The Missing Intern & The Congressman: The Man in the Park — Ep. 4 | MK Confidential

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0:56And talk to your doctor about Vivgard Hattrulo. Brought to you by Argenics. On the evening of May 14th, 2001, Hallie Schilling ties back her blonde hair, grabs her yellow Walkman, and drives down to Rock Creek Park for a run. She is 30, a journalist, athletic, 5 '10", and she has been running for nearly 20 years. She is not a woman who rattles easily. In the parking lot near the old Pierce Mill, she notices a young Hispanic man sitting on a curb, watching her. He makes her uncomfortable. But men stare at Hallie, she thinks, and she starts on her jog anyway. She heads up an empty trail that vanishes into the trees.

1:40Near the rise above the creek, the sun disappears behind the clouds. It feels ominous. Enough so that she picks up a stick off the ground for protection. but it's rotten and she tosses it back. Then she realizes the Hispanic man is jogging behind her, closing fast. She keeps looking back over her shoulder and he is always there. She speeds up, he speeds up. She slows down, he's still there. Then he sprints and closes the distance, grabbing her and throws her off the path and down into the trees. He has a knife. His arms lock around her neck, and something in Hallie flips like a switch. Two things hit her mind at once.

2:25The first is that the traffic on Beach Drive across the creek is loud enough to bury any sound she makes. No one will hear her scream. The second is a decision. There is no way she's going to let this man have her without a fight. A huge fight. She goes berserk. She screams, she twists, and she sees the flash of the knife. He tries to shush her, and that more than the knife blade is what enrages her. Years before, Hallie Schilling took a self-defense class. The thing she has never forgotten is the instructor's helper, a man in a padded rubber suit who stood there in body armor at the end of each session and let the students hit him so they would know what it feels like to strike another human being.

3:13On the ground in Rock Creek Park, that feeling comes back to Hallie. She goes for his eyes, misses, then works a hand into his mouth and digs her fingernails into the soft flesh under his tongue. He bites down on her fingers hard, but she is already tearing loose when to her own shock he turns and runs off the way he came. Hallie is up and she is running up the slope. She makes her way to the park police station with help from two other runners she meets minutes after she breaks loose. She walks into the station house wild-haired, and the officers move at once. A wall of police rushes out onto the trail after the man with the knife.

3:57It is fast and professional. The one thing that needles her, Hallie will write later, is that the officer taking her statement keeps calling her over the radio, the victim. She fought, she thinks, and she is alive. Two weeks earlier, in this same park, Chandra Levy disappeared. She would be found on a wooded slope about half a mile from the trail where Hallie Schilling just saved her own life. 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 how it's called title fraud your property records are public by law your name your address even your signature it's all sitting in a database anyone can access a cyber scammer can pull your records use AI to forge a transfer document, file it with your county, and on paper, they're the new legal owner of your property.

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5:44The first female jogger, um, the one who was attacked about 700 yards from where Levy's body was found said she saw one DK in the Pierce mill parking lodge. And if you look at where Chandra Levy lived, the logical route would have taken her right through the Pierce Mill parking lot. For a year, the search for Chandra Levy points at a congressman. But while the whole country watches Gary Condit, something else is happening on the trails of Rock Creek Park. That spring, in a sudden burst, a man is attacking women in the park, one after another. Yet somehow, no one connects any of it to Chandra. One of the women he grabs will tell her story in public.

6:26Holly Schilling, the runner at the start of the episode, is a journalist. And in the spring of 2002, she publishes a first-person account of her attack in the Washington Post, describing how that self-defense class saved her life on a Rock Creek Park trail. Polly does not name the man who came at her with a knife because at the time, no one has connected him to anything larger. What she writes is that these days, she sticks to a gym treadmill instead of the park trails, but takes comfort in one thing. The man who attacked her is off the streets. He was caught weeks later after he went after another woman, Christy Weigand, near the same stretch of trail, and the park police tied the two attacks.

7:14together. On May 22nd, 2002, five weeks after Hallie's essay runs in the post, a man walking his dog finds a human skull in Rock Creek Park, half a mile from where Hallie was attacked. The connection is not lost on her. She reads the coverage and understands, that could have been me. It is not lost on reporters either. Guandique's name has surfaced in Roll Call, the newspaper that covers Capitol Hill. Reporters pull the court file, find the names of the women he attacked, and dig through databases until they turn up Hallie's article. They are on her doorstep within days. The detectives working Chandra Levy's murder are not.

7:59For the seven years after reporting her attack from 2001 to 2008, Hallie Schilling waits for a call from the D.C. police, a call that does not come, and cannot understand why the detectives on the most notorious murder in the city seem so uninterested in a woman who survived an attack in the same park two weeks after Chandra vanished. It is not until December 2008, after the Washington Post's 13-part series Who Killed Chandra Levy, forces the case back open, that the Levy detectives come to Hallie Schilling. They bring her into Rock Creek Park and walk with her up the trail to the spot where the man attacked her, and she takes them through it.

8:45Her father stands a few feet away, silent. As he watches, he finds himself shaking with anger, understanding for the first time how close he came to losing his daughter. The next day, investigators call Hallie before a grand jury, weighing whether to charge Guandique with Chandra Levy's murder. Hallie's own attack had been prosecuted years earlier. Now prosecutors want the jury to hear what Guandique did to another woman on those same trails. More than seven years after Hallie escaped him, D.C. detectives and the prosecutor apologize for never interviewing her as part of the Levy investigation.

9:26One investigator shakes his head and says he cannot believe Gary Condit was ever a suspect. That summer of 2002, after Chandra's remains are found, an FBI agent named Brad Garrett and a D.C. detective named Jim Trainham bring a geographic profiler into the case. A man named Kim Rosmo, whose studies where violent crimes happen and what the pattern of their locations can tell you about the perpetrator. Kim's really good at looking at a crime scene and helping you understand what is it about the scene that kind of contributed to the crime occurring at that location. Rossmo lays out a map of Rock Creek Park and marks the attacks on lone women from the spring of 2001.

10:12For me, one of the most important early questions was how common are these attacks in Rock Creek Park? We took a look at the data from the park's police about their crimes in an 18-month period living up to there, and it was very clear that crimes of this nature were just so rare. One stretch of the park lights up, an isolated run of trail near the Pierce Mill. The attacks cluster there 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 Hallie Schilling and Christy Wigand in Rock Creek Park, a man at whom no one working the Levy case has ever seriously looked.

11:05His name is Ingmar Guandique. 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 murder, we're going to have an encounter, a place where the offender first sees the victim. Then we're going to have the point where he first attacks her. Then we have the actual murder scene itself. Then finally, we have where the body gets disposed of. So Rossmo takes a hard look at Rock Creek Park. Years later, he will lay out what he found in a documentary on Chandra Levy for investigation discovery. Rossmo goes to the attack scenes, three of them, Chandra's and the two women who lived.

11:47Each is the same kind of place, a secluded spot near a ravine or a steep bank, hidden from the trail behind dense brush. Each of the women had been carrying a Walkman. The Hispanic man demanded nothing and took nothing. No money, no jewelry. To Rossmo, these are not robberies. they are attempted sexual assaults, and he comes to believe the same thing was done to Chandra Levy. Look at how remote this is. It's quiet. There aren't any other witnesses. So this is an ideal spot for a predator to attack somebody. When Rossmo lays the attacks out by date, they fall into a tight cluster in the spring of 2001 on that one isolated stretch of trail near the Pierce Mill.

12:33Holly Schilling attacked in mid-May, two weeks after that. A man exposing himself to a massage therapist on the same ground that same month. Christy Weigand pulled into a ravine on the 1st of July. And then nothing. The attacks end completely the week the man is caught. We took a look at the location where Shonda's body was found. And then we looked at the locations where the attacks on the two female joggers had occurred. There's no one else around. Attacks like that in the park are really rare. And when you've got three of them in a very short time period, that calls for them to be looked at as being connected crimes.

13:15We know that he lived just to the east of Rock Creek Park. And there were no similar attacks after the arrest him. It made Guandiki stand out like a neon sign. He had to be considered a viable suspect and needed to be explored further. There is one more thing the map shows. The place where the man attacked Hallie Schilling is about half a mile from the ravine where Chandra's remains are found. Seven weeks after those remains turn up, in July of 2002, Levy detectives finally walked the ground where Hallie 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.

13:59So what do we know about the man already in prison? Guandique came to the United States illegally from El Salvador. He made his way through Mexico. He swam across the Rio Grande into Texas. He made his way to Houston. And then he made his way to Washington, D.C. He's got a family in El Salvador that's deeply impoverished. He was born in 1981 in the early years of El Salvador's civil war, which takes his father before he's born. When Guandique'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 Guandique will later say his stepfather and mother beat him.

14:44He struggles in school and drops out in the seventh grade. At 14, he is working in the fields. Now, in Washington, D.C., Guandique is 19 and takes whatever work a man without papers can find, and for a while holds it together, but not for long. He drinks heavily. He smokes marijuana and snorts cocaine when he can get it. He drifts from job to job. By the time the D.C. detectives come looking for him, Guandique has been in and out of the prison system for years, moving from one facility to the next. In one prison, he mails obscene drawings to a woman he's never met. In another, he exposes himself to the female guards.

15:27Somewhere along the way, he joins MS-13, the violent Salvadoran gang. This is the man to whom Rosmo's map keeps pointing back. Then there is the 1st of May, 2001. On the day Chandra Levy vanishes, Guandique 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.

16:19area. 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 recedes once again. Guandique sits in prison for the two park attacks. No one is building a murder case against him. Law enforcement is not focused on Chandra Levy, and her case goes cold again. Five years later, the Chandra Levy case is revived thanks to a new police chief and a newspaper. Charles Ramsey is gone, replaced by Kathy Lanier. In 2007, soon after she takes over, Lanier meets Susan Levy at police headquarters.

17:08When Susan holds out her hand, Lanier hugs her instead and comes out of the meeting vowing to solve the Chandra case. One of the two original detectives has retired. Lanier removes the other, Ralph Durant, and hands the case to two veterans, Todd Williams and Anthony Brigidini. The new detectives pull Chandra's clothing and Guandique'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 Guandique's mail and phone calls from prison. When the results come back, the DNA does not establish a tie between Guandique and Chandra. The testing that was supposed to break the case wide open hands them nothing they can put in front of a jury.

17:58What finally shakes the case loose is a newspaper. When you sign your insurance policy for some brokers, that's the finish line. Handshake, commission, bye. Then you may not hear from them again until it's time for renewal. That's not a real relationship. Your business runs all year, however, and so do the gaps and risk. This is why I want to tell you about SuperSure. If your company has more than 25 employees, whether you're the owner, CFO, or HR manager, it can be too complex to just buy a policy online. SuperSure is the super agency built just for you. Licensed in every state for your business insurance and employee benefits.

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19:11That includes helping partners like The Good Acre provide 45 ,000 meals and lower A1C in the Twin Cities, and helping Hello Family Doulas deliver 44 % fewer underweight births in Spartanburg. Because building healthier communities starts by giving people access to the care and services they need to live healthier lives. Learn more at unitedhealthgroup.com slash commitment. In the summer of 2008, the Washington Post runs a 13-part investigation. Who killed Chandra Levy by Sari Horwitz, Scott Higgum, and Sylvia Moreno? Not enough attention was being paid to a suspect who was hiding in plain sight.

19:54The series clears Gary Condit and names Guandique 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, Horwitz asks Police Chief Lanier what she hopes it will do. Stir things up, Lanier says. Sometimes people do come forward. It was the first time anyone from the outside had really exposed what was going on with this case and some of the mistakes that led the case to go cold. The reinvestigation also surfaces something buried since 2001.

20:35When the park police first arrested Guandique, he told an officer he had seen Chandra 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. Guandique does not leave prison. From his arrest in the summer of 2001, through the cold years and the reinvestigation, he stays locked up for the two park attacks. When the detectives finally go looking for their man, they already have him in a cell in California. In September of 2008, two months after the series of articles, a team of D.C.

21:19detectives flies to the federal prison at Victorville in the California desert, where Guandique 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 Guandique into admitting the two park attacks by offering him a less despicable version of the story. They sit Guandique down. They ask him for a DNA sample, and then they run a bluff. They tell him they already have his DNA on evidence from the Chandra Levy case, and they wait. Guandique doesn't flinch. If they have his DNA, he tells them, they should charge him with murder.

22:03They press him. Why would his DNA be on Chandra 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 Guandique. Not, I never met her. Not, I never touched her. Not, who's Chandra Levy? Instead, so what if I did? The detectives write it down word for word. It's nowhere near enough to charge a man with murder, but it is the first time Guandique has placed himself anywhere near Chandra Levy, and he's done it in his own words. The detectives turn to the fat lip and the scratches from May 1st, 2001, seven years earlier.

22:53He tells them two men robbed him. They remind him he had told his landlady it was his girlfriend. Guandique splits the difference. The lip from the robbery, the scratches from the girlfriend. While the detectives are in the room with him, prison officials are searching his cell. Tucked among his things, kept by his bed, they find a photograph of Chandra clipped from a magazine. It is an odd thing for someone with allegedly no connection to her to have bedside seven years after she vanished from a city 2 ,000 miles away. They saw a photo of Chandra Levy in his cell right by his bed, which was very odd.

23:35And as they were talking to Juan Dike, they saw something else that really struck them as odd. They saw a tattoo of a woman on his body. And as they looked at this tattoo, they believed that resembled Chandra Levy. There is one more thing they learn about the man at Victorville. In early 2009, as the murder case against him is coming together, an inmate tips off prison officials that Guandique is planning to break out. On February 26, guards pull him from his cell and search it. They find the makings of a weapon and an escape kit, Loose razor blades, a AA battery, a filed-down sliver of toenail clipper, and a homemade knife.

24:18Two of the blades lashed together with strips of plastic. Guandique will not be going anywhere. So the detectives move on to the one thing that could actually make a case, a witness. That witness is a man named Armando Morales, and you'll be hearing quite a bit about him. Armando Morales is a Fresno, California native, a lifetime criminal with a long record of violent crimes, guns, drugs, and so on. He was a cellmate of Ingmar Guandique in Kentucky in 2006. Morales comes forward in 2009 while the reopened Levy case is searching for anyone who can tie Guandique 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 juries usually trust.

25:14What makes prosecutors listen is that Morales asks for nothing. He is also not the first inmate to say Guandique has talked. Over the years, several jailhouse witnesses did, and their stories did not always match. Guandique's defense will seize on this fact later. But Morales is the witness around whom the prosecution decides to build its case. Guandique and Morales belonged to allied gangs. And for six weeks in a Kentucky cell, they talked. Armando Morales and Imar Guandique belonged to a similar gang affiliation. And as a result, they considered themselves brothers. They were honest with each other.

25:54They looked out for each other in prison. They talked about everything together. According to Armando Morales, one of the things they talked about was the whole Sean Jalivi case. According to Morales, Guandique was desperate to correct one thing in particular. In prison, a man marked as a rapist is a target, and Guandique knew the word was he had raped and killed the intern. Morales said Guandique 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 Guandique confessed that he grabbed Chandra from behind on the trail, dragged her into the bushes, and took her fanny pack before he ran.

26:40To prosecutor 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 Chandra was carrying a fanny pack. None is ever recovered, not at the scene, not anywhere. Nothing in the physical evidence and no witness other than Morales ever establishes that Chandra was carrying one that day. The single source for the detail the prosecution sees as so damning is Morales. There is no corroboration that there ever was a fanny pack, never mind that Guandique took it.

27:23On 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 Guandique case reaches trial, investigators no longer treat Gary Condit as a suspect in Chandra'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 in Chandra's underwear supported what Condit had spent the summer of 2001 denying that he and Chandra had been sexually involved, but nothing beyond that.

28:09On March 3, 2009, Police Chief Lanier stands at a lectern at police headquarters, flanked by the D.C. mayor, the U.S. attorney, and the three detectives who built the case. She announces that Ingmar Guandique will be charged with the first-degree murder of Chandra Ann Levy. She says that she called Bob and Susan Levy that morning to prepare them. Today we make a very significant announcement. We announced that the Metropolitan Police Department have secured an arrest warrant and homicide in 2001 of Chandra Levy. The arrestee is Ingmar Guandique. With that, Lanier does something the department has not done in eight years.

28:52She points the case at another man, and she never once says the name Gary Condit. Congressman Condit was never charged with anything. He was interviewed multiple times. I interviewed him with my FBI partner. Did people think that he was a real possibility? Sure. Did it ever make any sense to me? The answer is no. The trial opens in Washington on October 25, 2010. more than nine years after Chandra disappeared. The lead prosecutor, Amanda Haynes. Amanda Haynes was one of the most senior homicide prosecutors in Washington, D.C. She was so good, they put her on the most difficult assignments, and that's cold cases.

29:31Amanda Haynes had a way of relating to the jury. She can tell a story and make people see the crime scene and see the final moments of the victim's lives. In 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 Guandique to the scene. She admits that.