What she saw on tape was not at all what she had envisioned when she heard that he had confessed.
“He would ask him a question,” she said of the interrogator, “and he would answer it for him.”
The man, Christopher Tapp, was exonerated Wednesday in Idaho Falls, Idaho, in part because of Dodge’s persistence, and in part thanks to novel forensic techniques that pair DNA with genealogy databases.
It was the first time genetic genealogy, a revolutionary technique that identifies suspects by matching crime scene DNA to relatives, has been used to clear a convicted killer’s name.
In May 1998, Tapp was convicted of rape and murder. The prosecutors’ case rested on Tapp’s confession and the testimony of a woman who said she overheard Tapp mention the murder at a party. Decades later, the woman would tell Carol Dodge and a local newspaper that under pressure from the police, she had lied on the stand.
Finally Dodge called CeCe Moore, a genealogist with a consulting firm called Parabon, for help. After creating a new DNA profile from a degraded sample, Moore identified several relatives in a genealogy database. By building out their family trees and looking to see how they intersected, she identified Brian Leigh Dripps, who had lived across the street from the victim at the time of the murder.
After investigators confirmed that the crime scene DNA was his, Dripps was arrested. During his interview with the police, he not only confessed, but explicitly stated that he had acted alone and did not know Tapp.
The police and the prosecutors did not block the effort this week to clear Tapp. On Wednesday, Daniel Clark, the Bonneville County prosecutor, submitted a motion asking the judge to dismiss all charges against Tapp. “There is no doubt that there are failings in the criminal justice system and I think this case is evident of that,” he told a packed courtroom. “Hindsight is 20/20 and this case certainly speaks to that effect.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.