Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Bonus: Megyn Kelly's MK Confidential | The Missing Intern & the Congressman

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

MK Confidential opens on the morning the biggest missing-persons story in America is supposed to peak. It is September 11th, 2001. Bob and Susan Levy are flying to Chicago to tell their daughter's story on Oprah. The congressman's son is booked on The View. For four months the country has asked two questions about a 24-year-old intern named Chandra Levy. Where is she, and was a sitting congressman involved? At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 hits the north tower. The interviews never happen. By nightfall, the story that consumed America is gone. Search The Megyn Kelly Show wherever you get your podcasts to hear the full series.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone, Megan Kelly here. We've got a new show for you at it's called MK Confidential. This summer, we will be examining America's most notorious crimes. The cases you thought you knew overlooked evidence, the questions that get to the truth. Find the rest of this series and all MK Confidential content by searching for the Megan Kelly Show wherever you listen to podcasts. Here's episode one. It is a beautiful late summer morning in September 2001, and the biggest missing person's story in America is about to have its biggest day. Important new questions in the case of Chandra Levy. Missing intern Shandra Levy. The 24-year-old woman disappeared without a trace. Will Chandra Levy ever be found? It has been the story all summer, a young woman who vanished in the nation's capital and the married congressman whose name keeps turning a. up alongside hers. It has run at the top of the newscasts and across the front pages of newspapers

for months. D.C. police detectives and FBI agents out tonight looking for more clues in this most unusual missing person's case. And this is the morning. It comes to a head. Across the country at this moment in California, Bob and Susan Levy are packing for a flight to Chicago, where they are booked to tell their daughter's story on Oprah, and then they will fly to New York for the Today Show. The congressman's son, Chad Condit, is preparing to defend his father on The View in New York City. For four months, the country has asked two questions nonstop, about a 24-year-old intern named Chandra Levy. Where is she? And was a sitting congressman, Gary Condit, involved in her disappearance. The parallels with the Clinton affair are both striking and obvious, although this time, because of Chandra's disappearance, much, much more serious.

The police investigation is stalled until Chandra is found, either dead or alive. Until then, this country remains in the grip of speculation. Today, on live television, both sides are set to make their case. At 8.46 a.m. Eastern Time, American Airlines Flight 11 hits the North Tower of the World. World Trade Center. Yes, it's September 11th. This just in, you were looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center. And we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers.

There is a major incident in lower Manhattan. We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City. The interviews never happen. Within minutes, the satellite trucks that have been camped outside the Levy's home all summer, start their engines and pull away. And by the end of the day, the story that consumed America is gone, vanished. But what happened to Shandra? I'm Megan Kelly, and this is M.K. Confidential.

That September morning was more than four months in the making. To understand it, we must go back to Chandra Levy's final months in Washington. At 24, Chandra Levy is nearly finished with what she came to Washington, D.C. to do. The 5-foot-4 110-pound brunette grew up in Modesto, California, in farm country, with a ranch house and a pool outback where her mother kept horses. Her father, Bob, is an oncologist, known for taking difficult cases, enough so that some patients call him last-chance Bob. Her mother, Susan, is an artist, a painter.

and quick with a big laugh. She was shy. She really liked being at home. Chandra is their first child and her father's princess. He has called her ladybug since she was a little girl at summer camp. Chandra was really headstrong. We were on a trip sometimes. She just walk away from us because she didn't want to be associated with our parents and kid brother.

She keeps four birds and names them Franny, Zoe, Christmas, and Hanukkah. She becomes a vegetarian at age 14. And what she wants most of all is a badge. In high school, Shandra joins the police explorers, the program for teenagers who think they might want to work in law enforcement. Shandra's mother later recalled that early taste of police work in a documentary for investigation discovery. In high school, she actually got to work in the police department

and she did parking tickets. She was very proud of the job, and she was good at it. You sound like you're very content. with the program for everything. Oh, yeah. Shandra studies criminal justice at San Francisco State and goes on to pursue a master's at USC. She wants a job with the FBI, maybe the CIA.

Despite her ambition, she stays close to her family. Favorite memories were when we travel, because that's when we were closest as a family. When we would drive from San Francisco back, they would say the whole Star War trilogy. by heart, the dialogue for all three movies. In the fall of 2000, Shandra takes an internship in Washington, D.C. at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, working in its Public Affairs Office.

It is not glamorous, but it is a first step toward the federal career Shandra wants. She sublets a studio apartment in DuPont Circle, a neighborhood of row houses and coffee shops northwest of downtown. She's a long way from Modesto. In Washington, her life is quiet and repetitive. Metro to the bureau, the gym afterward, then home. She knows few people and the person she speaks with most is her mother. By the last week of April 2001, Shandra has been working in Washington for eight months,

and her internship is ending. Chandra is preparing to leave Washington. She cancels her health club membership and keeps the receipt. She emails her landlord about the lease. she starts to pack up her belongings. The plan is to fly home, graduate from USC, and begin applying for the federal career she has wanted since high school. On Sunday, April 29th, Shandra leaves a message for her aunt, Linda Zamski, back in California. The internship is over, she says.

She will pack up over the next week or so and head home for a while. It's a routine message about a plan everyone expects her to complete. It is one of the last times anyone hears. Chandra's voice. The next day, April 30th, she works out at the Washington Sports Club. The people at that gym appear to be the last ones to have seen Chandra alive. She was very upbeat and looking forward to going home. The morning of Tuesday, May 1st, 2001, is the last ordinary day of Chandra Levy's life. She sits down to her laptop, set up on a makeshift desk in a hallway nook of her apartment. Investigators will later rebuild the morning almost minute by minute.

She signs on at 1027 a.m. and moves from site to site. The Drudge Report, National Geographic, Amtrak, Southwest Airlines. At 10.45 a.m., she emails her mother a list of Southwest fares for the trip home. Six days out, she is still pricing the flight. At 1126, she hits the Washington Post weather page. It calls for fair skies and temperatures near 80. At 1133, she opens a Washington Post Guide to Rock Creek Park. A minute later, she clicks a map of the park's hiking trails. At 12.24 p.m., she logs off. That is the last confirmed trace of Chandra Levy. She makes no more calls. She sends no more emails. She uses no credit card. On an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, she closes her laptop in her own apartment and seemingly steps off the face of the earth. No one who knew her ever hears from her again. The last place online, Chandra looked up in those final minutes at her laptop was Rock Creek Park. And to understand the rest of this story, you have to know the geography of this place.

This is not a manicured city park or a narrow strip of green. lush grass. It is 1,754 acres of real forest running straight up the middle of Washington, D.C. It is more than twice the size of Central Park in New York and one of the oldest natural urban parks in the country, reaching from the edge of downtown D.C. right up to the Maryland state line. It has bridal paths and a horse stable, picnic groves along the creek, and tucked into the trees the only planetarium in the National Park system. It also has long, steep, wooded ravines, places where the trees close over the trails and the city seems a world away. Rock Creek Park has heavily used running paths, and women do run there alone, but it also has isolated wooded trails,

where a runner can quickly find herself out of sight and entirely alone. Chandra's family and friends say she was not a jogger and did not like going into the park alone. Her apartment is about two miles away. Whether that trail map meant she planned to walk in the park that afternoon, or meant nothing at all will become one of the central questions of this case. 2,800 miles away in Modesto. The days pass and her parents cannot reach Chandra. Chandra calls home. She always calls home, always. Now the phone rings through to her voicemail again and again. We called her up and she didn't ask her phone at a message machine.

I kept calling and calling and she never answered it and I got worried about it. He got very upset and he said he felt something was wrong. Susan is normally the free spirit of the family. By the second week of silence, she has gone quiet. Back in the Levy Ranch home, the phone becomes the center of everything. Every time it rings, they hope it's Chandra. The messages the Levy's leave on their daughter's machine grow more blunt and more desperate as each day passes. Damn it, Chandra, Bob says in one of them.

Call me. Bob starts calling everywhere he can think of. He calls the Bureau of Prisons, where she interned. He calls the FBI, calls Washington hospitals one after another, asking whether a young woman matching his daughter's description has come in as an accident victim. Every call comes back the same. Nothing. No trace. The plan was for Shandra to be home by now, days from graduating.

To her family, that silence is not like Shandra at all. She's careful and responsible. The kind of daughter who checks in. She would not skip the ceremony for the master's degree that she crossed the country to earn. She'd got honors. She was top in her class. That would be exciting for her. It's not like her to not.

call or be in touch. Maybe she ran off, had a schizophrenic episode or something like that. I mean, I'll think of all those things as a reason why she didn't turn out. On May 6th, Bob Levy calls the police in Washington and reports his daughter missing. Ronald Monroe was an assistant chief with the D.C. police. At the time that Chandra Levy was reported, it's missing. The number of missing persons in the district probably exceeded 200 to 300 a month. When the parents called, we sent an officer to just check on the welfare of the person. A police officer goes to her DuPont Circle apartment for a welfare check. The door is locked. There's no sign of a break-in, no sign of a struggle, nothing violent at all.

The building's manager unlocks the door and the officer steps inside. The place looks like someone stopped packing in the middle of a move. Suitcases half-packed, clothes still hanging in the closet, dishes in the sink, a William Sonoma bag on the kitchen counter with a load of dirty laundry inside it, jeans and socks. Her jewelry is still out, earrings and an ankle bracelet and a necklace with a pendant. On the answering machine, 25 messages most from her parents. And then there is the most telling sign of all. Her purse, inside that. her wallet, her credit cards, her driver's license, and $31.50. Her cell phone left on the table. Her blue Sony laptop still open on the desk in the hall. What 24-year-old leaves home without any of it

for weeks at a time? Nor does any of this seem like Chandra. What troubles the detectives most is not what is missing from the apartment. It is what still remains. She has no history of this And based on the fact that we went to her apartment to check on her welfare, we found all her identification in their driver's license, credit cards, checkbook, jewelry, cell phones, anything that a normal person would take out with when they'd go out on the street. All that was in the apartments. Brad Garrett, a veteran FBI agent who works the Chandra Levy case. Her driver's license, her credit cards, her cell phone, and her cell phone were still in the apartment. That's baffling to me and other. because the whole idea is when you're going to leave,

you're at least going to take an ID. There were only two things missing. Her keys and a ring. Her keys and a gold pinky ring with her initials, C.L. That her parents had designed and given her. Wherever Chandra went that afternoon, she went with almost nothing. The apartment does not tell detectives

whether she left voluntarily or something happened to her. Detective Jim Trenum spent years working homicides in Washington. Did she just drop off the face of the earth voluntarily? Is she missing under suspicious circumstances but still alive? Could she have been the victim of foul clay? All of these are possibilities that you have to explore. In the nation's capital, Shandra is one missing name among a few hundred that month. In Modesto, she is the only one.

Police went to a room and found everything there, you know, nothing. They didn't find her anywhere. We searched the area immediate. around her DuPont Circle apartment. We searched the alleys, the dumpsters, hoping we would find something that was connected to her. We expanded the search through vacant properties in the city. Most of the missing cases in D.C., by the police department's own count, are teenagers who run away on their own and are back within a few days or weeks.

Many of those kids are from the neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park and across the Anacostia, where much of the city's violence plays out in the streets. Chandra is none of that. A 24-year-old woman who calls home like clockwork, gone without a trace from a quiet block in northwest D.C. In the days after her parents report Chandra missing, they stop waiting for answers and begin searching for clues themselves. They already pay their daughter's cell phone bills every month,

so they open the latest bills and read them line by line, looking for anyone she might be with. Most of the numbers are ones they would expect. A few Washington numbers repeat, ones they do not recognize. Susan Levy starts dialing them. The first rings through to an answering machine, playing soft background music, and no name or voice recording. She dials the next. This one is not a friend or a boyfriend or a landlord.

A recording tells her, she has reached the office of Democrat Congressman Gary Condit. Susan recognizes the name. immediately. I saw this number that was being called many, many, many times. I decided to call that number, and it turned out to be Gary Condon. Gary Condit is the Levy's own Modesto Congressman. 53 years old, married more than 30 years, one of the most recognizable politicians in their part of California. Gentlemen from California is recognized for two minutes. It is a tremendous cost to the committee and to the taxpayers of this country, and they're confused why we can't work together.

And his number is one that keeps turning up on their daughter's phone bills. Bob Levy decides to call him directly. The family finds a home number, and Condit answers. Bob's voice shakes. He can barely get the words out. He tells the congressman that he is Chandra Levy's father, that his daughter is an intern in Washington, D.C., that his number is all over her phone bills and that she is missing. Can he help? By the family's account,

Condit is pleasant but offers nothing. He says he knows Chandra, that she's a lovely person, and that he has no idea where she is. The Levy's do not believe him. They tell the D.C. police about the congressman and about the calls. By now, the police have taken Chandra's things, including her answering machine. Among the messages are two from a man. On May 3rd, days after she was last heard from, before Chandra had been reported to police. He never gives his name. It's 1145. Sorry, I've been fired up the last day. So give me a ball. Give me a phone down. Kind of what the schedule is. Things are looking pretty good for me today. I think it's already haven't heard from it. Anyway, give me a pop.

The voice belongs to Gary Condit, the congressman who had just played down how well he knew Shandra to her father, Bob Levy. Ronald Monroe was an assistant chief of D.C. police at the time. It was a little bit unusual to us. He had indicated he barely knew her. He just knew her and passed. Two messages in his own voice left days after she vanished, asking Chandra Levy for her schedule and a call back. It is the first clear contradiction in the case. I kind of felt maybe he might be covering his checks. He just seemed to be concerned about himself. In the first week of May 2001, this is still officially a missing person's case.

A young woman who closed her laptop, left her wallet on the table, and did not come home. There is no body. There is no crime scene. There's no witness, no ransom note, no proof that anything criminal... has happened at all. But her parents have found a curious connection, their own congressman's private numbers over and over on their daughter's phone bills. They have heard his voice on her answering machine, and they have heard him tell them directly that he knows nothing. Gary Condit's name is not in the news yet. That is about to change. I'm Megan Kelly, and next time on M.K. Confidential,

the secret Chandra kept, the other women who come forward, and 67 days of deceit from a congressman with everything to lose. That was episode one of M.K. Confidential. The rest of that story runs four more episodes, and we take a new case every week. John Bonae Ramsey, Chandra Levy, the D.C. Snipers, Scott Peterson, and more. To hear the rest, search for the Megan Kelly Show, wherever you listen to podcasts. That's where you will find MK Confidential. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.