An innocent Idaho man who spent 20 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit was mysteriously murdered a month after appearing on Dateline NBC to speak out about his wrongful conviction.
Christopher Tapp was just 21 when he was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted in 1996 of the rape and murder of his girlfriend, Angie Dodge, and then 18. He was exonerated in 2017 after the Idaho Innocence Project intervened.
The real killer, Brian Dripps, Sr., 55 confessed to the murder and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2021 and was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years and a maximum of life in prison.
But after an exclusive September 2023 interview with Dateline, Tapp, then 47, was found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room. He died of blunt force trauma and in January his death was ruled a homicide.
In the Dateline NBC episode “True Confession,” airing Friday, Tapp tells host Keith Morrison, “I’m just trying to be the best person I can be — blend the two people together.” The man who was in prison and the man before prison.”
‘We all make mistakes, good or bad. We can do things right or wrong, but I just try to be the best person I can.”
Morrison asked Tapp, even though he has moved on, “if he was still a little irritated inside.”
“Of course I will be. These people took my life for 20 years,” he said during the hearing. ‘I will always be angry. I will always have some tension and resentment because of what these people did to me.”
Christopher Tapp, 47, was just 21 when he was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted in 1996 of the rape and murder of his friend, Angie Dodd, then 18, but was released in 2017 after the Idaho Innocence Project declared his innocence had proven
The real killer, Brian Dripps, Sr. in the murder of Dodd confessed to the murder and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2021. He is pictured at the Bonneville County Courthouse on February 9, 2021.
Angie Dodge was 18 when she was raped and stabbed to death in her Idaho Falls apartment on June 13, 1996
Tapp told Morrison, “I wish I could say I’ve moved on and I’ve moved on because look at all these things I’ve been able to accomplish since the waiver with the compensation law here in Idaho and Oregon.
“I’ve helped pass bills across the country to help the wrongfully convicted for the next person.”
NBC Dateline has been following the case for decades, providing viewers with in-depth reporting.
The final two-hour broadcast will feature new interviews with investigators, other suspects, Dodge family members and more key figures, including lead investigator Bill Squires, who is now retired, and Jeremy Sargis, a friend who falsely accused Tapp of involvement.
Additional interviews include Steven Drizin, an expert on false confessions who worked to free Chris, and CeCe Moore, an investigative genetic genealogist who pointed police to the real killer.
On Thursday, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told DailyMail.com that the murder investigation is ongoing, with no new developments at this time.
Angie Dodge was raped and stabbed to death in an apartment she had recently moved into in June 1996.
Dodge’s body was found by colleagues who went to check on her. Investigators were able to obtain DNA samples from hair, skin cells and body fluids at the scene.
Tapp was interrogated nine times and subjected to seven polygraph tests, during which he was told he failed and as a result faces the death penalty.
He was convicted after a jury heard what experts would later say were false confessions under extreme duress, and was found guilty even though his DNA did not match evidence found at the crime scene.
On March 22, 2017, Tapp was released after serving twenty years of a thirty-year prison sentence following a plea deal with prosecutors.
The judge vacated his rape conviction and resentenced him to prison for Dodge’s 1996 murder.
Christopher Tapp, pictured right with his public defender John Thomas during Tapp’s post-conviction hearing at the Bonneville Courthouse in Idaho Falls on March 22, 2017
Christopher Tapp, right, and Jeremy Sargis, who was also originally connected to the crime but whose charges were dropped, embrace during Tapp’s post-conviction hearing at the Bonneville Courthouse in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Tapp imagined hugging his lawyer in the courtroom after he was acquitted
Christopher Tapp celebrates after his post-conviction hearing at the Bonneville Courthouse in Idaho Falls, Idaho, Wednesday, March 22, 2017. Tapp, who experts say was coerced into a false confession to murder, is now free after leaving half his life behind spent time behind bars.
His conviction was overturned using groundbreaking DNA technology, a technique called “genetic genealogy.”
The technique requires making DNA matches with distant relatives, which in Tapp’s case led police to Dripps, a neighbor of Dodge who lived across the street.
The database comes from websites that collect DNA samples from users and allow them to find relatives online by posting their results and generating a list
Police used the database of genetic profiles collected from websites such as 23 and Me and Ancestry, where people submit DNA samples to discover their roots
The technique has been used to implicate suspects in previous crimes, but this is the first time it has been used to exonerate someone who was already in prison.
“It’s a new life, a new beginning, a new world for me, and I’m just going to enjoy every day,” Tapp said after he was released.
Tapp was convicted in 1998 on the basis of only a confession that he later recanted. The court agreed to release him from prison in 2017, but the charges were not dropped.
On July 17, 2019, his murder conviction was overturned.
Judge Alan Stephens said: “As far as the court is concerned, you have been acquitted of the charges under which you have lived for the past 20 years.” Innocene Project.
Two years earlier, Bonneville County District Attorney Danny Clark, who initially said Tapp was complicit in Dodge’s death, joined the new motion to vacate the murder conviction.
During the hearing, Tapp said, “I am grateful to have been given this second chance at life. “I wasted twenty years of my life for something I never did, but I also grew up in those twenty years.”
In December 2019, Tapp filed a lawsuit in state court seeking damages from the city of Idaho Falls.