you and miss you so much. fly high, my bright star. love, tara. >> and then after a brief prayer, they stood by the pond and the brisk wind carried away their goodbyes. >> let go. >> farewell to hannah hill. never forgotten by her family and friends, or as it turned out, by the criminal justice system. >> that's all for this edition of "dateline." i'm craig melvin. thank you for watching. god, no. please, no. this can't be real. >> a teenager, home alone in a night of terror. >> i would just stare at the windows and try to figure out how scared she must have been. >> on her body, like a signature, a handprint in blood. >> it was a crime of passion.

>> there's a lot of anger involved in this. >> but hang on, because that handprint doesn't belong to the man police put in prison. >> the anger just surged through me. >> now, a mother turns detective -- >> her words to me, i'll never forget were, i just want to know what happened to my daughter. >> join is as he hunts for a killer and searches for the truth. >> i want to put my fist through the tv. >> still brings the hair up on the back of my neck. hello and welcome to "dateline." a confession can break a murder investigation wide-open. it certainly did in this story. soon after 19-year-old angie dodge was found stabbed to death in her idaho falls apartment, a local named christopher admitted he was one of her killers. police recorded every grisly

detail, convinced they had cracked the case. but years later, there was someone else who thought those tapes might tell a different story. here's keith morrison with "the confession." >> they keep him in here, deep inside the multiple walls and the armed doors and the rows and rows of raiser wire, the confessed stabber, the convicted killer of that sweet, young woman all those years ago. he is lucky to be alive probably given the nature of the crime and the appeal from that girl's mother for the death sentence, which made what that mother told us later on very puzzling, indeed. >> let him go. if the only thing his mother has is her only child, let him go. ♪ >> her name is carol dodge and

the amazing story she would tell us tonight began on the worst day of her life. it was a thursday, june 13th, 1996, mid-morning. she placed a call to a beauty salon to talk to her daughter, angie. >> i dialed angie's number at work and a lady answered. i said, this is carol dodge, angie's mom. she said, angie has been found dead. >> just over the phone. >> i remember saying, god, no, please no. this can't be real. >> happened, it turned out, the night before in the tiny second floor walkup where the independent 18-year-old had just started to build her life. stabbed to death, her throat cut and carol was haunted by a conversation she had with angie that very week. >> that's what she said to me, mom, i've done something really stupid. >> did you say to her what did you do? >> no, i didn't want to pry. >> what could it have been that something stupid? did it lead to murder?

idaho falls, idaho, big blue heaven above, dazzling white mormon temple below to anchor below. and signal like a beacon its call of virtues. fine way to raise a family, three dodge boys and one girl, angie, whose birth occasion, the biggest celebration of all. >> that was a pinnacle for my parents to have the baby girl. >> little angie was one of those kids who learned about independence early on who grew up busy and strong and stubborn. >> angie was 5'11" and she was strong. >> but, of course, big can be a problem for a girl. as a teenager, she was too tall, too awkward. she struggled. and to make it worse, her parents' marriage fell apart. >> that's when angie went and just made friends with whoever accepted her. >> among angie's new friends was

jessica martinez. >> we wanted to be accepted, not for what we looked like, but for who we were. >> carol worried about those new friends, didn't know they, like angie, had big plans. >> she wanted to go to college and just be the best person that she could be. >> now suddenly this little angie's life was over. and carol grief stricken and dazed endured a murder investigation. >> we clearly thought there was some sort of relationship there because it was a crime of passion. >> gerald and ken brown were back then detectives in the idaho falls p.d. angie's boyfriend was out of town. other friends seemed to have alibis, too. they turned to this physical evidence, this bloody imprint. when her killer did something that was quite beyond sick, pulled down her pants, pulled up her shirt, left a deposit of

semen on her body, his mark and his dna. >> there's a lot of anger, lot of humiliation involved in this. >> and frustration for the cops because that dna didn't match any of their possible suspects. month after month they chased leads into disappointing dead ends and all the while carol dodge haunted the investigation, practically stalked the detectives, desperate for information, begging them, find the killer. >> i drove to the police department every day that they were open. >> and then one day, seven months later, dead of winter, january '97, an arrest next door in nevada broke the case wide-open. in custody was a young man named benjamin hobbs. one of those less savory friends of angie's. here he is at angie's funeral, carrying flowers. but get this, hobbs was now charged with sexually assaulting a woman at knifepoint.

sound familiar? so while detective ken brown rushed off to question hobbs, detective jared furhman began talking to hobbs' friends. >> why do you think you're down here? >> honestly, i have no idea. >> one of whom was a 20-year-old named christopher tapp. he was no felon but he was an admitted druggie and what do you know, chris tapp had a bit of a history with ex-school resource offer now detective furhiman. he was in trouble a time or two? >> he was. just trying to help him out. >> i trust you and hopefully you trust me, okay? >> yes, sir. >> he trusted furhiman, but didn't know anything he said about angie's murder. >> if i did anything about this, i would say, but i do not know. that's the honest truth. >> having made his statement, christopher tapp went home, in the clear apparently. couple of days later, the detectives asked him to come downtown again. >> i told him i says, what are you doing?

i says, this is a murder case. >> this is tapp's mother, vera, she understood what he apparently did not that her son was quite possibly talking himself into very big trouble. >> mom, i don't have anything to hide. i want to tell them that i don't know anything. >> but it didn't quite work out that way. before long, chris tapp had written a statement for police saying that ben hobbs said he killed her and i just laughed it off like he was just telling me a joke. ah, but that was just the beginning. over the next several weeks they had tapp in here 9 times, questioning him 20 hours, even gave him an immunity deal and that is when mr. tapp's story began to evolve. yes, he admitted he was there when ben hobbs killed angie, even held her down, he admitted, when ben stabbed her and then finally, he said, he even stabbed her once himself. the motive, revenge. supposedly angie had been meddling in ben's marriage and mr. hobbs did not like that one

bit. so detectives confronted hobbs, who denied any part in fact murder. and asked them a question about angie. >> was she raped the night she was killed? >> i don't know. that's why i'm asking you because if she was, my dna will prove my innocence right there. >> and lo and behold, he was right. that dna result came back and the semen found on angie's body didn't belong to ben hobbs or chris tapp, neither one of them. what went through your heads when the dna results came back and it showed that the attacker was not ben hobbs? >> if you're going to nail it down to one word, it's frustration. >> but the detectives decided that didn't mean chris was lying or that the theory of the crime was wrong. it could only mean they decided that they needed to expand the theory. ben hobbs and chris tapp were guilty, they were sure of it, so that mystery dna must have come from a third man, a third attacker. so they put tapp back in the

interrogation room and asked him, was a third man involved in the crime? sure enough, chris tapp said yes, there was a third man. no matter how many times detectives asked, he couldn't or wouldn't tell them who it was. so prosecutors made a decision, if tapp wasn't going to tell them the whole truth, he wouldn't get his deal. chris tapp was charged with murder, but only chris. not enough evidence to go after hobbs or anyone else. the announcement caught carol dodge by surprise. detectives kept her in the dark until now. but one look at christopher tapp in court and she knew she wanted him dead. >> i mean, i was finally looking somebody in the eye. i thought was a devil who had taken my daughter's life. >> chris tapp was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for angie's murder and 20 years for rape, which is when carol

dodge's odyssey really began. her own investigation, filled with danger, surprise and some very troubling discoveries. >> one discovery so disturbing that angie's mother reached out for help. coming up -- >> the anger just surged through me. >> still brings the hair up on the back of my neck. >> when "dateline" continues. ws ws we want you, to keep doing you... and we'll take care of medicare part d. by helping you save up to $5 on each prescription... so you can get back to doing the things you love. stop in and start saving on your medicare part d prescriptions today... walgreens. trusted since 1901. with uncontrolled modor atopic dermatitis,a, you never know how your skin will look. and it can feel like no matter what you do, you're always itching. but even though you see and feel eczema on your skin,

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hobbs, in prison for a different felony, was never charged with angie's murder. and idaho falls police told angie's mother, carol, they still couldn't find that third man, the one who left his dna on angie's body. that's when carol became, her word, obsessed. if the police couldn't track down her daughter's killer, well, then she would. >> the anger just surged through me. and that's when i went to the streets and i literally put 60,000 miles on my truck searching for her killer. >> you put yourself in harm's way. >> oh, absolutely. i remember going to a place and the lady said you need to leave before somebody hurts you. >> that's how the days and weeks passed. >> i had a gun put to my head one night. >> in a frenzy of new leads that never panned out, but carol often ended up parked outside the apartment where angie was

murdered. >> i would just stare at that house and stare at the windows and try and figure out how scared she must have been. >> something else carol couldn't stop doing, reading police reports. practically memorizing them. >> i don't sleep and i get up and i just go, what part of this don't i understand? >> it didn't make sense. >> none of it made sense. >> and in one of those reports, carol found a phrase which, the more she read it, sounded out of place in a dna world. it was about pubic hairs, which in addition to the semen had been found on angie's body. >> it was written in this lab report that it is similar or same as the victim. and i said to myself, it's either angie's or it's not angie's. >> right. >> it can't be an either/or. not in today's scientific world. >> of course. then carol remembered reading an article about an internationally known dna expert who just so

happened to live and work right in idaho. how does it feel to be recognized dna expert? >> it's fun. i did fruit flies. nobody invited me to talk on television. >> this is the expert, dr. greg hampikian, a fruit fly geneticist who spreads his infectious enthusiasm at boise state university. his work is not all done in the classroom. in fact, his own path changed back in 2004 when he was asked to test some dna that eventually led to an innocent man being freed from prison in georgia. the doctor wrote a book and just like that the doctor found a new calling. he is now in high demand. in 2011, he was part of the team credited with freeing amanda knox, the american college student accused of murder in italy.

and in his spare time, he is founder and director of idaho's innocence project. >> it's an unfortunate thing that our name is innocence. honestly, i've worked on 13 exonerations now. four of the ones in georgia, they found the actual perpetrator, to those four guys i'm the guilty project. >> so now, the coincidence you just couldn't make up. the very week carol left a phone message for the doctor asking for help, idaho's innocence project had just taken on a new case -- the case of the man convicted of killing carol's daughter, christopher tapp. the doctor called carol back. >> her words to me, i'll never forget, i just want to know what happened to my daughter. and you know, it still brings the hair up on the back of my neck. >> the curiosity of her surprise you? >> the knowledge surprised me. she's turned all of that love and devotion for her daughter into a very careful record of this case. >> so she read that report to

him, the one that said the pubic hairs found on angie were similar to or the same as the victim. >> he goes, well they're either her's or they're not. >> just as you thought. >> he said, well where are the hairs? i said i assume that they're still in evidence. >> so, she called the idaho falls police department which found the hairs in an envelope in the evidence room where they had been stored for all those years. well, after carol's calls those pubic hairs were sent off to the crime lab where state-of-the-art dna could show that chris tapp was there at the crime scene or that ben hobbs was there at the crime scene or that the entirety of the physical evidence was left by one unknown third man. that was a fundamental question, huge. and the answer from the dna left no doubt. >> only one person who did this in terms of dna. >> one killer. the science said there was no evidence there were three attackers in angie's apartment

that night as the police had theorized, but just one. and that remarkable news could mean only one thing, at least according to the idaho innocence project, chris tapp's story was a false confession. he was not there. he was an innocent man. the theory of multiple killers, ridiculous, said the doctor. >> to imagine that there is this group of criminals who know about dna and are so careful, what did they do? they planted somebody else's semen and pubic hair and cleaned up all their own dna? >> as you might well imagine, that conclusion that chris tapp had to be innocent, the killer had never been caught, came down like a hammer to the head on angie's mother. >> i was extremely angry. when they have dna, not once but twice, that belongs to the same person and it's not chris tapp, something is wrong. >> so what did you do?

>> i met with the chief and i asked for copies of all of the video tapes. >> those video tapes, the ones in which chris tapp had confessed to taking part in the murder, on most accounts carol knew more about the case than anyone. but the one thing she had never done was watch all of the more than 20 hours of the chris tapp investigation. now, and she did, she watched every minute. and when she was done, carol dodge was a changed woman. look at a brand-new case. coming up -- the tale of the tapes. what exactly had she found? >> and we're going to go from here. >> when "dateline" continues. nobody likes dealing with insurance. see, esurance knows it's confusing. i literally have no idea what i'm getting. i don't know either. i'm just the spokesperson. but that's why they're making it simple - so that even actors, like us, can understand it.

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more than a dozen years after her daughter's murder, the ground beneath carol dodge's feet was quaking. new dna tests revealed that none of the physical evidence implicated confessed murderer christopher tapp but pointed instead to some mystery man still at large. and the woman who relentlessly prodded the idaho falls police to find their daughter's killer, began to doubt everything those detectives had been telling her. >> for 13 years they had me convinced that chris tapp was there. all they kept saying was that he confessed, carol, he confessed.

>> but was it a real confession? carol asked for and got a complete set of tapp's video tape confessions. and what she saw amazed her. by this time, of course, she knew so much more than she had a decade before, knew, for example, that then detective jared furhiman who ran the interviews had been a school resource officer, well known to a young chris tapp. >> i trust you and hopefully you trust me, okay? >> furhiman kept telling chris, just trust me, chris. you have to trust me. we go way back, chris. and i think that he was taught to respect adults and he was a follower. >> she watched as chris insisted he knew nothing and then she saw detectives, as they're trained to do, subtly make tapp a

participant. >> hypothetically, chris, how do you think it happened? i remember chris saying, you mean like a tv show? >> next she saw police administering polygraph after polygraph, almost always with the same result. they would tell him he's deceptive. when tapp was promised immunity, his story about ben hobbs changed. >> he got a knife. and he just started to cut her. >> but perhaps what troubled carol most was seeing how confused tapp was, even ten days after his first interviews, he still seemed not to know what house angie lived in. >> did she live on the corner? >> police, carol noticed, kept correcting him. for a guy who taken part in a murder, he seemed not to know much about the layout of angie's apartment. >> why don't you try to draw it out.

sometimes it helps to draw it out. >> when they asked him to draw it, he couldn't do it. detectives even perhaps inadvertently showed him where the murder occurred. >> bedroom, right back here. >> oh, yes. and there was more. police had always told carol that chris tapp knew things only the killer would know, the location and position of angie's body, the clothes she was wearing. well, now carol could see for herself on tape the reason chris would know those things. carol was stunned to see police had shown tapp photos of the crime scene. >> i want you to tell us if that's how you remember it, if that's how you don't remember it. just going to jog your memory for you and we'll go from there. >> there's times i wanted to put my fist through the tv. >> and finally, remember that the police theory of the crime after dna didn't match tapp or hobbs was that three people committed the murder together.

the detectives spent hours, literally trying to drag the name of that third man out of tapp. and when carol saw the tape, well, you watch it. >> the name nothing comes to my head. >> jeff. i'm going to say jeff. mike was the first name. mickelson. >> by the time you had gone through all of those tapes, what did you think about chris tapp, the man you believed all those years -- >> how did they do this to me? how have they managed to keep someone in prison for all these years and it's a possibility he's not there? >> after that eureka moment, carol dodge made a decision. she would do more than search to find her daughter's killer, she would actively work to free christopher tapp, the only man convicted of the murder. >> i think that chris' case truly got taken seriously after i made my contact with boise state.

>> she was the first victim's family member who came forward to work with the innocence project on a case. i mean, she's the leading edge of a group of people who have come forward and said, you know what, we just want to know what happened. >> but no matter who was now on his side, chris tapp was face-to-face with two very uncomfortable truths. one, years of appeals had done nothing to overturn his conviction and prison sentence, and, two, the detective who put him behind bars had gone on to a much more powerful position in idaho falls. and he was still absolutely certain that chris tapp is as guilty as sin. the former detective reveals what makes him so sewure of taps guilt. coming up -- >> he took us into the bedroom and relived that night. and you could see it on his face. >> when "dateline" continues. nus

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hour's top stories. president trump is calling a report about the fbi opening up a counterintelligence investigation into whether he had been working for russia insu insulting. "the new york times" says it was opened after the firing of james comey. and julian castro will be running for president in the 2020 election. the democrat announced his candidacy at an event in his hometown of san antonio where he served as mayor. now, back to "dateline." welcome back to "dateline." i'm craig melvin. more than a dozen years had passed since the murder of angie dodge. convicted killer, chris tapp, had admitted his role in the crime. but angie's mother, carol, was convinced that chris' con investigation was coerced. not true, said investigators. and what made them so confident? well, we asked them and were told about something that could not be found on the tapes.

here, again, is keith morrison with "the confession." >> by the time we visited the city of idaho falls in march of 2012, the angie dodge murder case was, to some, just a piece of city history. but to idaho's innocence project and its founder, dr. hampikian, it was a miscarriage of justice and a cause. >> if there's dna, for god sakes, believe the science. people are not that accurate. the dna is very precise. >> and 15 years after the murder of her daughter, angie's own mother, carol dodge, had done what was once unthinkable. she had joined forces with the innocence project. >> the city of idaho falls has got it wrong. >> you want somebody to take you seriously? >> yes. >> in the year since the murder, finding angie's killer had become carol's reason of living, through three heart attacks the death of an estranged husband,

off-and-on battles with the idaho police and now she had to fight that power in a whole new way because -- remember jared furhiman, the detective who befriended chris tapp in a previous position of school resources officer -- the fellow who got that confession has gone on to become the mayor of town. >> true. >> did that have anything to do with it as far as you can tell? >> people have to protect their story without looking any deeper and saying, is this really accurate? >> so, had the idaho falls police taken a false confession, put the wrong person in prison and failed to find the real killer? when we spoke to the former detective, then mayor, jared fuhriman said no. how does he know?

it was furhiman who took tapp to visit the crime scene, during some of those all those years ago. >> let me tell you, they weren't in the room with me when he took us up the stairs, took us into the bedroom and relived that night. you could see it on his face, he was reliving it. >> of course, the critics wouldn't be able to see that because it was one of the only times during the investigation when the police did not video tape chris tapp. but -- >> i have no doubts in my mind that chris tapp is a part of that homicide itself. >> right. >> you can't -- >> you can because what is it? 25% of all dna resolved cases where somebody is released from prison it turns out there was a false confession. people do confess to things they didn't do. >> we know that. but when people confess to crimes that they don't do, they don't know the minute details of that case. chris knew and knows the minute details of the case. >> he of course claims that he knows them because he was fed them. >> we would politely disagree with that.

>> is it possible, at least, that there was some suggestion involved in these things before he actually said them? >> for us to sit and say there was no possibility that anything could have happened, we can't say things like that. we can say we have reviewed those tapes over and over. we had a jury who reviewed those tapes. >> for two guys who interviewed this person over and over again, and found that in the first interview, the second interview, the third interview, the fourth interview, the fifth interview, he lied like a sidewalk. then, you finally get to the seventh interview and that's the gospel truth? >> no. during each of the interviews he was bringing out information that he knew, was not fed to. the color clothes she was wearing. the position of the clothes. how many times she was stabbed. the diagram of where she was at in the room. >> interesting. many times as the interviews progressed, chris tapp claimed to know nothing about the clothes angie dodge was wearing. >> do you remember what she had

on? >> no. >> do you remember she was clothed or unclothed? >> no, i don't know. >> but some details in the interview could be interpreted to back up the claims by police. once, for example, before tapp was shown the crime scene photos, he seems to, in a guessing kind of way, know what angie was wearing. and although he's wrong about the color of her clothes, after being asked many times if her clothes were half on or half off or pulled up or pushed down, he does correctly say this about her pants. >> they were half on. like, one leg. >> also said the detective, chris talked about ben hobbs, hitting angie behind the ear and -- >> we have the evidence to back it. we have bruising where he says that ben hit her. >> so, detectives insisted they were right.

ben hobbs was the ringleader, chris tapp was involved in the attack and an unknown third man left the dna in the form of semen. three attackers. the identity of the third is still a secret, unrevealed by the other two all those years later. and about the fact that carol dodge now disagrees with their theory and is now supporting chris tapp, the only man in prison for the murder -- what's it like to know that carol is now actively campaigning for his release? believes he's an innocent man? >> i think that's part of the process in some respects. her heart has been broken. >> and she's convinced you got the wrong guy. >> when i heard that, i was genuinely surprised. >> it's been a rollercoaster ride for 16 years for her. she's looking for closure. tomorrow or the next day, chris could be guilty in her mind again. >> so, perhaps now would be a good time to talk to the man in the middle of all this. this serial confessor, christopher tapp. coming up -- >> i didn't kill nobody.

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are the number one choice of hospitals, nurses and parents. there comes a time in every tale to meet the man at the center of the story. and here he is, christopher tapp. no longer the aimless pot head you saw on those videotapes

from 1997. when he we met him, he was a man who had done hard time. as people look at you, what do you most want them to know about you? >> i've been so wronged all these years. how could individuals do something to another human being like they've done to me? >> you're an innocent man? >> yes, sir, i am. >> of course everybody in prison is innocent, right? >> if you look at the whole entire case, the dna, none of it points to me. >> on that point, there is little dispute, of course. but how did chris tapp get here? that's a familiar story to many families. the sweet little boy shown in all these pictures of a typical childhood, carefully kept by his mom, vera. started smoking marijuana at 13, then at 16 turned to meth. chris dropped out of high school, got and stayed high every minute he could, he says. hanging out down by the river in idaho falls with all those kids

his mother warned him about. and that he says is how his name came up after the murder of angie dodge, when police were scouring the city for suspects who might match that dna left behind after the murder. so, too, he was asked to submit dna. did you think anything of that? >> no. i had no rhyme, no reason to be scared. >> then, not a word, for months, until, you'll recall, january of 1997, when tapp was brought in for questioning, after his friend, ben hobbs, was arrested for a nevada sexual attack, which police said was similar to the murder of angie dodge. >> i didn't know what i was being brought in for. >> you didn't connect it with the angie thing at all? >> no. i honestly thought i was going in for drugs. >> as you've seen over the course of several weeks, chris tapp soon went from saying he knew nothing about angie's murder, to being the only man charged in the case, just as his mother warned him.

how was your mother during all this? >> frantic. i was honest with her. i said i had nothing to do with this, mom. i tried to explain to her. i didn't really confess. it took days to get to a story where i actually made a confession. >> well, of course one of the difficulties was your story kept changing, right? >> very much it did. >> i mean, you went from saying i don't know anything about this to then saying, well, maybe ben had something to do with it, to then, well, maybe there's a third guy involved. wait a minute, i was there. and, oh, yeah, i cut her. where did that come from? >> trying to give them what they wanted to hear, just to appease them. >> wait a minute, but why would you say you cut her? >> during that time, mr. furhiman, he said hypothetical, even if you did cut her, we'll get you another deal, we'll be able to help you,

you just need to help us. >> indeed, here it is. on tape, with then-detective jared furhiman in charge. >> hypothetically if chris tapp was holding on to angie as she is being cut and some other stuff was going on or if chris tapp took part in the knife and any way, shape or form in cutting her, okay -- >> but i didn't. >> would you listen? >> yes, sir. >> okay. hypothetically -- >> yes, sir. okay. >> if you took part in any of that, that's okay because you're still here, you're still showing some good faith that you want to cooperate and the prosecutor will reconsider another possible -- exactly. >> you believed that story? >> hook, line and sinker. >> try to put yourself there right now and tell me what's going on inside your stomach and your brain. >> scared. trying to figure out what they want, just for them to leave me alone. >> why? >> i didn't kill nobody. i was never there the night the murder happened. they just kept focussing on, well, if you was there, if you did do it f you held a knife, it's okay.

we'll help you. so like an idiot, i believed them. >> and then they charge you with murderer? >> yep. >> now, of course, chris tapp is fighting to clear his name, not only the support of his own mother and the innocence project but of carol dodge, the victim's mother. carol dodge came around to your side. what was that like? >> it's an amazing feeling. and i appreciate her finally understanding that i'm innocent. >> and, as we spoke, for the first time in years chris tapp had reason to feel one spark of possibility, someone in a position to change his future was going to listen. coming up -- a new chance at freedom. could that controversial confession get thrown out of court? >> with this confession goes the state has almost no evidence. >> when "dateline" continues. hes

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more than 15 years after angie dodge was murdered, on a quiet street in idaho falls, something was about to change in the case of her confessed killer, christopher tapp. for first time since his trial, a hearing on evidence was about to be held before a judge.

as chris tapp headed to the courtroom, he and his supporters finally had reason for hope, not that the judge could review the evidence and just declare tapp innocent, no. this would have to be based strictly on points of law. the court of appeals over the years had thrown out all but one of tapp's interviews, the one where he said he took part in the crime. but in this hearing, it could be thrown out too if the court decided tapp believed he was in custody when he said those incriminating things. if he thought he was unable to leave this little room because that would have violated his basic constitutional rights. tapp's attorneys. what is the best result from this? new trial or possible to have an exoneration. >> if this confession goes, the state has almost no evidence. >> i think they have to dismiss the case. >> reporter: the stakes could not have been higher for mr.

tapp. his mother vera sat right behind him. carol dodge was there too. two of her sons also. >> they got a lot at stake. if chris tapp walks free, then what? then it is who is the killer? >> reporter: the prosecution would rely on the word of the detective who later became idaho falls mayor, jared furman. furman ran the police interviews and said chris tapp was never technically in custody. >> was chris tapp free to leave? >> yes. >> that's funny, chris tapp's lawyered wh es argued when it wr turn, how was he arrested twice and watched when the door was barred during his interviews, how could that young man who had been questioned on and off for nearly a month, who spent more than a week of that time actually locked up in jail, who watched as immunity deals were offered and then later torn up, how could that kid, the lawyer asked, be expected to believe he could leave whenever he wanted?

did you think that if you decided not talk to the police that you were going to be able to go home? >> no, i would not have been allowed to go home. >> but tapp had to acknowledge when questioned by the prosecutor, he had indeed lied over the years, many times. including in sworn affidavits used in past appeals. you admitted fact that you lied on any number of occasions. and if you lied before, how can we believe you now? >> of course you're going to say i'm a liar now. he's trying to save himself. but it is the truth. i'm innocent. i've never committed this crime. >> when testimony was over it was up to the judge, would he order a new trial for chris tapp or would he send him back to prison, maybe for good? and then four months later, a ruling. chris tapp was never threatened, restrained or handcuffed, said the judge. and thus was not in custody.

appeal denied. >> the truth will set me free some day. >> you're pretty convinced of that. >> as years go on, yeah. >> tapp's lawyers vow to continue that fight for as long as they had to, and for the first time since the murder, the two mothers of the center of the case could agree. >> come home every day and you think, i had a son. sooner or later something's got to break. >> let him go. it is the only thing his mother has. it is her only child. let him enjoy his mother, let his mother enjoy him. there's just two of them, that's all they have. >> and chris' case was far from over. there were more emotions, more hearings, but all was the same result. then two decades after his conviction, in march 2017, a

stunning twist. prosecutors offered chris tapp a plea deal, downgrading his conviction to second degree murder and vacating his rape conviction. chris had a decision to make. this was not an exoneration. he still would be a killer in the eyes of the law. but he would be a free man. he accepted and was resentenced to time served, no probation or parole. after 20 years behind bars, he left the hearing a free man. >> how are you feeling? >> overwhelmed. completely totally overwhelmed. >> as for ben hobbs, he's still in prison in nevada, and still denies any involvement in angie's murder he declined "dateline's" request for an interview. but dr. greg of the idaho innocence project, the answer still lies not in the machinery of law, but in science. that dna left at the scene, it points, he says to the simplest explanation, not to a third man

or even a second one, but just one. what are the chances that a story could remain a secret for that many years if three people were involved? >> secrets can be kept, but science reveals the secrets. someone went in and committed a typical violent rape/murder and left typical evidence. there is no other person there by dna. where is he? >> where indeed? and carol dodge is still tortured, still pondering that last message from her angie, that she had done something stupid. >> sounds to me like you believe she crossed or double crossed somebody who was very dangerous. >> she cross the line and didn't have any clue of what she had gotten herself into. >> and neither did she, carol admits. when she sat out on a quest to find a killer, not finished, not yet.

>> i'm never going to stop looking. one day i'm going to look that man in the eye. one day he will be found. he'll be found. >> that's all for this edition of "dateline." i'm craig melvin. thank you for watching. i'm craig melvin thank you for watching i'm craig melvin. >> i'm natalie morales. >> and this is "dateline." >> i said, did you ever contemplate committing the perfect murder? and he said, yes. the key element to that is making sure that someone is caught. once i have somebody, they'll stop looking and that's how you can get away. >> a cold blooded killing, a victim worth millions. and all kinds of conflicting clues. >> i never had a case this complicated before. >> police