In July of 2016, a woman who calls herself "Babs Froller" is living out of a ...
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 hotel's sliding glass, lobby door, closes on the dog, and buddy, spooked, will not move or go back inside.
A man, Babs, has never seen before quickly crosses the lobby to help.
He gathers the animal up and carries the dog into the hotel for her. I thought he was a dog lover, she will say later. He tells her his name is Phoenix, Babs shares her story with ABCs 2020. "He was very kind, he was very friendly, he seemed like a very personal, nice guy. Who was there in the park?
No, no, no, no, no, that 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 napolis,
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 Guantique to prison for 60 years for the murder of Shondra 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 speaking up about
Guantique was the first time in his life he had ever helped law enforcement, but that was not true, and the proof was sitting in the government's own files, a letter documenting that Morales had cooperated with authorities before. Years before he ever said a word about Guantique. A rule called Brady, from the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady vs. Maryland, requires prosecutors
to turn over any evidence like that, evidence that is potentially exculpatory, or helpful to the defendant, to the defense.
“Earlier 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 Guantique that its star witness had cooperated with law enforcement in the past, exactly
what he swore under oath he had never done.
The 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 Guantique'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. Guantique's 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, our Mondo Morales' credibility
remains the single most valuable thing the government has, and that is not a good thing. On these tapes he sounds nothing like the man the jury saw, none of the reformed witness
Who claims to have found God and a conscience behind bars, just a gang thug c...
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.
It 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 Guantique a second time. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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By the winter of 2011, it looks finished. A jury has found in Marguan de Gate guilty of murdering Chandra Levy, a judge has sentenced him to 60 years. For Bob and Susan Levy, after nearly 10 years, it is the closest thing to an answer that anyone gives them.
But the verdict rests entirely on the word of one man, Armando Marales.
“Marales 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 Guandike in a penitentiary in Kentucky. In 2009, as the reopened case searches for anyone who can tie Guandike to Chandra's murder, Marales comes forward with what he says he heard inside that cell. At the trial he told the jury that Guandike confessed to the murder that he grabbed Chandra
Levy on a trail, took her fanny pack and choked her and never meant for her to die.
Marales 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 Marales, there was no case and the prosecution knew it. Bernie Grimm, a Washington defense attorney who sat in that courtroom and watched Marales 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, Marales wrapped his account in a story of his own redemption, a hardened man who has found a conscience in prison and wants just this once to do the right thing and
give a grieving family its answer. He was a compelling witness precisely because his story flatters no one and asks for nothing. "Very compelling, very believable for these reasons, he wasn't perfect, a lot of informants will be perfect and say he admitted to me that he robbed the bank and all the details. He gave facts that were inconsistent with the government's theory of a sexual assault.
He gave facts that didn't put 1DK and the worst light possible which to me made it all the more believable." On Babs' Prolars' recordings, six years later, that witness is nowhere to be found. What is on the tapes is a man who sounds like exactly what he assured the court, he no longer was, a violent thug.
Keith Alexander, a Washington Post reporter who listened to every hour of the tapes, hears it at once.
Then Babs' Prolars 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 light guy, they just needed somebody to say it. He said that to you, 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, when Morales lied about the back that he marked on D.K., had admitted to him that he killed Sean Jolivey, and we found out that wasn't the truth when we listened to those recordings or so.
Far from taking anything back, Morales holds to his story on the tapes. He tells Prolars that go on D.K., committed the killing, and when she presses him further warns her, don't go there. But the recordings do, is less dramatic than the admission Prolars 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 to 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." Perhaps Prolars, 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' prowler, comes through Washington Post, and she has information. She is 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. This 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. In 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 the mover 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. They can never put this guy in front of a jury again. The hidden letter is what undoes the conviction, but the tapes are what costs the government
its second trial. On July 28, 2016, before the second trial begins, the government drops the murder charge against Inmarguan D.K., conceding 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 D.C. 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 D.C. This was something the Hollywood writers could never even dream of.
How could they let Wendy Kichis feel?
Kichis seems so strange to me, Guan D.C. 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 under an American street, a free man.
A detention center in Virginia, Guan D.C. tells this to Washington Post reporter Sylvia Moreno. Guan D.C. 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 Shondra Levy 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. You don't wait until your house is on fire to install a smoke detector, and you don't wait until
“the wind and rain hammer your windows and the power goes out to prepare for a hurricane.”
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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 damming. 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 Shondra Levy 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 prosecution's handling
of its own evidence. But in August 2025, the DC 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 Guantique 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 Relevi. Morales' implosion does not tell you whether Guantique committed this crime. Only the evidence can do that, and the evidence still points at one man.
Once investigators finally move past Gary Condit, Guantique is the only suspect they ever
charged, 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 isolat...
of Rockery Park.
“In the weeks around Shondra's disappearance and finds that they stop exactly when Guantique”
is jailed. A park police detective shows Guantique a Shondra's photograph in the summer of 2001, and Guantique admits that he has seen Shondra in the park and thought she was pretty, and had missioned the detective leaves out of his report and that no one on the leavey case will hear for seven years.
Guantique 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 bluffed 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 Salmaid'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 comforter lies on the floor just inside her door, which is not like her.”
A small amount of an unidentified man's DNA is on her clothing, and it matches no one who is ever tested, with the defense asking the jury to wonder who it is. Her keys, the bracelet gary condit gave her, and an engraved ring, the ones she wore on her
pinky with her initials, are never found.
None of that proves Guantigay 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, Elene Coutard, that she never believed Guantigay 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 Guantigay 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 murder was ever brought into the light.
Even Shondra's own parents come to doubt that Guantigay is the killer, though only with time. 12 years later, Shondra's parents also tell Elene 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 Elene, Susan has decided that justice really means justice. 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 clothes.
He sues over the lured theories spun about him, among the targets the writer ...
Dunn, and the case is settled 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. The same year, promoting the book, he sits down with Dr. Phil and breaks 15 years of silence
on television.
“I think it's an injustice that's been handed to the family, the person who committed”
the crime and tragically killed Shondra 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, but you're not avoiding that. In fact, you said, please invite them to be a part of this 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 that real victim of this is Shondra 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 Shondra were involved romantically. Why is it you will not answer publicly whether or not you had a sexual relationship with Shondra Levy? I don't feel I haven't 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, Condit takes the witness stand at Juan D. Gays Murdertrial and even there with Shondra's parents a few feet away, he gives up as little as the questions allow, MK confidential reached out to Gary Condit and invited him to sit
for an interview he did not respond. Here is where the case officially stands as of today. No one else has ever been charged in the eyes of the law the murder of Shondra 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 visuals, 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 Shondra 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 to work closer, no way really likes us lost anybody that we hate that word." More than 20 years on, Bob and Susan Levy sat down in Paris with the French journalist
Alem Kutar, 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 Shondra's disappearance, they have tried to live the way they believe she would have wanted them to.
The little girl they called Ladybug. Shondra dreamed of seeing Antarctica, so they go. And now they travel somewhere every year. And where they go, Ladybug's 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 Zamzki's house in Chesapeake City, Maryland, where he last saw Shondra alive. In their phones, they keep the pictures. Shondra intends a nea 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 Shondra would have wanted. In a refusal, as she puts it, to become bad people. M.K. 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. Shondra'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 Shondra. Susan noted that Gary Condit had access to government secrets at the time Shondra died,
“and told us quote, "Was there something that wasn't meant to be found out?”
What are they all covering up? There's a lot of lying and a lot of cover-ups, and so it leaves us with unanswered questions." This story should end not with the men whose names wound up attached to hers, but with Shondra. 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 is 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. One of it happens, "What comes instead is that this young woman vanishes on a spring afternoon,
and for more than a year police search and argue and look in the wrong places while she lies on a slope inside Rock Creek Park."
“I think he learned to see what important 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 you just get used to everything, you hate to get used to, that's where it's, well, what else can you do but go on?"
I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK Confidential, join me next week for our new case.
