Vera Tapp

I told him, I says, what are you doing?

I says, this is a murder case.

He says, Mom, I don't have anything to hide.

And I want to tell him that I don't know anything.

I was going to let a killer walk free.

I got to do what's right.

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

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

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.

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.

Well, Brian, at this point, it's our obligation to tell you that you are under arrest.

Can I ask one last thing right before you do that?

For now... Today we're here to announce that we have arrested Brian Lay Drips for the murder and rape of Angie Dodge.

But we hadn't done that follow-up investigation yet to verify what Dripps had said.

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 to talk about Chris Tapp.