The Megyn Kelly Show - Chandra Levy - The Missing Intern and the Congressman： The FULL MK Confidential Series

00:00:00.420 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:12.140 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's Sunday Mega

00:00:16.640 Episode. Today we bring you all five episodes of our MK Confidential series on Chandra Levy.

00:00:23.220 What was true about Gary Condit's relationship with Chandra Levy and what became Urban Legend?

00:00:29.060 the man arrested for her murder, and why he is free today. Do we think he did it?

00:00:36.080 Find all of our MK Confidential episodes on the Megyn Kelly podcast feeds and YouTube channel.

00:00:42.260 In the meantime, enjoy this one, and we are back on Monday.

00:00:46.940 It is a beautiful late summer morning in September 2001, and the biggest missing person story in

00:00:54.280 America is about to have its biggest day. Important new questions in the

00:00:59.040 case of Chandra Levy. Missing intern Chandra Levy. The 24-year-old woman disappeared without

00:01:04.200 a trace. Will Chandra Levy ever be found? It has been the story all summer. A young woman who

00:01:11.180 vanished in the nation's capital and the married congressman whose name keeps turning up alongside

00:01:16.980 hers. It has run at the top of the newscasts and across the front pages of newspapers for months.

00:01:23.480 D.C. police detectives and FBI agents out tonight looking for more clues in this most unusual missing persons case.

00:01:33.580 And this is the morning it comes to a head.

00:01:37.000 Across the country at this moment in California, Bob and Susan Levy are packing for a flight to Chicago,

00:01:42.940 where they are booked to tell their daughter's story on Oprah, and then they will fly to New York for the Today Show.

00:01:50.100 The congressman's son, Chad Condit, is preparing to defend his father on The View in New York City.

00:01:56.920 For four months, the country has asked two questions nonstop about a 24-year-old intern named Chandra Levy.

00:02:05.880 Where is she? And was a sitting congressman, Gary Condit, involved in her disappearance?

00:02:12.320 The parallels with the Clinton affair are both striking and obvious,

00:02:15.500 although this time, because of Chandra's disappearance, much, much more serious.

00:02:20.160 The police investigation is stalled until Chandra is found, either dead or alive.

00:02:25.800 Until then, this country remains in the grip of speculation.

00:02:29.820 Today on live television, both sides are set to make their case.

00:02:34.760 At 8.46 a.m. Eastern Time, American Airlines Flight 11 hits the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

00:02:43.600 Yes, it's September 11th.

00:02:46.400 This just in, you were looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there.

00:02:50.940 That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning

00:02:54.400 that a plane has crashed into one of the towers.

00:02:57.800 There is a major incident in lower Manhattan.

00:03:00.380 We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion

00:03:03.460 at the World Trade Center in New York City.

00:03:07.740 The interviews never happen.

00:03:10.460 Within minutes, the satellite trucks that have been camped outside the Levy's home all summer

00:03:15.560 start their engines and pull away. And by the end of the day, the story that consumed America

00:03:21.480 is gone, vanished. But what happened to Chandra? I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:03:30.880 that september morning was more than four months in the making to understand it we must go back

00:03:40.460 to chandra levy's final months in washington at 24 chandra levy is nearly finished with what she

00:03:47.640 came to washington dc to do the five foot four 110 pound brunette grew up in modesto california

00:03:54.740 in farm country, with a ranch house and a pool out back where her mother kept horses.

00:04:01.080 Her father, Bob, is an oncologist known for taking difficult cases,

00:04:06.120 enough so that some patients call him Last Chance Bob.

00:04:10.000 Her mother, Susan, is an artist, a painter, and quick with a big laugh.

00:04:15.100 She was shy. She really liked being at home.

00:04:18.280 Chandra is their first child and her father's princess.

00:04:22.160 He has called her Ladybug since she was a little girl at summer camp.

00:04:26.380 Chandra was really headstrong.

00:04:28.240 We were on trips sometimes.

00:04:29.480 She'd just walk away from us because she didn't want to be associated with her parents and kid brother.

00:04:34.220 She keeps four birds and names them Franny, Zoe, Christmas, and Hanukkah.

00:04:40.220 She becomes a vegetarian at age 14.

00:04:43.300 And what she wants most of all is a badge.

00:04:47.040 In high school, Chandra joins the Police Explorers,

00:04:50.220 the program for teenagers who think they might want to work in law enforcement.

00:04:54.500 Chandra's mother later recalled that early taste of police work

00:04:58.080 in a documentary for Investigation Discovery.

00:05:01.200 In high school, she actually got to work in the police department

00:05:06.080 and she did parking tickets.

00:05:08.460 She was very proud of the job and she was good at it.

00:05:11.640 You sound like you're very content with the program and everything.

00:05:14.600 Oh, yeah.

00:05:15.500 Chandra studies criminal justice at San Francisco State

00:05:18.800 and goes on to pursue a master's at USC.

00:05:22.540 She wants a job with the FBI, maybe the CIA.

00:05:26.460 Despite her ambition, she stays close to her family.

00:05:30.080 Favorite memories were when we traveled,

00:05:32.280 because that's when we were closest as a family.

00:05:35.720 When we would drive from San Francisco back,

00:05:39.180 they would say the whole Star War trilogy by heart.

00:05:44.980 the dialogue for all three movies in the fall of 2000 chandra takes an internship in washington dc

00:05:52.500 at the federal bureau of prisons working in its public affairs office it is not glamorous but it

00:05:58.740 is a first step toward the federal career chandra wants she sublets a studio apartment in dupont

00:06:04.740 circle a neighborhood of row houses and coffee shops northwest of downtown she's a long way from

00:06:11.460 Modesto. In Washington, her life is quiet and repetitive. Metro to the bureau, the gym afterward,

00:06:18.360 then home. She knows few people, and the person she speaks with most is her mother. By the last

00:06:24.940 week of April 2001, Chandra has been working in Washington for eight months, and her internship

00:06:30.840 is ending. Chandra is preparing to leave Washington. She cancels her health club membership and keeps

00:06:37.280 the receipt. She emails her landlord about the lease. She starts to pack up her belongings.

00:06:43.520 The plan is to fly home, graduate from USC, and begin applying for the federal career she has

00:06:49.140 wanted since high school. On Sunday, April 29th, Chandra leaves a message for her aunt,

00:06:55.840 Linda Zamsky, back in California. The internship is over, she says. She will pack up over the next

00:07:01.680 week or so and head home for a while. It's a routine message about a plan. Everyone expects

00:07:06.940 her to complete. It is one of the last times anyone hears Chandra's voice. The next day,

00:07:13.740 April 30th, she works out at the Washington Sports Club. The people at that gym appear to

00:07:19.920 be the last ones to have seen Chandra alive. She was very upbeat and looking forward to going home.

00:07:27.600 The morning of Tuesday, May 1st, 2001, is the last ordinary day of Chandra Levy's life.

00:07:35.420 She sits down at her laptop, set up on a makeshift desk in a hallway nook of her apartment.

00:07:41.140 Investigators will later rebuild the morning, almost minute by minute.

00:07:45.600 She signs on at 10.27 a.m. and moves from site to site.

00:07:50.740 The Drudge Report, National Geographic, Amtrak, Southwest Airlines.

00:07:56.000 At 10.45 a.m., she emails her mother a list of Southwest fares for the trip home.

00:08:01.880 Six days out, she is still pricing the flight.

00:08:04.660 At 11.26, she hits the Washington Post weather page.

00:08:09.200 It calls for fair skies and temperatures near 80.

00:08:12.920 At 11.33, she opens a Washington Post guide to Rock Creek Park.

00:08:18.880 A minute later, she clicks a map of the park's hiking trails.

00:08:23.160 At 12.24 p.m., she logs off.

00:08:26.560 That is the last confirmed trace of Chandra Levy.

00:08:30.180 She makes no more calls.

00:08:32.620 She sends no more emails.

00:08:34.680 She uses no credit card.

00:08:36.880 On an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, she closes her laptop in her own apartment and seemingly

00:08:42.740 steps off the face of the earth.

00:08:45.480 No one who knew her ever hears from her again.

00:08:49.420 The last place online Chandra looked up in those final minutes at her laptop was Rock

00:08:55.300 Creek Park.

00:08:56.340 And to understand the rest of this story, you have to know the geography of this place.

00:09:01.340 This is not a manicured city park or a narrow strip of green, lush grass.

00:09:07.740 It is 1,754 acres of real forest running straight up the middle of Washington, D.C.

00:09:15.920 It is more than twice the size of Central Park in New York

00:09:19.340 and one of the oldest natural urban parks in the country,

00:09:23.720 reaching from the edge of downtown D.C. right up to the Maryland state line.

00:09:28.200 It has bridle paths and a horse stable.

00:09:31.340 picnic groves along the creek and tucked into the trees the only planetarium in the national park

00:09:37.420 system it also has long steep wooded ravines places where the trees close over the trails

00:09:44.540 and the city seems a world away rock creek park has heavily used running paths and women do run

00:09:51.660 there alone but it also has isolated wooded trails where a runner can quickly find herself

00:09:57.900 out of sight, and entirely alone. Chandra's family and friends say she was not a jogger

00:10:05.080 and did not like going into the park alone. Her apartment is about two miles away. Whether that

00:10:11.600 trail map meant she planned to walk in the park that afternoon or meant nothing at all will become

00:10:16.920 one of the central questions of this case. Hey, what you doing? Are you doom scrolling other

00:10:22.640 people's vacations? Miami? San Diego? With Expedia, your trip can earn rewards which you can use

00:10:27.980 towards your next eligible stay. Soon, people will doom scroll you. Expedia, the one place you go to

00:10:33.340 go places. Terms apply. 2,800 miles away in Modesto. The days pass and her parents cannot

00:10:42.160 reach Chandra. Chandra calls home. She always calls home, always. Now the phone rings through

00:10:49.240 to her voicemail again and again. We called her up and she didn't answer the phone at a message

00:10:55.840 machine. I kept calling and calling and she never answered it and I got worried about it. He got

00:11:00.600 very upset and he said he felt something was wrong. Susan is normally the free spirit of the family.

00:11:09.520 By the second week of silence, she has gone quiet. Back in the Levy Ranch home, the phone becomes the

00:11:16.260 center of everything. Every time it rings, they hope it's Chandra. The messages the Levy's leave

00:11:22.560 on their daughter's machine grow more blunt and more desperate as each day passes. Damn it,

00:11:28.120 Chandra, Bob says in one of them. Call me. Bob starts calling everywhere he can think of.

00:11:34.420 He calls the Bureau of Prisons, where she interned. He calls the FBI, calls Washington hospitals,

00:11:40.160 one after another, asking whether a young woman matching his daughter's description

00:11:43.700 has come in as an accident victim.

00:11:46.720 Every call comes back the same.

00:11:49.100 Nothing.

00:11:50.100 No trace.

00:11:51.960 The plan was for Chandra to be home by now,

00:11:54.400 days from graduating.

00:11:56.040 To her family, that silence is not like Chandra at all.

00:11:59.480 She's careful and responsible.

00:12:01.700 The kind of daughter who checks in.

00:12:03.680 She would not skip the ceremony for the master's degree

00:12:06.320 that she crossed the country to earn.

00:12:08.580 She got honors.

00:12:10.640 She was top in her class.

00:12:12.440 I thought it would be exciting for her.

00:12:14.780 It's not like her to not to call or be in touch.

00:12:18.220 Maybe she ran off, had a schizophrenic episode or something like that.

00:12:22.840 I mean, I'll think of all those things.

00:12:24.540 That's a reason why she didn't turn up.

00:12:27.040 On May 6th, Bob Levy calls the police in Washington and reports his daughter missing.

00:12:33.420 Ronald Monroe was an assistant chief with the D.C. police.

00:12:37.480 At the time that Shondra Levy was reported, it's missing.

00:12:41.500 The number of missing persons in the district probably exceeded 200 to 300 a month.

00:12:48.660 When the parents called, we sent an officer to just check on the welfare of the person.

00:12:55.180 A police officer goes to her DuPont Circle apartment for a welfare check.

00:13:00.120 The door is locked.

00:13:01.960 There's no sign of a break-in, no sign of a struggle, nothing violent at all.

00:13:06.800 The building's manager unlocks the door and the officer steps inside.

00:13:11.500 The place looks like someone stopped packing in the middle of a move.

00:13:16.120 Suitcases half-packed, clothes still hanging in the closet, dishes in the sink,

00:13:21.400 a Williams-Sonoma bag on the kitchen counter with a load of dirty laundry inside it, jeans and socks.

00:13:27.620 Her jewelry is still out, earrings and an ankle bracelet and a necklace with a pendant.

00:13:32.760 On the answering machine, 25 messages, most from her parents.

00:13:38.060 And then there is the most telling sign of all.

00:13:40.500 her purse inside that her wallet her credit cards her driver's license and 31 and 50 cents

00:13:48.400 her cell phone left on the table her blue sony laptop still open on the desk in the hall

00:13:55.380 what 24 year old leaves home without any of it for weeks at a time nor does any of this

00:14:03.000 seem like chandra what troubles the detectives most is not what is missing from the apartment

00:14:08.400 it is what still remains. She has no history of this, and based on the fact that we went to her

00:14:15.620 apartment to check on her welfare, we found all her identification in there, driver's license,

00:14:21.700 credit cards, checkbook, jewelry, cell phones, anything that a normal person would take out

00:14:27.220 with them when they go out on the street. All that was in the apartments. Brad Garrett,

00:14:31.500 a veteran FBI agent who works the Chandra Levy case. Her driver's license, her credit cards,

00:14:37.100 her cell phone and her cell phone were still in the apartment that's baffling to me and others

00:14:42.720 because the whole idea is when you're going to leave you're at least going to take an id there

00:14:47.340 were only two things missing her keys and a ring her keys and a gold pinky ring with her initials

00:14:54.320 cl that her parents had designed and given her wherever chandra went that afternoon she went

00:15:00.280 with almost nothing the apartment does not tell detectives whether she left voluntarily

00:15:05.340 or something happened to her.

00:15:07.820 Detective Jim Trainham spent years working homicides in Washington.

00:15:11.840 Did she just drop off the face of the earth voluntarily?

00:15:14.900 Is she missing under suspicious circumstances but still alive?

00:15:19.460 Could she have been the victim of foul play?

00:15:22.240 All of these are possibilities that you have to explore.

00:15:24.860 In the nation's capital, Chandra is one missing name among a few hundred that month.

00:15:30.800 In Modesto, she is the only one.

00:15:33.200 The police went to a room and found everything there, you know, nothing.

00:15:37.440 They didn't find her anywhere.

00:15:39.200 We searched the area immediately around her DuPont Circle apartment.

00:15:44.260 We searched the alleys, the dumpsters, hoping we would find something that was connected to her.

00:15:50.400 We expanded the search through vacant properties in the city.

00:15:54.140 Most of the missing cases in D.C., by the police department's own count,

00:15:57.960 are teenagers who run away on their own and are back within a few days or weeks.

00:16:03.120 Many of those kids are from the neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park and across the Anacostia,

00:16:08.380 where much of the city's violence plays out in the streets.

00:16:11.920 Chandra is none of that.

00:16:14.120 A 24-year-old woman who calls home like clockwork, gone without a trace from a quiet block in

00:16:20.400 northwest D.C.

00:16:22.260 In the days after her parents report Chandra missing, they stop waiting for answers and

00:16:27.660 begin searching for clues themselves.

00:16:29.780 They already pay their daughter's cell phone bills every month, so they open the latest bills and read them line by line, looking for anyone she might be with.

00:16:39.660 Most of the numbers are ones they would expect.

00:16:42.160 A few Washington numbers repeat, ones they do not recognize.

00:16:47.220 Susan Levy starts dialing them.

00:16:50.300 The first rings through to an answering machine, playing soft background music and no name or voice recording.

00:16:57.800 She dials the next.

00:16:59.740 This one is not a friend or a boyfriend or a landlord.

00:17:03.740 A recording tells her she has reached the office of Democrat Congressman Gary Condit.

00:17:10.080 Susan recognizes the name immediately.

00:17:12.520 I saw this number that was being called many, many, many times.

00:17:19.100 I decided to call that number, and it turned out to be Gary Condit.

00:17:23.980 Gary Condit is the Levy's own Modesto congressman.

00:17:26.980 53 years old, married more than 30 years, one of the most recognizable politicians in their part

00:17:33.700 of California. Gentleman from California is recognized for two minutes. It is a tremendous

00:17:39.260 cost to the committee and to the taxpayers of this country. And they're confused why we can't

00:17:45.120 work together. And his number is one that keeps turning up on their daughter's phone bills.

00:17:52.160 Bob Levy decides to call him directly.

00:17:54.980 The family finds a home number, and Condit answers.

00:17:58.740 Bob's voice shakes.

00:18:00.680 He can barely get the words out.

00:18:02.940 He tells the congressman that he is Chandra Levy's father,

00:18:06.100 that his daughter is an intern in Washington, D.C.,

00:18:09.760 that his number is all over her phone bills,

00:18:13.740 and that she is missing.

00:18:15.740 Can he help?

00:18:17.420 By the family's account, Condit is pleasant, but offers nothing.

00:18:22.080 He says he knows Chandra, that she's a lovely person, and that he has no idea where she is.

00:18:29.880 The Levy's do not believe him.

00:18:32.320 They tell the D.C. police about the congressman and about the calls.

00:18:36.420 By now, the police have taken Chandra's things, including her answering machine.

00:18:40.920 Among the messages are two from a man.

00:18:43.320 on May 3rd, days after she was last heard from,

00:18:47.880 before Chandra had been reported to police.

00:18:50.920 He never gives his name.

00:18:52.820 It's 11.45. Sorry, I've been fired up a lot today.

00:18:55.980 So give me a call. Give me a lend-in on kind of what the schedule is.

00:19:01.000 Things are looking pretty good for me today.

00:19:03.760 I think I already haven't heard from you.

00:19:05.360 Anyway, give me a call.

00:19:07.140 The voice belongs to Gary Condit,

00:19:09.360 The congressman who had just played down how well he knew Chandra to her father, Bob Levy.

00:19:15.320 Ronald Monroe was an assistant chief of D.C. police at the time.

00:19:20.180 It was a little bit unusual to us.

00:19:23.280 He had indicated he barely knew her.

00:19:25.620 He just knew her and passed.

00:19:27.840 Two messages in his own voice left days after she vanished,

00:19:32.280 asking Chandra Levy for her schedule and a call back.

00:19:35.520 It is the first clear contradiction in the case.

00:19:38.860 I kind of felt maybe he might be covering his checks.

00:19:42.500 He just seemed to be concerned about himself.

00:19:46.300 In the first week of May 2001, this is still officially a missing persons case.

00:19:52.040 A young woman who closed her laptop, left her wallet on the table, and did not come home.

00:19:58.340 There is no body. There is no crime scene.

00:20:01.320 There's no witness, no ransom note, no proof that anything criminal has happened at all.

00:20:06.640 But her parents have found a curious connection.

00:20:10.500 Their own congressman's private numbers over and over on their daughter's phone bills.

00:20:16.200 They have heard his voice on her answering machine,

00:20:18.980 and they have heard him tell them directly that he knows nothing.

00:20:24.080 Gary Condit's name is not in the news yet.

00:20:27.760 That is about to change.

00:20:30.120 I'm Megan Kelly, and next time on MK Confidential,

00:20:33.480 The secret Chandra kept, the other women who come forward, and 67 days of deceit from a congressman with everything to lose.

00:20:51.380 In the early summer of 2001, a reporter at NBC's Washington station receives a phone call she will never forget.

00:20:59.780 The voice on the line is a source.

00:21:02.340 It gives her one sentence, and then it's gone.

00:21:05.520 The first time I heard Chandra Levy's name,

00:21:08.420 it was in the morning before I came to work.

00:21:10.960 I might have been at the gym or something like that.

00:21:13.220 And I got a phone call from a police source,

00:21:17.340 and I'll never forget it.

00:21:18.480 He phrased it exactly like this.

00:21:21.420 There's a young woman, an intern,

00:21:24.020 who's missing from her apartment in Northwest D.C.,

00:21:26.760 and she was having an affair with a congressman.

00:21:29.280 And the person hung up.

00:21:33.220 A missing intern, a congressman, an alleged affair.

00:21:37.680 One anonymous sentence.

00:21:39.840 For about two weeks, Chandra Levy is a small, local story.

00:21:43.500 A missing intern in a city with hundreds of missing persons cases a month.

00:21:48.740 Then a congressman's name surfaces.

00:21:51.440 And within days, it is the story the whole country is following.

00:21:55.300 Nearly every camera in America pulled off the search for Chandra Levy.

00:21:59.280 And on to Democrat Congressman Gary Condit.

00:22:02.900 I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:22:09.340 By now, Chandra Levy has been missing for weeks.

00:22:13.240 Her parents have no idea what's happened to her,

00:22:15.800 but have found their own congressman's private number on her phone bill.

00:22:19.800 His name is Gary Condit, and when they called and confronted him,

00:22:23.540 he had played down how well he knew their daughter.

00:22:27.080 Chandra's mother, Susan, later recalled the discovery to ABC's Deborah Roberts.

00:22:31.120 I saw this number that was being called many, many, many times.

00:22:37.540 I decided to call that number, and it turned out to be Gary Connors, and he answered the phone.

00:22:43.840 By the middle of May 2001, this is no longer a family's private suspicion.

00:22:48.720 It is a national news story that will become an obsession.

00:22:52.300 The congressman, seen in this picture with Ms. Levy, says she's a great person and a good friend.

00:22:59.040 He says she frequently visited his Capitol Hill office.

00:23:03.160 A staffer for the congressman says there was no romantic relationship between the congressman and Ms. Levy.

00:23:10.720 And from this point on, there are, in effect, two investigations.

00:23:14.960 One is trying to find a missing 24-year-old woman.

00:23:18.180 The other is trying to find out what a congressman is hiding.

00:23:22.200 Over that summer, the hunt for answers from the congressman all but replaces the search for Chandra Levy.

00:23:29.300 To understand any of it, we must go back to how the two of them met in the first place.

00:23:34.780 It is October of 2000.

00:23:37.660 Chandra, new to Washington, is making every connection she can to help build a career.

00:23:43.000 One afternoon, she and her friend from USC, Jennifer Baker, who is also from Modesto,

00:23:48.120 drop in unannounced at the Capitol Hill office of their own congressman, Gary Condit.

00:23:54.740 By all accounts, Condit is happy to see two friendly constituents.

00:23:59.220 He gives them a tour, takes them to the House gallery to watch a vote,

00:24:03.080 and the three pose for a photo together.

00:24:05.860 Jennifer walks out with an internship in his office,

00:24:09.080 and Chandra walks out with a crush.

00:24:12.460 A few days later, Chandra stops by again,

00:24:15.420 this time to see Jennifer at her brand-new congressional internship,

00:24:19.920 and this time she and Condit exchange phone numbers.

00:24:23.900 She calls him for career advice, which leads to dinner at Trist,

00:24:28.820 a coffee shop in Adams Morgan, minutes from Condit's apartment,

00:24:33.080 and thousands of miles from Modesto and Gary's wife.

00:24:37.520 And within weeks, by her aunt's later account,

00:24:41.140 Chandra will be spending two and sometimes three nights a week in that apartment.

00:24:46.540 For a long time, only one person in Chandra's life knew the name of the man she was seeing.

00:24:51.580 Not her parents, far away in California.

00:24:54.580 Not her friends.

00:24:56.180 Only her favorite aunt, Linda Zamsky,

00:24:58.780 who is closer to her age and lives an hour and a half up the road in Chesapeake City, Maryland.

00:25:04.920 The family Chandra could actually get to.

00:25:07.500 And the one person she trusts with the truth.

00:25:11.180 Over Thanksgiving 2000 and Passover the following spring, on long walks and long conversations, Chandra tells Linda about her man in Washington.

00:25:22.500 She calls him my guy, but the aunt knows he actually belongs to someone else.

00:25:28.460 He has promised that one day he will leave his wife in Modesto, give up his seat in Congress, and start a family with Chandra.

00:25:37.440 What she describes, according to her aunt, is not a fling.

00:25:41.580 It's a plan, one to play out over the next five years,

00:25:45.620 finish the internship, land the dream job in federal law enforcement,

00:25:49.580 and then start the life she's been striving for.

00:25:53.460 Her co-worker, Sven Jones, hears the same thing from Chandra

00:25:56.740 and shares this with 2020.

00:25:59.540 When she spoke of her relationship, she never offered a name.

00:26:05.180 She's just a powerful person. Someone who she was in love with. Someone who she could see

00:26:11.640 making a life with. The man her aunt knows is Gary Condit. And whatever Chandra believes about

00:26:18.040 their future, the secrecy of the present runs on his terms. By Zamsky's account, there are rules

00:26:25.360 and Chandra recites them to her. Allegedly, if she and Condit ride the elevator in his apartment

00:26:31.280 building and someone else gets on, Chandra is to get off on a different floor. If anyone asks,

00:26:37.360 she is to say she is visiting a sick friend. She is never to carry her identification when she goes

00:26:42.680 to see Gary Condit. To reach him, her aunt says, Chandra dials a private line, waits through soft

00:26:49.680 music, and leaves a message. And one rule, Chandra tells her, matters more than all the others.

00:26:55.440 silence about their secret. If anyone ever finds out, her aunt says Condit is emphatic. It's done.

00:27:05.520 Chandra sees a future together. Condit, in her telling, builds a system to make sure

00:27:10.700 no one else sees the present. Gary Condit is 53 years old. He's been married to his high school

00:27:17.960 sweetheart, Carolyn, for 34 years. They have two grown children, Chad and Katie. His wife lives at

00:27:25.180 their home in California. Gary lives in Washington in his condo alone. Carolyn comes to visit that

00:27:31.820 spring, but only briefly for a luncheon hosted by First Lady Laura Bush. Condit is the son of a

00:27:37.900 Baptist preacher, a Democrat from Modesto. Condit helped found the Blue Dog Democrats, a block of

00:27:44.420 fiscally conservative moderate Dems who broke from their party's left. A mural of a big blue dog

00:27:50.820 hangs in his congressional office beside a photo of Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich. Condit is

00:27:57.300 well-liked. He's telegenic, good-looking. Chandra thinks he looks like Harrison Ford. So well-groomed

00:28:03.920 that colleagues call him Mr. Blowdry, and there is talk he could go higher still, which is the point.

00:28:10.480 He is a man with a long marriage, a family, and a career he has spent decades building,

00:28:15.300 all of it resting on a certain image, all of it at risk if the truth comes out about an affair

00:28:22.280 with a missing intern. In public for months from the moment his name surfaces, he will not admit

00:28:28.700 the relationship was ever romantic, not to the reporters camped outside his condo, not on national

00:28:35.180 television, not to the country. The Washington, D.C. chief of detectives, Jack Barrett, sees his

00:28:41.680 investigators pull toward Condit like magnets to steal for one reason. From the very beginning,

00:28:48.860 he was trying to protect his professional reputation as a congressman. He was the one

00:28:54.500 that created this problem for himself. We had no place to turn other than to try and focus on him.

00:29:00.100 In private, however, the story is not quite so one-dimensional. Behind closed doors and

00:29:05.980 interviews with police, Condit acknowledges more. When detectives first sit down with Condit,

00:29:12.420 he acknowledges that Chandra had come to his apartment and on a few occasions had stayed the

00:29:18.020 night. When a sergeant asks him point blank whether the relationship was intimate, Condit

00:29:23.700 refuses to be explicit. Quote, I don't think we need to go there, he says, and you can infer what

00:29:30.160 you want with that. Weeks later, in a third police interview, according to Washington Post journalist

00:29:35.960 Scott Higgum and Sari Horwitz, Gary finally admits to the detectives that there had been a sexual

00:29:42.460 affair, an admission that promptly leaks, and that he never once repeats in public. Years later,

00:29:49.020 long after it no longer matters, this is as close as Gary Condit would come to publicly admitting

00:29:54.220 to an affair with Chandra. Here's what he tells Dr. Phil in 2016.

00:29:59.360 I saw her one time outside the office at a restaurant, and she came by my condo once.

00:30:05.960 You came by your Condit once?

00:30:08.220 Well, maybe twice. I think it was twice you came by.

00:30:10.820 And here is the distinction on which the rest of this story turns.

00:30:14.640 A man who has something to hide is not necessarily the same as a man who knows what happened to Chandra Levy.

00:30:21.720 But in the summer of 2001, the two appear identical to some.

00:30:27.180 There is also the question of where Condit has been.

00:30:30.840 By his own account, on the day Chandra vanished, Condit is on Capitol Hill.

00:30:35.420 Around midday, close to the hour she logs off her computer for the very last time, Condit is in a

00:30:41.000 meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney about California's energy crisis. Cheney's office

00:30:46.240 would later confirm the meeting took place. That afternoon, Condit casts two votes on the House

00:30:51.480 floor. Those events place Condit on Capitol Hill for portions of the day, though they do not account

00:30:57.560 for every hour. That evening, he says he is home at his D.C. condo with his wife Carolyn, who's in

00:31:04.120 town. The detectives are not the only ones pressing on Gary Condit. Chandra's mother,

00:31:10.600 Susan, comes to Washington and will not leave quietly. She goes on any program that will have

00:31:16.220 her and turns to cameras with a plea. Mr. Condit, would you please step forward and share whatever

00:31:22.980 you know? You may have been one of the last people to really have spent any time with Chandra.

00:31:29.320 With the police producing no timely answers, the Levy's hire a public relations team.

00:31:34.120 The strategy is deliberate.

00:31:36.280 Release what they know a piece at a time.

00:31:38.920 Keep reporters interested and make sure Chandra does not vanish from public view.

00:31:44.300 It works almost too well.

00:31:47.540 Chandra stays in the headlines, in the small print, below the actual headlines, which are

00:31:53.320 all about Gary Condit.

00:31:55.020 It soon becomes clear Condit has many secrets.

00:31:59.500 As reporters dig into his private life, other women begin to emerge.

00:32:04.120 The first is a former legislative aide named Jolene Argentini, who had her own long relationship with Condit years earlier, and who once gave him an expensive watch.

00:32:15.180 The second is a flight attendant with United named Anne-Marie Smith, who says she was involved with Condit right up until that spring of 2001.

00:32:24.960 She says that after Chandra vanished, Condit's staff asked her to sign an affidavit

00:32:29.980 swearing there had been no sexual relationship between her and the congressman.

00:32:35.560 She refused.

00:32:36.940 And she goes public, telling Fox News she was afraid.

00:32:41.400 I didn't stay in my own hotel rooms and my layovers.

00:32:44.680 I moved to a place where nobody knows my address, nobody knows my phone number.

00:32:48.920 I was very concerned for my own safety.

00:32:51.800 These women have nothing to do with Chandra's disappearance,

00:32:54.340 but each tells a version of the same story.

00:32:57.980 Secrecy, denial, and the strict Condit rulebook.

00:33:02.200 Together, they make Condit's insistence on privacy look less like respect for a grieving family

00:33:07.460 and more like a habit of protecting himself.

00:33:10.860 What none of it does is help anyone find Chandra.

00:33:14.840 For weeks, Condit's affairs have been front-page news,

00:33:18.320 but the relationship with Chandra remains just a rumor, much suspected, but technically

00:33:24.440 unconfirmed. That all changes on July 6th. Fed up with Condit's denials, Chandra's aunt,

00:33:32.260 Linda Zamsky, speaks to the Washington Post, putting her account on the record.

00:33:37.520 Chandra told Linda directly that Gary Condit was her lover. Chandra stayed with Condit in his

00:33:44.600 apartment. He had made her leave her ID behind. And Gary Condit, she says, is a liar. It's no

00:33:51.960 longer a rumor a family member has now told all. By the second week of July, the pressure on Gary

00:33:58.220 Condit is at a full boil. Satellite trucks are parked outside his apartment day and night.

00:34:03.600 Pedestrians can barely get past them. Reporters chase him through the halls of Congress. The

00:34:08.260 story goes global, carried by the Daily Mail in London to a state news agency in China.

00:34:14.600 On American Cable, it becomes a nightly soap opera, on Crossfire, on Hardball, on Hannity and Combs.

00:34:21.160 Tabloids offer cash for any scrap of new information.

00:34:25.260 And it is in the middle of all this that investigators ask Gary Condit for a sample of his DNA.

00:34:33.440 The request stems from evidence collected two months earlier.

00:34:37.360 When detectives searched in Chandra's apartment back in May,

00:34:40.220 inside that Williams-Sonoma bag of dirty laundry,

00:34:43.820 they had found a pair of her underwear stained with semen. Is it Condit's or was Chandra seeing

00:34:51.120 another man police know nothing about? It is this course of events that brings Gary Condit

00:34:56.880 at about 10 p.m. on the night of July 9th to a dimly lit parking lot behind a giant supermarket

00:35:03.080 near the National Cathedral. A sitting congressman gets out of a car to meet a detective named

00:35:08.380 Ralph Durant, who takes out a cotton swab, runs it along the inside of the

00:35:13.580 lawmaker's cheek, and walks away. No words are exchanged. The whole thing takes

00:35:19.760 less than a minute. No witnesses, no fanfare. The sample is then driven to the

00:35:25.280 FBI lab at Quantico. The next night, however, the search plays out in front of

00:35:30.720 the cameras. Just after 11 p.m., police and crime scene technicians pull up to

00:35:35.960 Condit's building in unmarked cars and go inside, searching his apartment for the very first time.

00:35:43.480 For three and a half hours, they pour over the fourth floor unit. They swab the bathroom floor,

00:35:49.240 the doorknob, the walls, the bathtub. They pull a hair from a shoe in his closet and lint from

00:35:55.140 the clothes dryer. From the street below, cameras catch the technicians moving through the darkened

00:36:00.320 rooms with ultraviolet light, searching for bodily fluids and other trace evidence, the whole

00:36:06.600 apartment glowing and eerie purple. They find nothing that ties Gary Condit to any crime.

00:36:14.400 After three and a half hours examining Condit's home, police are no closer to knowing what

00:36:19.720 happened to Chandra. The press coverage, Condit would say later, was something he never saw coming.

00:36:26.960 He'd been around politics a long, long time, but he had never imagined it could be as brutal or as incompetent as it is about to be.

00:36:36.580 And then there is the watch box.

00:36:39.740 As the police had been preparing to search Condit's apartment, Condit was on a mission of his own.

00:36:45.820 Around 8 p.m. that evening, an aide drives Condit in a black Jetta across the river to Alexandria, Virginia.

00:36:52.900 The car pulls up to a curb near a McDonald's, and a man named Daniel Olson just happens to be driving by.

00:37:01.620 Daniel recognizes Condit and pulls over to see what he's up to.

00:37:06.580 Daniel sees the congressman walk to a trash can, push something deep inside, get back into the Jetta, and pull away.

00:37:15.340 Daniel is curious. He walks over, reaches in, and finds the discarded item.

00:37:20.840 A small black box, about the size of a computer disk.

00:37:26.200 It is the empty case for a Tag Heuer watch, torn and flattened, a manual and a warranty still tucked inside, but no watch.

00:37:36.200 Daniel takes it home and shows his roommates.

00:37:38.820 The next day, Daniel throws it back in the trash, and a co-worker, a former Baltimore cop, tells him to call the cops.

00:37:46.520 Daniel calls the police and a detective drives out to Alexandria,

00:37:50.220 retrieves the box, and traces that watch to Jolene Argentini,

00:37:55.000 the former staffer and girlfriend who had given it to Condit years before.

00:38:00.360 Condit brushes it off as a nothing.

00:38:03.280 People were digging through his garbage, he says, and he only wanted to maintain his privacy.

00:38:07.980 In his words, quote,

00:38:08.940 They're saying a woman gave me a watch and I threw the watch box away.

00:38:12.940 Even if that's true.

00:38:14.040 So? What's that? It was nothing.

00:38:17.660 To this day, Condit insists the whole thing was overblown.

00:38:21.300 Well, they were trying to make something out of everything they could.

00:38:23.800 But at the time, to the detectives, it was far from nothing.

00:38:28.260 Why would a man keep a watch box for nearly seven years

00:38:31.240 and then drive across the river to dispose of it in a public trash can

00:38:35.960 three hours before police searched his home?

00:38:40.080 They came to believe that Gary Condit was, at the very least,

00:38:44.040 making it harder for detectives to clear him and follow other leads.

00:38:49.420 Then the result comes back from Quantico.

00:38:52.320 The DNA profile from the semen in Chandra's underwear matches Gary Condit.

00:38:58.100 That result will answer the question consuming Washington,

00:39:01.860 but it does not answer the question consuming Chandra's family.

00:39:06.080 Where is she?

00:39:08.280 To Jack Barrett, the D.C. chief of detectives, the DNA match changes nothing.

00:39:12.980 It only confirms what he had already deduced, that Condit and Chandra had been having a sexual affair

00:39:17.980 and that Condit had been lying about it to save his marriage and career.

00:39:22.260 But to the prosecutors, Barbara Cattay and Heidi Passachow, it is a turning point.

00:39:28.960 Detective Barrett later described the women's reaction in two words,

00:39:32.920 aha moment.

00:39:34.440 As he would later put it, they think this is more proof that Condit did it.

00:39:39.340 And that, Barrett believes, is the problem.

00:39:42.440 The prosecutors become so fixated on the congressman and his affairs that they bury his detectives in demands, chase every lead about Condit and his aides to the ground while other paths go cold.

00:39:56.520 The prosecutors see it differently. Condit has spent more time with Chandra in the past nine months than almost anyone alive. To ignore him would be malpractice.

00:40:06.320 As Kate put it, we spent the most amount of time on the person that spent the most amount of time with Chandra.

00:40:12.440 and both of them, in a way, are right, which is how a case goes south. The affair is real,

00:40:20.240 the lies are real, the watchbox, the evasions, all of it's real, and every hour spent proving

00:40:26.380 that Gary Condit is a liar was an hour that no one spent looking for the young woman about whom

00:40:32.900 he had lied. Behind the scenes, the leaks are constant. Kate calls it an impossible situation

00:40:40.280 to manage. Everyone, she says, wants to be a hero. Everyone wants to solve it. She would eventually

00:40:46.420 ask to be taken off the case. Barrett would ask for new prosecutors altogether. And Gary Condit

00:40:53.100 sits at the center of it all, impossible to charge or to clear. Years later, Detective Barrett

00:41:01.500 sums up the ordeal with Gary Condit in a single sentence. He goes and gets real goofy on us. He

00:41:08.320 said, we could not eliminate him. Under mounting pressure, Condit agrees to answer questions

00:41:15.520 on national television. It is a desperate move to improve his public standing.

00:41:21.880 On August 23, 2001, Condit sits down with ABC's Connie Chung in primetime. About 24 million people

00:41:30.000 tune in for one of the most closely watched interviews of the year. Chung does not open

00:41:35.840 with the affair she opens with the questions that actually matter one after another congressman

00:41:43.200 condit do you know what happened to chandra levy no i did not did you have anything to do with her

00:41:49.760 disappearance no i didn't did you say anything or do anything that could have caused her to drop out

00:41:55.760 of sight you know chandra and i never had a crossword do you have any idea if there was anyone

00:42:02.560 who wanted to harm her no did you cause anyone to harm her no did you kill chandra levy i did not

00:42:11.920 on the gravest question whether condit had killed chandra condit is clear but when chung turns to

00:42:19.560 the one thing everyone already knows whether the relationship had been sexual he refuses to say it

00:42:25.880 may i ask you was it a sexual relationship well connie i've been married for 34 years and

00:42:31.740 And I've not been a perfect man, and I've made my share of mistakes.

00:42:36.420 But out of respect for my family, and out of a specific request from the Levy family,

00:42:42.980 I think it's best that I not get into those details about Chandra Levy.

00:42:48.780 Can you tell us, did you have a romantic relationship with Chandra Levy?

00:42:52.540 Well, once again, I've been married 34 years.

00:42:56.040 I have not been a perfect man.

00:42:58.180 I have made mistakes in my life, but out of respect for my family, out of a specific request

00:43:03.880 by the Levy family, it's best that I not get into the details of the relationship.

00:43:09.220 He gives that answer in one form or another for half an hour.

00:43:14.140 There's also no evidence the Levy family has asked any such thing.

00:43:18.620 Chandra's mother has spent the summer pleading with Condit to come forward and say what he

00:43:23.140 knows can you tell me this was chandra levy in love with you were you in love with her well i

00:43:30.440 don't know that she was in love with me she never said so and i was not in love with her

00:43:34.220 did she want to marry you and have your child i only knew chandra levy for five months and in

00:43:40.180 that five months period we never had a discussion about a future about children about marriage

00:43:44.760 any of those items never came up in that five month period did you ever make promises to her

00:43:50.120 Never.

00:43:51.660 Did she want you to leave your wife?

00:43:53.780 No. I mean, I've been married for 34 years,

00:43:56.700 and I intend to stay married to that woman as long as she'll have me.

00:44:00.080 Jack Barrett, who oversees the D.C. detectives,

00:44:03.020 could not understand why Condit had agreed to the interview at all.

00:44:07.720 It was preposterous. You just have to shake your head and say,

00:44:09.940 why would he even agree to do the interview if he's not going to be forthcoming?

00:44:13.420 And in Modesto, Susan Levy watches the man who represents her town

00:44:18.520 deny any part in her daughter's disappearance and then refuse to speak plainly about the nature of

00:44:24.900 his relationship with her daughter. She's not persuaded. I laughed about it because I thought

00:44:31.680 it was so false, phony. Condit's infidelities not only hurt the progress of the Levy investigation,

00:44:38.900 they also throw his family into the spotlight. When folks start calling my dad a murderer,

00:44:44.920 it's wrong. His son Chad defended his father Gary to ABC. I knew he had done nothing wrong,

00:44:51.960 illegally wrong. By the end of August, millions of Americans have formed an opinion about Gary

00:44:58.240 Condit, whether he lied, whether he cheated, whether he had done something far worse.

00:45:04.060 The ABC interview settled none of it, and it had not brought Chandra Levy one step closer to home.

00:45:11.240 By the end of August, Chandra has been missing for four months.

00:45:15.020 America knows almost everything about Gary Condit's private life

00:45:18.260 and still has no idea where Chandra is.

00:45:22.240 But Chandra will be found, and soon, in Rock Creek Park.

00:45:27.600 And that will send this case down a dark and twisted road.

00:45:32.060 That's next time on MK Confidential.

00:45:40.500 It's July 25th, 2001, 8.58 a.m.

00:45:45.360 28 police recruits stand alongside Glover Road,

00:45:48.920 one of the streets that cuts through Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.

00:45:53.060 Huge park, twice as big as Central Park in New York City.

00:45:56.800 Three sergeants line up the recruits shoulder-to-shoulder

00:45:59.460 near a picnic area called Grove 17.

00:46:02.600 It is already more than 80 degrees,

00:46:04.820 the start of another humid summer day in Washington.

00:46:07.860 The team is out looking for Chandra Levy.

00:46:10.500 Rock Creek Park is not your typical urban park. It's got a huge creek running through it. It's got rocky areas and areas that are just pure wilderness. It is extremely difficult to do a complete search of every single inch of it.

00:46:26.880 The command from police headquarters was to search 100 yards from roads and trails. But many of the search team that day heard it as 100 yards from the roads only, a key distinction.

00:46:40.500 So that is where the recruits and the sergeants walk, the open ground near the pavement, beating the brush along the edges of the road, calling Chandra's name.

00:46:50.280 It is a far cry from the trails, which run much deeper into the park along the ridgelines and down toward the creek, where the land drops away into ravines thick with vines and fallen trees.

00:47:02.540 No one covers that ground.

00:47:04.580 By one o'clock, it's 91 degrees and feeling hotter.

00:47:08.500 The search team is dripping with sweat.

00:47:11.320 The sergeants call off the search along Glover Road.

00:47:14.860 The recruits climb onto a bus and ride to another part of the park.

00:47:19.520 Ten months from now, Chandra Levy will be found on this very hillside.

00:47:24.440 On ground, this search never reached.

00:47:26.680 The area the sergeants and recruits are leaving,

00:47:30.480 just 79 yards below the Western Ridge Trail near Glover Road.

00:47:35.900 The difference will come down to a lapse in communication.

00:47:39.500 Search the roads and trails versus just the roads.

00:47:43.740 This is the summer the search for Chandra Levy misses almost everything that matters.

00:47:49.780 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:47:55.240 While the country watches Congressman Gary Condit,

00:47:57.920 the investigation behind the cameras is quickly coming apart.

00:48:02.340 Across the country, in Modesto, California, Chandra's parents wait.

00:48:06.240 Bob and Susan Levy do what their advisors tell them.

00:48:09.340 Speak to the press when publicity might turn up a lead,

00:48:12.500 step back when it might bury one,

00:48:14.740 and keep their daughter's name in front of the public however they can.

00:48:19.460 But Susan cannot simply wait in California.

00:48:22.340 She flies to Washington to meet with investigators,

00:48:25.000 press police for answers,

00:48:26.580 and make a public appeal for Chandra's return.

00:48:29.140 I want my daughter home, and I want her alive, and I want the truth to come out.

00:48:34.460 You're a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person, and we just miss her.

00:48:37.820 Once we do.

00:48:38.520 You want her back.

00:48:40.540 I want to have faith that she will come back.

00:48:45.560 At the airport, television cameras film her holding one of Chandra's stuffed animals, a small yellow chick.

00:48:52.960 Back in Modesto, Susan starts a support group for the families of missing loved ones.

00:48:58.200 At first, it helps.

00:49:00.000 But as her daughter's case grows and gets so much news coverage,

00:49:04.040 it crowds out missing loved ones of the others.

00:49:07.100 At least, that's how some members of the group feel.

00:49:10.200 The other families whose own missing children draw almost no attention at all

00:49:15.420 begin to pull away, and the meetings stop.

00:49:18.960 I couldn't just trust that the police could do all the work.

00:49:21.980 It was a lot of work.

00:49:23.380 We needed to find as much as we can.

00:49:26.200 We needed someone out there that could do more investigation.

00:49:31.280 Frustrated by the pace of the official investigation and determined to have someone in Washington working solely for them,

00:49:38.600 the Levy's hire Billy Martin, a former federal prosecutor.

00:49:42.660 Martin brings in two private investigators, both retired D.C. homicide detectives, Joe McCann and Dwayne Stanton.

00:49:50.940 They interview Chandra's friends and co-workers.

00:49:53.460 They retrace her movements, set up their own tip line, and post a reward.

00:49:58.760 More than 100 calls a day come in, and the two of them have to sort the real from the worthless.

00:50:04.480 The mistaken sightings, the dead ends, the psychics who say they can see where Chandra is.

00:50:10.340 Leads are coming in all the time and took us down many, many different paths.

00:50:15.740 This one particular night, it was just me and my partner.

00:50:19.900 The 800 number rings.

00:50:22.260 We answer the phone.

00:50:23.700 There's a gentleman on the other end of the phone who doesn't want to give us his name.

00:50:28.220 But he's got this story to tell about Chandra being in California.

00:50:33.460 And as we listened to it, it did sound credible.

00:50:36.740 He was just looking for 15 minutes of fame.

00:50:39.300 It cost just a lot of effort.

00:50:41.760 And so I was pretty annoyed, pissed off at him.

00:50:44.480 There was just nothing. There was really nothing about Chandra.

00:50:48.360 The PIs are working around the city's own detectives, not with them.

00:50:52.920 Officers who quietly keep McCann and Stanton in the loop are reprimanded for it.

00:50:57.040 A lot of people who followed it remember how crazy it was.

00:51:02.060 You couldn't pick up a newspaper, a magazine, listen to a TV show.

00:51:06.080 The media was talking about it. It was every day. It was every night. It was nonstop.

00:51:11.180 To understand how a case this big goes cold, you have to understand the department working it.

00:51:18.420 In 2001, Washington, D.C. police are climbing out of a brutal decade.

00:51:23.600 The nation's capital has had one of the highest homicide rates of any major American city for years.

00:51:30.060 1,500 killings from the 1990s remain unsolved.

00:51:34.420 In 2001, police clear fewer than half of the city's homicides, just 48.5%.

00:51:41.300 The D.C. medical examiner's office is overwhelmed.

00:51:44.900 The city morgue is full, police case files are a mess, and trust between the public and

00:51:50.660 the department is thin at best.

00:51:53.460 The D.C. police chief, Charles Ramsey, had been brought in from Chicago three years earlier

00:51:58.540 to reform a department battered by scandal, low morale, and the decade of unsolved murders.

00:52:05.480 But the Levy case does not land with a seasoned murder squad. It lands in the 2nd District,

00:52:12.400 one of the quieter, wealthier parts of town, with a detective named Ralph Durant,

00:52:17.340 who has spent decades on the force but little of that time working homicides.

00:52:22.420 It is, in almost every respect, a department unready for the story about to break over its head.

00:52:28.540 start with the surveillance tapes.

00:52:32.200 Chandra's building, the Newport,

00:52:34.600 is secure with a guard on duty around the clock

00:52:37.040 and 13 cameras recording every face that comes and goes.

00:52:40.880 But the system records over itself every seven days.

00:52:45.820 Police officers come to the building on May 6th,

00:52:48.480 on May 7th, on May 8th.

00:52:51.220 And each time they leave

00:52:52.540 without asking anyone to save the recording.

00:52:56.280 By the time someone thinks to ask, the video from May 1st, the day Chandra vanished, has already been taped over.

00:53:05.840 Gone with that recording, what time she left, what she was wearing, whether she was alone.

00:53:11.980 Any one of those 13 cameras might have answered the first question every investigator asks.

00:53:18.140 Instead, there is nothing.

00:53:20.560 Former FBI agent Brad Garrett called out this loss to ABC News in 2017.

00:53:26.280 Things like surveillance cameras, unless you go and initially grab them or tell the management to hold them, they erase or disappear.

00:53:34.240 And unfortunately, that's what happened in this case.

00:53:37.100 Then there's the laptop.

00:53:38.980 Chandra left her computer open on a makeshift desk in the hall of her apartment.

00:53:43.740 And on that computer are her last Internet searches.

00:53:47.500 A police sergeant named Ronald Wyatt, who is not a trained technician,

00:53:52.680 turns her laptop on in an effort to retrace her steps, and the hard drive corrupts.

00:53:59.040 Simply turning a computer on should not do that,

00:54:01.720 and years later, at trial, a computer expert still cannot fully explain what went wrong.

00:54:08.780 What he can explain is the cost.

00:54:11.360 It takes federal forensic examiners nearly two months to recover Chandra's browsing history

00:54:16.160 from the damaged drive.

00:54:18.460 When they do, they can finally see

00:54:20.560 where her last hour online was spent,

00:54:22.980 from train schedules and airfares to California,

00:54:26.340 to a Washington Post guide to Rock Creek Park,

00:54:29.640 and then to a map of the park's trails.

00:54:32.580 Investigators initially focus on a web address

00:54:35.120 for the park's headquarters at Klingle Mansion.

00:54:39.040 In July, they comb the grounds around the mansion,

00:54:41.780 but find no evidence Chandra had been there.

00:54:45.120 What receives less attention is the page Chandra opens minutes later,

00:54:49.560 the broader map of Rock Creek Park.

00:54:52.440 It is that map, once the FBI has pulled it off the damaged drive,

00:54:56.760 that finally sends the investigators into the park.

00:55:00.260 It is what puts that search party of 28 recruits and three sergeants

00:55:05.100 along Glover Road on July 25th,

00:55:08.320 the team that worked the roads, but not the trails.

00:55:11.620 Because the search was only limited to that area off the roads,

00:55:16.920 the area where her body was ultimately found was not searched.

00:55:21.280 The search that was supposed to be the big break.

00:55:23.980 Instead, it became one more thing the investigation got wrong.

00:55:27.980 Former D.C. Chief of Detectives Jack Barrett remembers it this way.

00:55:32.120 This is something that we all have to live with.

00:55:34.700 There may have been DNA evidence that all that was lost

00:55:38.380 because of the fact that we were unable to locate her remains

00:55:43.100 during the time that we were searching the park.

00:55:45.080 While the police are losing the trail of Chandra Levy,

00:55:48.000 a few miles away, another story is unfolding,

00:55:51.360 one no one thinks to connect with Chandra's.

00:55:55.060 Two weeks after Chandra vanishes,

00:55:57.240 on the evening of May 14th,

00:55:59.220 a tall woman named Hallie Schilling

00:56:02.040 is attacked on a trail near the old Pierce Mill in Rock Creek Park.

00:56:07.160 She's a jogger, 30 years old, and a journalist.

00:56:11.300 A man follows her into the woods and tackles her.

00:56:14.960 She fights him off, and she runs straight to park police and reports it.

00:56:19.540 No one thinks to connect it to Chandra.

00:56:22.440 Seven weeks later, it happens again.

00:56:26.060 On the evening of July 1st, a young woman named Christy Weigand is running in Rock Creek Park.

00:56:33.600 She's not running alone.

00:56:35.480 Her fiancé pulls ahead of Christy on the path, as he usually does.

00:56:39.420 Before long, he is out of sight, and Christy is alone on the trail.

00:56:44.400 Weigand is 25, a lawyer, and seven weeks from her wedding.

00:56:48.820 It's raining.

00:56:50.300 The road, through that stretch of the park, is closed to cars, and the trail is nearly empty.

00:56:56.360 Christy turns her head and notices a man behind her, gaining.

00:57:00.320 Then he has her, an arm locked around her from behind, hauling her off the path and down into a ravine.

00:57:08.000 There is a knife. He puts a hand over her mouth so she cannot scream.

00:57:12.980 Christy is certain in that moment that she will die on this hillside.

00:57:17.660 But Christy Weigand is a former college rower, and she is bigger than the man holding her.

00:57:23.760 She fights.

00:57:25.280 She twists and kicks and makes enough noise that the man gives up and runs off into the

00:57:31.320 forest.

00:57:31.960 She is a difficult victim.

00:57:34.440 She claws her way back up the slope and flags down the first person she sees.

00:57:40.060 He never reached for her engagement ring.

00:57:42.440 He never touched the radio clipped at her waist.

00:57:45.380 Whatever he wanted from Christy in that ravine, it wasn't money.

00:57:50.060 This time, the man does not get away.

00:57:53.460 Weigand's description goes out over the police radio.

00:57:57.100 The park police spin up a helicopter and flood the trails,

00:58:00.260 and within about 45 minutes, two officers find the man not far from where Christy was attacked.

00:58:06.660 He is wet, streaked with dirt and leaves, and exactly matches the description she gave,

00:58:12.560 a Hispanic man wearing a white t-shirt, baggy shorts, and sneakers.

00:58:17.580 Police take him to the small stone station house inside the park and run him through the system.

00:58:23.860 Go back now to fall of 2000.

00:58:27.460 A few miles from Chandra's apartment near Rock Creek Park,

00:58:31.060 a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador is trying to establish a life in D.C.

00:58:37.600 He's been in the country illegally for a little more than a year,

00:58:41.540 taking whatever work he can find without legal status,

00:58:44.740 hard, low-paid jobs, earning $7.50 an hour.

00:58:49.460 In his free time, he often goes to the park with his girlfriend.

00:58:53.100 By the spring of 2001, their relationship becomes violent. He beats her. He drinks heavily,

00:59:01.060 using whatever drugs he can get and scaring the people around him. His girlfriend's family begins

00:59:06.520 to fear him. He kicks in doors. He keeps hitting his girlfriend. He bites her hard enough to leave

00:59:13.440 marks. The man from El Salvador starts telling her that if he cannot have her, no one will.

00:59:20.420 He takes to carrying a six-inch knife wrapped in a red cloth.

00:59:25.480 That spring, he breaks into an apartment on his own block, steals a gold wedding ring, and is arrested.

00:59:32.340 He promises to appear in court and never shows.

00:59:37.320 The man from the ravine is identified as Ingmar Adalid Guandique, a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador.

00:59:45.940 He lives in a northwest Washington neighborhood near the park.

00:59:51.000 The night of Christy Weigand's attack, shortly after one in the morning, a veteran detective

00:59:56.220 named Joe Green sits down across from Guandique in his cell with a second officer and a Spanish

01:00:03.760 interpreter. Guandique agrees to talk without a lawyer. Leading the questioning is Joe Green,

01:00:10.080 a big, balding detective who has 30 years on the job. He starts with the assaults.

01:00:16.860 Green does not accuse. He offers the man an easier story, one where the whole thing was just

01:00:23.720 a misunderstanding, and the prisoner takes it. D.C. Metro detective Jim Tranum described the

01:00:31.180 dynamic this way to Investigation Discovery in 2017. When they ask him about the attack,

01:00:38.040 He denied it.

01:00:40.260 But they used a different tack and asked him if maybe he just accidentally brushed up against somebody in the woods.

01:00:48.920 He gave them this story about, oh, yeah, he was running or jogging in the woods and collided with a woman by accident.

01:00:56.620 And so they knew that at that point that they had the right guy.

01:01:00.940 Guandique describes bumping into Christy Weigand on the trail,

01:01:04.940 trying to help her up, and her screaming instead.

01:01:09.120 Then he gives Green the same kind of account of a second woman weeks earlier,

01:01:14.000 a tall jogger.

01:01:15.880 Two attacks he admits to dressed up as accidents.

01:01:20.040 Then Green tries one more thing.

01:01:22.800 Chandra Levy's face is on flyers all over Washington that summer.

01:01:27.800 Green slides one of the flyers across the table,

01:01:30.780 her photograph on it, and asks a simple question.

01:01:34.560 Has he ever seen this woman in the park?

01:01:37.760 Yes, Guandique admits.

01:01:40.480 He has seen her once near the parking lot

01:01:43.420 by the old Pierce Mill.

01:01:45.480 He thought she was pretty.

01:01:47.320 He never saw her again.

01:01:49.660 Green writes up the two assaults.

01:01:51.220 He does not write down what Guandique said

01:01:53.960 about Chandra Levy.

01:01:55.880 Green is park police.

01:01:57.920 The detectives chasing Chandra are D.C. police, separate forces, working the rest of the city.

01:02:04.720 And at that moment, the D.C. police are chasing a congressman.

01:02:08.520 The answer to a question no one else had thought to ask goes into a drawer and stays there.

01:02:15.940 A man who hunts women on these trails sitting in a locked room in July of 2001 telling a detective

01:02:24.480 he had seen Chandra Levy in the park and found her pretty. It will be years before anyone working

01:02:31.880 the Levy case hears a word of it. The Chandra Levy story is still the biggest in the country

01:02:38.440 through the morning of September 11th, 2001.

01:02:42.140 By that afternoon, it's gone.

01:02:45.200 For our family, we were shocked.

01:02:48.180 But we were not emotional like most people

01:02:51.560 because we've already felt 9-11 happen to us.

01:02:55.820 The attacks in New York and at the Pentagon

01:02:58.000 change every priority in Washington.

01:03:00.700 The cameras leave Gary Condit's door.

01:03:03.700 The federal agents who had been working the Levy case

01:03:05.800 are pulled into terrorism task forces.

01:03:08.440 the tip line goes quiet.

01:03:10.920 For the private investigators hired by the Levees,

01:03:13.720 the effect is immediate.

01:03:15.680 We didn't get the media attention anymore,

01:03:17.740 and there go a lot of the Leaves.

01:03:19.780 So things start to dry up.

01:03:21.640 Even after the initial shock,

01:03:23.380 the 9-11 attacks cast Paul over the case,

01:03:27.560 in March of 2002,

01:03:29.880 Gary Condit loses his primary,

01:03:32.880 beaten by a one-time ally,

01:03:34.980 the state legislator, Dennis Cardoza.

01:03:38.180 Washington's most watched man the previous summer is now finished in politics,

01:03:43.740 of zero interest to the public, and leaves D.C. with Chandra Levy still missing.

01:03:49.680 On May 22, 2002, more than a year after Chandra Levy disappeared,

01:03:56.120 a man named Philip Palmer walks his dog in Rock Creek Park.

01:04:01.540 Palmer is a furniture maker who has collected antlers and animal bones since he was a boy.

01:04:06.660 so he thinks nothing of leaving the trail

01:04:09.220 and working his way down a slope.

01:04:11.640 That morning, he sees a scrap of red fabric

01:04:14.980 then something pale and rounded in the leaves

01:04:17.980 about the size of a silver dollar.

01:04:20.820 He brushes the leaves away.

01:04:23.160 What he finds is a human skull.

01:04:26.480 He ties his dog's blue leash to a branch to mark the spot,

01:04:30.360 climbs back to a nearby road,

01:04:32.580 borrows a phone from a construction worker

01:04:34.460 and calls 911.

01:04:37.320 Here's a bit of that phone call.

01:04:39.680 I was walking my dog in wood this morning, and I came across him in skull.

01:04:45.080 At the Washington Post, a reporter named Sari Horwitz is at breakfast with a police source at the exact moment the call comes in.

01:04:53.820 I arranged a breakfast with a police official, and during the breakfast, his pager just started going off.

01:05:01.140 And when he came back, he had this stunned look on his face.

01:05:04.220 and he said, you're not going to believe this, but I just got a call and they think they found

01:05:10.960 Chandra Levy's remains in Rock Creek Park. The remains are 79 yards below the Western Ridge

01:05:18.240 Trail, down a wooded slope so steep that in some places it falls away at 45 degrees.

01:05:24.680 It is the ground the recruits had walked right past, but not through, the summer before.

01:05:32.040 What remains of Chandra is surrounded by items a year of weather and animals have left.

01:05:39.340 Her sunglasses, a running shoe, a gray Property of USC Athletics t-shirt, a small radio, and something odd.

01:05:49.140 A pair of black stretch pants turned inside out with each pant leg tied in a knot at the ankle.

01:05:56.000 When they found her leggings, they were like docks and loops in the legs.

01:06:01.300 If she fell down at that ravine and knocked their head and died by accident,

01:06:04.960 there's no reason to remove their pants.

01:06:07.320 The first officer down the slope recognizes it at once,

01:06:10.740 the isolated ravine, the radio, the knotted clothing,

01:06:14.120 because he had stood at a similar scene the previous summer

01:06:17.200 at one of two jogger attacks.

01:06:20.080 Here's former detective Trainham again.

01:06:22.240 When you're looking at the scene, bones are scattered everywhere.

01:06:26.620 And that's normal for this sort of scene.

01:06:28.480 And if there's a body that's out in the elements, it begins to decompose.

01:06:33.820 And then animals and other scavengers attack the body.

01:06:37.900 They actually take the skull to the medical examiner's office with red lights and siren.

01:06:43.900 They were in such a hurry.

01:06:46.720 The medical examiner had already obtained Chandra's dental records.

01:06:51.540 So he was able to match up the various fillings.

01:06:55.400 The examiner, Jonathan Arden, holds the x-rays up against the records,

01:07:00.340 steps back and forth between them, and says two words.

01:07:04.620 It's her.

01:07:06.080 Well, after they identified her, they called us up and told us that it was just really bad.

01:07:10.980 I mean, it's just as bad as anything could be.

01:07:14.020 Six days later, on May 28th, Arden rules Chandra Levy's death a homicide.

01:07:19.920 But the body has been left abandoned out in the open for more than a year.

01:07:24.900 and the bones cannot tell him how she died. No bullet holes, no stab marks, nothing left of her

01:07:31.100 throat to say whether she was strangled. It is possible, he tells reporters, that no one will

01:07:36.560 ever know the specific injury that killed her. When a reporter asks the D.C. police chief,

01:07:42.420 Charles Ramsey, how a search the summer before could have walked past her, Ramsey does not flinch.

01:07:49.240 It's possible, he says, to search and not find.

01:07:53.600 Word of her discovery travels fast to Modesto.

01:07:57.180 That same day, a thousand people gather for a memorial in Chandra's hometown.

01:08:02.080 At the doors, someone has set out silver bowls of Reese's peanut butter cups, Chandra's

01:08:07.220 lifelong favorite.

01:08:09.060 Now they know for sure how short her life really was.

01:08:12.780 Then comes the detail that says the most about the search.

01:08:17.120 Two weeks after Chandra's remains are recovered,

01:08:20.060 the family's own investigators, Joe McCann and Dwayne Stanton,

01:08:24.360 go back over the released crime scene themselves,

01:08:27.100 on their hands and knees with garden rakes,

01:08:29.640 because they do not trust that the police have done it properly.

01:08:32.860 An hour and a half in, McCann's rake catches on a bone

01:08:37.520 the search teams had left in the dirt.

01:08:40.540 About a foot long, it is Chandra's left tibia.

01:08:44.900 The department's first response is to suggest that animals must have carried the bone back in after the search was done.

01:08:53.120 A Washington Post columnist named Mark Fisher mocks them in print and suggests the chief invest in a good, heavy-duty garden rake.

01:09:01.980 When detectives call McCann in, they ask him to take a polygraph examination.

01:09:07.020 He refuses.

01:09:08.600 Ramsey, furious that his technicians missed a foot-long bone, sends the teams back into the woods.

01:09:15.620 Over the next 19 days, they found more of Chandra's remains. Bones from her hands and her feet,

01:09:22.760 her back, her femur, the largest bone in the body. One of them 170 feet from where her skull was

01:09:29.760 found. Two retired detectives with garden rakes had found what scores of officers had missed.

01:09:37.600 For the Levy's, the call they had been dreading

01:09:40.200 was an excruciating end to the saga of their missing daughter.

01:09:44.760 They cried.

01:09:45.540 Yeah, I cried a lot.

01:09:46.300 They screamed and cried.

01:09:47.120 Yeah.

01:09:48.160 You can't imagine to have your child laying out there.

01:09:52.780 It seems so unfair.

01:09:54.300 For 13 months, the biggest missing persons case in America

01:09:57.520 had been all about a congressman.

01:09:59.900 Now it is about a body on a wooded slope

01:10:02.720 in the park Chandra Levy had looked up on her computer

01:10:05.800 the morning she vanished.

01:10:07.600 On the ground, a class of police recruits never touched.

01:10:12.360 The question is no longer, where is Chandra Levy?

01:10:15.620 From here on, it is, who killed her?

01:10:18.560 When investigators finally go looking for an answer,

01:10:21.380 they will turn to a man they already have in hand.

01:10:25.540 Next time on MK Confidential,

01:10:27.880 the woman who fought off a killer on those trails and lived

01:10:31.880 and waited seven years for a call that never came

01:10:35.660 and a prisoner with a story to tell.

01:10:44.120 On the evening of May 14th, 2001,

01:10:47.480 Hallie Schilling ties back her blonde hair,

01:10:50.160 grabs her yellow Walkman,

01:10:51.880 and drives down to Rock Creek Park for a run.

01:10:54.960 She is 30, a journalist, athletic, 5'10",

01:10:59.020 and she has been running for nearly 20 years.

01:11:02.360 She is not a woman who rattles easily.

01:11:05.660 In the parking lot near the old Pierce Mill, she notices a young Hispanic man sitting on a curb

01:11:11.340 watching her. He makes her uncomfortable, but men stare at Hallie, she thinks, and she starts

01:11:19.000 on her jog anyway. She heads up an empty trail that vanishes into the trees. Near the rise above

01:11:25.680 the creek, the sun disappears behind the clouds. It feels ominous, enough so that she picks up a

01:11:32.240 stick off the ground for protection, but it's rotten and she tosses it back. Then she realizes

01:11:38.720 the Hispanic man is jogging behind her, closing fast. She keeps looking back over her shoulder

01:11:45.160 and he is always there. She speeds up, he speeds up. She slows down, he's still there. Then he

01:11:52.960 sprints and closes the distance, grabbing her and throws her off the path and down into the trees.

01:11:58.380 he has a knife. His arms lock around her neck, and something in Hallie flips like a switch.

01:12:06.960 Two things hit her mind at once. The first is that the traffic on Beach Drive across the creek

01:12:12.320 is loud enough to bury any sound she makes. No one will hear her scream. The second is a decision.

01:12:20.760 There is no way she's going to let this man have her without a fight. A huge fight. She goes

01:12:27.480 berserk. She screams, she twists, and she sees the flash of the knife. He tries to shush her,

01:12:34.660 and that more than the knife blade is what enrages her. Years before, Hallie Schilling took a self

01:12:40.980 defense class. The thing she has never forgotten is the instructor's helper, a man in a padded

01:12:47.280 rubber suit who stood there in body armor at the end of each session and let the students hit him

01:12:53.580 so they would know what it feels like to strike another human being.

01:12:57.680 On the ground in Rock Creek Park, that feeling comes back to Hallie.

01:13:02.760 She goes for his eyes, misses, then works a hand into his mouth

01:13:06.840 and digs her fingernails into the soft flesh under his tongue.

01:13:10.360 He bites down on her fingers hard, but she is already tearing loose

01:13:14.560 when to her own shock he turns and runs off the way he came.

01:13:20.840 Hallie is up, and she is running up the slope.

01:13:24.640 She makes her way to the park police station with help from two other runners she meets minutes after she breaks loose.

01:13:31.160 She walks into the station house wild-haired, and the officers move at once.

01:13:36.920 A wall of police rushes out onto the trail after the man with the knife.

01:13:41.200 It is fast and professional.

01:13:43.760 The one thing that needles her, Hallie will write later,

01:13:47.080 is that the officer taking her statement keeps calling her over the radio, the victim.

01:13:53.060 She fought, she thinks, and she is alive.

01:13:56.980 Two weeks earlier, in this same park, Chandra Levy disappeared.

01:14:02.960 She would be found on a wooded slope about half a mile from the trail

01:14:07.000 where Hallie Schilling just saved her own life.

01:14:10.880 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

01:14:14.660 The first female jogger, the one who was attacked about 700 yards from where Levy's body was found,

01:14:21.760 said she saw Gwandeke in the Pierce Mill parking lodge.

01:14:25.940 And if you look at where Chandra Levy lived,

01:14:28.020 the logical route would have taken her right through the Pierce Mill parking lot.

01:14:31.640 For a year, the search for Chandra Levy points at a congressman.

01:14:36.660 But while the whole country watches Gary Condit,

01:14:38.820 something else is happening on the trails of Rock Creek Park. That spring, in a sudden burst,

01:14:44.840 a man is attacking women in the park, one after another. Yet somehow, no one connects any of it

01:14:51.480 to Chandra. One of the women he grabs will tell her story in public. Hallie Schilling,

01:14:58.160 the runner at the start of the episode, is a journalist. And in the spring of 2002,

01:15:03.220 she publishes a first-person account of her attack in the Washington Post, describing how

01:15:09.680 that self-defense class saved her life on a Rock Creek Park trail. Hallie does not name the man

01:15:16.840 who came at her with a knife because at the time, no one has connected him to anything larger.

01:15:23.220 What she writes is that these days, she sticks to a gym treadmill instead of the park trails,

01:15:28.260 but takes comfort in one thing. The man who attacked her is off the streets. He was caught

01:15:35.240 weeks later after he went after another woman, Christy Weigand, near the same stretch of trail

01:15:41.140 and the park police tied the two attacks together. On May 22, 2002, five weeks after Hallie's essay

01:15:50.580 runs in the post, a man walking his dog finds a human skull in Rock Creek Park, half a mile from

01:15:57.560 where Hallie was attacked. The connection is not lost on her. She reads the coverage and understands

01:16:04.120 that could have been me. It is not lost on reporters either. Guandique's name has surfaced

01:16:10.840 in Roll Call, the newspaper that covers Capitol Hill. Reporters pull the court file, find the

01:16:17.100 names of the women he attacked, and dig through databases until they turn up Hallie's article.

01:16:23.020 They are on her doorstep within days.

01:16:26.260 The detectives working Chandra Levy's murder are not.

01:16:30.240 For the seven years after reporting her attack from 2001 to 2008,

01:16:35.760 Hallie Schilling waits for a call from the D.C. police, a call that does not come,

01:16:41.940 and cannot understand why the detectives on the most notorious murder in the city

01:16:46.180 seem so uninterested in a woman who survived an attack in the same park two weeks after Chandra

01:16:53.060 vanished. It is not until December 2008, after the Washington Post's 13-part series, Who Killed

01:17:01.580 Chandra Levy, forces the case back open, that the Levy detectives come to Hallie Schilling.

01:17:08.240 They bring her into Rock Creek Park and walk with her up the trail to the spot where the man

01:17:12.920 attacked her, and she takes them through it. Her father stands a few feet away, silent. As he

01:17:19.420 watches, he finds himself shaking with anger, understanding for the first time how close he

01:17:25.020 came to losing his daughter. The next day, investigators call Hallie before a grand jury,

01:17:31.860 weighing whether to charge Guandique with Chandra Levy's murder. Hallie's own attack had been

01:17:37.340 prosecuted years earlier. Now prosecutors want the jury to hear what Guandique did to another woman

01:17:43.260 on those same trails. More than seven years after Hallie escaped him, D.C. detectives and the

01:17:50.680 prosecutor apologize for never interviewing her as part of the Levy investigation. One investigator

01:17:57.680 shakes his head and says he cannot believe Gary Condit was ever a suspect. That summer of 2002,

01:18:05.060 After Chandra's remains are found, an FBI agent named Brad Garrett and a D.C. detective named Jim Trainham bring a geographic profiler into the case.

01:18:15.760 A man named Kim Rosmo, whose studies where violent crimes happen and what the pattern of their locations can tell you about the perpetrator.

01:18:24.500 Kim's really good at looking at a crime scene and helping you understand what is it about the scene that kind of contributed to the crime occurring at that location.

01:18:35.060 Rossmo lays out a map of Rock Creek Park and marks the attacks on lone women from the spring of 2001.

01:18:42.600 For me, one of the most important early questions was, how common are these attacks in Rock Creek Park?

01:18:48.780 We took a look at the data from the park's police about their crimes in an 18-month period living up to there,

01:18:55.700 and it was very clear that crimes of this nature were just so rare.

01:19:01.100 One stretch of the park lights up, an isolated run of trail near the Pierce Mill.

01:19:07.140 The attacks cluster there over a matter of weeks.

01:19:11.180 Then they stop all at once.

01:19:14.100 They stop the week a single man is arrested on those trails and taken to jail.

01:19:20.160 That man is already in prison.

01:19:21.920 He has been since the summer of 2001,

01:19:25.180 serving 10 years for attacking Hallie Schilling and Christy Wigand in Rock Creek Park.

01:19:30.660 A man at whom no one working the Levy case has ever seriously looked.

01:19:36.280 His name is Ingmar Gwondike.

01:19:39.500 Rosmo says a violent offender is not random.

01:19:42.980 He tends to strike where he feels safe on ground he knows.

01:19:46.640 We break a crime down to its constituent parts.

01:19:49.700 So for a murder, we're going to have an encounter,

01:19:51.580 a place where the offender first sees the victim.

01:19:54.260 Then we're going to have the point where he first attacks her.

01:19:56.600 Then we have the actual murder scene itself.

01:19:58.800 Then finally, we have where the body gets disposed of.

01:20:01.860 So Rosmo takes a hard look at Rock Creek Park.

01:20:05.200 Years later, he will lay out what he found in a documentary on Chandra Levy for investigation discovery.

01:20:12.120 Rosmo goes to the attack scenes, three of them, Chandra's and the two women who lived.

01:20:18.360 Each is the same kind of place, a secluded spot near a ravine or a steep bank,

01:20:24.320 hidden from the trail behind dense brush.

01:20:27.540 Each of the women had been carrying a Walkman.

01:20:30.660 The Hispanic man demanded nothing and took nothing.

01:20:34.400 No money, no jewelry.

01:20:36.820 To Rosmo, these are not robberies.

01:20:39.220 They are attempted sexual assaults.

01:20:41.380 And he comes to believe the same thing was done to Chandra Levy.

01:20:44.900 Look at how remote this is.

01:20:46.400 It's quiet.

01:20:47.140 There aren't any other witnesses.

01:20:48.320 So this is an ideal spot for a predator to attack somebody.

01:20:52.820 When Rosmo lays the attacks out by date,

01:20:55.040 They fall into a tight cluster in the spring of 2001 on that one isolated stretch of trail

01:21:01.920 near the Pierce Mill.

01:21:03.940 Holly Schilling attacked in mid-May, two weeks after that.

01:21:07.900 A man exposing himself to a massage therapist on the same ground that same month.

01:21:14.580 Christy Weigand pulled into a ravine on the 1st of July, and then nothing.

01:21:20.180 The attacks end completely the week the man is caught.

01:21:24.660 We took a look at the location where Shonda's body was found,

01:21:29.140 and then we looked at the locations where the attacks on the two female joggers had occurred.

01:21:34.240 There's no one else around.

01:21:36.260 Attacks like that in the park are really rare.

01:21:38.480 And when you've got three of them in a very short time period,

01:21:41.260 that calls for them to be looked at as being connected crimes.

01:21:45.560 We know that he lived just to the east of Rock Creek Park,

01:21:49.560 and there were no similar attacks after the arrest camp.

01:21:55.260 It made Guandiki stand out like a neon sign.

01:21:58.240 He had to be considered a viable suspect and needed to be explored further.

01:22:02.820 There is one more thing the map shows.

01:22:05.780 The place where the man attacked Hallie Schilling is about half a mile from the ravine where Chandra's remains are found.

01:22:12.020 Seven weeks after those remains turn up, in July of 2002,

01:22:16.820 Levy detectives finally walked the ground

01:22:19.100 where Hallie fought free.

01:22:21.160 And they put it in their investigative report

01:22:23.400 in plain words, quote,

01:22:25.320 this site is easy walking distance

01:22:27.380 from the Levy crime scene.

01:22:29.560 So what do we know about the man already in prison?

01:22:33.360 Juan Dica came to the United States

01:22:35.140 illegally from El Salvador.

01:22:38.180 He made his way through Mexico.

01:22:40.420 He swam across the Rio Grande into Texas.

01:22:43.180 He made his way to Houston.

01:22:44.540 and then he made his way to Washington, D.C.

01:22:49.000 He's got a family in El Salvador that's deeply impoverished.

01:22:53.520 He was born in 1981 in the early years of El Salvador's civil war,

01:22:58.080 which takes his father before he's born.

01:23:01.160 When Guandique's mother is three months pregnant,

01:23:03.300 his father is killed by a government death squad.

01:23:06.580 The boy grows up in a house with a dirt floor.

01:23:09.640 His mother remarries,

01:23:10.800 and Guandique will later say his stepfather and mother beat him.

01:23:15.640 He struggles in school and drops out in the seventh grade.

01:23:19.000 At 14, he is working in the fields.

01:23:21.800 Now, in Washington, D.C., Guandique is 19

01:23:24.960 and takes whatever work a man without papers can find

01:23:28.060 and for a while holds it together, but not for long.

01:23:32.500 He drinks heavily.

01:23:34.540 He smokes marijuana and snorts cocaine when he can get it.

01:23:37.980 He drifts from job to job.

01:23:40.560 By the time the D.C. detectives come looking for him,

01:23:43.440 Guandique has been in and out of the prison system for years,

01:23:46.680 moving from one facility to the next.

01:23:49.580 In one prison, he mails obscene drawings to a woman he's never met.

01:23:54.420 In another, he exposes himself to the female guards.

01:23:58.280 Somewhere along the way, he joins MS-13, the violent Salvadoran gang.

01:24:03.320 This is the man to whom Rosmo's map keeps pointing back.

01:24:08.840 Then there is the 1st of May, 2001.

01:24:12.200 On the day Chandra Levy vanishes,

01:24:14.260 Guandique does not show up for work.

01:24:17.140 Days later, his landlady sees him with a fat lip,

01:24:20.220 a bloody eye, scratches at his throat.

01:24:23.540 She asks him what happened.

01:24:25.560 He tells her he got in a fight with his girlfriend,

01:24:28.260 that she hit him.

01:24:30.040 The landlady doesn't believe him

01:24:31.800 because she knows they broke up

01:24:33.540 and his girlfriend is small.

01:24:36.280 Whoever did this fought back hard.

01:24:39.460 17 months later, in October of 2002,

01:24:43.520 a pair of snipers begins shooting people out the back of a car

01:24:47.360 across the Washington, D.C. area.

01:24:50.320 Spoiler alert, we are covering this story on MK Confidential soon.

01:24:53.800 The FBI pulls Brad Garrett off the Levy case to help hunt the D.C. snipers.

01:25:00.720 The press goes to.

01:25:03.040 The Levy case recedes once again.

01:25:06.100 Guandique sits in prison for the two park attacks.

01:25:09.540 No one is building a murder case against him.

01:25:12.580 Law enforcement is not focused on Chandra Levy, and her case goes cold again.

01:25:19.300 Five years later, the Chandra Levy case is revived thanks to a new police chief and a newspaper.

01:25:27.780 Charles Ramsey is gone, replaced by Kathy Lanier.

01:25:32.320 In 2007, soon after she takes over, Lanier meets Susan Levy at police headquarters.

01:25:38.860 When Susan holds out her hand, Lanier hugs her instead and comes out of the meeting vowing to solve the Chandra case.

01:25:47.240 One of the two original detectives has retired.

01:25:50.900 Lanier removes the other, Ralph Durant, and hands the case to two veterans, Todd Williams and Anthony Brigidini.

01:25:59.060 The new detectives pull Chandra's clothing and Guandique's as well out of the evidence lockers

01:26:04.040 and send both for the DNA testing no one had run in 2001.

01:26:09.700 And they start monitoring Guandique's mail and phone calls from prison.

01:26:14.380 When the results come back, the DNA does not establish a tie between Guandique and Chandra.

01:26:21.300 The testing that was supposed to break the case wide open hands them nothing they can put in front of a jury.

01:26:28.280 What finally shakes the case loose is a newspaper.

01:26:33.740 In the summer of 2008, the Washington Post runs a 13-part investigation.

01:26:40.420 Who killed Chandra Levy by Sari Horwitz, Scott Higgum, and Sylvia Moreno?

01:26:47.200 Not enough attention was being paid to a suspect who was hiding in plain sight.

01:26:51.860 The series clears Gary Condit and names Guandique as the most likely killer,

01:26:57.800 though it offers little in the way of hard evidence.

01:27:00.600 It puts the reinvestigation and everything the police had missed

01:27:03.820 on the front page for 13 straight days.

01:27:07.860 A few days before it starts, Horwitz asks Police Chief Lanier what she hopes it will do.

01:27:14.020 Stir things up, Lanier says.

01:27:15.980 Sometimes people do come forward.

01:27:18.180 It was the first time anyone from the outside had really exposed what was going on with this case and some of the mistakes that led the case to go cold.

01:27:28.040 The reinvestigation also surfaces something buried since 2001.

01:27:33.060 When the park police first arrested Guandique, he told an officer he had seen Chandra Levy in Rock Creek Park and that he found her pretty.

01:27:43.860 The officer remembered it, but for seven years, that information never made it into any report.

01:27:50.100 Through all of it, one thing never changes.

01:27:52.880 Guandique does not leave prison.

01:27:55.500 From his arrest in the summer of 2001, through the cold years and the reinvestigation,

01:28:00.980 he stays locked up for the two park attacks.

01:28:04.320 When the detectives finally go looking for their man, they already have him in a cell in California.

01:28:11.140 In September of 2008, two months after the series of articles,

01:28:15.320 a team of D.C. detectives flies to the federal prison at Victorville in the California desert,

01:28:21.620 where Guandique is finishing his sentence for those park attacks.

01:28:25.340 The detectives have done their homework.

01:28:27.880 They have read the park police reports from 2001,

01:28:30.640 and they know how an officer named Joe Green once talked Guandique into admitting the two park attacks

01:28:37.680 by offering him a less despicable version of the story.

01:28:41.900 They sit Guandique down.

01:28:44.280 They ask him for a DNA sample, and then they run a bluff.

01:28:48.440 They tell him they already have his DNA on evidence from the Chandra Levy case,

01:28:53.100 and they wait.

01:28:55.400 Guandique doesn't flinch.

01:28:57.640 If they have his DNA, he tells them, they should charge him with murder.

01:29:01.540 They press him.

01:29:02.840 Why would his DNA be on Chandra Levy's things?

01:29:05.100 He gives them a line the detectives will not forget, one that is not a confession and not

01:29:11.640 quite a denial either. So what if I touched her? It is the closest thing to an admission

01:29:18.460 anyone will ever get from Guantique. Not, I never met her. Not, I never touched her.

01:29:25.120 Not, who's Chandra Levy? Instead, so what if I did? The detectives write it down word for word.

01:29:33.360 It's nowhere near enough to charge a man with murder,

01:29:35.640 but it is the first time Guandique has placed himself anywhere near Chandra Levy,

01:29:41.400 and he's done it in his own words.

01:29:44.420 The detectives turn to the fat lip and the scratches from May 1st, 2001, seven years earlier.

01:29:51.040 He tells them two men robbed him.

01:29:53.880 They remind him he had told his landlady it was his girlfriend.

01:29:58.220 Guandique splits the difference.

01:30:00.020 The lip from the robbery.

01:30:01.520 the scratches from the girlfriend. While the detectives are in the room with him,

01:30:06.680 prison officials are searching his cell. Tucked among his things, kept by his bed,

01:30:13.040 they find a photograph of Chandra clipped from a magazine. It is an odd thing for someone with

01:30:19.560 allegedly no connection to her to have bedside seven years after she vanished from a city 2,000

01:30:25.980 miles away. They saw a photo of Chandra Levy in his cell, right by his bed, which was very odd.

01:30:33.660 And as they were talking to Juan Dike, they saw something else that really struck them as odd.

01:30:38.320 They saw a tattoo of a woman on his body. And as they looked at this tattoo, they believed

01:30:43.780 that resembled Chandra Levy. There is one more thing they learn about the man at Victorville.

01:30:50.360 In early 2009, as the murder case against him is coming together,

01:30:54.680 an inmate tips off prison officials that Guandique is planning to break out.

01:31:00.280 On February 26, guards pull him from his cell and search it.

01:31:05.080 They find the makings of a weapon and an escape kit.

01:31:08.260 Loose razor blades, a AA battery, a filed-down sliver of toenail clipper, and a homemade knife.

01:31:16.180 Two of the blades lashed together with strips of plastic.

01:31:19.260 Guandique will not be going anywhere.

01:31:22.120 So the detectives move on to the one thing that could actually make a case, a witness.

01:31:27.820 That witness is a man named Armando Morales, and you'll be hearing quite a bit about him.

01:31:34.980 Armando Morales is a Fresno, California native, a lifetime criminal with a long record of violent crimes, guns, drugs, and so on.

01:31:45.000 He was a cellmate of Ingmar Guandique in Kentucky in 2006.

01:31:52.560 Morales comes forward in 2009 while the reopened Levy case is searching for anyone who can tie Guandique to the killing.

01:32:00.260 He's been in federal prison since the 1990s, serving a long sentence on drug charges, a lifelong criminal with a violent record.

01:32:08.740 And Morales is not the kind of man juries usually trust.

01:32:12.680 What makes prosecutors listen is that Morales asks for nothing.

01:32:17.440 He is also not the first inmate to say Guandique has talked.

01:32:21.660 Over the years, several jailhouse witnesses did, and their stories did not always match.

01:32:26.940 Guandique's defense will seize on this fact later.

01:32:30.200 But Morales is the witness around whom the prosecution decides to build its case.

01:32:35.020 Guandique and Morales belong to allied gangs, and for six weeks in a Kentucky cell, they talked.

01:32:41.960 Armando Morales and Imar Guandique belonged to a similar gang affiliation.

01:32:47.740 And as a result, they considered themselves brothers.

01:32:50.500 They were honest with each other.

01:32:51.740 They looked out for each other in prison.

01:32:53.920 They talked about everything together.

01:32:56.440 According to Armando Morales, one of the things they talked about was the whole Sharjah Levy case.

01:33:01.800 According to Morales, Guandique was desperate to correct one thing in particular.

01:33:06.840 In prison, a man marked as a rapist is a target.

01:33:09.920 and Guandique knew the word was he had raped and killed the intern.

01:33:15.340 Morales said Guandique wanted Morales to understand

01:33:18.220 that he had only done one of those two things, the killing.

01:33:22.880 Morales' account carries one detail in particular on which prosecutors seize.

01:33:28.460 He says Guandique confessed that he grabbed Chandra from behind on the trail,

01:33:33.660 dragged her into the bushes, and took her fanny pack before he ran.

01:33:38.000 To prosecutor Amanda Haynes, that fanny pack is critical.

01:33:42.180 She argues it is exactly the kind of inside detail only the killer could know,

01:33:47.160 and that Morales could only have gotten it from the man who committed the crime.

01:33:51.800 However, even Haynes does not actually know whether Chandra was carrying a fanny pack.

01:33:57.820 None has ever recovered, not at the scene, not anywhere.

01:34:00.860 nothing in the physical evidence and no witness other than Morales ever establishes that Chandra

01:34:06.840 was carrying one that day. The single source for the detail the prosecution sees as so damning

01:34:13.240 is Morales. There is no corroboration that there ever was a fanny pack, never mind that Guandique

01:34:19.940 took it. On the stand, he tells the jury he wants nothing for his testimony, that he is here only

01:34:26.100 to give a grieving family its answer, and that he has never been an informant before in his life.

01:34:32.760 Hold on to that last part. So what about Gary Condit? For a year, the congressman was the story.

01:34:40.480 By the time the Guandique case reaches trial, investigators no longer treat Gary Condit as a

01:34:45.760 suspect in Chandra's murder. Police had checked his account of his whereabouts on May 1st,

01:34:51.540 And it held. No physical evidence ever tied him to her death. The DNA in Chandra's underwear

01:34:57.960 supported what Condit had spent the summer of 2001 denying that he and Chandra had been

01:35:03.800 sexually involved, but nothing beyond that. On March 3rd, 2009, Police Chief Lanier stands at

01:35:11.320 a lectern at police headquarters, flanked by the D.C. mayor, the U.S. attorney, and the three

01:35:17.280 detectives who built the case. She announces that Ingmar Guandique will be charged with the first

01:35:23.200 degree murder of Chandra Ann Levy. She says that she called Bob and Susan Levy that morning to

01:35:29.380 prepare them. Today we make a very significant announcement. We announced that the Metropolitan

01:35:34.840 Police Department have secured an arrest warrant and homicide in 2001 of Chandra Levy. The arrestee

01:35:42.920 is Ingmar Wendike. With that, Lanier does something the department has not done

01:35:48.380 in eight years. She points the case at another man, and she never once says the name Gary Condit.

01:35:56.600 Congressman Condit was never charged with anything. He was interviewed multiple times.

01:36:01.100 I interviewed him with my FBI partner. Did people think that he was a real possibility? Sure.

01:36:07.080 Did it ever make any sense to me? The answer is no. The trial opens in Washington on October 25th,

01:36:12.920 2010, more than nine years after Chandra disappeared, the lead prosecutor, Amanda Haynes.

01:36:20.100 Amanda Haynes was one of the most senior homicide prosecutors in Washington, D.C.

01:36:24.060 She was so good, they put her on the most difficult assignments, and that's cold cases.

01:36:29.460 Amanda Haynes had a way of relating to the jury.

01:36:32.880 She can tell a story and make people see the crime scene and see the final moments of the victims' lives.

01:36:39.080 In her opening, Haynes names the thing that had cost the case so many years.

01:36:45.180 The investigation, she tells the jury, had been pulled off course

01:36:48.260 by the affair between the intern and the congressman.

01:36:52.400 This case, she says, is also about the secrets of a man named Gary Condit.

01:36:57.520 Then she sets Condit aside and turns to the man in the defendant's chair.

01:37:02.340 This is not an easy case to prove.

01:37:04.960 There is no physical evidence tying Guandique to the scene.

01:37:07.860 She admits that.

01:37:09.080 There is no confession on the record.

01:37:10.680 The medical examiner, working from remains that lay out in the open for more than a year,

01:37:16.620 could never determine how Chandra died, only that it was a homicide.

01:37:20.640 What the state has is the pattern in the park, Guantique's own shifting stories,

01:37:26.540 and a jailhouse witness named Morales, who says the defendant told him he did it.

01:37:32.580 Morales is the case.

01:37:34.500 When Armando Morales took the witness stand, he was the only piece of evidence that directly linked

01:37:40.080 Geymar Guandique to the death of Chandra Levy.

01:37:44.140 To reporters watching in the courtroom, Morales is strong on the stand.

01:37:47.640 He is calm, he's specific, and his story does not flatter anyone.

01:37:52.940 He tells the jury Guandique insisted he had not raped Chandra, only killed her,

01:37:58.700 an account that cuts against the defendant and against the prosecution's own earlier assumption

01:38:03.520 that Chandra had been sexually assaulted, which is exactly why it lands. For the jurors, it will

01:38:10.380 come down to whether they believe Morales. There is no weapon to hold up, no fingerprints,

01:38:16.440 no video, no DNA linking him to the crime. There is the pattern in the park, and there is the man

01:38:22.680 from the Kentucky cell. The defense tells a very different story. Guandique's public defenders

01:38:28.560 argue that the government has taken a man guilty of two ugly park attacks and used those crimes to

01:38:34.320 pin a murder on him, it could not otherwise solve. It's not a hard story to tell. For years, the

01:38:41.240 police have chased the wrong man in full public view and have been mocked mercilessly in the

01:38:46.380 media. Now the defense says they need a conviction. So they've reached for the easiest target,

01:38:52.420 an illegal immigrant with no alibi and a record of violence in that very park.

01:38:58.560 Morales, they say, is a career criminal, telling a jailhouse story no one can verify in a case

01:39:05.000 with no cause of death, no physical evidence, and no confession anyone recorded. Suspicion

01:39:10.980 is not proof, they tell the jury. Similarity is not identity. The defense has one more card.

01:39:19.000 A small amount of DNA from an unknown man was found on Chandra's leggings,

01:39:23.740 matching no one who was tested, not Guandique, not Condit, not the technicians who handled the

01:39:30.840 leggings. The prosecution calls it contamination. The defense asked the jury to consider that it

01:39:37.100 might belong to the actual killer. In her closing argument, prosecutor Amanda Haynes tells the jury

01:39:43.520 how she thinks Chandra died. It is a story Haynes tells with confidence, but one Chandra's remains

01:39:49.900 could never prove. She describes a young woman attacked on the trail, bound and gagged, Haynes

01:39:55.580 theorizes, left unable to call for help, dying alone in the ravine of exposure and thirst.

01:40:02.340 Then Haynes says the thing the defense will seize upon. No one really knows how Chandra Levy died.

01:40:09.980 What Haynes asks the jury to know is who killed her. The jury takes the case on a Friday.

01:40:17.100 Deliberations run into a third day, then a fourth.

01:40:20.380 Notes come out of the room.

01:40:22.020 Everyone in the courthouse starts watching the jury room door.

01:40:25.280 A lot of people thought that this was going to be a hung jury.

01:40:29.360 We did not think all 12 jurors would be able to come back with a verdict.

01:40:33.240 Much to our surprise, three and a half days later, they come back.

01:40:35.980 On November 22, 2010, after three and a half days, the jury comes back with a verdict.

01:40:43.000 Guilty of first-degree murder.

01:40:45.580 Guandique tears the translation headphones from his ears.

01:40:49.320 Outside the courtroom, Chandra's mother, Susan Levy, speaks.

01:40:53.040 She has waited nine years for this.

01:40:55.820 The results of the verdict may be guilty,

01:41:00.400 but I have a lifetime sentence of a lost limb missing from our family tree.

01:41:07.120 Three months later, on February 11, 2011, Guandique is sentenced to 60 years in prison.

01:41:14.320 At the hearing, Susan Levy stands a few feet from him and speaks to him directly.

01:41:19.240 She looked him in the eye and she said, you know, you are a hideous creature.

01:41:26.280 You are lower than a cockroach.

01:41:28.520 You should rot in hell.

01:41:30.540 And it was very dramatic.

01:41:33.120 She then pleaded for the truth about Chandra's murder.

01:41:36.300 Did you really take her, she asked.

01:41:38.480 Look into my eyes right now and tell me.

01:41:41.280 Guandique shakes his head.

01:41:43.380 The judge interrupts and tells Susan she cannot speak to Guandique directly.

01:41:48.420 Susan looks at the judge, then back to the man convicted of killing her baby girl.

01:41:53.520 She adds one line, and finally, fuck you.

01:41:58.100 And then she sits down.

01:41:59.840 When his turn comes, Guandique tells the court he is sorry for what happened to Chandra Levy,

01:42:04.780 but that he had nothing to do with it.

01:42:07.400 For the Levy family, after nine years and nine months,

01:42:10.940 It is the closest thing to an answer anyone has ever handed them.

01:42:15.600 A jury heard the case and found that the man in the park killed their daughter.

01:42:20.520 Bob and Susan Levy fly home to Modesto, believing it's finally over.

01:42:26.460 But the whole of that verdict rests on the word of one man, Armando Morales.

01:42:32.600 He has told the jury he wanted nothing for his testimony.

01:42:36.380 He has told the jury he had never been an informant in his life.

01:42:41.120 Neither of those things was true.

01:42:44.080 That man has not told the jury everything.

01:42:47.760 Next time on MK Confidential, a woman with seven hours of secret recordings, a letter

01:42:54.420 the prosecution never turned over, and a conviction nine years in the making, undone by a single

01:43:01.740 witness.

01:43:02.180 in july of 2016 a woman who calls herself babs proler is living out of a country inn and suites

01:43:15.080 in annapolis maryland she has just been evicted from her home and she has her golden retriever

01:43:20.900 buddy with her one afternoon the hotel's sliding glass lobby door closes on the dog and buddy

01:43:27.660 spooked, will not move or go back inside. A man Babs has never seen before quickly crosses the

01:43:34.160 lobby to help. He gathers the animal up and carries the dog into the hotel for her. I thought

01:43:39.800 he was a dog lover, she will say later. He tells her his name is Phoenix. Babs shares her story

01:43:46.720 with ABC's 2020. He was very kind. He was very friendly. He seemed like a very personal, nice

01:43:54.960 guy. Was there a spark going on here? No, no, there was no spark. They become friends over the next

01:44:01.700 few days. Phoenix watches Buddy when Babs needs the help. They talk about Buddhism, about the

01:44:07.400 military, about a daughter he says he lost somewhere in his life. Then he begins to fill

01:44:12.680 in the rest. He has just gotten out of prison and he shows her his prison identification to prove it.

01:44:19.160 20 years inside. I said 20 years you must have almost killed someone to be in for 20 years

01:44:25.900 and his answer was I wish it would have only been one person. He tells her the things he did to get

01:44:31.880 there the things he lets her know he is still capable of. He tells her that a man can melt

01:44:38.640 10 foam cups down into a single shank drive it through another man's eye and in his words

01:44:45.020 penetrate that shell into their brain and take their life. What turns their friendship is the

01:44:51.640 violence of his talk and the fear that comes with it. The fear that he might make good on a threat

01:44:57.440 against her ex-husband. So she does the only thing she can think to do to protect herself.

01:45:02.700 On July 11th, quietly, she begins to record him in the car, driving around Annapolis,

01:45:10.120 and on the concrete floor of her storage unit

01:45:13.580 while he helps her move her boxes.

01:45:16.540 I only started taping because I truly was afraid.

01:45:19.340 By the end, she has about seven hours of Phoenix talking.

01:45:24.560 The man who calls himself Phoenix is named Armando Morales,

01:45:29.700 a five-time felon and a leader of a California prison gang.

01:45:33.660 Six years earlier, his was the single voice

01:45:37.320 that persuaded a jury to send Ingmar Guandique to prison for 60 years for the murder of Chandra

01:45:44.720 Levy. He is living in this hotel because the government has put him here. Morales is about

01:45:50.340 to be its star witness all over again because there will be a second trial. The conviction

01:45:57.820 his testimony delivered has been thrown out. And here is why. On the stand, Morales swore

01:46:04.500 he had never been a government informant, that speaking up about Guandique was the first time

01:46:10.040 in his life he had ever helped law enforcement. But that was not true, and the proof was sitting

01:46:16.420 in the government's own files, a letter documenting that Morales had cooperated with authorities

01:46:22.740 before, years before he ever said a word about Guandique. A rule called Brady from the 1963

01:46:30.380 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, requires prosecutors to turn over any evidence like that,

01:46:37.120 evidence that is potentially exculpatory or helpful to the defendant, to the defense.

01:46:43.160 Here, the letter undermined the credibility of a key state's witness. The defense was entitled to

01:46:49.020 it. But the prosecution never produced the letter until 2011. The Fresno County Sheriff's Department

01:46:57.920 alerted the U.S. Attorney's Office prosecuting Guandique that its star witness had cooperated

01:47:04.640 with law enforcement in the past, exactly what he swore under oath he had never done.

01:47:11.380 Fresno County had interviewed Morales years earlier. That forced the disclosure into the

01:47:17.840 open. The defense seized on it, and in 2015, a judge vacated Guandique's conviction and ordered

01:47:25.120 a new trial set for the fall of 2016. The U.S. Attorney's Office still means to win this case

01:47:31.860 by putting Morales back on the stand. But these tapes present a new and tricky problem.

01:47:39.960 The Guandique case has only ever rested on one man's word, which means it is only ever as strong

01:47:46.400 as that man's credibility, which is already compromised thanks to the lies he told on the

01:47:52.020 stand in the first trial. In the summer of 2016, with the retrial just months away, Armando

01:47:58.420 Morales' credibility remains the single most valuable thing the government has, and that is

01:48:04.200 not a good thing. On these tapes, he sounds nothing like the man the jury saw. None of the

01:48:10.920 reformed witness who claims to have found God and a conscience behind bars, just a gang thug

01:48:17.700 counting off hand grenades and shanks and scores still to settle. Phoenix says a lot in those

01:48:24.160 secret recordings, but there is one thing he never says. He never says the thing the woman recording

01:48:31.120 him will later swear she heard. That is, that he lied on the witness stand and sent an innocent

01:48:38.460 man to prison for the murder of Chandra Levy. Even so, those seven hours recorded on a storage

01:48:45.280 room floor inside a stranger's phone are about to destroy the government's plan to try Ingmar

01:48:51.520 Guandique a second time. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

01:49:00.300 By the winter of 2011, it looks finished. A jury has found Ingmar Guandique guilty of murdering

01:49:08.220 Chandra Levy. A judge has sentenced him to 60 years. For Bob and Susan Levy, after nearly 10

01:49:14.800 years, it is the closest thing to an answer that anyone gives them. But the verdict rests entirely

01:49:22.160 on the word of one man, Armando Morales. Morales has been in federal prison since 1997, serving

01:49:29.640 time on drug and weapons convictions, a career gang member from California. For about six weeks

01:49:35.640 in 2006, he shared a cell with Guandique in a penitentiary in Kentucky. In 2009, as the

01:49:44.380 reopened case searches for anyone who can tie Guandique to Chandra's murder, Morales comes

01:49:50.360 forward with what he says he heard inside that cell. At the trial, he told the jury that Guandique

01:49:57.540 confessed to the murder, that he grabbed Chandra Levy on a trail, took her fanny pack, and choked

01:50:03.880 her and never meant for her to die. Morales claimed to want nothing in return, and he told

01:50:09.920 the jury plainly that he has never once been an informant in his life. There is no forensic

01:50:15.560 evidence, no fingerprints, no eyewitness to the killing, no video. Without Morales,

01:50:21.880 there was no case and the prosecution knew it. Bernie Grimm, a Washington defense attorney who

01:50:28.040 sat in that courtroom and watched Morales testify, puts it plainly on Fox 5 News.

01:50:34.300 He's a linchpin. They don't get to a jury without him. Without him, there's no forensics,

01:50:38.720 there's no eyewitnesses. On the stand, Morales wrapped his account in a story of his own

01:50:43.940 redemption. A hardened man who has found a conscience in prison and wants just this once

01:50:50.220 to do the right thing and give a grieving family its answer. He was a compelling witness precisely

01:50:56.160 because his story flatters no one and asks for nothing. Very compelling, very believable

01:51:03.040 for these reasons. He wasn't perfect. A lot of informants will be perfect and say he admitted

01:51:12.200 to me that he robbed the bank and all the details. He gave facts that were inconsistent with the

01:51:17.100 government's theory of a sexual assault. He gave facts that didn't put Guandique in the worst light

01:51:23.640 possible, which to me made it all the more believable. On Babs Proler's recordings six years

01:51:30.560 later, that witness is nowhere to be found. What is on the tapes is a man who sounds like exactly

01:51:37.460 what he assured the court he no longer was, a violent thug. Keith Alexander, a Washington Post

01:51:44.700 reporter who listened to every hour of the tapes, hears it at once. When we listen to Armando

01:51:50.860 Morales, he didn't sound like the same man who testified in court years ago. He still sounded

01:51:58.160 like someone who was still very much involved in criminal activity. Then Babs Proler goes on

01:52:05.600 television with a claim of her own. She says that Morales admitted on her secret recordings

01:52:11.480 that he lied on the witness stand. And then he says, you know what? The prosecutors wanted me

01:52:17.200 to lie. They knew they had the right guy. They just needed somebody to say it. He said that to

01:52:23.960 you. And you had that on a recording. But that admission is not on the secret tapes. The

01:52:30.480 Washington Post reporters who listen to every hour of the tapes say so clearly. Here's Keith

01:52:36.080 Alexander from The Post. She told us that Romano Morales lied about the fact that Imar Guandique

01:52:43.980 admitted to him that he killed Shonda Levy. And we found out that wasn't the truth when we listened

01:52:49.980 into those recordings ourselves.

01:52:51.760 Far from taking anything back,

01:52:53.860 Morales holds to his story on the tapes.

01:52:57.000 He tells Proler that Gondike committed the killing,

01:53:00.120 and when she presses him further, warns her,

01:53:02.500 don't go there.

01:53:04.020 What the recordings do is less dramatic

01:53:06.660 than the admission Proler claimed,

01:53:09.200 but just as lethal to the retrial.

01:53:12.120 They show the government a witness

01:53:14.320 it can never again put in front of a jury.

01:53:17.300 The dude that I testified,

01:53:19.320 He committed the homicide.

01:53:21.600 Are you sure?

01:53:22.860 Why wouldn't I be sure?

01:53:24.260 He's in a cell with me.

01:53:25.420 Do you think he's going to tell me I meant to do that?

01:53:28.580 Come on.

01:53:30.860 Hello?

01:53:32.620 Babs Proler, it turns out, has had her own problems with honesty.

01:53:37.440 An occasional actress, she has a criminal record of her own.

01:53:41.040 In 2012, she was arrested for theft in Pennsylvania

01:53:44.800 and later received three years probation in a case she says involved altering the price labels

01:53:51.020 on toothbrushes. And there is a problem with the recordings themselves. Maryland requires the

01:53:57.620 consent of both parties to tape a private conversation, so secretly recording Morales

01:54:02.840 may itself have broken the law. But none of that changes what the tapes do.

01:54:08.860 Babs never has to take the stand at all.

01:54:11.980 She is not the prosecution's witness.

01:54:14.360 If anything, her recordings would be used by the defense.

01:54:18.300 The damage is done the moment the prosecutors sit and listen for themselves.

01:54:22.680 Whatever Babs' credibility, it is Morales' that is terminally injured.

01:54:28.120 This woman, who goes by the name of Babs Prowler, she comes to Washington Post and she has information.

01:54:35.700 She's an occasional actress with the Netflix series House of Cards.

01:54:40.040 We had no idea that this would be the woman who would blow the entire case apart.

01:54:47.980 But the tapes, for all the noise around them, are not what freed Ingmar Guandique.

01:54:54.780 His conviction was already gone, gone over the hidden letter exposing Morales' lie about never having been an informant.

01:55:03.220 For years, his public defenders had been chipping away at the one thing the case depended on,

01:55:09.240 whether the jury had been told the truth about who Armando Morales really was.

01:55:15.220 Two of the Washington Post reporters who spent years back inside the case do not soften what they found.

01:55:21.420 Yeah, yeah, he committed perjury. He lied.

01:55:24.620 This is not a technicality. The whole case was one witness.

01:55:28.140 and the one fact that could have warned the jury

01:55:31.440 about that witness's credibility

01:55:33.320 stayed locked inside the government's own file.

01:55:37.600 When the witness is the case,

01:55:39.720 that is the kind of failure that undoes a verdict.

01:55:43.040 It is why the conviction was thrown out.

01:55:45.560 Even so, before the Babs Proler tapes,

01:55:48.880 the government did intend to try Guandique a second time

01:55:52.080 with Morales back on the stand.

01:55:54.760 Then Babs Proler shows up.

01:55:56.640 She takes her seven hours of recordings and turns them over to the prosecutors, to the defense, and to Chandra's own mother.

01:56:06.060 On these recordings is the government's star witness, sounding like a man who never left the life he swore he had reformed from.

01:56:14.540 The prosecutors do the math.

01:56:16.980 Morales is ruined.

01:56:19.260 They can never put this guy in front of a jury again.

01:56:22.260 The hidden letter is what undoes the conviction,

01:56:25.320 but the tapes are what cost the government its second trial.

01:56:29.600 On July 28th, 2016, before the second trial begins,

01:56:34.220 the government drops the murder charge against Ingmar Guandique,

01:56:38.640 conceding it can no longer prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he killed Chandra Levy.

01:56:44.680 A stunning development in the 15-year-old murder case of Washington, D.C. intern Chandra Levy.

01:56:50.220 prosecutors, suddenly dropped the case against the man who had previously been convicted of that

01:56:56.120 crime. This truly was the craziest case ever to hit Washington, D.C. This was something that

01:57:02.740 Hollywood writers could never even dream of. How could they let Guandique just go? It just

01:57:09.100 seems so strange to me. Guandique has been locked up this entire time since the summer of 2001.

01:57:16.920 Dropping the murder charge does not set him free.

01:57:19.740 He's a Salvadoran citizen with no legal right to be in our country.

01:57:23.100 And the moment the criminal case ends, immigration authorities take him into custody for deportation.

01:57:29.840 He never walks out onto an American street a free man.

01:57:33.740 From a detention center in Virginia, Guandique tells this to Washington Post reporter Sylvia Moreno.

01:57:40.720 I don't have anything to do with Chandra Levy

01:57:44.220 Guandique fights to stay in the United States and loses

01:57:49.120 On May 8, 2017, he is deported back to El Salvador

01:57:53.960 Back to the same country he once swam a river to leave

01:57:57.640 He disappears into it

01:57:59.720 16 years after Chandra Levy vanished

01:58:02.880 The only person ever charged with her murder

01:58:05.660 Is beyond the reach of the American courts

01:58:08.580 the U.S. legal system is finished with him. But the case is not yet over. In 2023, a District

01:58:17.180 of Columbia board that disciplines lawyers takes up the conduct of the trial's lead prosecutor,

01:58:23.320 Amanda Haynes. Its conclusion is both narrow and damning. Haynes failed to turn over the February

01:58:30.840 2009 letter about Morales being an informant, the very document that could have told the jury

01:58:37.720 who the prosecution's star witness really was.

01:58:41.320 A disciplinary hearing committee recommends her law license be suspended for 90 days.

01:58:46.880 By 2023, more than 20 years after Chandra Levy vanished,

01:58:51.360 the murder conviction is gone, the charge is gone,

01:58:55.700 and the man once found guilty of killing her has been deported past the reach of the courts.

01:59:01.200 The one official finding of wrongdoing left standing

01:59:04.700 concerns the prosecution's handling of its own evidence.

01:59:09.060 But in August 2025, the D.C. Court of Appeals,

01:59:13.740 which has the final say on this matter,

01:59:16.220 spares Amanda Haynes an active suspension,

01:59:19.480 imposing 60 days, but immediately staying it for a year of probation,

01:59:24.980 calling her failure a seemingly honest mistake

01:59:28.100 rather than an intentional misdeed.

01:59:31.720 So where does all of that leave this case?

01:59:35.940 A dismissal is not an acquittal, and it is not an exoneration.

01:59:40.840 Those are three very different words, and the difference between them is everything.

01:59:45.300 An acquittal is a jury saying, no, no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this person did it.

01:59:52.460 An exoneration is proof that the state had the wrong man.

01:59:56.720 This guy did not do it.

01:59:58.400 A dismissal is the government throwing its hands up and saying it can no longer meet its burden.

02:00:04.800 That is what happens here.

02:00:06.880 The murder charge against Ingmar Guandique collapses on a document the prosecution fails to turn over

02:00:12.580 and a witness who falls apart after the fact.

02:00:15.900 And not one piece of that is proof that the man he was accusing did not kill Chandra Levy.

02:00:23.480 Morales' implosion does not tell you whether Guandique committed this crime.

02:00:28.200 Only the evidence can do that.

02:00:30.200 And the evidence still points at one man.

02:00:34.600 Once investigators finally move past Gary Condit,

02:00:38.540 Guandique is the only suspect they ever charge.

02:00:41.000 The man already in prison for attacking two women on these same trails.

02:00:47.660 Look at what the years of investigation actually revealed.

02:00:51.540 A geographic profiler maps a run of knife attacks on lone women to one isolated stretch

02:00:59.120 of Rock Creek Park in the weeks around Chandra's disappearance and finds that they stop exactly

02:01:05.520 when Guandique is jailed.

02:01:07.660 A park police detective shows Guandique Chandra's photograph in the summer of 2001, and Guandique

02:01:14.320 admits that he has seen Chandra in the park and thought she was pretty, and admission

02:01:20.520 the detective leaves out of his report and that no one on the Levy case will hear for seven years.

02:01:28.080 Guandique does not turn up for work, the morning Chandra vanishes, and surfaces days later with a

02:01:34.240 fat lip and scratches for which he gives multiple explanations. When detectives finally sit across

02:01:41.300 from him in a California prison and bluff that they have his DNA, he does not say he has never

02:01:48.140 met this woman. He says, so what if I touched her? In his prison cell next to his bed, they find a

02:01:56.460 photograph of Chandra Levy clipped from a magazine seven years after she vanished from a city 2,000

02:02:03.260 miles away. None of this standing alone is proof of anything. Put together and set alongside the

02:02:11.700 cellmate's testimony about a confession, it is why a jury says the word guilty. There is another set

02:02:19.440 of facts, however, that never fit the tidy version, the ones that the people closest to Chandra have

02:02:26.660 always wrestled with. Her family says flatly that Chandra does not run outdoors, that she keeps to

02:02:34.180 the treadmill at her gym, and the shoes she works out in are still in her apartment. The stretch of

02:02:41.420 The Western Ridge Trail, where she is found, is not a smooth jogging path, but a rough horse trail,

02:02:48.500 broken by rocks and roots, the kind even experienced hikers pick their way across.

02:02:54.780 It does not seem like terrain she would run on or walk on for a nature stroll.

02:03:00.040 Inside Chandra's apartment, too, there are oddities.

02:03:03.320 A clean comforter lies on the floor just inside her door, which is not like her.

02:03:08.260 A small amount of an unidentified man's DNA is on her clothing, and it matches no one who

02:03:15.380 was ever tested, with the defense asking the jury to wonder whose it is. Her keys,

02:03:21.820 the bracelet Gary Condit gave her, and an engraved ring, the one she wore on her pinky

02:03:27.760 with her initials, are never found. None of that proves Gwandike innocent. What it explains is why

02:03:35.800 the people who know Chandra best still have real questions about how she died. Some of them never

02:03:42.560 make their peace with the verdict at all. Chandra's aunt, Linda Zansky, tells French journalist

02:03:48.900 Hélène Coutard that she never believed Guandique was guilty. His arrest in 2009 brought Linda no

02:03:56.460 relief. Linda continued to believe that Condit was somehow involved, an enduring suspicion but one

02:04:02.600 that has never been proven. Joe McCann, the retired homicide detective the Levy's hired,

02:04:10.060 is sure from the first morning that Chandra was murdered, and he never comes to believe

02:04:14.820 Guandique is the killer. The case against him, McCann says, is thin. A jailhouse informant and

02:04:22.240 some scratches, and you could, he likes to say, build a case like that against almost anyone.

02:04:27.540 He has a guess about who really killed Chandra, but he will not say.

02:04:32.920 What he will say is that he does not believe every piece of evidence

02:04:36.200 in Chandra Levy's murder was ever brought into the light.

02:04:40.820 Even Chandra's own parents come to doubt that Guandique is the killer,

02:04:46.020 though only with time.

02:04:48.300 Twelve years later, Chandra's parents also tell Alain that their certainty is gone.

02:04:54.420 I thought he was guilty at the time, Bob says.

02:04:57.440 Susan puts it another way.

02:04:59.280 They never proved it, she says, but I acted as if, because I needed to.

02:05:05.440 According to Hélène, Susan has decided that justice really means just us.

02:05:12.300 Then there is the congressman.

02:05:14.940 Gary Condit spends the summer of 2001 as the most watched and most suspected man in America.

02:05:22.380 Police say he is cleared, that his alibi checks out.

02:05:26.100 He has never charged, but none of that puts him back together.

02:05:30.200 In March of 2002, Condit loses his seat,

02:05:34.560 beaten in his own Democratic primary by his former chief of staff,

02:05:38.640 Dennis Cardoza, by some 18 points,

02:05:41.640 a rout in a district that has been his for 13 years.

02:05:45.560 He leaves Washington for Arizona,

02:05:48.020 where he and his family buy a pair of Baskin-Robbins ice cream franchises

02:05:52.680 that end in a lawsuit and close.

02:05:56.520 He sues over the lurid theories spun about him,

02:06:00.220 among the targets the writer Dominic Dunn,

02:06:03.000 and the cases settle out of court the terms never disclosed.

02:06:07.060 In 2016, Condit publishes a memoir

02:06:09.860 laying out his side of a story the world has already told 10,000 times without him.

02:06:15.920 He calls the book Actual Malice,

02:06:18.780 the standard of proof in a defamation case brought by a public figure.

02:06:23.500 That same year, promoting the book,

02:06:26.440 he sits down with Dr. Phil and breaks 15 years of silence on television.

02:06:32.160 I obviously think it's an injustice that's been handed to the family.

02:06:36.640 The person who committed the crime and tragically killed Shondra Leva is free.

02:06:43.080 And I would like the Levy family to know that I have fully cooperated.

02:06:48.080 I've done everything that I could to be helpful.

02:06:50.940 And I want people to know that you, in fact, ask us to invite the Levy's to participate in this, to be involved in this, and they declined to do that.

02:07:02.860 Right.

02:07:03.440 But you're not avoiding that at all.

02:07:07.520 In fact, you said, please invite them to be a part of this.

02:07:12.520 You're being completely transparent with them.

02:07:14.980 I'm trying to be.

02:07:16.000 The Levy family, you have made very clear, are the victims here.

02:07:20.280 You don't consider yourself a victim.

02:07:22.020 No, I'm not the victim in this.

02:07:23.800 The real victim of this is Chandra and her family.

02:07:26.760 There's no justice for what happened to her.

02:07:29.700 Even then, even under the gentlest questioning,

02:07:33.700 he will not say out loud whether he and Chandra were involved romantically.

02:07:38.520 Why is it you will not answer publicly whether or not you had a sexual relationship with Shondra Levy?

02:07:46.220 Dr. Phil, I haven't, you know, answered that question publicly for 15 years.

02:07:53.580 And I'm not going to change my position or my view on that today or probably any time in the future.

02:07:59.500 He has even been made to face it under oath.

02:08:02.720 In November of 2010, subpoenaed and sworn, Condit takes the witness stand at Guandique's

02:08:07.740 murder trial, and even there, with Chandra's parents a few feet away, he gives up as little

02:08:13.500 as the questions allow. MK Confidential reached out to Gary Condit and invited him to sit for

02:08:19.420 an interview. He did not respond. Here is where the case officially stands as of today.

02:08:26.540 No one else has ever been charged. In the eyes of the law, the murder of Chandra Levy

02:08:31.420 is unsolved. For the people who love her, there is no version of this that ends.

02:08:39.260 Bob and Susan Levy have done everything that is ever asked of them. The travel, the media

02:08:45.560 interviews, the searches, the vigils, the waiting, and the trial. They hear a jury say the word

02:08:52.240 guilty out loud in a courtroom. Then they sit and watch a court take it back. They bury Chandra

02:08:59.860 outside Modesto, next to her grandparents, under a stone that reads on all three graves

02:09:05.780 the same words, we are not here. Because none of them are really there, Bob says. They are

02:09:13.700 in our hearts. At the end of all of it, Bob and Susan are left without the one answer that would

02:09:20.800 last. We don't like the word closure. Nobody really likes it. We've lost anybody. We hate

02:09:25.100 that word. More than 20 years on, Bob and Susan Levy sat down in Paris with the French journalist

02:09:31.400 Alain Coutard, who was writing a book about the case. The couple talk about the daughter they've

02:09:37.080 lost and about the life they have lived ever since. In the years following Chandra's disappearance,

02:09:43.680 they have tried to live the way they believe she would have wanted them to, the little girl

02:09:48.640 they called Ladybug. Chandra dreamed of seeing Antarctica, so they go. And now they travel

02:09:56.040 somewhere every year. Everywhere they go, Ladybugs seem to find them. In Berlin, in Moscow, in Finland,

02:10:03.100 in Mongolia. And for a moment, they smile. But the grief has never truly left their house.

02:10:10.460 We seem functional, Susan says, but sometimes we're not. Bob still cannot make himself return to

02:10:17.140 Linda Zamsky's house in Chesapeake City, Maryland, where he last saw Chandra alive.

02:10:23.580 On their phones, they keep the pictures, Chandra in Tanzania with her tongue stuck out and a giraffe

02:10:29.560 behind her, and they pass the phone back and forth. Two decades on, the anger, Susan says,

02:10:36.080 is mostly gone, and what replaces it is a decision to live the way Chandra would have wanted,

02:10:41.820 and a refusal, as she puts it, to become bad people.

02:10:47.300 MK Confidential spoke with Susan Levy for this series.

02:10:50.560 She said she and Bob are not satisfied with the answers

02:10:53.200 or lack thereof they've received about their daughter's murder.

02:10:56.740 Chandra's mother pointed to the many mistakes made by DC police

02:11:00.020 and wondered aloud whether there was something more sinister at play here.

02:11:04.720 She wonders why they didn't go ahead with retrying Guandique

02:11:07.300 if they really thought he killed Chandra.

02:11:10.400 Susan noted that Gary Condit had access to government secrets at the time Chandra died

02:11:15.420 and told us, quote, was there something that wasn't meant to be found out?

02:11:20.560 What are they all covering up?

02:11:22.280 There's a lot of lying and a lot of cover ups.

02:11:24.720 And so it leaves us with unanswered questions.

02:11:28.340 This story should end not with the men whose names wound up attached to hers, but with Chandra.

02:11:36.980 She grows up in California, an oncologist's daughter who keeps four birds.

02:11:42.480 She loves the San Francisco Giants and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups,

02:11:46.020 and once sits with her father through the 1989 World Series,

02:11:50.100 the game and earthquake stopped, and never forgets it.

02:11:53.780 In her high school yearbook, she writes seven words.

02:11:57.580 Always have dreams, always make them reality.

02:12:01.340 She believes those words enough to move clear across the country,

02:12:04.400 all alone, to the capital of the free world, seeking to make something of herself.

02:12:10.880 At a kitchen table in Maryland and on long walks with her Aunt Linda, she lays her whole future

02:12:17.240 out in the open, finish the internship, land the job she has wanted since she was a girl.

02:12:24.040 Then in about five years at 29 or 30, the thing she talks about more than any career,

02:12:29.420 a husband, children, a family of her own.

02:12:33.740 She has planned it nearly to the year,

02:12:36.080 and she thinks she's found her life partner.

02:12:39.760 None of it happens.

02:12:41.520 What comes instead is that this young woman vanishes on a spring afternoon,

02:12:45.680 and for more than a year, police search and argue and look in the wrong places

02:12:50.480 while she lies on a slope inside Rock Creek Park.

02:12:54.000 I think you learn to see what important things in life is and what trivial things there are.

02:13:03.100 Her parents are never handed a definitive answer about their daughter's murder.

02:13:07.620 What they have instead is a small red beetle that keeps finding them.

02:13:13.100 On a windowsill at home, on a hotel curtain half a world away.

02:13:18.100 On the worst days and on the ordinary ones.

02:13:21.680 it's been a while now and you just get used to everything you hate to get used to it but that's

02:13:27.920 what else can you do but go on i'm megan kelly this is mk confidential join me next week for a

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The Megyn Kelly Show - August 23, 2026

Chandra Levy - The Missing Intern and the Congressman： The FULL MK Confidential Series

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