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Chapter 1: What led to Christopher Tapp's wrongful conviction?
Hi, it's Kate Snow, NBC News anchor and host of the NBC News podcast, The Drink. And this month, I'm grabbing a Hugo Spritz with former reality star Lauren Conrad here at The Drink. We love learning about someone's journey to the top. And Lauren and I, we go back to the very beginning of her extraordinary story.
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It really hits deeply. Actually seeing the crime scene photo, it made me just very, very angry what had been done to Angie.
The day that Angie was found, Dad, my whole system shut down. Everything just shut down.
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Chapter 2: How did the investigation into Angie Dodge's murder unfold?
Jeff Pratt was a veteran cop by then. 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. What had been done to that young woman? Well, she was nearly decapitated. Oh, man. What else do you remember finding on, around her?
Well, there was a lot of blood spatter on the walls, the carpet, the bedding around her, a lot of other injuries on her body that had been inflicted by a sharp instrument.
Near the bed was a stuffed teddy bear, soaked in blood. On the dead girl's stomach was a bloody handprint. Could you get a print off that, a usable print? We tried, and in that time, we were not capable of doing that. But the killer had left critical, verifiable DNA evidence on the victim's body. A lot of biological materials that had been left behind, indicating there had been a sexual assault.
At the time, DNA was quite new. It was. And that's why we were focused so hard on collecting all of those biologicals. This moment, this place, would imprint itself on the detectives for life. Perangi's family called down to the police department. It was beyond imagining. So they brought in some pictures. Is this your sister? And pictures of the crime scene. How's that to look at?
It's just horrifying. My whole system shut down. My emotional, my everything just shut down. While the CSIs went about their work, homicide detectives looked for the murder weapon. Had to be a knife of some sort. but they couldn't find it. They determined there was no forced entry. The killer left the exterior door ajar, and when they looked at the body, it seemed to them almost posed.
What did that say to you? Yeah, I mean, it was a passionate crime. It was somebody who wanted to humiliate her.
Former detectives Ken Brown and Jared Furriman.
There was well over 14 different wounds.
It was that horrific. The detectives had a hunch from the start. There had been powerful emotions at play here. Angie had lived in the apartment only a matter of weeks. She'd been dating a young man for about the same length of time. You checked him out? Yes. DNA didn't match. DNA didn't match. They learned that some of Angie's friends had gone to see her before the murder.
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Chapter 3: What role did DNA evidence play in the case?
Police were a constant presence at the river in those first days and weeks after the murder. Jer 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.
For months, it seemed, police got nowhere, which drove Carol Dodge even more mad. Everybody went on with their lives except me. I drove to the police department every day that they were open. You became a fixture in there. 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 just walked right back in their offices.
I got called in by the prosecutor and, you know, Carol, you have to stop. And I wouldn't stop.
Finally, about six months after the murder... 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 Ely, Nevada for very brutal rape and cutting a young woman with a knife. Kind of the same pattern, huh? Yes.
His name? Benjamin Hobbs, another of the River Kids. As you see here, Hobbs even carried flowers behind Angie's casket at her funeral. So as one detective traveled to Nevada to confront Hobbs, others began calling in Hobbs' friends, including the kids from the river. Now for videotaped interviews. Why do you think you're down here? Honestly, I have no idea.
One of whom was a 20-year-old named Christopher Tapp. Tapp said he would like to help, but he said he didn't know anything about Angie's murder. If I did anything know about this, I would say... But I do not know. That's all the truth. And having made his statement, Christopher Tapp went home in the clear, apparently. A couple of days later, the detectives asked him to come downtown again.
I told him, I says, what are you doing? I says, this is a murder case.
This is Tapp's mother, Vera. She understood what he apparently did not, that her son was quite possibly talking himself into very big trouble.
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Chapter 4: How did Carol Dodge advocate for justice for her daughter?
So who was that third man? Police just couldn't pin it down. Or had they already? What did Officer Furman tell you that Chris Tapp had said about you? That Chris has placed you there.
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It was the middle of winter in Idaho. Angie Dodge had been dead seven months when they arrested Jeremy Sargis, charged him as an accessory to murder, So Jeremy cooled his heels in jail, knowing full well who put him there. I got it from Jeremy. What did Officer Furman tell you that Chris Tapp had said about you? That Chris has placed you there.
He's just trying to tell me that he knew we did this.
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? It was heartbreaking. Because... You thought Chris was your friend? You don't lie about something like that. I mean, it was hard to deal with. But it turned out that Jeremy had something going for him that Chris Tapp did not. An aggressive attorney. What advice did your attorney give you?
All you can say, under the advice of your attorney, you invoke your Fifth Amendment right. And without more evidence that just Chris Tapp say so, prosecutors were forced to drop the charges against Jeremy. The fact of the matter was, if you didn't talk to them, they couldn't prove anything. Right. How long were you actually in jail? Just two days. Two days of bitterness. Betrayed by a friend.
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Chapter 5: What were the circumstances surrounding Christopher Tapp's confession?
Or was it this man, George Pockies? Seemed like the whole town suspected him, just because Chris was his friend. 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. What do you say? No? No, I didn't murder that girl? But if Tap's friends thought they were being tortured, Angie's mom, Carol, was living in her own personal hell.
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. Did you go to scary places, dangerous places? Oh, yes. And I remember going to a place and the lady said, said, you know, you need to leave before somebody hurts you. And yet she kept doing it for years, taking incredible risks.
I had a gun put to my head one night. And during those nights, Carol often ended up parked outside the apartment where Angie was murdered. I would just stare at that house and stare at the windows and try and figure out how scared she must have been. She also endlessly is, is talk the right word? Those friends of Chris Tapp, like Jeremy Sargis.
There was times I would be working, look up, and there she is.
She'd been watching me for a while. She was relentless. And by that time, I think Furman had her pretty convinced that we had something to do with it.
That's Detective Jared Furman, of course. Carol prodded him. Proud of them, the whole department insisting they keep searching for the killer for more than a decade. She spent her days and nights reading police reports, practically memorizing them. I don't sleep and I get up and I just go, what part of this don't I understand?
In one of those reports, Carol found a phrase which, the more she read it, sounded out of place in the DNA world. It was about pubic hairs. which, in addition to the semen, had been found in Angie's body. 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 an either-or.
Then Carol remembered reading an article about an internationally known DNA expert who just so happened to live and work right in Idaho. This is the expert, Dr. Greg Hampikian, a fruit fly geneticist from Boise State University. But Dr. 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. And just like that, the doctor found a new calling, founder and director of Idaho's Innocence Project. Secrets can be kept, I guess. But, you know, science reveals those secrets.
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Chapter 6: How did the police handle the investigation over the years?
And I think that he was taught to respect adults, and he was a follower. She watched as Chris told Furham that he knew nothing about Angie's murder. And then she watched the detectives get tapped to imagine himself as an active participant.
Let's say, for example, hypothetically, Chris, you were there, okay?
Okay. Hypothetically, Chris, how do you think it happened? And I remember Chris saying, you mean like a TV show? Next, she saw police administering polygraph after polygraph and almost always with the same result. They would tell him he was deceptive. But perhaps what troubled Carol most was seeing how confused Tapp was.
Even ten days after his first interviews, he still seemed not to know what house Angie lived in.
Angie might live on the corner, or was it... It was another block.
For a guy who'd taken part in a murder, Tapp also seemed not to know much about the layout of Angie's apartment. So Detective Brown suggested this helpful memory aid. They seemed to be coaching him. He still couldn't do it. And then they showed him where the murder happened. There was more. Carol was stunned to see that police had shown Tapp photos of the crime scene.
I want you to tell us if that's how you remember it. If that's how you don't remember it, maybe it's going to draw some memories for you, and we're going to go from there.
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 Jim. It wasn't us. Nicholson, Mackleton.
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Chapter 7: What new evidence emerged that changed the case?
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. Have a seat. Thank you. There comes a time in every tale to meet the person at the center of the story. And here he is, Christopher Tapp. No longer the aimless pothead you've seen on those videotapes from 1997.
At the time of this interview in 2012, he was a man of 35 who'd done more than a decade of hard time. As people look at you, what do you most want them to know about you? I've been so wronged all these years.
How could individuals do something to another human being like they've done to me?
You're an innocent man? Yes, sir, I am. Of course, everybody in prison is innocent, right? If you look at the whole entire case, the DNA, none of it points to me, none of them. On that point, there is little dispute, of course. But how did Chris Tapp get here? That's a familiar story to many families.
The sweet little boy shown in all these pictures of a typical childhood started smoking marijuana at 13. Then at 16 turned to meth. Chris dropped out of high school, hanging out down by the river in Idaho Falls with all those kids his mother warned him about. That, he said, is how his name came up after the murder of Angie Dodge. Did you think anything of that?
No.
I had no rhyme, no reason to be scared. 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.
I didn't know what I was being brought in for until I got there. You didn't connect it with the Angie thing at all? No. I thought I was, honestly, I was going in for drugs.
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. Well, of course, one of the difficulties was your story kept changing, right? Very much it did. I mean, you went from saying, I don't know anything about this, to then saying, well, maybe Ben had something to do with it.
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Chapter 8: What was the final outcome for Christopher Tapp and Brian Dripps?
who Carol Dodge was, and my phone rank. And I picked up the phone, and the woman on the other end of the line was Carol Dodge.
And I almost fell out of my chair. It's hard to get your head around that in a way, isn't it? It is extremely unusual that a victim's family member would reach out to me. And when he watched those hours and hours of Chris Tapp's interrogation tapes...
Well... This was the worst example of police contamination, fact-feeding, suggesting a story that I have ever seen. In all my years at looking at these cases, Chris was trying, in a sense, to come up with a story that would please the polygraph machine. 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? Because that's what the law enforcement officers told them.
It was all a ruse. Well, now that would shake things up, thought Chris Tapp's public defender, John Thomas. Wouldn't it? So with that, you know, world-leading false confession expert, did the police attitude begin to change?
Not really. It just fell on deaf ears.
So Drizzen got the National Innocence Project involved. And while progress was not immediate, things began to happen. For one thing, this woman was having a change of heart. Remember Destiny Osborne? One of the river kids? So that little knot of uncomfortable stuff was working away inside you.
Yeah, it's not a little knot.
It's a big knot. A knot in her stomach. Cause, 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. What did that feel like? Finally come clean. It was great. I mean, she was in shock.
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