Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?

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Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Welcome back to another episode of Postmortem.
I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green, and today we are discussing the case of Angela Pritchard, who was shot dead by her estranged husband in 2022 following weeks of stalking and harassment, all of which she reported to the local police in Bellevue, Iowa. After the murder trial, Angela's family filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Bellevue, as well as three police officers for what they say was inaction and indifference by not arresting Christopher Pritchard sooner.

So joining me today to talk about this, to dig in a little bit more,

is CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti and 48 Hours producer Mead Stone.

Welcome, guys.

Thanks for having us.

Good to be here. Thank you.

So a reminder to everyone, as usual,

if you haven't already listened to the 48 Hours episode, the audio version of it, you can find it in your podcast feed right above this one. So go listen and then come on back so we can talk about it.
All right. So I think what is particularly tragic about this case, guys, is that it really, really seemed preventable.
It seemed like Angela really did all the things that you're supposed to do. She endured months of domestic violence, and then Angela Pritchard obtained a no-contact order against Chris Pritchard, meaning that if there was any contact that he made with her, it could result in a mandatory arrest.
Here's the question. If Angela's no contact order had been enforced in a better way, what should have happened with this case?

Great question, Anne-Marie. I've covered a number of 48 Hours cases.
Usually, the whodunit of these cases is the mystery. As it pertains to this story, the mystery was, why was it more done in time? Everyone we spoke with, from prosecutors to David O'Brien, he's the civil rights attorney representing Angela's family in that lawsuit against Bellevue Police investigators, they all said more could have been done.
There were two no-contact orders that were issued. The first one, Angela actually lifted herself because she wanted to give her marriage a second chance, but then it became very clear that the violence was only escalating.
And so she successfully requested a second no contact order. As you mentioned, a no contact order means exactly that, no contact of any kind.
That means no text messages, no phone calls, no emails. And yet David O'Brien says in a 37-day window in that period of time, Chris Pritchard made 12 violations.
Now, he was arrested once. He spent a day in jail for that.
He was released. He was supposed to appear in court, failed to do so twice.
There was then an arrest warrant issued for him. Seven days went by.
No arrest was made in time. Angela was then killed, and it would take 24 hours after that to finally arrest Chris Pritchard.
And that final week of Angela's life, the police apparently didn't do anything to try to find Chris Pritchard. According to their own police records, they were doing other things in the town, like chaperoning a prom and providing an escort for a funeral procession.
There was a loud barking dog, apparently, in the neighborhood. The Bellevue police made notes about these incidents, but nowhere in their records is there any mention of trying to find and arrest Chris Pritchard.
Anne-Marie, to give you some context, because this is what struck me when Mead and I were in Bellevue. You drive down that main street, we're talking about a population of 2,500 people, there was not a single traffic light.
Mead points out the police were responding to loud barking from dogs. They had time to respond to these calls.
Indeed. Absolutely.
You know, I wanted to try to understand this case sort of in a greater context. And so I kind of dug into the statistics about these types of protective orders, these orders to stay away from the victim.
And one of the things that I found is it's really hard to get solid information. A lot of the information about domestic violence is old.
I think the kind of overwhelming conclusion, though, about these types of orders is that they can be very effective if they're enforced. I'm sure this came up in your reporting as you were talking to people.
How did they feel about the weight of these types of protective orders? Yeah, and David Bryan put it very well, and it still sticks with me. He said, a lot of people often look at these no contact orders as not being worth the paper they're written on.
But in his they are very valuable as long as they are enforced as you so accurately mentioned and and unfortunately in this case it just seemed like a lot of these violations were not enforced and mean i know that you were really looking into this too because there are ramifications with each violation comes more time spent in jail is that correct yes yes i think that's one of tragedies. In Iowa, for the first offense, it's one night in jail.
A second offense, it goes to seven days in jail. And it goes up from there.
And, you know, had Pritchard been arrested each time he violated the no contact order, you know, he would have eventually been spending a good amount of time behind bars. And, you know, one would think that would be a deterrent.
You know, sometimes victims of domestic violence, they have been alienated from their support system or they are embarrassed to share what they're going through. This is not the case with Angela.
Her family is very supportive. You know, they basically become like protective detail.
Her sister, Wendy, is her shadow. This must have had a tremendous impact on the family.
I mean, you've got to think about it. And it's something I've been thinking about too, and it's a really good point.
Victims of domestic violence, oftentimes the hardest first step is even recognizing you're a victim and then trying to figure out what steps to take. Very early on, Angela, with the support of her family, identified Chris Pritchard as a problem and they took the right steps.
They went immediately to law enforcement thinking that they would be protected, but it wasn't enough. They were living in in fear and you mentioned it Wendy buddy uh who's Angela's sister was her shadow even having Angela at one

point live with her unfortunately the one time she wasn't by Angela's side is when Angela was

attacked and killed and on top of all that you also had Angela's sons who live in the area who

also were dealing with their own issues with Chris Pritchard one son saying that Chris Pritchard

I'm going to identify. Police were being called and included in all of this, but the family still had this real sense of helplessness.
The thing is that Chris Pritchard was not always like this. Relationships don't typically start off like this, right? In fact, Wendy liked him.
Wendy introduced him to her sister, but then he starts to take this kind of downward spiral. And we learn in the hour that it seems to begin once he is brought up on charges, accused of a stealing from his employer.
It's $36,000. So it's not a little bit.
But can you tell me a little bit more about that case? He rented equipment that belonged to the company he worked for to customers, and he was requesting that they pay him for the rentals. So they apparently wrote Pritchard checks, and he kept the money.
It was a first-degree theft charge. When that was exposed, the family says that ultimately led to this downward spiral.
And without a job, and now having lost the respect of this very small community, he started to engage in drug use and abuse, methamphetamine, which then led to anger, and it only continued, according to those sticky notes, what we call a diary of domestic abuse that Angela documented so well that her sister Wendy shared with us. Too much was expected and put on Angela to protect herself.
And ultimately, in the end, it is her who identifies the suspect, right? Chris shows up with a gun at her workplace. We want to play that 911 call, but we just want to warn you that this is disturbing to listen to.
Please. Hello? Yeah, I didn't hear you.
I have customers coming in. 911? Please get out of here.
Where are you at? Correct. You know, you can put yourself in her shoes at that moment.
You know, it's just, you can't even imagine that sort of terror. And she had the presence of mind to call 911 in that moment.
And, you know, she shouted his name in the last split second of her life. It wasn't just her identifying Chris in that moment that helped.
A few seconds later, you hear Chris say an expletive directed towards Angela as he is standing over her lifeless body. The profanity that he uttered helped convict him because as Angela's son, Josh, points out, that's not a word you say after you accidentally shoot someone.
And of course, Pritchard claimed that the shooting was accidental. And that proved to the prosecutors that it was premeditated and intentional.
Welcome back. So I want to talk a little bit more about why police were convinced that this wasn't an accident.
Our special agents in our hour interviewed Pritchard three times. And each time they did, his story of the accidental shooting changed a little bit.
The first one was Angela pushed him, shoved him, and he fell back and the shotgun hit a cabinet or something and went off. And he had another story where he had kicked a backpack and the gun fell over and went off and shot her.
The medical examiner testified that the shotgun blast had a downward trajectory. And in Pritchard's examples, most of them would have had an upward trajectory.
The police tested the gun and it was in perfectly fine working conditions. and the condition that Pritchard explained, that the gun just went off, would have been impossible.
And prosecutors did an incredible job showing premeditation. So really, you had prosecutors really detail and outline how this whole plan really started to form the day before the murder took place.
So you had Chris who borrowed a truck, something very different than the car that he drove, which was very recognizable, stashed that borrowed truck somewhere, then trekked through the woods to access the kennels at around 4 a.m. And we know this because of security footage outside of the kennels and then laid in wait from that residence to the kennels it's about a mile and a half a couple of miles uh and he left in the middle of the night but this was would have been a treacherous hike it would have been you know pitch black through very very thick woods i mean this shows an incredible amount of determination.
And then, yes, he was just waiting for her for about four hours to show up. He takes off into the woods.
But news of this spreads like wildfire because Bellevue is a small town. So then he shows up at a friend's house.
Yeah. He shows up at Jeff Junk and his girlfriend, Kim Klein.
They're at home. They already know what's going on.
And they just completely play it cool. And they invite him in and he has a drink.
You spoke to them. I mean, what was this like for them? I think they were surprised.
I think they were in a state of shock. And I think at that point they were in a state of preservation, preserve that time so that cops, when they felt safe enough to contact them, could come.
And so what they did to make that place feel safe for Chris, they invited him in, they offered him a drink. I think they also cooked up some microwavable pizza, sat down.
The way that Jeff and Kim described it, they, the entire time, know he had just killed Angela Pritchard. But Chris didn't act like anything was off, like it was just a normal night of catching up with friends.
And Kim was so, she was so taken aback by how surreal this all was, she secretly snapped a photo on her phone just to document it as they also contacted police. At one point, you had Chris Pritchard, I guess so exhausted from everything that had happened, being on the run, he passed out in a lazy boy reclining chair.
And he was still asleep when police eventually made their way to the property and carried out that arrest. Yes.
And that was quite a scene. There was a lot of officers from different agencies.
It was a SWAT team that came in and arrested him. And when they get to the jail, there's more body cam footage of Pritchard being processed.
And you just, you sense the gravity of what he's done has hit him. Right.
He pleads not guilty to first-degree murder and robbery charges. In February of 2024, a jury took less than an hour to find him guilty of both charges.
And then about a month later, he is sentenced to life in prison without parole. But the hour does not end there.
There is a second court case in this hour, which is very fascinating to me, a federal lawsuit that civil rights attorney David O'Brien, who we mentioned a little bit earlier, filed against the city of Bellevue and three of the officers who work for the city, work for the police department there, for failure to arrest Chris Pritchard leading up to Angela's murder. At the end of the hour, though, we learn that the judge overseeing this case dismisses it.
Can you tell us a little bit more about why this case was dismissed? You know, the judge didn't, he didn't buy the argument of the state-created danger. Okay, we got to slow down.
State-created danger. Yes.
That's what they had to prove. Right.
That's what Dave O'Brien was arguing, that there was a state created danger. And that's a legal term, which means that a police force, in this case, the Bellevue police, actually made Angela's situation more dangerous because they didn't enforce the no contact order.
So, their inaction actually put Angela in greater peril. And that's what a state-created danger is.
The judge didn't agree. The judge also didn't agree that there was sufficient evidence to prove that the officers and Pritchard had relationships.
Dave O'Brien requested his hearing a couple of months later because the officers in pre-trial filings said they, two of them said they had never boarded their dogs at the kennels. And it turned out that Angela's family had found receipts for the two officers, showing that they had indeed boarded their dogs in the kennels.
Now, that by itself is not particularly important. What's important is that they apparently lied about this in an attempt, says O'Brien, to conceal their relationship with Pritchard.
The defense attorneys say that this information was not turned over in discovery because of a mistake that the defense attorneys had made, not their clients. And this was considered, and it did not change his decision.
The judge, in his ruling, he said there's no evidence to indicate that they're friends. Anne-Marie, police have what's known as qualified immunity.
And long story short, that sets a really high bar to convict police. You need to show an action.
And in a situation like that, it almost comes down to having a text message where a police officer is saying, we're friends with Chris, let's not arrest him. Obviously, that did not exist.
So what's next for this case? Angela's family said they are appealing the case to the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis.
It's a process that will lengthen their legal journey for about another year. What about Angela's family? How are they doing? When we spoke with Wendy, there was still this tremendous sense of guilt for not being there to do more, to protect.
She said that she was really struggling to live with that guilt. Though she did say the one thing that she was proud of was that until the very end, Angela fought and fought, and she did not give up.
And unfortunately, and why this case is so tragic, she was so vocal, she fought for herself for so many months, and it was only in her death that her words finally brought some amount of justice. From that last word, Chris, and the 911 call, to all of the written words on those sticky notes, she fought for herself.
It wasn't enough to save her life, but it was enough to bring her killer to justice. Well said, Jonathan.
Very well said. As you guys know, we talk about justice.
There's never really sort of justice in a case like this. But people should know that there are a ton of resources out there.
Everyone should know about the National Domestic Violence Hotline. And if you go to their website, if you call the number 800-799-7233, there are all sorts of options available for you.
So you do not have to live in terror. Jonathan and Mead, I want to thank you guys so much.
Thank you for having us.

Yes, thank you. Thank you.

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