The Snare, Episode 4: A New Crusade

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“Now here's the next episode of The Snare.”

Think about a 31st Newly. No, no. No, then? Go ahead, now it's time to go back to the 31st Newly. In 1998, Chris Tap was convicted of the rape and murder of Angie Dodge.

But his DNA didn't match the samples found at Angie's apartment. So there was still one question that lingered. Who did this DNA belong to? This DNA could lead investigators to the unknown male who would rape Angie and inflicted the mortal wound that killed her. But without a match, that question would remain unanswered for years.

Meanwhile, Chris Tap continued to say he was innocent, that he falsely confessed to the crime and was never involved.

And he filed a petition for post-conviction relief. In 2008, a decade after Chris was convicted, an attorney at the Bonneville County Public Defenders Office took on his appeal. My name is John Thomas. John Thomas was still reading it on the case. When he was surprised by an unlikely visitor.

One day, I was walking across the lawn after court. I'm walking back to my office and Carol Dodge stopped me and I thought, "Oh, no, this is not going to be good." John says Carol's reputation preceded her. She was the tenacious mother who wanted to know who murdered her daughter. He'd heard about Carol's frequent visits to the police station.

Carol would wander around and talk to anybody that she could talk to. What have you done about Angie's killer? Why are you not on Angie's killer? These are the things that I've been doing and I want to know what you've been doing. He says if Carol wanted to talk to you, she'd approach you and do it right then in there.

“And that's what John says Carol did to him that day.”

Carol was very intimidating, sort of figure. And I thought probably not a great time to meet when she's the mother of this murdered woman. And I am the defense attorney attempting to free a man who was guilty of murder and rape in her case. But it turns out Carol wanted to help him. Carol was still looking for the unknown male who's DNA matched the samples found in Angie's apartment.

All of these things happening and yet you've never found the person that matches the DNA,

there's only one DNA that crime scene I didn't understand it. She went back to the case files, trying to find answers. She told John Thomas that she was watching the hours and hours of police interviews. She is thinking to herself, I really want to know who killed Angie. And maybe there's something in these interrogation tapes that will help me to know who killed Angie.

And she thinks if I watch these interrogation tapes, I can pull out the pieces of information that I can then track down myself or turn over to the police and help them to find the real killer. But John says, Carol started to see something else. When Carol watches all of the video from start to finish, she starts to think, this is wrong. They've really done this guy wrong.

“Could the wrong man be sitting in prison for Angie's rape and murder?”

From ABC Audio and 2020, I'm Maggie Ruley. And this is the snare. Episode 4, a new crusade. John Thomas says he didn't know very much about the tapes before Carol dodged a approach to him.

Carol introduced me to the video tapes, told me that I needed to watch the video tapes. During the investigation, police had conducted nine interrogations and six polygraph tests with Chris. Some of those interviews were almost three hours long. This is what Chris ultimately confessed to investigators that he and a friend went to Angie's apartment that they were in her bedroom when Chris held Angie down and says the other person raped and stabbed her.

That Chris himself also cut Angie on her chest. He implicated a friend in the crime, but his friends DNA didn't match the crime scene evidence.

And the friend denied ever being involved in Angie's rape and murder, and would never be charged with those crimes.

At Chris's trial, he pleaded not guilty and his attorney argued that he gave a false confession. But the jury didn't buy it. That was 1998. Now, over a decade later, Carol dodged was questioning Chris's confession. All because of the interrogation tapes. So Carol is originally thinking Chris tap was there, but as Carol's watching these, it dawns on her that it's like, this isn't right.

Chris tap is only saying things after they're telling him to say them.

“They ask him questions about, okay, well, where did she live?”

And she, like, moved on the corner.

And they say, no, no, Chris, Chris, it's not that house. It was the middle of the block. It was the middle of the block, the detective says. They also ask Chris, where Angie was killed? They ask him, which room was she killed in? It goes, this is where she was killed.

Where do you secret get better, where did you live? No more in the kitchen, in the living room. Chris tells the polygrafer, Angie was killed in the living room. And they go, no, Chris, it's over here. This is the room. You're mistaken.

They never took her down in the living room. She was killed in the bedroom.

A trial 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. But interrogation experts, like Mark Fallen, say they saw officers using now problematic interrogation technique. This is memory molding. And what they're doing is they are telling him now that it was not in the living room, that it happened in the bedroom, and he is having troubled describing the apartment

because he's never been in it. Fallen wasn't involved in Chris's case. ABC News asked him to review Chris's interviews and polygraph tests with police. He spent more than two decades with NCIS, and is the director of club fed, a consulting firm that examines the science of interrogations.

“Remember, these interrogations happened in the 90s.”

Fallen says back then, law enforcement employed certain methods in situations like these. There we use in this 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. That he says there is a potential problem with these tactics. These tactics, unfortunately, are a very effective way of obtaining confession from a guilty person.

It's unfortunate because there are also a very effective method of obtaining a confession from an innocent person. Fallen broke down the techniques. He saw detectives use in Chris's interrogation. One of the techniques was trying to convince Chris that his memory was wrong. That he had actually did commit this crime, but his mind would let him admit to it. Just like me, I saw the rules stuff that we see out on the streets.

My mind shuts down and I'll leave because I don't want to remember.

“Okay, then this may be the case here with you, okay?”

They tried to reinforce that with the polygraph, trying to claim that it was infallible. And so it's Chris's memory that must be wrong and they came up with their alternative hypothesis of what occurred. And then continue to try to get Chris to grasp for every lifeline that they threw him in an effort to save himself. I would have to remember that anyone would be there on the charge of intelligence and to make you with that.

And so what you try to do is maximize the penalty, maximize what happened, create the most critical conditions.

And then as the investigator, you come in as the person who could save them from that. Fallen says interrogation strategies have evolved over the years. But at the time, many of the techniques detectives used in Chris' taps interviews were the norm in law enforcement. When Chris was interrogated, they didn't have the science on their side. So they went with instinctually what they thought was valid and it was not.

At Chris' trial and in the years following, the prosecution and the detectives insisted the methods used during the interrogations were sound. Fallen says the detectives did the job 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 here. Supervisors have boarded to the detectives' stories.

Prosecutors have boarded into this story.

“Even though the evidence is contrary to Chris's guilt, everyone latched on to the guilt because that's what they wanted.”

That evidence Fallen is talking about is the DNA. Again, the DNA at the crime scene did not match Chris' taps. And now, a decade after Chris was sent to prison for the rape and murder of her daughter, Carol Dodge was convinced that authorities had gotten it wrong. It took me a long time after doing all the investigation about Chris Tap to say, Chris Tap's not there. Hello, Devina.

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Carol Dodge and John Thomas started forming a team of experts to review the interrogation tapes and offer an opinion. That's when Stephen Drizen came into the picture. I picked up the phone and Carol Dodge was on the other end of the line. And she asked me if I would review the interrogation tapes of the man

who had confessed to and been convicted of killing her daughter. Stephen Drizen is a professor at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and the co-director of the Center of Wrongful Convictions. His research focuses on interrogation tactics and the motivations behind false confessions. When he got the call from Carol asking for help, he was surprised.

This was the first time in my 30-plus years as a lawyer that a crime victim's mother called me and said,

"I've got real concerns that the man who killed my daughter is innocent." If what Carol saw in those tapes was enough to cause a change of heart, Drizen thought then maybe something really was wrong.

I was looking at these tapes to try to determine whether or not Chris's confession was reliable.

Was it truthful evidence of his guilt?

“After reviewing the footage, Drizen published a report detailing what he saw,”

and he agreed with Chris's defense team. He thought that Chris' tap statements were "unreliable." Drizen argued that Chris's statements fit the pattern of documented false confessions, and concluded that, quote, "the rapist and murderer of Angie Dodge was still on the loose." Chris's defense would cite Drizen's report in future legal filings.

Drizen was among a number of legal experts, Chris's defense recruited to help in his case. Soon after Drizen got involved, the Innocence Project joined Chris's post-conviction efforts. The organization works to exonerate people who they think have been wrongfully convicted.

“The defense was building their team, people who could explain why Chris might have falsely confessed.”

Drizen says the idea of confessing to a crime you didn't commit can be hard to understand.

The techniques and the tactics are so powerful that any one of us could find ourselves confessing to a murder we didn't commit.

But the only person who knows exactly what it was like to be in that interrogation room was Chris' tap himself. I was a young kid, I didn't know any difference. This is Chris' tap. When Chris first came to the police station back in January 1997, he was 20 years old. He was working odd jobs at restaurants and warehouses.

Chris loved fishing, camping, and playing video games. Most days, he was with his friends at the Snake River. Chris agreed to sit down with ABC News back in 2019. He was 42 years old at the time. He had a full beard then shaved head. No longer that young man, Idaho false detective spoke to years earlier.

I was naive. Really naive. The Chris that sits here today still joke he still can make people laugh, but also the Chris today isn't so naive anymore. The Chris today is a little bit harder, a little bit meaner, a little bit tougher, a little bit rougher around the edges. You reflected on that month he spent talking to investigators. The hours and hours of interrogations and polygraph tests he had agreed to sit through.

He says he went from trying to help to just wanting the questioning to stop. The biggest things I felt during all the interrogations to polygraphs was fear, scared. Because it just continued to get worse from me and I just kept trying to do whatever they wanted. I kept trying to answer their questions or give them scenario or anything that they wanted. That would help me if I wanted to go home.

Chris said he knew he had nothing to do with Angie's rape and murder. But he couldn't understand why the polygraph kept telling him he was failing his tests.

So I started second guessing myself during all this.

I started to not believe in myself or who I was. Ultimately Chris falsely confessed to holding Angie down and cutting her chest. Now remember there was no physical evidence connecting Chris to Angie's rape and murder. His DNA didn't match what was found at the crime scene. But his confession helped convince the jury that he was guilty.

Because why would someone confess to a crime they didn't commit?

“Chris taps it out of fear. That's why he did it.”

I've tried to explain that to people for years. And a lot of people don't understand when you're underneath all that pressure. And to start your thing you're doing the right thing and you just want to help woman.

But back in 2008 a decade after his conviction things would change for Chris tap.

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check out Red handed wherever you get your podcasts. In 2008. This tap receives big news through one of his weekly phone calls with his attorney. Carol Dodge wanted to help overturn his conviction. And I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't believe it. You know, she's watched the polygraph. She's watched the interrogations. She understands and she saw how it all unfolded. Again, Chris is a pellet attorney.

John Thomas. Carol comes to the conclusion for herself that they got the wrong guy. And so then her crusade not only to get Angie Dodge as killer. Her crusade also turns into we got to get Chris tap out. Carol built up a community support for Chris's case.

She got the word out on local and national media outlets. She hosted open houses where people could learn more about Chris's case. Here's Carol speaking to local reporters at one of those events. There's not one speck of evidence on Angie. That belongs to Chris tap in belongs to one individual.

And that individual has never been found.

She was determined to make Chris a free man again. But it would be an uphill battle. Over the next few years, Chris's defense team filed two appeals that were dismissed. His lawyers had alleged in one appeal that police used provocative questions to heighten his stress and employed hypothetical questions to encourage speculative responses.

But the court affirmed the jury's decision. It found that the defense failed to provide support that such interrogation techniques weren't allowed. And ruled that police are allowed to ask questions that play on a suspects ignorance, fears, and anxieties. Chris says the appeals process was disheartening. But reporter Brian Clark says the momentum in Idaho Falls for Chris's exoneration was building.

The community generally pretty much thought Chris was guilty. You had different opinions here and there.

“But now I think people are almost unanimous.”

They think this was a wrongful conviction and they're waiting for prosecutors to do what they can to correct it.

The court was a community pushed for the Bonneville County Prosecutors Office to revisit Chris's case.

“And the office was feeling the pressure.”

The years proceeding like taking that office had there was an escalation of various advocacy groups. This is former Bonneville County Prosecutor Daniel Clark. So speaking on behalf of Mr. Tap, and frankly raising questions about the veracity of the conviction, raising questions about the confession, things of that nature. Clark says when he took office in 2015, the prosecutor's office had ordered an independent review into Chris's conviction. Because he was hoping the review might lead to some new information that would help find the source of that mystery DNA.

“What I wanted was my investigator to find something under some rock that gave us some absolute answer one way or another.”

This is attempts to overturn his conviction had failed on appeal, but maybe this independent review was the opportunity he'd been waiting for. The prosecutor's office was revisiting his case. The review took about a year to complete. The independent investigator who conducted it went through the case file, including all of the interrogation and polygraph footage police recorded with Chris. When I got the report from the independent investigator, there wasn't any magic bullets, if you will, or something like that.

“But it certainly raised a lot of questions about the integrity of the confession, the integrity of the conviction, things of that nature certainly came to mind mind during that time.”

The independent review commissioned by the Bonneville County Prosecutor's office did cast out on Chris's confession, regarding his personal involvement in Angie's death. But it concluded that he was present when Angie was attacked and stabbed. Chris had spent over a decade trying to prove his innocence when the prosecutor's office ordered the independent review into his conviction.

It seemed like the tide might finally be turning in his case.

But Chris has attempts to overturn his conviction seem to be at a standstill once again. Meanwhile, at the Idaho Falls Police Station, a new generation of investigators would take on the question that had haunted everyone for years. Who did the DNA at the crime scene belong to? This is DNA evidence, biological evidence that we have to keep in this method to keep a preserve. This one in particular is the DNA extract from the dodge case.

The snare is a production of ABC audio in 2020. Hosted by me, Maggie Rulley, produced by Camille Peterson and Sabrina Fang, with help from Emily Silinder and Emily Schutz. Edited by Tracy Samelson, our supervising producer, is Susie Luth, music by Evan Biola, mixing by Bob Mallory, special thanks to Katie Dendos, Janice Johnson, Nancy Rosenbaum, Sasha Aslinian, Suzanne DeCunto, and Michelle Margolis. Josh Cohan is our director of podcast programming. Amy McNiff is our executive producer.

Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling. Set in my home state of Maine and the Greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light. Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.