Joyce ChiangOn January 9, 1999, Joyce Chiang disappeared. Today, police announced that they had closed the case.
On the day she disappeared, Chiang, a lawyer with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had met with friends for a movie and dinner and, on the way home, made a stop at the Starbucks at the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and R Street NW. She never made it back to her Dupont Circle apartment, located four blocks away. Several community candlelight vigils were held, the neighborhood was plastered with flyers, and the FBI pursued several leads — including the discovery of Chiang’s wallet and torn clothing in Anacostia Park — but Chiang’s body wasn’t discovered until three months later, eight miles down the Potomac River, by a canoer. Investigators couldn’t determine the cause of death, and the case sat cold for 12 years.
But today, Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier announced that the police had officially ruled a homicide, a closed case. In 2001, police surmised that Chiang had committed suicide, but began to revisit the case last April. According to police, two men known to rob people for drug money abducted Chiang and, at some point during the abduction, she fell into the Anacostia River — which, it being January, was ice cold. However, WTOP’s Neil Augenstein reports that police will not prosecute the two suspects, due to a lack of evidence — though one is currently serving a life sentence in a Maryland correctional facility, and the other resides in Guyana, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.
Chiang’s brother, Roger, who spearheaded awareness of his sister’s disappearance, expressed relief during this morning’s press conference, stating said that Lanier had “put the luster on the badge by solving this case.”
