Man convicted in Chandra Levy murder case gets new trial

WASHINGTON — A judge on Thursday ordered a new trial for the man convicted of the 2001 slaying of former Bureau of Prisons intern Chandra Levy.

Punctuating an extraordinary sequence of events that has slowly unfolded over the past several years, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Gerald Fisher granted the request for a new trial made by attorneys for Ingmar Guandique.

Photos of Chandra Levy are displayed in Modesto Centre Plaza in Modesto, Calif., at the 2002 memorial service for the Washington intern killed in 2001.

Ingmar Guandique is escorted from the Violent Crimes Unit by police in Washington in 2009. Guandique has won a retrial in the 2001 murder of government intern Chandra Levy.

The new trial will feature different attorneys arguing before a new judge who must now come quickly up to speed on a killing that has, at times, attracted both national notoriety and fevered speculation.

“I am not familiar with the facts,” D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert E. Morin said Thursday morning, “other than it’s a homicide.”

Guandique was convicted of first-degree murder in 2010 based largely on the testimony of former gang leader Armando Morales, who testified that Guandique had confessed to him while they were cellmates in a federal prison in Kentucky. Morales’ credibility has since been questioned, hence the new trial.

Levy’s disappearance brought to light her affair with then-Congressman Gary Condit. Prosecutors said Condit, a California Democrat, was never a suspect in the killing.

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