The Missing Intern & The Congressman: Life Sentence — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential
August 7, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readThe Missing Intern & The Congressman: Life Sentence — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential
In July 2016, a woman calling herself Babs Proler was living out of a hotel after being evicted, with only her golden retriever Buddy for company. When the hotel's sliding glass door closed on the dog, a stranger crossed the lobby to help, carrying the animal inside. He told her his name was Phoenix. Over the next few days, he watched Buddy when she needed help. They talked about Buddhism, the military, a daughter he said he'd lost. Then he told her he'd just gotten out of prison and showed her his prison ID. When she said twenty years meant he must have nearly killed someone, his answer was: "I wish it would have only been one person." He described melting foam cups into a shank and driving it through another man's eye. Frightened, Babs began secretly recording him. She captured about seven hours of Phoenix talking.
The Witness Who Was the Whole Case
The man calling himself Phoenix was Armando Morales, a five-time felon and leader of a California prison gang. Six years earlier, his testimony had been the single piece of evidence that sent Ingmar Guandike to prison for sixty years for the murder of Chandra Levy. There was no forensic evidence, no fingerprints, no eyewitness, no video. As defense attorney Bernie Grimm put it: "They don't get to a jury without him."
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What you'll learn
- 1 MK Confidential: The Missing Intern & The Congressman — Life Sentence (Ep. 5)
- 2 (01:00) **Babs Proler Meets "Phoenix"** - A woman living out of a hotel meets a stranger who helps her injured dog, beginning a friendship that turns into a secret recording project
- 3 (03:11) **The Secret Recordings Begin** - Babs captures about seven hours of Phoenix talking, revealing the man's true identity and his role in a murder case
- 4 (03:49) **The Conviction Unravels** - The Guandike conviction gets thrown out because Morales lied under oath about never being an informant
- 5 (05:27) **The Government's Dilemma** - With a retrial set for fall 2016, the prosecutors face a ruined witness and a new set of secret recordings
- 6 (08:08) **How Morales Became the Case** - The 2011 trial rested entirely on a jailhouse informant's story of redemption
- 7 (10:38) **The Tapes Destroy the Witness** - What's on the recordings is a violent thug, not the reformed man the jury saw
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
“MK Confidential" opens in a hotel lobby in Annapolis, Maryland, in July of 2016. A sliding glass door closes on a golden retriever named Buddy, and a stranger gathers the animal up and carries him inside. He tells the dog’s owner his name is Phoenix. Over the next few days he tells her the rest — twenty years in prison, and still capable of doing horrific things when prompted. She gets frightened enough to start recording their conversations. By the time she stops, she has seven hours of a career criminal named Armando Morales, the witness who sent Ingmar Guandique to prison for sixty years for the murder of Chandra Levy.
Megyn Kelly lays out how the murder conviction comes apart. On the stand, Morales swore he had never been an informant. Sitting in the government's own files was a letter proving otherwise — a document the prosecution never turned over, and the defense was entitled to have. A judge vacates the conviction and orders a new trial. Then, the tapes surface, and the government's star witness sounds nothing like the reformed man the jury voted to trust. On July 28th, 2016, prosecutors drop the murder charge. Guandique is deported to El Salvador, and disappears.
A dismissal is not an acquittal, and it is not an exoneration. Megyn walks through what the evidence still shows, and what has never fit — the rough horse trail where Chandra's family says she would never have run, the workout shoes still sitting in her apartment, an unidentified man's DNA on her clothing, her missing keys and pinkie ring, never found. Chandra's aunt never believed Guandique killed her; neither did the family’s private eye. In time, even Bob and Susan Levy stopped being sure. Twenty-five years after their daughter walked out of her apartment, the murder of Chandra Levy is, in the eyes of the law, unsolved. Her parents find consolation in ladybugs, the source of Chandra’s childhood nickname, which find them wherever they go, exploring the world in honor of the daughter who left so much of it unseen. This is Episode 5, and the conclusion of the Chandra Levy story.
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