True Confession

Summary

Dateline NBC: “True Confession” (June 12, 2026)

Episode Overview

This episode of Dateline NBC, hosted by Lester Holt and featuring reporting from Keith Morrison, tells the extraordinary and tragic story of the 1996 rape and murder of Angie Dodge in Idaho Falls. It follows the dogged pursuit of justice by Angie’s mother, Carol Dodge, the wrongful conviction and eventual exoneration of Christopher Tapp, and the decades-long search for the real killer, culminating in a stunning use of genetic genealogy. The story is both a gripping true crime investigation and a human saga—of grief, obsession, systemic failure, and redemption, with a tragic coda of its own.

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Key Themes & Structure

• The murder of Angie Dodge and its impact on her community
• Miscarriage of justice: Christopher Tapp’s false confession and imprisonment
• Carol Dodge’s relentless quest for the truth
• The evolution of forensic science and genetic genealogy
• Identification and conviction of the true killer
• Personal aftermath and tragic ending for the wrongfully accused

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Detailed Breakdown & Key Moments

1. The Crime and Immediate Aftermath

[01:22–06:54]

• Angie Dodge (18), a vibrant young woman in Idaho Falls, is found raped and murdered in her apartment.
  • “It really hits deeply. Actually seeing the crime scene photo, it made me just very, very angry. What had been done to Angie.” – Carol Dodge [01:22]
  • “She was nearly decapitated.” – Jeff Pratt, veteran officer [06:52]
• The brutality of the crime horrifies her family and the community.
• DNA evidence is collected, but in 1996 forensic technology is still new.
• Carol Dodge’s grief is overwhelming:
  • “My whole system shut down. Everything just shut down.” – Carol Dodge [08:11]

2. The Police Investigation—Suspicions and Mistakes

[06:54–18:42]

• Police interrogate many of Angie’s friends—the so-called “River Kids.”
• DNA clears initial suspects, including Angie’s boyfriend.
• Christopher Tapp, 20, is interviewed multiple times, eventually falsely confessing under pressure after lengthy interrogations and polygraphs.
• The police, unable to match the crime scene DNA to Tapp or Ben Hobbs (the initial suspect in a similar crime), theorize a third unidentified accomplice.
  • “There had to be a third attacker… and it was that third man who left the DNA.” – Lester Holt [17:06]

3. Wrongful Conviction—The False Confession

[19:20–26:13]

• Tapp is charged and convicted almost entirely on the basis of his inconsistent confessions, despite the fact that DNA from the crime scene doesn’t match him (or others accused).
• Carol Dodge believes in Tapp’s guilt, watching him in court with anger, until new questions arise.
  • “When I was finally looking somebody in the eye, someone I thought was a devil who had taken my daughter's life. The anger surged within me.” – Carol Dodge [24:33]

4. Carol Dodge’s Pursuit and Evolution

[26:45–36:09]

• Carol Dodge refuses to let the case rest, spending years advocating for answers and reading every detail in the police files.
  • “I literally put 60,000 miles on my truck searching for her killer.” – Carol Dodge [28:03]
• She becomes convinced by DNA evidence and the work of forensic experts (notably Greg Hampikian of Idaho’s Innocence Project) that only one unknown man committed the murder.
• Carol transitions from believing Tapp’s guilt to becoming his staunchest advocate for exoneration.

5. The Innocence Project & Police Missteps

[30:44–44:59]

• Steve Drizen, a nationally known expert on false confessions, reviews the tapes and calls it “the worst example of police contamination, fact-feeding, suggesting a story that I have ever seen.” [54:33]
• Destiny Osborne, a friend pressured by police to lie on the stand, later recants:
  • “I lied.” – Destiny Osborne [56:15]
• Prosecutors offer Tapp a plea deal for time served. He spends 20 years in prison.

6. Breakthrough: Genetic Genealogy & The Real Killer

[60:02–74:23]

• With advances in DNA and the involvement of genealogist CeCe Moore (despite very degraded DNA samples), the case is revived.
  • “My first assessment of this case was that it was not viable for investigative genetic genealogy.” – CeCe Moore [63:30]
• Through painstaking genealogical research, the suspect is linked to the Usry family, but is identified under a different surname—Brian Drips, who lived nearby at the time and was overlooked by the original investigation.
• Police obtain Drips’ DNA from a discarded cigarette; it matches the crime scene.
  • “I just got a call from the lab. It’s him.” – Detective Squires [74:04]

7. Drips Confesses and Tapp is Fully Exonerated

[74:41–83:45]

• Drips confesses to acting alone, exonerating Tapp:
  • “He did what was right. He finally… said he acted alone, and I had nothing to do with it.” – Christopher Tapp [78:43]
• On July 2019, Tapp is officially exonerated by the court.
  • “As far as this court is concerned, you are innocent of the convictions that you’ve been living under for the past 20 plus years.” – Judge [83:07]
• Tapp becomes the first person in the world exonerated via genetic genealogy.

8. Aftermath—Justice, Vindication, and More Tragedy

[84:10–90:08]

• Drips pleads guilty and is sentenced to life in prison.
• Tapp receives compensation and, with Carol Dodge’s support, speaks publicly about wrongful convictions.
• Personal losses haunt Tapp—his marriage falls apart and his ex-wife dies in a car crash.
• In 2023, Tapp himself dies in Las Vegas in what first appears to be an accident, later ruled a homicide after an altercation, with a suspect indicted.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “[Angie] was a force to be reckoned with. She was not gonna let it go.” – Lester Holt [02:09]
• “You don’t lie about something like that. It was hard to deal with.” – Jeremy Sargis (about being accused by Tapp) [22:00]
• “It was the worst example of police contamination… fact-feeding… I have ever seen.” – Steve Drizen [54:33]
• “For 13 years, they had me convinced that Kristap was there… When they have DNA… that belongs to the same person and it’s not Kris Tapp, something’s wrong.” – Carol Dodge [33:07]
• “She… turned all of that love and devotion for her daughter into a very careful record of this case.” – Detective Ken Brown [31:23]
• “I will never talk about the Angie Dodge case again.” – Christopher Tapp, after his final interview [88:52]

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Timeline / Timestamps for Pivotal Segments

• Crime & Aftermath: [01:22–09:18]
• Police focus on friends/River Kids: [10:12–19:43]
• Chris Tapp interrogation, confession, conviction: [14:44–26:13]
• Carol Dodge’s obsessive investigation: [26:45–36:09]
• Shift in Carol’s belief, Innocence Project, evidence of false confession: [36:09–56:57]
• Prosecutors offer Tapp plea deal, Carol’s courtroom statement: [58:19–58:48]
• New police chief & CeCe Moore, genetic genealogy breakthrough: [60:02–66:38]
• Identification, DNA match, and confession of Brian Drips: [66:38–78:18]
• Tapp exoneration in court: [81:50–83:45]
• Resolution, aftermath, Chris Tapp’s activism and untimely death: [86:22–91:25]

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Conclusion & Reflections

The episode ends somberly, reflecting on the long pursuit of justice, loss, and the unpredictability of fate:

• “I don’t know if there’s a way to make sense of this. It’s just so incomprehensible.” – Steve Drizen [91:18]
• Carol Dodge’s unique crusade not only freed her daughter’s wrongly accused friend but also propelled advances in criminal justice, though her personal losses remain profound.
• The story offers a rare, poignant look at wrongful conviction from a victim’s mother’s perspective—a testament to the power of persistence, the consequences of police failure, and the complicated, unexpected aftermaths of even hard-won victories.

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This episode’s detailed journey through the Angie Dodge case serves as a cautionary tale about rushing to judgment, the dangers of coerced confessions, and the crucial role of science, advocacy, and, most of all, perseverance in the search for justice.

Transcript

[Lester Holt]

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[Carol Dodge]

It really hits deeply. Actually seeing the crime scene photo, it made me just very, very angry. What had been done to Angie.

The day that Angie was found dead, my whole system shut down. Everything just shut down.

[Jeremy Sargis]

Who would do that to Angie? To one of our friends?

[Detective Ken Brown]

The accusations were flying. They were running and gunning for anybody.

[Lester Holt]

You're handcuffed. Yeah.

[Jeremy Sargis]

They treated me like I was part of this nasty crime.

[Lester Holt]

They were convinced that you were there. Yeah.

[Christopher Tapp]

These people robbed my life for 20 years for something I never did.

[Carol Dodge]

All they kept saying is, he confessed, Carol, he confessed. I said, what is going on here? I went to the streets searching for her killer.

She was advocating for justice.

[Lester Holt]

She was a force to be reckoned with. She was not gonna let it go.

[Carol Dodge]

She begged me to give it a

[Detective Bill Squires]

deeper look, to potentially have a break on this. Oh, my gosh. We're gonna go solve a murder. We're gonna solve a 25 year old murder.

[Lester Holt]

Years lost, lives shattered. A mother fights to uncover the truth. I'm Lester Holt and this is.

[Steve Drizen]

Here's Keith Morrison with true confession.

[Lester Holt]

They call it the Snake River. And it glides wide and placid past the gleaming white Mormon temple and then twists and tumbles over rocks and weirs through the town of Idaho Falls. It twists and tumbles like this Most improbable tale, the one that began right here.

[Christopher Tapp]

Where are your kids?

[Lester Holt]

Long before the state of Idaho was associated with notorious names like Lori Valo or Chad Daybell or Brian Kohberger. Brian, did you do it? We thought we knew the story we're about to tell. Perhaps you think you know it too, but that old cliche is a cliche for a reason. Truth is often stranger than fiction, as you will see.

[Steve Drizen]

I don't think anybody saw this coming. I don't think that you could have imagined this in a million years.

[Lester Holt]

But here at the river is where it first went wrong. Among a group of young men and women who'd formed what felt to them like a kind of family.

[George Pahees]

It was an almost every night thing during the summertime that we would go down there, hang out with friends, meet girls.

[Lester Holt]

A daily gathering of the ones who didn't quite fit anywhere else.

[Detective Ken Brown]

We're a bunch of wild kids, young adults just having fun, trying to live our lives.

[Lester Holt]

One of their number had just left a family nest, set out on her own. She was a special one because of a kind of no nonsense charisma she seemed to carry around with her. Her name was Angie.

[Jeremy Sargis]

She was a personality, that's for sure. You didn't want to cross Angie, man. She wrestled me down. I thought she was gonna put me in the river. She was happy.

[Lester Holt]

18 year old Angie Dodge, this is her brother Brent and her mother Carol.

[Carol Dodge]

She grew up in a household with three brothers, so she wrestled with him and her friends always knew that nobody got in her face because she would take care of you.

[Lester Holt]

She was good sized too. I mean, she wasn't some wee petite thing.

[Carol Dodge]

She was 5, 11. And she was strong.

[Lester Holt]

Strong and grown up enough in 1996 to move across town from the family home to her own apartment.

[Carol Dodge]

And we gave each other a hug and she walked towards her car and she threw me in Kias and says, I love you. And I did the same. And it was like she's in slow motion and she just drifted up the street. And it's the last time I saw her.

[Lester Holt]

It all seems surreal now, that thing that happened all these years later. It was the morning of June 13, 1996. Bill Squires was a rookie cop when he got the call to go to a house in a residential neighborhood here on I Street in Idaho Falls.

[Detective Bill Squires]

So I just barely got out of training and was, you know, working as a solo police officer myself. When that call came out, he made

[Lester Holt]

his way upstairs to a tiny second floor apartment. What did you see? Inside that apartment, what appeared to be,

[Detective Bill Squires]

unfortunately, a murdered young lady. That was the first homicide that I'd ever been exposed to.

[Lester Holt]

The victim was, of course, Angie Dodge. Keep a log, said a senior officer. And that's what Squires did. He kept track of everyone who went in and out. Standard procedure. Jeff Pratt was a veteran cop by then.

[Jeff Pratt]

It was the most horrific scene that I had ever worked up in, you know, in that 15 years of my career.

[Lester Holt]

At that point, what had been done to that young woman?

[Jeff Pratt]

Well, she was nearly decapitated.

[Lester Holt]

Oh, man. What else do you remember finding on around her?

[Jeff Pratt]

Well, there was a lot of blood spatter on the walls, the carpet, the bedding around her. A lot of other injuries on her body that had been inflicted by a sharp instrument.

[Lester Holt]

Near the bed was a stuffed teddy bear soaked in blood. On the dead girl's stomach was a bloody handprint. Could you get a. Like a print off that? A usable print?

[Jeff Pratt]

We tried, and in that time, we were not capable of doing that.

[Lester Holt]

But the killer had left critical, verifiable DNA evidence on the victim's body.

[Jeff Pratt]

A lot of biological materials that had been left behind, indicating there'd been a sexual assault.

[Lester Holt]

At the time, DNA was quite new.

[Jeff Pratt]

It was, and that's why we were focused so hard on collecting all of those biologicals.

[Lester Holt]

This moment, this place, would imprint itself on the detectives for life. Farangie's family called down to the police department. It was beyond imagining. So they brought in some pictures. Is this your sister? And pictures of the crime scene. How's that to look at? It's just horrifying.

[Carol Dodge]

My whole system shut down. My emotional, my. Everything just shut down.

[Lester Holt]

While the CSIs went about their work, homicide detectives looked for the murder weapon. Had to be a knife of some sort. But they couldn't find it. They determined there was no forced entry. The killer left the exterior door ajar. And when they looked at the body, it seemed to them almost posed. What did that say to you?

[Detective Ken Brown]

Yeah, I mean, it was a passionate crime. It was somebody who wanted to humiliate her.

[Lester Holt]

Former detectives, Ken Brown and Jared Furiman.

[Detective Ken Brown]

There was well over 14 different wounds. It was that horrific.

[Lester Holt]

The detectives had a hunch. From the start, there had been powerful emotions at play here. Angie had lived in the apartment only a matter of weeks. She'd been dating a young man for about the same length of time. You checked him out?

[Detective Ken Brown]

Yes.

[Lester Holt]

DNA didn't match.

[Detective Ken Brown]

DNA didn't match.

[Lester Holt]

They learned that some of Angie's friends had gone to see her before the murder. But they left shortly before 1am they all checked out.

[Detective Ken Brown]

DNA didn't match well.

[Lester Holt]

Detectives began casting a wider net, focusing on interviews. Crime scene investigator Jeff Pratt was increasingly sure it was DNA that would take the lead role in finding the killer.

[Jeff Pratt]

I really believe that that was going to be the solving factor from the very beginning.

[Lester Holt]

Was that a recommendation you were able to make to the lead investigators on the case?

[Jeff Pratt]

I made that suggestion. They were already kind of on task on some other things, so they didn't really follow that. And like you say, DNA was relatively new. It wasn't well received.

[Lester Holt]

What was that like for you?

[Jeff Pratt]

Well, it's. It's kind of like trying to sell something that's never been, you know, they. They've not seen it before. It was hard. I believed in it. I knew that that was going to be instrumental and big, you know, a big issue. But I couldn't convince everybody, you know,

[Lester Holt]

initially, which was, it would turn out a great pity. And none of them had a clue, of course. How could they? That the mystery begun here would be unlike any other in this town. That the crime committed against Angie Dodge would spread its damage like a contagion. And thus a decades long obsession took over Carroll's every waking minute. To find the man who killed Angie, but also to demand a particular sort of justice, which would turn out to be the most improbable demand of all.

[Carol Dodge]

I got called in by the prosecutor and, you know, carol, you have to stop. And I wouldn't stop.

[Lester Holt]

Carol Dodge lost her mind after her daughter Angie was raped and murdered that awful summer of 1996. That was Carol's own assessment. And why would anyone doubt it? Certainly not her son, Angie's brother, Brent. I remember going down to the mortuary and we had to choose a casket for her. And mom laid on the casket and said, you're not burying my baby in this. It was beyond what you can imagine and make up. It was tough, too, for Angie's friends, those who hung around down by the Snake river, like Jeremy Sargis, known as Jer.

[Jeremy Sargis]

She was definitely a part of the girls that came down to the river every day or, you know, multiple times a week at least.

[Lester Holt]

What was she like?

[Jeremy Sargis]

She was a personality, that's for sure. You didn't want to cross Angie. Yeah, she was a personality. She's a social butterfly.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Sargis]

She'd been bullied through school a little bit because of her size. Yeah, she's tall.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Jeremy Sargis]

And at that point, you know, I think she was getting comfortable with herself

[Lester Holt]

among those river kids. Angie Dodge was a force. Smart, fun, loving, respected by her friends. Angie graduated high school early at 17 with honors, and then turned 18 and started college and had a new job at a beauty salon.

[Destiny Osborne]

She was a good friend to people.

[Lester Holt]

Jessidy Osborne was a friend.

[Destiny Osborne]

She was a very nice person and very responsible. Everybody loved her.

[Lester Holt]

Russ Baldwin was also a River regular.

[Detective Ken Brown]

She had a big, bright, beautiful character.

[Lester Holt]

You just knew who she was, as was George Pahes.

[George Pahees]

It was wild that somebody we knew had been murdered.

[Lester Holt]

Police were a constant presence at the river in those first days and weeks after the murder.

[George Pahees]

Jer was terrified. I was terrified. Our everyday lives are suddenly scrutinized and they're asking, where were you six days ago? And I was like, I really don't remember.

[Lester Holt]

For months it seemed police got nowhere, which drove Carol Dodge even more mad.

[Carol Dodge]

Everybody went on with their lives except me. Yeah, I drove to the police department every day that they were open.

[Lester Holt]

You became a fixture in there.

[Carol Dodge]

I did. Nobody could stop me from talking to those detectives. I didn't bother to say could I talk to so and so. I just walked right back in their office. I got called in by the prosecutor and you know, carol, you have to stop. And I wouldn't stop.

[Lester Holt]

Finally, about six months after the murder,

[Detective Ken Brown]

we had information that one of the people that we had interviewed at this case and had given an alibi at the river was arrested in Ely, Nevada, for very brutal rape and cutting a young woman with a knife.

[Lester Holt]

Kind of the same pattern, huh? Yes. His name, Benjamin Hobbs, another of the river kids. As you see here, Hobbs even carried flowers behind Angie's casket at her funeral. So as one detective traveled to Nevada to confront Hobbs, others began calling in Hobbs friends, including the kids from the river.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Hey, Chris.

[Lester Holt]

Now for videotaped interviews. Why do you think you're down here? Honestly, I have no idea. One of whom was a 20 year old named Christopher Tapp. Tapp said he would like to help, but he said he didn't know anything about Angie's murder.

[Christopher Tapp]

If I did anything wrong about this, I would say, but I do not

[Lester Holt]

know that's honest truth. And having made his statement, Christopher Tapp went home in the clear. Apparently, a couple of days later, the detectives asked him to come downtown again. I told him, I says, what are you doing? I says, this is a murder case. This is Tapp's mother, Vera. She understood what he apparently did not, that her son was quite possibly talking himself into very big trouble. He said, mom, I don't have anything to hide and I want to tell him that I don't know anything. All I know is I did not kill Angie Dodge. 400 miles away in Nevada, Ben Hobbs said he didn't kill Angie either, and he didn't know who did. And then he asked a question. Was she raped the night she was killed?

[Brian Drips]

Tommy?

[Christopher Tapp]

Was she right? I don't know.

[Lester Holt]

That's why I'm asking you. Because if she was, my DNA will prove my innocence.

[Christopher Tapp]

Right there.

[Lester Holt]

They took blood samples from both Hobbs and Tapping, and then they pulled Tapp in again for more questions. Nine times, a total of 20 hours of questions. They polygraphed him repeatedly, and eventually it came out a confession of sorts. Tapp admitted he was in Angie's apartment with Ben Hobbs when Hobbs did it, killed Angie. And with that, police were convinced they had their killers. But sometime after all those interrogations, the DNA tests were done and results came back. And the semen found on Angie's body did not belong to Ben Hobbs or Chris Tapp. What went through your heads when the DNA results came back and it showed that the attacker was not Ben Hobbs?

[Detective Ken Brown]

If you're going to nail it down to one word, it's frustration.

[Lester Holt]

The detectives, Brown and Furman, were as sure as could be that Tapp knew more than he was saying, more than even his confession. So they kept him in jail and developed a theory to account for those negative DNA results.

[Christopher Tapp]

What about Jeremy?

[Lester Holt]

There had to be a third attacker with Hobbs and Tapp. And it was that third man who left the DNA. So they worked at Tapp some more. And what do you know? Tapp fingered another buddy who was also a friend of Angie's.

[Detective Ken Brown]

What do you think Dan got the knife?

[Christopher Tapp]

I got it from Jer.

[Lester Holt]

Jer? Well, you've met him. Jeremy Sargis.

[Jeremy Sargis]

I remember waking up on my birthday. The police were there to arrest me. Pulled me out of bed, cuffed me, dragged me downtown. Told me I was under arrest for accessory to the murder of Angie Dodge.

[Lester Holt]

What was that like?

[Jeremy Sargis]

That was one of the scariest things I've ever been through.

[Lester Holt]

You're handcuffed.

[Jeremy Sargis]

I'm handcuffed, yeah. They took me downtown and treated me like I was part of this nasty crime.

[Lester Holt]

Meanwhile, the police went hard at the other river kids. Maybe Jeremy was the third man, or maybe it was one of the others, like George Pahees.

[George Pahees]

They flat out told me I was lying to them and I was protecting my friends. I was terrified because none of us are violent. And I thought I was next. I thought that my girlfriend at the time was next, plain and simple. Every single day I was afraid that there was going to be a policeman show up to my my work and arrest me for this.

[Lester Holt]

Russ Baldwin was on the list too,

[Detective Ken Brown]

but I was in jail and that's how that went. And they were like, what? And I'm like, yeah, I was in jail when this happened.

[Lester Holt]

Strange but true. Records showed Baldwin had been picked up on a warrant for failure to appear in court for, in all seriousness, fishing without a license at 7:29pm the evening before Angie Dodge's murder. Records said he wasn't released from jail until five days after the murder. But the police weren't so sure.

[Detective Ken Brown]

I mean, they even went as far as to demand DNA, because I could have broken out, murdered Angie Dodge and then broke back in.

[Lester Holt]

But the DNA was not Baldwin's and he was cleared. So who was that third man? Police just couldn't pin it down. Or had they already? What did Officer Furman tell you that Chris Tapp had said about you then

[Jeremy Sargis]

Chris has placed you there.

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[Brian Drips]

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[Christopher Tapp]

I got it from Jared.

[Lester Holt]

What did Officer Furman tell you that Chris Tapp had said about you?

[Jeremy Sargis]

Chris has placed you there. He's just trying to tell me that he knew we did this.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Mr. Tapp stated that Jeremy Sargis was one of the individuals that actually held her arms down right during the homicide itself.

[Lester Holt]

What was it like to hear that it was heartbreaking because you thought Chris was your friend.

[Jeremy Sargis]

You don't lie about something like that. I mean, it was. It was hard to deal with.

[Lester Holt]

But it turned out that Jeremy had something going for him that Chris Tapp did not. An aggressive attorney. What advice did your attorney give you?

[Jeremy Sargis]

All you can say under the advice of your attorney, you invoke your fifth amendment right.

[Lester Holt]

And without more evidence that just Kris Tapped say so, prosecutors were forced to drop the charges against Jeremy. The fact of the matter was, if you didn't talk to them, they couldn't prove anything.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Right.

[Lester Holt]

How long were you actually in jail?

[Jeremy Sargis]

Just two days.

[Lester Holt]

Two days of bitterness, betrayed by a friend. How'd you feel about your old friend Chris Tapp?

[Jeremy Sargis]

Oh, I hated him. I hated him. What the hell are you thinking, man?

[Lester Holt]

Meantime, police and prosecutors kept talking to Chris Tapping because unlike Jeremy, he kept talking to them. And then it happened. Sometime during those many hours of interviews, Kristapp added to his confession something very disturbing. He didn't just watch Ben Hobbs do it. He played a role in Angie's rape. And remember that blood soaked teddy bear police found near the bed? Tapp told police that Ben Hobbs held that over Angie's face as he, Hobbs, slit her throat. More persons of interest were brought in. More DNA tests were done. That rookie cop who'd worked the crime scene kept up on the case by keeping his ears open around the station house.

[Detective Bill Squires]

I think every time they, they did a DNA sample that didn't match Keith, I think it was a punch in the gut every time.

[Lester Holt]

With Ben Hobbs already behind bars in Nevada on different rape charges and not enough evidence to charge him or some mysterious third man, prosecutors in Idaho decided it was time to move on what they had, which was Chris Tapp's confession. They called a press conference to announce they were charging Tapp with first degree murder, rape and use of a deadly weapon. Was there a collective sigh of relief when Kristapp was arrested?

[Detective Bill Squires]

I can only speak for myself, but I looked at it as, okay, well, we've got one of the suspects now in custody. Now we just need to find out the rest of the story so we can close the case completely.

[Lester Holt]

Oh, if only. When Kristapp went on trial in 1998, Carol Dodge was convinced he absolutely played a role in the rape and murder of her daughter.

[Carol Dodge]

When I was finally looking somebody in the eye, some looking at some what I thought was a devil who had taken my Daughter's life. The anger surged within me.

[Lester Holt]

She watched him in court, her eyes full of venom as she listened to the evidence against him. That is his own confession, his many confessions, which the defense tried to unsuccessfully to suppress. Taps own words convinced Carol he was guilty. But if that wasn't enough for the jury, then one more witness would do it. A woman you've already met. What did they tell you would happen if you refused?

[Destiny Osborne]

I was going to let a killer walk free. I got to do what's right.

[Lester Holt]

Destiny Osborne, Angie's friend and Chris's friend too, testified that she heard Kris Tapp confess to the crime at a party. Destiny said she wanted to do the right thing, especially since she knew both Angie and Angie's mother, Carol. She was happy you testified.

[Destiny Osborne]

Well, I mean, yeah, because she felt it gave her some answers.

[Lester Holt]

Yes, answers Angie's mother had been desperate for. For so many months. What did you want to have done to him?

[Carol Dodge]

They had discussed the death penalty, but I didn't believe in the death penalty. No human being on this human earth has the right to take another person's life.

[Lester Holt]

Even the person who murdered your daughter?

[Carol Dodge]

Absolutely not.

[Lester Holt]

But she was pleased when Chris Tapp was found guilty and sent off to state prison for 40 years. Except that couldn't be the end of it. Tapp's so called third accomplice, the owner of that DNA, was still out there. So DNA Carol felt sure, had to be the key. But the police couldn't seem to find the person. And so Carol decided she would. This was your search now. Find the person who was the owner of that DNA.

[Carol Dodge]

Exactly.

[Lester Holt]

Because they could tell the story.

[Carol Dodge]

They're the only one. That person is the one that's going to tell the story.

[Lester Holt]

It was a partial victory, some justice for Angie Dodge and her mother, Carol. Chris Tapp was in prison. His alleged accomplice, Ben Hobbs, was behind bars in Nevada for a different crime, though he was never charged with Angie's murder. But of course, it wasn't over. The Idaho Falls police made it known they were still searching for that third man, the one who left his DNA on Angie's body. And something like a public guessing game ensued. Was it this man? Or this one? Or was it this man, George Paches? Seemed like the whole town suspected him just because Chris was his friend.

[George Pahees]

I would have patrons of my family's restaurant walk in the door and walk straight up to me and ask me if I was a murderer. What do you say?

[Carol Dodge]

No.

[George Pahees]

No, I didn't murder that. That girl.

[Lester Holt]

But if Tapp's friends thought they were being tortured. Angie's mom, Carol, was living in her own personal hell.

[Carol Dodge]

That's when I went to the streets, and I literally put 60,000 miles on my truck searching for her killer. I distributed, like, 1200 flowers through the summer.

[Lester Holt]

Did you go to scary places, dangerous places?

[Carol Dodge]

Oh, yes. And I remember going to a place and the lady said, you know, you need to leave before somebody hurts you.

[Lester Holt]

And yet she kept doing it for years, taking incredible risks.

[Carol Dodge]

I had a gun put to my head one night.

[Lester Holt]

And during those nights, Carol often ended up parked outside the apartment where Angie was murdered.

[Carol Dodge]

I would just stare at that house and stare at the windows and try and figure out how scared she must have been.

[Lester Holt]

She also, endlessly. Is talk the right word? Those friends of Kristapp, like Jeremy Sargis.

[Jeremy Sargis]

There was times I would be working, look up, and there she is. She'd been watching me for a while.

[Lester Holt]

She was relentless.

[Jeremy Sargis]

And by that time, I think Furman had her pretty convinced that we had something to do with it.

[Lester Holt]

That's Detective Jared Furman, of course. Carol prodded him, prodded them, the whole department, insisting they keep searching for the killer. For more than a decade, she spent her days and nights reading police reports, practically memorizing them.

[Carol Dodge]

I don't sleep, and I get up and I just go, what part of this don't I understand?

[Lester Holt]

In one of those reports, Carol found a phrase, which the more she read, it sounded out of place in a DNA world. It was about pubic hairs, which, in addition to the semen, had been found on Angie's body.

[Carol Dodge]

It was written in this lab report that it's similar or same as the victim. And I said to myself, it's either Angie's or it's not Angie's. It can't be an either or.

[Lester Holt]

Then Carol remembered reading an article about an internationally known DNA expert who just so happened to live and work right in Idaho. This is the expert, Dr. Greg Hampikian, a fruit fly geneticist from Boise State University. But Dr. Hampikian's work is not all done in the classroom. In fact, his own path changed years ago when he was asked to test some DNA and got an innocent man freed from a Georgia prison. And just like that, the doctor found a new calling. Founder and director of Idaho's Innocence Project.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Secrets can be kept, I guess, but, you know, science reveals those secrets.

[Lester Holt]

So Carol called this Dr. Hampikia and discovered that his Innocence Project had just taken on the case of Christopher Tapp, at which she might have been forgiven for hanging up the phone, but she didn't. Quite the reverse.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Her words to me, I'll never forget were, I just want to know what happened to my daughter. And, you know, it still brings the hair up on the back of my neck.

[Lester Holt]

The curiosity of hers surprised you?

[Detective Ken Brown]

The knowledge surprised me. She's turned all of that love and devotion for her daughter into a very

[Lester Holt]

careful record of this case. Carol was well on her way to becoming an expert in her own right in forensic science. So she read that report to him, the one that said the pubic hairs found on Angie looked similar to or the same as as the victims.

[Carol Dodge]

He goes, well, they're either hers or

[Lester Holt]

they're not, just as you thought.

[Carol Dodge]

He said, well, where are the hairs? I said, I assume that there's still an evidence.

[Lester Holt]

So she called the Idaho Falls police department, which found the hairs in an envelope in the evidence room. And once DNA tests were run on those hairs and compared with the semen and all the other materials from the crime scene, Dr. Hampikian concluded this. There was no evidence whatsoever that anyone was inside Angie's apartment besides Angie and the mystery man who killed her.

[Detective Ken Brown]

It's all one person. Who did this.

[Lester Holt]

In terms of the DNA, Dr. Hampikian believed police were mistaken. There was one killer, not three like the police thought.

[Detective Ken Brown]

To imagine that there is this group of criminals who know about DNA and are so careful. What did they do? They planted somebody else's semen and pubic hair and then cleaned up all their own DNA.

[Lester Holt]

And that remarkable news could mean only one thing. According to the Idaho Innocence Project, Kristaps confession was false. He didn't do it. No matter what the police thought. He wasn't even there. The news came down on Carol Dodge's head like a hammer.

[Carol Dodge]

For 13 years, they had me convinced that Kristap was there. All they kept saying is, he confessed, Carol, he confessed. I was extremely angry. When they have DNA not once, but twice, that belongs to the same person and it's not Kris Tapp, something's wrong.

[Lester Holt]

Next step, watch those Kristapp confession tapes for herself.

[Carol Dodge]

There's times that I wanted to put my fist through the tv.

[Lester Holt]

The DNA convinced Carol Dodge. There could be no doubt that Chris Tapp was nowhere near her daughter's bedroom the night Angie was killed, and he needed to be out of prison. But the question remained, why would he confess? So what'd you do?

[Carol Dodge]

I met with the chief and I asked for copies of all of the videotapes.

[Lester Holt]

Those videotapes, including the ones in which Kristaphead Confessed to taking part in the murder. And now, a dozen years after the murder of her daughter, Carol watched every single minute of those hours and hours of videotapes, interviews with all those men who'd been interrogated. Like I told you, we're just going in circles. Well, I know. That's why I think this is starting with Ben Hobbs, man.

[Carol Dodge]

He was adamant that he said, I did not kill Angie Dodge.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Please don't be nervous.

[Lester Holt]

Next, she watched the police interview Jeremy Sargis, whom Chris Tapp had implicated.

[Carol Dodge]

I mean, literally, I said, what is going on here? Their strategy was that they were trying to get each one of these guys roll on the other one. And Ben and Jeremy were much smarter and just basically, you know, get played their game.

[Lester Holt]

What she saw amazed her, as did what she learned. That the man interrogating Chris Tapp, then Detective Jared Furlman, had been a school resource officer, well known to a young Kris Tapp.

[Detective Ken Brown]

I trust you, and hopefully you trust me. Okay?

[Carol Dodge]

Furman kept telling Chris, just trust me, Chris. You gotta trust me. You know, we go way back, Chris, and I think that he was taught to respect adults. Sure. And he was a follower.

[Lester Holt]

She watched as Chris told forum that he knew nothing about Angie's murder. And then she watched the detectives get tapped to imagine himself as an active participant.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Let's say, for example, hypothetically, Chris, you were there.

[Carol Dodge]

Okay, hypothetically, Chris, how do you think it happened? And I remember Chris saying, you mean like a TV show?

[Lester Holt]

Next, she saw police administering polygraph after polygraph, and almost always with the same result. They would tell him he was deceptive. But perhaps what troubled Carol most was seeing how confused Tapp was. Even 10 days after his first interviews, he still seemed not to know what house Angie lived in. Didn't she, like, live on the corner?

[Brian Drips]

I wasn't.

[Lester Holt]

It was a lower block for a guy who'd taken part in a murder. Tapp also seemed not to know much about the layout of Angie's apartment. So Detective Brown suggested this helpful memory aid. Why don't you try and dry? Sometimes it's easy to see if you can draw it out. They seemed to be coaching him. He still couldn't do it. And then they showed him where the murder happened. Bathrooms like here and bedrooms back here. There was more. Carol was stunned to see that police had shown tapping photos of the crime scene. I want you to tell us if

[Detective Ken Brown]

that's how you remember it, if that's

[Lester Holt]

how you don't remember it, maybe it's going to dodge some memories for you. And we're going to go from there and finally remember that the police theory of the crime after DNA didn't match Tapper Hobbs was that three people committed the murder together. The detective spent hours literally trying to drag the name of that third man out of tap. And when Carol saw the tape, well, you watch it.

[Christopher Tapp]

The name, nothing comes to my head.

[Brian Drips]

It wasn't Jerry. It wasn't us.

[Christopher Tapp]

Mickelson, Mackleton.

[Carol Dodge]

There's times that I wanted to put my fist through the tv.

[Lester Holt]

By the time you had gone through all of those tapes, what did you think about Kris Tapp?

[Carol Dodge]

How did they do this to me? How have they managed to convince and keep someone in prison for all these years? And it's a possibility. It's not there.

[Lester Holt]

So then Carol made the most remarkable decision. She would do everything in her power to free the man convicted of killing her own daughter. Impossible, of course. Tapp had lost all his appeals. It was over for him. And the detective who put him behind bars was now more. More powerful than ever was mayor of Idaho Falls and absolutely certain that Kristapp was as guilty as sin. What's it like to know that Carol is now actively campaigning for his release? Believes in innocent man.

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[Carol Dodge]

Let's check in on the serta counting sheep. Why aren't we counting anymore?

[Lester Holt]

Well, the all new Certa Perfect sleeper has the Q4 support system that helps relieve aches and back pain. And will never get counted again.

[Destiny Osborne]

Nope.

[Lester Holt]

Serta. We make the world's best mattress. For years after the murder, finding Angie's killer was Carol's reason for living through three heart attacks, the death of her estranged husband, off and on battles with the Idaho Falls police, and then that Fight became way more complicated because Detective Jared Furman was soon elected mayor of the city. And as Mayor Jared Furman still seemed to be caught up in the Angie Dodge case, as Jeremy Sargis and his mother discovered.

[Jeremy Sargis]

Mom worked at City hall, and he wasn't fond of her, and she wasn't fond of him.

[Lester Holt]

Well, he still believed you're guilty.

[Jeremy Sargis]

He did. And he would make sure and tell her that, too.

[Lester Holt]

Your son's gotten away with murder.

[Jeremy Sargis]

Yeah, we know he's done something to Tap.

[Lester Holt]

Mayor Furman and Detective Captain Ken Brown were so sure the doubters were wrong that back in 2012, they were more than happy to sit with us and answer whatever questions we had. And here the mayor told us he absolutely knew that Chris Tapp was guilty. Knew because it was he, Furman, who took Tapp to the crime scene, where he, not the doubters, saw how Tapp behaved in the bedroom where Angie Dodge was murdered.

[Detective Ken Brown]

He took us into the bedroom and relived that night, and you could see it on his face. He was reliving it.

[Lester Holt]

Of course, the critics wouldn't be able to see that because it was one of the only times during the investigation when. When the police did not videotape Kristapp.

[Detective Ken Brown]

But I have no doubts in my mind that Chris Tapp is part of that homicide itself.

[Christopher Tapp]

You can't.

[Lester Holt]

The worrying thing, though.

[Christopher Tapp]

Well, you can't.

[Lester Holt]

People do confess to things they didn't do.

[Detective Ken Brown]

We know that. But when people confess to crimes that they don't do, they don't know the minute details of that case. And Chris knew the minute details of that case.

[Lester Holt]

He, of course, claims that he knows them because he was fed them?

[Detective Ken Brown]

No, we would politely disagree with that.

[Lester Holt]

Is it possible at least, that there was some suggestion involved in these things before he actually said them that he heard in the questions he was being asked some hint of what the answer might be. Hypotheticals, as it were, for us to

[Detective Ken Brown]

sit and say there's absolutely no possibility anything could have happened. You know, we can't say things like that. We can say something that. We have reviewed those tapes over and over. We had a jury who reviewed those

[Lester Holt]

tapes for two guys who interviewed this person and found that in the first interview, the second interview, the third interview, the fourth interview, the fifth interview, he lied like a sidewalk. Then you finally get to the seventh interview, and that's the gospel truth. Well, not.

[Detective Ken Brown]

No, absolutely. Absolutely not. During each of the interviews, he was bringing out information that. That he absolutely knew was not fed to her. The color clothes that she was Wearing the position of the clothes.

[Lester Holt]

Interesting. Many times as the interviews progressed, Chris Tack claimed to know nothing about the clothes Angie Dodge was wearing. You know, she was clothed, unclosed. But some details in the interview could be interpreted to back up claims by the police. Once, for example, before Tabb was shown the crime scene photos, he did seem to, in a guessing kind of way, know what Angie was wearing. I mean, the only comfy half, of

[Brian Drips]

course, in my mind.

[Lester Holt]

And although he's wrong about the color of her clothes, after being asked many times if her clothes were half on or half off or pulled up or pushed down, he does correctly say this about her pants. Also said the detectives, Chris talked about Ben Hobbs hitting Angie behind the ear.

[Detective Ken Brown]

And we have the evidence to back it. We have bruising where. Where he says that Ben hit her.

[Lester Holt]

So detectives insisted they were right. Ben Hobbs was the ringleader, Kristapp was involved, and an unknown third man left the DNA in the form of semen. But as we talked to the mayor and the detective, we knew, and they knew that the victim's mother, Carol Dodge, believed Tapp was innocent. And they detectives, had made a terrible mistake. What's it like to know that Carol is now actively campaigning for his release, believes in an innocent man?

[Detective Ken Brown]

I think that's part of the process. Her heart has been broken, and she's

[Lester Holt]

convinced you got the wrong guy.

[Detective Ken Brown]

When I heard that, I was. I was. I was genuinely surprised. She's looking for closure.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Tomorrow or the next day, Chris could be guilty in her mind again.

[Lester Holt]

Hmm.

[Detective Bill Squires]

Really?

[Lester Holt]

Hello there. Anyway, perhaps this, we decided, would be a good time to talk to the man in the middle of it all, the serial confessor, Christopher Tapp. Have a seat.

[Brian Drips]

Thank you.

[Lester Holt]

There comes a time in every tale to meet the person at the center of the story. And here he is, Christopher Tapp. No longer the aimless pothead you've seen on those videotapes from 1997. At the time of this interview in 2012, he was a man of 35 who'd done more than a decade of hard time. As people look at you, what do you most want them to know about you?

[Christopher Tapp]

I've been so wronged all these years. How could individuals do something to another human being like they've done to me?

[Lester Holt]

You're an innocent man.

[Christopher Tapp]

Yes, sir, I am.

[Lester Holt]

Of course, everybody in prison is innocent, right?

[Christopher Tapp]

If you look at the whole entire case, the DNA, none of it points to me. None of them.

[Lester Holt]

On that point, there is little dispute, of course, but how did Chris Tapp get here? That's a familiar story to many families. The sweet little boy shown in all these pictures of a typical childhood started smoking marijuana at 13, then at 16, turned to mess. Chris dropped out of high school, hanging out down by the river in Idaho Falls with all those kids. His mother warned him about. That, he said, is how his name came up after the murder of Angie Dodge. Did you think anything of that?

[Christopher Tapp]

No, I had no rhyme, no reason

[Lester Holt]

to be scared until, you'll recall January of 1997, when Tapp was brought in for questioning after his friend Ben Hobbs was arrested for a Nevada sexual attack which police said was similar to the murder of Angie Dodge.

[Christopher Tapp]

I didn't know what I was being brought in for until I got connected

[Lester Holt]

with the Angie thing at all.

[Christopher Tapp]

No, I thought I was. Honestly, I was going in for. For drugs.

[Lester Holt]

And as you've seen over the course of several weeks, Christopher Tapp soon went from saying he knew nothing about Angie Dodge's murder to being the only man charged in the case. Well, of course, one of the difficulties was your story kept changing, right?

[Christopher Tapp]

Very much. It did.

[Lester Holt]

I mean, you went from saying, I. I don't. Don't know anything about this, to then saying, well, maybe Ben had something to do with it, to then, well, maybe there's a third guy involved. Wait a minute. I was there, and. And, oh, yeah, and I cut her. Where did that come from?

[Christopher Tapp]

Trying to give them what they wanted to hear just to appease out.

[Lester Holt]

Wait a minute. But why would you say you cut her?

[Christopher Tapp]

Because during that time, Mr. Furman, he said, hypothetically, even if you did cut her, it still ain't gonna matter. We'll be able to help you. You just need to help us.

[Lester Holt]

And indeed, here it is on tape with then detective turned mayor Jared Furman in charge of the interview.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Hypothetically, if Chris Tapp was holding on to Angie and she was being cat and in some notes, stuff was going

[Lester Holt]

on, or if Chris Tapp took part

[Detective Ken Brown]

in the knife in any way, shape or form and cutting her, okay, but I didn't.

[Lester Holt]

Would you listen? That's all right.

[Brian Drips]

Okay.

[Detective Ken Brown]

Hypothetically, I said, okay, if you took part in any of that, that's okay, because you're still here. You're still showing some good faith that

[Jeremy Sargis]

you want to cooperate.

[Lester Holt]

Do you believe that story?

[Christopher Tapp]

Hook, line, and sinker.

[Lester Holt]

Try to put yourself there right now and tell me what was going on inside your stomach and your brain.

[Christopher Tapp]

Scared. Trying to figure out what they want. Just for them to leave me alone.

[Lester Holt]

Why I didn't.

[Christopher Tapp]

I didn't kill Nobody. I was never there the night the murder happened. They just kept focusing on, well, if you was there, if you did do it, if you held the knife, it's okay. We will help you. So, like an idiot, I believe them,

[Lester Holt]

and then they charge you with murder.

[Carol Dodge]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

As we spoke here back in 2012, Kristapp was fighting to clear his name with the support of the Idaho Innocence Project. And the victim's mother, Carol Dodge, came around to your side. What was that like?

[Christopher Tapp]

It's an amazing feeling, and I appreciate her finally understanding that I'm innocent.

[Lester Holt]

Carol, of course, despite this turnabout and new mission in life, was still stuck in her grief. And by the time our first report on this case aired in 2012, more than 16 years after the murder of Angie Dodge, those river kids Kristaps friends had tried to move on as well, but couldn't. Russ Baldwin had bounced around the country from coast to coast with only occasional visits back to Idaho Falls.

[Detective Ken Brown]

It just feels like every time I go there, I need to watch my step. That's why I can't live there.

[Lester Holt]

Jeremy Sargis, wrongly accused by his friend Chris of taking part in the murder, had gone into a kind of exile 500 miles from Idaho Falls.

[Jeremy Sargis]

My friends, my support group had kind of disbanded, and I was kind of alone.

[Lester Holt]

But your family was there. That's your home. You grew up there. How's it like having to leave and try to find a new life somewhere else?

[Jeremy Sargis]

It was scary. My family has a business that's been there for over 100 years, and I always felt like I had a path, a career. Stuff like that kind of takes its toll on you a little bit, too.

[Lester Holt]

The rookie cop who'd manned the door at the murder scene, Bill Squires, was now a sergeant and still convinced that Kristaps confession and conviction were righteous. As they say, you would just never expect somebody to confess to something repeatedly that they didn't do.

[Detective Bill Squires]

Yeah, there's no doubt. We've got a suspect here and they're admitting to this. Why would we do anything differently?

[Lester Holt]

Carol Dodge, of course, could think of a lot of reasons to do something differently, was convinced those detectives had blown the case completely and had browbeaten an innocent man into a false confession. She needed help now. And so she looked and looked until she found him, the man who might make all the difference.

[Steve Drizen]

My phone rang, and I picked up the phone and I almost fell out of my.

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[Carol Dodge]

Let's check in on the SERTA Counting Sheep why aren't we counted anymore?

[Lester Holt]

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[Carol Dodge]

Nope.

[Lester Holt]

Serta we make the world's best Matt. Carol Dodge had to look a long way from Idaho Falls to find the one she needed. The one who could help her convince the police there was something very wrong with the Kris Tapp conviction. She looked all the way to Chicago, in fact, where she found him. He is Steve Drizen, a clinical professor of law at Northwestern University, legal director of the center on Wrongful Convictions, and one of the world's leading experts on the phenomenon of false confessions. When that Dateline program about the case aired, Drizen had been watching.

[Steve Drizen]

I had seen the Dateline show, so I was aware of who Carol Dodge was and my phone rang and I picked up the phone and the woman on the other end of the line was Carol Dodge. And I almost fell out of my chair.

[Lester Holt]

It's hard to get your head around that in a way, isn't it?

[Steve Drizen]

It is extremely unusual that a victim's family member would reach out to me.

[Lester Holt]

And when he watched those hours and hours of Kristaps interrogation tapes, well, this

[Steve Drizen]

was the worst example of police contamination, fact feeding, suggesting a story that I have ever seen in all my years at looking at these cases. Chris was trying in a sense, to come up with a story that would please the polygraph machine. If he could tell a story that would show that he was telling the truth according to the polygraph, he would get the benefit of an immunity deal.

[Lester Holt]

Why would he get that idea?

[Steve Drizen]

Because that's what the law enforcement officers told them. It was all a ruse.

[Lester Holt]

Well now that would shake things up Thought Kristaps public defender John Thomas wouldn't it. So with that, you know, world leading false confession expert, did the police attitude begin to change?

[Jeff Pratt]

Not really.

[Lester Holt]

It just fell on deaf ears. So Drizen got the National Innocence Project involved. And while progress was not immediate, things began to happen. For one thing, this woman was having a change of heart. Remember Destiny Osborne, one of the river kids? See that little knot of uncomfortable stuff was working away inside?

[Destiny Osborne]

Yeah, it's not a little knot, but

[Lester Holt]

yeah, it's a big knot, a knot in her stomach. Cause Destiny, who testified at Tappe's trial and told the jury that she had heard him confess to the crime, gathered up her courage and told Angie's mom Carol that police had pressured her to lie and that she hadn't heard Kris Tapp confess at all. What did that feel like, finally come clean?

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It was great.

[Destiny Osborne]

I mean she was in shock and I'm just like, I lied.

[Lester Holt]

It was all a lie.

[Destiny Osborne]

Like, yeah, so.

[Lester Holt]

Oh my. Destiny had been in trouble when police approached her after the murder. She was in juvenile custody at the time. Did they suggest what might happen to you if you didn't cooperate with them?

[Destiny Osborne]

Oh, yeah, they pretty much told me, you can either come meet with us today or you can just go right to the big jail.

[Lester Holt]

Then the police fed her a story she said and made her rehearse it.

[Destiny Osborne]

I was literally told things that weren't true and I, like, knew they weren't true. But for some reason, when someone's telling you like they're true and that you know you're lying, you kind of maybe start to think that you're the crazy one.

[Lester Holt]

I think the common expression they use on the street is my.

[Destiny Osborne]

Well, that's what I was going to

[Carol Dodge]

say, but I chose to keep it a little bit appropriate.

[Lester Holt]

The city of Idaho Falls lawyer said that in Destiny's diarrhea a year after the murder and during a police interview six years after that, she repeated the story she told in court. Destiny told us it all stemmed from what police told her to say. What stopped you from coming forward to say that was all bs.

[Destiny Osborne]

How do you undo that without being charged with perjury yourself? And I ended up in a situation for probably like good 15 years after that that prevented me from really doing much, even leaving my house, so.

[Lester Holt]

But the fabric of Tapp's conviction was fraying at the seams. And prosecutors decided to make him an offer. Plead guilty to murder and be re sentenced to time served. In other words, admit to something he said he didn't do and remain a felon for the rest of his life, but get out of prison. Do you remember what you thought about that?

[Detective Bill Squires]

I was kind of torn. He had spent 20 years in prison. That's a reasonable sentence to have to put in. I was torn between that and that. Why are we letting him out of prison when we know that he's guilty?

[Detective Ken Brown]

Thank you. Please be seated.

[Lester Holt]

It was March 2017 when Christopher Tapp, along with defense attorney John Thomas, appeared in court to take the deal. And the room went silent when Angie Dodge's mother, Carol, took the witness stand.

[Carol Dodge]

I can't imagine that, knowing what we know now, that anyone can convict someone, that there's no DNA.

[Lester Holt]

And before long, the legal details were done and the courtroom exploded in celebration as a deputy removed Chris Tapp's handcuffs for the last time. And he was engulfed in the arms of Carol Dodge. And along with Tapp's mother, Vera, was Jeremy Sargis, that once close friend of Chris's, about whom Tappan lied to police about being at the crime scene scene of the murder. The man who once said he hated Chris.

[Jeremy Sargis]

I cried.

[Lester Holt]

You felt pretty, pretty bad about that?

[Jeremy Sargis]

He's still the same Chris. He just been through some rough stuff.

[Brian Drips]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Did he apologize to you multiple times?

[Jeremy Sargis]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

You felt pretty, pretty bad about that?

[Jeremy Sargis]

He does.

[Lester Holt]

You should.

[Jeremy Sargis]

Shouldn't have done that.

[Lester Holt]

That's all right.

[Jeremy Sargis]

We're only halfway done with life, so we got the good half now.

[Detective Bill Squires]

Yes.

[Lester Holt]

Fate rarely what anyone expects. Chris Tab said he wanted to find the real killer now. And so did this man, the new chief of the Idaho Falls Police, Bryce Johnson.

[Bryce Johnson]

For me, and this is going to sound a little hard for me, I wanted to make Kristapp irrelevant to the investigation we were doing. The reality was we had a DNA sample that didn't belong to him. We wanted to find out who left that DNA sample. And so that's what the entire focus was, was finding that person.

[Lester Holt]

Since the original investigation, Detective Ken Brown had retired detective turned mayor Jared Furman had developed Alzheimer's and withdrawn from public life. So to lead the reinvigorated investigation, the new chief promoted Bill Squires to detective captain. It was Squires, remember, who worked the door at the original crime scene more than 20 years before.

[Detective Bill Squires]

My guidance for our staff was always, let's look at this completely differently again, with the eyes that we have now and the technology we have now.

[Lester Holt]

Squires didn't know it yet, but a woman known to be at the leading edge of that technology had been approached to work on the case.

[Carol Dodge]

And her first thought, my first assessment of this case was that it was not viable for investigative genetic genealogy.

[Lester Holt]

But, of course, CeCe Moore had yet to encounter Carol Dodge. Chris Tapp had a lot to get used to. The world was a very different place, as was Idaho Falls. What did it feel like to walk out of prison a free man in 2017?

[Christopher Tapp]

What it felt like to walk was overwhelming. Truly, truly overwhelming. I had a panic attack. You know, the first time I went shopping, I had to run out of the store because I couldn't handle it all. It was so much. Never had choices before.

[Lester Holt]

And so he made up for lost time. Got a factory job inspecting potato sacks, and he got married, which made him both a husband and stepfather to a couple of kids. Meanwhile, that very spring, the Idaho Falls police kept looking for the man who'd left DNA on the body of angie Dodge. In 1996, a DNA technology company called Parabon Labs had made this sketch of what that man might look like based on genetic material left at the scene. And then Parabon made an offer to the new man in charge of the murder investigation, Captain Bill Squires.

[Detective Bill Squires]

Parabon said, hey, you know, by the way, we've got some hours that we have available to commit to this. Would you be interested in doing that? And it was easy for me to say, yes, absolutely. Let's. Let's do this cooperatively and see where it goes.

[Lester Holt]

No matter the cost. Full steam ahead. And with that kind of priority, Parabon asked the head of its law enforcement unit to get the world's most celebrated genetic genealogist, CeCe Moore, a pioneer in the field who closed hundreds of cold cases like Angie's. But this case, there was a problem.

[Carol Dodge]

It was highly degraded DNA. So we were missing about 40% of the genetic markers that we need for investigative genetic genealogy.

[Lester Holt]

In fact, when your services were first requested. Requested? Didn't you turn it down?

[Carol Dodge]

So my first assessment of this case was that it was not viable for investigative genetic genealogy.

[Lester Holt]

But then, guess who? Carol Dodge, Angie's mom, intervened again, begging cece to get involved and sending her the crime scene photos, which changed everything.

[Carol Dodge]

It made me just ill and very, very, very angry, seeing what had been done to Angie.

[Lester Holt]

Not the sort of thing you can get out of your mind.

[Carol Dodge]

I opened them out of respect for Carol. Cause I thought if she had to look at what had been done to her daughter, I should be able to do that as well. It just really had a deep impact on me and made me even more determined to find a way to help Carol and help Idaho Falls Police Department.

[Lester Holt]

It's a big challenge.

[Carol Dodge]

It certainly was. And the first time that we were trying to use genetic genealogy on a sample that was that degraded.

[Lester Holt]

So how'd you go about that?

[Carol Dodge]

What I always do is just building

[Lester Holt]

trees, family trees, that is. Somebody who'd sent a sample to America's vast body of voluntarily shared DNA. Also shared a marker or two with the suspect. Some distant relation trick was to figure out who.

[Carol Dodge]

The idea is to build trees and find commonalities between the people who are sharing DNA with the unknown suspect. You find common ancestors. And once I am able to do that, I know there's promise. I know I'm going in the right direction. And so I just started building trees.

[Lester Holt]

And despite her initial pessimism, CeCe Moore began to come up with some answers, all connected to a family with the name of Usri. Tell me what it was like when, what you thought, at least when you first got a name from CeCe Moore.

[Detective Bill Squires]

Oh, my gosh, we were so excited, I can't even tell you. There was potentially six males that could match this based on their age. And one of them happened to live in Idaho and had lived in Idaho the whole time.

[Lester Holt]

Five of them were eventually ruled out, but that one person lived only a couple of hours from Idaho Falls in Twin Falls. But how to get a DNA sample without spooking him?

[Detective Bill Squires]

Could this person be your suspect? Yeah, he absolutely could be. Could he not be? Yeah, that's possible, too. So do you go down there and just knock on his door, or do you go down and try to collect a sample without him knowing, in a legal manner that doesn't compromise the investigation, in case that's not your person? And finally just came to the conclusion, look, we're going to try to do this clandestinely and try to get this sample without him knowing? Because I am not going to be the person that compromises this investigation once we've gotten to this point. So we're just not going to leave anything to chance.

[Lester Holt]

The usual methods, grabbing a cigarette butt or a glass from a restaurant, didn't work. So police got creative when they noticed the man was driving a car with expired license plates.

[Detective Bill Squires]

The officer pulled him over. And so why they had the subject stop, they asked him, hey, would you. This officer's in training. Would you mind giving us a breath sample? Just so he can get the practice of running this machine. You don't even have to get out of your car. And he's like, of course, yeah, no problem. And we collected two breath samples in those breath tubes on the Alka sensor device. And that gave us the DNA sample.

[Lester Holt]

But when the results came back from the lab, no match.

[Christopher Tapp]

Whoa.

[Detective Bill Squires]

That one huge disappointment. That one hit us hard. We really thought we were on the right track and really forced us all to go back to the drawing board.

[Lester Holt]

All including Cece Moore. He had to be in there somewhere.

[Carol Dodge]

He had to. Genetic genealogy had never led me wrong, and I was beating my head against the wall.

[Lester Holt]

But as Moore went back through the USRI family trees, all the names, the connections, something struck her.

[Carol Dodge]

There could always be an adoption son who's been born to a man he doesn't know about it. Could there be someone missing?

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[Lester Holt]

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[Carol Dodge]

When I went back to the drawing board, I again focused on that and said, is somebody missing here?

[Lester Holt]

Families can be complicated secrets, affairs or brief or abandoned marriages. Sometimes kids are the result.

[Carol Dodge]

So my colleague started calling around and she called this very small local library in a small town where this family had been based initially. And some sweet librarian agreed to Go

[Lester Holt]

through their archives, where he found an obituary for a woman who the obit revealed had a daughter. And the daughter had been married to a man named Asri, except that was no longer the daughter's last name.

[Carol Dodge]

So she had obviously remarried. And she had one son.

[Lester Holt]

The son who had Usri DNA, but took on the name of his stepfather, which explained why he had been so hard to find. So tell me what it was like to discover that.

[Carol Dodge]

It was an amazing moment because finally all the pieces started falling in place. We learned he actually lived in Idaho Falls in 1996.

[Lester Holt]

And when Moore dropped all this knowledge of the Idaho Falls police, it was

[Carol Dodge]

very hard not to break into tears

[Detective Bill Squires]

telling them, I don't know if we would ever found him. I really don't without them finding it.

[Lester Holt]

The specter who had eluded all efforts to identify him for decades now apparently maybe had a name. So what was the name?

[Bryce Johnson]

Drips. Brian Drips.

[Lester Holt]

Brian Drips. And lo and behold, it was a name that had come up right after the murder back in 1996, Detective Captain John Marley, his name was, had been listed in there as a neighbor that had lived across the street. Detective Lieutenant Sage Albright. So this neighbor, he said that he had been drinking heavily that night, couldn't remember where he had been or what he had been doing, and basically couldn't account for anything that had happened on the night that Angie was murdered. Was there a DNA sample for this fellow?

[George Pahees]

No.

[Lester Holt]

No DNA test for a neighbor with no alibi. Why the heck was that? He had left the area shortly after that. He had moved to another state and then, as far as we know, had never returned to the idol falls area. An excuse? Not really. Now, retired detective Jeff Pratt, the man who from the start, thought DNA would solve the case.

[Jeff Pratt]

It was really quite unnerving, you know, to think that we were that close and should have been doing that work.

[Lester Holt]

You know, it's investigating 101.

[Jeff Pratt]

It is.

[Lester Holt]

Now, clearly the priority was to get a sample of DNA from this Drips character. This man right here. At the time all this was going down, Brian Drips was 53 years old, an ex Marine and father of three. He now lived 300 miles from Idaho Falls in a town called Caldwell, just west of Boise. So those detectives decamped to Caldwell.

[Detective Bill Squires]

I could not have had a more motivated staff. We're gonna go solve a murder. We're gonna solve a 25 year old murder.

[Lester Holt]

And on May 10, 2019, just a month shy of 23 years since the murder of Angie Dodge. And after days and nights of surveillance, they watched Brian Drips flick a cigarette butt from his car.

[Detective Bill Squires]

Three of us were on that cigarette butt so fast that would make your head spin. And we didn't care whether a car. Car was going to take us out or not.

[Lester Holt]

Off it went to the Idaho State Crime Lab. And the very next day, the captain got a call from his lieutenant.

[Detective Bill Squires]

And, geez, I almost want to tear up. I'm. I'm trying to keep it calm and collected here. When he called me, he said, I just got a call from the lab. It's him.

[Lester Holt]

Those are the words, it's him.

[Detective Bill Squires]

And hung up the phone with him. And I remember just going, my, my gosh, this is

[Lester Holt]

huge.

[Detective Bill Squires]

What this means for the family and what this means for our city.

[Lester Holt]

The case you were on from the very beginning as a patrolman, you're getting the result finally, all those years later. Yeah.

[Detective Bill Squires]

Yeah.

[Lester Holt]

So what do you do about that? You got to go arrest the guy, right?

[Detective Bill Squires]

We do.

[Lester Holt]

And four days later, Brian Drips was led into an interview room.

[Brian Drips]

Well, what questions do you have for us to begin with? Well, where to start? Yeah, what's basically going on? That murder case is the only thing I can think of that happened when I was living there.

[Lester Holt]

Was it odd that the suspect himself brought up the crime?

[Brian Drips]

From what I remember, that night, I was drinking with my buddies and woke up the next day, and there was a cop car sitting up front, and I went to work, and that's all I really remember.

[Lester Holt]

But of course, it wasn't. He claimed he didn't know a thing except for what he'd seen watching Dateline.

[Brian Drips]

There was that kid that they did arrest and got charged with it, you know, and that the mom, I guess, said that he wasn't. He never did it.

[Lester Holt]

Four hours. Drips kept denying that he killed Angie Dodge. And then.

[Brian Drips]

So you would just be completely shocked if we had your DNA at the scene. Yep. We have your DNA at the scene, idiot. That's why we're here.

[Lester Holt]

At that moment, specifically, he wanted to take another break. We took him out of the interview room, brought him out into the balcony so that he could smoke, and that's when he told us that he didn't. He didn't mean to kill her. And then back inside, it all spilled out.

[Brian Drips]

I went to labor because I was almost stepped on coke and drunk. How did you get in and just walked through the door. Did she say anything to you? Did she. Was she screaming, calling for help? I don't think. I don't recall that she Did? No. But she fought. Yeah, she hit me, and I think that's when it ended up cutting her. What did you use? My knife. Was she moving at all when you left? I don't remember. I was on Dollar Verdict.

[Lester Holt]

And just like that, the murder of Angie Dodge was solved. But there was one more big task for Brian Drips to convince detectives that the other man who confessed to the crime and still had a conviction on his record, that is Chris Tapp, was truly innocent.

[Brian Drips]

If you were trying to convince us that nobody else was there, how would you do that?

[Lester Holt]

Before detectives were finished interrogating now confessed killer Brian Drips, they had to put one huge issue to rest. Did Drips commit the crime alone, or was someone else, say, Christopher Tapp, did

[Brian Drips]

someone go with you over there? No.

[Lester Holt]

Drips stood firm.

[Brian Drips]

If you're trying to take the blame and there was other people involved or.

[Lester Holt]

The answers seemed clear.

[Brian Drips]

So, o', Brien, at this point, it's our obligation to tell you that you are under arrest. Can I smoke that cigarette before you do that?

[Detective Bill Squires]

Frankly, I was a bit surprised, really. I believed that we were going to find out that he had some relationship with Kristapp.

[Lester Holt]

Did you realize that whole time that they still thought you were a guilty man?

[Christopher Tapp]

I got to watch the out of office police department detectives try to lead that man down a path towards me.

[Lester Holt]

And he.

[Christopher Tapp]

He did what was right. He finally did what was the complete, total truth and. And said he acted alone, and I had nothing to do with it.

[Lester Holt]

It must have been a nerve wracking experience to start watching this guy not knowing what he was going to say exactly.

[Christopher Tapp]

It was rough because again, at the end of the day, to save himself, he might have been like, well, hey, yeah, I know Christopher Tapp, but thankful he was finally, you know, man enough to admit what he did wrong. I'm appreciative for him finally being truthful.

[Lester Holt]

And just like that, the long black cloud of suspicion that had hung over Christopher Tapp and his River Kid friends for all those years vanished. And life was suddenly like sun after rain.

[Jeremy Sargis]

Chris called me when the arrest had been made and said, they got him, Jer. They freaking got him.

[Lester Holt]

And the guy was right across the street right there.

[Jeremy Sargis]

Maybe they didn't have enough Q tips to do DNA to the neighbors or something. I just. I don't know. But. Pretty bad police work.

[Lester Holt]

But that was for another day. For now.

[Bryce Johnson]

Today we're here to announce that we have arrested Brian Leigh Drips for the murder and rape of Angie Dodge, Idaho

[Lester Holt]

Falls Police Chief Bryce Johnson made the announcement along with the woman without whom the crime might never have been solved. Angie's mother, Carol Dodge.

[Carol Dodge]

I can't even breathe. How hard this journey has been

[Lester Holt]

and

[Carol Dodge]

the hundreds of people that's been affected by one person's choice to take my daughter's life.

[Lester Holt]

Including, of course, the man who'd spent more than two decades in prison after confessing falsely that he killed Angie. Chris Tapp.

[Bryce Johnson]

I got asked the question, do you owe Chris Tapp an apology? But we hadn't done that follow up investigation yet to verify what Drips had said. So I kind of said at the time that, hey, right now we're. We're here to talk about Drips and the day will come in which we need to talk about Chris tapp.

[Lester Holt]

It was two months later, in July 2019, when in the words of the police chief, Chris Tapp finally got his day. You nervous about this?

[Christopher Tapp]

Yes, very nervous.

[Lester Holt]

We rode with Chris to the courthouse for what was potentially the day of his exoneration. If the judge signed off, we can

[Christopher Tapp]

walk in the states in agreeance with, you know, my actual innocence, everything else but the judge, like, maybe I don't agree. And then where do we go from there?

[Lester Holt]

Well, we're about to find out.

[Christopher Tapp]

Yeah, we are.

[Lester Holt]

At his attorney's office, Chris Tapp was greeted by many of his oldest friends, those river kids wearing T shirts bearing a message they'd repeated ever since the start. Innocent, we told you so. They all marched with Chris to the courthouse a block away. Those present included Jeremy and Russ and George.

[George Pahees]

From my perspective, all of those white T shirts walking into that courthouse was middle fingers in the air. We told you so.

[Lester Holt]

Here's what happened when Chris walked into the courtroom. Carol Dodge was there, of course.

[Detective Ken Brown]

All rise.

[Lester Holt]

The prosecution went first.

[Jeremy Sargis]

In my view, there's clear and convincing evidence the defendant was convicted of a crime for which he did not commit. Based upon that, we're going to move to dismiss, to vacate the the jury verdict and a move to dismiss that case.

[Lester Holt]

Brent Dodge, Angie's brother, spoke for the family. This day, I think, is a. Is a day of healing for all of us. It was then time for Chris to speak.

[Christopher Tapp]

I'm thankful that I've been given this second chance of life. I'm thankful for Carol Dodge, Brendan Dodge, the Dodge family, for continuing to push forward to believing in me when they actually saw the truth. I am so grateful and humbled to be their friend.

[Lester Holt]

And then finally the judge.

[Detective Ken Brown]

So I am going to grant the state's motion to dismiss Both the rape conviction and the murder conviction on the basis of actual innocence of Mr. Tapp. As far as this court is concerned, you are innocent of the convictions that you've been living under for the past 20 plus years. So I don't think any of us can really put ourselves in your place. But I'm just glad that that can be corrected at this time. And we're off the record in this.

[Lester Holt]

It was finished. Chris Tapp had become, according to the Innocence Project, the first person in the world to be exonerated by genetic genealogy. If our story ended here, well, that ending might be a happy one. But it doesn't end here. And this ending, well, it's more grand Greek tragedy than anything else.

[Steve Drizen]

I don't know if there's a way to make sense of this.

[Lester Holt]

Nearly a quarter century to the day after he raped and murdered Angie Dodge, Brian Drips shuffled into a courtroom in Idaho Falls. He'd cut a deal and pleaded guilty. This was sentencing day. Why?

[Carol Dodge]

What a long 25 years of pure hell. Brian Drips, you put us through.

[Lester Holt]

Carol Dodge told us she was too torn up to sit down with us for a final interview about her struggle to get justice for her daughter, Angie. But in court, she did not hold back.

[Carol Dodge]

You, Brian Dripps, deserve eternal hell. You better look up at me instead of looking at that table. We have to have go through 25 years of pure hell trying to find justice working for you.

[Lester Holt]

Before sentence was pronounced, Drips spoke to the Dodge family. I'm sorry. I know you'll never forgive me.

[Carol Dodge]

But

[Lester Holt]

the judge sentenced Drips to life in prison. He must serve 20 years before he's eligible for parole in 2039, when he will be 73 years old. If nothing else, will be in recess.

[Jeff Pratt]

Thank you.

[Lester Holt]

The two original lead detectives charged with finding Angie Dodge's killer were not in court that day. Ken Brown, who's retired, did not respond to our questions about Kristapp's exoneration or about the failure to collect Drips DNA. And Jared Furman, the former mayor, died from Alzheimer's a year after Drips was sent to prison. He was 60 years old. As for the fully exonerated, actually innocent Chris Tapp, what word would he use to describe himself after all he's been through?

[Christopher Tapp]

I've been a little lucky. Lucky enough that you guys picked up the case. Lucky enough that, you know, the Dodge family started to believe in my innocence. So, again, I take it as luck.

[Lester Holt]

Yeah, it's really amazing, isn't it? I mean, you were a pariah you were that. That drug addled bad kid from the riverbank.

[Christopher Tapp]

Oh, yeah.

[Lester Holt]

Who with his bad friends did this terrible thing.

[Christopher Tapp]

It was nice for people to finally see the truth. If it wasn't for this show, through all this bad luck, I guess I'd probably still be sitting in an 8 by 10 cell right now.

[Lester Holt]

And once he was out, Chris Tapp became a bit of an activist.

[Christopher Tapp]

It is my honor to be here today.

[Lester Holt]

In 2021, he watched as Idaho's governor signed a law providing compensation for the wrongfully convicted. The law provided Chris more than a million dollars. He lobbied for similar laws in other states and he filed a lawsuit against the city of Idaho Falls and its police department. Chris settled it for an apology from city hall and $11.7 million.

[Christopher Tapp]

Still, it doesn't take away my father passing away while I was inside. It doesn't take away the chance that I had the ability to have my own children. They stole that away from me. So I just don't see how it's fair for them to walk away completely clean and I have to live this nightmare.

[Lester Holt]

I had talked to Chris often through the years, found him rather, well, sweet. The kid who loved his mother and his old friends and for whom there might finally be a storybook ending. But no, this wasn't that kind of story. That marriage after his release didn't work out. And then in August 2023, as he and his wife Stacy were in the middle of their divorce, she went for a ride in her new Corvette and was killed in a wreck.

[Christopher Tapp]

It hurts that I know she won't be here for her kids or her family. And honest truth, you know, I'll never get the closure I wanted with her either. It hurts.

[Lester Holt]

This conversation was one month later in Chris's new home. September 2023. All right, done. And then the interview was over. Okay. It's been nice talking to you all these years.

[Christopher Tapp]

And it's been amazing, Keith. I mean, like I said, here we are 11 years later. Who would have thunk it?

[Lester Holt]

An interview that ended with Tapp making a vow. It's nice to see it to its conclusion.

[Christopher Tapp]

Me too, because this is my last one. I will never not. This is my last interview. I will never talk about the Angie Dodge case again.

[Lester Holt]

And so we packed up our cameras, not thinking much of it, assuming that's just something Chris said, something we all say from time to time. I'm done with that. Never again. Only this time. Well, six weeks later, Chris was visiting Las Vegas overnight for a car show.

[Christopher Tapp]

So what I had heard happen is

[Detective Ken Brown]

that he was in his hotel room

[Christopher Tapp]

in Las Vegas and he was walking through the suite and tripped and fell and hit his head on the coffee table.

[Lester Holt]

He was rushed to the hospital with serious head injuries. And a week later, Nate Eaton, news director of the East Idaho News, heard his phone.

[Steve Drizen]

It was a Sunday night when I got a text message saying, have you heard that Kristapp died? And I said to my wife, Chris Tapp died. And she's like, what?

[Lester Holt]

It was true. Chris Tapp was 47 years old. Days later, Carol and Destiny sat side by side as Tapp's shocked family and friends gathered in Idaho Falls for his funeral.

[George Pahees]

Chris Life being cut short is the exact opposite of what anyone expected from Chris. Chris had ideas of what he was going to do for the rest of forever.

[Detective Ken Brown]

I love him very much and I

[Lester Holt]

miss him very much. All of his old closest friends are

[Detective Ken Brown]

hurting really bad right now.

[Lester Holt]

And then January 2024, like a bolt from the blue. This from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Through the course of the suspicious death investigation, LVMPD homicide detectives have learned Tapp was in an altercation inside a room at a resort before being located and transported to the hospital. The Clark county coroner's office has since ruled Tapp's death a homicide as a result of blunt force trauma to the head. In March of 2024, Daniel Roedimer, a former professional wrestler, was charged with murdering Chris Tapp during a party at the resort. Rodheimer pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

[Steve Drizen]

I don't know if there's a way to make sense of this. It's just so incomprehensible.

[Lester Holt]

One day years ago, we encountered a grieving mother who was trying to do something we had never heard of before. Free the man convicted of killing her daughter. And she this force of nature, against all odds that seemed insurmountable, succeeded. But life and history are stubbornly unmoldable and weren't finished yet with the story of the River Kid, Christopher Tapp. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking. With Capital One, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. What's in your wallet terms apply. See capitalone.com bank capital1NA member FDIC.