In the summer of 1996, investigators in Idaho Falls held something most departments can only dream of in a homicide case: a complete, usable DNA profile from the man who murdered eighteen-year-old Angie Dodge. They also had his residential address. He lived directly across the street from her apartment. Five days after her death, police sat down with him for a routine interview.

Then they let him go. Twenty-three years would pass before anyone spoke to him again. Angie Dodge was born on December 21, 1977, the youngest of four children and the only daughter in a family that called Idaho Falls home. By the summer of 1996 she had just begun tasting independence.

She moved into her own ground-floor apartment at 444 I Street about three weeks before everything changed. She worked at a local shop called Beauty for All Seasons, and outside of work she spent most of her time with a tight circle of friends known around town as the River Rats, who gathered along the banks of the Snake River. Friends described her as someone with real plans, someone who talked about opening her own business one day rather than working for someone else forever. She had recently left her parents’ home after a disagreement about house rules, choosing to live on her own terms for the first time.

On the night of June 12, 1996, she spent the evening with friends at a small gathering. Around 10:20 p. m. , she said goodbye and walked home alone.

That was the last time anyone who knew her saw her alive. The next morning, Angie did not show up for her shift. Two worried coworkers went to her apartment on I Street to check on her. What they found inside ended her short life and opened an investigation that would stretch across decades.

Medical examiners later placed her time of death between 12:45 a. m. and 11:15 a. m.

that same day, a narrow window spanning the night of June 12 into June 13. Idaho Falls had roughly fifty thousand residents at the time, small enough that a case like this touched nearly everyone. Pressure on local police to make an arrest was immediate. Investigators processed the crime scene quickly, and there they found something that would define the case for more than twenty years: a complete, usable DNA profile left by the person responsible.

Technically, they had everything they needed to identify him. Except his name. Seven months passed with no name attached to the DNA. Then, in January 1997, a break came from an unexpected direction.

Benjamin Hobbs, a young man who moved in the same social circle as Angie, was arrested in Nevada on an unrelated charge. That arrest pointed Idaho Falls detectives toward Hobbs and everyone connected to him. They tested his DNA against the crime scene sample. There was no match.

Hobbs was not the man they were looking for. But tracing his social circle led police to another name: Christopher Tapp, a twenty-year-old who knew both Hobbs and Angie. That connection alone, nothing more than shared friends, brought Tapp into the case for the first time. Tapp initially told investigators he had no information about what happened to her.

That answer did not end the interrogation. It was only the beginning. Over the following weeks, he was brought in for session after session, totaling more than twenty hours of questioning. He was given polygraph tests more than once, and each time detectives pushed harder, telling him the results did not clear him.

At one point, according to court records, he was told he could face the death penalty if he refused to cooperate. Under that pressure, his story did not hold steady. It shifted from session to session. He began by denying any knowledge of the crime.

Then he placed himself near the crime scene. Then he described his own involvement. Then he began naming other people, adding names to an investigation that had, until that moment, produced no forensic evidence tying anyone to the DNA found at the scene. Later reviews of the recordings would raise a troubling question that lingered for years: how did a young man who initially claimed to know nothing end up describing details that matched the crime scene so precisely?

Attorneys who examined the tapes later pointed out that investigators repeatedly reinforced certain details across sessions, effectively providing the facts Tapp would then repeat as his own story. Every name Tapp gave investigators went straight to the lab for DNA testing. Every one of them came back excluded. It had already happened with Hobbs.

It was about to happen with Tapp himself. The DNA kept excluding, and the confession kept building anyway. On February 3, 1997, Christopher Tapp was formally charged with murder. When the case went to trial in the spring of 1998, prosecutors faced a problem they could not overcome.

The physical evidence from the crime scene did not support the charges against him. What they had instead was his own statement and a witness named Destiny Osborne, who testified that she heard Tapp and Hobbs discussing the crime. Osborne later admitted she had been under the influence of drugs at the time she claimed to have heard that conversation. Tapp’s alibi witnesses were also challenged, with prosecutors citing inconsistencies in dates and timing that confused his defense before the jury.

The case was heard by a jury of nine women and three men. On May 28, 1998, they returned a guilty verdict. At sentencing, Judge Ted Wood said something that echoed through the case for years: Without the confession, he told the courtroom, there would have been no conviction at all. No physical evidence tied Tapp to the crime.

There was only what he had said in that interrogation room. Tapp was sentenced to decades in prison, and for the state of Idaho, the case was closed. For a time, the conviction held. In 2001, the Idaho Court of Appeals made a notable admission: Tapp’s rights had indeed been violated during those interrogations years earlier.

But the judges ruled the violation was not substantial enough to overturn the conviction. The case stayed closed. In 2007, the Idaho Innocence Project quietly began reviewing Tapp’s file. In 2008, an early DNA examination of hair evidence briefly seemed to support the original conviction, a result that appeared to confirm the state had been right all along.

Then, in 2012, another round of testing went forward. Investigators examined biological evidence from the crime scene. Both Tapp and Hobbs were excluded, again. While the courts moved slowly, someone outside the legal system refused to accept that the file was closed.

Carol Dodge, Angie’s mother, asked to see the original interrogation tapes herself. What she saw concerned her enough to take action. She reached out to John Thomas, a public defender handling Tapp’s case, and the two began comparing their notes on what the footage actually showed. On the other side of the fight was Vera, Tapp’s mother, who had spent years and mortgaged her home to help fund his defense, certain that her son had told the truth the first time when he said he knew nothing.

In 2013, Thomas brought in Steven Drizen, a nationally recognized expert on false confessions, to formally analyze the interrogation recordings. That same year, Carol connected with Mike Heavey, a retired judge who led a volunteer group called Judges for Justice. Heavey and his colleagues began reviewing the case independently. By 2014, they reached a conclusion: the confession showed clear signs of coercion built across repeated sessions rather than a single freely told account.

Separately, the Idaho Innocence Project, under DNA scientist Greg Hampikian, concluded that the evidence pointed to one person acting alone, not the group Tapp had named. Not everyone agreed. In 2016, prosecutor Daniel Clark released his own report rejecting the coercion claims and standing by the original case, arguing that Tapp’s statements were consistent with things he had told acquaintances outside the interrogation room. What makes this part of the story unusual is who was pushing for a new look.

It was not a defense attorney or an advocacy group starting from scratch. It was the victim’s own mother, who had independently decided that the man convicted of killing her daughter might not be the one responsible. In 2014, investigators tried something almost no one else in the country had attempted at the time. They took the unidentified DNA from Angie’s case and compared it against a public genealogy database that Ancestry.

com had briefly made available for such research. The results pointed to a partial match, 34 of 35 genetic markers, to a man named Michael Usry Sr. That partial match led investigators to his son, Michael Usry Jr. , a filmmaker living in New Orleans with ties to Idaho.

He was brought in, questioned, and tested. In January 2015, his DNA results came back. They were not a match. He was fully cleared.

Ancestry. com later cut off public access to the database used in the search. The lead was wrong, but it showed investigators something important: the DNA could still be traced through biological relatives, even without a direct match. They had simply not reached the right branch of the family tree yet.

By 2016, testing technology had advanced enough to re-examine the case’s evidence with greater precision. The results completely excluded Christopher Tapp from every sample found at the crime scene. On March 22, 2017, under an agreement with prosecutor Daniel Clark, Tapp’s rape conviction was vacated and his murder sentence was reduced to time served. He walked out of prison that day.

Clark was nevertheless clear with the public: the agreement did not mean Tapp was innocent. That same year, Destiny Osborne came forward and recanted her testimony, saying investigators had threatened her and provided her with details before she took the witness stand. In 2018, newly appointed police chief Bryce Johnson reopened the investigation with a specific goal: identifying the owner of the DNA that had remained in the evidence for more than twenty years. Under his direction, detectives returned to decades of old records.

Investigator Sege Albright began digging through old files and found something no one had connected before: utility paperwork placing a man named Brian Dripps at 459 I Street in 1996, directly across from Angie’s apartment. Around the same time, Carol Dodge contacted CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogy expert working with Parabon Labs. Moore took the degraded sample, uploaded it to GEDmatch, a public genealogy database, and built the family tree that the 2014 search had only partially revealed. This time, the trail led to a relative no one had identified before: Brian Dripps, a man who did not carry the family surname the DNA pointed to because he had been raised by a stepfather.

Investigators recovered a discarded cigarette from Dripps on May 10, 2019. The lab confirmed the match within about twenty-four hours. On May 15, 2019, Dripps was taken into custody. During interrogation, he confessed, stating that he had acted alone and had never met Christopher Tapp.

A single archived utility record and a distant relative who had uploaded his DNA years earlier with no idea what it would eventually lead to: that combination finally closed the gap that had remained open for more than two decades. Brian Dripps had been married to a woman named Nicole Sept, and they had three children together. In 1996, the same year Angie died, Sept filed for divorce. The proceedings concluded two years later in 1998.

She later publicly described him as someone who struggled with drugs and could be violent at home, and said she had not spoken to him in nearly seventeen years by the time of his arrest. Before 2019, his criminal record was minor compared to what he would eventually be charged with: a single misdemeanor possession in 2002 and a few driving under the influence convictions. There was no documented history of violence attached to him before 1996. About seven weeks after Angie’s death, he left Idaho Falls and eventually settled in Caldwell, Idaho, where he was still living when investigators finally connected his name to the DNA.

The technology that identified him had not existed in any usable form until roughly three years before his arrest. On July 17, 2019, Christopher Tapp stood in a Bonneville County courtroom while Judge Alan Stephens formally vacated his conviction. It marked the first full exoneration in United States history obtained through investigative genetic genealogy, a method that only three years earlier had not been precise enough to do more than clear an innocent man in New Orleans. The courtroom erupted in applause.

Tapp embraced his mother Vera and Carol Dodge, the woman who had spent years fighting for the truth on his behalf. Angie’s brother, Brent Dodge, spoke for the family, expressing relief that the truth had finally come out. In February 2021, Brian Dripps pleaded guilty before Judge Joel Tingey to the rape and murder of Angie Dodge. That June, he was sentenced to twenty years to life in prison.

The following year, on June 9, 2022, the city of Idaho Falls reached a settlement with Tapp reported to be between 11. 4 and 11. 7 million dollars. The mayor offered a formal public apology.

Two men were held accountable in this case, more than two decades apart, in two different courtrooms, before two different judges. One of those moments took five days to reach. The other took more than twenty years. After his exoneration, Tapp spent his remaining years advocating for the wrongly convicted.

In August 2023, his former wife, Stacey Tapp, died in a car accident in Idaho. Two months later, on October 29, Tapp was fatally injured during a fight at a party in Las Vegas. The Clark County coroner ruled his death a homicide. In 2024, Daniel Rodimer was charged with his killing.

Rodimer pleaded not guilty, and the case remained unresolved, with a trial expected in early 2027. A separate civil lawsuit also remained pending. Angie’s case was closed.

But the case connected to the man her mother had spent decades fighting to free had not yet reached its verdict.