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Behind the Post's Guandique interviews

By Mark Obbie

Sylvia Moreno is the only journalist to have interviewed Ingmar Guandique, who's now charged with Chandra Levy's murder. In The Washington Post's remarkable series last year, "Who Killed Chandra Levy?", Moreno and two other writers -- Sari Horwitz and Scott Higham -- documented the D.C. police investigation's misfires and focused suspicion publicly for the first time on Guandique. Now Moreno has told some of the backstory of her Guandique interviews -- and the crime-news site Ticklethewire.com gets the scoop.Moreno writes that she had to interview Guandique by phone -- in two hour-long sessions -- after prison officials and Guandique's lawyer objected to a face-to-face. The more interesting insight is how long Moreno had worked to get the interview:. . .  my involvement in the story began in summer, 2002 when Guandique's name first surfaced as a potential suspect. I found and interviewed his family in El Salvador and his friends and relatives in D.C. I wrote to Guandique in federal prison, where he was already being held in September, 2002 for attacking two female joggers in Rock Creek Park, and we corresponded in Spanish for several months. When I resumed the correspondence in 2007, he replied immediately, and after a couple of letters, he consented to a visit, as he had in 2002.Why didn't Moreno write this in the Post? Because the series was Moreno's last assignment. The veteran reporter took a buyout last year. (Via McClatchy's Michael Doyle)

Full post as published by Lawbeat on March 05, 2009 (boomark / email).