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

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111, every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's Sunday mega episode. Today we bring you all five episodes of our MK Confidential series on Chandra Levy. What was true about Gary Condit's relationship with Chandra Levy and what became urban legend? The man arrested for her murder and why he is free today. Do we think he did it? Find all of our MK Confidential episodes on the Megyn Kelly podcast feeds and YouTube channel. In the meantime, enjoy this one and we are back on Monday. in the case of Chandra Levy. Missing intern Chandra Levy. The 24-year-old woman disappeared without a trace. Will Chandra Levy ever be found? It has been the story all summer. A young woman who vanished in the nation's capital and the married congressman whose name keeps turning up alongside hers. It has run at the top of the newscasts and across the front pages of newspapers for months. D.C. police detectives and FBI agents out tonight looking for more and more information. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. More clues in this most unusual missing persons case. And this is the morning it comes to a head. Across the country at this moment in California, Bob and Susan Levy are packing for a flight to Chicago, where they are booked to tell their daughter's story on Oprah. And then they will fly to New York for the Today Show. The congressman's son, Chad Condit, is preparing to defend his father on The View in New York City. For four months, the congressman's son, Chad Condit, is preparing to defend his father on The View in New York City. For four months, the congressman's son, Chad Condit, is preparing to defend his father on incident in lower Manhattan. We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City. The interviews never happen. Within minutes, the satellite trucks that have been camped outside the Levy's home all summer start their engines and pull away. And by the end of the day, the story that consumed America is gone, vanished. But what happened to Chandra? I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. That September morning was more than four months in the making. To understand it, we must go back to Chandra Levy's final months in Washington. At 24, Chandra Levy is nearly finished with what she came to Washington, D.C. to do. The 5'4", 110-pound brunette grew up in Modesto, New York City, and she's now in Washington, D.C. to do what she came to Washington, D.C. to do. The 5'4", 110-pound brunette grew up in Modesto, California in farm country with a ranch house and a pool out back where her mother kept horses. Her father, Bob, is an oncologist known for taking difficult cases, enough so that some patients call him Last Chance Bob. Her mother, Susan, is an artist, a painter, and quick with a big laugh. She was shy. She really liked being at home. Chandra is their first child and her father's princess. He has called her Ladybug and she was a little girl at summer camp. Chandra was really headstrong. We were on trips. Sometimes she'd just walk away from us because she didn't want to be associated with her parents and kid brother. She keeps four birds and names them Franny, Zoe, Christmas, and Hanukkah. She becomes a vegetarian at age 14. And what she wants most of all is a badge. In high school, Chandra joins the Police Explorers, the program for teenagers who think they might want to work in law enforcement. Chandra's mother later recalled that early taste of police work in a documentary for investigation discovery. In high school, she actually got to work in the police department and she did parking tickets. She was very proud of the job and she was good at it. You sound like you're very content with the program for everything. Oh yeah. Chandra studies criminal justice at San Francisco State and goes on to pursue a master's at USC. She wants a job in the FBI, maybe the CIA. Despite her ambition, she stays close to her family. Favorite memories were when we travel because that's when we were closest as a family. When we would drive from San Francisco back, they would say the whole Star War trilogy by heart, the dialogue for all three movies. In the fall of 2000, Chandra takes an internship in Washington, D.C. at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, working in its public affairs office. It is not glamorous, but it is a first step toward the federal career Chandra wants. She sublets a studio apartment in DuPont Circle, a neighborhood of row houses and coffee shops northwest of downtown. She's a long way from Modesto. In Washington, her life is quiet and repetitive. Metro to the Bureau, the gym afterward, then home. She knows few people and the person she speaks with most is her mother. By the last week of April 2001, Chandra has been working in Washington for eight months, and her internship is ending. Chandra is preparing to leave Washington. She cancels her health club membership and keeps the receipt. She emails her landlord about the lease. She starts to pack up her belongings. The plan is to fly home, graduate from USC, and begin applying for the federal career she has wanted since high school. On Sunday, April 29th, Chandra will be in Washington, D.C. Chandra leaves a message for her aunt, Linda Zamsky, back in California. The internship is over, she says. She will pack up over the next week or so and head home for a while. It's a routine message about a plan everyone expects her to complete. It is one of the last times anyone hears Chandra's voice. The next day, April 30th, she works out at the Washington Sports Club. The people at that gym appear to be the last ones to have seen Chandra alive. She was very upbeat and looking forward to going home. The morning of Tuesday, May 1st, 2001, is the last ordinary day of Chandra Levy's life. She sits down at her laptop, set up on a makeshift desk in a hallway nook of her apartment. Investigators will later rebuild the morning, almost minute by minute. She signs on at 10.27 a.m. and moves from site to site. The Drudge Report, National Geographic, says Chandra is on a mission to save her mom and her baby. She is also on a mission to rescue Chandra. At 10.45 a.m., she emails her mother a list of Southwest fares for the trip home. Six days out, she is still pricing the flight. At 11.26, she hits the Washington Post weather page. It calls for fair skies and temperatures near 80. At 11.33, she opens a Washington Post guide to Rock Creek Park. A minute later, she clicks a map of the park's hiking trails. At 12.25, she logs off. That is the last confirmed trace of Chandra Levy. She makes no more calls. She sends no more emails. She uses no credit card. On an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, she closes her laptop in her own apartment and seemingly steps off the face of the earth. No one who knew her ever hears from her again. The last place online Chandra looked up in those final minutes at her laptop was Rock Creek Park. And to understand the rest of this story, you have to know the geography of this place. This is not a manicured city park or a narrow strip of green lush grass. It is 1,754 acres of real forest running straight up the middle of Washington, D.C. It is more than twice the size of Central Park in New York and one of the oldest natural urban parks in the country. Reaching from the edge of downtown D.C. right up to the Maryland state line. It has bridle paths and a horse stable, picnic groves along the creek, and tucked into the trees, the only planetarium in the national park system. It also has long, steep, wooded ravines, places where the trees close over the trails and the city seems a world away. Rock Creek Park has heavily used running paths, and women do run there alone, but it also has a lot of fun. It also has isolated wooded trails, where a runner can quickly find herself out of sight and entirely alone. Chandra's family and friends say she was not a jogger and did not like going into the park alone. Her apartment is about two miles away. Whether that trail map meant she planned to walk in the park that afternoon or meant nothing at all will become one of the central questions of this case. 2,800 miles away in Modesto, the days pass and her parents cannot reach Chandra. Chandra calls home. She always calls home, always. Now the phone rings through to her voicemail again and again. We call her up and she didn't answer the phone at a message machine. I kept calling and calling and she never answered it and I got worried about it. He got very upset and he said he felt something was wrong. Susan is normally the free spirit of the family. By the second week after Chandra's death, Bob starts calling everywhere he can think of. He calls the Bureau of Prisons, where she interned. He calls the FBI, calls Washington hospitals, one after another, asking whether a young woman matching his daughter's description has come in as an accident victim. Every call comes back the same. Nothing. No trace. The plan was for Chandra to be home by now, days from graduating. To her family, that silence is not like Chandra at all. She's careful and responsible, the kind of daughter who checks in. She would not skip the ceremony for the master's degree that she crossed the country to earn. She got honors. She was top in her class. I thought it would be exciting for her. It's not like her to not to call or be in touch. Maybe she ran off, had a schizophrenic episode or something like that. I'll think of all those things as a reason why she didn't turn up. On May 6th, Bob Levy calls the police in Washington and reports his daughter missing. Ronald Monroe was an assistant chief with the D.C. police. At the time that Chandra Levy was reported as missing, the number of missing persons in the district probably exceeded 200 to 300 a month. When the parents called, we sent an officer to just check on the welfare of the person. A police officer goes to her DuPont Circle apartment for a welfare check. The door is locked. There's no sign of a break-in, no sign of a struggle, nothing violent. At all. The building's manager unlocks the door and the officer steps inside. The place looks like someone stopped packing in the middle of a move. Suitcases half-packed, clothes still hanging in the closet, dishes in the sink, a Williams-Sonoma bag on the kitchen counter with a load of dirty laundry inside it, jeans and socks. Her jewelry is still out, earrings and an ankle bracelet and a necklace with a pendant. On the answering machine, 25 messages. Most from her parents. And then there is the most telling sign of all. Her purse. Inside that, her wallet, her credit cards, her driver's license, and $31.50. Her cell phone left on the table. Her blue Sony laptop still open on the desk in the hall. What 24-year-old leaves home without any of it for weeks at a time? Nor does any of this seem like Chandra. What troubles the detective's most is not what is missing from the apartment. It is what still remains. She has no history of this. And based on the fact that we went to her apartment to check on her welfare, we found all her identification in there. Driver's license, credit cards, checkbook, jewelry, cell phones, anything that a normal person would take out with them when they go out on the street. All that was in the apartment. Brad Garrett, a veteran FBI agent who works the Chandra Levy case. Her driver's license. Her credit cards. Her cell phone. And her cell phone were still in the apartment. That's baffling to me and others because the whole idea is when you're going to leave, you're at least going to take an ID. There were only two things missing. Her keys and a ring. Her keys and a gold pinky ring with her initials CL that her parents had designed and given her. Wherever Chandra went that afternoon, she went with almost nothing. The apartment does not tell detectives whether she left voluntarily. Or something happened to her. Detective Jim Traynham spent years working homicides in Washington. Did she just drop off the face of the earth voluntarily? Is she missing under suspicious circumstances but still alive? Could she have been the victim of foul play? All of these are possibilities that you have to explore. In the nation's capital, Chandra is one missing name among a few hundred that month. In Modesto, she is the only one. Police went to her room and found everything. The area, nothing. They didn't find her anywhere. We searched the area immediately around her DuPont Circle apartment. We searched the alleys, the dumpsters, hoping we would find something that was connected to her. We expanded the search through vacant properties in the city. Most of the missing cases in D.C. by the police department's own count are teenagers who run away on their own and are back within a few days or weeks. Many of those kids are from the neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park, and across the Anacostia, where much of the city's violence plays out in the streets. Chandra is none of that. A 24-year-old woman who calls home like clockwork, gone without a trace from a quiet block in northwest D.C. In the days after her parents report Chandra missing, they stop waiting for answers and begin searching for clues themselves. 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. Most of the numbers are ones they would expect. A few Washington numbers repeat, ones they do not recognize. Susan Levy starts dialing them. The first rings through to an answering machine, playing soft background music and no name or voice recording. She dials the next. This one is not a friend or a boyfriend or a landlord. A recording tells her she has reached out to her boyfriend, and she has reached the office of Democrat Congressman Gary Condit. Susan recognizes the name immediately. I saw this number that was being called many, many, many times. I decided to call that number, and it turned out to be Gary Condit. Gary Condit is the Levy's own Modesto congressman. 53 years old, married more than 30 years. One of the most recognizable politicians in their part of California. Gentlemen from California, is recognized for two minutes. It is a tremendous cost to the committee and to the taxpayers of this country, and they're confused why we can't work together. And his number is one that keeps turning up on their daughter's phone bills. Bob Levy decides to call him directly. The family finds a home number, and Condit answers. Bob's voice shakes. He can barely get the words out. He tells the congressman that he is Chandra Levy's father, that his daughter is an intern in Washington, D.C., that his number is all over her phone bills, and that she is missing. Can he help? By the family's account, Condit is pleasant, but offers nothing. He says he knows Chandra, that she's a lovely person, and that he has no idea where she is. The Levy's do not believe him. They tell the D.C. police about the congressman and about the call. By now, the police have taken Chandra's things, including her answering machine. Among the messages are two from a man. On May 3rd, days after she was last heard from, before Chandra had been reported to police, he never gives his name. The voice belongs to Gary Condit, the congressman who had just played down how well he knew Chandra to her father, Bob Levy. Ronald Monroe was an assistant chief of D.C. police at the time. It was a little bit unusual to us. He had indicated he barely knew her. He just knew her in passing. Two messages in his own voice left days after she vanished, asking Chandra Levy for her schedule and a call back. The voice belongs to Gary Condit, It is the first clear contradiction in the case. I kind of felt maybe he might be covering his tracks. He just seemed to be concerned about himself. In the first week of May 2001, this is still officially a missing persons case. A young woman who closed her laptop, left her wallet on the table, and did not come home. There is no body. There is no crime scene. There's no witness, no ransom note, no proof that anything criminal has happened. At all. But her parents have found a curious connection. Their own congressman's private numbers, over and over on their daughter's phone. bills. They have heard his voice on her answering machine, and they have heard him tell them directly that he knows nothing. Carrie Condit's name is not in the news yet. That is about to change. I'm Megyn Kelly, and next time on MK Confidential, the secret Chandra kept, the other women who come forward, and 67 days of deceit from a congressman with everything to lose. In the early summer of 2001, a reporter at NBC's Washington Station receives a phone call she will never forget. The voice on the line is a source. It gives her one sentence, and then it's gone. The first time I heard Chandra Levy's name, it was in the morning before I came to work. I might have been at the gym or something like that. And I got a phone call from a police source, and I'll never forget it. He phrased it exactly like this. There's a young woman, an intern, who's missing from her apartment in northwest D.C., and she was having an affair with a congressman. And the person hung up. A missing intern, a congressman, an alleged affair. One anonymous sentence. For about two weeks, Chandra Levy is a small, local story. A missing intern in a city with hundreds of missing persons cases a month. Then a congressman's name surfaces. And within days, it is the story the whole country is following. Nearly every camera in America pulled off the search for Chandra Levy and onto Democrat Congressman Gary Condit. By now, Chandra Levy has been missing for weeks. Her parents have no idea what's happened to her, but have found their own congressman's private number on her phone bill. His name is Gary Condit. And when they called and confronted him, he had played down how well he knew their daughter. Chandra's mother, Susan, later recalled the discovery to ABC's Deborah Roberts. And he answered the phone. By the middle of May 2001, this is no longer a family's private suspicion. It is a national news story that will become an obsession. The congressman, seen in this picture with Ms. Levy, says she's a great person and a good friend. He says she frequently visited his Capitol Hill office. A staffer for the congressman says there was no romantic relationship between the congressman and Ms. Levy. And from this point on, there are, in effect, two investigations. One is trying to find a missing 24-year-old woman. The other is trying to find out what a congressman is hiding. Over that summer, the hunt for answers from the congressman all but replaces the search for Chandra Levy. To understand any of it, we must go back to how the two of them met in the first place. It is October of 2000. Chandra, new to Washington, is making every connection she can to help build a career. What? What? What? What? One afternoon, she and her friend from USC, Jennifer Baker, who is also from Modesto, drop in unannounced at the Capitol Hill office of their own congressman, Gary Condit. By all accounts, Condit is happy to see two friendly constituents. He gives them a tour, takes them to the House Gallery to watch a vote, and the three pose for a photo together. Jennifer walks out with an internship in his office. And Chandra walks out with a crush. A few days later, Chandra stops by again, this time to see Jennifer at her brand-new congressional internship. And this time, she and Condit exchange phone numbers. She calls him for career advice, which leads to dinner at Trist, a coffee shop in Adams Morgan, minutes from Condit's apartment, and thousands of miles from Modesto and Gary's wife. And within weeks, by her aunt's later account, Chandra will be spending two and sometimes three nights a week in that apartment. For a long time, only one person in Chandra's life knew the name of the man she was seeing. Not her parents, far away in California. Not her friends. Only her favorite aunt, Linda Zamsky, who is closer to her age and lives an hour and a half up the road in Chesapeake City, Maryland. The family Chandra could actually get to. And the one person she trusts with the truth. Over Thanksgiving 2000 and Passover the following spring, on long walks and long conversations, Chandra tells Linda about her man in Washington. She calls him my guy, but the aunt knows he actually belongs to someone else. 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. What she describes, according to her aunt, is not a fling, it's a plan, one to play out over the next five years. Finish the internship, land the dream job in federal law enforcement, and then start the life she's been striving for. Her co-worker, Sven Jones, hears the same thing from Chandra and shares this with 2020. When she spoke of her relationship, she never offered a name. She just said, powerful person. Someone who she was in love with. Someone who she could. Someone who she could see making a life with. The man her aunt knows is Gary Condit. And whatever Chandra believes about their future, the secrecy of the present runs on his terms. By Zamsky's account, there are rules, and Chandra recites them to her. Allegedly, if she and Condit ride the elevator in his apartment building and someone else gets on, Chandra is to get off on a different floor. If anyone asks, she is to say she is visiting a sick friend. She is never to carry her. She is always on her way to her identification, when she goes to see Gary Condit. To reach him, her aunt says, Chandra dials a private line, waits through soft music, and leaves a message. And one rule, Chandra tells her, matters more than all the others: silence about their secret. If anyone ever finds out, her aunt says, Condit is emphatic. It's done. Chandra sees a future together. Condit, in her telling, builds a system to make sure, no one knows. No one knows. Here is the distinction on which the rest of this story turns. who has something to hide is not necessarily the same as a man who knows what happened to Chandra Levy. But in the summer of 2001, the two appear identical to some. There is also the question of where Condit has been. By his own account, on the day Chandra vanished, Condit is on Capitol Hill. Around midday, close to the hour she logs off her computer for the very last time, Condit is in a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney about California's energy crisis. Cheney's office would later confirm the meeting took place. That afternoon, Condit casts two votes on the House floor. Those events place Condit on Capitol Hill for portions of the day, though they do not account for every hour. That evening, he says he is home at his D.C. condo with his wife Carolyn, who's in town. The detectives are not the only ones pressing on Gary Condit. Chandra's mother, Susan, comes to Washington and will not leave quietly. She goes on any program that will have her and turns to cameras with a plea. Mr. Condit, would you please step forward and share whatever you know? You may have been one of the last people to really have spent any time with Chandra. With the police producing no timely answers, the Levees hire a public relations team. The strategy is deliberate. Release what they know a piece at a time. Keep reporters interested and make sure Chandra does not vanish from public view. It works. Almost too well, Chandra stays in the headlines, in the small print, below the actual headlines, which are all about Gary Condit. It soon becomes clear Condit has many secrets. As reporters dig into his private life, other women begin to emerge. 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. 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. She says that after Chandra vanished, Condit's staff asked her to sign an affidavit swearing there had been no sexual relationship between her and the congressman. She refused. And she goes public, telling Fox News she was afraid. I didn't stay in my own hotel rooms on my layovers. I moved to a place where nobody knows my address, nobody knows my phone number. I was very concerned for my own safety. These women have nothing to do with Chandra's disappearance, but each tells a version of the same story. Secrecy, denial, and the strict Condit rulebook. Together, they make Condit's insistence on privacy look less like respect for a grieving family and more like a habit of protecting himself. What none of it does is help anyone find Chandra. For weeks, Condit's affairs have been front-page news. But the relationship with Chandra remains just a rumor, much suspected, but technically unconfirmed. That all changes on July 6th. Fed up with Condit's denials, Chandra's aunt, Linda Zamsky, speaks to the Washington Post, putting her account on the record. Chandra told Linda directly that Gary Condit was her lover. Chandra stayed with Condit in his, apartment. He had made her leave her I.D. behind, and Gary Condit, she says, is a liar. It's no longer a rumor a family member has now told all. By the second week of July, the pressure on Gary Condit is at a full boil. Satellite trucks are parked outside his apartment day and night. Pedestrians can barely get past them. Reporters chase him through the halls of Congress. The story goes global, carried by the Daily Mail in London to a state news agency in China. On American cable, it becomes a nightly soap opera. On Crossfire, on Hardball, on Hannity and Combs. Tabloids offer cash for any scrap of new information. And it is in the middle of all this that investigators ask Gary Condit for a sample of his DNA. The request stems from evidence collected two months earlier. When detectives searched in Chandra's apartment back in May, inside that Williams-Sonoma bag of dirty laundry, they had found a pair of her underwear stained with semen. Is it Condit's? Or was Chandra seeing another man police know nothing about? It is this course of events that brings Gary Condit at about 10 p.m. on the night of July 9th to a dimly lit parking lot behind a giant supermarket near the National Cathedral. A sitting congressman gets out of a car to meet a detective named Ralph Durant, who takes out a cotton swab, runs it along the inside of the cheek, and walks away. No words are exchanged. The whole thing takes less than a minute. No witnesses, no fanfare. The sample is then driven to the FBI lab at Quantico. The next night, the search plays out in front of the cameras. Just after 11 p.m., police and crime scene technicians pull up to Condit's building in unmarked cars and go inside, searching his apartment for the very first time. For three and a half minutes, the police and crime scene begins. For three and a half hours, they pour over the fourth floor unit. They swab the bathroom floor, the doorknob, the walls, the bathtub. They pull a hair from a shoe in his closet and lint from the clothes dryer. From the street below, cameras catch the technicians moving through the darkened rooms with ultraviolet light, searching for bodily fluids and other trace evidence, the whole apartment glowing an eerie purple. They find nothing that ties Gary Condit to any crime. After three and a half hours examining Condit's home, police are no closer to knowing what happened to Chandra. The press coverage, Condit would say later, was something he never saw coming. 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. And then there is the watch box. As the police had been preparing to search Condit's apartment, Condit was on a mission of his own. Around 8 p.m. that evening, an aide drives Condit in a black Jetta across the river to Alexandria, Virginia. The car pulls up to a curb near a McDonald's, and a man named Daniel Olson just happens to be driving by. Daniel recognizes Condit and pulls over to see what he's up to. Daniel sees the congressman walk to a trash can, push something deep inside, get back into the Jetta, and pull over to see what he's up to. Daniel sees the car and pulls away. Daniel is curious. He walks over, reaches in, and finds the discarded item. A small black box, about the size of a computer disc. It is the empty case for a Tag Heuer watch, torn and flattened, a manual and a warranty still tucked inside, but no watch. Daniel takes it home and shows his roommates. The next day, Daniel throws it back in the trash, and a co-worker, a former Baltimore cop, tells him to call the cops. Daniel calls the police, and a detective drives out to Alexandria, retrieves the box, and traces that watch to Jolene Argentini, the former staffer and girlfriend who had given it to Condit years before. Condit brushes it off as a nothing. People were digging through his garbage, he says, and he only wanted to maintain his privacy. In his words, quote, they're saying a woman gave me a watch, and I threw the watch box away. Even if that's true, so? What's that? It was nothing. To this day, Condit insists the whole thing was overblown. Well, they were trying to make something out of everything they could. But at the time, to the detectives, it was far from nothing. Why would a man keep a watch box for nearly seven years, and then drive across the river to dispose of it in a public trash can three hours before police searched his home? They came to believe that Gary Condit was, at the very least, making it harder for detectives to clear him and follow other leads. Then the result comes back from Quantico. The DNA profile from the semen in Chandra's underwear matches Gary Condit. That result will answer the question, consuming Washington. But it does not answer the question consuming Chandra's family. Where is she? To Jack Barrett, the D.C. chief of detectives, the DNA match changes nothing. It only confirms what he had already deduced, that Condit and Chandra had been having a sexual affair, and that Condit had been lying about it to save his marriage and career. But to the prosecutors, Barbara Kittay and Heidi Passachow, it is a turning point. Detective Barrett later described the women's reaction in two words, aha moment. As he would later put it, they think this is more proof that Condit did it. And that, Barrett believes, is the problem. 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. 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. As Kittay put it, we spent the most amount of time on the person that spent the most amount of time with Chandra. And both of them, in a way, are right, which is how a case goes south. The affair is real. The lies are real. The watch box, the evasions, all of it's real. And every hour spent proving that Gary Condit is a liar was an hour that no one spent looking for the young woman about whom he had lied. Behind the scenes, the leaks are constant. Cate calls it an impossible situation to manage. Everyone, she says, wants to be a hero. Everyone wants to solve it. She would eventually ask to be taken off the case. Barrett would ask for new prosecutors altogether. And Gary Condit sits at the center of it all, impossible to charge or to clear. Years later, Detective Barrett sums up the ordeal with Gary Condit in a single sentence. He goes and gets real goofy on us, he said. We could not eliminate him. Under mounting pressure, Condit agrees to answer questions on national television. It is a desperate move to improve his public standing. On August 23rd, 2001, Condit sits down with ABC's Connie Chung in primetime. About 24 million people tune in for one of the most closely watched interviews of the year. Chung does not open with the affair. She opens with the questions that actually matter. One at a time. After another. Congressman Condit, do you know what happened to Chandra Levy? No, I do not. Did you have anything to do with her disappearance? No, I didn't. Did you say anything or do anything that could have caused her to drop out of sight? You know, Chandra and I never had a crossword. Do you have any idea if there was anyone who wanted to harm her? No. Did you cause anyone to harm her? No. Did you kill Chandra Levy? I did not. On the gravest question whether Condit had killed Chandra, Condit is clear. But when Chung turns to the one thing everyone already knows, whether the relationship had been sexual, he refuses to say it. May I ask you, was it a sexual relationship? Well, Connie, I've been married for 34 years and I've not been a perfect man and I've made my share of mistakes. But out of respect for my family and out of a specific relationship, I'm not going to request from the Levy family. I think it's best that I not get into those details about Chandra Levy. Can you tell us, did you have a romantic relationship with Chandra Levy? Well, once again, I've been married 34 years. I have not been a perfect man. I have made mistakes in my life. But out of respect for my family, out of a specific request by the Levy family, it's best that I not get into the details of the relationship. He gives that answer. He gives that answer in one form or another for half an hour. There's also no evidence the Levy family has asked any such thing. Chandra's mother has spent the summer pleading with Condit to come forward and say what he knows. Can you tell me this? Was Chandra Levy in love with you? Were you in love with her? Well, I don't know that she was in love with me. She never said so. And I was not in love with her. Did she want to marry you and have your child? I only knew Chandra Levy for five months. And in that five months, I was in love with her. And I was in love with her. We never had a discussion about a future, about children, about marriage. Any of those items never came up in that five-month period. Did you ever make promises to her? Never. Did she want you to leave your wife? No. I mean, I've been married for 34 years, and I intend to stay married to that woman as long as she'll have me. Jack Barrett, who oversees the D.C. detectives, could not understand why Condit had agreed to the interview at all. It was preposterous. You just have to shake your head and say, why would he even agree? to do the interview if he's not going to be forthcoming? And in Modesto, Susan Levy watches the man who represents her town deny any part in her daughter's disappearance and then refuse to speak plainly about the nature of his relationship with her daughter. She's not persuaded. I laughed about it because I thought it was so false, phony. Condit's infidelities not only hurt the progress of the Levy investigation, they also throw his family into the spotlight. When folks start calling my dad a murderer, it's wrong. His son, Chad, defended his father, Gary, to ABC. I knew he had done nothing wrong, illegally wrong. By the end of August, millions of Americans have formed an opinion about Gary Condit, whether he lied, whether he cheated, whether he had done something far worse. The ABC interview settled none of it, and it had not brought Chandra Levy one step closer to home. By the end of August, Chandra has been missing for four months. America knows almost everything about Gary Condit's private life and still has no idea where Chandra is. But Chandra will be found, and soon, in Rock Creek Park. And that will send this case down a dark and twisted road. That's next time on MK Confidential. It's July 25th, 2001, 8.58 a.m. 28 police recruits stand alongside Glover Road, one of the streets that cuts through Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. Huge park. Twice as big as Central Park in New York City. Three sergeants line up the recruits shoulder to shoulder near a picnic area called Grove 17. It is already more than 80 degrees, the start of another humid summer day in Washington. The team is out looking for Chandra Levy. 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. 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. 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. It is a far cry from the trails, which run much deeper into the park along the ridge lines and down toward the creek, where the land drops away into ravines thick with vines and fallen trees. No one covers that ground. By one o'clock, it's 91 degrees and feeling hotter. The search team is dripping with sweat. The sergeants call off the search along Glover Road. The recruits climb onto a bus and ride to another part of the park. Ten months from now, Chandra Levy will be found on this very hillside. On ground, this search never reached. The area the sergeants and recruits are leaving, just 79 yards below the Western Ridge Trail near Glover Road. The difference will come down to a communication. Trails versus just the roads. This is the summer the search for Chandra Levy misses almost everything that matters. While the country watches Congressman Gary Condit, the investigation behind the cameras is quickly coming apart. Across the country in Modesto, California, Chandra's parents wait. Bob and Susan Levy do what their advisors tell them, speak to the press when publicity, might turn up a lead, step back when it might bury one, and keep their daughter's name in front of the public however they can. But Susan cannot simply wait in California. She flies to Washington to meet with investigators, press police for answers, and make a public appeal for Chandra's return. I want my daughter home, and I want her alive, and I want the truth to come out. You're a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person. We just miss her. We want her back. I want to have faith that she will come back. At the airport, television cameras film her holding one of Chandra's stuffed animals, a small yellow chick. Back in Modesto, Susan starts a support group for the families of missing loved ones. At first, it helps. But as her daughter's case grows and gets so much news coverage, it crowds out missing loved ones of the others. At least, that's how some members of the group feel. Other families, whose own missing children draw almost no attention at all, begin to pull away, and the meetings stop. I couldn't just trust that the police could do all the work. It was a lot of work. We needed to find as much as we can. We needed someone out there that could do more investigation. Frustrated by the pace of the official investigation and determined to have someone in Washington working solely for them, the Levees hire Billy Martin, a former federal prosecutor. Martin brings in two private investigators, both retired D.C. homicide detectives, Joe McCann and Dwayne Stanton. They interview Chandra's friends and co-workers. They retrace her movements, set up their own tip line, and post a reward. More than 100 calls a day come in, and the two of them have to sort the real from the worthless. The mistaken sightings, the dead ends, the psychics who say they can see where Chandra is. leads are coming in all the time and took us down many, many different paths this one particular night there's just me and my partner the 800 number rings we answer the phone there's a gentleman on the other end of the phone who doesn't want to give us his name but he's got this story to tell about Chandra being in California and as we listened to it it did sound credible he was just looking for 15 minutes of fame he cost just a lot of effort and so I was pretty annoyed pissed off at him there was just nothing there was really nothing about Chandra the P eyes are working around the city's own detectives not with them officers who quietly keep McCann and Stanton in the loop are reprimanded for it a lot of people who followed it remember how crazy it was you couldn't pick up a newspaper a magazine listen to a TV show the media was talking about it it was every day it was every night it was non-stop to understand why Chandra was so angry at the police she didn't want to be in the To understand how a case this big goes cold, you have to understand the department working it. In 2001, Washington, D.C. police are climbing out of a brutal decade. The nation's capital has had one of the highest homicide rates of any major American city for years. 1,500 killings from the 1990s remain unsolved. In 2001, police clear fewer than half of the city's homicides, just 48.5%. The D.C. medical examiner's office is overwhelmed. The city morgue is full, police case files are a mess, and trust between the public and the department is thin at best. The D.C. police chief, Charles Ramsey, had been brought in from Chicago three years earlier to reform a department battered by scandal, low morale, and the decade of unsolved murders. But the Levy case does not land with a seasoned murder squad. It lands in the 2nd District. One of the quieter, wealthier parts of town, with a detective named Ralph Durant, who has spent decades on the force but little of that time working homicides. It is, in almost every respect, a department unready for the story about to break over its head. Start with the surveillance tapes. Chandra's building, the Newport, is secure, with a guard on duty around the clock and 13 cameras recording every face that comes and goes. But the system records. It records over itself every seven days. Police officers come to the building on May 6th, on May 7th, on May 8th, and each time they leave, without asking anyone to save the recording. By the time someone thinks to ask, the video from May 1st, the day Chandra vanished, has already been taped over. Gone with that recording, what time she left, what she was wearing, whether she was alone. Any one of those 13 cameras might have answered the first question every investigator asks. Instead, there is nothing. Former FBI agent Brad Garrett called out this loss to ABC News in 2017. Things like surveillance cameras, unless you go and initially grab them or tell the management to hold them, they erase or disappear. And unfortunately, that's what happened in this case. Then there's the laptop. Chandra left her computer open on a makeshift desk. In the hall of her apartment. And on that computer are her last internet searches. A police sergeant named Ronald Wyatt, who is not a trained technician, turns her laptop on in an effort to retrace her steps, and the hard drive corrupts. Simply turning a computer on should not do that. And years later, at trial, a computer expert still cannot fully explain what went wrong. What he can explain is the cost. It takes federal. It takes federal forensic examiners nearly two months to recover Chandra's browsing history from the damaged drive. When they do, they can finally see where her last hour online was spent. From train schedules and airfares to California, to a Washington Post guide to Rock Creek Park, and then to a map of the park's trails. Investigators initially focus on a web address for the park's headquarters at Klingle Mansion. In July, they combed the grounds around the mansion. But find no evidence Chandra had been there. What receives less attention is the page Chandra opens minutes later. The broader map of Rock Creek Park. It is that map, once the FBI has pulled it off the damaged drive, that finally sends the investigators into the park. It is what puts that search party of 28 recruits and three sergeants along Glover Road on July 25th. The team that worked the roads, but not the trails. Because. Because the search was only limited to that area off the roads, the area where her body was ultimately found was not searched. The search that was supposed to be the big break. Instead, it became one more thing the investigation got wrong. Former D.C. Chief of Detectives Jack Barrett remembers it this way. This is something that we all have to live with. There may have been DNA evidence that all that was lost because of the fact that we were unable to locate. Her remains during the time that we were searching the park. While the police are losing the trail of Chandra Levy, a few miles away, another story is unfolding. One no one thinks to connect with Chandra's. Two weeks after Chandra vanishes, on the evening of May 14th, a tall woman named Hallie Schilling is attacked on a trail near the old Pierce Mill in Rock Creek Park. She's a jogger, 30 years old, and a journalist. A man follows her. She follows her into the woods and tackles her. She fights him off and she runs straight to park police and reports it. No one thinks to connect it to Chandra. Seven weeks later, it happens again. On the evening of July 1st, a young woman named Christy Weigand is running in Rock Creek Park. She's not running alone. Her fiance pulls ahead of Christy on the path as he usually does. Before long, he is out of sight. And Christy. Christy is alone on the trail. Weigand is 25, a lawyer, and seven weeks from her wedding. It's raining. The road through that stretch of the park is closed to cars and the trail is nearly empty. Christy turns her head and notices a man behind her, gaining. Then he has her, an arm locked around her from behind, hauling her off the path and down into a ravine. There is a knife. He puts a hand over her mouth so she cannot scream. Christy is certain in that moment that she will die on this hillside. But Christy Weigand is a former college rower and she is bigger than the man holding her. She fights. She twists and kicks and makes enough noise that the man gives up and runs off into the forest. She is a difficult victim. She claws her way back up the slope and flags down the first person she sees. He never reached for her engagement ring. He never touched the radio clipped at her waist. Whatever he wanted from Christy in that ravine, it wasn't money. This time the man does not get away. Weigand's description goes out over the police radio. The park police spin up a helicopter and flood the trails. And within about 45 minutes, two officers find the man not far from where Christy was attacked. He is wet, streaked with dirt and leaves, and exactly matches the description she gave. A Hispanic man wearing a white t-shirt, baggy shorts, and sneakers. Police take him to the small stone station house inside the park and run him through the system. Go back now to fall of 2000. A few miles from Chandra's apartment near Rock Creek Park, a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador is trying to establish a life in D.C. He's been in the country illegally for a little more than a year, with whatever work he can find without legal status, hard, low-paid jobs, earning $7.50 an hour. In his free time, he often goes to the park with his girlfriend. By the spring of 2001, their relationship becomes violent. He beats her, he drinks heavily, using whatever drugs he can get, and scaring the people around him. His girlfriend's family begins to fear him. He kicks in doors, he keeps hitting his girlfriend. He bites her, hard enough to leave marks. The man from El Salvador starts telling her that if he cannot have her, no one will. He takes to carrying a six-inch knife wrapped in a red cloth. That spring, he breaks into an apartment on his own block, steals a gold wedding ring, and is arrested. He promises to appear in court and never shows. The man from the ravine is identified as Ingmar Adelie. He is a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador. He lives in a northwest Washington neighborhood near the park. The night of Christy Wigan's attack, shortly after 1 in the morning, a veteran detective named Joe Green sits down across from Guandique in his cell with a second officer and a Spanish interpreter. Guandique agrees to talk without a lawyer. Leading the questioning is Joe Green, a big, balding detective. Guandique is the man from El Salvador. detective who has 30 years on the job, he starts with the assaults. Green does not accuse. He offers the man an easier story, one where the whole thing was just a misunderstanding, and the prisoner takes it. D.C. Metro detective Jim Tranum described the dynamic this way to Investigation Discovery in 2017. When they asked him about the attack, he denied it. But they used a different tack and asked him if maybe he just accidentally brushed up against somebody in the woods. He gave them this story about, oh yeah, he was running or jogging in the woods and collided with a woman by accident. And so they knew that at that point that they had the right guy. Guandique describes bumping into Christy Weigand on the trail, trying to help her up, and her screaming. Instead, then he gives Green the same kind of account of a second woman, weeks earlier. A tall jogger. Two attacks he admits to, dressed up as accidents. Then Green tries one more thing. Chandra Levy's face is on flyers all over Washington that summer. Green slides one of the flyers across the table, her photograph on it, and asks a simple question. Has he ever seen this woman in the park? Yes, Guandique admits. He has seen her, once, near the parking lot by the old Pierce Mill. He thought she was pretty. He never saw her again. Green writes up the two assaults. He does not write down what Guandique said about Chandra Levy. Green is park police. The detectives chasing Chandra are D.C. police, separate forces, working the rest of the city. And at that moment, the D.C. police are chasing a cop. A man who hunts women on these trails, sitting in a locked room in July of 2001, telling a detective he had seen Chandra Levy in the park and found her pretty. It will be years before anyone working the Levy case hears a word of it. The Chandra Levy story is still the biggest in the country through the morning of September 11th, 2001. By that afternoon, it's gone. For our family, we were shocked. But we were not emotional like most people because we've already felt 9-11 happen to us. The attacks in New York and at the Pentagon change every priority in Washington. The cameras leave Gary Condit's door. The federal agents who had been working the Levy case are pulled into terrorism task force. We didn't get the media attention anymore, and there go a lot of the leads. So things start to dry up. Even after the initial shock, the 9-11 attacks cast Paul over the case. In March of 2002, Gary Condit loses his primary, beaten by a one-time ally, the state legislator Dennis Cardoza. Washington's most watched man the previous summer is now finished in politics of zero interest to the public and leaves D.C. with Chandra Levy still missing. On May 22nd, 2002, more than a year after Chandra Levy disappeared, a man named Philip Palmer walks his dog in Rock Creek Park. Palmer is a furniture maker who has collected antlers and animal bones since he was a boy. So he thinks nothing of it. He's a man who has been working the Levy case for a long time, and he's been working the Levy case for a long time. He's been working the Levy case for a long time. So he thinks nothing of leaving the trail and working his way down a slope. That morning, he sees a scrap of red fabric, then something pale and rounded in the leaves, about the size of a silver dollar. He brushes the leaves away. What he finds is a human skull. He ties his dog's blue leash to a branch to mark the spot, climbs back to a nearby road, borrows a phone from a construction worker, and calls 911. So he thinks nothing of leaving the trail and working the Levy case for a long time. He's a man who has been working the Levy case for a long time. He thinks nothing of leaving the trail and working his way down a slope. He calls 911. is at breakfast with a police source at the exact moment the call comes in. I arranged a breakfast with a police official, and during the breakfast, his pager just started going off. And when he came back, he had this stunned look on his face. And he said, you're not going to believe this, but I just got a call, and they think they found Chandra Levy's remains in Rock Creek Park. The remains are 79 yards below the Western Ridge Trail, down a wooded slope so steep that in some places it falls away at 45 degrees. It is the ground the recruits had walked right past, but not through, the summer before. What remains of Chandra is surrounded by items a year of weather and animals have left. Her sunglasses, a running shoe, a gray property of USC, athletics t-shirt, a small radio, and something odd, a pair of black stretch pants turned inside out with each pant leg tied in a knot at the ankle. When they found her leggings, they were like dots and loops in the legs. If she fell down at that ravine and knocked her head and died by accident, there's no reason to remove her pants. The first officer down the slope recognizes it at once, the isolated ravine, the radio, the knotted clothing, because she's not alone. Because he had stood at a similar scene the previous summer at one of two jogger attacks. Here's former detective Traynham again. When you're looking at the scene, bones are scattered everywhere. And that's normal for this sort of scene. If there's a body that's out in the elements, it begins to decompose, and then animals and other scavengers attack the body. They actually take the skull to the medical examiner's office with red lights and siren. They were in something. It's a hurry. The medical examiner had already obtained Chandra's dental records, so he was able to match up the various fillings. The examiner, Jonathan Arden, holds the x-rays up against the records, steps back and forth between them, and says two words. It's her. Well, after they identified her, they called us up and told us that it was just really bad. I mean, it's just as bad as anything could be. Six days later, on May 28th, Arden rules Chandra Levy's death a homicide. But the body has been left abandoned out in the open for more than a year, and the bones cannot tell him how she died. No bullet holes, no stab marks, nothing left of her throat to say whether she was strangled. It is possible, he tells reporters, that no one will ever know the specific injury that killed her. When a reporter asks the D.C. police chief, Charles Ramsey, how a search was conducted, could have walked past her, Ramsey does not flinch. It's possible, he says, to search and not find. Word of her discovery travels fast to Modesto. That same day, a thousand people gather for a memorial in Chandra's hometown. At the doors, someone has set out silver bowls of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Chandra's lifelong favorite. Now they know for sure how short her life really was. Then comes the detail that says, the most about the search. Two weeks after Chandra's remains are recovered, the family's own investigators, Joe McCann and Dwayne Stanton, go back over the released crime scene themselves, on their hands and knees with garden rakes, because they do not trust that the police have done it properly. An hour and a half in, McCann's rake catches on a bone the search teams had left in the dirt, about a foot long. It is Chandra's left tibia. The department's first response is to suggest that animals must have carried the bone back in after the search was done. A Washington Post columnist named Mark Fisher mocks them in print and suggests the chief invest in a good, heavy-duty garden rake. When detectives call McCann in, they ask him to take a polygraph examination. He refuses. Ramsey, furious that his technicians missed a foot-long bone, sends the teams back into the search. Over the next 19 days, they found more of Chandra's remains. Bones from her hands and her feet, her back, her femur, the largest bone in the body. One of them 170 feet from where her skull was found. Two retired detectives with garden rakes had found what scores of officers had missed. For the Levees, the call they had been dreading was an excruciating end to the saga of their missing daughter. You cried. Yeah, I cried a lot. You screamed and cried. Yeah. You can't imagine to have your child laying out there. It seems so unfair. For 13 months, the biggest missing persons case in America had been all about a congressman. Now it is about a body on a wooded slope in the park Chandra Levy had looked up on her computer the morning she vanished. On the ground, a class of police recruits never touched. The question is no longer, Where is Chandra Levy? from here on it is who killed her. When investigators finally go looking for an answer they will turn to a man they already have in hand. Next time on MK Confidential the woman who fought off a killer on those trails and lived and waited seven years for a call that never came and a prisoner with a story to tell. On the evening of May 14th 2001 Hallie Schilling ties back her blonde hair grabs her yellow walkman and drives down to Rock Creek Park for a run. She is 30 a journalist athletic 5 foot 10 and she has been running for nearly 20 years. She is not a woman who rattles easily. In the parking lot near the old Pierce Mill she notices a young Hispanic man sitting on a curb watching her. He makes her uncomfortable but men stare at Hallie she thinks and she starts on her jog anyway. She heads up an empty trail that vanishes into the trees. Near the rise above the creek the sun disappears behind the clouds. It feels ominous enough so that she picks up a stick off the ground for protection but it's rotten and she tosses it back. Then she realizes the Hispanic man is jogging behind her closing fast. She keeps looking back over her shoulder and he is always there. She speeds up he speeds up. She slows down he's still there. Then he sprints and closes the distance grabbing her and throws her off the path and down into the trees. He has a knife. His arms lock around her neck and something in Hallie flips like a switch. Two things hit her mind at once. The first is that the traffic on Beach Drive across the creek is loud enough to bury any sound she makes. No one will hear her scream. The second is a decision. There is no way she's going to let this man have her without a fight. A huge fight. She goes berserk. She screams she twists and she sees the flash of the knife. He tries to shush her and that more than the knife blade is what enrages her. Years before Hallie Schilling took a self-defense class. The thing she has never forgotten is the instructor's helper. A man in a padded rubber suit who stood there in body armor at the end of each session and let the students hit him so they would know what it feels like to strike another human being. On the ground in Rock Creek Park that feeling comes back to Hallie. She goes for his eyes, misses, then works a hand into his mouth and digs her fingernails into the soft flesh under his tongue. He bites down on her fingers, cuts them open with a knife, cuts them open with a knife. She gets the knife out of his hand and stabs him in the back of the head. Hallie is hit hard, but she is already tearing loose. When to her own shock he turns and runs off the way he came. Hallie is up and she is running up the slope. She makes her way to the park police station with help from two other runners she meets minutes after she breaks loose. She walks into the station house wild haired and the officers move at once. A wall of police rushes out onto the trail after the man with the knife. It is fast, and professional. The one thing that needles her, Hallie will write later, is that the officer taking her statement keeps calling her over the radio, the victim. She fought, she thinks, and she is alive. Two weeks earlier, in this same park, Chandra Levy disappeared. She would be found on a wooded slope about half a mile from the trail where Hallie Schilling just saved her own life. The first female jogger, the one who was attacked about 700 yards from where Levy's body was found, said she saw Guandique in the Pierce Mill parking lot. And if you look at where Chandra Levy lived, the logical route would have taken her right through the Pierce Mill parking lot. For a year, the search for Chandra Levy points at a congressman. But while the whole country watches Gary Condit, something else is happening on the trails of Rock Creek Park. That spring, in a sudden burst, a man is attacking women in the park, one after another. Yet somehow, no one connects any of it to Chandra. One of the women he grabs will tell her story in public. Hallie Schilling, the runner at the start of the episode, is a journalist. And in the spring of 2002, she publishes a first-person account of her attack in the Washington Post, describing how that self-defense class saved her life. on a Rock Creek Park trail. Hallie does not name the man who came at her with a knife because at the time, no one has connected him to anything larger. What she writes is that these days, she sticks to a gym treadmill instead of the park trails, but takes comfort in one thing. The man who attacked her is off the streets. He was caught weeks later after he went after another woman, Christy Weigand, near the same stretch of trail. Park police tied the two attacks together. On May 22, 2002, five weeks after Hallie's essay runs in the Post, a man walking his dog finds a human skull in Rock Creek Park, half a mile from where Hallie was attacked. The connection is not lost on her. She reads the coverage and understands, that could have been me. It is not lost on reporters either. Guandique's name has surfaced in Roll Call, the newspaper that covers Capitol Hill. Reporters pull the court file, find the names of the women he attacked, and dig through databases until they turn up Hallie's article. They are on her doorstep within days. The detectives working Chandra Levy's murder are not. For the seven years after reporting her attack from 2001 to 2008, Hallie Schilling waits for a call from the D.C. police, a call that does not come. And cannot understand why the detectives on the most notorious murder in the city seem so uninterested in a woman who survived an attack in the same park two weeks after Chandra vanished. It is not until December 2008, after the Washington Post's 13-part series, Who Killed Chandra Levy, forces the case back open, that the Levy detectives come to Hallie Schilling. They bring her into Rock Creek Park and walk with her up the trail to the, the spot where the man attacked her. And she takes them through it. Her father stands a few feet away, silent. As he watches, he finds himself shaking with anger, understanding for the first time how close he came to losing his daughter. The next day, investigators call Hallie before a grand jury, weighing whether to charge Guandique with Chandra Levy's murder. Hallie's own attack had been prosecuted years earlier. Now, prosecutors want the jury to hear what Guandique did to another woman on those same trails. More than seven years after Hallie escaped him, D.C. detectives and the prosecutor apologize for never interviewing her as part of the Levy investigation. One investigator shakes his head and says he cannot believe Gary Condit was ever a suspect. That summer of 2002, after Chandra's remains are found, an FBI agent named Brad Garrett, and a D.C. detective named Jim Traynham, bring a geographic profiler into the case. A man named Kim Rosmo, whose studies where violent crimes happen and what the pattern of their locations can tell you about the perpetrator. 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. Rosmo lays out a map of Rock Creek Park and marks the attacks on lone women who have been involved in the crime since the spring of 2001. For me, one of the most important early questions was how common are these attacks in Rock Creek Park? We took a look at the data from the park's police about their crimes in an 18-month period, living up to there, and it was very clear that crimes of this nature were just so rare. One stretch of the park lights up: an isolated run of trail near the Pierce Mill. The attacks cluster there. In a matter of weeks, then they stop all at once. They stop the week a single man is arrested on those trails and taken to jail. That man is already in prison. He has been since the summer of 2001, serving 10 years for attacking Hallie Schilling and Christy Wiegand in Rock Creek Park. A man at whom no one working the Levy case has ever seriously looked. His name is Ingmar Gwandike. Rossmo says a violent offender is not random. He tends to strike where he feels safe on ground he knows. We break a crime down to its constituent parts. So for a murder, we're going to have an encounter, a place where the offender first sees the victim. Then we're going to have the point where he first attacks her. Then we have the actual murder scene itself. Then finally we have where the body gets disposed of. So Rossmo takes a hard look at Rock Creek Park. Years later, he will lay out what he found in a documentary on Chandra Levy. Rossmo goes to the attack scenes, three of them. Chandra's and the two women who lived. Each is the same kind of place, a secluded spot near a ravine or a steep bank, hidden from the trail behind dense brush. Each of the women had been carrying a walkman. The Hispanic man demanded nothing and took nothing. No money, no jewelry. To Rosmo, these are not robberies. They are attempted sexual assaults. And he comes to believe the same thing was done to Chandra Levy. Look at how remote this is. It's quiet. There aren't any other witnesses. So this is an ideal spot for a predator to attack somebody. When Rosmo lays the attacks out by date, they fall into a tight cluster in the spring of 2001 on that one isolated stretch of trail near the Pierce Mill. Holly Schilling attacked in mid-May, two weeks after that. A man exposing himself to a massage therapist on the same ground that same month. Dusty Weigand pulled into a ravine on the 1st of July. And then nothing. The attacks end completely the week the man is caught. We took a look at the location where Sharna's body was found. And then we looked at the locations where the attacks on the two female joggers had occurred. There's no one else around. Attacks like that in the park are really rare. And when you've got three of them in a very short time period, that calls for them to be looked at as being connected. Connected crimes. We know that he lived just to the east of Rock Creek Park. And there were no similar attacks after they arrested him. It made Juan Dickey stand out like a neon sign. He had to be considered a viable suspect and needed to be explored further. There is one more thing the map shows. The place where the man attacked Holly Schilling is about half a mile from the ravine where Shandra's remains are found. Seven weeks after those remains turn up, in July of 2002, Levy detectives finally walked the ground where Holly fought free. And they put it in their investigative report in plain words, quote, this site is easy walking distance from the Levy crime scene. So what do we know about the man already in prison? Juan Dickey came to the United States illegally from El Salvador. He made his way through Mexico. He swam across the Rio Grande into Texas. He made his way to Houston. And then he made his way to Washington, D.C. He's got a family in El Salvador that's deeply impoverished. He was born in 1981 in the early years of El Salvador's civil war, which takes his father before he's born. When Juan Dickey's mother is three months pregnant, his father is killed by a government death squad. The boy grows up in a house with a dirt floor. His mother remarries. And Juan Dickey will later say his stepfather and mother beat him. He struggles in school and drops out in the seventh grade. At 14, he is working in the fields. Now in Washington, D.C., Juan Dickey is 19 and takes whatever work a man without papers can find and for a while holds it together. But not for long. He drinks heavily. He smokes marijuana and snorts cocaine when he can get it. He drifts from job to job. By the time the D.C. detectives come looking for him, Juan Dickey has been in prison for a long time. Juan Dickey has been in and out of the prison system for years, moving from one facility to the next. In one prison, he mails obscene drawings to a woman he's never met. In another, he exposes himself to the female guards. Somewhere along the way, he joins MS-13, the violent Salvadoran gang. This is the man to whom Rosmo's map keeps pointing back. Then there is the 1st of May, 2001. On the day Chandra Levy vanishes, Juan Dickey does not show up for work. Days later, his landlady sees him with a fat lip, a bloody eye, scratches at his throat. She asks him what happened. He tells her he got in a fight with his girlfriend, that she hit him. The landlady doesn't believe him, because she knows they broke up. And his girlfriend is small. Whoever did this fought back hard. 17 months later, in October of 2002, a pair of snipers begins shooting people out the back of a car across the Washington, D.C. area. Spoiler alert, we are covering this story on "MK Confidential" soon. The FBI pulls Brad Garrett off the Levy case to help hunt the D.C. snipers. The press goes too. The Levy case recedes once again. Juan Dickey sits in prison for the two park attacks. No one is building a murder case against him. Law enforcement, is not focused on Chandra Levy. And her case goes cold again. Five years later, the Chandra Levy case is revived, thanks to a new police chief and a newspaper. Charles Ramsey is gone, replaced by Kathy Lanier. In 2007, soon after she takes over, Lanier meets Susan Levy at police headquarters. When Susan holds out her hand, Lanier hugs her instead and comes out of the meeting vowing to solve the Chandra case. One of the two original detectives has retired. Lanier removes the other, Ralph Durant, and hands the case to two veterans, Todd Williams and Anthony Brigidini. The new detectives pull Chandra's clothing and Juan Dickey's as well, out of the evidence lockers, and send both for the DNA testing no one had run in 2001. And they start monitoring Juan Dickey's mail and phone calls from prison. When the results come back, the DNA does not establish a tie between Juan Dickey and Chandra. The testing that was supposed to break the case wide open hands them nothing they can put in front of a jury. What finally shakes the case loose is a newspaper. In the summer of 2008, the Washington Post runs a 13-part investigation. Who killed Chandra Levy? By Sari Horowitz, Scott Higgum, and Sylvia Moreno. Not enough attention was being paid to a suspect who was hiding in plain sight. The series clears Gary Condit and names Juan Dickey as the most likely killer, though it offers little in the way of hard evidence. It puts the reinvestigation and everything the police had missed on the front page for 13 straight days. A few days before it starts, Horowitz asks police chief Lanier what she hopes it will do. "Stir things up," Lanier says. "Sometimes people do come forward." 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. The reinvestigation also surfaces something buried since 2001. When the park police first arrested Juan Dickey, he told an officer he had seen Chandra Levy in Rock Creek Park and that he found her. The officer remembered it, but for seven years, that information never made it into any report. Through all of it, one thing never changes. Juan Dickey does not leave prison. From his arrest in the summer of 2001, through the cold years and the reinvestigation, he stays locked up for the two park attacks. When the detectives finally go looking for their man, they already have him in a cell in California. In September of 2001, two months after the series of articles, a team of D.C. detectives flies to the federal prison at Victorville in the California desert, where Juan Dickey is finishing his sentence for those park attacks. The detectives have done their homework. They have read the park police reports from 2001, and they know how an officer named Joe Green once talked Juan Dickey into admitting the two park attacks by offering him a less despicable version of the story. They sit down, get Juan Dickey down. They ask him for a DNA sample, and then they run a bluff. They tell him they already have his DNA on evidence from the Chandra Levy case, and they wait. Juan Dickey doesn't flinch. If they have his DNA, he tells them, they should charge him with murder. They press him. Why would his DNA be on Chandra Levy's things? He gives them a line the detectives will not forget, one that is not a confession and not quite a denial, either. So what if I touched her? It is the closest thing to an admission anyone will ever get from Juan Dickey. Not, "I never met her." Not, "I never touched her." Not, "Who's Chandra Levy?" Instead, "So what if I did?" The detectives write it down word for word. It's nowhere near enough to charge a man with murder, but it is the first time Juan Dickey has placed himself anywhere near Chandra Levy, and he's done it in his own words. The detectives turn to the fat lip and the scratches from May 1, 2001, seven years earlier. He tells them two men robbed him. They remind him he had told his landlady it was his girlfriend. Juan Dickey splits the difference. The lip from the robbery, the scratches from the girlfriend. While the detectives are in the room with him, prison officials are searching his cell. Tucked among his things, kept by his bed, They find a photograph of Chandra, clipped from a magazine. It is an odd thing for someone with allegedly no connection to her to have bedside seven years after she vanished from a city 2,000 miles away. They saw a photo of Shondra Levy in his cell, right by his bed, which was very odd. And as they were talking to Juan Dique, they saw something else that really struck them as odd. They saw a tattoo of a woman on his body. And as they looked at this tattoo, they believed that it resembled Shondra Levy. There is one more thing they learn about the man at Victorville. In early 2009, as the murder case against him is coming together, an inmate tips off prison officials that Juan Dique is planning to break out. On February 26, guards pull him from his cell and search it. They find the makings of a weapon and an escape kit, loose razor blades and double-avers. They find a battery, a filed-down sliver of toenail clipper, and a homemade knife. Two of the blades lash together with strips of plastic. Juan Dique will not be going anywhere. So the detectives move on to the one thing that could actually make a case, a witness. That witness is a man named Armando Morales, and you'll be hearing quite a bit about him. Armando Morales is a Fresno, California native, a lifetime criminal with a long, violent record of violent crimes, guns, drugs, and so on. He was a cellmate of Ingmar Juan Dique in Kentucky in 2006. Morales comes forward in 2009 while the reopened Levy case is searching for anyone who can tie Juan Dique to the killing. He's been in federal prison since the 1990s, serving a long sentence on drug charges, a lifelong criminal with a violent record, and Morales is not the kind of man, the jury's usually trust. What makes prosecutors listen is that Morales asks for nothing. He is also not the first inmate to say Juan Dique has talked. Over the years, several jailhouse witnesses did and their stories did not always match. Juan Dique's defense will seize on this fact later, but Morales is the witness around whom the prosecution decides to build its case. Juan Dique and Morales belong to allied gangs, and for six weeks in a Kentucky cell, they talked. Armando Morales and Ingmar Juan Dique belong to a similar gang affiliation, and as a result, they consider themselves brothers. They were honest with each other, they looked out for each other in prison. They talked about everything together. According to Armando Morales, one of the things they talked about was the whole Sean J. Levy case. According to Morales, Juan Dique was desperate to correct one thing in particular. In prison, a man marked as a rapist is a target. And Juan Dique knew the word was he had raped and killed the intern. Morales said Juan Dique wanted Morales to understand that he had only done one of those two things, the killing. Morales's account carries one detail in particular on which prosecutors seize. He says Juan Dique confessed that he grabbed Chandra from behind on the trail, dragged her into the bushes, and took her fanny pack before he ran. To prosecutor Amanda Haynes, that fanny pack was the only thing he knew. She says the fanny pack was the only thing he knew. She argues it is exactly the kind of inside detail only the killer could know, and that Morales could only have gotten it from the man who committed the crime. However, even Haynes does not actually know whether Chandra was carrying a fanny pack. None is ever recovered, not at the scene, not anywhere. Nothing in the physical evidence and no witness other than Morales ever establishes that Chandra was carrying one that day. The single source for the fanny pack is the police. The police are looking for Chandra. The trial opens in Washington on October 25, 2010, more than nine years after Chandra disappeared. The lead prosecutor, Amanda Haynes. Amanda Haynes was one of the most senior homicide prosecutors in Washington, DC. She was so good, they put her on the most difficult assignments, and that's cold cases. Amanda Haynes had a way of relating to the jury. She can tell a story and make people see the crime scene and see the final moments of the victim's lives. In the evening, Haynes names the thing that had cost the case so many years. The investigation, she tells the jury, had been pulled off course by the affair between the intern and the congressman. This case, she says, is also about the secrets of a man named Gary Condit. Then she sets Condit aside and turns to the man in the defendant's chair. This is not an easy case to prove. There is no physical evidence tying Guandique to the scene, she admits that. There is no confession on the record. The medical examiner, working from remains that lay out in the open for more than a year, could never determine how Chandra died, only that it was a homicide. What the state has is the pattern in the park, Guandique's own shifting stories, and a jailhouse witness named Morales, who says the defendant told him he did it. Morales is the case. When Amanda Morales took the witness stand, he was the only piece of evidence. That directly linked Imar Guandique to the death of Chandra Levy. To reporters watching in the courtroom, Morales is strong on the stand. He is calm, he's specific, and his story does not flatter anyone. He tells the jury Guandique insisted he had not raped Chandra, only killed her, an account that cuts against the defendant and against the prosecution's own earlier assumption that Chandra had been sexually assaulted, which is exactly why it lands. For the jurors, it will come down to whether they believe Morales. There is no weapon to hold up, no fingerprints, no video, no DNA linking him to the crime. There is the pattern in the park, and there is the man from the Kentucky cell. The defense tells a very different story. Guandique's public defenders argue that the government has taken a man guilty of two ugly park attacks and used those crimes to pin a murder on him it could not otherwise solve. It's not a hard story to tell. For years, the police have chased the wrong man in full public view and have been mocked mercilessly in the media. Now the defense says they need a conviction, so they've reached for the easiest target: an illegal immigrant with no alibi and a record of violence in that very park. Morales, they say, is a career criminal, telling a jailhouse story no one can verify in a case with no cause of death, no physical evidence, and no confession. Anyone recorded. Suspicion is not proof, they tell the jury. Similarity is not identity. The defense has one more card. A small amount of DNA from an unknown man was found on Chandra's leggings, matching no one who was tested, not Guandique, not Condit, not the technicians who handled the leggings. The prosecution calls it contamination. The defense asked the jury to consider that it might belong to the actual man. In her closing argument, prosecutor Amanda Haynes tells the jury how she thinks Chandra died. It is a story Haynes tells with confidence, but one Chandra's remains could never prove. She describes a young woman attacked on the trail, bound and gagged, Haynes theorizes, left unable to call for help, dying alone in the ravine of exposure and thirst. Then Haynes says the thing the defense will seize upon. No one really knows how Chandra died. Chandra Levy died. What Haynes asks the jury to know is who killed her. The jury takes the decision. the case on a Friday. Deliberations run into a third day, then a fourth. Notes come out of the room. Everyone in the courthouse starts watching the jury room door. A lot of people thought that this was going to be a hung jury. We did not think all 12 jurors would be able to come back with a verdict. Much to our surprise, three and a half days later, they come back. On November 22nd, 2010, after three and a half days, the jury comes back with a verdict. Guilty of first-degree murder. Guandique tears the translation headphones from his ears. Outside the courtroom, Chandra's mother, Susan Levy, speaks. She has waited nine years for this. The results of the verdict may be guilty, but I have a lifetime sentence of a lost limb missing from our family tree. Three months later, on February 11th, 2011, Guandique is sentenced to 60 years in prison. At the hearing, Susan Levy stands a few feet from him and speaks to him directly. She looked him in the eye and she said, you know, you are a hideous creature. You are lower than a cockroach. You should rot in hell. And it was very dramatic. She then pleaded for the truth about Chandra's murder. Did you really take her, she asked. Look into my eyes right now and tell me. Guandique shakes his head. The judge interrupts and tells her, Susan, she cannot speak to Guandique directly. Susan looks at the judge, then back to the man convicted of killing her baby girl. She adds one line, and finally, fuck you. And then she sits down. When his turn comes, Guandique tells the court he is sorry for what happened to Chandra Levy, but that he had nothing to do with it. For the Levy family, after nine years and nine months, it is the closest thing to an answer anyone has ever handed them. A jury heard the case and found that the man in the park killed their daughter. Bob and Susan Levy fly home to Modesto, believing it's finally over. But the whole of that verdict rests on the word of one man, Armando Morales. He has told the jury he wanted nothing for his testimony. He has told the jury he had never been an informant in his life. Neither of those things was true. That man had nothing to do with it. That man has not told the jury everything. Next time on MK Confidential, a woman with seven hours of secret recordings, a letter the prosecution never turned over, and a conviction nine years in the making, undone by a single witness. In July of 2016, a woman who calls herself Babs Proler is living out of a country inn in Sweden in Annapolis, Maryland. She has just been evicted from her home, and she has her golden retriever, Buddy, with her. One afternoon, the hotel's sliding glass lobby door closes on the dog, and Buddy, spooked, will not move or go back inside. A man Babs has never seen before quickly crosses the lobby to help. He gathers the animal up and carries the dog into the hotel for her. I thought he was a dog lover, she will say later. He tells her his name is Phoenix. Babs shares her story with ABC's 2020. They become friends over the next few days. Phoenix watches Buddy when Babs needs the help. They talk about Buddhism, about the military, about a daughter he says he lost somewhere in his life. Then he begins to fill in the rest. He has just gotten out of prison. And he shows her his prison identification to prove it. 20 years inside. I said, 20 years? You must have almost killed someone to be in for 20 years. And his answer was, I wish it would have only been one person. He tells her the things he did to get there. The things he lets her know he is still capable of. He tells her that a man can melt 10 foam cups down into a single shank, drive it through another man's eye, and, in his words, penetrate that shell into their brain and take their life. What turns their friendship is the violence of his talk and the fear that comes with it. The fear that he might make good on a threat against her ex-husband. So she does the only thing she can think to do to protect herself. On July 11th, quietly, she begins to record him in the car, driving around Annapolis, and on the concrete floor of her storage unit while he helps her move. I only started taping because I truly was afraid. By the end, she has about seven hours of Phoenix talking. The man, who calls himself Phoenix, is named Armando Morales, a five-time felon and a leader of a California prison gang. Six years earlier, his was the single voice that persuaded a jury to send Ingmar Guandique to prison for 60 years for the murder of Chandra Lee. He is living in this hotel because the government has put him here. Morales is about to be its star witness all over again, because there will be a second trial. The conviction his testimony delivered has been thrown out. And here is why. On the stand, Morales swore he had never been a government informant, that speaking up about Guandique was the first time in his life he had ever helped law enforcement. But that was not true. And the proof was sitting in the government's own files. A letter documenting that Morales had cooperated with authorities before, years before he ever said a word about Guandique. A rule called Brady, from the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, requires prosecutors to turn over any evidence like that, evidence that is potentially exculpatory or helpful to the defendant, to the defense. Here, the letter undermined the credibility of the case. The defense was entitled to it. But the prosecution never produced the letter until 2011. The Fresno County Sheriff's Department alerted the U.S. Attorney's Office prosecuting Guandique that its star witness had cooperated with law enforcement in the past, exactly what he swore under oath he had never done. Fresno County had interviewed Morales years earlier. That forced the disclosure into the open. The defense seized on it, and in 2015, a judge vacated Guandique's conviction and ordered a new trial set for the fall of 2016. The U.S. Attorney's Office still means to win this case by putting Morales back on the stand. But these tapes present a new and tricky problem. The Guandique case has only ever rested on one man's word, which means it is only ever as strong as that man's credibility, which is already compromised thanks to the lies he told on the stand in the first trial. In the summer of 2016, with the retrial just months away, Armando Morales' credibility remains the single most valuable thing the government has, and that is not a good thing. On these tapes, he sounds nothing like the man the jury saw. None of the reformed witness who claims to have found God, and a conscience behind bars, just a gang thug counting off hand grenades and shanks and scores still to settle. Phoenix says a lot in those secret recordings, but there is one thing he never says. He never says the thing the woman recording him will later swear she heard, that is, that he lied on the witness stand and sent an innocent man to prison for the murder of Chandra Levy. Even so, those seven-year-old men who were in prison for the murder of Chandra Levy for seven hours recorded on a storage room floor inside a stranger's phone are about to destroy the government's plan to try Ingmar Guandique a second time. By the winter of 2011, it looks finished. A jury has found Ingmar Guandique guilty of murdering Chandra Levy. A judge has sentenced him to 60 years. For Bob and Susan Levy, after nearly 10 years, it is the closest thing to an answer that anyone gives them. But the verdict rests entirely on the word of one man, Armando Morales. Morales has been in federal prison since 1997, serving time on drug and weapons convictions, a career gang member from California. For about six weeks in 2006, he shared a cell with Guandique in a penitentiary in Kentucky. In 2009, as the reopened case searches for anyone who can tie Guandique to Chandra's murder, Morales comes forward with what he says he heard inside that cell. At the trial, he told the jury that Guandique confessed to the murder, that he grabbed Chandra Levy on a trail, took her fanny pack, and choked her, and never meant for her to die. Morales claimed to want nothing in return, and he told the jury plainly that he has never once been an informant in his life. life. There is no No forensic evidence, no fingerprints, no eyewitness to the killing, no video. Without Morales, there was no case, and the prosecution knew it. Bernie Grimm, a Washington defense attorney who sat in that courtroom and watched Morales testify, puts it plainly on Fox 5 News. He's a linchpin. They don't get to a jury without him. Without him, there's no forensics, there's no eyewitnesses. On the stand, Morales wrapped his account in a story of his own redemption. A hardened man who has found a conscience in prison and wants just this once to do the right thing and give a grieving family its answer. He was a compelling witness precisely because his story flatters no one and asks for nothing. Very compelling, very believable for these reasons. He wasn't perfect. A lot of informants will be perfect and say he admitted to me that he robbed the bank and all the details. He gave facts that were inconsistent with the government's theory of a sexual assault. He gave facts that didn't put Guandique in the worst light possible, which to me made it all the more believable. On Babs Proler's recordings six years later, that witness is nowhere to be found. What is on the tapes is a man who sounds like exactly what he assured the court he no longer was, a violent thug. Keith Alexander, a Washington Post reporter. A Washington Post reporter who listened to every hour of the tapes, hears it at once. When we listen to Armando Morales, he didn't sound like the same man who testified in court years ago. He still sounded like someone who was still very much involved in criminal activity. Then Babs Proler goes on television with a claim of her own. She says that Morales admitted on her secret recordings that he lied on the witness stand. And then he says, you know what, the prosecutors wanted me to lie. They knew they had the right guy. They just needed somebody to say it. He said that to you? Yes. And you had that on a recording? But that admission is not on the secret tapes. The Washington Post reporters who listen to every hour of the tapes say so, clearly. Here's Keith Alexander from the Post. She told us that Armando Morales lied about the fact that he marked Guandique. He admitted to him that he killed Sean Jalili. And we found out that wasn't the truth when we listened to those recordings ourselves. Far from taking anything back, Morales holds to his story on the tapes. He tells Proler that Guandique committed the killing. And when she presses him further, warns her, don't go there. What the recordings do is less dramatic than the admission Proler claimed, but just as lethal to the retrial. They show the government a witness. It can never again put in front of a jury. Babs Proler, it turns out, has had her own problems with honesty. An occasional actress, she has a criminal record of her own. In 2012, she was arrested for theft. In Pennsylvania, and later received three years probation in a case she says involved altering the price labels on toothbrushes. And there is a problem with the recordings themselves. Maryland requires the consent of both parties to tape a private conversation. So secretly recording Morales may itself have broken the law. But none of that changes what the tapes do. Babs never has to take the stand at all. She is not the prosecution's witness. If anything, her recordings would be used by the defense. The damage is done the moment the prosecutors sit and listen for themselves. Whatever Babs' credibility, it is Morales' that is terminally injured. This woman, who goes by the name of Babs Proler, she comes to the Washington Post and she has information. She's an occasional actress with the Netflix series House of Cards. We had no idea that this would be the woman. Who would blow the entire case apart. But the tapes, for all the noise around them, are not what freed Ingmar Guandique. His conviction was already gone. Gone over the hidden letter exposing Morales' lie about never having been an informant. For years, his public defenders had been chipping away at the one thing the case depended on. Whether the jury had been told the truth about who Armando Morales revealed. Or whether it really was. Two of the Washington Post reporters who spent years back inside the case do not soften what they found. Yeah, yeah, he committed perjury. He lied. This is not a technicality. The whole case was one witness. And the one fact that could have warned the jury about that witness' credibility stayed locked inside the government's own file. When the witness is the case, that is the kind of failure that undoes a verdict. It is why the conviction was thrown out. Even so, before the Babs-Proler tapes, the government did intend to try Guandique a second time with Morales back on the stand. Then Babs-Proler shows up. She takes her seven hours of recordings and turns them over to the prosecutors, to the defense, and to Chandra's own mother. On these recordings is the government's star witness, sounding like a man who never left the life he swore he had reformed. The prosecutors do the math. Morales is ruined. They can never put this guy in front of a jury again. The hidden letter is what undoes the conviction, but the tapes are what cost the government its second trial. On July 28, 2016, before the second trial begins, the government drops the murder charge against Ingmar Guandique. Conceding, it can no longer prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he killed Chandra Levy. A stunning development in the 15-year-old murder case of Washington, D.C. intern Chandra Levy. Prosecutors suddenly dropped the case against the man who had previously been convicted of that crime. This truly was the craziest case ever to hit Washington, D.C. This was something that Hollywood writers could never even dream of. How could they let Guandique just go? It just seems so strange to me. Guandique has been locked up this entire time, since the summer of 2001. Dropping the murder charge does not set him free. He's a Salvadoran citizen with no legal right to be in our country. And the moment the criminal case ends, immigration authorities take him into custody for deportation. He never walks out onto an American street a free man. From a detention center in Virginia, Guandique tells this to Washington Post. But in August 2025, the D.C. Court of Appeals, which has the final say on this matter, spares Amanda Haynes an active suspension, imposing 60 days, but immediately staying it for a year of probation, calling her failure a seemingly honest mistake rather than an intentional misdeed. So where does all of that leave this case? A dismissal is not an acquittal, and it is not an exoneration. Those are three very different words, and the difference between them is everything. An acquittal is a jury saying, no, no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this person did it. An exoneration is proof that the state had the wrong man. This guy did not do it. A dismissal is the government throwing its hands up and saying it can no longer meet its burden. That is what happens here. The murder charge against Ingmar Guandique collapses on a document the prosecution fails to turn over and a witness who falls apart. after the fact, and not one piece of that is proof that the man he was accusing did not kill Chandra Levy. Morales' implosion does not tell you whether Guandique committed this crime. Only the evidence can do that, and the evidence still points at one man. Once investigators finally move past Gary Condit, Guandique is the only suspect they ever charge. The man already in prison for attacking two women on these same trails. Look at what the years of investigation actually revealed. A geographic profiler maps a run of knife attacks on lone women to one isolated stretch of Rock Creek Park in the weeks around Chandra's disappearance and finds that they stop exactly when Guandique is jailed. A park police detective shows Guandique Chandra's photograph in the scene. Summer of 2001, and Guandique admits that he has seen Chandra in the park and thought she was pretty. An admission the detective leaves out of his report, and that no one on the Levy case will hear for seven years. Guandique does not turn up for work. The morning Chandra vanishes and surfaces days later with a fat lip and scratches, for which he gives multiple explanations. When detectives finally sit across from him, in a California prison, and bluff that they have his DNA, he does not say he has never met this woman. He says, so what if I touched her? In his prison cell, next to his bed, they find a photograph of Chandra Levy clipped from a magazine, seven years after she vanished from a city 2,000 miles away. None of this standing alone is proof of anything. Put together and set alongside the cellmate's testimony about a confession, it is why a jury says the word guilty. There is another set of facts, however, that never fit the tidy version. The ones that the people closest to Chandra have always wrestled with. Her family says flatly that Chandra does not run outdoors, that she keeps to the treadmill at her gym, and the shoes she works out in are still in her apartment. The Western Ridge Trail, where she is found, is not a smooth jogging path, but a rough horse trail, broken by rocks and roots, the kind even experienced hikers pick their way across. It does not seem like terrain she would run on or walk on for a nature stroll. Inside Chandra's apartment, too, there are oddities. A clean comforter lies on the floor just inside her door, which is not like her. A small amount of an unidentified man's DNA is on her clothing, and it matches no one who has ever tested, with the defense asking the jury to wonder whose it is. Her keys, the bracelet Gary Condit gave her, and an engraved ring, the one she wore on her pinky with her initials, are never found. None of that proves Guandique innocent. What it explains is why the people who know Chandra best still have real questions about how she died. Some of them never make their peace with the verdict at all. Chandra's aunt, Linda Zansky, tells French journalist Hélène Coutard that she never believed Guandique was guilty. His arrest in 2009 brought Linda no relief. Linda continued to believe that Condit was somehow involved, an enduring suspicion, but one that has never been proven. Jill McCann, the retired homicide detective the Levy's hired, is sure from the first morning, that Chandra was murdered, and he never comes to believe Guandique is the killer. The case against him, McCann says, is thin. A jailhouse informant and some scratches, and you could, he likes to say, build a case like that against almost anyone. He has a guess about who really killed Chandra, but he will not say. What he will say is that he does not believe every piece of evidence in Chandra Levy's murder was ever brought into the light. Even Chandra's own parents come to doubt that Guandique is the killer, though only with time. Twelve years later, Chandra's parents also tell Hélène that their certainty is gone. I thought he was guilty at the time, Bob says. Susan puts it another way. They never proved it, she says, but I acted as if, because I needed to. According to Hélène, Susan has decided that Guandique's murder means just us. Then there is the Congressman. Gary Condit spends the summer of 2001 as the most watched and most suspected man in America. Police say he is cleared, that his alibi checks out. He is never charged, but none of that puts him back together. In March of 2002, Condit loses his seat, beaten in his own Democratic primary by his former chief of staff, Cardoza, by some 18 points, a rout in a district that has been his for 13 years. He leaves Washington for Arizona, where he and his family buy a pair of Baskin-Robbins ice cream franchises that end in a lawsuit and close. He sues over the lurid theories spun about him, among the targets the writer Dominic Dunn, and the cases settle out of court, the terms never disclosed. In 2016, Condit pulls out of court, and he is found guilty of a murder. Condit is sentenced to 10 years in prison. He is sentenced to 12 years in prison. Condit is sentenced to 12 years in prison. In 2016, Condit publishes a memoir, laying out his side of a story the world has already told 10,000 times without him. He calls the book Actual Malice, the standard of proof in a defamation case brought by a public figure. That same year, promoting the book, he sits down with Dr. Phil and breaks 15 years of silence on television. I obviously think it's an injustice that's been handed to the family. The person who committed the crime and tragically killed Chandra Levy is free. And I would like the Levy family to know that I have fully cooperated. I've done everything that I could to be helpful. And I want people to know that you, in fact, ask us to invite the Levys to participate in this, to be involved in this, and they declined to do that. But you're not avoiding that, in fact, you said, please invite them to be a part of this. You're being completely transparent with them. I'm trying to be. The Levy family, you have made very clear, are the victims here. You don't consider yourself a victim. No, I'm not the victim in this. The real victim of this is Chandra and her family. There's no justice for what happened to her. Even then, even under the gentlest questioning, he will not say out loud whether he and Chandra were involved. Romantically, why is it you will not answer publicly whether or not you had a sexual relationship with Chandra Levy? Dr. Phil, I haven't, you know, answered that question publicly for for 15 years, and I'm not going to change my position or my view on that today or probably any time in the future. He has even been made to face it under oath. In November of 2010, subpoenaed and sworn, Condit takes the witness stand at Guandique's murder trial. And even there, with Chandra's parents a few feet away, he gives up as little as the questions allow. MK Confidential reached out to Gary Condit and invited him to sit for an interview. He did not respond. Here is where the case officially stands as of today. No one else has ever been charged. In the eyes of the law, the murder of Chandra Levy is unsolved. For the people who love her, there is no version of this. That ends. Bob and Susan Levy have done everything that is ever asked of them. The travel, the media interviews, the searches, the vigils, the waiting, and the trial. They hear a jury say the word guilty out loud in a courtroom. Then they sit and watch a court take it back. They bury Chandra outside Modesto, next to her grandparents, under a stone that reads on all three graves the same words, We are not here. Because none of them are really there, Bob says. They are in our hearts. At the end of all of it, Bob and Susan are left without the one answer that would last. We don't like the word closure. Nobody really likes it. It's lost to anybody. We hate that word. More than 20 years on, Bob and Susan Levy sat down in Paris with the French journalist Alain Coutard, who was writing a book about the case. The couple talk about the daughter they've lost, and about the life they have lived ever since. In the years following Chandra's disappearance, they have tried to live the way they believe she would have wanted them to. The little girl they called Ladybug. Chandra dreamed of seeing Antarctica, so they go. And now they travel somewhere every year. Everywhere they go, Ladybugs seem to find them. In Berlin, in Moscow, in Finland, in Mongolia. And for a moment, they smile. But the grief has never truly left their house. We seem functional, Susan says, but sometimes we're not. cannot make himself return to Linda Zamsky's house in Chesapeake City, Maryland, where he last saw Chandra alive. On their phones, they keep the pictures, Chandra in Tanzania with her tongue stuck out and a giraffe behind her, and they pass the phone back and forth. Two decades on, the anger, Susan says, is mostly gone, and what replaces it is a decision to live the way Chandra would have wanted, and a refusal, as she puts it, to become bad people. MK Confidential spoke with Susan Levy for this series. She said she and Bob are not satisfied with the answers or lack thereof they've received about their daughter's murder. Chandra's mother pointed to the many mistakes made by DC police and wondered aloud whether there was something more sinister at play here. She wonders why they didn't go ahead with retrying Guandique if they really thought he killed Chandra. Susan noted that Gary Connick, who was the father of Chandra's daughter, was the one who killed her. Had access to government secrets at the time Chandra died and told us, quote, was there something that wasn't meant to be found out? What are they all covering up? There's a lot of lying and a lot of cover-ups, and so it leaves us with unanswered questions. This story should end not with the men whose names wound up attached to hers, but with Chandra. She grows up in California, an oncologist's daughter who keeps four birds. She loves the San Francisco Giants and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and once sits with her father through the 1989 World Series, the game and earthquake stopped and never forgets it. In her high school yearbook, she writes seven words. Always have dreams, always make them reality. She believes those words enough to move clear across the country, all alone, to the capital of the free world, seeking to make something of herself. At a kitchen table in Maryland, and on long walks with her Aunt Linda, she lays her whole future out in the open. Finish the internship. Land the job she has wanted since she was a girl. Then, in about five years, at 29 or 30, the thing she talks about more than any career, a husband, children, a family of her own. She has planned it nearly to the year, and she thinks she's found her life partner. None of it happens. What comes instead is that this young woman vanishes on a spring afternoon. And for more than a year, police search and argue and look in the wrong places while she lies on a slope inside Rock Creek Park. I think you learn to see what important things in life is, and what trivial things there are. Her parents are never handed a definitive answer about their daughter's murder. What they have instead is a small red beetle that keeps finding them. On a windowsill at home. On a hotel curtain half a world away. On the worst days. And on the ordinary ones. It's been a while now, and you just get used to everything. You hate to get used to it, but that's the way it is. What else can you do but go on? I'm Megyn Kelly. This is MK Confidential. Join me next week for a new case.