IDAHO 1996 Cold Case Solved – The Wrong Man Served 20 Years 

For 23 years, the man who killed Angie Dodge walked free. He raised children. He moved across Idaho. He lived his life as if nothing had happened on that June night in 1996 when he walked into an 18-year-old’s apartment in Idaho Falls and ended her life. Meanwhile, a different man sat in prison for the crime.

 Christopher Tap had confessed under pressure during a series of interrogations that a Northwestern University expert would later call the worst example of police contamination he had ever seen. Tap’s DNA was never found at the scene. The jury convicted him anyway. It took a mother’s refusal to stop asking questions, a forensic genealogologist working with a DNA sample that was barely usable, and one discarded cigarette butt to finally connect the murder to Brian Lee Drips, Senior, the man who had been living 40 ft away from

Angie’s front door the entire time. This is the story of the longest 40 ft in American criminal history. And every piece of it is true. If you follow cold cases, if the stories of the forgotten and the wrongfully convicted stay with you long after the video ends, you are in the right place. Hit like and subscribe to Cold Case Redemption.

 We go deep on the cases everyone else gave up on. Now, before we talk about the investigation, the confession, or the DNA that finally cracked this case open, we need to talk about the person at the center of all of it. Not the killer, not the wrongly convicted man, the 18-year-old girl whose life was cut short before it had a chance to begin.

Angie Ray Dodge was born on December 21st, 1977 in Vancouver, Washington. She was the youngest of four children born to Jack and Carol Dodge and the only daughter in the family. She had three older brothers, Todd, Roger, and Brent. And by every account from the people who knew her, Angie was the kind of person who left an impression.

 Carol Dodge described her daughter as bright, stubborn in the best possible way, and fiercely independent. The kind of kid who wanted to figure things out for herself, even when someone was standing right there ready to help. The Dodge family moved around during Angie’s childhood. They spent time in San Diego before eventually settling in Idaho Falls, a midsize city in eastern Idaho that sits along the Snake River.

 The city has a population of roughly 60,000 people. It is the kind of place where people know their neighbors, where high school football games are major events, and where crime, especially violent crime, is relatively rare. Angie grew up there. She made friends there. She built her life there.

 She attended Idaho Falls High School and graduated with honors in 1995. She was a good student, the kind who did not just absorb information, but wanted to share it. She spent time tutoring younger kids in math and English, subjects that came naturally to her, and she seemed to genuinely enjoy watching other people learn.

 After graduation, she briefly attended Idaho State University. She was figuring out her path the way most 18-year-olds do, trying things on, testing her independence, seeing what felt right. In May of 1996, Angie took a big step. She signed the lease on her very first apartment, a small place at 444 I Street in Idaho Falls.

 It was nothing fancy, a modest apartment on a quiet residential street, but it was hers, her own space, her own beginning. She was 18 years old. She had her whole life ahead of her. And at that moment, the future looked wide open. One month later, every bit of that future was taken from her. >>  >> If you think cases like Angie’s deserve to be told in full, not shortened, not sensationalized, but told the way they actually happened, consider subscribing.

Every case on this channel went cold. Every one of them found its way back. On the morning of June 13th, 1996, Angie Dodge did not show up for work. That was unusual enough to worry the people who knew her. Angie was reliable. She kept her commitments. She was not the type to simply not appear without calling.

 When she could not be reached by phone, two of her co-workers made the decision to drive over to her apartment and check on her in person. What they found inside 444 I Street was devastating. Angie had been attacked and killed during the early morning hours. She had suffered approximately 14 to 16 stab and cut wounds.

 Her throat had been slashed so severely that responding officers would later describe her as having been nearly decapitated. There was a blood soaked stuffed teddy bear found near her bed and a bloody handprint was visible on her body. The apartment showed no signs of forced entry which meant that either Angie had let her attack her in or the person had found another way inside without breaking a lock or a window.

 Idaho Falls police responded in force. Patrol officers secured the building. Detectives arrived to process the scene. The department’s resources were stretched thin by the scale of the crime. Idaho Falls was not the kind of city where something like this happened. Violent crime rates in eastern Idaho were low. A murder of this nature, a young woman attacked in her own apartment, sent a wave of fear through the community that would last for months.

 Doors that had never been locked were suddenly bolted. Parents who had let their teenage daughters live independently began second-guessing that decision. The local newspaper ran front page coverage. People talked about the case at work, at church, in the aisles of grocery stores. For the Dodge family, the impact was total.

 Carol Dodge would later describe the moment she learned about Angie’s death as a complete shutdown of her entire system. The world as she had known it simply stopped existing. Her daughter, her only girl, the youngest child, the one who had just stepped into adulthood with such confidence, was gone. And the manner in which she was taken, made the grief almost unbearable.

Investigators processed the crime scene and recovered significant physical evidence. They found biological material from an unknown male. Forensic scientist Greg Hampian, who would become deeply involved in the case years later, described the DNA profile as pristine. It was clean, usable, and highly identifiable.

 In a case with this quality of physical evidence, detectives had every reason to believe that a match would come quickly and an arrest would follow shortly after. It did not happen. Over the following weeks and months, Idaho Falls police collected DNA samples from dozens of men in the surrounding area.

 They focused early attention on a loose social group known locally as the river rats. Young people who spent time hanging out along the banks of the Snake River. Angie had connections to some members of this group through friends and acquaintances. One by one, their DNA was tested against the crime scene profile. None of them matched. Not a single one.

5 days after the murder, during a standard neighborhood canvas, officers knocked on doors up and down I Street, they spoke with residents, asked routine questions, and documented their responses. Among the people they spoke with was a man named Brian Drips, who lived at 459 I Street. That address sat directly across the road from Angie’s apartment at 444 I Street.

 The two front doors faced each other from opposite sides of a quiet residential street. The distance between them was roughly 40 ft.  Drips was spoken to during the canvas. He was not flagged as suspicious. He was not asked to provide a DNA sample. He was not investigated further. The officers moved on. Drips moved on.

 And the case continued to stall. Weeks became months. The DNA profile from the crime scene sat in the evidence file, matching no one. Idaho Falls detectives were under increasing pressure from the community and from the Dodge family who wanted answers. And with no DNA match anywhere on the horizon, investigators began shifting their approach.

 They stopped looking for physical evidence that would lead them to the killer. Instead, they went looking for a confession. In late 1996, a name surfaced that seemed to offer a breakthrough. Benjamin Hobbs was part of the same loose social circle that overlapped with Angie’s world in Idaho Falls. He had recently been arrested in Elely, Nevada on a violent charge involving a knife.

Idaho Falls detectives saw a potential connection. A young man from Angie’s Social Orbit arrested for a violent knife crime in another state. They began to wonder whether Hobbes might have been involved in Angie’s murder. To build a case against Hobbes, they needed information from people who knew him.

 That is how Christopher Tap entered the picture. Tap was 20 years old. He was part of the same general group of young people in the Idaho Falls area. He knew Hobbs. He had no criminal history connected to the Dodge case. No physical evidence tied him to the crime scene. No witness had placed him at Angie’s apartment on the night of the murder.

 Detectives approached him initially not as a suspect, but as a potential witness, someone who might be able to give them information that would help them build a case against Benjamin Hobbs. That framing did not last long. The lead detective handling Tap’s interrogation was Jared Furman. This is an important detail. Furman had previously worked as a school resource officer at Idaho Falls High School.

During the time Tap was a student there. The two men had a prior relationship. Vorimman used that history deliberately. He positioned himself as someone Tap could trust, a familiar face, a person who was on his side, someone who wanted to help him. He told Tap that cooperating was the smart play, that Furman would take care of him.

Beginning in January 1997, TAP was brought in for questioning nine separate times over the course of roughly 3 weeks. Every session was recorded on video. The total accumulated footage, including interrogation sessions, polygraph examinations, and waiting periods, would eventually amount to approximately 60 hours.

 Within that footage, between 20 and 28 hours consisted of direct questioning by detectives. The exact figure varies across sources because different reviewers drew different boundaries between formal questioning and adjacent activity like polygraph preparation. What happened inside those interrogation rooms over the next 3 weeks would eventually be studied by legal scholars, false confession experts, and forensic psychologists across the country.

 It is one of the most thoroughly documented examples of a coerced false confession in American criminal history. And the only reason we know exactly how it happened, step by step and session by session, is because the tapes survived. Every session was recorded, every manipulation captured, every threat preserved on magnetic tape in a storage room at the Idaho Falls Police Department.

 It is worth pausing to understand why that matters. In most false confession cases, the recordings are either incomplete, partially erased, or never made in the first place. When a defendant later claims that police pressured them into confessing, it becomes a swearing match between the defendant and the officers. In the tap case, there was no ambiguity.

 The footage existed, 60 hours of it. And when people finally watched it years later, what they saw was devastating. From the earliest sessions, detectives applied pressure that went far beyond standard questioning techniques. TAP was subjected to seven separate polygraph examinations. Polygraphs are not lie detectors.

 They measure physiological stress responses such as changes in heart rate, respiration, and perspiration.  Their results are inadmissible as evidence in most American courts for good reason. They are unreliable. In Tap’s case, the polygraphs were not being used to determine whether he was telling the truth.

 They were being used as a psychological tool to break down his resistance. Dr. Charles Hans, a professor at Boise State University and an expert in polygraph methodology, would later review the interrogation recordings in detail. His conclusion was damning. He described the repeated polygraph tests as a psychological rubber hose used in an effort to coersse a confession.

 Every time Tap said he did not know  anything about the murder, detectives told him the polygraph indicated he was lying. Every time he denied involvement, they told him his own body was betraying him. The message they delivered repeatedly and relentlessly was simple. We already know you did it. Your body already told us. Stop denying it. Help yourself.

 Tap was told he was facing the death penalty. Detectives told him he could end up in the gas chamber. He was told that if he did not cooperate, there would be no way to save him. In contrast, if he gave them what they wanted, specifically information implicating Benjamin Hobbes, they would give him immunity.

 He would walk away. All he had to do was tell them what happened.  Tap did not know what happened. He was not there. So, detectives helped him construct a story. Across the nine sessions, investigators fed Tap non-public details about the crime scene. Information that only the actual killer or the investigating officers would have known.

Tap’s account of the murder shifted dramatically from session to session. Not because he was gradually remembering traumatic events, as detectives would later suggest, but because he was being corrected. Each time his account did not match the crime scene evidence, detectives steered him toward the version they wanted.

 They gave him facts. He repeated those facts back, and the camera recorded it all. The contamination was visible on tape for anyone willing to watch. When Tap described the interior of Angie’s apartment, he got basic details about the layout wrong. Details that someone who had actually been inside that apartment would have known instinctively.

 When detectives asked him to describe what Angie was wearing on the night she was killed, he could not answer until after he was shown crime scene photographs. This sequence would become critically important at trial. Detective Furman would later testify under oath that Tap had described Angie’s clothing before being shown any photographs, suggesting that Tap possessed knowledge he could only have obtained by being present at the crime.

A reviewing court would later call that testimony the crux of the state’s case. The interrogation tape showed it did not happen the way Furman described. Detectives also introduced the concept of repressed memories, suggesting to Tap that he had been present during the crime, but that his mind had blocked out the traumatic experience.

 This gave Tap a psychological framework for confessing to something he had not done. He was not lying, the detectives implied. He was simply remembering. By the end of the process, Tap had produced a version of events in which he claimed to have been present during Angie’s attack, holding her down while Hobbes and a third person committed the murder.

 He named a third suspect, a man he referred to by the names Mike or Sargus. When that individual was investigated and cleared, the immunity agreement that detectives had offered Tap was voided. On January 29th, 1997, Tap’s status flipped. He was no longer a cooperating witness.  He was a murder suspect. And the confession that had been extracted from him through weeks of psychological pressure was now going to be used to put him in prison.

 Tap would later say that his confession was a lie. A story that police fed to him and then forced back out of him on camera. Former FBI agent Steven Moore conducted a comprehensive review of the interrogation footage and produced a 68page investigative report documenting every failure in the process. Steven Drizzen, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University and one of the leading false confession researchers in the country, reviewed the tapes and called the interrogation the worst example of police contamination and fact

feeding. he had ever encountered. Dr. Hans’s polygraph analysis demonstrated the coercive misuse of the testing instrument. Former FBI agent Greg McCra and retired detective Stuart Robinson, working through the organization Judges for Justice, added their own expert analyses confirming the contamination.

 None of that mattered in 1998 because by then Idaho Falls police had a confession on tape. And a confession, even a manufactured one, is an extraordinarily difficult thing for a defendant to overcome at trial. If this case is making you angry or sad or both, you are paying attention. That reaction matters.

 If you want to make sure stories like these keep getting the attention they deserve, hit the like button. [clears throat] It takes 1 second and it helps more people find this video. On May 12th, 1998, nearly 2 years after Angie Dodge’s murder, Christopher Tap went to trial in Idaho’s 7th judicial district. The presiding judge was Ted V.

Wood. The prosecution was led by Bonavville County Prosecutor Kip Manwearing, assisted by John Shindurling. The state’s case rested overwhelmingly on the confession. There was no physical evidence linking Tap to the crime. No fingerprints at the scene, no DNA match, no eyewitness testimony placing him at Angie’s apartment that night.

  The clean DNA profile recovered from the crime scene belonged to someone and that someone was not Christopher Tap. Prosecutors acknowledged this gap. Their theory was that an unidentified third man had been present at the crime and had left the biological evidence while Tap participated without leaving any physical trace.

 The presentation of the interrogation footage to the jury was carefully managed. Out of the roughly 25 hours of direct questioning, the prosecution played only a brief cherrypicked segment. This short clip made Tap’s confession appear spontaneous, voluntary, and informed. The hours of psychological pressure, the polygraph coercion, the death penalty threats, the fact feeding by detectives, the many moments where TAP guessed wrong and was corrected before guessing again.

None of that context was placed before the 12 people who would decide his fate. Detective Furman testified that Tap had independently described what Angie was wearing the night she was killed before being shown any crime scene photographs. This was presented as evidence that Tap had personal knowledge of the crime scene.

 It was the strongest piece of non-confession evidence the prosecution had and the interrogation tape showed it was not accurate. Tap was shown the photographs before he described the clothing. The sequence as Furman described it under oath did not match what the recorded footage actually showed. The jury never saw the full tapes.

 They had no way to evaluate this discrepancy. On May 28th, 1998, a jury of nine women and three men returned a guilty verdict. Christopher Tap was convicted of first-degree murder and related charges. He was sentenced to a unified term of life in prison with a 30-year fixed minimum. He was 20 years old. His DNA had never been found at the crime scene.

The biological evidence recovered from the victim belonged to an unknown man who had not been identified, tested, or investigated. The prosecution had convinced a jury that this unknown man existed, that he had been the one to leave physical evidence behind, and that Tap had participated in the crime without leaving any trace of himself at all.

 The theory required the jury to accept that a violent attack involving multiple people could result in only one person’s DNA being left behind. They accepted it and Christopher Tap was handcuffed in the courtroom and led away to begin a sentence that would consume his entire 20s, his 30s, and a significant portion of his 40s. his mother, his friends, his chances at education, at employment, at the ordinary experiences that make up a young person’s life. All of it was over.

Tap would later say that he entered prison knowing he was innocent, but also knowing that nobody believed him. The confession existed, the tape existed, and no one who had the power to help him had watched enough of it to understand what had actually happened in those rooms. The conviction was affirmed by the Idaho Supreme Court in 2001.

Multiple postconviction appeals filed between 2002 and 2015 were denied with one exception that provided a limited hearing but no relief. The Idaho Innocence Project, founded by Boise State University professor Greg Hampikian, took up his case between 2007 and 2009, but could not overcome the legal barriers to reopening a case anchored by a recorded confession.

 The system had spoken. As far as the state of Idaho was concerned, the case was closed. Meanwhile, across the street from 444 I Street, apartment 459 had been empty for years. Brian Lee Drips Senior had left Idaho Falls on August 2nd, 1996, less than 2 months after the murder. He moved to other parts of Idaho.

 He would not be looked at again for more than two decades.  And in the years following the conviction, Carol Dodge tried to live with the outcome. She had lost her daughter. She believed the system had delivered justice. She had wanted the death penalty for Christopher Tap. She wanted him to suffer the way Angie had suffered.

 That conviction was the only thing holding her grief in place. It was a terrible anchor, but it was something to hold on to. The belief that at least the right person was paying for what happened inside that apartment. That belief held for roughly 12 years. Around 2008, Carol obtained copies of the complete interrogation recordings.

Not the short clip the jury had been shown at trial. All of it. Every session, every polygraph, every hour of footage that had been recorded during those 3 weeks in January 1997. She sat down in her home and began to watch 60 hours. Carol Dodge alone with her television watching the man she believed had killed her daughter being questioned by Idaho Falls police detectives.

 She did not approach the footage as a legal expert. She approached it as a mother, a mother who had buried her child and who needed to understand exactly how the case had been solved. What she saw undid everything she believed. She watched a confused young man who could not accurately describe the interior of her daughter’s apartment, the apartment where he supposedly committed the most violent act of his life.

 She  watched detectives provide him with specific crime scene details, things only the killer would have known and then prompt him to repeat those details back on camera as if they were his own memories. She watched Tap guess wrong about things that any actual participant would have known instinctively. She watched him describe events that did not match the physical evidence.

 She watched detectives correct him patiently, repeatedly, guiding him toward the version of events they had already decided was true. She watched the polygraph sessions, seven of them. She saw them used not as diagnostic tools, but as psychological weapons. She heard Detective Furman, the man who had been TAP’s school resource officer,  the man Tap had been told to trust, tell him over and over that the machine proved he was lying.

 She heard the threats about the death penalty, the gas chamber, the certainty of conviction if he did not cooperate. She watched a 20-year-old kid sitting in a room surrounded by authority figures without a lawyer being broken down session after session until he stopped resisting and started saying whatever the people across the table wanted him to say.

 The green tinted footage from the January 11th, 1997 session shows Tap being questioned by Furman. No attorney is visible. The young man on the screen looks exhausted and confused. He is trying to give answers that will satisfy the detectives, not answers that reflect what actually happened because he does not know what actually happened.

 He was never there. Carol later told reporters that there were times she wanted to put her fist through the television screen. By the time she finished, the woman who had wanted Christopher Tap dead had arrived at a conclusion that shattered the last stable ground she had. Tap was not  there.

 He did not kill Angie. The confession was built from nothing. As Carol later described it, she had been trying to put the puzzle together for years, and the center of the puzzle was missing. The realization left Carol in a position that no parent should ever have to occupy. If Tap did not kill her daughter, then Angie’s actual killer was still free.

 The grief Carol had been carrying for over a decade was now compounded by a second burden.  the knowledge that an innocent man had been trapped in prison for two decades while the person who actually murdered her daughter lived without consequence. Carol could have stayed quiet. She could have told herself that maybe she was misreading the tapes, that the system knew better, that questioning a jury verdict was not her place.

 She did none of those things. On February 22nd, 2013, Carol Dodge picked up the phone and cold called Steven Drezen at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. Drizzen had spent his entire career studying false confessions. He had reviewed hundreds of interrogation recordings across dozens of cases.

 He had never received a phone call like this one. It was the first time in his professional life that the mother of a murder victim had contacted him and asked him to review the interrogation tapes of the man convicted of killing her child. Not a defense attorney reaching out on behalf of a client. Not an innocence organization filing a formal request.

 the victim’s own mother calling from her home in Idaho Falls, asking a stranger at a university in Illinois to watch the same footage that had destroyed her certainty. Drizzen agreed. He reviewed the recordings. His assessment was unequivocal. The confession was contaminated. The interrogation techniques were textbook coercion.

 Tap’s statements were the product of sustained psychological pressure, not personal knowledge of the crime. Carol did not stop with one phone call. She connected with Greg Hampikian at the Idaho Innocence Project. She worked alongside TAP’s defense attorney John Thomas. She partnered with the organization Judges for Justice, whose membership included former FBI agents Greg McCra and Steven Moore and retired detective Stuart Robinson.

 Moore produced his 68page investigative report walking through every misstep in the interrogation process with forensic precision. In 2016, Carol pushed for the crime scene evidence to be retested using the MVAC system, a newer touch DNA collection technology developed in West Jordan, Utah that could extract biological material from surfaces that older methods might miss.

 The retesting confirmed what the original analysis had shown. Christopher Tap’s DNA was not present at the crime scene. It had never been there. For Carol, freeing an innocent man and finding the real killer were not two separate goals. They were the same mission. While Carol was building the case for Tap’s innocence, detectives continued attempting to identify the unknown DNA profile from the 1996 crime scene.

 In 2014, one of those efforts led to a troubling dead end that would become a cautionary tale in forensic science. Detective Patrick McKenna searched a small Y chromosome DNA database originally compiled by the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation and later acquired by Ancestry. The search returned a partial match 34 out of 35 markers to a man named Michael Usri Senior.

 Investigators pivoted to his son Michael Usri Jr. a filmmaker living in New Orleans. Usri Jr. had produced a short film with violent themes and had family connections to Idaho. On the surface, the circumstantial alignment looked compelling. Detectives obtained a court order to unmask his identity from the database and collected his DNA for autosomal comparison.

 In January 2015, the results came back. Michael Uzzree Jr. was completely excluded. His autosomal DNA bore no resemblance to the crime scene profile. He had absolutely nothing to do with the murder of Angie Dodge. He had been swept into a homicide investigation, had his name pulled from a genealogy database by court order, and had his DNA collected under suspicion of murder.

 All because of a partial Y chromosome matched to his father and the subject matter of a student film he had made in college. The experience left Ozri shaken. For weeks, he had lived under the possibility that he might be charged with a murder committed 2,000 m away when he was a teenager. The episode became one of the most widely cited cautionary tales in the emerging field of familial DNA searching.

 It raised serious questions about privacy, about the reliability of partial genetic matches, and about the willingness of law enforcement to pursue leads based on thin evidence when no stronger options existed. Ancestry responded by permanently taking the entire Sorenson database offline, removing it from law enforcement access entirely.

 For the Dodge case, it was another dead end. Another year with no justice for Angie. Another year with Christopher Tap behind bars for a crime the DNA said he did not commit. By March 2017, however, a partial victory arrived. Under a stipulation with Bonavville County Prosecutor Daniel Clark, who had taken over the case, Tap’s assault conviction was vacated, and he was resentenced to time served on the remaining count.

After approximately 20 years inside the Idaho prison system, Christopher Tap walked out. He was free in the physical sense. He could leave the building, breathe outdoor air, make choices about where to go and what to eat. But the murder conviction still cast its shadow. He had not been exonerated.

 He had not been cleared. The legal record still said he was a convicted killer. and Angie Dodge’s actual murderer remained unidentified. Then Carol Dodge made one more phone call and this one changed everything. In the spring of 2018, Idaho Falls police authorized the forensic laboratory Parabon Nanolabs to attempt investigative genetic genealogy on the crime scene DNA sample.

 The timing was not coincidental. Just weeks earlier, in April 2018, investigators in California had used this exact methodology to identify Joseph James D’Angelo as the Golden State Killer. That case, which had been cold for over 40 years, was cracked when crime scene DNA was uploaded to GED Match, a free public genealogy database.

 By finding distant genetic relatives and building family trees backward through generations, investigators had been able to narrow the field to a single individual. The Golden State Killer identification sent shock waves through law enforcement. If a 40-year-old cold case could be solved through genealogy, then theoretically any case with preserved DNA evidence was now solvable.

 Idaho Falls Police wanted to try the technique on the Dodge case. There was a serious obstacle. The DNA sample from the 1996 crime scene was old and badly degraded. When Parabon processed it for upload, the results were discouraging. Only about 61.2% of the single nucleotide polymorphisms,  the individual genetic markers that genealogy databases use for matching, were readable.

Nearly 329,000 data points out of roughly 850,000 were missing. This was an extraordinarily low call rate. In simpler terms, more than a third of the genetic information needed to find matches was simply gone. CC Moore, the lead genetic genealogologist at Parabon Nanolabs, looked at the numbers and hesitated.

She had worked degraded samples before, but this was near the bottom of what she considered potentially viable. The matches the database returned would be faint, distant, and potentially misleading. Building an accurate family tree from data this incomplete was like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle when more than a third of the pieces are missing.

 Carol Dodge contacted Moore directly. She told more about Angie, about the 23 years she had been waiting, about the innocent man who had already served 20 years for a crime he did not commit. She asked Moore to try. Moore agreed to take the case. Working from Parabon’s offices, Moore uploaded the partial profile to GED match and began analyzing the results.

She identified three genetic networks, clusters of individuals who shared overlapping DNA segments with the unknown profile. Using a technique called reverse genealogy, she traced these family lines backward through historical records generation by generation, looking for common ancestors where the branches converged.

Once she identified shared ancestors, she could work forward through their descendants, methodically eliminating individuals until only potential candidates remained. The process generated six leads. The strongest pointed to a man living in Twin Falls, Idaho. An investigative team traveled to Twin Falls and covertly collected a DNA sample from chewing tobacco the man had discarded.

  The lab results excluded him. The genetic relationship turned out to be more distant than the data had initially suggested.  The lead evaporated. Moore returned to the databases. She expanded her search to additional genealogical records. She went through library archives, obituary collections, and public records databases, searching for descendants who might not appear in the digital family trees.

 She was looking for someone who had been missed, someone who had fallen through the genealogical cracks because of a name change,  an adoption, an incomplete birth record, or some other gap in the paper trail. And that is when she found a seventh person. Someone who had been completely invisible in  every previous search.

 A man whose biological father carried the same Y chromosome lineage as  the Usri family, the same genetic line that had produced the false lead with Michael Usri Jr. in 2014. But this man did not carry the Usri surname. As a child, he had taken his stepfather’s last name. That single change had effectively erased him from every genealogical database search that investigators and genealogologists had conducted over the previous two decades.

His name was Brian Drips. Detective Sage Albbright ran the name through Idaho public records and found something that made the investigation snap into focus. Upon receipt in utility bills placed Brian Lee Drip Senior at 459 I Street, Idaho Falls from April 3rd through August 2nd, 1996. Directly across the street from 444 I Street.

 Directly across the street from Angie Dodge’s apartment, roughly 40 feet between the two front doors, the man CC Moore had identified through fragmented DNA and library obituaries had been living close enough to see Angie’s front door from his own kitchen window during the spring and summer of 1996. He had been spoken to by officers during the neighborhood canvas 5 days after the murder.

 and then he had simply left town, moved on with his life under a name that no one connected to the crime scene DNA for 23 years. Police Chief Bryce Johnson later described the moment the address was confirmed. The investigation, as he put it, kicked into hyperdrive. Now they needed proof. Investigators needed a confirmatory DNA sample from Brian Drips to verify the genealogical match against the 1996 crime scene profile.

 They could not alert Drips to their  interest. If he was the killer, any warning could trigger flight, evidence destruction, or worse. The sample had to be collected covertly. A team led by Captain Bill Squires made the drive from Idaho Falls to Caldwell, Idaho, a small city in the western part of the state, roughly 4 hours away, where Drips had been living for years. They could not approach him.

They could not knock on his door. They could not do anything that might alert him to the fact that he was under investigation for a 23-year-old murder. If Drips ran, if he destroyed evidence, if he harmed himself or someone else, the opportunity might be lost forever. So they watched.

 They set up a rotating surveillance operation and followed Drips through his daily routine. They watched him go to stores, drive through town, sit in parking lots. For roughly 20 hours across multiple days, a team of Idaho Falls investigators sat in unmarked vehicles in a city 4 hours from their jurisdiction, watching a man they believed had murdered Angie Dodge, waiting for him to throw something away.

It was not glamorous work. It was tedious, high stakes, and entirely dependent on the habits of a man who had no idea he was being observed. If Drips happened to be a person who disposed of his trash carefully, who did not spit on sidewalks or toss receipts out car windows, the operation could have dragged on indefinitely.

 Then Brian Lee Drips, Senior, tossed a cigarette butt out of his car window. An undercover detective moved immediately, retrieving the discarded cigarette from the roadway before it could be run over, rained on, or contaminated. The butt was sealed, documented, and sent to the Idaho State Crime Lab for comparison against the 23-year-old DNA profile from Angie’s apartment.

 On May 11th, 2019, the results came back. The DNA from Brian Drips’ cigarette bud matched the crime scene profile. After nearly 23 years of investigation, after more than 100 DNA samples collected and tested from men across Idaho and beyond, after a wrongful conviction, a false lead involving a filmmaker in New Orleans, and a genetic genealogy search conducted on a sample that was missing nearly 40% of its data, the source of the DNA left at 444 I Street had been identified.

Brian Lee Drips, Senior. Four days later, on May 15th, 2019, officers arrested Drips at his home in Caldwell. He was taken in for questioning. Initially, he denied any connection to Angie Dodge or to the events of June 1996. He maintained his denials for several hours. Then, confronted with the DNA evidence, Drips changed his account.

 He  confessed. He told investigators that he had entered Angie’s apartment alone on that night in June 1996. He was carrying a knife. He admitted to attacking and killing her. He said he had been heavily impaired by cocaine and alcohol at the time and that he did not intend for the encounter to end in death.

  He stated that he acted alone and he said he did not know Christopher Tap. He had never met him. Tap had nothing to do with it. Brian Lee Drip Senior was originally from Kirksville, Missouri. He was in his early 30s in 1996. He had moved into 459 I Street in April of that year, just weeks before the murder. Records showed he had a limited criminal history, including a misdemeanor drug charge years later, but nothing that would have flagged him as a person of interest in a homicide investigation.

He was not on any watch list. He was not known to local law enforcement as a violent offender. He was, as far as the system was concerned,  nobody. He left Idaho Falls on August 2nd, 1996, less than 2 months after killing Angie Dodge. His ex-wife, Nicole Sept, had been pregnant in 1996, and later had two more children with drips  after the crime.

 When she learned of the arrest, she told reporters that he had been a violent drug user during their time together and that she had been afraid of him. She struggled to process the revelation that she had built a family with a man who had committed murder across the street from their home while she was pregnant. At a press conference following the arrest, Idaho Falls Police Chief Bryce Johnson addressed the assembled media.

 He acknowledged the role that Carol Dodge had played in the resolution of the case. He said six words that captured the entire 23-year arc of the investigation. This case begins and ends with Carol. With Drips in  custody, his confession recorded, and the DNA match confirmed by the state crime lab, the legal system moved to correct its other great failure.

 Bonavville County Prosecutor Daniel Clark filed a formal motion on July 11th, 2019,  stating that clear and convincing evidence existed that Christopher Tap had been convicted of a crime he  did not commit. 6 days later, on July 17th, 2019, Judge Allan Stevens convened a hearing and  vacated the murder conviction.

 In the courtroom, Stevens addressed Tap directly. He told him that as far as the court was concerned, he was cleared of the charges he had been living under for more than 20 years. Tap standing in the courtroom as a free and exonerated man told reporters that he was grateful for a second chance at life.

 He said he had wasted 20 years of his life for something he never did. The tap exoneration is widely believed to be the first instance in which investigative genetic genealogy helped clear a wrongfully convicted person. The same technology that had been developed to identify unknown perpetrators had now demonstrated its ability to work in the opposite direction, freeing the innocent.

 In the courtroom that day, something happened that almost never occurs in the American justice system. Carol Dodge, the mother of the murder victim, and Christopher Tap, the man who had spent 20 years in prison after being convicted of her daughter’s murder, stood face to face. They embraced. They held each other. They cried.

 Think about what that moment required from both of them. Carol had to look at the man she had once wanted dead and see him as what he truly was, a victim. another person whose life had been destroyed by the same failure that kept Angie’s killer free. And Tap had to look at the mother of the woman he had been accused of murdering and see her not as an adversary, not as someone who wanted him locked away forever, but as the person who had done more than anyone else to set him free.

 Two people on opposite sides of the same tragedy for more than two decades. united by a truth that the system had been unable or unwilling to find on its own. It was Carol  who found it. And it was Carol who would not let go until everyone else saw it, too. On June 8th, 2021, Brian Lee Drip, Senior, stood before Judge Joel Tingi in the Bonavville County Courthouse.

 He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison. At sentencing, Drip spoke briefly. He said he was sorry. He said he did not intend for what happened that night. Carol Dodge and Angie’s three brothers delivered victim impact statements. Carol told Drips that she could never forgive him.

 Not for what he did to Angie. Not for the 23 years of waiting and searching. Not for any of it. 25 years after the murder of Angie Ray Dodge, the right man was finally behind bars. The resolution of the Angie Dodge case sent ripples far beyond the Bonavville County Courthouse. Christopher Tap’s wrongful conviction became a direct catalyst for legislative change in the state of Idaho.

 Before the Dodge case reached its resolution, Idaho had no law on the books to compensate people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes. If you were proven innocent after spending years or decades in prison, the state owed you nothing. No money, no apology, no recognition that something had gone terribly wrong.

 That changed because of Christopher Tap. In March 2021, Governor Brad Little signed the Idaho Wrongful Conviction Act into law at a ceremony held in the Bonavville County Courthouse, the very same building where TAP had been convicted in 1998 and exonerated in 2019. Tap himself had helped craft the legislation, working alongside state senator Doug Ricks and state representative Barbara Ehart.

 The law made Idaho the 36th state in the nation to provide financial compensation for people wrongfully imprisoned, paying $62,000 for each year of wrongful incarceration and $75,000 per year for anyone wrongfully held on death row. Under the new statute, the state of Idaho paid TAP  1.2 2 million in June 2021.

Separately, TAP had filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Idaho Falls and seven former police officers in October 2020. On June 9th, 2022, the Idaho Falls City Council voted unanimously to approve an 11.7 million settlement. The agreement was paid through the city’s insurer and included a formal written apology from Mayor Rebecca Casper acknowledging the city’s role in TAP’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment.

  The city also committed to consulting with experts on interrogation reform. The case became a landmark in forensic science as well. It demonstrated that investigative genetic genealogy could produce reliable results even from severely  degraded DNA samples, pushing the boundary of what forensic laboratories had previously considered viable.

 It proved that the technology was not merely a tool for identifying perpetrators. It could also function as a mechanism for freeing the innocent. Both directions of the same technology working from the same crime scene sample. But the story of Christopher Tap does not end with vindication. After his settlement, Tap tried to build the life that had been stolen from him.

He married a woman named Stacy. He spoke publicly about wrongful convictions and the need for interrogation reform. He tried to move forward. In August 2023, Stacy was killed in a car accident. Two months later, on October 29th, 2023, Christopher Tap, age 47, was fatally injured at a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

 He was transported to Sunrise Hospital where he died on November 5th. The Clark County Coroner ruled his death a homicide, the result of blunt force trauma to the head. In March 2024, a former professional wrestler  and one-time Republican congressional candidate named Daniel Rodimer was charged with open murder in connection with Tap’s death.

 Rotoimer pleaded not  guilty. Because this case has not been resolved in court, the charges remain allegations as of this recording. Christopher Tap lost 20 years of his life to a false confession. He was freed by science and by a mother who refused to accept the system’s answer when she knew it was wrong.

 He fought for his exoneration, helped change the law, won the largest wrongful conviction settlement in Idaho history, and  then did not get to live out the second chance he had earned. 23 years and 40 ft. That was the distance between Angie’s Dodge’s apartment at 444 I Street  and Brian Drip’s front door at 459.

 The distance between a young man’s wrongful conviction and the truth. The distance between a mother’s grief and the answer that took more than two decades to find. Carol Dodge spent 23 years carrying two burdens that no person should have to bear at the same time.  the grief of losing her only daughter and the growing certainty built hour by hour through 60 hours of interrogation footage that the system had punished the wrong man for it.

 She carried both until the evidence gave her the clarity to act. And then she did something unprecedented. She fought to free the man the state said killed her child. Detective  Jared Furman, who led the interrogation of Christopher Tap, went on to serve  two terms as mayor of Idaho Falls. He died of Alzheimer’s disease in May 2022 at the age of 60.

 He never publicly acknowledged error in the case. CeCe Moore, the genetic genealogologist who identified Brian drips from a DNA sample, missing nearly 40% of its data, continued her work with Parabon Nanolabs, and went on to help resolve dozens of additional cold cases across the country. And Angie Ray Dodge, she was 18 years old.

 She had just signed the lease on her first apartment on a quiet street in Idaho  Falls. She tutored children in math and English because she liked watching people learn. She graduated high school with honors. She was the youngest of four siblings and the only daughter. She had plans. She had ambitions.

 She had a future that was just beginning to take shape. The kind of open, unwritten future that belongs to every 18-year-old  standing at the start of their adult life. For 23 years, the system failed her. It convicted the wrong man. It let the right one walk away. And it took her own mother working from home in Idaho Falls with interrogation tapes and the phone numbers of strangers who might listen to fix what the entire criminal justice system could not.

 This story is Angie’s story. It was nearly buried forever. Carol Dodge made sure it wasn’t. If this case stayed with you, if you believe  the forgotten victims deserve to have their names restored and the wrongfully convicted deserve to be remembered, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption.  Every case on this channel went cold.

Every one of them found  its way back. I will see you in the next one.