THE STRANGE CASE OF THE MISSING 7TH DESCENDANT
Eighteen-year-old Angie Dodge from Idaho Falls was raped and murdered on 13 June 1996, and in 1998 Chris Tapp was imprisoned for the crime for 20 years. It wasn’t until May 2019 that genetic genealogy provided the leads that not only found the true culprit – Brian Leigh Dripps Sr – but also exonerated Tapp.
CeCe Moore, the chief genetic genealogist of DNA analysis and genetic genealogy company Parabon, remembers it as her most satisfying case. But the path to Dripps was not an easy one. The crime scene DNA was badly degraded, and not obviously suitable for analysis. But enough was decoded for it to come up with several links on GEDmatch and for Moore to begin studying family trees. In total, she worked on the case for 100 hours.
“The person we ended up identifying as the murderer was actually missing from the family tree,” she says. “I had narrowed it down to six persons of interest and it was none of those so I was sort of stumped.”
Moore realised there must be a seventh missing descendant, who eluded official records and family contact. She suspected this had something to do with a teenage marriage and early divorce between one of the genetically matched men and a young woman. It was likely there had been a child that no one had recorded and no one talked about.
Moore knew she couldn’t make enquiries among possible relatives, because that might alert the suspect. So she dug deeper.
The genetically matched man had died, and his obituary didn’t mention a son. His wife couldn’t be traced. So Moore looked for records of her mother instead. Eventually she found an online obituary, where there was mention of a named grandson.
“The young woman did indeed have a baby son with that first husband, but she left him so early that he clearly was never part of his dad’s family’s lives,” says Moore. “And that was it. Once we found the son, we found he was in Idaho Falls in 1996. He was the seventh missing descendant and it turns out he lived across the street from Dodge at the time she was murdered. We knew the guy had brown eyes – just like the genetic phenotype predicted. And we knew we finally had him after around a year’s work.”
Brian Leigh Dripps Sr was arrested on 15 May 2019 and confessed to the crimes.
Angie Dodge, who was a victim in a case CeCe Moore helped solve; Chris Tapp talks to journalists after his exoneration; Carol Dodge, Angie’s mum, is emotional when thanking the people who helped identify the correct suspect; Tapp and Dodge embrace after hearing that Brian Leigh Dripps Snr had been arrested