Angela Samota

Case background and investigation

Angela Marie Samota, known as Angie, was born on September 19, 1964 and was a 20-year-old student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in the fall of 1984. According to Wikipedia's account of the case, she spent the evening of Friday, October 12 at the State Fair of Texas and at a dance club with friends before returning to her condominium at about 1:45 a.m. on October 13.

Shortly afterward she telephoned her boyfriend and told him that a man was in her home who had asked to use the telephone and the bathroom. When she did not call back as expected, he became alarmed and contacted the police. Officers reached the residence at 2:17 a.m. and found her dead on her bed. An autopsy determined that she had been raped and stabbed 18 times in the chest, with the wounds to her heart proving fatal.

Dallas police looked at several men who knew her in the weeks that followed, but none was charged and, according to published accounts, all were eventually cleared. The investigation stalled and the case stayed unsolved for more than twenty years. A friend and former roommate, Sheila Wysocki, repeatedly pressed the police department to re-examine the evidence, and she later became a licensed private investigator.

In 2006 Dallas Police Detective Linda Crum took up the case and submitted preserved biological evidence, including blood, semen and fingernail samples, for DNA testing. In 2008 the resulting profile was matched to Donald Andrew Bess Jr. By then Bess was in a Texas prison serving a life sentence for a separate sexual assault and kidnapping. Records of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice show that he had earlier been imprisoned for aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping and sexual assault, and that he had been released on parole on March 23, 1984, less than seven months before Samota was killed.

Bess was tried in Dallas County in 2010. The jury found him guilty of capital murder, and he was sentenced to death in June of that year after hearing testimony from other women who said he had assaulted them. The Department of Criminal Justice recorded his arrival on death row on September 27, 2010. According to Wikipedia, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction and sentence in March 2013, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in January 2014, and a further appeal was rejected in 2016.

The sentence was never carried out. Wikipedia reports that Bess died of a heart attack on October 8, 2022 while still on death row, at the age of 74. Samota's mother had died the previous year, having seen the man responsible for her daughter's death identified and convicted.