Chapter 5: The Hunt

In summer 2017, the Idaho Falls Police Department got a new police chief, Bryce Johnson. The investigations bureau was also refreshed, and one officer who had been a rookie cop at the time of Angie Dodge’s murder was made its captain.

“Shortly after I got here Carol Dodge reached out to me,” Johnson said. “She introduced herself and we spoke a couple of times. She put her arm around me, she told me that she loved me, and I thought, ‘I’m an American police officer, don’t touch me!’” he joked.

“But I realised she was sincere. It was clear that she absolutely loved Angie and this story had dominated her life for decades,” he said. “Carol made all of us want to do our best for Angie. She had an immense influence on us.”

The department set about finding who had left the DNA sample.

New technology - genetic genealogy - was gaining traction in the US. It had been used to snare a suspect in the Golden State Killer case in California, when a man believed to be behind 12 murders and 45 rapes was detained. The method involves comparing DNA evidence found at crime scenes to personal DNA that individuals submit to commercial websites like Ancestry.com.

The department made genetic genealogy a central part of its investigation.

In late 2018, the police partnered with CeCe Moore, a DNA expert who regularly appeared on big-name TV shows. Moore - with her curly blonde hair and pearly smile - was one of the best-known faces in genetic genealogy. She had cracked cold cases across the country, but turned down the Dodge case over concerns the DNA samples were too degraded.

“Then Carol reached out to me,” she said. “She begged me to try and make it work and do everything I could to find her daughter’s killer. I felt a tremendous amount of pressure. I didn’t want to let her down.”

In summer 2018, Moore uploaded the DNA to a database called GEDmatch, that allows users of websites like Ancestry.com to compare their results with others. Despite her concerns about the quality of the sample, it worked.

She started building genetic networks, that let her see who shared DNA with the unknown suspect. Those matches would then be traced back to a common ancestral couple. This family tree could, in theory, lead Moore to Angie’s killer.

Moore soon established the suspect had to be the grandson or great-grandson of a man called Clarence Ussery. Using birth certificates and obituaries, she mapped all his descendants who would have been the right age at the time of Angie’s death in 1996. She narrowed it down to six men - one of whom lived in Idaho.

“I had hit a brick wall... for the first time in my career.” CeCe Moore

She gave the name to the Idaho Falls Police Department, who then needed to get a DNA sample from him. They tailed the suspect for days.

“I told Carol that it was looking good and we were going to be able to find the killer,” Moore said. “I told her: ‘I'm gonna do this, Carol, I'm gonna finally find this guy and you're gonna finally get justice and answers.’”

But they would have to wait. In an enormous blow for the new investigation, the results excluded the suspect, his family and all six men Moore had on her list. “I was so sure he had to be in the family,” Moore said. “It was devastating. I had hit a brick wall. It appeared that genetic genealogy might have led me wrong for the first time in my career.”

The bad news hit Dodge hard.

“I woke up at three o’clock in the morning, drank a Coke, and sat at my kitchen table and started to sob. I said: ‘Angie, I’m so sorry. I’m tired and I don’t know where to go.’ I literally felt her looking down on me and saying: ‘Mom, you’re almost there. You’ve come so far. You can’t stop now.’”

Moore went back to the family tree she had built and looked for anything she might have missed. “One thing that had always bothered me was a really early marriage in the family,” she said. “They had split up and there were no recorded children. But I couldn't trace the wife and couldn't find what happened to her.

“I wanted to be sure that there wasn't a child born to that marriage that went with her. I knew there was a chance he could have been raised by another man.”

They found what they were looking for in a small library in Missouri. Moore’s assistant called to say she had found an obituary for the woman in question. Not only did it say the surname she had taken - Dripps - but it said she had had a son and a grandson. “We looked up the grandson and found that he had been raised with his stepfather’s surname,” Moore said. “His mother had taken him and he never had any contact with the original family.

“Surviving are her daughter Linda M Dripps... and two grandchildren Brian and Tracy Dripps.”

“Then we found that he had lived in Idaho Falls. He didn't just live in Idaho Falls, he had lived there in 1996.”

“I started crying,” Moore said. “I was on an aeroplane trying not to make a scene. I just kept thinking about what this would mean to Carol.”

Moore held a video call with detectives in Idaho Falls and explained how she had got the new name - Brian Leigh Dripps Sr.

“I got choked up for a minute and even they started crying,” she said. “We all just wanted it for Carol. But that's where my work ended and theirs began. Now they had to try and build a case.”