cops never solved this case. And Guandique was convenient.)

But there are still a few pretty basic problems with the new theory. In fact, the Post article addresses some of them, even if it does sorta bury them.

In May, authorities played down Guandique as a suspect because Levy had been killed before his attacks on the joggers — who fought back and escaped without serious injury. They theorized that someone who already had killed would have been more violent with the later victims. Also, the two joggers looked strikingly similar, tall and blond, while Levy was a petite brunet.

But investigators now believe that opportunity, not how the women looked, was a key factor in the attacks, according to law enforcement sources. They still are not sure why Levy was in the park, because family and friends say she was not a jogger and didn’t like to go there alone. Some investigators have speculated that she went for a long walk, possibly to see the Nature Center, or was in the park to meet someone.

[D.C. Superior Court Judge Noel A.] Kramer said Guandique never stole anything from the women, not even their portable tape players, items he told police he was trying to take when he attacked them. “There is more here than a Walkman,” the judge said.

In a similarity noted by law enforcement authorities, Levy’s Walkman also was found with her remains.

Here we have two very basic problems which — in the absence of any direct evidence inculpating Guandique — still seem to me hard to overcome. It seems improbable — though certainly not impossible — that a serial killer would quickly dispatch his first victim and then flub the next two. As the Post piece says, one imagines you’d get better at it, not worse.

Still more problematic is just why Levy would have been in the park. Levy was not only not a jogger, she was not a jogger — according to friends and family — specifically because she didn’t think it was safe to jog outside in a city like DC. If that’s true, why on earth would she go to an isolated and sorta scary place like that to jog?

There are some other small details militating against the jogging hypothesis. But I’ll spare you those.

Secondly, if you consider where she lived and where her body was found this would have been a very, very long jog on a hot summer day. At least it seems that way to a pitiful jogger like TPM. But we don’t have to go into that.

This issue of the eerie similarity of no one having their Walkman stolen is really just too moronic to even comment on.

Now, there is always the Kafkaesque — well, not exactly Kafkaesque, but work with me, I can’t think of another word — scenario in which Condit, or some rent-a-goon he hired, lured Levy into a secluded part of Rock Creek Park to tell her it was over, positively over, and she better not think of making any trouble. Then he leaves her there. Chandra is crushed and despondently drifts off into some wooded section of the park only to get whacked by Guandique.

It would be just Condit’s luck.

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