20/20 - The Snare, Episode 4: A New Crusade

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

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This is Deborah Roberts here with another weekly episode of our latest true crime series from 2020 and ABC Audio, The Snare. Remember, you can get new episodes early by following The Snare on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening now. Now, here's the next episode of The Snare. If you like your true crime, like you like your coffee, red-handed is the podcast for you. It's dark, intense, and might just keep you up all night. I'm Hannah. I'm Surruti. And every week on Red Handed, we break down a different, fascinating case. From the most recent US trials everyone is obsessing over, like Brendan Banfield, Karen Reid and Ellen Greenberg,

to the most unbelievable stories from around the world. There's nothing we love more than digging into every detail of the cases we cover, getting beyond a basic analysis and cutting to the heart of the story. Red Handed has over 400 episodes ready to binge right now. Plus, be sure to check out our weekly sister show, Shorthand, where we unpack everything, from the Black Death to Area 51. If you're looking for smart, detailed true crime with personality, check out red-handed wherever you get your podcasts. In 1998, Chris Tapp 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 had raped. Angie and inflicted the mortal wound that killed her. But without a match, that question would remain unanswered for years. Meanwhile, Chris Tapp 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 Defendant,

office took on his appeal. My name's John Thomas. John Thomas was still reading in 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 and there. And that's what John says Carol did to him that day. Carol was a 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 whose 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, and there's only one DNA at 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 in 2020, I'm Maggie Rooley. And this is The Snair. Episode 4, A New Crusade. John Thomas says he didn't know very much about the tapes before Carol Dodge approached. him. He had just started representing Chris. Carol introduced me to the videotapes, told me that I needed to watch the videotapes. 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 friend's 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 Dodge was questioning Chris's confession, all because of the interrogation tapes. So Carol was 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 Tapp is only 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. It was the middle of the block.

It was the middle of the block, the detective says. They also asked Chris where Angie was killed. They asked him, which room was she killed in? He goes, this is where she was killed. Where do you stick her in the bedroom or in the living room? Chris tells the polygrapher, 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 Fallon, say they saw officers use a 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 trouble describing the apartment because he's never been in it. Fallon 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 ClubFed, a consulting firm that examines the science of interrogations. Remember, these interrogations happened in the 90s.

Fallon says back then, law enforcement employed certain methods in situations like these. They were using 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. But 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 they're also a very effective method of obtaining a confession from an innocent.

in person. Fallon 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 actually did commit this crime,

but his mind wouldn't let him admit to it. Just like me, on some of the brutal stuff that we see out on the streets, my mind shuts down on me because I don't want to remember. Okay? And 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 continued to try to get Chris to grasp for every lifeline that they threw him in an effort to save himself. Remember? I would remember that.

Anyone would? The charge your talent is saying to me, you were there. Another interview method, Fallon saw investigators use, was a technique called maximization. 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. Fallon says interrogation strategies have evolved over the years. But at the time, many of the techniques detectives used in Chris Tapp's 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's trial and in the years following, the prosecution and the prosecution and the the detectives insisted the methods used during the interrogations were sound.

Fallon 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 brought into the detective stories. Prosecutors have brought 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 Fallon 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 lot of... time after doing all the investigation about Christ Tap to say, Chris Tap's not there. One online predator unleashed hell on his targets. An internet terrorist. For the young female gamers, he's hunting.

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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 being 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, Drisand thought, then maybe something really was wrong. So Drizen agreed to review the hours of interrogation in polygraph footage. 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 Tapp's statements were, quote, unreliable. Driesen 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 Driesen's report in future legal filings. Driesen 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 Tapp himself. I was a young kid. I didn't know any difference. This is Chris Tapp. When Chris first came to the police station back in January 19, 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 and shaved head. No longer that young man Idaho Falls Detective spoke to. years earlier. I was naive, really naive.

The Chris that sits here today, still choky, 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, the 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 a scenario or anything that they wanted that would help me. 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 polygrapher 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 physical. 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 Tapp said, 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 you think you're doing the right thing and you just want to help them as the time goes on it just continues to get more heavier and more weight on your shoulders and you're just so scared to admit to something you didn't do.

But back in 2008, a decade after his conviction, things would change for Chris Tapp. Because Carol Dodge, the woman who had once campaigned for him to get the death penalty would now be one of his strongest allies.

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I couldn't believe it that, you know, she's watched the polygraph, she's watched the interrogation, she understands and she saw how it all unfolded. Again, Chris's appellate 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 community support for Chris's case. She got the word out on local and national media outlets.

She hosted open houses where people. 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 Tapp. It 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 suspect's 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. And legal efforts were also building momentum. There was a community push for the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office to revisit Chris's case.

The office was feeling the pressure. The years preceding my taking that office had, there was an escalation, of various advocacy groups. This is former Bonneville County prosecutor, Daniel Clark. Those speaking on behalf of Mr. Tapp, 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. He says 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. Chris's 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 my mind during that time. The Independent Review commissioned by the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office did cast doubt on Chris's confession regarding his personal involvement in Angie's death. But it concluded that he was present when Anne.

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's attempts to overturn his conviction seemed 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 it preserved. This one in particular is the DNA extract from the Dodge case. The snare is a production of ABC Audio in 2020. and me, Maggie Rooley. Produced by Camille Peterson and Sabrina Fang with help from Annalisa Linder and Emily Shutz. Edited by Tracy Samuelson.

Our supervising producer is Susie Liu. Music by Evan Viola. Mixing by Bob Mallory. Special thanks to Katie Dendos, Janice Johnston, Nancy Rosenbaum, Sasha Aslanian, Suzanne DeConto, and Michelle Margolis. Josh Cohen 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.