The Missing Intern & The Congressman: Buried in the Park — Ep. 3 | MK Confidential

It's July 25th, 2001, 8 58 a.m. 28 police recruits stand alongside Glover Road, one of the streets that cuts through Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. Huge park, twice as big as Central Park in New York City. Three sergeants line up the recruits shoulder to shoulder near a picnic area called Grove 17. It is already more than 80 degrees, the start of another humid summer day in Washington. The team is out looking for Chandra Levy. Rock Creek Park is not your typical urban park. It's got a huge creek running through it. It's got rocky areas and areas that are just pure wilderness. It is extremely difficult to do a complete search of every single inch of it. The command from police headquarters was to search 100 yards from roads and trails, but many of the search team that day heard it as 100 yards from the roads only, a key distinction. So that is where the recruits and the sergeants walk, the open ground near the pavement, beating the brush along the edges of the road, calling Chandra's name. It is a far cry from the trails, which run much deeper into the park along the ridge lines and down toward the creek, where the land drops away into ravines thick with vines and fallen trees. No one covers that ground. By one o'clock, it's 91 degrees and feeling hotter. The search team is dripping with sweat. The sergeants call off the search along Glover Road. The recruits climb onto a bus and ride to another part of the park. Ten months from now, Chandra Levy will be found on this very hillside, on ground this search never reached, the area the sergeants and recruits are leaving. Just 79 yards below the Western Ridge Trail near Glover Road. The difference will come down to a lapse in communication. Search the roads and trails versus just the roads. This is the summer the search for Chandra Levy misses almost everything that matters. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. AI 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. Then they can borrow against your equity, or even sell your property long before you realize anything's wrong. But let me tell you about Home Title Lock. They monitor your property's title 24-7, alert you of any changes, and if you are a victim, their team of restoration experts will spend up to $1 million restoring your title. 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You're a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person. I want to have faith that she will come back. At the airport, television cameras film her holding one of Chandra's stuffed animals, a small yellow chick. Back in Modesto, Susan starts a support group for the families of missing loved ones. At first, it helps. But as her daughter's case grows and gets so much news coverage, it crowds out missing loved ones of the others. At least, that's how some members of the group feel. The other families, whose own missing children draw almost no attention at all, begin to pull away, and the meetings stop. I couldn't just trust that the police could do all the work. There was a lot of work. We needed to find as much as we can. We needed someone out there that could do more investigation. Frustrated by the pace of the official investigation, and determined to have someone in Washington working solely for them, the Levees hire Billy Martin, a former federal prosecutor. Martin brings in two private investigators, both retired D.C. homicide detectives, Joe McCann and Duane Stanton. They interview Chandra's friends and co-workers. They retrace her movements, set up their own tip line, and post a reward. More than 100 calls a day come in, and the two of them have to sort the real from the worthless. The mistaken sightings, the dead ends, the psychics who say they can see where Chandra is. Leads are coming in all the time and took us down many, many different paths. This one particular night, it's just me and my partner. The 800 number rings. We answer the phone. There's a gentleman on the other end of the phone who doesn't want to give us his name. But he's got this story to tell about Chandra being in California. And as we listened to it, it did sound credible. He was just looking for 15 minutes of fame. It cost just a lot of effort. And so I was pretty annoyed, pissed off at him. There was just nothing. There was really nothing about Chandra. The PIs are working around the city's own detectives, not with them. Officers who quietly keep McCann and Stanton in the loop are reprimanded for it. A lot of people who followed it remember how crazy it was. You couldn't pick up a newspaper, a magazine, listen to a TV show. The media was talking about it. It was every day. It was every night. It was nonstop. To understand how a case this big goes cold, you have to understand the department working it. In 2001, Washington, D.C. police are climbing out of a brutal decade. The nation's capital has had one of the highest homicide rates of any major American city for years. 1,500 killings from the 1990s remain unsolved. In 2001, police clear fewer than half of the city's homicides, just 48.5%. The D.C. medical examiner's office is overwhelmed. The city morgue is full. Police case files are a mess. And trust between the public and the department is thin at best. The D.C. police chief, Charles Ramsey, had been brought in from Chicago three years earlier to reform a department battered by scandal, low morale, and the decade of unsolved murders. But the Levy case does not land with a seasoned murder squad. It lands in the 2nd District, one of the quieter, wealthier parts of town, with a detective named Ralph Durant, who has spent decades on the force but little of that time working homicides. It is, in almost every respect, a department unready for the story about to break over its head. Start with the surveillance tapes. Chandra's building, the Newport, is secure with a guard on duty around the clock and 13 cameras recording every face that comes and goes. But the system records over itself every seven days. Police officers come to the building on May 6th, on May 7th, on May 8th. And each time they leave without asking anyone to save the recording. By the time someone thinks to ask, the video from May 1st, the day Chandra vanished, has already been taped over. Gone with that recording, what time she left, what she was wearing, whether she was alone. Any one of those 13 cameras might have answered the first question every investigator asks. Instead, there is nothing. Former FBI agent Brad Garrett called out this loss to ABC News in 2017. Things like surveillance cameras, unless you go and initially grab them or tell the management to hold them, they erase or disappear. And unfortunately, that's what happened in this case. Then there's the laptop. Chandra left her computer open on a makeshift desk in the hall of her apartment and on that computer are her last internet searches. A police sergeant named Ronald Wyatt who is not a trained technician, turns her laptop on in an effort to retrace her steps and the hard drive corrupts. Simply turning a computer on should not do that. And years later at trial, a computer expert still cannot fully explain what went wrong. What he can explain is the cost. It takes federal forensic examiners nearly two months to recover Chandra's browsing history from the damaged drive. When they do, they can finally see where her last hour online was spent. From train schedules and airfares to California, to a Washington Post guide to Rock Creek Park, and then to a map of the park's trails. Investigators initially focus on a web address for the park's headquarters at Klingle Mansion. In July, they comb the grounds around the mansion but find no evidence Chandra had been there. What receives less attention is the page Chandra opens minutes later, the broader map of Rock Creek Park. It is that map, once the FBI has pulled it off the damaged drive, that finally sends the investigators into the park. It is what puts that search party of 28 recruits and three sergeants along Glover Road on July 25th. The team that worked the roads, but not the trails. Because the search was only limited to that area off the roads, the area where her body was ultimately found was not searched. The search that was supposed to be the big break. Instead, it became one more thing the investigation got wrong. Former DC Chief of Detectives Jack Barrett remembers it this way. This is something that we all have to live with. There may have been DNA evidence that all that was lost because of the fact that we were unable to locate her remains during the time that we were searching the park. While the police are losing the trail of Chandra Levy, a few miles away, another story is unfolding. One no one thinks to connect with Chandra's. Two weeks after Chandra vanishes, on the evening of May 14th, a tall woman named Hallie Schilling is attacked on a trail near the old Pierce Mill in Rock Creek Park. She's a jogger, 30 years old, and a journalist. A man follows her into the woods and tackles her. She fights him off and she runs straight to park police and reports it. No one thinks to connect it to Chandra. Seven weeks later, it happens again. On the evening of July 1st, a young woman named Christy Weigand is running in Rock Creek Park. She's not running alone. Her fiance pulls ahead of Christy on the path as he usually does. Before long, he is out of sight and Christy is alone on the trail. Weigand is 25, a lawyer, and seven weeks from her wedding. It's raining. The road through that stretch of the park is closed to cars and the trail is nearly empty. Christy turns her head and notices a man behind her, gaining. Then he has her, an arm locked around her from behind. Hauling her off the path and down into a ravine. There is a knife. He puts a hand over her mouth so she cannot scream. Christy is certain in that moment that she will die on this hillside. But Christy Weigand is a former college rower and she is bigger than the man holding her. She fights. She twists and kicks and makes enough noise that the man gives up and runs off into the forest. She is a difficult victim. She claws her way back up the slope and flags down the first person she sees. He never reached for her engagement ring. He never touched the radio clipped at her waist. Whatever he wanted from Christy in that ravine, it wasn't money. This time the man does not get away. Weigand's description goes out over the police radio. The park police spin up a helicopter and flood the trails and within about 45 minutes two officers find the man not far from where Christy was attacked. He is wet, streaked with dirt and leaves and exactly matches the description she gave. A Hispanic man wearing a white t-shirt, baggy shorts and sneakers. Police take him to the small stone station house inside the park and run him through the system. Go back now to fall of 2000. A few miles from Chandra's apartment near Rock Creek Park a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador is trying to establish a life in D.C. He's been in the country illegally for a little more than a year taking whatever work he can find without legal status. Hard, low-paid jobs earning $7.50 an hour. In his free time he often goes to the park with his girlfriend. By the spring of 2001 their relationship becomes violent. He beats her. He drinks heavily using whatever drugs he can get and scaring the people around him. His girlfriend's family begins to fear him. He kicks in doors. He keeps hitting his girlfriend. He bites her hard enough to leave marks. The man from El Salvador starts telling her that if he cannot have her no one will. He takes to carrying a six-inch knife wrapped in a red cloth. That spring he breaks into an apartment on his own block steals a gold wedding ring and is arrested. He promises to appear in court and never shows. 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There is no cost to you. There is no obligation. They are not big on pressuring you to do it. They just want to give you straightforward info on how you can diversify if you want to. Even with an IRA or a 401k you can diversify just part of it if that's your preference with gold. Birch Gold is a great option to consider. All right. Check it out for yourself by texting MK to 989898. The man from the ravine is identified as Ingmar Adelide Juandique, a 19-year-old day laborer from El Salvador. He lives in a northwest Washington neighborhood near the park. The night of Christy Wigand's attack shortly after one in the morning a veteran detective named Joe Green sits down across from Juandique in his cell with a second officer and a Spanish interpreter. Juandique agrees to talk without a lawyer. Leading the questioning is Joe Green, a big balding detective who has 30 years on the job. He starts with the assaults. Green does not accuse. He offers the man an easier story, one where the whole thing was just a misunderstanding and the prisoner takes it. D.C. Metro detective Jim Tranum described the dynamic this way to Investigation Discovery in 2017. When they asked him about the attack, he denied it. But they used a different tack and asked him if maybe he just accidentally brushed up against somebody in the woods. He gave them this story about, oh yeah, he was running or jogging in the woods and collided with a woman by accident. And so they knew that at that point that they had the right guy. Juandique describes bumping into Christy Wigand on the trail trying to help her up and her screaming instead. Then he gives Green the same kind of account of a second woman weeks earlier, a tall jogger. Two attacks, he admits to, dressed up as accidents. Then Green tries one more thing. Chandra Levy's face is on flyers all over Washington that summer. Green slides one of the flyers across the table, her photograph on it, and asks a simple question. Has he ever seen this woman in the park? Yes, Juandique admits. He has seen her once near the parking lot by the old Pierce Mill. He thought she was pretty. He never saw her again. Green writes up the two assaults. He does not write down what Juandique said about Chandra Levy. Green is park police. The detectives chasing Chandra are D.C. police, separate forces working the rest of the city. And at that moment, the D.C. police are chasing a congressman. The answer to a question no one else had thought to ask goes into a drawer and stays there. A man who hunts women on these trails, sitting in a locked room in July of 2001, telling a detective he had seen Chandra Levy in the park and found her pretty. It will be years before anyone working the Levy case hears a word of it. The Chandra Levy story is still the biggest in the country through the morning of September 11th, 2001. By that afternoon, it's gone. For our family, we were shocked. But we were not emotional like most people because we've already felt 9-11 happened to us. The attacks in New York and at the Pentagon change every priority in Washington. The cameras leave Gary Condit's door. The federal agents who had been working the Levy case are pulled into terrorism task forces. The tip line goes quiet. For the private investigators hired by the Levy's, the effect is immediate. We didn't get the media attention anymore and there go a lot of the leads. So things start to dry up. Even after the initial shock, the 9-11 attacks cast pall over the case. In March of 2002, Gary Condit loses his primary. Beaten by a one-time ally, the state legislator, Dennis Cardoza. Washington's most watched man the previous summer is now finished in politics, of zero interest to the public, and leaves D.C. with Chandra Levy still missing. On May 22nd, 2002, more than a year after Chandra Levy disappeared, a man named Philip Palmer walks his dog in Rock Creek Park. Palmer is a furniture maker who has collected antlers and animal bones since he was a boy, so he thinks nothing of leaving the trail and working his way down a slope. That morning, he sees a scrap of red fabric, then something pale and rounded in the leaves, about the size of a silver dollar. He brushes the leaves away. What he finds is a human skull. He ties his dog's blue leash to a branch to mark the spot, climbs back to a nearby road, borrows a phone from a construction worker, and calls 9-1-1. Here's a bit of that phone call. I was walking my dog in the woods this morning, and I came across a human skull. At the Washington Post, a reporter named Sari Horwitz is at breakfast with a police source at the exact moment the call comes in. I arranged a breakfast with a police official, and during the breakfast, his pager just started going off. And when he came back, he had this stunned look on his face, and he said, you're not going to believe this, but I just got a call, and they think they found Chandra Levy's remains in Rock Creek Park. The remains are 79 yards below the Western Ridge Trail, down a wooded slope so steep that in some places it falls away at 45 degrees. It is the ground the recruits had walked right past, but not through, the summer before. What remains of Chandra is surrounded by items a year of weather and animals have left. Her sunglasses, a running shoe, a gray Property of USC Athletics t-shirt, a small radio, and something odd, a pair of black stretch pants turned inside out, with each pant leg tied in a knot at the ankle. When they found her leggings, they were like docks and loops in the legs. If she fell down that ravine and knocked her head and died by accident, there's no reason to remove her pants. The first officer down the slope recognizes it at once, the isolated ravine, the radio, the knotted clothing, because he had stood at a similar scene the previous summer at one of two jogger attacks. Here's former detective Traynham again. When you're looking at the scene, bones are scattered everywhere, and that's normal for this sort of scene. If there's a body that's out in the elements, it begins to decompose, and then animals and other scavengers attack the body. They actually take the skull to the medical examiner's office with red lights and siren. They were in such a hurry. The medical examiner had already obtained Chandra's dental records, so he was able to match up the various fillings. The examiner, Jonathan Arden, holds the x-rays up against the records, steps back and forth between them, and says two words, it's her. Well, after they identified her, they called us up and told us that was just really bad. I mean, it's just as bad as anything could be. Six days later, on May 28th, Arden rules Chandra Levy's death a homicide, but the body has been left abandoned out in the open for more than a year, and the bones cannot tell him how she died. No bullet holes, no stab marks, nothing left of her throat to say whether she was strangled. It is possible, he tells reporters, that no one will ever know the specific injury that killed her. When a reporter asks the D.C. police chief, Charles Ramsey, how a search the summer before could have walked past her, Ramsey does not flinch. It's possible, he says, to search and not find. Word of her discovery travels fast to Modesto. That same day, a thousand people gather for a memorial in Chandra's hometown. At the doors, someone has set out silver bowls of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Chandra's lifelong favorite. Now they know for sure how short her life really was. Then comes the detail that says the most about the search. Two weeks after Chandra's remains are recovered, the family's own investigators, Joe McCann and Dwayne Stanton, go back over the released crime scene themselves, on their hands and knees with garden rakes, because they do not trust that the police have done it properly. An hour and a half in, McCann's rake catches on a bone the search teams had left in the dirt. About a foot long, it is Chandra's left tibia. The department's first response is to suggest that animals must have carried the bone back in after the search was done. A Washington Post columnist named Mark Fisher mocks them in print and suggests the chief invest in a good, heavy-duty garden rake. When detectives call McCann in, they ask him to take a polygraph examination. He refuses. Ramsey, furious that his technicians missed a foot-long bone, sends the teams back into the woods. Over the next 19 days, they found more of Chandra's remains. Bones from her hands and her feet, her back, her femur, the largest bone in the body. One of them 170 feet from where her skull was found. Two retired detectives with garden rakes had found what scores of officers had missed. For the Levees, the call they had been dreading was an excruciating end to the saga of their missing daughter. They cried. Yeah, cried a lot. Screamed and cried. Yeah. If you can't imagine to have your child laying out there, it seems so unfair. For 13 months, the biggest missing persons case in America had been all about a congressman. Now it is about a body on a wooded slope. In the park, Chandra Levee had looked up on her computer the morning she vanished. On the ground, a class of police recruits never touched. The question is no longer, where is Chandra Levee? From here on, it is, who killed her? When investigators finally go looking for an answer, they will turn to a man they already have in hand. Next time on MK Confidential, the woman who fought off a killer on those trails and lived, and waited seven years for a call that never came, and a prisoner with a story to tell.