Washington Post staff writers Sari Horwitz and Allan Lengel report in an article titled, “Levy Probe Concentrates On Rock Creek Attacker.” Excerpt:
Detectives in the Chandra Levy murder case are focusing on a man convicted of assaulting two women jogging in Rock Creek Park last year — a suspect who was initially discounted after he passed a polygraph test that investigators now believe was flawed.
Ingmar A. Guandique, 21, has been in prison for the assaults on the joggers since July 2001, two months after Levy disappeared. After her remains were found in the park May 22, some investigators reexamining his case were struck by the similarities in the three crime scenes, law enforcement sources said.
Investigators then discovered that a Spanish-speaking interpreter instead of a bilingual polygraph technician was used in administering Guandique’s polygraph, sources said. Relying on an interpreter, according to legal experts, can skew the results of the test because the questions are filtered through and possibly altered by the interpreter.
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A Tip Discounted
D.C. police first spoke to Guandique about the Levy case in the summer of 2001 after U.S. Park Police alerted them to his arrest in the jogger assaults, according to court records. But law enforcement sources said they found nothing to indicate he was involved in her disappearance, especially since, at the time, they weren’t aware that her body was in the park.
After Guandique’s arrest, an inmate at the D.C. jail told authorities that Guandique had confided in him that he stabbed Levy and left her body in the park, law enforcement sources said. The inmate didn’t try to trade the information for a lighter sentence, saying he came forward because he felt bad for the Levy family.
In September 2001, the inmate failed a polygraph test, also administered through an interpreter. Guandique, who denied involvement in the Levy case, passed, the sources said, and authorities felt comfortable that he was not their man.
When Levy’s body was found eight months later, Guandique’s name surfaced as someone who had attacked other women in the park. High-ranking police, knowing that their detectives had discounted him because of the polygraph, played him down as a suspect, with Ramsey scolding, “The press is making too big a deal of it.”
Ramsey’s then-deputy, Terrance R. Gainer, was more blunt: “He wasn’t our suspect then. He’s not our suspect now.”
Ramsey last week defended the use of the interpreter. “When you’ve got language issues, it’s not unusual to use a translator,” he said.
But Billy Franklin, director of the Virginia School of Polygraph in Norfolk, said he prefers not to use interpreters because if they don’t pose the questions correctly, the answers can be wrong.
“In such an important case, they should have used a bilingual examiner if possible,” he said.
James Starrs, professor of law and forensic science at George Washington University, contends that because lie detector tests can be unreliable, they shouldn’t always determine the course of an investigation.
“Simply because someone passes the test, they shouldn’t be written off, absolutely not,” he said.