The Missing Intern & The Congressman: "Did You Kill Chandra Levy?" — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

The voice on the line is a source. It gives her one sentence and then it's gone.

The first time I heard Chandra Levy's name, it was in the morning before I came to work.

I might have been at the gym or something like that, and I got a phone call from a police source.

“And I'll never forget. 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, Chandra Levy is a small, local story, a missing intern in a city with hundreds of missing persons cases a month. Then a congressman's name surfaces, and within days it is the story the whole country is following.

Nearly every camera in America pulled off the search for Chandra Levy, and onto Democrat congressman Gary Condon. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. A.I. can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts, and criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you.

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By now, Shandra Levy has been missing for weeks. Her parents have no idea what's happened to her, but have found their own congressman's private number on her phone bill. His name is Gary Condott, 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 Depper 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 Condott, 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 Levy, 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 Levy.

And from this point on, there are, in effect, two investigations. One is trying to find a missing 24-year-old woman. The other is trying to find out what a congressman is hiding. Over that summer, the hunt for answers from the congressman all but replaces the search for Shandra Levy.

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

It is October of 2000. 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, and 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.

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, a 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 he actually belongs to someone else.”

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

Carolyn 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 dams who broke from their parties 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 from 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 D.C. 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 Shandra 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, "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 journalist 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.

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." "You know, you condo once?"

“"Well, maybe twice." I think it was twice. She came by.”

"And here is 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 Shandra Levy, but in the summer of 2001, the two appear identical to some. There is also the question of where Condit has been. By his own account on the day Shandra vanished, Condit is on Capitol Hill.

Around midday, close to the hour she logs off her computer for the very last time, Condit is in a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney about California's energy crisis. Cheney's office would later confirm the meeting took place. That afternoon, Condit casts two votes on the House floor. Those events 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 is in town.”

The detectives are not the only ones pressing on Gary Condit. Shandra's mother Susan comes to Washington and will not leave quietly. She goes on any program that will have her and turns to cameras with a plea. Mr. Condit, would you please step forward and share whatever you know, you may have been one of the last people to really have spent any time with the police producing no timely answers.

There's the leaveys hire a public relations team. The strategy is deliberate. Release what they know a piece at a time. Keep reporters interested and make sure Shandra does not vanish from public view. It works.

Almost too well.

“Shandra 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 Ann Marie Smith, who says she was involved with Condit right up until that spring of 2001. She says that after Shandra vanished, Condit's staff asked her to sign an affidavit, swearing, there had been no sexual relationship between her and the congressman. She refused, and she goes public, telling Fox News she was afraid. I had staying laying on hotel rooms on my layovers.

I moved to a place where nobody knows my address, nobody knows my phone number. I was very concerned for my own safety. These women have nothing to do with Shandra's disappearance, but each tells a version of the same story, secrecy, denial, and 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 Shandra.

For weeks, Condit's affairs have been front page news, but the relationship with Shandra remains just a rumor, much suspected, but technically unconfirmed. That all changes on July 6th. Fed up with Condit's denials, Shandra's aunt, Linda Zamsky, speaks to the Washington Post, putting her account on the record. Shandra told Linda directly that Gary Condit was her lover. Shandra 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 Comes. 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.

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Super sure dot com slash Megan, paid for by super sure insurance agency LLC, a licensed insurance agency. The request stems from evidence collected two months earlier. When detective searched in Shandra'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 condits or was Shandra seeing another man, police know nothing about. It is this course of events that brings Gary condit at about 10 p.m. on the night of July 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 out in front of the cameras.

Just after 11 p.m., police and crime scene technicians pull up to condits 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, the whole apartment glowing and eerie purple.

They find nothing that ties Gary condit to any crime. After three and a half hours examining condits 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 condits apartment, condit was on a mission of his own. Around 8pm 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 disk. 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, "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.

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 Katey and Heidi Passechow, 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 Katey 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 woman about whom he had lied. Behind the scenes, the leaks are constant. Katey calls it an impossible situation to manage, everyone she says wants to be a hero, everyone wants to solve it. She would eventually ask to be taken off the case.

Barrett would ask for new prosecutors 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. Do 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 graveste 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. And I asked you was it a sexual relationship? Well, Condit, 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'd respect for my family and out of a specific request from a 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 ought to respect for my family.

Out of a specific request by the Levy family, it's best that I not get into details about 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 months 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?

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 it was so false, phony.”

Condit's infidelities not only hurt the progress of the Levy investigation, they also throw his family into the spotlight. When folks start calling my dad a 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 to home. By the end of August, Sean Relevy has been missing for four months. American knows 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. That's next time on MK Confidential.