got him. my mind immediately went to russell. who else could have done it? and then she says to you? it s not russell. it s not russell? it s not russell. you could not have shocked me any more. everything i had known my whole life was just gone. this whole time i thought this guy had done it and it wasn t him. it wasn t him. dna, as we now know, does not lie. the sample taken from angie samota s body did not match russell buchanan. did you feel guilty for having done everything you could to put somebody behind bars, well, yeah. done everything you could to convict russell and send him to death row? of course i did. i thought this guy was it, and i was
you remember this, don t you can? because you did this. we think you did this. no! it wasn t, we think. it is you did this. you had sex with her, you killed her. you stabbed her 18 times. but russell continued to deny it. that steady drumbeat of accusation and denial ended only when russell hired the attorney and refused any further free trips downtown. and the murder of angie samota then went cold, for years. then in 2004, 20 years after the crime, angie s friend, sheila, by then living in nashville, decided to act on something she had thought about for a while. i actually had felt angie around me for a while, and then i was doing homework for a bible study class, and all of a sudden i look up and as you re sitting there, there was angie. and then i thought, it s time. and i called the police. and said? i wanted to know about the
afraid of lance because he had a temper, and had once pulled a knife on her. there was ben, angie s boyfriend at the time of her death. older and already out of school, he was a construction supervisor in dallas. sounds like he was kind of the opposite of lance. i would say he was the opposite of lance. and there was russell, a new friend of angie s who had gone out that evening with her and her friend, anita, another female engineering student at smu. you you saw her that last night? yes. how was she? she was angie. i mean, she was fine. that night, anita accompanied angie and russell on an expedition to a series of bars and clubs. angie s boyfriend, ben, was not present. ben was aware of the fact that angie, russell, and i were all going out together. at least angie s friend,
murder, police started picking up russell after work and bringing him down to the station for questioning. it seemed like two or three times a month for six months. as they got towards the five to six-month time period, there was a significant shift in the tone and tenor of the interrogation. accusatory? outright accusatory. i recall in detail the detective leaning back in his chair with an envelope, photographs of the crime scene, that they were absolutely horrific. he would hold them up in front of me and his questions were, russell, this looks familiar, doesn t it?
was along for appearances sake only. it certainly didn t occur to me that it was an angie and russ event. it was the three of us. i remember anita and i sitting at the table, visiting while angie was out on the dance floor dancing. russell told police angie and anita dropped him off around 1:00 a. m. and he went to sleep. for him, that was the end of the night. your alibi was you were home in bed. yeah. there was no way to prove it, unfortunately. the police theory was that you, after you were dropped off, walked back to angie s house, knocked on the door. she let you in, because she knew you. you already had a thing for her. something went wrong. you attacked her. you had sex with her, you raped her. and then since she knew you and she could identify you, you stabbed her to death. that s what they thought. and so in the days after the