The Missing Intern & The Congressman: Life Sentence — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

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0:44Don't use if you're allergic to Cosentix. Before starting, get checked for tuberculosis. An increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur, like tuberculosis or other serious bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some are fatal. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough, had a vaccine or planned to, or if inflammatory bowel disease symptoms develop or worsen. Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTICS or cosentics.com slash Cindy. In July of 2016, a woman who calls herself Babs Proler is living out of a country inn and suites in Annapolis, Maryland.

1:28She has just been evicted from her home and she has her golden retriever, Buddy, with her. One afternoon, the hotel's sliding glass lobby door closes on the dog and Buddy, spooked, will not move or go back inside. A man Babs has never seen before quickly crosses the lobby to help. He gathers the animal up and carries the dog into the hotel for her. I thought he was a dog lover, she will say later. He tells her his name is Phoenix. Babs shares her story with ABC's 2020. He was very kind. He was very friendly. He seemed like a very personal, nice guy. Was there a spark going on here? No, no, there was no spark.

2:11They 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.

3:01What turns their friendship is the violence of his talk and the fear that comes with it, the fear that he might make good on a threat against her ex-husband. So she does the only thing she can think to do to protect herself. On July 11th, quietly, she begins to record him in the car, driving around Annapolis, and on the concrete floor of her storage unit while he helps her move 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.

3:45Six years earlier, his was the single voice that persuaded a jury to send Ingmar Guandique to prison for 60 years for the murder of Chandra 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 swore he had never been a government informant that speaking up about Guandique was the first time in his life he had ever helped law enforcement. But that was not true, and the proof was sitting in the government's own files, a letter documenting that Morales had cooperated with authorities before, years before he ever said a word about Guandique.

4:38A rule called Brady from the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland requires prosecutors to turn over any evidence like that, evidence that is potentially exculpatory or helpful to the defendant, to the defense. Here, the letter undermined the credibility of 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 Guandique that its star witness had cooperated with law enforcement in the past, exactly what he swore under oath he had never done. Fresno County had interviewed Morales years earlier.

5:26That 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. The Guandique case has only ever rested on one man's word, which means it is only ever as strong as that man's credibility, which is already compromised thanks to the lies he told on the stand in the first trial. In the summer of 2016, with the retrial just months away, Armando Morales' credibility remains the single most valuable thing the government has, and that is not a good thing.

6:17On these tapes, he sounds nothing like the man the jury saw. None of the reformed witness who claims to have found God and a conscience behind bars, just a gang thug counting off hand grenades and shanks and scores still to settle. Phoenix says a lot in those secret recordings, but there is one thing he never says. He never says the thing the woman recording him will later swear she heard. That is, that he lied on the witness stand and sent an innocent man to prison for the murder of Chandra Levy. Even so, those seven hours recorded on a storage room floor inside a stranger's phone are about to destroy the government's plan to try Ingmar Guandique a second time.

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8:27A jury has found Ingmar Guandique guilty of murdering Chandra Levy. A judge has sentenced him to 60 years. For Bob and Susan Levy, after nearly 10 years, it is the closest thing to an answer that anyone gives them. But the verdict rests entirely on the word of one man, Armando Morales. Morales has been in federal prison since 1997, serving time on drug and weapons convictions, a career gang member from California. For about six weeks in 2006, he shared a cell with Guandique in a penitentiary in Kentucky. In 2009, as the reopened case searches for anyone who can tie Guandique to Chandra's murder, Morales comes forward with what he says he heard inside that cell.

9:17At the trial, he told the jury that Gwandike confessed to the murder, that he grabbed Chandra Levy on a trail, took her fanny pack, and choked her, and never meant for her to die. Morales claimed to want nothing in return, and he told the jury plainly that he has never once been an informant in his life. 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 linchpin.

9:58They don't get to a jury without him. Without him, there's no forensics. There's no eyewitnesses. On the stand, Morales wrapped his account in a story of his own redemption. A hardened man who has found a conscience in prison and wants just this once to do the right thing and give a grieving family its answer. He was a compelling witness precisely because his story flatters no one and asks for nothing. Very compelling, very believable for these reasons. He wasn't perfect. A lot of informants will be perfect and say he admitted to me that he robbed the bank and all the details. He gave facts that were inconsistent with the government's theory of a sexual assault.

10:42He gave facts that didn't put Guandique in the worst light possible, which to me made it all the more believable. On Babs Proler's recordings six years later, that witness is nowhere to be found. What is on the tapes is a man who sounds like exactly what he assured the court he no longer was a violent thug. Keith Alexander, a Washington Post reporter who listened to every hour of the tapes, hears it at once. When we listen to Armando Morales, he didn't sound like the same man who testified in court years ago. He still sounded like someone who was still very much involved in criminal activity. Then Babs Proler goes on television with a claim of her own.

11:31She says that Morales admitted on her secret recordings that he lied on the witness stand. And then he says, you know what? The prosecutors wanted me to lie. They knew they had the right guy. They just needed somebody to say it. He said that to you? Yes. And you had that on a recording? But that admission is not on the secret tapes. The Washington Post reporters who listen to every hour of the tapes say so clearly. Here's Keith Alexander from The Post. She told us that Romando Morales lied about the fact that Imar Guandique admitted to him that he killed Shonda Levy. And we found out that wasn't the truth when we listened to those recordings ourselves.

12:14Far from taking anything back, Morales holds to his story on the tapes. He tells Proler that Guandique committed the killing. And when she presses him further, warns her, don't go there. What the recordings do is less dramatic than the admission Proller claimed, but just as lethal to the retrial. They show the government a witness it can never again put in front of a jury. The dude that I testified, he committed the homicide. Are you sure? Why wouldn't I be sure? He's in a 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.

13:00An 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.

13:41The 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, she comes to Washington Post and she has information. She's an occasional actress with the Netflix series House of Cards. We had no idea that this would be the woman who would blow the entire case apart. But the tapes for all the noise around them are not what freed Ingmar Gwandeke. His conviction was already gone, gone over the hidden letter exposing Morales' lie about never having been an informant.

14:26For years, his public defenders had been chipping away at the one thing the case depended on, whether the jury had been told the truth about who Armando Morales really was. Two of the Washington Post reporters who spent years back inside the case do not soften what they found. Yeah, yeah, he committed perjury. He lied. This is not a technicality. The whole case was one witness, and the one fact that could have warned the jury about that witness'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.

15:08Even so, before the Babs-Proler tapes, the government did intend to try Guandique a second time with Morales back on the stand. Then Babs Proler shows up. She takes her seven hours of recordings and turns them over to the prosecutors, to the defense, and to Chandra's own mother. On these recordings is the government's star witness sounding like a man who never left the life he swore he had reformed 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 cost the government its second trial.

15:52On July 28, 2016, before the second trial begins, the government drops the murder charge against Ingmar Guandique, conceding it can no longer prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he killed Chandra Levy. A stunning development in the 15-year-old murder case of Washington, D.C. intern Chandra Levy. prosecutors suddenly dropped the case against the man who had previously been convicted of that crime. This truly was the craziest case ever to hit Washington, D.C. This was something that Hollywood writers could never even dream of. How could they let Guandique just go? It just seems so strange to me.

16:34Guandique has been locked up this entire time since the summer of 2001. Dropping the murder charge does not set him free. He's a Salvadoran citizen with no legal right to be in our country. And the moment the criminal case ends, immigration authorities take him into custody for deportation. He never walks out onto an American street a free man. From a detention center in Virginia, Guandique tells this to Washington Post reporter Sylvia Moreno. I don't have anything to do with Chandra Levy.

17:34is 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. You don't reach for your seatbelt after the impact because after the crash, the hurricane of the house fire, it's too late. And in the same vein, you do not wait until the dollar goes to zero before you buy gold. It's too late then. So consider diversifying with precious metals right now because you never know what will threaten your savings next. Let me tell you, every wealthy person I know is doing this.

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19:33Its 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 Chandra 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.

20:17But in August 2025, the D.C. Court of Appeals, which has the final say on this matter, spares Amanda Haynes an active suspension, imposing 60 days, but immediately staying it for a year of probation, calling her failure a seemingly honest mistake rather than an intentional misdeed. So where does all of that leave this case? A dismissal is not an acquittal, and it is not an exoneration. Those are three very different words and the difference between them is everything. An acquittal is a jury saying no, no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this person did it. An exoneration is proof that the state had the wrong man.

21:05This guy did not do it. A dismissal is the government throwing its hands up and saying it can no longer meet its burden. That is what happens here. The murder charge against Ingmar Guandique collapses on a document the prosecution fails to turn over and a witness who falls apart after the fact. And not one piece of that is proof that the man he was accusing did not kill Chandra Levy. Morales' implosion does not tell you whether Guandique committed this crime. Only the evidence can do that. And the evidence still points at one man. Once investigators finally move past Gary Condit, Guandique is the only suspect they ever charge, the man already in prison for attacking two women on these same trails.

21:56Look at what the years of investigation actually revealed. A geographic profiler maps a run of knife attacks on lone women to one isolated stretch of Rock Creek Park in the weeks around Chandra's disappearance and finds that they stop exactly when Guandique is jailed. A park police detective shows Guandique Chandra's photograph in the summer of 2001, and Guandique admits that he has seen Chandra in the park and thought she was pretty. An admission the detective leaves out of his report and that no one on the Levy case will hear for seven years. Guandique does not turn up For work, the morning Chandra vanishes and surfaces days later with a fat lip and scratches, for which he gives multiple explanations.

22:48When detectives finally sit across from him in a California prison and bluff that they have his DNA, he does not say he has never met this woman. He says, so what if I touched her? In his prison cell, next to his bed, they find a photograph of Chandra Levy clipped from a magazine. seven years after she vanished from a city 2 ,000 miles away. None of this standing alone is proof of anything. Put together and set alongside the cellmate's testimony about a confession, it is why a jury says the word guilty. There is another set of facts, however, that never fit the tidy version, the ones that the people closest to Chandra have always wrestled with.

23:36her family says flatly that Chandra does not run outdoors that she keeps to the treadmill at her gym and the shoes she works out in are still in her apartment the 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 Chandra's apartment, too, there are oddities. A clean comforter lies on the floor just inside her door, which is not like her. A small amount of an unidentified man's DNA is on her clothing, and it matches no one who was ever tested, with the defense asking the jury to wonder whose it is.

24:29Her keys, the bracelet Gary Condit gave her, and an engraved ring, the one she wore on her pinky with her initials, are never found. None of that proves Gwondike innocent. What it explains is why the people who know Chandra best still have real questions about how she died. Some of them never make their peace with the verdict at all. Chandra's aunt, Linda Zansky, tells French journalist Hélène Coutard that she never believed Guandique was guilty. His arrest in 2009 brought Linda no relief. Linda continued to believe that Condit was somehow involved, an enduring suspicion, but one that has never been proven.

25:14Joe McCann, the retired homicide detective the Levy's hired, is sure from the first morning that Chandra was murdered, and he never comes to believe Guandique is the killer. The case against him, McCann says, is thin. A jailhouse informant and some scratches, and you could, he likes to say, build a case like that against almost anyone. He has a guess about who really killed Chandra, but he will not say. What he will say is that he does not believe every piece of evidence in Chandra Levy's murder was ever brought into the light. Even Chandra's own parents come to doubt that Guandique is the killer, though only with time.

25:5712 years later, Chandra's parents also tell Alain 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 Alain, 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 is never charged, but none of that puts him back together. In March of 2002, Condit loses his seat, beaten in his own Democratic primary by his former chief of staff, Dennis Cardoza, by some 18 points, a rout in a district that has been his for 13 years.

26:54He leaves Washington for Arizona, where he and his family buy a pair of Baskin-Robbins ice cream franchises that end in a lawsuit and close. He sues over the lurid theories spun about him, among the targets the writer Dominic Dunn, and the cases settle out of court the terms never disclosed. In 2016, Condit publishes a memoir laying out his side of a story the world has already told 10 ,000 times without him. He calls the book actual malice, the standard of proof in a defamation case brought by a public figure. That same year, promoting the book, he sits down with Dr. Phil and breaks 15 years of silence on television.

27:41I obviously think it's an injustice that's been handed to the family. that the person who committed the crime and tragically killed Shonda Levy is free. And I would like the Levy family to know that I have fully cooperated. I've done everything that I could to be helpful. And I want people to know that you, in fact, ask us to invite the Levy's to participate in this, to be involved in this, and they declined to do that. Right. But you you're not avoiding that at all. In fact, you said, please invite them to be a part of this. Yeah. You're being completely transparent with them. I'm trying to be.

28:25The Levy family, you have made very clear, are the victims here. You don't consider yourself a victim. No, I'm not the victim in this. The real victim of this is Chandra and her family. There's no justice for what happened to her. Even then, even under the gentlest questioning, he will not say out loud whether he and Chandra were involved romantically. Why is it you will not answer publicly whether or not you had a sexual relationship with Chandra leaving? Um, Dr. Phil, I haven't, you know, answered that question publicly for 15 years. and I'm not going to change my position or my view on that today or probably any time in the future.

29:08He has even been made to face it under oath. In November of 2010, subpoenaed and sworn, Condit takes the witness stand at Guandique's murder trial and even there with Chandra's parents a few feet away, he gives up as little as the questions allow. MK Confidential reached out to Gary Condit and invited him to sit for an interview. He did not respond. Here is where the case officially stands as of today. No one else has ever been charged. In the eyes of the law, the murder of Chandra Levy is unsolved. For the people who love her, there is no version of this that ends. Bob and Susan Levy have done everything that is ever asked of them.

29:53The travel, the media interviews, the searches, the vigils, the waiting, and the trial. They hear a jury say the word guilty out loud in a courtroom. Then they sit and watch a court take it back. They bury Chandra outside Modesto, next to her grandparents, under a stone that reads on all three graves the same words. We are not here. Because none of them are really there, Bob says. They are in our hearts. At the end of all of it, Bob and Susan are left without the one answer that would last. We don't like the word closure. Nobody really likes it. We've lost anybody. We hate that word. More than 20 years on, Bob and Susan Levy sat down in Paris with the French journalist Alain Coutard, who was writing a book about the case.