SCANDAL: Joe Leon and Sarah Baskin star.
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On Sunday night, TLC premieres “Who Killed Chandra Levy?,” a terrific docudrama that covers the case from the day the DC intern went missing on May 11, 2001 until Sept. 11, the day our country suffered a tragedy so colossal that all other news faded into oblivion.
There’s only one big problem with the special — the title. It shouldn’t be called, “Who Killed Chandra Levy?” We all know who killed Chandra Levy: Ingmar Guandique, an illegal Ecuadorian immigrant.
The docudrama should be called, “Why Did The Cops, The Media and Everyone Else Think Gary Condit Killed Chandra Levy?” That’s the real thrust of the 90-minute show — how Condit seduced Levy, how suspiciously he acted when she disappeared, how he lied during police interviews and how the fumbling, bumbling DC police force blew the investigation.
In fact, it wasn’t the cops who nearly 10 years later nailed Guandique, but two Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz, when they reinvestigated the very cold case.
The special is done as a TV movie, interspersed with real-life interviews with Levy’s aunt, her friends and the two reporters, plus interviews done at the time with her parents and with Condit. The special traces Chandra’s life from the time she arrived in DC to the conviction of her killer.
Sarah Baskin as Levy and Joe Leon as Condit are not just believable in the parts, but pretty good. Most reenactments look like they hire whomever they find at the mall with the same hairdos as the killer and the killed — this one is 10 steps above that.
We learn how the congressman seduced the intern, and how slimy he really was — carrying on with three women at the same time. All that being said, however, he didn’t kill Chandra.
But the bumbling, bungling cops blew it when they didn’t check the camera in Levy’s building, then crashed her hard drive and lost all information for six weeks. When someone finally retrieved the info, they found that she’d been searching for hiking trails in Rock Creek Park, the same place that rangers had recently caught a sexual predator named Guandique. They didn’t bother to question him — even though he was sitting in jail. Nor did they search the trails. They just searched the roads.
To paraphrase an old African and Turkish maxim: DC, like a fish, stinks from the head down.