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Finding Chandra

by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz

The book

Jacket of Finding Chandra (Scribner, 2010): a forest stream in Rock Creek Park, with the title and the authors’ names

From the jacket

It was the mystery that gripped the nation during the summer of 2001: the sudden disappearance of Chandra Levy, a young, promising intern, and the possible involvement of Congressman Gary Condit. And then the case went cold.

Six years after the young intern’s disappearance, investigative editors of the Washington Post pitched two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters their idea: revisit the unsolved case and find out what happened to Chandra, a task that had eluded police and the FBI.

Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz went to work. The result was a thirteen-part series in the Washington Post that focused on a prime suspect the police and the FBI had passed over years before. They had wrongly pursued Condit and chased numerous false leads, including a claim that Chandra had been kidnapped and taken to the Middle East.

Finding Chandra explores the bungled police efforts to locate the crime scene and catch a killer, the ambition and hubris of Washington’s power elite and press corps, the twisted culture of politics, the dark nature of political scandal, and the agony of parents struggling to comprehend the loss of a child.

How the book was made

The book grew out of “Who Killed Chandra Levy?”, a 13-part series by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz that ran in The Washington Post in the summer of 2008. The reporters re-examined the police investigation and focused on a suspect already convicted of two attacks on women in Rock Creek Park around the time Levy disappeared.

Reviewers compared the book’s account of how the reporters got the story to Woodward and Bernstein’s in All the President’s Men, and noted that the series led police to renew their efforts in the case.

The authors launched the book in May 2010 with interviews on ABC’s Good Morning America, CNN and NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and with talks in Washington at Politics and Prose, the Newseum and the National Press Club.

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