welcome back to dateline . i m craig melvin. more than a dozen years had passed since the merger of angie dodge. convicted killer chris tapp, had it admitted his role in the crime. but as angie s mother as carol, was convinced that chris s confession was course. not true, said the investigators. and what made them so confident? well, we asked them and were told about something that could not be found on the tapes. here again is keith morrison with the confession . by the time we visited the city of idaho falls in march of 2012, the angie dodge murder case was to some, just a piece of city history. but to idaho s innocence project and its founder doctor greg hampikian, it was a miscarriage of justice. if there is dna, for god sakes, believe the science. people are not that accurate. the dna is very precise. and 15 years after the murder of her daughter, angie s
have alibis to. so they turn to the physical evidence, like this bloody handprint on angie s stomach. must have been left after she was dead, they figured. when her killer did something quite beyond sick. pulled on her pants, pulled up her shirt, left a deposit of semen on her body, his mark, and his dna. there s a lot of anger, a lot of humiliation involved in this. and frustration for the cops because that dna didn t match any of their possible suspects. month after month, they chased leads into disappointing dead ends, and all the while, carol dodge hunted the investigation, does preferring formation, begging them, find the killer. i drove to the police department every day that they were open. and then one day, seven months later, dead of winter, january 1987, in nevada, they broke the case wide open.
in this. but how long? because that handprint doesn t belong to the man police put in prison. the anger just surged through me. now, a mother turns detective. her words to me were, i just want to know what happened to my daughter. join in as she hunts for the killer and searches for the truth. i wanted to put my fist through the tv. it still brings the hair up the back of my neck. hello, and welcome to dateline. a confession can wake up murder investigation wide open. soon after 19 angie was found stabbed, a local named christopher tapp admitted he was one of her killers. police reported every grisly
so she read that report to him. the one that said, the people cares found on angie s body were similar to, or the same as the victim. he goes, it s either hers or her not. and he asked where the hairs? and i said, i assume they re still an evidence. she called the white idaho falls police department, where the evidence had been store for all those years. what the people cares were sent to a crime lab where state of the art forensics shows that christopher was tapp there at the crime scene, wombat hobbs was there at the crime scene, or that there was a third man. it was a big question. huge. and the dna left no doubt. it was one person who did this in terms of the dna. one killer. the science said that there was no evidence that there were three attackers in angie s apartment that night as the
police had theorized. but just one. and that remarkable news could mean only one thing. that these, according to the innocence project, what christopher tapp s story was a false confession. he was not there. he was a an innocent man. the theory of multiple killers? ridiculous thinks hampikian. to think that there is a group of killers who know about dna, what did they do, plant someone else is cnn semen and dna and cleaned up their own prints? so this had to mean that chris top was innocent. this came down like a hammer on the head on angie s mother s head. i was extremely angry. the blitz to the same person, it s not chris tapp. so why did you do?