Angie Dodge

On June 13, 1996, eighteen-year-old Angie Dodge was found raped and murdered in her apartment in Idaho Falls, Idaho. She had been stabbed multiple times and her throat was slashed. DNA evidence was collected from the scene, but it did not match anyone in existing databases. Under intense pressure to solve the case, Idaho Falls police focused on Christopher Tapp, a 20-year-old acquaintance of Dodge.

Through a series of controversial interrogation sessions spanning weeks—during which Tapp was subjected to coercive techniques and provided inconsistent, changing accounts that appeared to be fed to him by detectives—Tapp eventually confessed and implicated others. He was convicted of first-degree murder in 1998 and sentenced to life in prison plus additional years for rape. Crucially, his DNA did not match the DNA found at the crime scene.

Angie's mother, Carol Dodge, never believed Tapp was the killer because of the DNA mismatch. She spent over two decades advocating for further investigation. In 2017, Tapp was released after serving nearly 20 years when a judge ruled there was sufficient evidence of his innocence. The Idaho Innocence Project and the conviction integrity unit worked to free him.

The breakthrough came in May 2019 when genetic genealogy—the same technology used to identify the Golden State Killer—was applied to the crime scene DNA. It led investigators directly to Brian Leigh Dripps Sr., a 53-year-old man who had lived across the street from Angie's apartment at the time of the murder. When confronted, Dripps confessed. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and rape in 2021 and was sentenced to life in prison. Christopher Tapp was formally exonerated.