The Interrogation Tapes - Episode 6: Stranger Than Fiction
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Welcome to the final episode of The Interrogation Tapes, a special limited-run series produced by ABC News Studios in partnership with 2020. I'm Deborah Roberts, co-anchor of 2020. This is episode six, Stranger Than Fiction, The Murder of Angie Dodge. We're going to hear the story of a false confession and a determined quest for the truth. ♪

The difference between a real interrogation and a TV interrogation are big. I think people don't realize the differences. They watch TV and they see movies where detectives come in and slam their hand down on the table and then shine a light in the suspect's face. In reality, that's far from the truth. It involves a lot of planning and preparation. You don't wing it like you do on TV. We have a beautiful young woman killed at the very beginning of her life.

18-year-old Angie Dodge was raped and murdered. So many suspects. There were multiple interrogations. Did you kill Angie? Is there anything else that would tie you to Angie? The takeaway is that the interrogation methods that we've relied on for decades, really, they're not that good. I wasn't even down there. I wasn't nowhere around.

If you found a writer that would write all the events that happened, people would be like, "Ah, this is too over the top." It did happen, though. This is very much a life-altering moment. You are feeling that pressure. The only way that we can help you is if you are cooperating with us.

If investigators are going to learn the truth, they're going to have to do it inside the interrogation room. I'm Jamie Floyd. I was a criminal defense attorney for many years. Now I am a crime reporter and I've been doing that for 25 years. My name is Jim Trenum. I'm retired from the Washington Metropolitan Police Department where I spent 27 years. I currently work as a consultant in the area of police practices.

My name is Mark Fallon. I'm the director of Club Fed, an international security consulting organization that specializes in the science on interrogation. The problem with this case is that there's not just the interrogation itself. It's all the steps that occurred along the way and all the people that should have acted as safeguards, but they didn't. I can tell you I know what you're doing. It would be very hard

to be able to sit and watch something like that. Idaho Falls is a small city in Idaho with a river running through it, the Snake River, and some beautiful falls in the middle of town. It's a great tight-knit community. A lot of these people around here will give you the shirt off their back. It's not the type of place where you would expect a brutal murder to happen. That morning, the police were called to an apartment

They found the body of a young woman, 18-year-old Angie Dodge. I parked and got my camera out. This is the camera I used at the crime scene. There was a few other uniformed officers there. They had cautioned me that it was a pretty graphic and violent scene. I took photographs to show my approach. I proceed into the largest bedroom. That's where I was able to see the victim. She's laying on the floor on her back next to a mattress.

There are some blood stains and smears on the south wall. She has some extensive lacerations and there is a horrific wound to the throat. She was almost decapitated and then the body was left exposed. They didn't try to conceal her or cover her up in any way. There's semen that we can see clearly all over the victim. The violence used was just over the top.

One of the just most horrendous crimes you could imagine. When you have a child that's murdered, life just gets shattered. And there's no way to put the pieces back together. Angie had gotten out of high school just recently. Everyone who knew her said that she was a very bright, very cheerful person, that she had a way of kind of lighting up a room. That was our friend. Somebody took her away from us.

Angie was a really unique person. She was my, not only my baby, but she was my only daughter. And she was extremely intelligent. The police gathered DNA at the crime scene that included semen that was left on her body. We found one hair that was obviously different, one what we believed was a pubic hair. The killer absolutely left his killing card there.

We're interviewing all family members, associates, friends of hers, and just trying to determine what went on. The police interviewed hundreds of people, and they took DNA samples from over 100 of them and tested them against the DNA left at the crime scene. And none of it came back as a match. We do not have a suspect at this time, and there is reason for people to be cautious right now.

We, as people in this community, are not aware of what is really going on out there. Whoever it is, it's still out there. For months, there was no progress. And then a friend of hers named Benjamin Hobbs was arrested in Nevada for raping a woman at knife point.

There's a lot of similarities between those two cases. And so that's very natural for the department to want to look at that person. Detectives drove from Idaho Falls down to the jail in Nevada to question Ben Hobbs. Was Angie raped? Was she raped and then she was killed? Tell me, was she raped? I don't know. That's why I'm asking you. Because if she was, my DNA will prove my innocence right there. The police take a DNA sample from Ben Hobbs and they start to interview his known associates.

One of those associates is a young Idaho Falls man named Christopher Tapp. Why do you think you're down here? Honestly, I have no idea. All I think I know is about Ben. Chris had been a high school dropout. He's kind of couch surfing from place to place. Chris and Angie knew each other very peripherally. They had met and spoken a few times. Do you got an alibi, my friend? To put myself where I was at at that time. Yeah.

Chris Tapp couldn't give police a solid alibi, and so they become suspicious and they decide to give him a polygraph test. No. I'm scared.

When Chris tells the polygraph what that told them is that he's hiding information from them. And so now it's time to really lower the hammer on him. You know an accessory that's being charged just like the person did? If they get life or person, he asked Gene, I didn't do it. The detectives, they're now convinced that he's involved. And they need to give him a reason to kind of cop to it. You're scared.

They suggest maybe it was so horrific that you keep pushing it down and pushing it down. But the machine is reacting to what your body and mind remembers. They're trying to convince him that if he just admitted to this, he would feel better about it. I did it.

And then over the course of hours, his story changed.

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His initial story was that he didn't know anything, and then he said, "Okay, Ben Hobbs told me he did it." Usually people are changing their stories.

It's just an indicator that there's something more to be learned there. They were using what we call confession-driven tactics. The goal was to obtain a confession. What you do is you determine what you think might have happened. You develop a theme. And then you continuously just reinforce your theme.

And when the person tries to deny it... If I would have been there, I would have already left town. ...you continue to just reject the denials. The impression I got from him is you're like downstairs waiting for him because he said he wanted to go out and talk to him for a few minutes. And so the only release of the pressure is a concession. Maybe I was there, I just don't know. For the detectives, Chris's story, as it changes, is just a sign that they're finally making progress.

But just when the detectives thought they broke in this case, they hit a major snag. The DNA test came back and neither Hobbs nor Tapp were a match. Which means the police have no physical evidence connecting either suspect to the rape and murder of Angie Dodge. The theory that the detectives came up with was that there were multiple participants. They're looking for a third person.

There's definitely another person involved that you have not told us about. The evidence has borne that out. I think they believed that they were getting good information out of Chris. There were multiple people at the scene. They believed Chris was covering for someone. Eventually, if they kept going down this road, they were going to pressure Chris enough into giving up the real person who left the semen at the scene. The evidence is showing Chris Taup was there.

Chris Tapp would know who that other person is. Finally, at the very end, it just kind of snowballs to the confession. He said that he and Ben Hobbs and this person went over there. So let's walk through it. And we'll throw it into the ground.

- Okay, and then what? - Chris Tapp says, "I was holding her down while Ben Hobbs and some other guy were raping and murdering this woman." - At that point, Ben cuts her where? In the chest area. After he did that, I had to go there with that, so we cut. That used to go. That's when he cut her throat.

Based on Chris' confession, he's charged with first-degree murder and rape.

Ben Hobbs, the person that Chris Tapp alleged to police committed the actual crime, is never charged. Hobbs denied all of the allegations and said he wasn't even at Angie's apartment that night. I had nothing to do with the murder of Angie Dodge. I wouldn't kill my friends, I'm sorry. On top of that, Hobbs' DNA didn't match the crime scene, and no evidence ever surfaced tying him to the rape and murder.

The trial took place at the Bonneville County Courthouse. By that time, Chris had recanted his confession. He said that police had fed him all the details and he had repeated them. I think that the questioning was entirely suggestive. And I think that Christopher just was led down a path.

But authorities maintained that the interrogation was proper and that Tapp had in fact volunteered information about the crime that they claimed only a perpetrator could know. It was a winning argument. The jury saw him confessing to doing it, to participating in the crime, and ultimately found him guilty. Juries love confessions. It's counterintuitive to think that someone would confess to a crime they didn't commit.

The prosecutor actually asked for the death penalty. The judge took into account Chris Tapp's young age and ended up sentencing him to 30 years to life on the murder charge and 20 years on the rape charge.

The family was very upset that he didn't get either the death penalty or life without parole. It was clear from the trial that they hadn't caught everybody. The person who was convicted is not the DNA contributor at the crime scene.

So there had to at least be somebody else involved. We had to find them. But nothing came up. No evidence came forward. This case went very cold. This was frustrating for police. This was frustrating for the city of Idaho Falls. And most of all, it was frustrating for the mother of Angie Dodd. Carol started hitting the streets like a cop, interviewing people, trying to find out who killed her daughter.

I kept reading the different reports that I had accumulated. She would come to the police department and want to know updates. IFPD got so tired of me. And she did that for 20 years, basically. In 2008, Carol Dodge makes an extraordinary decision to watch all of Chris Tapp's interrogation tapes. She's trying to see if she can find more information about who killed her daughter.

She starts to think, this is wrong, because he really doesn't seem like he knows a lot. I mean, I've told you everything I know. When my daughter was killed. I can see now Chris Tapp's not there.

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If it wasn't just, you know, stabbed once or sliced once, there was a lot of aggression. I look at Angie's case, and there's so many pieces. And I've been trying to put this puzzle together, and the center's missing. Where did he say where he cut it? He said everywhere.

So as Carol's watching these, it dawns on her, gee, Chris Tapp is saying things after they're telling him to say them. They ask him questions about, okay, well, where did she live? And they say, no, no, Chris, Chris, it's not that house. So they ask him, which room was she killed in? And they go, no, Chris, it's over here.

She was killed in the bedroom. However, in Chris's trial, the detectives testified that they had evidence that proved Chris was lying to them and that Chris always knew where Angie lived and where she was killed. They couldn't cut her throat at all. There's no blood. There's nothing. This is memory molding. What they're doing is they are telling him now that it was not in the living room.

that it happened in the bedroom. What we know is that confession-driven tactics get confessions. They're very effective at getting a confession from a guilty person. They're also very effective at getting a confession from an innocent person. One of the techniques was trying to convince Chris that his memory was wrong, that he actually did commit this crime, but his mind wouldn't let him admit to it. Well...

And then they tried to reinforce that with the polygraph. Chris Tapp is a 19-year-old kid. He doesn't understand polygraph examinations, how they're used.

He came to look at the polygraph machine like an oracle, that it could reveal things that were unknowable otherwise. I don't know, because right now everything I've been saying, what I think is right in my head, it's been wrong. What that did with Chris was it made him believe that, yeah, this is possible. I could have done this. You know what accessory that is? That's being charged just like it was... They get gas changed on that.

They're applying what they call maximization. So what they're saying is that there are real consequences to what we're accusing you of, which is going to be followed by typically some sort of inferred or real promise of leniency. What happens if I talk with the prosecutor to see a possible complete immunity? They're telling him, you're going to be able to walk away from all of this, but you just have to be truthful.

The truth, though, is what they believe to be the truth. Is there a possibility that you were there downstairs? Yeah, I mean, I just don't know. I mean, if you guys want to put me down the stairs, hey, that's cool. If you guys want to put me down the stairs, hey, that's cool.

What Chris did was continually comply to the stories that they told. He would shape them a little bit, try to please them, but the whole goal was them getting Chris to say what they wanted to hear. Where did you cut him? Up on the right breast, inwards. At Chris's trial and in the years following, the prosecution and the detectives insisted their methods were sound.

However, an independent review commissioned by the Bonneville County Prosecuting Attorney concluded that Tapp was present when Angie was attacked and stabbed, but cast doubt on his confession regarding his personal involvement in her death. When I first started in law enforcement, I was taught and I believed that an innocent person wouldn't confess to a crime they didn't commit.

And I was wrong. What we know today because of DNA is that about one-third of the people who were wrongfully incarcerated falsely confessed to crimes they didn't commit. What I see in this case is confirmation bias, where you are only looking for evidence that supports your theory. And anything else that comes up, you just ignore it or you interpret it in a way that supports your theory.

And so when you have something like the DNA doesn't match, confirmation bias automatically leads you to believe that it doesn't match because Chris is lying to us about the third person. These detectives did the job that they thought they needed to do. A heinous crime was committed, and they were trying to protect society by taking the person who did it off the street. This is a failure of the system. Supervisors have bought into the detective stories.

Prosecutors have bought into the story. Even though the evidence is contrary to Chris's guilt, everyone latched on to the guilt because that's what they wanted. 13 years, I believed that Chris Tapp was part of my daughter's killing. But then I said, this is not about Chris Tapp. Carol Dodge went from somebody who adamantly wanted the death penalty to the fiercest advocate for Chris Tapp to be released from prison.

Over the next several years, Carroll worked closely with Tapp's public defender to overturn his conviction. Ultimately, Chris Tapp is offered a deal where the rape charge is completely vacated, so he's no longer a sex offender, but the murder charge would stay in place and would be released with a credit for time served, basically. Freedom! Woo!

20 years, two months, and four days. To have Carol and the Dodge family support me and not turn their back on me has been an amazing feeling. I love them for doing what they've done. This was the biggest case that we hadn't solved in the last decade, and there's a lot of unanswered questions. Was Chris involved? Although he'd been let out of prison, he was still convicted for the murder of Angie Dodge.

Was the DNA contributor the only person that's a part of this? Why was she murdered? For the people left behind, it's really important to understand why their loved one was taken from them. And the only way to know would be to find the real killer. To be a detective and to have a case that's open, it's frustrating. We wanted to know who it was. We wanted to know why they did it.

So as the sergeant of the Investigations Bureau, I assigned that case to Detective Sage Albright. I was a new detective and I'd never worked a homicide. Knowing the history of the case, it was extremely overwhelming. But at the same time, there's also this huge opportunity to do something really amazing, really good. We knew that the key to this case was going to be DNA.

The technology with DNA had changed so much from the time that the Dodge case originally happened that we felt that we could probably get some momentum going.

The Idaho Falls Police Department sent the crime scene sample to a genetic lab called Parabon. Using genetic genealogy, they were able to identify a potential suspect who was about the right age and living in Idaho Falls at the time of the murder. And his name was Brian Dripps. To have a lead like that after 23, 24 years, it's a big deal. We started digging into Brian Dripps.

He lived right across the street from Angie at the time of the crime. He worked a manual blue collar job. Shortly after the crime, he had left the area and then joined the Marine Corps. He didn't have a criminal record. He had a couple of kids and raised his kids and as far as we can tell, lived a life after he did this. We find out that he had a residence in Caldwell, Idaho, which is about four hours-ish from where we're at.

All right, so this is where his house is. So the main access road that he's probably going to use when he leaves is this one. Okay, it is our target. He is southbound. To confirm that Brian L. Drip's DNA matches the DNA left at the crime scene, detectives have to get a sample. So they surreptitiously tail Drips. And he was smoking a cigarette that he had hanging out the window.

Those cigarette butts, they're like DNA traps. They'd be perfect for collecting a sample. Still smoking. And they manage to get a cigarette butt that he's discarded. Bingo, looks like you got it. When they test the DNA, they get a perfect match. This guy had to be there. He had to have played some role in the last moments of Angie's life. We probably had enough evidence at that time. I'm convinced he would have been convicted.

But we still need the interrogation because there's a lot of unanswered questions. And this was the time to get the answers. Probably the only time. As we were preparing, John and I both knew that we weren't going to be doing family activities. We weren't going to be doing personal stuff.

We had a larger obligation to the community of Idle Falls, to the Dodge family, to our police department. So there was a lot of late nights, a lot of poring over documents, over old videos, over old files. So that when we eventually do contact Brian, we're prepared to have conversations and not let him lead us on any wild goose chases. Here he comes.

On May 15th, 2019, Detectives Albright and Marley picked up Brian Dripps. - That's our guy. - Camo fatigues, black shirt, big long beard. - And took him to the police station in Caldwell, Idaho. - I'm sure you got a lot of questions for us. I think I obviously wanted to talk to you, but I wanted to tell you I appreciate you coming in here.

But just as detectives are getting going, they discover a big problem that could derail the entire interrogation. You all right? You think back? Oh, yeah. He seemed to be in extreme discomfort. That's just using itself together. There's a lot of concern that his discomfort would stop the interview. It just sucks to be in my own body. He could eventually say, I'm just done talking with you guys. I'm uncomfortable. I'm in pain.

If he cut the interview short, we weren't going to get the information. Whenever news breaks. We are here in Israel, a nation at war. In Rolling Fork. This tornado tore through this town. From Lewiston, Maine. The scene of a horrific mass shooting. From the scene of that deadly missile strike. ABC News Live everywhere. In Iceland. Let's go. On the 2024 campaign.

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Well, only those drinks help you a little bit. You know, I got you a Pepsi, so...

They treated him with, even though they know he's their guy, decency. The most beneficial resource that an interrogator can have is empathy. When you give a person autonomy, they are more likely to cooperate with you. This was something that took place years and years ago, and it was when you were living in Idaho Falls. The only thing I can think of is the gun, that part of the case.

When Brian said that he had an independent memory of a homicide that happened across the street from where he lived, it shows us that this is on his mind. Tell us what you remember about that. Well, I don't remember much because I was drinking with my buddies and a scout woke up the next day and there was a cop car sitting out front that went to work. That's all I remember.

A major difference with the two cases is that with Chris, they were laser focused on getting him to confess. In Drip's case, what they were laser focused in on getting as much information as possible. And so the detectives employed a technique called the strategic use of evidence, where they just didn't come out and say, hey, we know you did it because your DNA is there.

They first explored every conceivable way that his DNA could have been there other than by him having committed the murder. So did you know anybody involved in that? I mean, if you guys were practically cross-the-street neighbors, and yet did you know? So you guys weren't neighbors that chatted or smoked together? Did she have a personal relationship with Brian Dribbs? Did she have a romantic relationship with Brian Dribbs?

But there was always the fear that we weren't going to get anywhere, that he was going to deny this whole thing. It would be devastating to the family, I think, to not have some of those questions answered. They would know that Dripps was it, but they wouldn't know how he did it or why he did it. I don't recall ever going up there or curfewing him or that, nothing like that.

Short breaks are very beneficial. It enables the investigators to go back and see if they had any gaps in what they asked for. And also it's a good chance for the suspect to reflect on what happened.

He has to start coming to terms with what is his plan? What is he going to do? Am I going to continue to fight this? And inevitably it creates a lot of emotions. I think he threw up just out of stress or fear or some sort of just avalanche of emotion. But that was the moment where I felt like he knows things are really, really bad.

The tough question here is what's the chances, what's the percentage that your DNA will match that on scene? So as we went through each of those possible circumstances where Brian's DNA could innocently be on the scene, as he closed those options down for himself, we knew that when we came in with this big piece of information, he was going to have some really big questions to answer. So you would just be completely shocked if we had your DNA at the scene?

I knew it was the time to drop the hammer on Drip. We have your DNA at the scene. You're the only person who knows what happened. This is your time to tell us, to give your story. When he finally broke, it was surreal. We had been chasing this from all the research, all the prep that we had done coming into the interview. I almost didn't feel like it was actually happening. What do you mean by Drip?

There's so many emotions that are going on. I felt terrible for Angie. I felt terrible for her family. But you're excited that you're getting the truth. When he said he accidentally did it, I don't believe that for a second. He had watched her enough to know that she was alone, that he could get there undetected, that there wouldn't be anybody else in the home. What did you use?

After we got the confession from Dripps, we still wanted to determine, did he do this act alone or was there help? We want to make sure also that you're not covering for somebody else. If there was

People helping you because that's... we had a conviction in that song. Did someone go with you over there? No. Well, Brian, you are under arrest and you're gonna be placed in handcuffs and taken to local jail. Today we're here to announce that we have arrested Brian Lay Dripps for the murder and rape of Angie Dodge. What an overwhelming day. I can't even express

How hard this journey has been. I'm just really grateful for all of your support. Thanks. Months later, Dripps had his day in court. At one, as set out in the information, is a charge of murder in the first degree. How do you plead? Guilty. Brian Dripps was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He's not young at this point, and he's in really bad health. So he got a life sentence out of it.

Even though Drip said he killed Angie Dodge alone, that's not the end of the story. Police still had one big question. Was Tapp there or was Tapp not there? Chris had said that he had participated in holding Angie down while somebody else committed the rape and murder. And so we really had to answer those questions. We looked through everything, computers, phones, emails, and there just wasn't anything that connected them.

Authorities concluded that Dripps was the only one involved in Angie Dodge's rape and murder. As per Jimenez's evidence, the defendant is convicted of a crime for which you have not yet. So I am going to grant the state's motion to dismiss both the claim conviction and the murder conviction on the basis of actual innocence and retrial. And I'm thankful that my mother will know that this last name is clean.

That's the most important thing to me in this world. In October 2020, Chris Tapp sued the city of Idaho Falls and several former members of the police department for wrongful conviction. While the former officers denied any wrongdoing, the city ultimately settled with Tapp for $11.7 million. As part of the deal, the city also issued a formal apology to Tapp and his family.

"Look, we put the wrong guy in prison. Did people make mistakes?" Yes, people made mistakes, but they were honest mistakes. They were doing the best that they knew how to do at the time. They had what they thought was a confession, and we know it's different now. We paid a pretty big price for it. None of these detectives wanted to go out and get a false confession. The general consensus was nobody's going to confess to a crime that they didn't commit unless they're mentally ill or tortured.

So they pretty much had carte blanche to do a lot of stuff such as lying to you and things along that line. They didn't know that there was a bad side to it. There's a lot of lessons learned in a case like this. Try not to get too focused on the person, to not lock in on one thing and be focused on the evidence.

I'll never forget those autopsy photos. I'll never forget the crime scene photos. They will be scarred in my head forever, but I'll always have the memories of how we did something really, really good, really positive. The Interrogation Tapes was produced by ABC News Studios in partnership with 2020. The series is now streaming on Hulu.

Next week, we'll be back with season three of wild crime called Blood Mountain. A Georgia missing hiker case leads to a serial killer who's stalking people in national forests. I'm Debra Roberts. Thanks for listening.

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