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

East.

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and today's Sunday mega

episode. Today we bring you all five episodes of our MK confidential series on Shondra Leavey. What was true about Gary Condod's relationship with Shondra Leavey 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 Megan Kelly podcast feeds and YouTube channel in the meantime enjoy this one and we are back on Monday. It is a beautiful late summer morning in September

2001 and the biggest missing person story in America is about to have its biggest day.

“Important new questions in the case of Shondra Leavey. Missing intern Shondra Leavey is a 24-year-old woman”

disappeared without a trace. Will Shondra Leavey 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. DC police detectives and FBI agents out tonight looking for more clues in this most unusual missing person's case. And this is the morning. It comes to a head.

Across the country at this moment in California Bob and Susan Leavey are packing for a flight to Chicago where they are booked to tell their daughter story on Oprah and then they will fly to New York for the today show. The congressman's son Chad Condett is preparing to defend his father

“on the view in New York City. For four months the country has asked two questions non-stop”

about a 24-year-old intern named Shondra Leavey. Where is she and was a sitting congressman Gary Condett involved in her disappearance. The parallels with the crimson affair about striking and obvious all over this time because of Shondra's disappearance much more serious. The police investigation is stole until Shondra is found either dead or alive until then this country remains in the grip of speculation. Today on live television both sides are set to make their case.

At 846 AM Eastern Time, American Airlines Flight 11 hits the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Yes, it's September 11th. This just in you are looking at obviously very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center and we have unconfermed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers. There is a major incident in Lower Manhattan. We just got a report and that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center

in New York City. The interviews never happened. Within minutes the satellite trucks that have

encamped outside the Leavey'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. What happened to Shondra?”

I'm Megan 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 Shondra Leavey's final months in Washington. At 24 Shondra Leavey is nearly finished with what she came to Washington DC to do. The 5 foot 4 110-pound brunette grew up in Modesto, California in farm country with a ranch house and a pool up 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 was a like-bang at home.

Shondra is their first child and her father's princess. He has called her Leavey bug

since she was a little girl at summer camp. "Chandra, as early as he has strong, we were on trips sometimes. He just walked away from us because she wanted 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 Shondra joins the police explorers, the program for teenagers who think they

might want to work in law enforcement. Shondra's mother later recalled that early taste of police work in a documentary for investigation discovery. "And high school she actually got

and she was good at it." "You felt like you were very content with the program for there."

“"Oh yeah." Shondra studies criminal justice at San Francisco State and goes on to pursue a”

master's at USC. She wants a job with the FBI, maybe the CIA. Despite her ambition, she stays close to her family. "They have a memories when we travel because that's when we were closest to this family. When we would drive in San Francisco back, they would say the whole star or trilogy. By heart, the dialogue for all three movies." In the fall of 2000, Shondra 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 Shondra wants.

She sublets a studio apartment in DuPont Circle, a neighborhood of Roe 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 Jim afterward, then home. She knows few people and the person she speaks with most is her mother. By the last week of April 2001, Shondra has been working in Washington for eight months and her internship is ending. Shondra 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 29, Shondra 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 Shondra's voice. The next day, April 30, she works out at the Washington Sports Club. The people at that

Jim appear to be the last ones to have seen Shondra alive. She was very upbeat and looking forward

to going home. The morning of Tuesday may first, 2001, is the last ordinary day of Shondra

leaves life. She sits down her laptop, set up on a makeshift desk and a hallway nook of her apartment. Investigators will later rebuild the morning, almost minute by minute. She signs on at 10 27am and moves from site to site. The judge report, National Geographic, Amtrak, Southwest Airlines, at 1045am, she emails her mother a list of Southwest fares for the trip home. Six days out, she is still pricing the flight. At 1126, she hits the Washington Post Weather Page. It calls

for fair skies and temperatures near 80. At 1133, she opens a Washington Post Guide to Rock Creek Park. A minute later, she clicks a map of the parks hiking trails. At 1224pm, she logs off. That is the last confirmed trace of Shondra leavey. 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 Shondra 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, DC. 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 DC right up to the Maryland state line. It has bridal 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 isolated wooded trails where a runner can quickly find herself out of sight and entirely alone. Shondra's family and friends say she was not a

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 day's pass and her parents cannot reach Shondra. Shondra calls home. She always calls home,

always. Now the phone rings through to her voice mail again and again. We call her up and she didn't have a phone at a messy machine. I kept calling and calling and she never answered and I got worried about it. He got very upset and he felt something was wrong. Susan is normally the free spirit of the family. By the second week of silence, she has gone quiet. Back in the leavey ranch home, the phone becomes the center of everything. Every time it rings, they hope it's Shondra.

The messages the leavey's leave on their daughter's machine grow more blunt and more desperate

as each day passes. Dammit Shondra, Bob says in one of them, call me. 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 Shondra to be home by now, days from graduating. To her family, that silence is not like Shondra 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 seemed that honors. She was top in her class, thought of the 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 DC police. At the time that Shondra Levy was reported is missing. The number of missing persons in the district probably seeded 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 have packed, clothes, still hanging in the closet, dishes in the sink, a William 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 an 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 Shandra. What troubles the detectives 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 her 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 apartments. Brad Garrett, a veteran FBI agent, who works the Shandra leavey 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 least going to take an ID. There are 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 Shandra 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 Trainam spent years working homicides in Washington. This she just dropped off the face of the earth

voluntarily. Is she missing under suspicious circumstances but still alive? Could she have been the

capital, Shandra is one missing name among a few hundred that month. In Modesto, she is the only one.

“Peace went to room and found everything there. You know 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 DC by the police department's own count are teenagers who run away on their own in our back within a few days or weeks. Many of those kids are from the neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park and across Vienna, Costa, or much of

the city's violence plays out in the streets. Shandra is none of that. A 24-year-old woman who calls home like clockwork, gone without a trace from a quiet block in Northwest DC. In the days after her parents report Shandra missing, they stopped waiting for answers and

“begins 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.

Once 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 the office of Democrat Congressman Gary Condit. Susan recognizes the name immediately. 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. Delments from California's recognized for two minutes? It is a tremendous cost to the committee into 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 Shandra 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 Shandra 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 calls. By now the police have taken Shandra'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 Shandra had been reported to police. He never gives his name. It's 145,

sorry, I've been fired up for a lot of today's show. Timmy Paul gave me a

“rundown about what the schedule is. I think you're looking pretty good for me today. I've picked”

slowly up from it anyway. He made up. The voice belongs to Gary Condit, the Congressman who had just played down how well he knew Shandra 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 and passed. Two messages in his own voice left days after she vanished,

asking Shandra Levy for her schedule and a call back. 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 person's 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 Conditz name

the secret Shandra kept the other women who come forward and sixty-seven 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 Shandra leave his 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. He phrased it exactly like this. There's a young woman an intern who's missing

from her apartment in northwest DC and she was having an affair with a Congressman. And the person hung up. A missing intern, a Congressman, and alleged affair. One anonymous sentence. For about two weeks, Shandra leavey is a small local story. A missing intern in a city with hundreds of missing person's 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 Shandra

“leavey and onto Democrat Congressman Gary Condit. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential.”

By now, Shandra leavey 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. Shandra's mother Susan later recalled the discovery to ABC's Deborah Roberts. 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 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 Miss leavey says she's a great person and a good friend.

“He says she frequently visited his capital Hill office. A staffer for the Congressman says there”

was no romantic relationship between the Congressman and Miss leavey. 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 Shandra leavey.

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. Shandra, new to Washington, is making every connection she can to help build a career. One afternoon, she and her friend from USC, Jennifer Baker, who is also from Modesto, drop in unannounced at the capital Hill office of their own Congressman, Gary Condit. By all accounts, Condit is happy to see two friendly constituents. It 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 Shandra walks out with a crush. A few days later, Shandra 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 Adam's Morgan, minutes from Condit's apartment in thousands of miles from Modesto and Gary's wife. And within weeks, by her aunts later account,

Shandra will be spending two and sometimes three nights a week in that apartment. For a long time, only one person in Shandra'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 was closer to her age and lives an hour and a half up the road in Chesapeake City, Maryland. The family Shandra could actually get to, and the one person she trusts with the truth.

Over Thanksgiving 2000 and Passover the following spring, a long walks and long conversations, Shandra tells Linda about her man in Washington. She calls him "my guy," but the aunt knows

in Modesto, give up his seat in Congress and start a family with Shandra. 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 and federal law enforcement, and then start the life she's been striving for. Her co-worker Sven Jones hears the same thing from Shandra 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 see making a life with. The man her aunt knows is Gary Condit, and whatever Shandra believes about their future, the secrecy of the present runs on his terms. By Zamsky's account there are rules and Shandra recites them to her. Allegedly, if she and Condit ride the elevator in his apartment building and someone else gets on, Shandra 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 identification when she goes to see Gary Condit. To reach him, her aunt says, Shandra dials a private line, waits through soft music, and leaves a message.

“And one rule Shandra 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. Shandra sees a future together. Condit in her telling builds a system to make sure no one else sees the present. Gary Condit is 53 years old. He's been married to his high school sweetheart Carolyn for 34 years. They have two grown children, Chad and Katie. His wife lives at their home in California. Gary lives in Washington in his condo alone. Caroline comes to visit that spring but

only briefly for a luncheon hosted by First Lady Laura Bush. Condit is the son of a Baptist

preacher, a Democrat from Modesto. Condit helped found the blue dog Democrats a block of fiscally conservative moderate Dems, who broke from their party's left. A mural of a big blue dog

“hangs in his congressional office beside a photo of Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich. Condit”

is well-liked. He's telegenic, good-looking. Shandra thinks he looks like Harrison Ford. So while groomed that colleagues call him Mr. Blowdry, and there is talk he could go higher still, which is the point. He is a man with a long marriage, a family, and a career he has spent decades building, all of it resting on a certain image. All of it at risk if the truth comes out about an affair with a missing intern. In public for months from the moment his name

surfaces, he will not admit the relationship was ever romantic. Not to the reporters camped outside his condo, not a national television, not to the country. The Washington DC Chief of Detectives Jack Barrett sees his investigators pull toward Condit like magnets to steal for one reason. From the very beginning he was trying to protect his professional reputation as a congressman. He was the one that created this problem for himself. We had no place to turn other than

to try and focus on him. In private, however, the story is not quite so one-dimensional. Behind closed doors and interviews with police, Condit acknowledges more. When detectives first sit down with Condit, he acknowledges that Chandra had come to his apartment, and on a few occasions, had stayed the night. When a sergeant asks him point blank whether the relationship was intimate, Condit refuses to be explicit, quote, "I don't think we need to go there," he says,

"and you can infer what you want with that." Weeks later in a third police interview, according to Washington Post Journalists Scott Higgum and Sorry Horowitz. Gary finally admits to the detectives that their had been a sexual affair, and admission that promptly leaks,

and that he never once repeats in public. Years later, long after it no longer matters,

this is as close as Gary Condit would come to publicly admitting to what affair was Chandra. Here's what he tells Dr. Phil in 2016. I saw her one time outside the office at a restaurant, and she came by my condo once. And here's the distinction on which the rest of this story turns. A man 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

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 to a place. That afternoon, Condit casts two votes on the House floor. Those events placed 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 DC 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 that you may have been one of the last people to really have spent any time, Ms. Chandra. With the police producing no timely answers, the leavey's 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 aid

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 their head "bendosexual relationship"

“between her and the congressman, she refused. And she goes public, telling Fox News she was afraid.”

I'd 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's 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 Zamski, 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 ID 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 detective 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 10pm on the night of July 9 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 lawmakers' 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, however, the search plays

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

“For three and a half hours, they pour over the fourth floor unit. They swab the bathroom floor,”

the door knob, the walls, the bathtub. They pull a hair from a shoe in his closet and lint from the closed 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, a whole apartment glowing and 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 Shondra. 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 aid drives Condit in a black jetter across the river to Alexandria, Virginia. The car pulls up to a curb near a McDonald's and a man named Daniel Olsen 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 jetter,

and pull 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-hoyer 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 coworker, 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 rushes 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 the thing 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 Shondra's underwear, matches Gary Condit. That result will answer the question "consuming Washington," but it does not answer the question "consuming Shondra's family." Where is she? To Jack Barrett, the DC Chief of

detectives, the DNA match, changes nothing. It only confirms what he had already deduced, that Condit and Shondra 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 Catey and Heidi Passichal, 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 aids to the ground while other paths go cold. The prosecutors see it differently. Condit has spent more time with Shondra in the past nine months than almost anyone alive to ignore him would be malpractice. As Catey put it, we spent the most amount of time on the person that spent

the most amount of time with Shondra. And both of them, in a way, are right. Which is how a case goes south. The affair is real, lies are real, the watchbox, the evasions, all of its real. And every hour spent proving that Gary Condit is a liar was an hour that no one spent looking for the young

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 all”

together. 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. An August 23rd, 2001, Condit sits down with ABC's

Connie Chung in prime time. 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 after another. Congressman Condit, do you know what happened to Chandra Levy? No, I did 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 I'll respect for my family and out of a specific 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 I have to respect for my family. Out of a specific request by the Levy family, it's best that I not get into details with the relationship. 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-month period 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 DC detectives, could not understand why Condit had agreed to the interview at all. It was preposterous, he just had 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 refused to speak plainly about the nature of his relationship with her daughter. She's not persuaded. I laughed about it because I thought I was so false, phony. Condit's infidelity's not only hurt the progress of the Levy investigation, they also throw his family into the spotlight. When folks start calling my dad a murder, 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 Sean Relevy one step closer at home. By the end of August, Sean Relevy has been missing for four months. Americano's almost everything about Gary Condit's private life and still has no idea where Sean Relevy is. But Sean Relevy will be found

and soon in Rockery Park. And that will send this case down a dark and twisted road.

Glover Road. One of the streets that cuts through Rockery Park in Washington, DC. 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 Sean Relevy. Black Creek Park is Dr. Typical Urban Park. It's a huge creek running through it. It's not 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 Sean Relevy. 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 width 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, Sean Relevy 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”

lapse in communication. Search the roads and trails versus just the roads. This is the summer the search for Sean Relevy misses almost everything that matters. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK confidential. While the country watches Congressman Gary Condett, the investigation behind the cameras is quickly coming apart. Across the country in Medesto, California, Seanre's parents' weight, Bob and Susan Levy do what their advisers 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 Seanre's return. I want my daughter home and I want her alive and I want the truth to come out. They're wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful person. I want to have faith that she will come back.

At the airport, television cameras film her holding one of Seanre's stuffed animals, a small yellow chick. Back in Medesto, 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.”

The other families whose own missing children draw almost no attention at all begin to pull away and the meetings stop. It couldn't just trust that the police could do all the work. There 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 Levi's hire Billy Martin, a former

federal prosecutor. Martin brings in two private investigators, both retired DC homicide detectives, Joe McCann, and Dwayne Stanton. They interview Seanre's friends and co-workers. They retrace her movements, set up their own tipline 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 Seanre is. Leeds a comment at all the time,

and took us down many, many different paths. This one particular night is 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 this name, but he's got this story to tell about Seanre being in California, and as we listened to it, it did sound credible. He was just looking for 15 minutes of fame.

nothing that was really nothing about Seanre. The PI's 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 listened to a TV show. The media was talking about it. It was every day. It was every night.

“It was nonstop. To understand how a case this big goes cold, you have to understand the department”

working it. In 2001, Washington DC 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. 1500 killings from the 1990s remain unsolved. In 2001 police clear fewer than half of the city's homicides, just 48.5%. The DC 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 DC 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 leavey case does not land with a seasoned murder squad. It lands in the second 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 an almost every respect, a department unready for the story about to break over its head. Start with the surveillance tapes. Shondra's building, the new port, is secure with a guard on duty around the clock and 13 cameras recording every face that comes and goes, but the system 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 Shondra 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. Unfortunately, that's what happened in this case.”

Then there's the laptop. Shondra 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, a trial, a computer expert still cannot fully explain what went wrong. What he can't explain

is the cost. It takes federal forensic examiner's nearly two months to recover Shondra's

browsing history from the damaged drive. When they do, they can finally see where her last hour

online was spent. From trained schedules and air fairs 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 Clingle Mansion. In July, they comb the grounds around the mansion, but find no evidence Shondra had been there. What receives less attention is the page Shondra 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 the search was only limited to that area of 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 DC Chief of Detectives Jack Barrett remembers it this way. This is something that we all have to live with as they 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

a few miles away, another story is unfolding, one no one thinks to connect with Shondras.

“Two weeks after Shondra vanishes, on the evening of May 14th, a tall woman named Hally Shilling,”

is attacked on a trail near the old pure smell in Rock Creek Park. She's a jogger, 30 years old, and a journalist. A man 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 Shondra. Seven weeks later, it happens again. On the evening of July 1st, a young woman named Christy Y-Gan is running in Rock Creek Park. She's not running alone. Her fiance pulls a head of

Christy on the path as he usually does. Before long, he is out of sight and Christy is alone on the trail. Y-Gan 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. A Christy Y-Gan is a former college roar 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 clip to her waist.

Whatever he wanted from Christy in that ravine, it wasn't money. This time the man does not get away. Y-Gan's description goes out over the police radio.

“The park police spin up a helicopter and flood the trails and within about 45 minutes too”

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 Shondra's apartment near Rock Creek Park, a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador, is trying to

establish a life in DC. He's been in the country illegally for a little more than a year, taking whatever work he can find without legal status, hard, low-paid jobs, earning $7.50 cents 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 Adaleed 1DK, a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador. He lives in a Northwest Washington neighborhood near the park. The night of Christy-Wygans attack shortly after one in the morning a veteran detective named Joe Green sits down across from Guandike in his cell with a second officer and a Spanish interpreter. Guandike agrees to talk without a lawyer. Leading the questioning is Joe Green, a big

balding 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. DC Metro Detective Jim Trainham 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 pack and asked him if maybe he just acted on a brushed up against

and colliding with a woman by accident. And so they knew that at that point that they had the right guy.

“Guandike describes bumping into Christy-Wygans 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. Shondri 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, Guandike admits. He has seen her, once,

near the parking lot by the old pure smell. He thought she was pretty. He never saw her again.

Green writes up the two assaults. He does not write down what Guandike said about Shondri Levy.

“Green is park police. The detectives chasing Shondra are DC police, separate forces,”

working the rest of the city, and at that moment the DC police are chasing a congressman. The answer to a question no one else had thought to ask goes into a drawer and stays there. A man who hunts women on these trails sitting in a locked room in July of 2001, telling a detective he had seen Shondri Levy in the park and found her pretty.

It will be years before anyone working the Levy case hears a word of it.

The Shondri Levy story is still the biggest in the country through the morning of September 11, 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 happened to us. The attacks in New York and at the Pentagon”

changed every priority in Washington. The cameras leave Gary Conditz door. The federal agents who had been working the Levy case are pulled into terrorism task forces. The tip line goes quiet. For the private investigators hired by the Levy's, the effect is immediate. 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 Conditz loses his primary, beaten by a one-time ally, the state legislator Dennis Cardosa. Washington's most watched man, the previous summer, is now finished in politics of zero interest to the public and leaves DC with Shondri Levy still missing. On May 22, 2002, more than a year after Shondri 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 leaving the trail and working his way down a slope. That morning, he sees a scrap of red fabric and 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 9/11. Here's a bit of that phone call. I was walking my dog in the width of

this morning and I came across the human skull. At the Washington Post, a reporter named Sorry Horowitz 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 stunning 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 Shondra leaves green mains in raw creep part." 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 that recruits had walked right past but not through the summer before. What remains of Shondra is surrounded by items a year of weather and animals have left. Her sunglasses are running shoe, a gray property of USC athletics t-shirt, a small radio,

nut at the ankle. When they found her leggings they were like box and leaps and the legs. If you fell down

“at that ravine and knocked their head and died by accident there's no reason to remove their pants.”

The first officer down the slope recognizes it at once the isolated ravine, the radio,

the knotted clothing because he had stood at a similar scene the previous summer at one of two jogger attacks. Here's former detective Trenum again. When you're looking at the scene, bones just 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 such a hurry. The medical examiner had already obtained a Shondra'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

“they call us up and told us that was just really bad I mean it's just that's what was bad as it”

anything could be. Six days later on May 28, Arden rules Shondra Levi'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 DC police chief Charles Ramsey

how a search the summer before 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 Shondra's hometown.

“At the doors someone has set out silver bowls of Reese's peanut butter cups, Shondra'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 Shondra's remains are recovered the family's own investigators, Joe McCann and Duane 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 Shondra'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. Ramsay furious that his technicians missed a foot long bone sends the teams back into the woods. Over the next 19 days they found more of Shondra'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 with scores of officers had missed. For the leaveies the call they had been dreading was an excruciating end to the saga of their missing daughter. McCann. McCann. If you can't imagine to have your child laying out there and seem so unfair. For 13 months the biggest missing person's case in America had been all about a congressman. Now it is about a body

on a wooded slope. In the park Shondra 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

Shondra 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 Hally Shilling ties back her blonde hair grabs her yellow walkman

and she has been running for nearly 20 years. She is not a woman who rattles easily.

“In the parking lot near the old pure smell she notices a young Hispanic man sitting on a curb”

watching her. He makes her uncomfortable but men stare at Hally 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 Hally 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 shut her and that more than the knife blade is what enrages her.

Years before Hally's chilling 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 Hally. 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 hard, but she is already tearing loose. When to her own shock, he turns and runs off the way he came. Hally 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 under the trail after the man with the knife. It is fast

and professional. The one thing that needles her Hally 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, Shondra Levy disappeared. She would be found on a wooden slope about half a mile from the trail where Hally's shilling just saved her own life.

I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK confidential. The first female jogger, the one who was attacked

about 700 yards from where Levy's body was found, said she saw Gwendike in the Pierce Mill parking lot. And if you look at where a Shondra Levy lived, the logical route would have taken her right through the Pierce Mill parking lot. For a year, the search for Shondra 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 Shondra. One of the women he grabs will tell her story in public. Hally shilling, 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. Pally does not name the man who came at her with a knife because of

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 Ygan, near the same stretch of trail, and the park police hide the two attacks together. On May 22, 2002, five weeks after Hally's essay runs in the post, a man

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. Guantique's name has surfaced in Role 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 Hally's article. They are on her door step within days. The detectives working Sean Relieve's murder are not. For the seven years after reporting her attack from 2001 to 2008, Hally's shelling waits for a call from the DC 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 Shandra vanished. It is not until December 2008 after the Washington Post's 13 part series who killed Shandra Levy forces the case back open that the Levy detectives come to Hally's shelling.

“They bring her into Rock Creek Park and walk with her up the trail to 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 Hally before a grand jury, weighing whether to charge Juan D. K with Shandra Levy's murder. Hally's own attack had been prosecuted years earlier. Now prosecutors want the jury to hear what Juan D. K did to another woman on those same trails.

More than seven years after Hally escaped him, DC 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 Condott was ever a suspect. That summer of 2002 after Shandra's remains are found, an FBI agent named Brad Garrett and a DC detective named Jim Trainam, bring a geographic pro-filer into the case. A man named Kim Rosmo, who 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 loan women from 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 parts police about their crimes in 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 pure smell. The attacks cluster there over 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 Holly Shilling and Christie Wygan in Rock Creek Park. A man at whom no one working the leavey case has ever seriously looked. His name is Ingmar Guantique. Rosmo 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 or then we have the actual murder scene itself. Then finally, we have where the body gets disposed of. So Rosmo takes a hard look at Rock Creek Park. Years later, he will lay out what he found in a documentary on Shondra Levy for investigation discovery. Rosmo goes to the attack scenes, three of them. Shondras and the two women who lived. Each is the same kind of place, a secluded spot, neuro 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 to sexual assault and he comes to believe the same thing was done to Shondra 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

Holly Shilling attacked in mid-May two weeks after that. A man exposing himself to a massage

“therapist on the same ground that same month. Christy Wygan pulled into a ravine on the”

first of July and then nothing. The attacks end completely. The week the man is caught.

We took a look at the location where Shondra'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. Tax like that in the park are really rare. When he's got three of them in a very short time period, that calls for them to be looked at as being connected crimes. We know that he lived just to the east of Rock Creek Park and there were no similar attacks after the arrest him and made one

dequistando like a knee on 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 Hally Shilling is about half a mile from the ravine where Shondra's remains are found. Seven weeks after those remains

turn up in July of 2002, Levy detectives finally walked the ground or Hally 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 Dica 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, BC. 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. Juan Dica'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 Dica 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, DC, Juan Dica is 19 and takes whatever

“work a man without papers confined and for a while holds it together. But now 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 DC detectives come looking for him, Juan Dica has been in and out of the prison system for years, moving from one facility to the next. In one prison, he males 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 Ross Mos map keeps pointing back. Then there is the first of May 2001. On the day, Shondra Levy vanishes, Juan Dica 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 to.

The Levy case receives once again. Juan Dica sits in prison for the two park attacks. No one is building a murder case against him. Law enforcement is not focused on Shondra Levy and her case goes cold again. 5 years later, the Shondra Levy case is revived, thanks to a new police chief and a newspaper. Charles Ramsey is gone, replaced by Kathy Linier. In 2007, soon after she takes over, Linier meets Susan Levy at police headquarters.

When Susan holds out her hand, Linier hugs her instead and comes out of the meeting, vowing to solve the Shondra case. One of the two original detectives has retired. Linier removes the other, Ralph Durant, and hands the case to two veterans, Todd Williams,

Gwen Dica'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 Gwen Dica's mail and phone calls from prison.”

When the results come back, the DNA does not establish a tie between Gwen Dica and Shondra. The testing that was supposed to break the case, why it opened, 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 Shondra Levy by sorry 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 Gwen Dica 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 Linier what she hopes it will do. Stir things up, Linier says, "Sometimes people do come forward." It was the first time anyone from the outside had really exposed what was going on this case and some of the mistakes that led the case to go cold. The reinvestigation also services something buried since 2001. When the park police first arrested Gwen Dica, he told an officer,

he had seen Shondra Levy in Rock Creek Park and that he found her pretty. The officer remembered

it, but for seven years that information never made it into any report.

Through all of it, one thing never changes. One Dica 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 his cell in California. In September of 2008, two months after the series of articles, a team of DC detectives flies to the federal prison at Victorville in the California desert, where Gwen Dica 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 Gwen Dica into admitting the two park attacks by offering him a less despicable version of the story. They sit Gwen Dica 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 Shondra Levy case and they wait. Gwen Dica 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 Shondra Levy's

things? He gives them a line that 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 Gwen Dica. Not, I never met her, not I never touched her,

not who's Shondra 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 Gwen Dica has placed himself anywhere near Shondra Levy and he's done it in his own words. The detectives turned to the fat lip and the scratches from May 1st 2001, 7 years earlier. He tells them two men robbed him. They remind him he had told his land lady it was his

girlfriend. Gwen Dica split 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. Talked among his things, kept by his bed. They find a photograph of Shondra, 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 2000 miles away. They saw a photo of

Shondra Levy in his cell, right by his bed, which was very odd. As they were talking to Juan Dica, they saw something else that really struck them as odd. They saw a tattoo of a woman or his body. And as they look at this tattoo, they believe that resembled Shondra Levy. There is one more thing they learned 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

They find the makings of a weapon and an escape kit. Moose razor blades,

“a AA battery, a filed-down sliver of toenail clipper, and a homemade knife. Two of the blades”

lash together with strips of plastic. Juan Dica 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 data, a lifetime criminal with a long record of island crimes, guns, drugs, and so on. He was a somme of the Marguan Dica in Kentucky in 2006.

Morales comes forward in 2009, while the reopened Levy case is searching for anyone who can tie Guan Dica 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 jeries usually trust. What makes prosecutors listen is that Morales asks for nothing. He is also

“not the first inmate to say Guan Dica has talked. Over the years, several jailhouse witnesses did,”

and their stories did not always match. Guan Dica's defense will seize on this fact later.

But Morales is the witness around whom the prosecution decides to build its case. Guan Dica and Morales belong to Allied gangs, and for six weeks in a Kentucky cell, they talked. Armando Morales and Inward 1DK belong to a similar gang affiliation, and as a result, they considered themselves brothers. They were honest with each other, they looked out for each other, in prison, they talked about everything together. According to Manomorales,

one of the things they talked about was the whole charge of Levy case. According to Morales, Guan Dica was desperate to correct one thing in particular. In prison, a man marked as a rapist, is a target, and Guan Dica knew the word was, he had raped and killed the intern.

“Morales said Guan Dica wanted Morales to understand that he had only done one of those two things,”

the killing. Morales' account carries one detail in particular on which prosecutors seize. He says Guan Dica confessed that he grabbed Shandra from behind on the trail, dragged her into the bushes, and took her fanny pack before he ran.

To prosecute her, Amanda Haynes that fanny pack is critical. 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 Shandra 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 Shandra was carrying one that day. The single source for the detail, the prosecution, sees as "so damning" is Morales.

There is no corroboration that there ever was a fanny pack, never mind that Guan Dica took it. On the stand, he tells the jury he wants nothing for his testimony,

that he is here only to give a grieving family its answer, and that he has never been an

informant before in his life. Hold on to that last part. So what about Gary Condit? For a year the congressman was the story. By the time the Guan Dica case reaches trial, investigators no longer treat Gary Condit as a suspect in Shandra's murder. Police had checked his account of his whereabouts on May 1st, and it held. No physical evidence ever tied him to her death. The DNA and Shandra's underwear

supported what Condit had spent the summer of 2001 denying that he and Shandra had been sexually involved, but nothing beyond that. On March 3rd 2009 police chief Linier stands at a lectern at police headquarters flanked by the DC mayor, the US attorney, and the three detectives who built the case. She announces that Yingmar Guan Dica will be charged with the first to remurder of Shandra and Levy. She says that she called Bob and Susan Levy that morning to prepare

them. Today we make a very significant announcement. We announce that the Metropolitan Police Department have secured an arrest warrant and homicide on 2001 of Shandra Levy. The arrest is Yingmar Guan Dica. With that, Linier does something that a department has not done in eight years. She points the case at another man, and she never once says the name Gary Condit. Constit Connet was never charged with anything. He was interviewed multiple times. I interviewed him

making any sense to me the answer is no. The trial opens in Washington on October 25th, 2010,

“more than nine years after Shandra 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 Caucasus. Amanda Haynes had a way of relating to the jury. She can tell us stored and make people see the crime scene and see the final moments of the victim's lives. In her opening, 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 Guantique 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 Shandra died only that it was a homicide.

What the state has is the pattern in the park Guantique's own shifting stories and a jailhouse witness named Morales who says the defendant told him he did it. Morales is the case. When a man of Morales took the witness stand, he was the only piece of evidence that directly linked E. Mark Guantique to the death of Shandra leaving. To reporters watching in the courtroom Morales is strong on the stand, he is calm, he is specific and his story does not flatter anyone.

He tells the jury Guantique insisted he had not raped Shandra, only killed her and account that cuts against the defendant and against the prosecution's own earlier assumption that Shandra 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. Guantique's public defender's 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 Shondra's leggings, matching no one who was tested, not Guantique, not conduct, not the technicians who handled the leggings. The prosecution calls it contamination. The defense asks the jury to consider that it might belong to the actual killer. In her closing argument,

prosecutor Amanda Haynes tells the jury how she thinks Shondra died. It is a story Haynes

tells with confidence that one Shondra'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 Shondra Levi died. What Haynes asks the jury to know is who killed her. The jury takes 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 birding. 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 birding. Guilty of first-degree murder. Guantique cares the translation headphones from his ears. Outside the courtroom, Shondra's mother Susan Levi speaks. She has waited nine years for this.

The results of the verdict. Maybe Guilty, but I have a lifetime sentence of a lost lamb,

60 years in prison. At the hearing, Susan Levi 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 and hell." And it was very dramatic.”

She then pleaded for the truth about Shondra's murder. Did you really take her? She asked, "Look into my eyes, right now, and tell me." Guantique shakes his head. The judge interrupts and tells Susan she cannot speak to Guantique directly. Susan looks at the judge, and 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, Guantique tells the court he is

sorry for what happened to Shondra Levi, but that he had nothing to do with it. For the Levi 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 Levi 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 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 in and suites in Annapolis, Maryland. She has just been evicted from her home and she has her golden retriever buddy with her. One afternoon, the hotels 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. He was very kind. He was very friendly. He seemed like a very personal, nice guy. Who is there? No. No. No. There was no spot. 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 thread 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 a napalus, and on the concrete floor of her storage unit, while he helps her move her boxes. 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 Inmar Guantigay to prison for 60 years for the murder of Shandra Levy. 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 wore, he had never been a government informant. That

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 Guantigay. A rule called Brady, from the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady versus 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 a key state's witness, 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 Guantigay 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 Guantigay'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 Guantigay 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's 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 Shandra Levy. Even so, those seven hours recorded on a storage room floor inside a stranger's phone are about to destroy the government's plan to try Ingmar Guantigay a second time. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential. By the winter of 2011, it looks finished. A jury has found Ingmar Guantigay guilty of murdering

Shandra 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 Guantigay in a penitentiary in Kentucky. In 2009, as the reopened case searches for anyone who can tie Guantigay to Shandra's murder, Morales comes forward with what he says he heard inside that cell. At the trial he told the jury that Guantigay confessed to the murder that he grabbed Shandra 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. There is 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 lynch band, they don't get to a jury without him.

Without him, there's no forensic, 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. It 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

theory of a sexual assault. He gave facts that didn't put one decade 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. Heath Alexander, a Washington Post reporter who listened to every hour of the tapes. Here's it at once. Well, he listened to the amount of

Morales. He didn't sound like the same man who testified in court years ago. He still sounds 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 listened to every hour of the tapes say so clearly. Here's Keith Alexander from the post. She told us that, for Mano Morales lied about the back that E. Mark Juan D. K. had admitted to him

that he killed Sean Julevy. 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 Juan D. K. committed the killing. And when she presses and 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. They do, did I testify? He committed the homicide. Are you sure? Why wouldn't I be sure? He's in the cell with me. Do you think he's going to tell me I meant to do that? Come on. Hello. 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 watch the post, and she has information. She's an occasional actress with the Netflix series House of Courts. 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 in Marguan, D.K., his conviction was already gone, gone over the hidden letter exposing Morales's lie about

never having been an informant. For years, his public defenders had been shipping away at the one thing

the case depended on, whether the jury had been told the truth about who Armando Morales really was. Two of the Washington Post reporters who spent years back inside the case do not soften what they found. This is not a technicality. The whole case was one witness and the one fact that could have warned the jury about that witness's 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 to go on D.K. 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 Shandra'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 from. The prosecutors do the math. Morales is ruined.

but the tapes are what caused the government its second trial. On July 28, 2016, before the second trial

“begins, the government drops the murder charge against Ingmar Guan D.K., conceiting it can no longer”

prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he killed Shandra Levy. A stunning development in the 15-year-old murder case of Washington DC intern Shandra 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 DC. This was something that Hollywood writers could never even dream of.

How could they let Guan D.K. just be? It just seems so strange to me. Guan D.K. 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,”

Guan D.K. tells this to Washington Post reporter Sylvia Moreno.

Guan D.K. fights to stay in the United States and loses. On May 8, 2017, he is deported back to

El Salvador. Back to the same country he once swam a river to leave. He disappears into it. 16 years after Shandra leave he vanished. The only person ever charged with her murder is beyond the reach of the American courts. The U.S. legal system is finished with him. But the case is not yet over. In 2023, a district of Columbia board that disciplines lawyers takes up the conduct of the Trials Lead Prosecutor Amanda Haynes. Its conclusion is both narrow

and damning. Haynes failed to turn over the February 2009 letter about Morales, being an informant. The very document that could have told the jury who the prosecution star witness really was. A disciplinary hearing committee recommends her law license be suspended for 90 days. By 2023, more than 20 years after Shandra leave he vanished, the murder conviction is gone, the charge is gone, and the man once found guilty of killing her has been deported past the

reach of the courts. The one official finding of wrongdoing left standing concerns the prosecutions handling of its own evidence. 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 at 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

Guandike 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 Sean Relievee. Morales' implosion does not tell you whether Guandike committed this crime, only the evidence can do that, and the evidence still points at one man.

Once investigators finally move past Gary Condit, Guandike 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 Shondra's disappearance and finds that they stop exactly when Guandike is jailed. A park police detective shows Guandike Shondra's photograph in the summer of 2001 and Guandike

admits that he has seen Shondra in the park and thought she was pretty. And admission the detective

Guandike does not turn up for work, the morning Shondra 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 Shondra Levy clipped from a magazine seven years after she vanished from a city 2000 miles away. None of this standing alone is proof of anything but 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 Shondra have always wrestled with. Her family says flatly that Shondra 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 stretch of 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 Shondra's apartment too, there are oddities. A clean comfortor 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 who's it is. Her keys, the bracelet gary condit gave her, and

engraved ring, the one she wore on her pinky with her initials, are never found.

None of that proves Guandike innocent. What it explains is why the people who know Shondra best

“still have real questions about how she died. Some of them never make their peace with the verdict”

at all. Shondra's aunt, Linda Zansky, tells a French journalist, Ellen Kutar, that she never believed Guandike was guilty. His arrest in 2009 brought Linda no relief. Linda continued to believe that condit was somehow involved, and enduring suspicion but one that has never been proven. Jill McCann, the retired homicide detective, the leavey's hired, is sure from the first morning

that Shondra was murdered, and he never comes to believe Guandike 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 Shondra, but he will not say. What he will say is that he does not believe every piece of evidence in Shondra's movies murder was ever brought into the light. Even Shondra's own parents come to doubt that Guandike is the killer, though only with time. 12 years later, Shondra's

parents also tell Ellen 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 Ellen, Susan has decided that justice really 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 has 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, Dennis Cardosa by some 18 points, a route, in a district that has been his for 13 years. He leaves Washington for Arizona, where he and his family by a pair of basking robins ice cream franchises that end in a lawsuit and close. He sues over the lured 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 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.

been handed to the family, that the person who committed the crime and tragically killed

“Chandra Levy is free. When 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 Levy to participate in this, to be involved in this and they declined to do that. Right. But you, you're not avoiding that. All in fact, you said, "Please invite them to be a part of this." Yes, and 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 a victim. And it's 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?”

I don't feel I haven't, you know, answered that question publicly for 15 years. And I'm not going to change my position on 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 in sworn, Chandra takes the witness stand at Juan D. Gay'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 Chandra 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 has 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 and 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. No way really likes the lost anybody. We hate that word. More than 20 years on, Bob and Susan Levy sat down in Paris with the French journalist, a Len 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. Bob still cannot make himself return to Linda Zamski's house in Chesapeake City, Maryland, where he last saw Chandra alive. On their phones, they keep the pictures. Chandra intends a knee-out 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. In 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 Guandike if they really thought he killed

Chandra. Susan noted that Gary Condit 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."

She grows up in California and oncologists 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 a 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 Rockery Park. I think he learned to see what

“recorded things the 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 window sill 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 it's just, "Get used to everything, you hate to get used to, that's where it's." Well, what you do will go on. I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK Confidential. Join me next week for our new case.