True Confession

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Speaker 12 Tonight on Dateline.

Speaker 13 It really hits deeply.

Speaker 13 Actually seeing the crime scene photo, it made me just very, very angry. What had been done to Angie?

Speaker 16 The day that Angie was found dead, my whole system shut down.

Speaker 17 Everything just shut down.

Speaker 18 Who would do that to Angie?

Speaker 19 To one of our friends.

Speaker 20 The accusations were flying. They were running and gunning for anybody.

Speaker 1 You're handcuffed?

Speaker 19 Yeah, they treated me like I was part of this nasty crime.

Speaker 21 They were convinced that you were there.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 22 These people robbed my life for 20 years for something I never did.

Speaker 16 All they kept saying is, he confessed, Carol. He confessed.
I said, what is going on here? I went to the streets searching for her killer.

Speaker 13 She was advocating for justice.

Speaker 23 She was a force to be reckoned with. She was not going to let it go.

Speaker 13 She begged me to give it a deeper look.

Speaker 24 The potentially have a break on this? Oh my gosh.

Speaker 24 We're going to go solve a murder. We're going to go solve a 25-year-old murder.

Speaker 25 Years lost.

Speaker 26 lives shattered, a mother fights to uncover the truth. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 29 Here's Keith Morrison with true confession.

Speaker 35 They call it the Snake River, and it glides wide and placid past the gleaming white Mormon temple, and then twists and tumbles over rocks and weirs through the town of Idaho Falls.

Speaker 36 It twists and tumbles like this most improbable tale.

Speaker 37 The one that began right here.

Speaker 15 Where are your kids?

Speaker 2 Long before the state of Idaho was associated with notorious names like Laurie Vallo or Chad Daybell or

Speaker 44 Brian Coburg or Brian De Doet.

Speaker 45 We thought we knew the story we're about to tell.

Speaker 41 Perhaps you think you know it too.

Speaker 46 But

Speaker 47 that old cliché is a cliché for a reason.

Speaker 48 Truth is often stranger than fiction, as you will see.

Speaker 50 I don't think anybody saw this coming. I don't think that you could have imagined this in a million years.

Speaker 51 But here at the river is where it first went wrong.

Speaker 52 Among a group of young men and women who'd formed what felt to them like a kind of family.

Speaker 53 It was an almost every night thing during the summertime that we would go down there, hang out with friends, meet girls.

Speaker 54 A daily gathering of the ones who didn't quite fit anywhere else.

Speaker 20 We were a bunch of wild kids, young adults, just having fun, trying to live our lives.

Speaker 34 One of their number had just left a family nest, set out on her own.

Speaker 55 She was a special one because of a kind of no-nonsense charisma she seemed to carry around with her.

Speaker 56 Her name was Angie.

Speaker 57 She was a personality, that's for sure.

Speaker 48 You didn't want to cross Angie.

Speaker 19 Man, she wrestled me down. I thought she was going to put me in the river.

Speaker 30 I mean,

Speaker 27 she was happy.

Speaker 35 18-year-old Angie Dodge. This is her brother, Brent, and her mother, Carol.

Speaker 16 She grew up in a household with three brothers, so she wrestled with them. And her friends always knew that nobody got in her face because she would take care of you.

Speaker 14 She was good size, too.

Speaker 59 I mean, she wasn't a petite thing.

Speaker 16 She was 5'11 and she was strong.

Speaker 62 Strong and grown up enough in 1996 to move across town from the family home to her own apartment.

Speaker 16 And we gave each other a hug, and she walked towards her car, and she

Speaker 16 threw me in kiss and says, I love you.

Speaker 60 It all seems

Speaker 63 surreal now.

Speaker 37 That thing that happened all these years later.

Speaker 2 It was the morning of June 13th, 1996.

Speaker 28 Bill Squires was a rookie cop when he got the call to go to a house in a residential neighborhood here on I Street in Idaho Falls.

Speaker 24 So I just barely got out of training and was, you know, working as a solo police officer myself when that call came out.

Speaker 8 He made his way upstairs to a tiny second floor apartment.

Speaker 28 What did you see inside that apartment?

Speaker 24 What appeared to be, unfortunately, a murdered young lady. That was the first homicide that I'd ever been exposed to.

Speaker 66 The victim was, of course, Angie Dodge.

Speaker 51 Keep a log, said a senior officer.

Speaker 7 And that's what Squires did.

Speaker 2 He kept track of everyone who went in and out.

Speaker 69 Standard procedure.

Speaker 10 Jeff Pratt was a veteran cop by then.

Speaker 70 It was the most horrific scene that I had ever worked up in, you know, in that 15 years of my career at that point.

Speaker 46 What had been done to that young woman?

Speaker 70 Well, she was nearly decapitated.

Speaker 37 Near the bed was a stuffed teddy bear, soaked in blood.

Speaker 52 On the dead girl's stomach was a bloody hand print.

Speaker 59 Could you get a like a print off that, a usable print?

Speaker 70 We tried, and in that time, we were not capable of doing that.

Speaker 49 But the killer had left critical, verifiable DNA evidence on the victim's body.

Speaker 70 And a lot of biological materials that had been left behind, indicating there had been a sexual assault.

Speaker 75 At the time, DNA was quite new.

Speaker 70 It was, and that's why we were focused so hard on collecting all of those biologicals.

Speaker 62 This moment, this place, would imprint itself on the detectives for life.

Speaker 77 For Angie's family, called down to the police department, it was beyond imagining.

Speaker 78 So they brought in some pictures as this, your sister, and pictures of the crime scene.

Speaker 59 How's that to look at?

Speaker 30 It's just horrifying.

Speaker 16 My whole system shut down, my emotional, my, everything just shut down.

Speaker 35 While the CSIs went about their work, homicide detectives looked for the murder weapon.

Speaker 64 Had to be a knife of some sort, but they couldn't find it.

Speaker 28 They determined there was no forced entry.

Speaker 58 The killer left the exterior door ajar.

Speaker 12 And when they looked at the body, it seemed to them almost posed.

Speaker 80 What did that say to you?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, it was a passionate crime. It was somebody who wanted

Speaker 20 to humiliate her.

Speaker 34 Former detectives Ken Brown and Jared Furriman.

Speaker 14 There was well over 14 different wounds.

Speaker 80 It was that horrific.

Speaker 31 The detectives had a hunch in the start.

Speaker 34 There had been powerful emotions at play here.

Speaker 56 Angie had lived in the apartment only a matter of weeks.

Speaker 64 She'd been dating a young man for about the same length of time.

Speaker 16 You checked him out?

Speaker 83 Yes. DNA didn't match.

Speaker 14 DNA didn't match.

Speaker 51 They learned that some of Angie's friends had gone to see her before the murder.

Speaker 58 But they left shortly before 1 a.m.

Speaker 20 They all checked out. DNA didn't match.

Speaker 34 Well, detectives began casting a wider net, focusing on interviews.

Speaker 42 Crime scene investigator Jeff Pratt was increasingly sure it was DNA that would take the lead role in finding the killer.

Speaker 70 I really believed that that was going to be the solving factor from the very beginning.

Speaker 85 Was that a recommendation you were able to make to the lead investigators in the case?

Speaker 70 I made that suggestion. They were already kind of on task on some other things.

Speaker 12 On other things.

Speaker 54 Which was, it would turn out a great pity.

Speaker 60 And none of them had a clue, of course.

Speaker 37 How could they?

Speaker 76 That the mystery begun here would be unlike any other in this town.

Speaker 3 That the crime committed against Angie Dodge would spread its damage like a contagion.

Speaker 58 And thus a decades-long obsession took over Carol's every waking minute to find the man who killed Angie.

Speaker 39 But also

Speaker 69 to demand a particular sort of justice,

Speaker 35 which would turn out to be the most improbable demand of all.

Speaker 16 I got called in by the prosecutor, and, you know, Carol, you have to stop. And I wouldn't stop.

Speaker 36 Carol Dodge lost her mind.

Speaker 6 After her daughter Angie was raped and murdered that awful summer of 1996. that was Carol's own assessment.

Speaker 33 And why would anyone doubt it?

Speaker 44 Certainly not her son, Angie's brother, Brent.

Speaker 78 I remember going down to the mortuary and we had to choose a casket for her. And mom laid on the casket and said,

Speaker 78 you're not burying my baby in this.

Speaker 88 It was beyond what you can imagine and make up.

Speaker 32 It was tough, too, for Angie's friends, those who hung around down by the Snake River.

Speaker 18 Like Jeremy Sarges, known as Jer.

Speaker 19 She was definitely a part of the girls that came down to the river every day or,

Speaker 8 you know, multiple times a week at least.

Speaker 91 Among those river kids, Angie Dodge was a force, smart, fun-loving, respected by her friends.

Speaker 69 Angie graduated high school early at 17 with honors.

Speaker 65 and then turned 18 and started college and had a new job at a beauty salon.

Speaker 93 She was a good friend to people.

Speaker 34 Tessie Osborne was was a friend.

Speaker 93 She was a very nice person and very responsible. Everybody loved her.

Speaker 5 Russ Baldwin was also a river regular.

Speaker 20 She had a big, bright, beautiful character. You just knew who she was.

Speaker 69 As was George Poggies.

Speaker 53 It was wild that somebody we knew had been murdered.

Speaker 34 Police were a constant presence at the river in those first days and weeks after the murder.

Speaker 53 Jare was terrified. I was terrified.
Our everyday lives are suddenly scrutinized and they're asking, where were you six days ago? And I was like, I really don't remember.

Speaker 76 For months, it seemed police got nowhere, which drove Carol Dodge even more mad.

Speaker 16 Everybody went on with their lives except me.

Speaker 16 I drove to the police department every day that they were open.

Speaker 83 You became a fixture in there.

Speaker 16 I did. Nobody could stop me from talking to those detectives.
I didn't bother to say, could I talk to so-and-so? I'd just walk right back in their office.

Speaker 16 I got called in by their prosecutor, and you know, Carol, you have to stop. And I wouldn't stop.

Speaker 56 Finally, about six months after the murder,

Speaker 20 we had information that one of the people that we had interviewed at this case and had given an alibi at the river was arrested in Ealy, Nevada, for very brutal rape and cutting a young woman with a knife.

Speaker 58 Kind of the same pattern, huh? Yes.

Speaker 60 His name?

Speaker 35 Benjamin Hobbs, another of the river kids.

Speaker 79 As you see here, Hobbs even carried flowers behind Angie's casket at her funeral.

Speaker 34 So as one detective traveled to Nevada to confront Hobbs, others began calling in Hobbes' friends, including the kids from the river.

Speaker 18 Hey, Chris.

Speaker 29 Now for videotaped interviews.

Speaker 64 Why do you think you're down here?

Speaker 53 Honestly, I have no idea all.

Speaker 55 One of whom was a 20-year-old named Christopher Tapp.

Speaker 5 Tapp said he would like to help, but he said he didn't know anything about Angie's murder.

Speaker 97 If I did anything know about this, I would say,

Speaker 30 but I do not know.

Speaker 17 That's all it's true.

Speaker 31 All I know is I did not kill Angie Dodge.

Speaker 9 400 miles away in Nevada. Ben Hobbs said he didn't kill Angie either, and he didn't know who did.

Speaker 96 And then he asked the question.

Speaker 100 Was she right the night just killed? Kabi, was she right? I don't know. That's why I'm asking you, because if she was, my DNA will prove my innocence right there.

Speaker 5 They took blood samples from both Hobbes and Tapp.

Speaker 3 And then they pulled Tapp in again for more questions.

Speaker 101 Nine times, a total of 20 hours of questions.

Speaker 102 They polygraphed him repeatedly.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 64 eventually it came out.

Speaker 76 A confession of sorts.

Speaker 10 Tapp admitted he was in Angie's apartment with Ben Hobbs when Hobbes did it, killed Angie.

Speaker 29 And with that, police were convinced they had their killers.

Speaker 32 But sometime after all those interrogations, the DNA tests were done and results came back.

Speaker 10 And the semen found on Angie's body did not belong to Ben Hobbs or Chris Tack.

Speaker 78 What went through your your heads when the DNA results came back and it showed that the attacker was not Ben Hobbs?

Speaker 20 If you're going to nail it down to one word, it's frustration.

Speaker 96 The detectives, Brown and Furriman, were as sure as could be that Tapp knew more than he was saying, more than even his confession.

Speaker 51 So they kept him in jail and developed a theory to account for those negative DNA results.

Speaker 98 What about Jeremy?

Speaker 46 There had to be a third attacker with Hobbes and Tapp.

Speaker 42 And it was that third man who left the DNA.

Speaker 32 So they worked to tap some more.

Speaker 33 And what do you know?

Speaker 84 Tapp fingered another buddy who was also a friend of Angie's.

Speaker 93 Where do you think you ended up tonight?

Speaker 22 I got it from Jared.

Speaker 38 Jared?

Speaker 96 But you've met him.

Speaker 18 Jeremy Sargis.

Speaker 96 I remember...

Speaker 19 waking up on my birthday.

Speaker 19 The police were there to arrest me, pulled me out of bed, cuffed me, dragged me downtown.

Speaker 19 Told me I was under arrest for accessory to the murder of Angie Dodge.

Speaker 7 What was that like?

Speaker 19 That was one of the scariest things I've ever been through.

Speaker 1 You're handcuffed?

Speaker 19 I'm handcuffed. Yeah, they took me downtown and treated me like I was part of this nasty crime.

Speaker 35 Meanwhile, the police went hard at the other river kids.

Speaker 30 Maybe Jeremy was the third man, or maybe it was one of the others, like George Pais.

Speaker 53 They flat out told me I was lying to them and I was protecting my friends. I was terrified because none of us are violent, and I thought I was next.

Speaker 49 Russ Baldwin was on the list, too, but...

Speaker 70 I was in jail.

Speaker 42 And that's how that went. And they were like, what? And I'm like, yeah, I was in jail when this happened.

Speaker 61 Strange, but true.

Speaker 58 Records showed Baldwin had been picked up on a warrant for failure to appear in court for,

Speaker 35 in all seriousness, fishing without a license at 7.29 p.m.

Speaker 76 the evening before Angie Dodge's murder.

Speaker 73 Records said he wasn't released from jail until five days after the murder.

Speaker 25 But the police weren't so sure.

Speaker 20 I mean, they even went as far as to demand DNA because I could have broken out, murdered Angie Dodge, and then broke back in.

Speaker 72 But the DNA was not Baldwin's and he was cleared.

Speaker 96 So who was that third man?

Speaker 54 Police just couldn't pin it down.

Speaker 38 Or had they already?

Speaker 25 What did Officer Furman tell you that Chris Tapp had said about you?

Speaker 98 Then Chris has placed you there.

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Speaker 32 It was the middle of winter in Idaho.

Speaker 2 Angie Dodge had been dead seven months when they arrested Jeremy Sargis, charged him as an accessory to murder.

Speaker 7 So Jeremy cooled his heels in jail,

Speaker 29 knowing full well who put him there.

Speaker 22 Why I got it from Jared.

Speaker 25 What did Officer Furman tell you that Chris Tapp had said about you?

Speaker 98 Then Chris has placed you there.

Speaker 19 He's just trying to tell me that he knew we did this.

Speaker 109 And Mr. Tapp stated that Jeremy Sargis was one of the individuals that actually held her arms down during the homicide itself.
What was it like to hear that?

Speaker 58 It was heartbreaking

Speaker 90 because...

Speaker 75 You thought Chris was your friend.

Speaker 19 You don't lie about something like that. I mean, it was hard to deal with.

Speaker 54 But it turned out that Jeremy had something going for him that Chris Tapp did not.

Speaker 12 An aggressive attorney.

Speaker 21 What advice did your attorney give you?

Speaker 19 All you can say, under the advice of your attorney, you invoke your Fifth Amendment right.

Speaker 45 And without more evidence than just Chris Tapp says so, prosecutors were forced to drop the charges against Jeremy.

Speaker 28 The fact of the matter was, if you didn't talk to them, they couldn't prove anything.

Speaker 30 Right.

Speaker 46 How long were you actually in jail?

Speaker 18 Just two days.

Speaker 8 Two days of bitterness.

Speaker 85 Betrayed by a friend.

Speaker 75 How'd you feel about your old friend Chris Tapp?

Speaker 90 Oh, I hated him.

Speaker 42 I hated him.

Speaker 19 What the hell are you thinking, man?

Speaker 54 Meantime, police and prosecutors kept talking to Chris Tapp because, unlike Jeremy, he kept talking to them.

Speaker 65 And then it happened.

Speaker 110 Sometime during those many hours of interviews, Chris Tapp added to his confession something very disturbing.

Speaker 18 He didn't just watch Ben Hobbs do it, he played a role in Angie's rape.

Speaker 61 And remember that blood-soaked teddy bear police found near the bed?

Speaker 35 Tapp told police that Ben Hobbs held that over Angie's face as he, Hobbs, slit her throat.

Speaker 75 More persons of interest were brought in.

Speaker 102 More DNA tests were done. That rookie cop who'd worked the crime scene kept up on the case by keeping his ears open around the station house.

Speaker 24 I think every time

Speaker 24 they did a DNA sample that didn't match Keith, I think it was a punch in the gut every time.

Speaker 49 With Ben Hobbs already behind bars in Nevada on different rape charges and not enough evidence to charge him or some mysterious third man, prosecutors in Idaho decided it was time to move on what they had, which was Chris Tapp's confession.

Speaker 32 Same guy.

Speaker 18 They called a press conference to announce they were charging Tapp with first-degree murder, rape, and use of a deadly weapon.

Speaker 75 Was there a collective sigh of relief when Chris Tapp was arrested?

Speaker 24 I can only speak for myself, but I looked at it as, okay, well, we've got one of the suspects now in custody. Now we just need to find out the rest of the story so we can close the case completely.

Speaker 38 Oh, if only.

Speaker 34 When Chris Tapp went on trial in 1998, Carol Dodge was convinced he absolutely played a role in the rape and murder of her daughter.

Speaker 16 I mean, I was finally looking

Speaker 30 somebody in the eye,

Speaker 16 looking at some

Speaker 16 what I thought was a devil who had taken my daughter's life.

Speaker 16 The anger surged within me.

Speaker 65 She watched him in court, her eyes full of venom, as she listened to the evidence against him.

Speaker 31 That is, his own confession, his many confessions, which the defense tried unsuccessfully to suppress.

Speaker 54 Tapp's own words convinced Carol he was guilty.

Speaker 1 But if that wasn't enough for the jury, then one more witness would do it. A woman you've already met.

Speaker 2 What did they tell you would happen if you refused to?

Speaker 93 I was going to let a killer walk free. I got to do what's right.

Speaker 48 Destiny Osborne, Angie's friend, and Chris's friend too, testified that she heard Chris Taft confess to the crime at a party.

Speaker 2 Destiny said she wanted to do the right thing, especially since she knew both Angie and Angie's mother, Carol.

Speaker 110 She was happy you testified?

Speaker 93 Well, I mean, yeah, because she felt it gave her some answers.

Speaker 48 Yes, answers Angie's mother had been desperate for for so many months.

Speaker 98 What did you want to have done to him?

Speaker 16 They had discussed the death penalty, but I didn't believe in the death penalty. No human being on this

Speaker 16 human earth has the right. to take another person's life.

Speaker 14 Even the person who murdered your daughter? Absolutely not.

Speaker 56 But she was pleased pleased when Chris Tapp was found guilty and sent off to state prison for 40 years.

Speaker 40 Except

Speaker 49 that couldn't be the end of it.

Speaker 64 Tapp's so-called third accomplice, the owner of that DNA, was still out there.

Speaker 29 So DNA, Carol felt sure, had to be the key.

Speaker 44 But the police couldn't seem to find the person.

Speaker 25 And so Carol decided she would.

Speaker 83 This was your search now.

Speaker 69 Find the person who was the owner of that DNA.

Speaker 78 Exactly.

Speaker 98 Because they could tell the story.

Speaker 16 They're the only one. That person is the one that's going to tell the story.

Speaker 7 It was a partial victory.

Speaker 32 Some justice for Angie Dodge and her mother, Carol.

Speaker 2 Chris Tapp was in prison.

Speaker 68 His alleged accomplice, Ben Hobbs, was behind bars in Nevada for a different crime, though he was never charged with Angie's murder.

Speaker 65 But of course, it wasn't over.

Speaker 31 The Idaho Falls Police made it known they were still searching for that third man, the one who left his DNA on Angie's body.

Speaker 57 And something like a public guessing game ensued.

Speaker 42 Was it this man or this one?

Speaker 36 Or was it this man, George Paughees?

Speaker 31 Seemed like the whole town suspected him just because Chris was his friend.

Speaker 53 I would have patrons of my family's restaurant walk in the door and walk straight up to me and ask me if I was a murderer.

Speaker 88 What do you say? No.

Speaker 53 No, I didn't murder that girl.

Speaker 56 But if Tap's friends thought they were being tortured, Angie's mom, Carol, was living in her own personal hell.

Speaker 16 That's when I went to the streets and I literally put 60,000 miles on my truck searching for her killer. I distributed like 1,200 flowers through the summer.

Speaker 88 Did you go to scary places, dangerous places?

Speaker 16 Oh, yes.

Speaker 16 And I remember going to

Speaker 16 a place and the lady said, you know, you need to leave

Speaker 16 before somebody hurts you.

Speaker 54 And yet she kept doing it for years, taking incredible risks.

Speaker 16 I had a gun put to my head one night.

Speaker 31 And during those nights, Carol often ended up parked outside the apartment where Angie was murdered.

Speaker 16 I would just stare at that house and stare at the windows and try and figure out how scared she must have been.

Speaker 8 She also endlessly is, is talk the right word?

Speaker 32 Those friends of Chris Tapp, like Jeremy Sargis.

Speaker 19 There were times I would be working,

Speaker 39 look up, and there she is.

Speaker 31 She'd been watching me for a while.

Speaker 7 She was relentless.

Speaker 19 And by that time, I think Furman had her pretty convinced that we had something to do with it.

Speaker 55 That's Detective Jared Furriman, of course.

Speaker 49 Carol prodded him, prodded them, the whole department, insisting they keep searching for the killer for more than a decade.

Speaker 54 She spent her days and nights reading police reports, practically memorizing them.

Speaker 16 I don't sleep and I get up and I just go, what part of this don't I understand?

Speaker 28 In one of those reports, Carol found a phrase which, the more she read it, sounded out of place in the DNA world.

Speaker 2 It was about pubic hairs, which in addition to the semen had been found on Angie's body.

Speaker 16 It was written in this lab report that it's similar or same as the victim. And I said to myself, it's either Angie's or it's not Angie's.
It can't be in either or.

Speaker 77 Then Carol remembered reading an article about an internationally known DNA expert who just so happened to live and work right in Idaho.

Speaker 25 This is the expert, Dr.

Speaker 52 Greg Hampikian, a fruit fly geneticist from Boise State University.

Speaker 51 But Dr.

Speaker 52 Hampikian's work is not all done in the classroom. In fact, his own path changed years ago when he was asked to test some DNA and got an innocent man freed from a Georgia prison.

Speaker 3 And just like that, the doctor found a new calling, founder and director of Idaho's Innocence Project.

Speaker 45 Secrets can be kept, I guess, but, you know, science reveals those secrets.

Speaker 38 So Carol called this Dr.

Speaker 73 Hempikian

Speaker 92 and discovered that his Innocence Project had just taken on the case of

Speaker 92 Christopher Tapp.

Speaker 102 At which she might have been forgiven for hanging up the phone, but she didn't.

Speaker 92 Quite the reverse.

Speaker 113 Her words to me I'll never forget were, I just want to know what happened to my daughter.

Speaker 42 And, you know, it still brings the hair up on the back of my neck.

Speaker 16 The curiosity of hers surprised you.

Speaker 14 The knowledge surprised me.

Speaker 39 Carol was well on her way to becoming an expert in her own right in forensic science.

Speaker 79 So she read that report to him, the one that said the pubic hairs found on Angie looked similar to or the same as the victims.

Speaker 16 He goes, well, they're either hers or they're not.

Speaker 69 Just as you thought.

Speaker 16 He said, well, where are the hairs?

Speaker 56 So she called the Idaho Falls Police Department, which found the hairs in an envelope in the evidence room.

Speaker 33 And once DNA tests were run on those hairs and compared with the semen and all the other materials from the crime scene, Dr.

Speaker 46 Hampikian concluded this.

Speaker 51 There was no evidence whatsoever that anyone was inside Angie's apartment besides Angie.

Speaker 84 and the mystery man who killed her.

Speaker 83 It's all one person who did this in terms of the DNA.

Speaker 54 Dr. Hampikian believed police were mistaken.

Speaker 69 There was one killer, not three, like the police thought.

Speaker 102 Now that remarkable news could mean only one thing, according to the Idaho Innocence Project.

Speaker 36 Chris Tapp's confession was false.

Speaker 5 He didn't do it.

Speaker 47 No matter what the police thought, he wasn't even there.

Speaker 46 The news came down on Carol Dodge's head like a hammer.

Speaker 16 For 13 years, they had me convinced that Chris Tap was there.

Speaker 16 All they kept saying is, He confessed, Carol. He confessed.
And I was extremely angry.

Speaker 74 Next step, watch those Christop confession tapes for herself.

Speaker 16 There's times that I wanted to put my fist through the TV.

Speaker 34 The DNA convinced Carol Dodge.

Speaker 72 There could be no doubt that Chris Tapp was nowhere near her daughter's bedroom the night Angie was killed, and he needed to be out of prison.

Speaker 12 But the question remained, why would he confess?

Speaker 57 So what'd you do?

Speaker 16 I met with the chief, and I asked for copies of all of the videotapes. Maybe not even a lot of them.

Speaker 101 Those videotapes, including the ones in which Chris Tapp had confessed to taking part in the murder.

Speaker 58 And now, a dozen years after the murder of her daughter, Carol watched every single minute of those hours and hours of videotapes.

Speaker 12 Interviews with all those men who'd been interrogated.

Speaker 100 Like I told you, we're just going to circle.

Speaker 89 Well, I know, that's why I think this is

Speaker 76 starting with Ben Hobbs.

Speaker 16 Man, he was adamant. that he said, I did not kill Angie Dodge.

Speaker 17 Please don't be nervous. I'm just not used to me now.
here.

Speaker 46 Next, she watched the police interview Jeremy Sarges, whom Chris Tapp had implicated.

Speaker 16 I mean, literally, I said, what is going on here? Their strategy was that they were trying to get each one of these guys to

Speaker 16 roll on the other one.

Speaker 16 And Ben and Jeremy

Speaker 16 were much smarter and just basically,

Speaker 16 you know, didn't play their game.

Speaker 6 What she saw amazed her, as did what she learned.

Speaker 104 That the man interrogating Chris Tapp, then Detective Jared Furriman, had been a school resource officer well known to a young Chris Tapp.

Speaker 97 I trust you, and hopefully you trust me, okay?

Speaker 16 Furman kept telling Chris, just trust me, Chris. You got to trust me.
You know, we go way back, Chris, and I think that he was taught to respect adults and he was a follower.

Speaker 112 She watched as Chris told Furum that he knew nothing about Angie's murder.

Speaker 18 And then she watched the detectives get Tapp to imagine himself as an active participant.

Speaker 93 Let's say, for example, hypothetically, Chris, you were there, okay?

Speaker 16 Hypothetically, Chris, how do you think it happened?

Speaker 16 And I remember Chris saying, you mean like a TV show?

Speaker 29 Next, she saw police administering polygraph after polygraph and almost always with the same result.

Speaker 9 They would tell him he was deceptive.

Speaker 92 But perhaps what troubled Carol most was seeing how confused Tapp was.

Speaker 36 Even 10 days after his first interviews, he still seemed not to know what house Angie lived in.

Speaker 114 Didn't she like live on the corner? I was here.

Speaker 114 It was a bit of a lie.

Speaker 35 For a guy who'd taken part in a murder, Tapp also seemed not to know much about the layout of Angie's apartment.

Speaker 77 So Detective Brown suggested this helpful memory aid.

Speaker 17 While you're trying to draw it, sometimes it's going to use it, you know, since you can draw it out.

Speaker 2 They seemed to be coaching him.

Speaker 92 He still couldn't do it.

Speaker 12 And then they showed him where the murder happened.

Speaker 114 Bathroom right here, and bedroom, like back here.

Speaker 3 There was more.

Speaker 2 Carol was stunned to see that police had shown Tapp photos of the crime scene.

Speaker 100 I want you to tell us

Speaker 100 if that's how you remember it. If that's how you don't remember it, maybe it's going going to dod some memories for you and we're going to go from there

Speaker 10 and finally remember that the police theory of the crime after dna didn't match tapp or hobbs was that three people committed the murder together the detective spent hours literally trying to drag the name of that third man out of tapp and when carol saw the tape well you watch it the name nothing comes to my head it wasn't you

Speaker 16 it wasn't as mickelson mccleton there's times that I wanted to put my fists through the TV.

Speaker 59 By the time you had gone through all of those tapes, what did you think about Chris Tapp?

Speaker 16 How did they do this to me? How have they managed to convince and keep someone in prison for all these years? And it's a possibility is not there.

Speaker 51 So then Carol made the most remarkable decision.

Speaker 55 She would do everything in her power to free the man convicted of killing her own daughter.

Speaker 65 The impossible, of course, Tapp had lost all his appeals.

Speaker 8 It was over for him.

Speaker 38 And the detective who'd put him behind bars was now more powerful than ever, was mayor of Idaho Falls, and absolutely certain that Chris Tapp was as guilty as sin.

Speaker 4 What's it like to know that Carol is now actively

Speaker 80 campaigning for his release, believes in an innocent man?

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Speaker 7 For years after the murder, finding Angie's killer was Carol's reason for living.

Speaker 5 Through three heart attacks, the death of her estranged husband, often on battles with the Idaho Falls Police.

Speaker 92 And then that fight became way more complicated because Detective Jared Furriman was soon elected mayor of the city.

Speaker 3 And as mayor, Jared Furriman still seemed to be caught up in the Angie Dodge case, as Jeremy Sargis and his mother discovered.

Speaker 19 Mom worked at City Hall and he wasn't fond of her and she wasn't fond of him.

Speaker 80 Well, he still believed you're guilty.

Speaker 1 He did, and he would make sure and tell her that, too.

Speaker 52 Your son's gotten away with murder.

Speaker 19 Yeah, we know he's done something.

Speaker 80 To Tapp.

Speaker 73 Mayor Furriman and Detective Captain Ken Brown were so sure the doubters were wrong that back in 2012, they were more than happy to sit with us and answer whatever questions we had.

Speaker 48 And here, the mayor told us he absolutely knew that Chris Tapp was guilty.

Speaker 79 Knew because it was he, Furriman, who took Tapp to the crime scene, where he, not the doubters, saw how Tapp behaved in the bedroom where Angie Dodge was murdered.

Speaker 81 He took us into the bedroom and relived that night.

Speaker 109 And you could see it on his face.

Speaker 80 He was reliving it.

Speaker 112 Of course, the critics wouldn't be able to see that because it was one of the only times during the investigation when the police did not videotape Chris Tapp.

Speaker 38 But?

Speaker 80 I have no doubts in my mind that Chris Tapp is part of that homicide itself.

Speaker 59 But you can't worry anything, though.

Speaker 15 Well, you can't.

Speaker 83 People do confess to things they didn't do.

Speaker 20 We know that, but when people confess to crimes that they don't do, they don't know the minute details of that case. And Chris knew the minute details of that case.

Speaker 109 He, of course, claims that he knows them because he was fed them.

Speaker 109 We would politely disagree with that.

Speaker 83 Is it possible, at least, that there was some suggestion involved in these things before he actually said them? That he heard in the questions he was being asked some hint of what the answer might be.

Speaker 80 Hypotheticals, as it were.

Speaker 20 For us to sit and say there's absolutely no possibility

Speaker 20 anything could have happened, you know, we can't say things like that. We can say that we have reviewed those tapes over and over.

Speaker 14 We had a jury who reviewed those tapes.

Speaker 83 For two guys who interviewed this person and found that in the first interview, the second interview, the third interview, the fourth interview, the fifth interview, he lied like a sidewalk.

Speaker 69 Then you finally get to the seventh interview, and that's the gospel truth.

Speaker 30 Well, not

Speaker 20 absolutely, absolutely not.

Speaker 20 During each of the interviews, he was bringing out information that he absolutely knew was not fed to her, the color clothes that she was wearing, the position of the clothes.

Speaker 103 Interesting.

Speaker 68 Many times as the interviews progressed, Chris Tack claimed to know nothing about the clothes Angie Dodge was wearing.

Speaker 4 But some details in the interview could be interpreted to back up claims by the police.

Speaker 104 Once, for example, before Tapp was shown the crime scene photos, he did seem to, in a guessing kind of way, know what Angie was wearing.

Speaker 114 I know the only

Speaker 114 comfort has across my mind that the future is wet.

Speaker 91 And although he's wrong about the color of her clothes, after being asked asked many times if her clothes were half on or half off or pulled up or pushed down, he does correctly say this about her pants.

Speaker 84 Also, said the detectives, Chris talked about Ben Hobbs hitting Angie behind the ear.

Speaker 10 And.

Speaker 20 But we have the evidence to back it. We have bruising where he says that Ben hit her.

Speaker 36 So detectives insisted they were right.

Speaker 33 Ben Hobbs was the ringleader, Chris Tap was involved, and an unknown third man left the DNA in the form of semen.

Speaker 64 But as we talked to the mayor and the detective, we knew, and they knew, that the victim's mother, Carol Dodge, believed Tapp was innocent, and they, detectives, had made a terrible mistake.

Speaker 80 What's it like to know that Carol is now actively campaigning for his release, believes in an innocent man? I think that's part of the process.

Speaker 4 Her heart has been broken, and she's convinced you got the wrong guy.

Speaker 109 When I heard that, I was

Speaker 81 genuinely surprised.

Speaker 20 She's looking for closure. Tomorrow or the next day, Chris could be guilty in her mind again.

Speaker 20 Hmm. Really?

Speaker 37 Hello there.

Speaker 39 Anyway, perhaps this, we decided, would be a good time to talk to the man in the middle of it all, the serial confessor, Christopher Tapp.

Speaker 14 Have a seat. Thank you.

Speaker 2 There comes a time in every tale to meet the person at the center of the story.

Speaker 39 And here he is, Christopher Tapp.

Speaker 32 No longer the aimless pothead you've seen on those videotapes from 1997.

Speaker 41 At the time of this interview in 2012, he was a man of 35

Speaker 2 who'd done more than a decade of hard time.

Speaker 14 As people look at you, what do you most want them to know about you?

Speaker 20 I've been so wronged all these years.

Speaker 22 How could individuals do something to another human being like they've done to me?

Speaker 62 You're an innocent man? Yes, sir, I am.

Speaker 88 Of course, everybody in prison is innocent, right?

Speaker 22 If you look at the whole entire case, the DNA, none of them points to me. None of them...

Speaker 51 On that point, there is little dispute, of course.

Speaker 69 But how did Chris Tapp get here?

Speaker 2 That's a familiar story to many families.

Speaker 57 The sweet little boy shown in all these pictures of a typical childhood started smoking marijuana at 13.

Speaker 2 Then at 16 turned to meth.

Speaker 84 Chris dropped out of high school, hanging out down by the river in Idaho Falls with all those kids his mother warned him about.

Speaker 32 That, he said, is how his name came up after the murder of Angie Angie Dodge.

Speaker 83 Did you think anything of that? No.

Speaker 22 I had no rhyme, no reason to be scared.

Speaker 52 Until, you'll recall, January of 1997, when Tapp was brought in for questioning after his friend Ben Hobbs was arrested for a Nevada sexual attack, which police said was similar to the murder of Angie Dodge.

Speaker 22 I didn't know what I was

Speaker 22 being brought in for.

Speaker 83 You didn't connect it with the Angie thing at all.

Speaker 22 No, I thought I was, honestly, I was going in for drugs.

Speaker 31 And as you've seen, over the course of several weeks, Christopher Tapp soon went from saying he knew nothing about Angie Dodge's murder to being the only man charged in the case.

Speaker 98 Well, of course, one of the difficulties was your story kept changing, right?

Speaker 22 Very much it did.

Speaker 14 I mean, you went from saying, I don't know anything about this,

Speaker 88 to then saying, well, maybe Ben had something to do with it.

Speaker 88 To then, well, maybe there's a third guy involved.

Speaker 30 To, wait a minute, I was there and,

Speaker 14 oh, yeah, and I cut her.

Speaker 7 Where did that come from?

Speaker 22 Trying to give them what they wanted to hear, just to appease them.

Speaker 2 Wait a minute, but why would you say you cut her?

Speaker 22 Because during that time, Mr. Furman, he said, hypothetically, even if you did cut her, it still ain't going to matter.
We'll be able to help you. You just need to help us.

Speaker 12 And indeed, here it is on tape with then-detective turned mayor Jared Furiman in charge of the interview.

Speaker 97 Hypothetically, if Chris Tapp was holding on to Angie as she was being cut and that some other stuff was going on, or if Chris Tapp took part in the knife in any way, shape, or form in cutting her, okay, but I didn't.

Speaker 97 Would you listen? Sorry.

Speaker 30 Okay.

Speaker 22 Hypothetically, I said, okay.

Speaker 67 If you took part in any of that, that's okay.

Speaker 97 Because you're still here. You're still showing some good faith that you want to cooperate.

Speaker 80 Do you believe that story?

Speaker 22 Hook, lang, and sinker.

Speaker 88 Try to put yourself there right now and tell me what was going on inside your stomach and your brain.

Speaker 14 Scared.

Speaker 22 Trying to figure out what they want just for them to leave me alone.

Speaker 30 Why?

Speaker 22 I didn't kill nobody. I was never there the night the murder happened.

Speaker 98 They just kept focusing on, well, if you was there, if you did do it, if you held the knife, it's okay.

Speaker 30 We will help you.

Speaker 87 So, like an idiot, I believe them.

Speaker 98 And then they charge you with murder.

Speaker 96 Yeah.

Speaker 32 As we spoke here back in 2012, Chris Tap was fighting to clear his name with the support of the Idaho Innocence Project and the victim's mother.

Speaker 14 Carol Dodge came around to your side.

Speaker 28 What was that like?

Speaker 22 It's an amazing feeling.

Speaker 83 And I appreciate her finally understanding.

Speaker 87 That I'm innocent.

Speaker 48 Carol, of course, despite this turnabout and new mission in life, was still stuck in her grief.

Speaker 2 And by the time our first report on this case aired in 2012, more than 16 years after the murder of Angie Dodge, those River kids, Chris Tapp's friends, had tried to move on as well, but couldn't.

Speaker 34 Russ Baldwin had bounced around the country from coast to coast with only occasional visits back to Idaho Falls.

Speaker 20 It just feels like every time I go there, I need to watch my step.

Speaker 24 That's why I can't live there.

Speaker 62 Jeremy Sargis, wrongly accused by his friend Chris of taking part in the murder, had gone into a kind of exile 500 miles from Idaho Falls.

Speaker 19 My friends, my support group, had kind of disbanded and

Speaker 68 I was kind of alone.

Speaker 48 But your family was there, that's your home, you grew up there.

Speaker 85 How's it like having to leave and try to find a new life somewhere else?

Speaker 19 It was scary. My family has a

Speaker 98 business that's been there for over 100 years, and I've always felt like I had a path or a career, stuff like that kind of takes its toll on you a little bit too.

Speaker 2 The rookie cop who'd manned the door at the murder scene, Bill Squires, was now a sergeant and still convinced that Chris Tapp's confession and conviction were righteous, as they say.

Speaker 28 You would just never expect somebody to confess to something repeatedly that they didn't do.

Speaker 24 Yeah, there's no doubt. We've got a suspect here and they're admitting to this.
Why would we do anything differently?

Speaker 69 Carol Dodge, of course, could think of a lot of reasons to do something differently,

Speaker 56 was convinced those detectives had blown the case completely and had browbeaten an innocent man into a false confession.

Speaker 10 She needed help now.

Speaker 47 And so she looked and looked until she found him,

Speaker 1 the man who might make all the difference.

Speaker 120 My phone rang, and I picked up the phone, and I almost fell out of my chair.

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Speaker 116 Are you ready to get spicy?

Speaker 27 These Doritos Golden Sriracha aren't that spicy.

Speaker 118 Maybe it's time to turn up the heat.

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Try Dorito's Golden Sriracha.

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Speaker 84 Carol Dodge had to look a long way from Idaho Falls to find the one she needed.

Speaker 32 The one who could help her convince the police there was something very wrong with the Chris Tapp conviction.

Speaker 10 She looked all the way to Chicago, in fact, where she found him.

Speaker 45 He is Steve Drizzen, a clinical professor of law at Northwestern University, legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, and one of the world's leading experts on the phenomenon of false confessions.

Speaker 48 When that dateline program about the case aired, Drizzen had been watching.

Speaker 120 I had seen the dateline show, so I was aware of who Carol Dodge was, and my phone rang. And I picked up the phone, and the woman on the other end of the line was Carol Dodge.

Speaker 120 And I almost fell out of my chair.

Speaker 48 It's hard to get your head around that in a way, isn't it?

Speaker 120 It is extremely unusual that a victim's family member would reach out to me.

Speaker 2 And when he watched those hours and hours of Chris Tapp's interrogation tapes,

Speaker 91 well,

Speaker 120 this was

Speaker 30 the

Speaker 120 worst example of police contamination, fact-feeding, suggesting a story that I have ever seen in all my years at looking at these cases.

Speaker 120 Chris was trying, in a sense, to come up with a story that would please the polygraph machine.

Speaker 120 If he could tell a story that would show that he was telling the truth according to the polygraph, he would get the benefit of an immunity deal. Why would he get that idea?

Speaker 120 Because that's what the law enforcement officers told them.

Speaker 63 It was all a ruse.

Speaker 2 Well, now that would shake things up, thought Chris Tapp's public defender, John Thomas, wouldn't it?

Speaker 75 So with that, you know, world-leading false confession expert, did the police attitude begin to change?

Speaker 123 Not really. It just fell on deaf ears.

Speaker 42 So Drizzen got the National Innocence Project involved.

Speaker 51 And while progress was not immediate, things began to happen.

Speaker 32 For one thing, this woman was having a change of heart.

Speaker 28 Remember Destiny Osborne, one of the river kids?

Speaker 52 So that little knot of uncomfortable stuff was working away from her.

Speaker 124 That's not a little knock.

Speaker 30 It's a big knot.

Speaker 51 A knot in her stomach.

Speaker 58 Because Destiny, who testified at Tapp's trial and told the jury that she had heard him confess to the crime, gathered up her courage and told Angie's mom, Carol, that police had pressured her to lie and that she hadn't heard Chris Tapp confess at all.

Speaker 109 What did that feel like?

Speaker 21 Finally come clean.

Speaker 93 It was great. I mean, she was in shock and I'm just like, I lied.

Speaker 15 It was all a lie.

Speaker 108 Like, yeah, so.

Speaker 99 Oh, my.

Speaker 54 Destiny had been in trouble when police approached her after the murder.

Speaker 2 She was in juvenile custody at the time.

Speaker 75 Did they suggest what might happen to you if you didn't cooperate with them?

Speaker 27 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 93 They pretty much told me you can either come meet with us today or you can just go right to the big jail.

Speaker 7 Then the police fed her a story, she said, and made her rehearse it.

Speaker 93 I was literally told things that weren't true and I like knew they weren't true but for some reason when someone's telling you like they're true and that you know you're lying you kind of maybe start to think that you're the crazy one.

Speaker 21 I think the common expression they use on the street is my

Speaker 93 well that's what I was gonna say but I chose to

Speaker 93 keep it a little bit appropriate.

Speaker 61 The city of Idaho Falls lawyer said that In Destiny's diary a year after the murder and during a police interview six years after that, she repeated the story she told in court.

Speaker 49 Odessity told us it all stemmed from what police told her to say.

Speaker 75 What stopped you from coming forward to say that was all BS?

Speaker 93 How do you undo that without being charged with perjury yourself?

Speaker 93 And I ended up in a situation for probably like good 15 years after that that prevented me from really doing much, even leaving my house.

Speaker 48 But the fabric of Tapp's conviction was fraying at the seams.

Speaker 111 And prosecutors decided to make him an offer, plead guilty to murder, and be re-sentenced to time served.

Speaker 73 In other words, admit to something he said he didn't do and remain a felon for the rest of his life, but get out of prison.

Speaker 75 Do you remember what you thought about that?

Speaker 24 I was kind of torn. He had spent 20 years in prison.
That's a reasonable sentence to have to put in. I was torn between that and that,

Speaker 24 why are we letting him out of prison when we know that he's guilty? Thank you.

Speaker 31 Please be seated.

Speaker 74 It was March 2017 when Christopher Tapp, along with Defense Attorney John Thomas, appeared in court to take the deal.

Speaker 2 And the room went silent when Angie Dodge's mother, Carol, took the witness stand.

Speaker 125 I can't imagine that,

Speaker 125 knowing what we know now,

Speaker 125 that anyone can convict

Speaker 125 someone

Speaker 16 that there's no DNA.

Speaker 12 This court is.

Speaker 5 And before long, the legal details were done.

Speaker 73 And the courtroom exploded in celebration as a deputy removed Chris Tapp's handcuffs for the last time and he was engulfed in the arms of Carol Dodge.

Speaker 4 And right there as well,

Speaker 5 Jeremy Sargis, that once close friend of Chris's, about whom Taff had lied to police,

Speaker 35 about being at the crime scene, scene of the murder.

Speaker 55 The The man who once said he hated Chris.

Speaker 23 I cried.

Speaker 30 I did.

Speaker 19 He's still the same Chris.

Speaker 19 He's just been through some rough stuff.

Speaker 90 Yeah.

Speaker 59 Did he apologize to you?

Speaker 19 Multiple times, yeah.

Speaker 94 He felt pretty bad about that.

Speaker 90 He does.

Speaker 80 Which he should.

Speaker 19 He shouldn't have done that.

Speaker 30 It's all right.

Speaker 19 We're only halfway done with life, so we got the good half now.

Speaker 30 Victory!

Speaker 5 Yes, fate.

Speaker 112 Rarely what anyone expects.

Speaker 54 Chris Tapp said he wanted to find the real killer now.

Speaker 95 And so did this man, the new chief of the Idaho Falls Police, Bryce Johnson.

Speaker 124 For me, and this is going to sound a little hard.

Speaker 65 For me,

Speaker 124 I wanted to make Chris Tapp irrelevant to the investigation we were doing. The reality was we had a DNA sample that didn't belong to him.
We wanted to find out who left that DNA sample.

Speaker 124 And so that's what the entire focus was, was finding that person.

Speaker 31 Since the original investigation, Detective Ken Brown had retired.

Speaker 51 Detective turned Mayor Jared Furiman had developed Alzheimer's and withdrawn from public life.

Speaker 48 So to lead the reinvigorated investigation, The new chief promoted Bill Squires to detective captain.

Speaker 51 It was Squires, remember, who worked the door at the original crime scene more than 20 years before.

Speaker 24 My guidance for our staff was always, let's look at this completely differently again with the eyes that we have now and the technology we have now.

Speaker 3 Squires didn't know it yet, but a woman known to be at the leading edge of that technology had been approached to work on the case.

Speaker 99 And her first thought?

Speaker 13 My first assessment of this case was that it was not viable for investigative genetic genealogy.

Speaker 2 But of course, Cece Moore had yet to encounter Carol Dodge.

Speaker 69 Chris Tapp had a lot to get used to.

Speaker 37 The world was a very different place, as was Idaho Falls.

Speaker 21 What did it feel like to walk out of prison a free man in 2017?

Speaker 22 What it felt like to walk was overwhelming.

Speaker 22 Truly, truly overwhelming. I had a panic attack, you know, the first time I went shopping.

Speaker 22 I had to run out of the store because I couldn't handle it all. It was so much.

Speaker 22 Never had choices before.

Speaker 44 And so he made up for lost time, got a factory job inspecting potato sacks.

Speaker 77 And he got married, which made him both a husband and stepfather to a couple of kids.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, that very spring, the Idaho Falls Police kept looking for the man who'd left DNA on the body of Angie Dodge in 1996.

Speaker 58 A DNA technology company called Parabon Labs had made this sketch of what that man might look like based on genetic material left to the scene.

Speaker 33 And then Parabon made an offer.

Speaker 54 to the new man in charge of the murder investigation, Captain Bill Squires.

Speaker 24 Parabon said, hey, you know, by the way, we've got some hours that we have available to commit to this. Would you be interested in doing that? And it was easy for me to say, Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 24 Let's do this cooperatively and see where it goes.

Speaker 10 No matter the cost, full steam ahead.

Speaker 35 And with that kind of priority, Parabon asked the head of its law enforcement unit to join in.

Speaker 35 The world's most celebrated genetic genealogist, Cece Moore, a pioneer in the field who closed hundreds of cold cases like Angie's.

Speaker 111 But this case,

Speaker 58 there was a problem.

Speaker 13 It was highly degraded DNA, so we were missing about 40% of the genetic markers that we need for investigative genetic genealogy.

Speaker 28 In fact, when your services were first requested,

Speaker 111 didn't you turn it down?

Speaker 13 So my first assessment of this case was that it was not viable for investigative genetic genealogy.

Speaker 37 But then, guess who?

Speaker 42 Carol Dodge, Angie's mom, intervened again, begging Cece to get involved and sending her the crime scene photos, which changed everything.

Speaker 13 It made me just

Speaker 13 ill and very, very, very angry seeing what had been done to Angie.

Speaker 85 Not the sort of thing you can get out of your mind.

Speaker 13 I opened them out of respect for Carol because I thought if she had to look at what had been done to her daughter, I should be able to do that as well.

Speaker 13 It just really had a deep impact on me and made me even more determined to find a way to help Carol and help Idaho Falls Police Department.

Speaker 74 It's a big challenge.

Speaker 15 It certainly was.

Speaker 13 And the first time that we were trying to use genetic genealogy on a sample that was that degraded.

Speaker 4 So how'd you go about that?

Speaker 15 What I always do.

Speaker 13 is just building trees.

Speaker 31 Family trees, that is.

Speaker 32 Somebody who had sent a sample to America's vast body of voluntarily shared DNA also shared a marker or two with the suspect, some distant relation.

Speaker 69 Trick was to figure out who.

Speaker 13 The idea is to build trees and find commonalities between the people who are sharing DNA with the unknown suspect. You find common ancestors.
And once I am able to do that, I know there's promise.

Speaker 13 I know I'm going in the right direction.

Speaker 15 And so I just started building trees.

Speaker 51 And despite her initial pessimism, Cece Moore began to come up with some answers, all connected to a family with the name of Usri.

Speaker 85 Tell me what it was like,

Speaker 75 what you thought at least when you first got a name from Cece Moore.

Speaker 24 Oh my gosh, we were so excited. I can't even tell you.
There was potentially six males that could match this based on their age.

Speaker 24 And one of them happened to live in Idaho and had lived in Idaho the whole time.

Speaker 76 Five of them were eventually ruled out but that one person lived only a couple of hours from Idaho Falls in Twin Falls.

Speaker 33 But how to get a DNA sample without spooking him?

Speaker 24 Could this person be your suspect? Yeah, he absolutely could be a could he not be?

Speaker 28 Yeah, that's possible too.

Speaker 24 So do you go down there and just knock on his door?

Speaker 24 Or do you go down and try to collect a sample without him knowing in a legal manner that doesn't compromise the investigation in case that's not your person?

Speaker 24 And finally just came to the conclusion, look, we're going to try to do this clandestinely and try to get this sample without him knowing because I am not going to be the person that compromises this investigation once we've gotten to this point.

Speaker 24 So we're just not going to leave anything to chance.

Speaker 106 The usual methods, grabbing a cigarette butt or a glass from a restaurant, didn't work.

Speaker 34 So police got creative when they noticed the man was driving a car with expired license plates.

Speaker 107 The officer pulled him over.

Speaker 24 And so, why they had the subject stop, they asked him, Hey, would you, this officer's in training, would you mind giving us a breath sample just so he can get the practice of running this machine.

Speaker 24 You don't even have to get out of your car.

Speaker 24 And

Speaker 24 he's like, Of course, yeah, no problem. And we collected two breath samples in those breath tubes on the Alka sensor device.
And that gave us the DNA sample.

Speaker 64 But when the results came back from the lab,

Speaker 61 no match.

Speaker 30 Whoa.

Speaker 24 That one,

Speaker 2 huge disappointment.

Speaker 24 That one hit us hard. We really thought we were on the right track and

Speaker 24 really forced us all to go back to the drawing board.

Speaker 63 Oh, including C.C.

Speaker 65 Moore.

Speaker 28 He had to be in there somewhere.

Speaker 13 He had to. Genetic genealogy had never led me wrong.
And I was beating my head against the wall.

Speaker 96 But as Moore went back through the Ushri family trees, all the names, the connections, something struck her.

Speaker 13 There could always be an adoption, son who's been born to a man, and he doesn't know about it. Could there be someone missing?

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Speaker 116 Are you ready to get spicy?

Speaker 27 These Doritos golden sriracha aren't that spicy.

Speaker 15 Sriracha?

Speaker 116 Sounds pretty spicy to me.

Speaker 117 Um, a little spicy, but also tangy and sweet.

Speaker 118 Maybe it's time to turn up the heat.

Speaker 27 Or turn it down.

Speaker 27 It's time for something that's not too spicy. Try Dorito's Golden Sriracha.

Speaker 116 Spicy,

Speaker 88 but not too spicy.

Speaker 29 There had to be a missing link.

Speaker 110 Cece Moore had found the family with its six men who had to be closely related to the person who left DNA at the crime scene.

Speaker 29 The Ushri family had to be another male Ushri.

Speaker 7 But there were no more Ushries, unless...

Speaker 13 When I went back to the drawing board, I again focused on that and said, is somebody missing here?

Speaker 73 Families can be complicated.

Speaker 41 Secrets affairs or brief or abandoned marriages.

Speaker 8 Sometimes kids are the result.

Speaker 63 So.

Speaker 13 My colleague started calling around and she called this very small local library in a small town where this family had been based initially.

Speaker 13 And some sweet librarian agreed to go through their archives where he found an obituary for a woman who, the obit revealed, had a daughter.

Speaker 61 And the daughter had been married to a man named Usri.

Speaker 12 Except, that was no longer the daughter's last name.

Speaker 13 So she had obviously remarried, and she had one son.

Speaker 66 The son who had Usri DNA, but took on the name of his stepfather, which explained why he had been so hard to find.

Speaker 59 So tell me what it was like to discover that.

Speaker 13 It was an amazing moment because finally, all the pieces started falling in place. We learned he actually lived in Idaho Falls in 1996.

Speaker 43 And when Moore dropped all this knowledge on the Idaho Falls Police,

Speaker 13 it was very hard not to break into tears telling them.

Speaker 24 I don't know if we would have ever found him. I really don't.
Without them finding it.

Speaker 69 The specter, who had eluded all efforts to identify him for decades,

Speaker 10 now, apparently, maybe,

Speaker 60 had a name.

Speaker 59 So, what was the name?

Speaker 62 Dripps.

Speaker 124 Brian Dripps.

Speaker 37 Brian Dripps.

Speaker 68 And lo and behold, it was a name that had come up right after the murder, back in 1996.

Speaker 61 Detective Captain John Marley.

Speaker 23 His name had been listed in there as a neighbor that had lived across the street.

Speaker 28 Detective Lieutenant Sage Albright.

Speaker 23 So this neighbor, he said that he had been drinking heavily that night, couldn't remember where he had been or what he had been doing, and basically couldn't account for anything that had happened on the night that Angie was murdered.

Speaker 28 Was there a DNA sample for this fellow?

Speaker 20 No.

Speaker 68 No DNA test for a neighbor with no alibi?

Speaker 88 Why the heck was that?

Speaker 23 He had left the area shortly after that. He had moved to another state, and as far as we know, had never returned to the Otto Falls area.

Speaker 10 An excuse?

Speaker 37 Not really.

Speaker 2 Now retired Detective Jeff Pratt, the man who from the start thought DNA would solve the case.

Speaker 70 It was really quite unnerving, you know, to think that we were that close and should have been doing that work.

Speaker 32 You know, it's Investigating 101.

Speaker 8 It is.

Speaker 3 Now, clearly, the priority was to get a sample of DNA from this Dripps character.

Speaker 72 This man, right here.

Speaker 83 At the time all this was going down, Brian Dripps was 53 years old, an ex-marine and father of three.

Speaker 91 He now lives 300 miles from Idaho Falls in a town called Calwell, just west of Boise.

Speaker 8 So those detectives decamped to Caldwell.

Speaker 24 I could not have had a more motivated staff. We're going to go solve a murder.
We're going to go solve a 25-year-old murder.

Speaker 2 And on May 10th, 2019, just a month shy of 23 years since the murder of Angie Dodge, and after days and nights of surveillance, they watched Brian Dripps flick a cigarette butt from his car.

Speaker 24 Three of us were on that cigarette butt so fast that would make your head spin. We didn't care whether a car was going to take us out or not.

Speaker 5 Off it went to the Idaho State Crime Lab.

Speaker 60 And the very next day, the captain got a call from his lieutenant.

Speaker 24 And, geez, I almost want to cheer up. I'm trying to keep it calm and collected here.
When he called me, he said, I just got a call from the lab. It's him.

Speaker 95 Those were the words.

Speaker 59 It's him.

Speaker 1 And hung up the phone with him.

Speaker 24 And I remember just going, my gosh, this is

Speaker 24 huge, what this means for the family and what this means for our city.

Speaker 85 The case you were on from the very beginning as a patrolman,

Speaker 32 you're getting the result finally all those years later.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 64 So what do you do about that?

Speaker 106 You've got to go arrest the guy, right?

Speaker 7 We do.

Speaker 55 And four days later, Brian Dripps was led into an interview room.

Speaker 55 Well, what questions do you have for us to begin with? Well,

Speaker 55 where to start? Yeah,

Speaker 55 what's basically going on? That murder case. It's the only thing I can think of that happened when I was living there.

Speaker 103 Was it odd that the suspect himself brought up the crime?

Speaker 103 From what I remember that night,

Speaker 103 I was drinking with my buddies

Speaker 103 and woke up the next day, and there was a cop car sent out out front that went to work.

Speaker 103 And that's all I really remember.

Speaker 37 But of course, it wasn't.

Speaker 47 He claimed he didn't know a thing, except for what he'd seen watching Daycline.

Speaker 47 There was that kid that they did

Speaker 47 arrest and got charged with it, you know, and that the mom, I guess, said that he wasn't.

Speaker 47 He never did it.

Speaker 30 I mean, it might take one minute.

Speaker 55 For hours, Dripps kept denying that he killed Angie Dodge.

Speaker 84 Dodge.

Speaker 60 And then?

Speaker 60 So you would just be completely shocked if we had your DNA at the scene. Yep.

Speaker 60 We have your DNA at the scene.

Speaker 60 Yep. That's why we're here.

Speaker 23 At that moment specifically, he wanted to take another break. We took him out of the interview room.
Brought him out into the balcony so that he could smoke.

Speaker 23 And that's when he told us that he didn't he didn't mean to kill her

Speaker 25 and then back inside it all spilled out

Speaker 25 because I was almost up

Speaker 25 and drunk

Speaker 25 how did you get in

Speaker 25 and just walked through the door did she say anything to you did she was she screaming calling for help

Speaker 25 I don't think I don't recall that she did no

Speaker 25 but she fought yes I mean, and I think that's when it ended up.

Speaker 25 Good.

Speaker 25 What did you use?

Speaker 25 My knife. Was she moving at all when you left? I don't remember.
I was on Daubert and

Speaker 25 I took my thing and then allowed.

Speaker 55 And just like that, the murder of Angie Dodge was solved.

Speaker 6 But there was one more big task for Brian Dripps.

Speaker 31 To convince detectives that the other man who confessed to the crime and still had a conviction on his record, that is, Chris Tapp,

Speaker 49 was truly innocent.

Speaker 113 If you were trying to convince us that nobody else was there, how would you do that?

Speaker 49 Before detectives were finished interrogating now confessed killer Brian Dripps, they had to put one huge issue to rest.

Speaker 31 Did Dripps commit the crime alone

Speaker 8 or was someone else, say Christopher Tapp?

Speaker 30 Did someone go with you over there?

Speaker 30 No.

Speaker 65 Dripps stood firm.

Speaker 30 If you're trying to take the blame and there was other people involved, or

Speaker 49 the answers seemed clear so

Speaker 30 well brian at this uh point it's our obligation i tell you that you are under arrest can i smoke one last cigarette before you do that

Speaker 22 frankly i was a bit surprised really i believed that we were going to find out that he had some relationship with chris tapp did you realize that whole time that they still thought you were a guilty man i gotta watch the out of all the police department detectives try to lead that man down a path towards me and he he did what was right He finally did what was the pleat, total truth and said he acted alone and I had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 75 It must have been a nerve-wracking experience to start watching this guy not knowing what he was going to say exactly.

Speaker 22 It was rough because, again, at the end of the day, to save himself, he might have been like, well, hey, yeah, I know Christopher Tapp, but thankfully he was finally, you know, man enough to admit what he did wrong.

Speaker 22 I'm appreciative for him finally being truthful.

Speaker 69 And just like that.

Speaker 57 The long black cloud of suspicion that had hung over Christopher Tapp and his River Kid friends for all all those years vanished.

Speaker 31 And life was suddenly like sun after rain.

Speaker 19 Chris called me when the arrest had been made and said they got him, Jer.

Speaker 44 They freaking got him.

Speaker 7 And the guy was right across the street.

Speaker 90 Right there.

Speaker 19 Maybe they didn't have enough Q-tips to do DNA to the neighbors or something. I just, I don't know.

Speaker 98 But also pretty bad police work.

Speaker 42 But that was for another day.

Speaker 68 For now?

Speaker 113 Today we're here to announce that we have arrested Brian Lay Dripps for the murder and rape of Angie Dodge.

Speaker 56 Idaho Falls Police Chief Bryce Johnson made the announcement, along with the woman without whom the crime might never have been solved, Angie's mother, Carol Dodge.

Speaker 89 I can't even express

Speaker 89 how hard this journey has been

Speaker 126 and the hundreds of people that have been affected affected by

Speaker 89 one person's choice to take my daughter's life

Speaker 73 including of course the man who'd spent more than two decades in prison after confessing falsely that he killed Angie Chris Tapp.

Speaker 124 I got asked the question, do you owe Chris Tapp an apology? But we hadn't done that follow-up investigation yet to verify what Dripps had said.

Speaker 124 So I kind of said at the time that, hey, right now we're here to talk about Dripps and the day will come in which we need need to talk about Chris Tapp.

Speaker 49 It was two months later in July 2019 when, in the words of the police chief, Chris Tapp finally got his day.

Speaker 4 You nervous about this?

Speaker 71 Yes, very nervous.

Speaker 32 We rode with Chris to the courthouse for what was potentially the day of his exoneration

Speaker 52 if the judge signed off.

Speaker 71 We can walk in, the state's in agreeance with my actual innocence, everything else, but the judge could be like,

Speaker 71 maybe I don't agree. And then, where do we go from there?

Speaker 68 Well, we're about to find out.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 30 We are.

Speaker 2 At his attorney's office, Chris Tapp was greeted by many of his oldest friends, those river kids, wearing t-shirts, bearing a message they'd repeated ever since the start.

Speaker 52 Innocent.

Speaker 45 We told you so.

Speaker 52 They all marched with Chris to the courthouse, a block block away.

Speaker 5 Those present included Jeremy and Russ and George.

Speaker 53 From my perspective,

Speaker 53 all of those white t-shirts walking into that courthouse, those middle fingers in the air, we told you so.

Speaker 104 Here's what happened when Chris walked into the courtroom.

Speaker 3 Carol Dodge was there, of course.

Speaker 23 All rise.

Speaker 69 The prosecution went first.

Speaker 122 In my view, there's clear and convincing evidence the defendant was convicted of a crime for which he did not commit.

Speaker 122 Based upon that, we're going to move to dismiss, to vacate the jury verdict, and a move to dismiss that case.

Speaker 79 Brent Dodge, Angie's brother, spoke for the family.

Speaker 88 This day, I think, is a day of healing for all of us.

Speaker 2 It was then time for Chris to speak.

Speaker 34 I'm thankful

Speaker 22 that I've been given this second chance of life.

Speaker 22 I'm thankful for the Carol Dodge, Brad Dodge, the Dodge family, for continuing to push forward,

Speaker 22 to believing in me when they actually saw the truth. I am so grateful and humble to be their friend.

Speaker 52 And then finally, the judge.

Speaker 119 So I am going to grant the state's motion to dismiss both the rape conviction and the murder conviction on the basis of actual innocence of Mr.

Speaker 53 Tapp.

Speaker 119 As far as this court is concerned,

Speaker 119 you are innocent of the convictions that you've been living under for the past 20 plus years.

Speaker 119 So I don't think any of us can really put ourselves in your place. But I'm just glad that that can be corrected at this time.

Speaker 119 And we're off the record in this matter.

Speaker 105 It was finished.

Speaker 110 Chris Tapp had become, according to the Innocence Project, the first person in the world to be exonerated by genetic genealogy.

Speaker 10 If our story ended here, well, that ending might be a happy one.

Speaker 5 But it doesn't end here.

Speaker 64 And this ending?

Speaker 67 Well,

Speaker 5 it's more Greek tragedy than anything else.

Speaker 50 I don't know if there's a way to make sense of this.

Speaker 6 Nearly a quarter century to the day after he raped and murdered Angie Dodge, Brian Dripps shuffled into a courtroom in Idaho Falls.

Speaker 4 He'd cut a deal and pleaded guilty.

Speaker 8 This was sentencing day.

Speaker 126 Boy, what a long 25 years of pure hell, Brian Dripps, you've been us through.

Speaker 69 Carol Dodge told us she was too torn up to sit down with us for a final interview about her struggle to get justice for her daughter, Angie.

Speaker 52 But in court, she did not hold back.

Speaker 18 You, Brian Dripps,

Speaker 16 deserve eternal hell.

Speaker 16 You better look up at me instead of looking at that table. We have to have gone through 25 years of pure hell

Speaker 16 trying to find justice.

Speaker 16 Looking for you.

Speaker 69 Before sentence was pronounced, Dripps spoke to the Dodge family.

Speaker 69 I'm sorry.

Speaker 83 I know you're not forgiving, but

Speaker 83 I am so.

Speaker 68 The judge sentenced Dripps to life in prison.

Speaker 47 He must serve 20 years before he's eligible for parole in 2039.

Speaker 9 when he will be 73 years old.

Speaker 30 So nothing else will be in recess, recess, thank you.

Speaker 3 The two original lead detectives charged with finding Angie Dodge's killer were not in court that day.

Speaker 55 Ken Brown, who's retired, did not respond to our questions about Chris Tapp's exoneration or about the failure to collect Dripps' DNA.

Speaker 79 And Jared Furriman, the former mayor, died from Alzheimer's a year after Dripps was sent to prison.

Speaker 7 He was 60 years old.

Speaker 102 As for the fully exonerated, actually innocent Chris Tapp, what word would he use to describe himself after all he's been through?

Speaker 22 I've been a little lucky. Lucky enough that you guys picked up the case.
Lucky enough that, you know, the Dodge family started to believe in my innocence. So again, I take it as luck.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's really amazing, isn't it?

Speaker 96 I mean, you were a pariah.

Speaker 28 You were that drug-addled bad kid from the riverbank

Speaker 75 who with his bad friends did this terrible thing.

Speaker 22 It was nice for people to finally see the truth. If it wasn't for this show, through all this bad luck,

Speaker 22 I guess I'd probably still be sitting in an 8x10 cell right now.

Speaker 57 And once he was out, Chris Tapp became a bit of an activist.

Speaker 18 It is my honor to be here today.

Speaker 32 In 2021, he watched as Idaho's governor signed a law providing compensation for the wrongfully convicted.

Speaker 49 The law provided Chris more than a million dollars.

Speaker 35 My name is Chris. He lobbied for similar laws in other states.

Speaker 3 And he filed a lawsuit lawsuit against the city of Idaho Falls and its police department.

Speaker 57 Chris settled it for an apology from City Hall and $11.7 million.

Speaker 63 Still...

Speaker 22 It doesn't take away my father passing away while I was inside. It doesn't take away the chance that I had the ability to have my own children.
They stole that away from me.

Speaker 22 So I just don't see how it's fair for them to walk away completely clean and I have to live this nightmare.

Speaker 10 Well, of course.

Speaker 31 I had talked to Chris often through the years.

Speaker 12 Found him rather,

Speaker 49 well, sweet.

Speaker 38 The kid who loved his mother and his old friends, and for whom there might finally be a storybook ending.

Speaker 31 But, no, this wasn't that kind of story.

Speaker 4 That marriage after his release didn't work out.

Speaker 3 And then in August 2023, as he and his wife Stacey were in the middle of their divorce, she went for a ride in her new Corvette and was killed in a wreck.

Speaker 70 It hurts that I know she won't be here for her kids or her family.

Speaker 22 And honest truth, you know, I'll never get the closure I wanted with her either.

Speaker 87 And it hurts.

Speaker 111 This conversation was one month later in Chris's new home, September 2023.

Speaker 30 All right, good.

Speaker 64 And then the interview was over. Okay.

Speaker 21 It's been nice talking to you all these years.

Speaker 22 It's been amazing, Keith. I mean, like I said, here we are 11 years later.
Who would have thunk it?

Speaker 56 An interview that ended with Tapp making a vow.

Speaker 75 It's nice to see it to its conclusion.

Speaker 22 Me too. Because this is my last one.
I will never not, this is my last interview. I will never talk about the Edgie Dodge case again.

Speaker 55 And so we packed up our cameras, not thinking much of it.

Speaker 41 Assuming that's just something Chris said, something we all say from time to time.

Speaker 56 I'm done with that, never again.

Speaker 52 Only this time?

Speaker 52 Well.

Speaker 36 Six weeks later, Chris was visiting Las Vegas overnight for a car show.

Speaker 123 So what I had heard happen is that he was in his hotel room in Las Vegas and he was walking through the suite and tripped and fell and hit his head on the coffee table.

Speaker 40 He was rushed to the hospital with serious head injuries.

Speaker 105 And a week later, Nate Eaton, news director of the East Idaho News, heard his phone.

Speaker 50 It was a Sunday night when I got a text message saying, have you heard that Chris Tapp died?

Speaker 50 And I said to my wife, Chris Tapp died.

Speaker 16 And she's like, what?

Speaker 36 It was true.

Speaker 28 Chris Tapp was 47 years old.

Speaker 104 Days later, Carol and Destiny sat side by side as Tapp's shocked family and friends gathered in Idaho Falls for his funeral.

Speaker 120 Chris's life being cut short is the exact opposite of what anyone expected from Chris.

Speaker 9 Chris had ideas of what he was going to do for the rest of forever.

Speaker 21 For however many days I have left on this earth, I will miss him every day.

Speaker 21 I love him very much, and I miss him very much.

Speaker 30 All of his old closest friends are hurting really bad right now.

Speaker 60 And then,

Speaker 63 January 2024, like a bolt from the blue, this from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

Speaker 63 Through the course of the suspicious death investigation, LVMPD homicide detectives have learned Tapp was in an altercation inside a room at a resort before being located and transported to the hospital.

Speaker 10 The Clark County Coroner's Office has since ruled Tapp's death a homicide as a result of blunt force trauma to the head.

Speaker 31 The investigation is ongoing, we are told.

Speaker 2 But Las Vegas Metro isn't saying much.

Speaker 50 I don't know if there's a way to make sense of this. It's just so incomprehensible.

Speaker 35 One day, years ago, we encountered a grieving mother who was trying to do something we had never heard of before.

Speaker 64 Free the man convicted of killing her daughter.

Speaker 7 And she, this force of nature, against all odds that seemed insurmountable, succeeded.

Speaker 6 But life and history are stubbornly unmoldable and weren't finished yet with the story of the river kid, Christopher Tapp.

Speaker 26 That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our Talking Dateline podcast.

Speaker 26 Keith Morrison and Josh Mankowicz will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again Sunday at 9 8 Central.

Speaker 26 I'm Lester Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News. Good night.

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