Carol Dodge was determined to get justice for her daughter — even if it meant helping to free the man behind bars for the crime.

When Chris Tapp was convicted in 1998 for the brutal rape and murder of Carol’s 18-year-old daughter Angie Dodge after confessing to the crime, she saw him as evil personified.

“It was finally looking somebody in the eye… and looking at someone I thought was a devil, who had taken my daughter’s life,” Carol recalled through tears in Dateline: Unforgettable’s “True Confession” episode. “The anger surged within me.” 

But when Carol dove deeper into the case herself, she realized that the DNA left behind at the scene didn’t match Tapp and the only real evidence against him was a bumbling confession made after hours and hours in the interrogation room. 

She became convinced that Tapp, once a friend of her daughter’s, wasn’t responsible for the grisly crime and embarked on a relentless quest to not only track down the real killer, but also free Tapp in the process.

“One person still stands out as clear as day and that’s Angie’s mother,” Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison said of her incredible persistence. “Carol Dodge is among the most determined people I have ever met and one of the most courageous.” 

What happened to Angie Dodge?

College student Angie Dodge was found dead in her small, second-floor Idaho Falls, Idaho, apartment on the morning of June 13, 1996, just weeks after she’d moved in. 

She had been raped and stabbed to death.

“It was the most horrific scene that I had ever worked up in that, you know, 15 years in my career at that point,” Veteran cop Jeff Pratt recalled. “She was nearly decapitated.” 

A stuffed teddy bear found near her bed was soaked in blood. On Angie’s body, officers found a bloody handprint and DNA left behind by the killer during the sexual assault. 

“My whole system shut down, my emotional, my everything, just shut down,” Carol said of learning of her daughter’s death.

In life, Angie had been a force to be reckoned with after growing up with three brothers.

“Her friends always knew nobody got in her face because she would take care of you,” her mom recalled. 

She was smart, fun-loving, responsible and was remembered by one friend as a “big, bright beautiful character.” 

Who is Chris Tapp?

After her death, detectives began by looking at those closest to her. Angie’s boyfriend of just a few weeks was cleared by the DNA and several of her friends who had been at her apartment the night before she was killed had been ruled out the same way.

For six months, authorities had no real leads in the case until one of Angie’s friends, Benjamin Hobbs, was arrested in Nevada for committing a brutal rape and cutting the woman with a knife. Investigators believed he may have also been responsible for Angie’s death—even though he insisted he hadn’t killed her. 

Angie and Hobbs were part of a group of teenagers and young adults who often hung out by the nearby Snake River.  Believing Hobbs may have had an accomplice, detectives began taking a hard look at other males in the group, calling them in for questioning one after another. 

One of the men was 20-year-old Christopher Tapp.

“Chris was struggling a bit,” Morrison explained. “A sweet, slightly troubled kid, trying to get going in life. He loved his mother, loved his friends, loved his pot parties a bit too much.” 

Tapp insisted he didn’t know anything about Angie’s death, but authorities continued to pull him in for questioning nine separate times over 20 hours of interrogations. 

Exhausted, Tapp finally confessed to being in Angie’s apartment when Hobbs killed her.

“Ben went after her…” he said. “He stuck her.” 

The only problem was that neither man’s DNA matched the DNA left behind at the scene. With the confession in hand, detectives theorized that a third man must have been involved. 

Tapp was arrested and convicted in 1998 for the slaying, based primarily on his own confession. He was sentenced to 40 years behind bars. Hobbs was never formally charged in connection to Angie’s death and was serving time in Nevada for the separate attack.

The three killer theory falls apart

While Carol was pleased to see Tapp behind bars, she was determined to find the supposed third man, the one who had left behind the DNA at the scene. Relentless, Carol visited the police station every day it was open, drove for miles through seedy neighborhoods passing out fliers, read through police reports and even kept tabs on the so-called “River Kids” who had once hung out by the Snake River.

“I had a gun put to my head one night,” she told Dateline.

But the years passed without any more arrests. Then in one of the reports, Carol noticed that some pubic hairs had been found at the scene that were listed in the report as being “similar or same as the victim,” but it struck Carol that the hairs either belonged to her daughter or they didn’t. 

She reached out to DNA expert Dr. Greg Hampikian, the founder and director of Idaho’s Innocence Project. By chance, the organization had just agreed to take on Tapp’s case.

“Her words to me I’ll never forget were ‘I just want to know what happened to my daughter,’” Hampikian said.

The hairs were tested and matched the same man who’d left behind the DNA. Hampikian concluded that the DNA and the evidence left behind at the scene suggested there had only been one killer, not three like the detectives had theorized. 

Carol Dodge works to free Chris Tapp

The Idaho Innocence Project concluded that Tapp didn’t do it and that his confession had been false.

Carol was shocked and asked police for copies of all the interrogation tapes conducted with Tapp by Detective Jared Fuhriman. After watching hours of footage, which showed Tapp had been confused about where Angie’s apartment was, the layout of the apartment or who could have been involved, she reached the same conclusion.

“There’s times that I wanted to put my fist through the tv,” she said of watching the tapes. “How had they managed to convince and keep someone in prison for all these years, and it’s a possibility he’s not there?” 

Carol decided to dedicate herself to trying to free Tapp, who still continued to proclaim his own innocence.

“I’ve been so wronged all these years,” he told Morrison from behind bars in 2012, adding that as a confused, scared 20-year-old he had been trying to give detectives what they wanted.

By then, Fuhriman had been elected as mayor of Idaho Falls and was still convinced that Tapp was involved in the crime.

To aid in Tapp’s case, Carol tracked down Steve Drizin, a world-renowned expert in false confessions who called Tapp’s interrogation “the worst example of police contamination” that he had ever seen. He got the national Innocence Project involved in the case.

With public scrutiny growing, prosecutors decided to make Tapp a deal. He was allowed to plead guilty to murder and be re-sentenced for time served, allowing him to finally be freed in March of 2017.

Carol — who took the stand in support of Tapp at the hearing — was one of the first people he embraced.

Who killed Angie Dodge?

In the wake of Tapp’s release, Idaho Falls new police chief Bryce Johnson decided to take a fresh look at the case in an effort to track down the man who’d left behind the DNA sample at the scene all those years ago.

Carol wasn’t done either. She helped convince genetic genealogy expert CeCe Moore to get involved, even sending her the crime scene photos. 

“It made me just ill and very, very, very angry seeing what had been done to Angie,” Moore said of the images.

Moore, who worked at Parabon NanoLabs, got to work determining the source of the DNA by building out family trees of those who shared genetic markers with the killer. Through her work, they were able to identify a suspect by the name of Brian Dripps, an ex-Marine and father of three.

Dripps had lived across the street from Angie at the time of the murders. Idaho Falls Police secretly followed Dripps and collected a discarded cigarette butt in May of 2019 to confirm that he was their killer. When the DNA matched to the sample left at the crime scene, Dripps was arrested.

He ultimately confessed and confirmed that he was the only person involved in the slaying.

“I went to rape her,” he told the detectives, “”cause I was all messed up on coke and drunk.” 

Dripps said he killed Angie after she fought back and hit him. For Carol, it was finally an answer.

“I can’t even express how hard this journey has been and the hundreds of people who’ve been affected by one person’s choice to take my daughter’s life,” she said through tears at a press conference announcing Dripps’ arrest.

Dripps pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years.

Tapp was fully exonerated in 2019. He went on to help change legislation in the state that provided compensation for wrongfully convicted individuals, earning more than $1 million because of the new law himself. Tapp was also awarded $11.7 million in a civil lawsuit against Idaho Falls and its police department.

Tragically, Tapp was murdered in a Las Vegas hotel room in 2023 at the age of 47.