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Sept. 15, 2023 - Dr. Oz Podcast
42:43
Man's Wife Killed His New Girlfriend & Then Committed Suicide | Dr. Oz | S11 | Ep 26 | Full Episode
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Time Text
A betrayed wife.
She was controlling.
Secretly records her husband.
When did you first discover that she had a listening device like this?
She took my husband away.
I felt it inside of my jacket.
Then kills his girlfriend.
She described in great detail what she was going to do.
Before killing herself.
I'll always remember that day.
I'm just never gonna leave.
Coming up next.
Season 11 starts now.
I became a doctor to help people heal.
Now I'm using the same science and medicine to take on true crime.
On today's True Crime, the shocking story that made headlines around the world.
After her husband, Mark, admitted to an affair and said he wanted a divorce, Janair Gerardo secretly stalked him and his new girlfriend, Meredith Chapman, for months, recording their private conversations with listening devices that looked just like this, before ultimately breaking into Meredith's house, killing her, and then turning the gun on herself.
But today we're going deeper than the sensational headlines.
And I want everyone watching at home to pay close attention because there are things we can all learn from this unthinkable tragedy.
Take a look.
Married close to 25 years, Mark and Janair Gerardo, both successful marketing professionals, seem to be living a picture-perfect life.
But these family photos don't even hint at the tragic unwinding their relationship was about to endure.
In November of 2017, Mark accepts a job at the University of Delaware, where he meets Mary Chapman, also a marketing professional and a one-time candidate for state senate.
For years, I have been listening to neighbors about what is on their mind.
Mark feels an immediate connection and a romantic relationship ensues.
When Janair arrives from South Carolina weeks later, she is suspicious and confronts Mark.
After initially denying it, Mark finally admits his feelings for Meredith and his intention to file for divorce.
According to Mark, Janair appeared to take the news quite well.
But in reality, things are about to take a very dark turn.
Putting on his jacket, Mark discovers a recording device sewn inside.
Janair was stalking he and Meredith.
He even clones his phone.
This was one of the captured conversations.
What do you hate?
You're the person I want to be able to go to.
Yeah, and seeing you very well, that will absolutely be the case.
Janair attaches a hidden GPS to their cars, tracking their movements, her boiling rage evident in the way she refers to them as Mark Lyre and M Whore.
And she also breaks into Mark's phone and screenshots his texts with Meredith.
In this recording, Janera's heard confronting Mark about another recording.
She talked about marriage again last night.
She did not.
The f*** she did and I will play it for you.
Please do.
She's living my f***ing life.
I can't have that.
She took my husband away and broke up my family and ruined my life.
On the night of April 23rd, 2018, Mark was scheduled to meet Janair at a restaurant to discuss the divorce.
She cancels, breaks into Meredith's home, and waits for her.
When Meredith arrives, Janair shoots her dead.
Then she texts Mark, You ruined my life.
I hope you never find happiness.
And bye, Mark.
After that, Janair turns the gun on herself and takes her own life.
Mark Gerardo joins us now.
I thank you for coming.
I know this is difficult.
Probably was hard to watch that.
It was.
It always is.
Take me back to the moment you realized that your wife had died and so had your new girlfriend.
Well, as the lead up said, I walked in to the house.
And it has been a moment of shock that I've been living through ever since.
In the moment, I didn't understand what had happened.
I saw Meredith laying there, face down, and there was a fleck of blood on her leg, and there was a fleck of blood on the wall, and I just couldn't understand.
I tried to wake her up.
Eventually, the police told the dispatch to get me out of the house, and I stood up to pivot, and that's when I saw Janir laying there, and I rushed to her, and I noticed A bullet wound behind her ear, and it still didn't dawn on me as to what actually happened.
I was confused more than anything.
It wasn't until hours later in the police interrogation room that they said, we have to ask this, did you shoot these two women?
I was just taken back by...
I shot them.
There was a gun?
I mean, that's how confused I was by that.
And so I replay that.
A lot in that scene.
What has the last year been like for you as you try to, as you did, piece together what really happened?
So to answer your question, you know, there are, it's been 535 days.
And I've gone through 76 weeks of intensive therapy.
And I can't imagine not having done that.
And the other thing I've been doing this entire time, I wrote a journal.
And I wrote this journal and I shared it with my therapist.
And he said, this needs to be a book.
This actually can help people.
And so I finished that book this past May.
It has been, every day I don't know what I'm going to get.
Some days are good days, some days I can get through the day, some days the smallest trigger will set me off.
I think I'm making progress in getting past all this.
Even when you say Janair's name, there's still an affinity.
You were married 24 years.
We were.
What was your life like with her before all of this happened?
Look, like every married couple who's been married certainly for 24 years, we had ups and downs.
We definitely did.
But the last six years in South Carolina, which wasn't where we were from either, we had moved there, it was kind of a renaissance period.
We had a really good time together.
And then she lost her job.
And things started to spiral downward.
And so some of the things that she had done when we were married I look back at them now and she was controlling.
She was very controlling of people around her and very argumentative.
I would introduce her to people and sometimes say, look, she's an acquired taste.
She just says what she thinks.
So either you'll get used to that or you won't.
So you moved from South Carolina to Delaware.
And while there, your new boss is Meredith Chapman.
And she's married as well.
She was.
So what about your connection became so strong that neither of you could ignore it?
The first time I talked to her, I was taken back by how smart she was, just how she was articulate.
And I was in awe of her, professionally speaking.
As we get to know each other, we joke that we had a professional crush on each other.
And that's all it was.
It's all it was.
But the more time we spent together, the easier it got to speak, talk to her.
And that's just how it kind of all started.
She separated from her husband.
She separated from her husband after Jenner took some of the audio tapes for him to listen to.
And he almost immediately filed.
How did she find, Janier, find out that you were having an affair with Ms. Chapman?
Well, I was...
Janier moved 45 days after I moved there.
And by that time, Meredith and I were in pretty deep.
And she had suspicions just based on how I was acting.
I wasn't acting quite right.
And she kept pushing me, what is up?
What is going on?
And she knew how to push my buttons.
Finally, she...
She called me names, as she often did.
And it just triggered me, and I finally just came out and said, I want a divorce.
I've been here for 45 days, and I've enjoyed my freedom.
And I realized that I don't want to be married anymore.
And she immediately suspected Meredith.
And so I denied it.
I guess another 40, 45 days.
By that time, Jenner is collecting all this evidence and she's talking about things that Meredith and I talked about in private that she couldn't possibly have known.
And I couldn't figure out how she was learning all these things.
So when did you first discover that she had a listening device like this?
That she had bugged your clothes?
This is not hard to put in people's outfits, right?
She actually had sewn it into your clothes, I guess.
She had one.
She had at least a dozen of those.
A dozen of these?
She would sew them in.
I would go to the office.
I would come back at night, and she would stitch it back in, and I wouldn't know it was there.
So then she rotated it for the next clothes I'm going to wear the next day.
So she had 12 of them cycling in and out at all times, depending on what clothes I was going to wear the next day.
What was your relationship with Dunier like after you discovered this, that she was bugging you, that she had all this evidence now of your intimate discussions?
We were seeing a marriage therapist and I confronted her in the therapy session about these to kind of put her out, call her out on the carpet with the therapist there.
And she admitted to it and said, yes, I did it.
I'm not going to do it anymore.
And it was just a day in March.
I just happened to put on another jacket and felt that familiar thud.
And I kind of lost it with her.
And I was very upset.
I said, we don't have anything between us anymore.
And that was a devastating blow to her when she heard that.
Finally, for that to hear that.
What did she do?
Long story short, she threatened to throw herself out of a seven-story window.
But it was so staged.
I didn't believe her.
She made me run after her.
Threw in a bear hug and eventually we wrestled to the ground until she became more lucid.
She was calm and I could understand that she was through whatever she was going through.
And she said, just let me go.
I'm fine.
I'm sorry.
And then immediately she said, please don't institutionalize me.
And I said, I won't.
You promised me two things.
You call your parents tomorrow and you tell them what happened.
And I want you to see a psychiatrist immediately and get on medication if you need to be.
Those things she did.
Coming up, Mark's going to reveal his shock after learning a seemingly normal call with his wife had actually come from a gun range weeks before she murdered his girlfriend and killed herself.
At Oz Skin Care Investigation, we go undercover.
This one says it works in a week.
And what we found will shock you.
And you don't know what you're putting on your face.
Plus, age-defying secrets.
What's her age?
27. 32. 34. On how these women look half their age.
You ready for age?
Nuh-uh.
Whoa!
All new Oz.
That's coming up tomorrow.
After Mark Gerardo's wife, Janair, killed his new girlfriend, Meredith, and took her own life, Mark's shock and devastation was compounded by the discovery of hours worth of recordings Janair had been secretly compiling for months.
Are you on the other phone and am I on speakerphone so that Meredith can hear me?
No.
How would she go when I hear you?
Okay.
Well, why didn't you answer your other phone?
We're back with Mark Gerardo, who's gone through an unimaginable tragedy.
His wife, Janair, murdered his new girlfriend, Meredith, before killing herself.
We just heard one of the phone calls, Janair, secretly recorded after this incident.
You made a surprising discovery, one that would have sent chills down my spine.
Yeah.
I was actually coming back from a job interview in Pennsylvania, and we had said we'd talk afterwards and let her know how it was.
So she was upset that I hadn't called her, but the interview was two hours long.
And then when I matched the timeline from the phone call to the receipt at a gun range, she was standing getting gun training or waiting to have gun training while she's having this conversation with me.
Oh, my goodness.
I don't understand how...
I just can't picture her there.
I can't picture her buying a gun, let alone standing and practicing and then having a normal conversation with me.
You were married again 24 years.
Did she ever show any signs of violence?
Had she ever practiced shooting guns before?
Never.
We were as anti-gun as anybody.
I've never handled a gun in my life, and to my knowledge, she hadn't either.
She had family members who were hunters, and she was disgusted by that whole thing.
She didn't want any part of it.
And so she would be the last person I would have ever imagined buying a gun a little and using it on herself and on someone else.
After Mark's wife, Janair, killed his new girlfriend, Meredith, and herself, Mark did his own in-depth investigation to understand, at least try to make sense of what had happened.
How shocking was it to uncover all the details that came to light, things that as a husband you probably hadn't noticed but were there the whole time?
I think it's important to know we were seeing a family therapist.
She was seeing her own psychologist and she was seeing a psychiatrist as well as a divorce coach.
Nobody picked up she was living this double life.
Nobody knew that she was doing these things until it was after the fact.
All the work you've done on this, in retrospect, if you could go back, would you do anything differently?
If I have hindsight, I wouldn't have started a relationship with Meredith.
And I wouldn't have hurt Jannera the way I did.
I absolutely would not have done that.
Mark, why didn't Jannera just kill you?
You were the problem.
You were the one who left her.
Well, that was her plan B. There was a letter that she wrote.
And, you know, she described in great detail what she was going to do.
She was afraid of me walking in first.
And she says, If he does, I'm going to have to do a Bryn Phil Hartman.
And Phil Hartman was a famous actor on Saturday Night Live.
And he and his wife took his.
So she used their names as verbs as to what she was going to do.
So I was going to be the backup plan to take me out.
Take you out before taking out Meredith?
Yes.
That's my understanding from the letter.
After Janair committed this unthinkable act, Mark discovered a secret 15-page letter she had written.
Coming up, Mark's going to reveal what he's able to share from that devastating letter and what he would say to Janair today.
The latest on missing Colorado mom, Kelsey Berry.
Her fiancé headed to trial.
Is there enough to convince?
She saw the outline of a body that she believes was Kelsey.
All nuance.
That's coming up next week.
On April the 23rd, 2018, Mark Gerardo's life was shattered when his wife, Jenaire, murdered his new girlfriend, Meredith, and then killed herself.
Mark's here today.
We're also joined by psychiatrist Dr. Judith Joseph.
Mark, you say Jenaire was diagnosed with PTSD and she may have also had borderline personality disorder.
Yes, that was not a term I even knew until someone mentioned it to me.
Multiple people, including my own therapist as well, that these seemed like signs of someone who has borderline personality disorder.
So I dove deep into finding out what that even meant.
Dr. Joseph, does Janair's behavior seem more consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder?
I'll say it again, this borderline personality disorder, which I want you all to remember because it's a ton more common than most of us appreciate.
So, let's remember, I haven't met your wife, but I have spoken to you and I've seen some of the files.
And to me, it seems more in line with borderline personality disorder.
And here's why.
I treat people with severe trauma and PTSD in my office every day.
And one of the hallmark things that I see is an intense fear, avoidance of a trauma.
And in this case, she really didn't avoid the thing that was traumatizing.
It's quite the opposite.
She became engulfed with this affair.
Also, with borderline personality disorder, you see this intense rage, this revenge aspect.
And also, we have to remember that it is possible to have both at the same time, but it's very rare.
Only 2% of the population has both borderline personality disorder and PTSD at the same time, so it's highly unlikely.
So after the incident, Mark says he discovered a 15-page letter Janair had written.
Now, out of respect to her and to Meredith, he's asked us to keep that letter private, but Dr. Joseph and I have both read it.
I was stunned.
And Dr. Joseph, if it's okay, I'd like you to just walk through what signs of borderline personality disorder you saw in that letter.
So remember, there is the DSM-5.
It's like the bible of psychiatric diagnoses.
And typically people have this persistent pattern in their relationships that is unstable.
They have impulsivity, not a clear sense of self.
And when I read that letter, there were key things that really stood out to me.
Typically, you have to meet five of nine criteria.
In that letter, there are all nine criteria met.
Every single one.
I mean, that is very rare.
That speaks to severe borderline personality disorder.
So Dr. Joseph is going to have the full list of the borderline personality disorder signs and symptoms at DrOz.com.
It's worth checking.
Mark, if Janair was sitting where I am right now, what would you tell her?
What would you say?
Well, I actually talk to her all the time.
People don't believe this, but I tell her I love her.
I tell her I'm sorry.
I tell her I'm sorry that I didn't understand this illness that she had for probably most of her life.
I had just become so normalized to the things that she was doing.
And again, looking back, it's just...
It's devastating to see these nine criteria and go, I can check them off.
And again, that's the reason I'm here.
I want other people to understand this illness.
I think it's helpful to not blame yourself and to take care of yourself first.
A lot of people don't understand this and a lot of families suffer because they live with someone with borderline personality disorder.
So decreasing the stigma and getting the right care is so important.
I think it's also a dangerous disorder at times because it takes people to extreme places and very unpredictably.
I do believe that you're sad, and I do believe you loved her.
I do.
And I wish you the best going forward.
Part of your processing is to write, as you mentioned earlier, Mark's written a book and a blog where he documents his journey since this all happened.
We're going to put a link to his website at dros.com.
If you or anyone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline right now.
The number's at the bottom of the screen.
We'll be right back.
Joseph, thank you.
Up next, a story you have to see to believe.
A mom who actually helped exonerate her own daughter's convicted killer before new DNA evidence found another suspect.
The high profile case of Angie Dodge is one you may never forget.
A young woman brutally murdered in her quiet hometown.
The case garnered national attention as the hunt for Angie's killer stumped police for decades.
One man would end up spending over 20 years in prison for her murder.
But was he really the one responsible for her death?
On today's True Crime, the story you have to see to believe.
A mom who actually helped exonerate her own daughter's convicted killer before new DNA evidence found another suspect.
The victim's family is here, and what they have to say will shock you.
Take a look.
It was the summer of 1996. As the quiet town of Idaho Falls, Idaho slept, 18-year-old Angie Ray Dodge was viciously raped and murdered in her apartment.
With no leads, police were stumped.
It wasn't until six months later, police got a break, which led them to 20-year-old Christopher Tapp.
Tapp confessed after multiple interviews and polygraph tests to holding Angie down while she was attacked and stabbed that night.
Christopher Tapp was tried and sentenced to 30 years to life in prison.
On March 22, 2017, after spending over 20 years in prison and with the support of Angie's family, it was proven that Tapp's DNA did not match any of the DNA left at the crime scene or on Angie's body.
Tapp walked away a free man.
But the question still remains, who killed Angie Dodge?
New DNA evidence and genetic genealogy may be the key to breaking this decades-old case.
Joining me now is Angie Dodge's mother, Carol, and her brother, Brent.
I want to thank you both for being here.
Thank you.
And all these years later, it's still hard to revisit those days.
But let me take you back to when your daughter was 18 years of age, just starting out in her life.
What was going on?
She had graduated from high school.
She had spent a semester in college.
She was working two jobs.
She'd just bought a new car.
She just wanted to be free.
She wanted to experience being an adult.
And so three weeks before, she was brutally murdered.
She moved into her own apartment.
And, um, she died.
When did you find out something was wrong?
Um...
I had called Angie and a girl answered the telephone at her work, but I had dialed Angie's extension.
And I just said, is Angie there?
And she said, Angie's been just found dead.
And I just remember saying, oh God, no, and I hung up the phone.
And I went to the police department, and I just ran into the police department screaming, where's my baby?
And they took me to a room, and the next thing I remember is Brent.
Coming and saying, she's gone, Mom.
When they caught this man, Mr. Tapp.
Right.
And arrested him.
Right.
How did that make you feel?
When they first made the arrest, I remember him standing, facing the judge, and I just remember calling him a beast.
Very understandable.
I think most of us would feel that way.
The man we thought had murdered our beautiful daughter had been arrested.
Right.
When he got convicted and sent to jail for 30 years, did you feel vindicated?
Did you feel that was the right...
It was actually 30 years to life, so he could potentially have never gotten out of jail.
Did that make you feel better?
Uh...
Even before, when Chris was going through the process, before he even went to trial, I remember him being housed at one of the facilities about 50 miles out of Idaho Falls And I drove down to that facility and signed in.
And I remember Chris coming to the glass window and picking up the phone.
And I just remember saying to Chris, what was my baby's last words?
And he threw the phone at me and he walked away.
And I just, I was so angry at him because he wouldn't tell me.
But yet I knew his DNA didn't match.
So it's just not making sense.
You're obviously frustrated because you believe he knows something.
When did you begin to think that maybe he wasn't there at all?
It was probably 12, 13 years later, I actually got out the confession tapes of all the VHSs and started watching them.
I just remember thinking about all the things that he said during his confession as when we went to court and all of this being discussed.
And a lot of Chris's tapes, his confession tapes, were suppressed, but none of it made sense to me.
And I just kept thinking, why isn't Chris's DNA there?
So then the question remains, who killed Angie Dodge?
Chris spent over 20 years in prison for confessing to Angie's murder, but was later exonerated by DNA evidence.
Now he's here opening up about his time behind bars after two years of freedom, so don't go away.
A diet soda health alert.
It may save us some calories, but is it slowly killing us?
Just two glasses of diet sodas may increase your risk of death by 25%.
All new Oz.
That's coming up on Monday.
This was 20-year-old Christopher Tapp, who confessed to his participation in the murder of Angie Dodge back in 1996. Chris would end up spending 21 years, the majority of his adult life, in prison.
A taped confession landed him behind bars.
But there's just one catch.
Christopher Tapp was not telling the truth.
He's here opening up now in a daytime exclusive on what it took to clear his name.
Chris is here joined by his public defender, John Thomas.
Chris, nice to meet you.
Good to meet you, sir.
Nice to meet you.
What was it that happened during those confessions that prompted you to say those things?
What was it about the interrogations that got you to confess to a crime you didn't commit?
A lot of lies, a lot of promises that were never kept, a lot of manipulation.
And it was just one of those things where Maybe in the back of my mind I was trying to do something right and just the snowball just continued to you know go over me to the point of where it happened where I just got run over and and it messed me up for 20 you know some odd years of my life.
Many watching now will say well my goodness you didn't do the crime you weren't even there why would you at any level Admit that you had a role.
What were you trying to help?
I just thought I was trying to help myself and help them, you know, solve a case.
And every time they gave me the famous, you know, help us to help you.
So repeat, you know, some of the things that I would say to them, you know, as they're giving me the conversation.
And they give me answers to some of the questions and I just repeat it.
And it just got worse and worse as time went on.
Walk me through the process.
So, give me an example of how your words were used against you or you were trapped in the same things that sounded bad enough that a jury convicted you.
I mean, the best example I could give you was there was a map that they drew up of the apartment.
And the officer is, you know, explaining to me that Where did the murder happen?
And be like, no, Chris, that's the living room.
That's wrong.
It happened over here.
I'm like, oh, okay.
Because you'd never been there.
Right.
I never gave them answers.
It was just information they gave to me that I kept repeating back to them and giving to them.
John, what was wrong with the interrogation process?
Did Chris have legal representation during the interrogation?
He did.
His lawyers didn't do their jobs.
His lawyers didn't sit beside him.
And then it was a false confession.
So, Chris, you confess.
You're convicted, not surprisingly.
You're age 21. You're gonna spend the rest of your life potentially in jail.
How do you process all that?
And you're going to jail for a crime you didn't actually commit, and only you know that.
Heartbreaking.
It was truly...
Heartbreaking.
To know that I was going to go to prison for something I didn't do and have to sit there and have to live, you know, a life that no person should ever have to live.
It's miserable.
It's disgusting.
It's rough inside.
And you have to change who you are and you have to become something different inside of there to survive.
And it sucked.
There is no other way to explain it, but it truly sucked.
Just to be clear, look me in the eyes.
Did you have anything to do with Angie's murder?
No.
Did you even know Angie?
I knew Angie, yeah, as an acquaintance.
But I didn't know her.
So as an innocent man, all these years later, finally being exonerated, how do you cope with that?
A lot of faith.
A lot of true faith and never giving up.
That was the one thing in this world that I never could do.
They broke me once, and they threw me away like I wasn't worth anything.
So since I came home, now I work two jobs, and I have a wife, and I have a family, and I want to prove to myself and to the world that I was worth something.
Well, you're doing it by being here today.
So, John, what was it that led to Chris's exoneration?
I mean, we have a confession tape saying he held her down.
And who was involved?
It was a 10-year journey for me.
So, I worked on Chris's case to get him exonerated for 10 years.
Based on the interrogation tapes, it is clear, there was clear and convincing evidence that Chris Tapp was not the person that was involved here, and that it was a false confession.
And then we got Carol Dodge.
She would go into the police and say, hey, look, you haven't found my daughter's killer yet.
Why?
What have you done today?
What have you done today?
All right, so if it wasn't for Carol Dodge coming up to you, the courthouse, Would Crystal be in jail for the murder of her daughter?
Carol has been the force behind the force.
And she really rallied the troops.
She would come into my office.
She would come to my home and say, hey, John, we've got to look into this.
Hey, John, you know, I found this knife outside from somebody and we think we may need to have it tested.
Or, hey, John, there's this other guy that we're looking for.
Forensic genealogy and DNA evidence would later lead authorities to arrest 53-year-old Brian Lee Dripps Sr., who has now been charged for the 1996 rape and murder of Angie Dodge.
After testing over 100 DNA samples, his DNA was extracted from a discarded cigarette butt and matched to the DNA found at the crime scene.
Joining me now to help explain the science is investigative genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, Thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me again.
They're singing your praises about the important role you played in this case.
So you were hired by the Idaho Falls Police Department to build a family tree.
Using the evidence that you had, if you could explain to us how you did that, because that was ultimately what brought closure to the Dodge family.
Yes, the Idaho Falls Police Department never gave up on trying to identify who left their DNA behind at Angie's murder.
And so that was submitted to Parabon and analyzed and then uploaded to GEDmatch.
Once we have it on GEDmatch, we're looking for the closest matches.
We're hoping we're going to have nice, strong matches there.
Now, this case broke the mold.
It was the most challenging case I've worked in law enforcement so far.
Where we've had a successful conclusion.
Carol just kept pushing me, so I decided to spend some time trying to build those trees, and that led me to identify three different ancestral couples.
We have these six persons of interest, and I was sure it had to be one of them.
And the results came back, and it was incredibly disappointing, because it appeared to rule out all six of these descendants.
And it turned out there was a seventh male descendant from that family, but he was missing from the paper trail.
He had no connection to this family because his parents had married young, divorced young, and his mother had taken him away from that family and he had been raised by a stepfather and taken his surname.
So I couldn't find him in the family's obituaries.
He had no connection to them through the paper trail.
And it turns out that was the suspect.
So once I was able to share that with Idaho Falls Police Department, they collected his DNA and it was finally a match to that DNA that had been waiting years and years to be identified.
They got a discarded cigarette butt.
That's right.
And so they were able to pick it up and it matched the DNA that you'd identified.
Yes.
The seventh son.
Would have been impossible to find normally.
What's eerie is that police revealed Drips lived across the street from Angie at the time of her murder and knew her as a passerby.
Police even questioned him within the first 72 hours.
That's how close they were.
We reached out to the Idaho Police, the Idaho Falls Police Department regarding this investigation.
They said in part, the arrest of an individual who was admitted to committing the crime and whose DNA was at the scene has been made.
We are grateful to the individuals who have submitted their genetic profiles to databases which allow this important work to be done.
My friends, DNA solved this case.
All of our DNA. That's why it's so important.
So think about it.
Everyone would upload their profiles to the free site, jedmatch.com, where you could all become part of the crime-fighting community.
Now, I'm going to put instructions on the Crime Hunters page so you can all take action right now.
Remember, this is really important.
And you also have to do one more thing for me.
If you've already uploaded your information to Jedmatch, you've got to go back and opt in.
There's a new rule now.
You have to opt in saying law enforcement can access your profile to help solve cases like Angie Dodge and bring closure to her mom.
Up next, the unusual bond between a mother and her daughter's alleged killer, where Chris Tapp wants Angie Dodge's family to know.
Stay with us.
We're back discussing the many twists and turns in the Angie Dodge murder case.
Christopher Tapp was sentenced to life in prison for Angie's 1996 murder, but forensic genealogy and DNA evidence led authorities to arrest the real killer, 53-year-old Brian Lee Drip Sr., who has now been charged for the 1996 rape and murder of Angie Dodge.
Thankfully, Chris was released from prison and has now been officially exonerated.
So we're gonna talk to all of you a little bit here, but it's obviously emotional when you hear that.
How did you react to the DNA evidence that the real killer was there and then he confessed?
It was him.
When I heard his name, I just said, you gotta be kidding.
Brian Tripps, he lived across the street.
I was angry.
That it took 23 years of my life when he lived across the street.
Had you known he was a suspect?
I had read the police report when they interviewed him.
However, it just got buried in boxes and boxes of paperwork at the police department.
You speak for many families who feel they haven't had closure with the loss of their loved ones.
Not only do we not solve many murders in America, but we solve them the wrong way sometimes.
So Brent, you started a foundation called Five for Hope.
How do you hope to help families?
It started Several months before the news conference when they arrested Brian Dripps, and that was my mother had went to another news conference in which they had announced they had arrested somebody in another cold case murder.
And she called me on the phone and she said, when is it going to be our turn?
When is it going to be our turn?
And So little did we know three months later it was going to be our turn, thanks to C.C. Moore and those other individuals that helped.
And so the idea behind it is everybody can put $5 in to bring hope, and we're wanting to use that money to pay it forward.
Let's do that.
And in that way, we channel our grief in a positive way.
Chris, the Dodge family was instrumental.
In getting you released.
Speak to them.
Forget about us.
They helped set you free.
What do you have to say to them?
I've said so many words to you and I will continue to say how grateful and how thankful I am.
I'm thankful that I can call you family.
And I'm thankful that we can sit here now and smile and laugh.
And like I said, and you know it as well as I do, I don't want anybody to ever forget about Angie.
I've always said that since I've come home.
That is the one thing in this world, you know, please, you know, I will always stand up and always be able to say, please don't forget about Angie.
But I love you guys.
We love you too, Chris.
That stun you that the mother Of the young, beautiful woman that you're accused and confessed of killing was actually out there trying to free you.
It was.
At the start, it was truly mind-boggling to me.
I called my attorney, and he says, hey, Carol Dodge would like to talk to you.
And like Carol said earlier, the only interaction she had was she came to visit me one time in the jail, and she asked me that question, and I just had no answer.
I had nothing to say to the woman.
And then all of a sudden, you know, 12 years into the prison sentence, she's like, hey, Carol Dodge would like to talk to you.
And I called Carol, and it was so heartfelt.
I can never, ever express how thankful and grateful and how truly I love this woman for doing what she's done for me.
Carol, you want to say something?
If I could say to all the parents...
Out there that have been solved murder cases or missing people, don't stop looking for the truth.
It's a difficult journey, but you have to be really persistent because every victim deserves justice.
To your point, the power of one.
This is a remarkable story and of relentless persistence.
Thank you for sharing.
I know it's painful.
We'll be right back.
An Oz skincare investigation.
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And what we found will shock you.
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That's coming up tomorrow.
On the next true crime, a horrific murder that left a nine-month-old baby girl without a mother.
23-year-old Danielle Marshall was brutally shot and killed while her baby cried right there in the very next room.
Please quickly focus on her ex-boyfriend, Joshua Gibson.
But when they questioned him, he made a shocking accusation of his own.
Take a look.
On my way to my parents' house, made some turns with her, and as I made another turn, a car drove past me and shot at me twice.
Called 911, told them what happened, who I think it could possibly be.
I said, you know, it could have been Danielle. - On the next true crime, former prosecutor and co-host of "The View," Sonny Hostin is here.
She has all the twists and turns in this story as part of her new show, Truth About Murder.
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