Chris Tapp: Idaho: Major Development: (False confession case): Who really raped and murdered Angie Dodge? (The crimes for which then 20-year-old Chris Tapp falsely confessed, leading to wrongful convictions and 20 years wrongful imprisonment)..."More than two decades after 18-year-old Angie Dodge was raped and fatally stabbed in her apartment in Idaho Falls, the new forensic science of genetic genealogy has finally helped find a suspect whose DNA matches semen left at the scene. At a Thursday press conference, the Idaho Falls Police Department announced the arrest of Brian Leigh Dripps Sr., 53, from Caldwell, Idaho. At the time of the murder, he lived on the same street as Dodge."

PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "The Dodge investigation had a troubled history even before that misstep. In 1997, detectives suspected a local man, Ben Hobbs, who had been arrested for rape in Nevada. They pulled in a friend of Hobbs, 20-year-old Christopher Tapp, who confessed under interrogation to helping hold Dodge down while Hobbs and another man he didn’t know attacked her. Tapp was charged with aiding the rape and murder. Despite there being no physical evidence to tie him to the scene, Tapp was convicted. At his trial, he said his confession had been coerced. Tapp was eventually released in 2017 after the Idaho Innocence Project won a review of the DNA and other evidence. But only the rape conviction was formally overturned. “They still called him a murderer,” Greg Hampikian, a biologist at Boise State University and founder of the Idaho Innocence Project, told BuzzFeed News. “You can imagine how easy it is to find a job or rent a house.” The new breakthrough in the case came through testing the crime scene sample for hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across the entire genome, rather than the few dozen on the Y chromosome that falsely implicated Usry."

STORY: "Genetic Genealogy Helped Finally Crack The 1996 Murder Of 18-Year-Old Angie Dodge," by reporter Peter Aldhous, published by BuzzFeed on May 16, 2019. (Peter Aldhous is a Science Reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.)

SUB-HEADING: "The arrest in a notorious cold case follows the imprisonment of another man for two decades, and a false DNA lead that briefly implicated a New Orleans filmmaker."

GIST: More than two decades after 18-year-old Angie Dodge was raped and fatally stabbed in her apartment in Idaho Falls, the new forensic science of genetic genealogy has finally helped find a suspect whose DNA matches semen left at the scene. At a Thursday press conference, the Idaho Falls Police Department announced the arrest of Brian Leigh Dripps Sr., 53, from Caldwell, Idaho. At the time of the murder, he lived on the same street as Dodge. “His DNA matches the DNA sample left at the scene of the crime,” police chief Bryce Johnson said. “And he has also confessed to the crime in an interview.” The case highlights how far the science of sleuthing in genealogy databases has come in the last five years. In 2014, detectives working the case obtained a warrant that forced the leading genealogy company Ancestry to reveal the identity of a man who had put a DNA profile for his Y chromosome in a database that the company had recently acquired. The profile had a strong overlap — but wasn’t a perfect match — to semen found at the crime scene. That DNA profile belonged to the father of a New Orleans filmmaker, Michael Usry. Detectives found Usry had connections to Idaho and had made a movie titled Murderabilia about the trade in artifacts linked to notorious killers. On that evidence, police got a warrant to detain Usry and take a sample of his DNA. But it was a false lead. Conventional forensic DNA testing showed that Usry was not the killer. “Nobody ever thinks that they're gonna get picked up by the police and taken into an interrogation room and questioned about a murder,” Usry told CBS News’ 48 Hours. “When it happens to you, it's definitely a game changer.” The Dodge investigation had a troubled history even before that misstep. In 1997, detectives suspected a local man, Ben Hobbs, who had been arrested for rape in Nevada. They pulled in a friend of Hobbs, 20-year-old Christopher Tapp, who confessed under interrogation to helping hold Dodge down while Hobbs and another man he didn’t know attacked her. Tapp thought he would be given immunity for helping the police. But when a DNA test cleared Hobbs, Tapp was charged with aiding the rape and murder. Despite there being no physical evidence to tie him to the scene, Tapp was convicted. At his trial, he said his confession had been coerced. Tapp was eventually released in 2017 after the Idaho Innocence Project won a review of the DNA and other evidence. But only the rape conviction was formally overturned. “They still called him a murderer,” Greg Hampikian, a biologist at Boise State University and founder of the Idaho Innocence Project, told BuzzFeed News. “You can imagine how easy it is to find a job or rent a house.” The new breakthrough in the case came through testing the crime scene sample for hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across the entire genome, rather than the few dozen on the Y chromosome that falsely implicated Usry. Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA analysis company in Virginia that has worked with police on dozens of other cases over the past year, then uploaded that profile to a website called GEDmatch, used by people researching their family trees to look for possible relatives. Parabon’s lead genealogist, CeCe Moore, drew up three family trees from partial DNA matches at GEDmatch, which converged on a single couple that seemed to be the perpetrator’s great-grandparents. This couple’s descendants led to a handful of suspects, whom detectives shadowed to pick up items carrying DNA they had discarded. But when those samples were tested, none of the men were the perpetrator. “We originally had it narrowed down to about six men, but it turned out there was a seventh,” Moore said. Eventually, Moore realized that one woman in the family had conceived a son shortly before she divorced. That child was Dripps, who took the name of the woman’s new husband. Detectives tailed Dripps and picked up a cigarette butt thrown from his vehicle. When it was tested for DNA, it matched the semen from the crime scene. The arrest brings some closure to the Dodge family. “I can’t even express how hard this journey has been,” a tearful Carol Dodge, Angie’s mother, said at the press conference. “This is a great day for our family,” Brent Dodge, Angie’s brother, said. “We’re safe tonight. The bad guy is behind bars.” Johnson, the Idaho Falls police chief, declined to comment when asked whether Tapp would now receive an apology and reparations for his long imprisonment. “That would be a question for a couple of weeks from now,” he said. “We need a little bit more time to dot 'i's and cross 't's.” “I hope they will do the right thing and admit that they made a mistake,” Tapp told BuzzFeed News. “I believe and hope to god that they will.""

The entire story can be read at:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/angie-dodge-cold-case-murder-genetic-genealogy-parabon

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BACKGROUND: (FALSE CONVICTION): Go to link below: (The Charles Smith Blog: January 31, 2016): "

Sunday, January 31, 2016

"Chris Tapp: Idaho; 19 years behind bars for a rape and murder a retired judge (and many others including the victim's mother) believes Tapp did not commit: "A slew of reports from former FBI investigators, a polygraph expert, DNA experts and false confession experts have come to the same conclusion: Tapp falsely confessed under coercion. Angie Dodge’s mother, Carol, has reached the same conclusion. Carol Dodge says her motivation isn’t to get Tapp out of prison. She wants her daughter’s murderer to pay for his crime. She has reviewed the evidence for years, prodded police and prosecutors relentlessly, demanded new DNA testing and sought outside experts, but she hasn’t found one piece of scientific evidence that points to Tapp. And as long as Tapp is behind bars, and as long as police continue operating under the theory that he and two other men did it, she doesn’t think the killer will face his reckoning. The science points to one man, she says. The man who left semen, hair, fingerprints and skin cells at the scene. She doesn’t know who that is. “I am at the mercy of the city of Idaho Falls and the prosecution to find the one and only killer of my daughter,” she said. “They need to do their job.” (Must Read. HL);"

STORY: "Tapp confronts ‘lies’ he told that put him behind bars," by reporter Bryan  Clark, published by the Post Register on January 28 2016.

PHOTO CAPTION: "Retired Judge Mike Heavey traveled to the Idaho State Correctional Center in Kuna on Wednesday to show Chris Tapp a video that details a confession he says was false. Tapp has served 19 years in prison for a murder that many law enforcement and judicial experts believe he didn’t commit."

GIST: "Today (28 January, 2016)  marks the 19th anniversary of Chris Tapp’s time behind bars — 6,940 days. During that time Tapp’s father died. He couldn’t go to the funeral. And, three weeks ago, Lori Hollandsworth — a Tennessee woman who advocated for his release and married him in a short 2013 prison ceremony — died in a car accident. “She was my voice,” Tapp said, wiping away tears. Tapp is serving a sentence of 30 years to life for the 1996 rape and murder of Angie Dodge. He was convicted because he confessed. He says it was a false confession, that he knows nothing about the crime except what was fed to him by police during a series of long interrogations and polygraph tests. The murder: "A slew of reports from former FBI investigators, a polygraph expert, DNA experts and false confession experts have come to the same conclusion: Tapp falsely confessed under coercion. Angie Dodge’s mother, Carol, has reached the same conclusion. Carol Dodge says her motivation isn’t to get Tapp out of prison. She wants her daughter’s murderer to pay for his crime. She has reviewed the evidence for years, prodded police and prosecutors relentlessly, demanded new DNA testing and sought outside experts, but she hasn’t found one piece of scientific evidence that points to Tapp. And as long as Tapp is behind bars, and as long as police continue operating under the theory that he and two other men did it, she doesn’t think the killer will face his reckoning. The science points to one man, she says. The man who left semen, hair, fingerprints and skin cells at the scene. She doesn’t know who that is. “I am at the mercy of the city of Idaho Falls and the prosecution to find the one and only killer of my daughter,” she said. “They need to do their job.” The Bonneville County Prosecutor’s Office hired Stuart Robinson, a former police officer and private investigator based in Twin Falls, to review the investigation and outside reports. He says he has finished his initial review of the case, and is prepared to begin looking at the outside reports. He doesn’t have an exact date when he expects to release his findings. Prison:  Wednesday morning, retired Judge Mike Heavey arrived at the Boise airport. Heavey is the co-founder of Judges for Justice, an organization that investigates potential wrongful convictions. He has been looking into Tapp’s case for the last few years, spending hundreds of hours reviewing interrogation tapes, looking at evidence and investigating people he thinks could have committed the Dodge murder. Heavey has just released a two-hour video documenting how he believes Idaho Falls Police Department detectives coerced Tapp into a false confession. He has flown in from Seattle to show Tapp the video........The video isn’t a dramatic documentary. It’s a slow, plodding examination of key moments in the interrogations. The video posits that Tapp told six separate stories to police between his first interrogation in early January 1997 to his final confession later that month......... The video’s thesis is that each of the shifts in Tapp’s story can be explained by information that was fed to him by interrogators, along with the dual pressure of a possible death sentence for not cooperating and full immunity for giving police information on the crime. Repressed memories:  The video makes another suggestion: That police convinced Tapp he had repressed memories of participating in the crime, and that a polygraph machine could unlock these memories. At several points, Tapp is asked to confess to something, and he responds: But I would remember that, wouldn’t I? At one point, Detective Steve Finn, the polygrapher, tells Tapp he was deceptive when he denied involvement in the murder. Finn tells Tapp that he could face life in prison or the gas chamber. Tapp says he doesn’t remember being at the apartment. He says he’s scared. “The reason why is because you — subconsciously, you remember,” Finn tells Tapp. In a recent report, Boise State University professor and polygraph expert Charles Honts concluded police used the polygraph as a “psychological rubber hose” rather than as a tool to detect deceptiveness. The sensors used by the machine are improperly placed, Honts wrote, and the questions aimed at Tapp diverge wildly from accepted procedure.........The confession:  A few days later, with an offer of immunity, Tapp is prepared to say he was there with Hobbs. But he seems unsure of any details and he begins to offer whatever comes to his mind. Detective Ken Brown asks in what room the murder took place. “The only thing that comes to my head’s the living room,” Tapp says. “I don’t know why. It’s just the living room popped there. Anything that pops in, I’m gonna say. … I don’t know if it’s right or not.” It’s not right. The murder took place in Angie Dodge’s bedroom. Tapp gets lots of details wrong where the house is located, where the bedroom is within the apartment, where the killer ejaculated on her body. The moment when 20-year-old Tapp says he cut Angie Dodge finally comes, and inmate Tapp hangs his head and closes his eyes, not moving for several seconds. He’s asked about seeing his 20-year-old self speak the words that two decades later still have him behind bars. He looks around at the concrete floors as shouts ring through the hallways and says, “This is where I might wind up spending 30 years of my life.” Lying:  Actually, it could be much longer. Since being incarcerated, Tapp has twice attempted to re-confess and give police new names for the third man in exchange for a reduced sentence. Once he named a federal prison inmate he met. Another time he gave a name, Steve Price, that he says he made up. False confession expert Steve Drizin reviewed these confessions and wrote that they didn’t change his view that Tapp’s confession is false. Tapp never offered any information that indicates he knew anything about the crime, just that he wants out of prison. The Idaho Falls Police Department says it’s an indication Tapp’s guilty."

 

The entire story can be found at:

http://www.postregister.com/articles/featured-news-daily-email/2016/01/28/tapp-confronts-%E2%80%98lies%E2%80%99-he-told-put-him-behind-bars#

http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2016/01/

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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com.  Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.

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