Twenty-eight-year-old Joyce Chiang was the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, and worked as a lawyer for what was then called the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS. On the evening of January 9th, 1999, Joyce had been out to dinner and a movie with friends, and one of them had offered to give her a ride home, back to her apartment in Dupont Circle, which she shared with her brother Roger.
Joyce, though, asked to be dropped off in front of the Starbucks coffee shop four blocks from her building so she could get some tea; the Starbucks was a regular hangout of hers. The friend obliged, and Joyce got out of the car, but disappeared some time before arriving back at her residence.
The next day, a couple walking through Washington DC’s Anacostia Park found Joyce’s billfold, and a later search of the park by the FBI—who became involved in the case early on because Joyce was a federal employee—also turned up the victim’s apartment keys, gloves, video rental card, and grocery store card. In addition, Joyce’s green suede jacket was also found, ominously torn up the back.
There would be no other sign of Joyce’s fate for three long months. Then, in early April of 1999, an individual canoeing down the Potomac River spotted a badly decomposed body lying along the riverbank in Fairfax County. Later examination would determine that these were the remains of twenty-eight-year-old Joyce Chiang, who had vanished back in early January only four blocks from her apartment. The site where the body was found lay about eight miles downriver from where Joyce had last been seen alive.
Because cause of death could not be determined, authorities initially believed that Joyce had either committed suicide or had slipped and accidentally drowned in the river. Her family vehemently disagreed, stressing the unlikelihood of Joyce taking her own life, and citing the torn jacket found in the park only days after her disappearance. In spite of their insistence, Joyce’s death was not considered a homicide for many years afterward.
New life was breathed into the investigation following the 2001 slaying of DC intern Chandra Levy, a murder case that captured the national imagination due to the victim’s alleged romantic links to California congressman Gary Condit and rumors of a conspiracy surrounding the killing. Investigators pointed out that the murders of Chandra Levy and Joyce Chiang did bear some striking similarities, including the fact that both victims were attractive young interns with dark hair, both lived within a few blocks of each other in Dupont Circle (though Chandra did not move there until after Joyce’s death), and both were known to hang out at the same Starbucks, the one where Joyce was last seen alive (though again, Chandra did not live in the area until after Joyce was killed).
Ultimately, however, it was established that Chandra Levy had most likely been killed in the course of an attack perpetrated by a man named Ingmar Guandique, who had been convicted in 2001 of assaulting two other women in Rock Creek Park, where Chandra’s skeletal remains were discovered. Guandique was convicted in 2010 of Chandra’s murder and sentenced to 60 years, but in 2015, he was granted a new trial, and in the summer of 2016, the prosecution dismissed the charges against him. He was subsequently handed over to immigration authorities and was deported back to his home country of El Salvador in 2017.
Meanwhile, investigators in the Joyce Chiang case finally vindicated the victim’s family in 2011 by stating that Joyce had most likely been the victim of a homicide, and not only that, but asserted that they almost certainly knew who the perpetrators were. One of them, they stated, was a man named Steve Allen, who was already in prison in Maryland for a sexual assault; while the other was Neil Joaquin, who had subsequently moved to Guyana—which has no extradition treaty with the United States—and was therefore out of reach. Investigators put forth the theory that the two men often worked as a team on the streets of DC, targeting women at random for abduction, rape, and robbery. A very similar crime, thought to have been carried out by the same two attackers, occurred only a short time after Joyce went missing.
Though no charges have been filed against the two suspects, authorities seem confident that they are the most likely assailants. Though a link to the murder of Chandra Levy is still possible, most investigators seem to believe that the two crimes are unrelated.
For a time, there was also speculation that Joyce Chiang had been murdered by the same perpetrator behind the August 1998 rape and murder of twenty-nine-year-old Christine Mirzayan. Christine was the daughter of Iranian immigrants, a newlywed, a Congressional fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a graduate student in biology at Georgetown University. On the evening of August 1st, 1998, in fact, she was walking back to her dormitory building on campus after attending a friend’s cookout when she was set upon by an unknown assailant.
The next day, passersby discovered the young woman’s battered body near a wooded pathway. She had been savagely raped, and her skull had been bashed in with a massive rock. Months later, it was discovered that the killer had also taken the victim’s purse, placed a brick in it, and thrown it into a canal, perhaps in an effort to make the crime look like a robbery.
In 2009, the inquiry into Christine Mirzayan’s death took a different turn when it was established that DNA evidence recovered from her remains suggested that she had been killed by the so-called Potomac River Rapist, an individual believed to have committed at least nine other sexual assaults in the surrounding region between May of 1991 and November of 1997. Christine Mirzayan was the perpetrator’s only known murder. In 2019, the suspect was identified as Giles Warrick; he was arrested and charged with ten counts of sexual assault and one count of murder.
The death of Joyce Chiang, however, remains officially unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 