#129 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Chris Tapp

Chris Tap and find her own daughter's killer. There are certain special people you meet in your life, people that I like to say are more evolved than the rest of us, people that really inspire you. And Carol Dodge

is one of those people. It's one of the few times in my career as a lawyer where someone from the victor him his family has asked me to investigate an injustice and for a crime victim who was so invested in Chris's guilt that she wanted him to get the death penalty, to evolve to a place where she was thinking he might be innocent. That just blew me away.

How was it that a lay person could look at these interrogation tapes and see all of the problems, all of the coercion, all of the leading questions, all of the fact feeding when law enforcement officers on the Idaho Falls Police Department couldn't see it themselves. And it shows that wrongful convictions affect more than just the defendants. It's also the victims, families, the survivors of these horrible attacks, who are being fed a line about an innocent person

being guilty. It wasn't easy. She had helped from a lot of other people, but it was her persistence and her desire for knowledge that ultimately changed the course of this case. Chris Tapp's story starts in Idaho Falls, a town of about a hundred thousand people in southeastern Idaho, about two hours north of Yellowstone National Park. Idaho Falls is a beautiful place. There's mountains on the horizon and the Snake River cuts straight through town. Gorgeous though it

may be, the town was racked by terrible ugliness. Nearly twenty four years ago. In June, Idaho Falls, resident Angie Dodge was eighteen years old. She graduated from high school the year before, ahead of schedule. With honors, and life was just beginning for her. She was working two jobs, taking a few classes at Idaho State becoming independent. In fact, Angie had just recently moved into her first apartment, the upper floor of a little frame house on I Street,

where she lived by herself. But on the morning of Thursday June, Angie didn't show up for her day job at a local beauty supply store. A friend stopped by her apartment to make sure she was okay, but by eleven o'clock that friend was frantically dialing. She had found Angie Dodge lying face up on her bedroom floor, half naked and clearly dead, and she's head was against the bedroom wall with her legs outstretched. Next to her, there was a basket of stuffed animals, including a teddy bear,

specked in blood. She had been stabbed fourteen times and her throat had been cut. She was nearly decapitated. Most of the apartment was undisturbed, so all of the activity between the assailant and Angie took place in her bedroom. The crime scene did not suggest to prolonged struggle. Angie was six ft tall, and she had a reputation of

not taking guff from anybody. I mean, she would have been the kind of victim to have fought back, and she did have a few defensive wounds on her arms and her wrists, but police theorized that she had been attacked in her sleep and quickly overwhelmed. But who would want to hurt Angie Dodge. The police assured Angie's family, including her mom Carol, that the killer had left damning

evidence behind. Seamen left on Angie's body yielded a full DNA profile, but police ran the profile through the state and national DNA databases and got no hits. They compared it against Angie's male friends and family members, still no hits, and as summer turned to fall and the temperatures dropped, the case went cold. To The case stayed cold until January, when an acquaintance of Angie's named Ben Hobbs was arrested

in Nevada for a knife point sexual assault. Police started questioning Ben about whether he was involved in the attack on Angie, which seemed to be similar, but Ben insisted he had nothing to do with Angie Dodge and eventually lawyered up, so instead police turned to his friend Chris Tap to see if they could get some dirt on Ben. At the time, Chris was twenty years old, maybe a

year or two older than Angie. In fact, he and Angie and Ben were part of a young group of people who hung out on the trails along the Snake River and partied from time to time. This group of friends called themselves the river Rats crew, and police figured that if one of the river Rats had attacked Angie, then the others would know about it. Not only was Chris tap a river Rat, but one of the police

officers had known Chris for years. He figured it'd be easy to use their trusting relationship to make Chris give up whatever he knew about Ben Idaho Fall. The police decided to question Chris, and here come the interrogations, not one, not two, but eventually nine of them, spread out over nearly four weeks, for a total of twenty five hours of questioning. The statements that police get archaotic, confused, jumbled, and the tactics police used, well, they're a recipe for

wrongful conviction. It all began for Chris on Tuesday, January seven. The officer starts by asking Chris about Ben's possible role in Angie's death, Chris denies knowing anything about it, over and over again. I mean, I'll be straight up and cheerful with you. If I did anything know about this, I would say, but the police have an unsolved murder on their hands, and Chris is possible knowledge about Ben

Hobbs was the only lead they had. They try to create leverage with Chris by implying that he's withholding crucial information and that there could be consequences if the investigators don't get what they need. The deeper they get into the interview, the more police up the pressure. They tell Chris that he has to tell them something about Ben.

This officer was not a stranger to Chris. He was a school resource officer who Chris had known throughout his life, and one of the tactics this officer used was the false friend technique, suggesting that he was there to help

Chris to see him through this problem. Should say but kind of close, not when these crowds that could go out to theirs and the police suggests that if Chris tells him something about Ben, then they'd pull some strings that even though he's getting dragged into the investigation, they'd protect him. He wouldn't have anything to worry about. It's a theme they'd go on to repeat again and again.

Chris continues to insist that he doesn't have anything to tell them, and eventually the cops let him go home, but a few days later, on Friday January, the police are back. They still suspect that Chris is withholding information to protect his friend. They need more leverage, so they give him a polygraph test and they tell him that

he flunked it. It was extremely painful to watch because you see someone's will being broken over and over and over again by these two interrogators, primarily their friend, the school resource officer and the poligrapher. They also tell Chris that by covering for his friend, Chris is making himself an accessory to murder, and the police start warning him that the law treats cover ups the same as the crime.

In other words, Chris Tap is now facing the gas chamber at the possibility didn't charge ex penalty is dead. No penalty is life and time period your life. The threat of death penalty is in the air. Chris is terrified and so he starts to make things up in order to please isn't derrogators and save himself from a death sentence. He tells a story in which he'd heard Ben Hobbs admit to killing Angie, and the cops eat

it up. By now they can't wait to take Ben down for rape and murder, with Chris as the star member of their team. The school resource officer tells Chris at one point that that he really wants Chris to help in nailing then Hobbs so that he could drop kick Ben Hobbs through the goal posts of life Toxic masculinity, anybody, huh? Detectives keep pushing for more details, and they help Chris out by giving him hints about what they think happened.

They tell Chris, for example, that Angie had been stabbed with a knife. Pretty soon Chris agrees and says he heard Ben describe using a knife. But even as Chris regurgitates these details, he's freaking out, crying hard, terrified that whatever he says won't satisfy his interrogators, that instead of helping police drop kick Ben, he'll end up being the football. But the cops still don't seem convinced, and they start asking whether the DNA left on Angie's body might belong

to Chris. He rallies, take my DNA. It ain't gonna be me. He says, I was never inside Angie's apartment. The police let Chris go home again, but they still think he's not telling them everything he knows about Ben Hobbs. So the next day, January eleven, they arrest Chris and charge him as an accessory who helped cover up Angie dodges murder and that threat or suggestion of the gas chamber.

That's becoming realer and realer to Chris. Pretty soon, the promise of help gets more real to Chris gets a lawyer, and that lawyer negotiates an immunity agreement. Under the deal, Chris would escape charges if he provides information about who raped and killed Angie Dodge. But it's got to be information that the police will believe, and the police tell him that in order to go free, they expect him to say he was present during the attack, in their words,

get us up close. If he does that, they suggest he can go home. They'll leave him alone. Help you Now, Chris has no choice but to tell lies placing him inside Angie's bedroom, and as police keep pushing, Chris has to take the story further and further. By the very end, he agrees that he slashed Angie with a knife and held her down while Ben raped her. Angie dodge across the right breast with the knife. Even though Chris now has agreed to say he was directly involved, he can't

get the story right. He doesn't know basic facts like the layout of Angie's apartment or what room the attack occurred in. In fact, at one point, the police take Chris to I Street so he can point out Angie's home and walk them through the crime scene, but he can't even tell them which house she lived in. He guesses that she lived on the corner when she really lived in the middle of the block. This should have

been a huge red flag to these officers. He had previously told them that they won't find his DNA there because he'd never been to Angie's apartment. But they are stuck in the Chris tap box and they can't get out of it. They refuse to get out of it, even when a big problem emerges about a week later, and it's a problem we've seen in case after case.

By January eighteenth, the police have done DNA testing and the results are back their DNA from the crime scene does not belong to either Ben Hobbs or Chris Tap. Neither of them could have and Antie's rapist, and the police accept that Ben Hobbs had nothing to do with this crime. But Chris, on the other hand, he had confessed to being there, and why would anyone confess unless they were guilty. The police decide they'll never know whose DNA was left at the crime scene, but they stick

to their belief Chris was involved. They conclude that he's been protecting the identity of the real rapist this whole time. They're furious and the immunity deal is yanked off the table. Chris Tap is charged with first degree murder and sexual assault, and the county prosecutor announces that he'll seek the death penalty. At Chris's trial, prosecutors show the jury one brief clip from the interrogation Cherry picked from twenty five hours of videotape.

This excerpt makes his confession seem spontaneous and voluntary, and on May eight, Chris Tap is convicted of the rape and murder of Angie Dodge. This is where the hero of our story first comes in. Angie's mother Carol Dodge,

a heartbroken but ferocious woman. Carol was tortured by the thought that one of Angie's attackers was still free, the one who would have raped her, and Carol believed Chris knew who the rapist was, so when the time came for sentencing, Carol Dodge begged the judge to give Chris the death penalty. When the judge gave him life in prison instead, Carol broke down, sobbing to her justice hadn't

been served. Carol Dodge was right, justice hadn't been served, but the failures here were more profound and troubling than even she imagined at first. For years, an unanswered question remained at the heart of Angie Dodgers case, whose DNA

had been left on her body. The investigation had stalled, and Carol's frustration was going through the roof until one day, about twelve or thirteen years after Angie's death, Carol decided to take the matter into her own hands, and the first thing she wanted to look at were the video

tapes of chris Taps interrogation. It's the first time she's seen these tapes from start to finish, and as she watches them, She's growing angrier and angrier because those tapes are making her think that Chris Tap might be innocent. Carol starts doing research online about false confessions, and whose name comes up, but Steve Drisen. She picked up the phone and calls him. Now, I'll never forget this. I

was sitting at my desk one afternoon. It was February two thousand thirteen, and the phone rank and on the other end was Carol Dodge. Now I knew who Carol Dodge was. I had read about the cap case. I had seen Carol on an episode of Dateline, but I had never received a call from a crime victim before. Asking for my assistance, she said, would you mind reviewing and analyzing these interrogation videos? Who could say no to Carol Dodge. Carol sent the videotapes and Steve watched them all.

He wrote an expert report deeming Chris TAP's confessions unreliable. But even as Steve and Carol worked together, others were starting to raise questions too. An advocacy group called Judges for Justice started pushing to reopen the investigation. Two former FBI agents reviewed the case and concluded that the Idaho Falls Police investigation was deeply flawed, and an internationally recognized expert concluded that chris taps polygraph had been a sham.

The results, he said, weren't worth the paper they were written on. Things were starting to congeal around the idea that Chris was wrongfully convicted. Chris Tapp's own attorneys and representatives of the Idaho Innocence Project were beginning to push the innocence narrative in court. What the team really needed it was more forensic testing to show that Chris taps

DNA was nowhere in Angie Dodge's bedroom. Under previous Idaho law, defendants like Chris could only seek DNA testing during the year immediately following conviction, but that restriction was lifted in two thousand ten, and Chris's team jumped at the opportunity. They had additional testing done on some other things from Angie's bedroom, that Teddy bear with the blood on it and some articles of her clothing. What was found the same DNA profile as the person who had left his seamen.

We now had multiple DNA hits to the same guy. While we didn't know who that guy was, we did know he wasn't Chris Tap Based on all these new discoveries, Carola Dodge becomes convinced that Chris Tap is innocent, and she starts bringing pressure to bear on the local police department to release Chris and find her daughter's actual killer.

In May two thousand sixteen, Chris taps lawyer filed a post conviction petition alleging that new evidence had cast out on the reliability of TAP's confession, and pretty soon an enormous collection of forces was pushing the state of Idaho to do the right thing. Judges for Justice was releasing expert reports and calling for Chris's release, The Idaho Innocence Project was talking about the new DNA results, and the Idaho Falls Post Register in the local newspaper, was hammering

the prosecutor to release Chris. One local journalist became particularly invested in the case. His name is Brian Clark. I'm the opinion editor of the Post Register in Idaho Falls, and I'm a former reporter there. I first heard about the case shortly before Judges for Justice started releasing their reports about it. My editor approached me and said, I've got a gift for you. It's not going to feel like a gift, but I promise it is, and he introduced me to the Dodge case and the Tap conviction.

Even the Innocence Project in New York had joined the fight, but no one was pushing harder than Carol Dodge. It takes an army sometimes, and she was a general. An example of her tenacity you can actually see in the architecture of the police station there are a pair of doors that are in between the sort of main lobby area and the area where the detectives and other police are.

The reason they were put in is that Carol Dodge would show up at the police station, walk right past the front desk and into the chief's office and start demanding that he you know what, what are you doing to find my daughter's killer? And so they finally had to put indoors to keep her from doing that, that referred to as the Carol Doors. Eventually, prosecutors decide that they're not yet ready to exonerate Chris, but they would agree based on this new DNA evidence that Chris should

be granted immediate release. So in Chris Tap walked out of prison, not yet exonerated, but a freeman after spending twenty years behind bars. You see all the evidence stack up and it becomes clear the guys spent twenty years behind bars for something he didn't do, and that did keep me up at nights. Frankly, after working on it for years, I did not think it was gonna be remedied. So it was really great to watch them take those

handcuffs off. That made me really happy. The first two people to give him a hug was his mother, Vera and Carrol. They hugged and they were both crying, and it was just really remarkable. It was a bitter sweet moment. Carol Dodge was relieved that Chris had been released, but she was also concerned would the Idaho Falls police and prosecutors now give up the search for Andie's killer. There

was no way she was going to allow that to happen. Usually, in these cases, the DNA profile eventually gets matched and it's the identification of the real killer that leads to full exoneration. But this wasn't happening for Chris tap. The single DNA profile left at the scene was run again and again through the National DNA database, but it kept coming up dry. You see, profiles get added to that database only when people are arrested or charged with certain

serious offenses. Clearly, whoever had done this to Angie Dodge hadn't reoffended, at least not at the level of severity that would lead to his DNA being included in that database. But that didn't stop Carol. She wasn't going to arrest until that mystery DNA was identified, and she wanted Idaho police to try the brand new dn they identification technique called genetic genealogy. Genetic genealogy is basically the use of

DNA evidence in combination with traditional genealogical information. If you can identify whose DNA it is, at least you might be able to identify that person's family tree. This technique was recently used to solve the Golden State killer case in California. Now police had already given genetic genealogy a

shot in the case of Angie Dodge. Using the DNA profile from the crime scene and an ancestry dot com database, they obtained a partial d n A match to a man in New Orleans, a possible suspect, a man named Michael Ustrie. They became more and more interested in Austrie after it turned out that he was a filmmaker with

a flare for the macabre. He had recently created a short film called murder Abelia about the market for collectibles related to real life killings, and when he told the officers that he had been to Idaho at some point around the time of this crime on a camping trip, their expectations soared even higher. Police interviewed Michael Usfrie and got his full DNA profile, but it didn't match the DNA left at the scene. Film noir or not, he wasn't guilty. As for everyone else in the US three

family tree, police found themselves out of leeds. Again. Every other male in the family was ruled out too young, too old, never been to Idaho Falls. But again, Carol Dodge didn't give up. In she found the genetic genealogist who had cracked open the Golden State killer case, doctor C. C. Moore. Carol pressured police to hire doctor Moore, and they did.

Dr Moore started looking through obituaries to fill in the blanks in the US three family tree, and she was able to take samples that were found at the crime scene and compare them to genealogical DNA database. That led her to a family tree of individuals who could be related to the person who left the DNA at the crime scene, and only with the help of an obscure record that they found in a library, they were finally

able to track down Brian Drips. Brian Dripps is a biological Auzri who had been adopted by his stepfather and grew up as part of another family. By the time his name came up in late two thousand eighteen, Drips was fifty three years old, and it turned out he used to live in Idaho Falls, right across the street from Angie Dodge. Police had actually interviewed him during a canvas of the crime scene and the area around where the crime occurred. They interviewed the true killer within days

of Angie Dodges murder. Brian Dripps had left Idaho Falls shortly after the killing. He was now living in a different part of Idaho and he wasn't in the national DNA database. He was the perfect suspect. Now all police needed was a complete DNA match. They started tailing Drips and they found their opportunity when he threw a cigarette butt out his car window. Police recovered that cigarette butt and there it was a d N a match to the evidence left in Angie's bedroom all those years ago.

After more than two decades, Brian Dripps was arrested for the rape and murder of Angie Dodge, and Chris Tapp was finally exonerated in an Idaho courtroom on July seventeenth, two thousand nineteen. Since then, Chris Tap and Carol Dodge have become close. They've even appeared on television together to tell their intertwined stories of injustice. For his part, Brian Dripps is currently incarcerated in Idaho Falls, where he's awaiting trial on first degree murder and rape charges. He's entered

a plea. If not guilty, fighting for this canna be a long, slow crawl. Carol and Chris know this better than anyone. Assuming Brian Drips is eventually convicted, she will have not only freedom innocent man, but driven the effort to catch the guilty one. She's been the driving force behind this whole thing, both the exoneration of Chris Tap and the apprehension of Brian Drips. Slowly, but surely, over many years, she was able to get the Idaho Falls police out of the Chris Tap box. She got them

to see the truth. Yeah, Hi, how are you today, Steve. I'm really sad. I was just sitting here thinking with a gust of justice, those all the things that I sacrificed because of people that could have done the right thing at the very beginning. It's so important that you say that people you don't know. Its been a real price to your twenty three year search for the troops. And I've never allowed any of the authorities to tell me no the kind they told me that something couldn't

be done. I would just say, we'll watch me there. Thinks that you're work has done, which you probably can't even see or appreciate yet, that I hope gives you some comfort. It does. I love you. I love you too, and thank you. Hello. Hey, Chris, it's Laura. How are you good, Laura? How are you? I'm good. I'm good. So tell me about what you've been doing with your time as a free man. I understand it. Good a family, I do. I have an amazing family. Let's see. I

got out in March of two. I met my wife two month later in May and Wellwood Romance, and we were married in July. I have three beautiful step children or children of my own, as I could love to call him. I have a almost twenty one year old, I got a sixteen year old, and I got a fifteen year old. Board tell me a little bit about what it's meant here to have Carol Dodge. Oh, Carol Dodge. I love her dearly more than most people ever know.

The actual true killer of her daughter would be caught, and I wouldn't have the exoneration that wasn't for Carol. Dogs Chris, it was a great honor for me to play even a small role in your exoneration, and being in that courtroom when you were finally cleared was one of the highlights of my career. You've been given a gift, and I hope you take this gift, and I know you will, and you live a life that is honorable and worthy to Chris Tap and Carol Dodge, two of

our heroes. Thanks for letting us share your story. And that's the story of Chris Tap. Next week, join us as we bring you to Brooklyn, New York, where David McCallum and Willie Stucky were wrongfully convicted of murder. There are decades long fight for justice drew support from one of the most famous exonorees, of all time professional boxer Ruben Hurricane Carter. Until then, thanks for listening to Wrongful Conviction,

False Confessions. Wrongful Conviction False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flom and the team at Signal Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Special thank to jog Hammer for additional script

editing and for wrangling and writing like a Madwoman. Special things to Mike kV for organizing and editing Chris Taps interrogation videos. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura ni Rider and you can follow me on Twitter at s Drisen.

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