Shraman Mitra
When eighteen-year-old Angie Dodge finally got permission to move out of her mother’s house and into her own apartment, she looked forward to a wonderful independent life. However, just days later, residents of Idaho Falls, Idaho, witnessed a terrifying homicide when the 18-year-old was found raped and stabbed to death in her apartment. ABC’s ’20/20: Stranger Than Fiction: The Murder of Angie Dodge’ as well as NBC’s ‘Dateline: True Confession’ chronicles thus brutal murder and follows the police investigation that tried its best to get to the bottom of the murder.
Angie Dodge Was Found Dead in Her Bedroom
Angie Dodge was a lively and down-to-earth teen who’d graduated high school in the summer of 1996. Described as an amicable, generous, and kind-hearted individual, she was always ready to help others and was quite popular in her friend group. Interestingly, ever since her graduation, she’d been looking to get a taste of independence considering her grand ambitions for the future, and so kept asking her mother for permission to move out. Although the latter was initially unwilling to let her little girl go, she finally relented and let her get an apartment in May of the same year. She was delighted at getting to move into her own home and starting anew, unaware of the tragedy that awaited her.
On June 13, 1996, the usually peaceful city of Idaho Falls, Idaho, came to know of a brutal homicide when authorities uncovered a violent rape and murder in an apartment. Upon rushing to the scene, first responders identified the victim and Angie and learned she had not been receiving calls since the previous night. It turns out that when this ever-diligent teen had failed to turn up for work, her friends had decided to check in on her and were welcomed by the shocking scene. They were the ones to dial 911 in a panic.
During the initial investigations, police gathered the homicide to be a crime of hate due to the brutality of it all. The victim was found lying beside the bed in a pool of her own blood, still dressed in nightwear. Besides, a torn shirt and partially worn sweatpants indicated that she might have been sexually abused. Moreover, investigators noticed numerous stab wounds all over her body and realized that the killer had cut her throat. Later, an autopsy determined that the victim was brutally raped before being stabbed to death.
Angie Dodge’s Killer Wasn’t Positively Identified Until 2019
The initial investigation into Angie’s murder was relatively slow as there were no eyewitnesses or leads that could lead directly to the perpetrator. Although the authorities were able to recover a foreign male DNA sample from the crime scene, it did not match the ones present in the system, leaving them back at square one. They also sat down with the victim’s acquaintances and conducted interviews but to no avail.
Eventually, as the days passed, officers discovered that Angie had an acquaintance called Christopher “Chris” Tapp and began looking into his life. Although he was a normal teen with no criminal record, they seemed to consider him a suspect for unclear reasons and subjected him to tough interrogation as well as polygraph tests. He was subsequently charged with aiding and abetting Angie’s rape and murder, just to be convicted and sentenced to 20 years to life plus ten years in prison in 1997.
Ever since Christopher’s (or Chris’) arrest, he kept insisting on his innocence and never gave up on his fight for justice. Interestingly, on the other hand, with time, once Angie’s mother watched his interrogation tapes, she too was convinced of his innocence and became determined to find the person who’d actually brutalized her daughter. So, investigations continued at her behest. It was only then that authorities realized Christopher’s DNA did not match the one from the crime scene, driving a judge to acquit him and release him from prison on account of time served in 2017.
However, Christopher then became determined to prove his innocence. There was another man, Michael Usry Jr., who was accused of possibly having a hand in Angie’s sexual assault turned homicide in 2014, yet no evidence against him ever came to light – he was falsely accused. Eventually, after studying several DNA databases, officials zeroed in on a man named Brian Leigh Dripps Sr., whose DNA matched the one from the crime scene. Once questioned in 2019, he revealed that he only meant to rape Angie and never meant to kill her. He essentially confessed, and armed with this, authorities were able to get Brian to plead guilty in 2021, while Christopher was exonerated of all charges.
Read More: Where is Brian Leigh Dripps Sr. Now?
