The 2010 shooting death of ex-Mobile County Commissioner Stephen Nodine's mistress gets national TV attention Saturday with the long-awaited airing of a "48 Hours" episode on the topic.

Airing locally on CBS at 9 p.m., “Power and Passion” examines a story well-known to southwest Alabama residents: Angel Downs turns up dead outside her Gulf Shores home on Mother’s Day, and neighbors report seeing Nodine’s red pickup truck zooming out of the subdivision.

Baldwin County prosecutors tried Nodine for murder, but a jury could not reach a verdict. Ultimately, he accepted a plea bargain in which he admitted to a misdemeanor domestic violence charge and a perjury offense related to a form he filled out for a court-appointed lawyer.

Watch a clip from the show



Nodine currently is serving a two-year jail sentence and has gone on a public relations blitz to try to rehabilitate his image and convince people he had nothing to do with Downs’ death. He has maintained that Downs was unstable and took her own life that night.

In the style of the real-life crime drama, “48 Hours” looks at the case from both sides. A promo for the episode on the network’s website shows pictures and video of Nodine with prominent politicians, from George W. Bush to John McCain, during a career as a city councilman and county commissioner.

It also features beach pictures of the photogenic and beautiful blonde woman who carried on a six-year affair with the married Nodine.

The show conducted interviews with people as diverse as Downs’ younger sister, former Mobile County Sheriff Jack Tillman and Nodine, himself.

“Steve Nodine was a very well-liked politician… He runs with some pretty powerful people,” Tillman says at one point.

Sister Susan Bloodworth, meanwhile, tells interviewer Richard Schlesinger that Downs’ friends and relatives remain convinced that the death was not self-inflicted.

“As time went on, she realized Stephen was not leavin’ his wife,” she says. “Anytime she would try to end the relationship, he would get angry. I just asked her, I said, “What is it gonna take for you to leave him? For him to kill you?”

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