12/07/16 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Check out the archives at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton Show.
And you know what?
While you're there, you can also read all the writings of the great Will Grigg, managing editor of the Libertarian Institute as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Will?
Scott, I'm doing very well.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
Good, good.
Happy to have you here.
And, you know, you write really good stuff.
I like reading it.
Well, I have for about 27 years now.
And, you know, there's a guy named Christopher Tapp who one day is, well, maybe already, is going to owe you a bit of thanks here for covering his story.
Apparently he's passing under most everybody else's radar.
The latest article, well, on this subject, second to latest article at Libertarian Institute dot org slash articles slash will is or should just be slash will.
Anyway, Libertarian Institute dot org slash will lead you to justice has no expiration date.
That's a quote.
The continued wrongful imprisonment of Christopher Tapp.
So, well, go ahead.
Who's Christopher Tapp?
Oh, and I should say this is what?
Part five or six in a series, right?
Yes, it is.
Christopher Tapp is a 40 year old man who spent half of his life in prison for a murder he didn't commit.
He's from Idaho Falls, Idaho, in Bonneville County, which is a rural county in the southeastern quadrant of Idaho.
There are only about 50 or 60,000 people, perhaps 60 to 80,000 people by now who live in Bonneville County.
Christopher Tapp, as a young man dropped out of high school, but he didn't drop out quickly enough.
If he had dropped out of high school as a freshman or perhaps if he'd not gone to high school, he would have had the tremendous good fortune of never having met Jared Furman, who was a school resource officer and a DARE instructor who befriended Tapp at a very young age.
And several years later, talent scouted him as a patsy after Angie Dodge, an 18 year old woman, was murdered in her home in July of 1996.
And the IFPD, under pressure to solve this case, decided that they were going to use Chris Tapp and another friend by the name of Jared Sargis, Jeremy Sargis, forgive me, in an attempt to set up a third friend of theirs by the name of Ben Hobbs for the murder.
Ben Hobbs had been arrested in Ely, Nevada.
I believe that was in September of 1996.
He'd been accused of rape using a knife.
Angie Dodge had been sexually assaulted and she had been dismembered in her apartment, her second story, second floor bedroom, by somebody wielding an edged weapon.
And so by virtue of the fact that Hobbs, a resident of Idaho Falls, knew these other two, had been arrested for assault using a knife and that this was a sexual assault in nature, they decided that he was a good suspect for the crime.
In spite of the fact that none of these three was a genetic match for the DNA evidence that had been found in some abundance in Angie Dodge's bedroom.
It was on the sheets.
It was on her body.
It was on her clothing.
It was infused into a teddy bear that had apparently been used to suffocate her in order to muffle her screams.
So there was an abundance of genetic evidence.
None of it matched any of these three guys.
So what the police in Idaho Falls did was they followed what you might call the Central Park Five model of interrogation.
Put these three guys in separate rooms and then say that one of them is going to end up taking the fall for the crime and that each of them being interrogated in a specific room had an obvious interest in turning on the other two and that eventually the music would stop and you don't want to be the one left without a chair.
And so Jeremy Sargis, being a young man from a family of some means and influence in Idaho Falls, quite sensibly refused to say anything to the police interrogators and his family obtained suitable legal representation and very quickly he was released and no charges were ever pursued against him.
Once again, there was no physical evidence connecting any of these three to the murder.
Ben Hobbs had been arrested in Ely, Nevada and he made a point of saying go ahead and test my DNA because I wasn't there and I can say this knowing that the genetic tests will show that I wasn't there for this murder.
He ended up serving time in prison for the rape in Nevada but there was no evidence connecting him to the murder of Angie Dodge.
Unfortunately for Chris Tapp, he had known Jared Furman and Jared Furman had been grooming him and I use that expression knowing its connotations.
Furman again is the dare cop, his friend.
He's the dare cop.
He was a sergeant by rank at the IFPD but he was given what you might call a brevet promotion to the rank of detective in order to serve as the chief investigator for the Angie Dodge murder.
And knowing that he could insinuate himself into Chris Tapp's confidence Sergeant Furman began manipulating him into accusing first Ben, first Ben Hobbs and then Jeremy Sargis and then after the genetic evidence had excluded those two suspects he manipulated Chris Tapp, Furman did, into naming random people who had nothing at all to do with the actual crime.
At one point he said that somebody named Mike might have been there.
This is all happening I should point out in late 1996 and early 1997.
During these sessions no attorney is present.
Tapp is of course being assured by Furman, his good and staunch friend that he doesn't need an attorney to be present with him because what he's doing is he's helping to solve this murder.
At this point he had not been told that he was a suspect and he hadn't been told that he'd been cleared by the DNA testing either.
And so because of his ingenuous nature and because of the predatory opportunism of Jared Furman he was being put into these lengthy interrogation sessions and eventually he was given an immunity agreement by the prosecutor the then district attorney from Bonneville County.
I don't think it was Kip Manwaring.
I think Kip Manwaring became the district attorney the following year and his name will play a very big role in these stories as I continue to write them.
He's the one who ended up securing the conviction.
But there had been an immunity agreement extended to Chris Tapp on the assumption that he was going to help them solve this murder.
And after they were left without a suspect and more importantly after it turned out that the DNA evidence didn't corroborate the stories he was being fed by the police and regurgitating back to them about Jeremy Sargis and Ben Hobbs the immunity agreement was cancelled because he was lying to the police investigators and of course he was lying.
He was acting as a pass-through for the lies that they were telling him.
And in the course of these interrogations I should point out they were sharing with them critical details about the nature of the crime about the crime scene itself things that the public at large could not know and in doing so they were setting him up to be the perpetrator.
Eventually the prosecutor, Kip Manwaring, whom I'd referred to earlier would say in the trial in 1998 that the guilty knowledge that Chris Tapp had shared during these interrogation sessions could only be in the possession of somebody who had been there when the crime was being committed.
And of course these things were all told to him by the police investigators and some of it, as it turns out was contradicted by later factual disclosures about the physical evidence.
By January of 1997 Chris Tapp's mother, Verna, became very concerned because she had never shared Chris's perspective on Jared Furman about his reliability.
And at this time Chris was undergoing detailed and very confrontational polygraph examinations.
At this point I want to make it clear that if anybody who listens to this interview is asked to undergo a polygraph exam he or she should resolutely refuse to do so.
It cannot help you.
It is never used for the purpose of clearing somebody.
It's always used for the purpose of trying to incriminate somebody.
And in most jurisdictions it's not admissible as evidence in court.
And even where it is admissible it cannot be admitted to help you.
The only reason you're being subjected to a polygraph examination is because the police are treating you as a person of interest or a criminal suspect and want to find something they can use in order to close the case by putting you behind bars.
So don't have anything to do with polygraphs.
They're as scientifically reliable as water-witching.
Seriously, I'm going to interrupt just to chime in for a second that anybody can watch the Penn & Teller episode of BS where they talk about polygraphs and they interview the great George Matschke from antipolygraph.org.
This thing isn't a lie detector.
It's a voodoo machine, basically.
It's just a pretension.
It's a prop in an interrogation is all it is.
I haven't seen that program.
I'm going to have to do so.
I appreciate the fact that you refer to it as a voodoo machine.
What Tapp was told by Stephen Finn, who was the detective conducting the polygraph examinations, is that he had to conform his story about what happened to Angie Dodge and what the polygraph machine was supposedly telling Finn.
And so Tapp didn't understand what a polygraph is.
He didn't even think of it as a lie detector.
He had been led to believe that it was something akin to the Atavacron device from Star Trek, which on an alien planet was the vast storehouse, the digital storehouse of all the knowledge of that civilization.
And supposedly this represented an objective set of facts to which Tapp had to conform his story.
And he actually, at one point, was delighted after Stephen falsely told him that he had registered a truthful reply to a claim that the police wanted him to validate.
Tapp was delighted.
He said, I finally got it right.
After all this time, I'm finally understanding how my memory is deceiving me and I have to change my story in order to conform to what the polygraph machine is telling you.
That was the perspective he had on this procedure involving this supposed lie detector test.
And as you point out, Scott, it really doesn't detect lies.
It's just a prop.
In any case, by the time that his mother got involved in this, the police had determined that they were going to close the case by putting Chris Tapp behind bars as a suspect, either as a collaborator or as the perpetrator.
Now they knew that the physical evidence meant that he couldn't have been the perpetrator, but they had persuaded themselves that if they could convict him as a conspirator, as an accomplice in this murder, that they could close the case and then they could make it go away and nobody would really be concerned about what happened to this young man who was part of the local drug culture, a high school dropout.
Nobody really considered him to be particularly useful anyway.
And then there was, of course, an outstanding murder, a shocking crime happening in this predominantly Mormon town of about 30,000 people, involving a popular, lovely 18-year-old blonde girl who had many, many friends.
And so they thought it would make an equitable exchange from their perspective, that they put this guy behind bars and close the case, that way nobody would bother them anymore.
And so his mother finally said, listen, you can't go back in and talk to the police unless you have an attorney present.
And Chris was complaining that he'd given his word, he'd go back in on the following Monday, this is a Saturday morning in January of 1997 that this conversation took place, he'd go back in on Monday because he'd given his word.
She said, I don't care.
This is not the way it's supposed to work.
You're obviously not working from the perspective of your best interest, so go back in on Monday, but make sure you have an attorney present.
And so on that Saturday morning, Furman showed up at his home, at the Tapp home, saying, where's Chris?
He's supposed to come down and talk to us.
And Verna Tapp told him, no, he'll go back on Monday and he's going to have an attorney present.
And, of course, Furman was really angry and he went back to the police department.
And about an hour later, Chief Livesey, the police chief of Idaho Falls, shows up on the doorstep of the Tapp residence saying, where's Chris?
And Verna said, I just told Furman that he's going to be back on Monday, but he's not talking to you again unless he has an attorney present.
And Livesey's saying, you don't understand, he's up to his eyeballs on this.
And she said, no, he isn't.
I know that's what you're trying to say, but that's not true.
An hour and a half later, Tapp was arrested for supposedly harboring a fugitive.
And he's never seen the outside of a jail cell since then.
This was in January of 1997.
About six days later, after he had been persuaded that the only way he could avoid the death penalty was by admitting to some involvement of some kind in this murder, he confessed to this crime in the presence of the polygraph operator, Steve Finn.
And he did so in terms that contradicted the evidence about what had happened specifically by way of the wounds being inflicted on the victim.
For instance, he had claimed that he had pulled up her T-shirt, and he didn't describe the correct color of T-shirt.
He said that she was wearing a T-shirt and sweats, and this is supposedly guilty knowledge.
He didn't describe the correct color of those items of very common clothing.
Bear in mind, once again, this murder took place in July of 1986.
It was warm.
It's very common for people to go to sleep wearing a T-shirt and sweats.
But he had said he had supposedly pulled up her shirt and stabbed her in the breast.
She was stabbed in the breast, certainly, but she was stabbed through the clothing, and he didn't identify which breast had been stabbed.
That's just one example of how his so-called confession doesn't comport with the facts, but rather closely tracks a version of the story that was told to him by the police investigators in their exercise of cynical ventriloquism.
Let me stop you for a second here.
And I'm sorry, because there's always going to be a so, because you're so good at telling the story, but I want to make sure that I'm on the same page with you here before we go on.
So basically what happens is, when this girl is murdered, the cops say, okay, well, we have a guy who's from around here who's wanted in another violent crime against a woman and with a knife, but they pretty much conflate a rape with a knife to cutting someone to pieces, which is actually, if I was, you know, Mulder and this was a TV show, I would say, ah, that's a kind of different M.O. s, I'm not sure, but anyway.
So they liked this guy, and then they went to work on one of the cop's, you know, little buddies from the neighborhood, as you say that he'd been basically grooming as a pet of the police department here, to basically implicate this other guy.
The other guy who, as you write, and I think you said, is smart enough to have a lawyer and to shut his mouth and to just say, yeah, you can have my DNA because I know I'm innocent, but otherwise, leave me the hell alone.
He's already due in time, I guess, for his other charge.
But so the cops are left kind of halfway into their story.
They can't pin it on the guy they wanted to pin it on, but now they have this other guy who is already involved in telling them a lot of what they want to hear because, as you say, they put these words in his mouth, and so they just decided, shrug, let's make it look like this guy is only telling us things that he could only know if he was the one who did it, and they just decide to pin it on him when, really, they were the ones who, at least possibly, maybe presumably, they knew they were lying when they were trying to get him to be a witness in the first place.
They were basically setting him up even to be a witness, and then they decided, well, we've got to convict somebody, so they convicted him.
Do I understand?
On the basis of the evidence that I have examined appears to be what happened here.
They didn't believe that Tapp himself was the murderer.
They didn't believe that he was an accomplice to the murder until it became expedient for them to pretend that that's what they believed at a time when Hobbs had been cleared and Sargis had been cleared of any involvement in the crime.
Tapp had an alibi.
He had a very good alibi.
It came out in the trial about a year and a half later, and the police, at the point that both Hobbs and Sargis had been disqualified, were desperate to clear the case.
It was becoming a political embarrassment to them, and so they went to Plan B, and Plan B was to take this man, this young man, who had been filling full of details of the case with the objective of deploying him as a weapon against Ben Hobbs, and they still are trying to say that Ben Hobbs is guilty of this crime, and they're still trying to say that Jeremy Sargis was involved in it somehow.
Jeremy Sargis, the poor guy, he stood to inherit a multimillion-dollar business in Idaho Falls.
They drove him out of the county.
He's living up in the northern part of the state.
He's gotten as far away as he can from Idaho Falls while remaining within the boundaries of the Jim State because his reputation was completely ruined.
As late as, let me think, 2004, 2006, they were still putting his name out for public consumption as somebody who was either a material witness or a potential accomplice in the murder of Angie Dodge.
They have not so much as a subatomic particle evidence to support that.
It had been cleared by the DNA evidence.
It had been completely cooperative up to the point where they started wanting him to say things that would incriminate himself, and now they're trying to say that by virtue of the fact that he invoked his sovereign right against self-incrimination, he should be considered a criminal suspect, which, of course, is nonsense on stilts.
Right, and we know who did it, and we're going to get to that part in a minute, that this isn't just some blind mystery where there's reasonable doubt.
We're beyond any kind of doubt here.
Well, the thing about what happened with Tapp, though, in the interrogations, is that most of them were videotaped.
Most of the sessions between Jared Furman and Chris Tapp were videotaped.
And as you're saying, they had brought him in to be a witness, and he understood that.
He thought he was their little helper in solving this case.
He had no idea that they had turned and decided to make him the target at all until sometime later.
Exactly.
And the polygraph sessions, likewise, were videotaped.
They had scores of hours of videotape.
And so when he was put on trial in, I believe, was April or March of 1998, the prosecution very cunningly cobbled together excerpts of the critical interview where he broke and offered a patently false confession to this murder, and they used that as a way of convincing the jury that there was simply no way that the defense could rebut the case against him because we have him on videotape confessing to this crime.
And by that time, his defense attorney, a fellow by the name of Booker, had been trying to find some way to counteract the admittedly devastating impact of this videotaped confession.
And he was dealing here with this Talmudic volume of discovery evidence, which included, as I mentioned before, scores or hundreds of hours of videotape, none of which was indexed adequately.
What's really important is that the critical videotaped encounter between Detective Stephen Finn, the polygraph manipulator, and Chris Tapp, that videotape contains all kinds of exculpatory, what they call Brady-protected evidence, showing that he was manipulating Tapp into a false confession.
That videotape was artfully mislabeled by the prosecution.
It was provided in discovery to the defense, but it was mislabeled.
There was no way that a conscientious defense attorney who would have the type of resources available to a private defense attorney or even to a public defender would be able to go through that volume of material in order to find that particular needle in that particular field of haystacks.
And that was by design, I contend.
It wasn't until years later when the mother of the victim, the victim's name was Angie Dodge, the mother's name is Carol, started to go through this evidence on her own that she found all of these videotaped interrogation sessions in which it was clear that they were systematically manipulating this young man into confessing to a crime that he didn't commit.
And she became convinced several years ago that Chris Tapp was entirely innocent of the murder and began to agitate for a new trial.
She was the one who really instigated the effort to examine this as a wrongful conviction.
And she has enlisted the help of, among others, a wonderful group of people who are retired judicial officials and even a few from the FBI perhaps seeking to make penance.
The group is called Judges for Justice and it has put out a series of devastating reports that demolish the case against Chris Tapp that provide abundant evidence of conscious, deliberate, cynical misconduct on the part of both the Idaho Falls Police Department and the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office.
And it's because of their intervention that you've seen traction being found on the part of Chris Tapp's efforts for post-conviction relief.
Just within the last couple of months, the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office has published, amid agonies of reluctance, a document that was compiled by a former Blackfoot, Idaho police detective by the name of Stuart Robinson.
He's now in private practice, but he's doing privately essentially the same kind of work he had done as a publicly funded government police officer.
He's basically helping the police.
But he had been hired at an expense of $36,000 to put out an independent report examining the Chris Tapp conviction.
And for that $36,000, the tax victims residing in Bonneville County have gotten sort of a tepid rehash of the best elements of the work that had been done by judges for justice investigating the evidence.
He has, among other things, Stuart Robinson in this report, once again, funded by the, through I should say, not by, through the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office, confirmed that Chris Tapp's confession is spurious.
This is a false confession obtained through investigative methods that are illegal and unreliable.
For all of that, however, Robinson still wants to maintain the pretense that somehow Tapp was involved.
And on the basis of the evidence that he induces, he can't make that claim.
He's simply saying that he believes that, once again, he's in the possession of some kind of guilty knowledge that suggests that he was on the site.
He was on the scene when this happened.
He's not the murderer.
He's not the man who wielded the knife.
And his confession is invalid.
But we still have to pretend that he somehow was involved in this crime.
Even though, as you've written, they had to admit, they kept it a secret and tried to bury it.
But they did end up having to admit that they had taken him to the site and walked him through and basically gave him his lines.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Furman and one of his accomplices, and I think that word accomplice is better than colleagues in this context, took Tapp to the crime scene, which is something that you simply do not do with somebody who's a suspect until, perhaps, after he's confessed.
And it's no longer a question of whether or not you're dealing with somebody who's a person of interest or a suspect or a suspect as opposed to somebody who's a confessed killer.
They took him to the crime scene.
They didn't record it.
They didn't memorialize it in any way.
It's only something that you learn about after the fact by comments that Furman made in videotaped conversations with Chris referring to that scene, that visit to that crime scene.
It's staggeringly improper.
But that's something that's very typical of the methods that were used here in order to frame this young man.
Yeah.
Well, and listen, I think everybody listening to this knows that this kind of thing happens all the time.
And it's basically just the simple difference between inductive and deductive logic.
Yes.
If you want to build a case that somebody did anything, you can.
Cherry pick a case.
Saddam did 9-11, whichever you want.
And that's how cops build murder cases.
They don't go through deductively and say, man, there's really only one suspect that it could possibly be at this point or that kind of thinking.
They don't even approach it that way.
Conclusion first, evidence later.
I was just going to say, it's really interesting that one of the most salient criticisms in the analysis done by the Judges for Justice group is that this became a suspect-focused investigation very quickly as opposed to a criminal investigation where you investigate the crime and you deductively identify a suspect.
They had the suspect and they inductively built the case that he must have been the one who was the perpetrator.
I don't even think that criticism as potent as it is is adequate because I don't think that any of these people actually believes that Chris Tapp committed this crime.
What they are saying now is that by virtue of the fact that he confessed, the matter is disposed of.
It's res judicata.
They don't have to go back and validate what was said because what really matters is the process and not substantive justice in this case.
Which is true, which is the law, right?
Well, no, it isn't.
It isn't the law.
That's how you'd approach it from a procedural standpoint, but there is still a residual, very little used, but there's still a very important residual principle here that if substantive injustice has been done, if you're dealing with actual innocence, then the procedural matters are secondary.
And the problem is complicated by the fact that you do have a confession here, but in recent years as we've seen, there has been this avalanche of wrongful convictions that have been overturned.
You just have basically the first promontory dustings of what's proven to be an avalanche that occurred five or six years ago, and that's why people started looking at the Chris Tapp case.
Wait a second.
He's somebody who claims he was wrongfully convicted.
The physical evidence doesn't look all that compelling.
It was disputed at the time.
There's DNA evidence that needs to be tested.
Perhaps this would fit the emerging model here of wrongful convictions.
That started happening five or six years ago, just when you first started feeling the trickle of the snow that's the promontory warning of the impending avalanche that avalanche is underway right now.
But what you're saying is though that the standing court decision at this point is that if it's a question of actual innocence, then it doesn't matter if it fits the technicality of the trial was done improperly or the science was necessarily bad or some specific thing like this.
The case where the time has been told or anything of that sort.
Yeah, I'm not an attorney and I don't pretend to be, but from what I understand here, if you're dealing with a claim of actual innocence here and that claim is a compelling one based on the facts, then that tends to eclipse the procedural matters that would be used in order to dispose of.
See, I thought that was just in my imagination of how it's supposed to work, but you're telling me that's actually the case law now.
That's encouraging.
There are a number of cases where that principle has been embraced and praise God that that's the case because otherwise these people would be hopeless.
In my article, as you pointed out, Scott, I pointed out that it was such a palpable perversity that we were in this little courtroom in Idaho Falls.
There are about 20 or 22 of us there.
There were the two prosecutors.
There was the judge.
There was John Thomas who's the Bonneville County appellate public defender.
Wonderful guy.
And you had camera crew from a CBS affiliate.
And then everybody else in the courtroom was either a journalist or somebody who was there supporting Chris Tapp, including the mother of the victim and his mother who embraced like sisters in the hallway.
They become very, very close friends.
And they're both wonderful people.
But everybody in that courtroom knew that Chris Tapp was materially innocent of this crime.
And there were two people who were trying to persuade the judge that doesn't matter.
And that was Bonneville District Attorney Clark and his assistant, a fellow by the name of John Dewey.
And their entire approach was to say, listen, it doesn't really matter whether or not there's a substantive issue here having to do with Chris Tapp's innocence, whether this is a wrongful conviction he confessed, the time was told on this case.
And they're trying to say that the discovery by John Thomas of that concealed videotape of the manipulated confession, that that discovery means that it was in the possession of the defense at the time of the trial back in 1998.
And it just sort of sucks to be you if your defense attorney didn't find where we would hit, where we had hidden it at the time.
By now, the time has long expired.
And you're perpetrating a fraud on the court if you're trying to say that we should introduce this evidence now and re-examine the factual basis for convicting this young man and sending him to prison for 20 years now, prospectively for life.
It really just is something that left me and everybody else in the courtroom with the exception of these two invertebrates from the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office physically ill.
Poor Carol Dodge was sitting next to me while we were listening to this proceeding.
And she once again is the mother of the victim and somebody who's almost come to consider Chris Tapp to be an adopted son.
She's sitting there in tears, just furious to the depth of her being that these two prosecutors are trying to say that it doesn't matter whether you're dealing with an actually innocent man.
She's saying, these people think that they have all the power in the world.
They can convict an innocent man and keep him there for 20 years.
Can they breathe life back into my daughter?
The killer of her daughter has never been punished.
Yeah.
Well, we're going to get to that in just one second.
But here's something that I'm not certain I've read at least four or five of these.
I'm not certain if you've mentioned this part yet.
But I hope that maybe even as like an afterword, you know, in the seventh part of your series or however it wraps up, that you'll go back and do a criticism of the local paper and the local TV news coverage of this case as it was prosecuted as well.
Because if there's any person in the so-called civil society who's most responsible outside of the DA's office, it's the editor of the local paper who certainly, we can all just assume, but come on, they published a bunch of the government claims and wrote it as a bunch of facts for everyone to know that this is how it happened because that's how the government said it happened.
And if they hadn't have towed that line, the guy wouldn't have gotten convicted in the first place.
But somebody was forbidden from doing real journalism here.
Or no one was assigned the task of stopping this injustice before it happened 20 years ago.
And that's supposed to be their job, right?
Like if you're the editor of the local paper, you're going to do the exact same kind of journalism you're doing right now.
Exactly.
File this under the heading of people seeking to make penance for long-established injustices.
The post register was purchased about four years ago by a different ownership and a different publisher is in charge now.
And they have actually unleashed their reporters to investigate the Chris Tapp case.
And they're doing some very good adversarial reporting on what has been done, granted, decades after the fact.
And these are people I don't think it's fair to say that they are in any way tainted by what the predecessors who owned the paper did back in the 1990s and then the early 2000s and then the early years of this decade.
This only happened four or five years ago.
But there was an abrupt change in tone and an abrupt change of emphasis and focus that occurred about two and a half or three years ago.
And I actually had a chance to speak with the reporter who was assigned by the post register there in Idaho Falls to cover this case.
And he made a point of saying, yes, things have changed dramatically over the last several years.
We're allowed to do reporting now, which is why he was there.
And he's filed a number of very good stories on the subject.
That's great to hear.
And let that be a lesson to all the young journalists listening here.
Don't be a tool.
The government, they're a bunch of liars.
You know that.
I mean, why are you going to report a story and then pretend to not know that they're liars when they're lying to you?
Come on.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think it's an important little thing because this is...
I agree.
I've always just wondered, what's going on in the editor's office?
Because it ain't Mr. White from the Daily Planet.
It's something else.
Some other set of incentives at play that prevent good journalism from being done as a rule, right?
Like you're saying, for them to now be doing good work on this case is what's really notable.
That's hardly the default situation in your local paper or mine or any other for that matter.
Yeah, that's the man biting the canine rather than the other way around, unfortunately.
So we've got to talk about the mom and the guilty here because, as you've emphasized, the mom now is friends with the convicted because she knows good and well that he didn't do it.
Yes.
And so she's taking up his cause along with the cause of her poor, raped and murdered and dismembered daughter who never got justice and whoever did it is...
Where, Will?
Do you know?
Does the local DA know as well as you know who really did this crime, Will Grigg?
I don't know how he could avoid that.
On the subject of Carol Dodge, very quickly, I want to point out something.
She is the one who has been investigating this case.
The AFPD never has.
And that underscores something that I've been saying for a long time, which is that if you want a crime to be solved, don't expect the police to solve it.
They clear cases.
They don't solve crimes.
She has been the chief investigator and she has encyclopedic knowledge of what happened in this case and many similar cases that are surprisingly commonplace there in Bonneville County.
Another thing I want to emphasize, too, is that Chris Tapp himself never indulges in self-pity.
Whenever he's asked about what he's suffered, he says, I have suffered a great deal, but Carol Dodge has suffered more than I ever will.
This is a guy who's sitting in prison for something he didn't do, and he has that type of perspective on what happened.
I am one of many people who believe that the actual killer of Angie Dodge quite likely was Jeffrey Lynn Smith, who's somebody who had been investigated for a double murder in Ammon, which is a town nearby Idaho Falls that occurred in 1992.
His brother, a mentally disabled man by the name of Lanny Smith, was eventually convicted of those murders.
It was an elderly couple by the name of the Downards, and the story that the prosecution told is that this man in his mid-20s, who had a mental disability because of a nearly fatal automobile accident he was involved in as a toddler, that he was supposedly sexually fixated on a 70-year-old woman and that he killed her and her husband in a fit of irrational jealousy.
The only physical evidence obtained at that crime scene was one footprint in the dust in the master bedroom that was photographed at an angle and that apparently was a match for either of these two young men, Jeff and Lanny Smith.
I should point out that Jeff was adopted and everybody who knew him said that he was a sociopathic criminal from the time he was a teenager.
But during the grand jury testimony in that case, Jeff Smith twice said that he wore the same size of shoe as that that left the footprint in the dust in the master bedroom.
And then he was taken out into the hallway by the detective who was investigating this case and he came back in and he started to plead the fifth when they started to ask him again what size shoe he wore.
And there were many, many other elements of that case that suggest that he was actually a much better suspect than Lanny Smith had been.
Lanny Smith was never considered a suspect in 1992 and early 1993.
The case against Jeff Smith was dismissed for reasons that have never been fully explained.
And then Lanny Smith was railroaded, no other word is suitable, for this conviction on the basis in large measure of the jailhouse testimony of a fellow by the name of James Swagger who met Lanny Smith when they were both being held in a satellite lockup facility in a town called Burley, Idaho, which is not all that close to Idaho Falls.
But he decided that he'd make himself an informant so that he could get a downward departure on his likely sentence for molesting his stepdaughter back in the mid-1990s.
And then he had remorse and he told the prosecutor and he told the investigating detective that he didn't want to testify against Lanny Smith because he didn't want to perjure himself.
And at that point, according to an account that Swagger has given to a federal post-conviction, a federal public defender who's seeking post-conviction relief for Lanny Smith, at that point, the Bonneville County Prosecutor's Office and this detective from the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office said, if you don't testify against Lanny Smith, we're going to say that you were involved in this murder and you're going to go to the electorate chair.
That's the same thing they did with Chris Tapp, essentially.
It seems to be sort of a standard model there in Bonneville County.
Anyhow, Jeffrey Lynn Smith was the original suspect in that double murder.
He has a record that includes two assault rapes, several acts of statutory rape, numerous death threats, assault robbery.
He's somebody who was allowed to remain at large in the city of Idaho Falls, notwithstanding that record, and then to testify against his own brother.
In the night of Angie Dodge's murder, he shows up about three blocks away from her house shortly after the murder took place.
He's got blood all over his clothing.
He's obviously experienced some kind of physical trauma that suggests that he was involved in a fight.
He knocks on the door of a couple and says, I need to use your phone.
He goes in and uses the phone and tries to explain to them that he was involved in a motorcycle accident of some sort.
But the police were very well aware of that and they went and interviewed the couple.
They're no longer married.
Each of them gave separate testimony saying that they very well remembered this fellow showing up on the doorstep, bloodied, and displaying all the indicia of having been in some kind of a desperate struggle.
He was never seriously considered as a suspect in this case, although he makes a very good match given his history of violent sexual predation and death threats.
He makes a very good match for the circumstances.
He lives in Kentucky and one of my essays actually told you specifically how he can find his house because he's a registered sex offender and he lives about, what, a mile and a half away from a police station in this little town in Kentucky.
So he would make a much better suspect in my opinion than Christopher Tapp would.
I'm not sure whether he's ever been seriously considered as a suspect by the IPD, but once again, they have their story and they're sticking with it.
Well, is that all the problem is?
Is they have their story or is there any other reason why they would prefer their current story to going ahead and getting the guilty guy?
If it's that easy?
One of the reasons why they would prefer their current story to going ahead and getting the guilty guy if it's that easy?
One of the things that I keep being told by people who live in Bonneville County who have been following this case, Carol Dodge, the Public Defender's Office, many people who have been investigating this as actual citizen investigators, not the sort of people who show up with an assault rifle and a pizza joint, but actual citizen investigators who look at the factual record is that there is ample reason to suspect that Jeffrey Lynn Smith was a confidential informant.
He was a cooperating witness there working with the NARCs who were employed by the IFPD and for some reason they were the first group of investigators to look into the murder of Angie Dodge.
One element of the story that I'm trying to ferret out involves the fact that just a couple of weeks before the murder, the house immediately next to Angie Dodge's apartment, was separated by an alley and it was out behind her apartment.
That house was raided by the IFPD in a drug bust and among others, I'm trying to remember the names here and I'm not going to disclose them right now because this is an inchoate element of the story so far, but several of the people who were involved in that operation were either cooperating informants or they were narcotics investigators who went on to investigate the murder of Angie Dodge.
That took place once again right next door, literally right next door to the home where the murder would take place a couple of weeks later.
And so there are probably in this story some elements that have to do with potential corrupt deals that were being made as part of the war on drugs.
You develop people who are confidential informants, you give them certain immunities and certain privileges and you let them loose and eventually, the people who are running these informants as police investigators are deeply implicated in whatever they're doing and they're compromised in such a way that if they do something genuinely horrible, they might face not only civil but potentially criminal liability.
So there is an obvious motive, assuming of course that what we're saying here is what happened.
There would be an obvious motive for people in the IFPD to protect their informants so he doesn't turn around and inform on them if it turns out that he was actually involved in this murder as either an accomplice or the chief participant.
Well, come on, Will.
We all know the worst that they would face is possible embarrassment.
But that could be enough.
Absolutely.
I see what you're saying.
If the murderer was working for them, well, let's go ahead and pin it on this idiot then.
No offense to Chris Tapp, but come on.
The prosecutor who originally got involved in this is a fellow by the name of John Shinderling and he went on to become a district judge in a different criminal district here in the state of Idaho.
He took an early retirement about a year and a half ago at about the same time that the first post-conviction hearing was held for Christopher Tapp.
Jared Furman went on to become the mayor of Idaho Falls on the strength of his illustrious record as a police detective.
He suddenly developed a memory issue and had to resign from his position as mayor at about the same time the first post-conviction hearing on Chris Tapp's case was held.
And when NBC's Dateline program started to investigate this, I think it was NBC.
I'm pretty sure it was.
And then there are at least two other investigators who were involved in this who took early retirements at about the same time the case was reopened.
So there are a number of careers that were built on this bogus prosecution including people who went on to become judges.
And I don't doubt for a second that if we were able to exhume the full truth about this, that there would be many, many other careers including people who are in positions of prominence and influence in Bonneville County and perhaps the state of Idaho in general who are implicated in this as well.
So it's not just Jared Furman.
It's not just one or two others.
There are probably half a dozen or more very prominent people who have a great deal to lose if they were to acknowledge that Chris Tapp didn't murder this poor little girl.
You do great journalism, Will.
I sure appreciate you coming on the show, man.
Thank you so much, Scott.
That means everything to me.
Yeah.
Well, and everybody can see why I'm so proud to have Will as part of the Libertarian Institute.
It's me, Sheldon Richman, Will Grigg, and Jerry LaBelle.
LibertarianInstitute.org Check out Will's great archive there.
His latest is The Sames Between Cops and Slave Owners.
And the one before that is Justice Has No Expiration Date The Continued Wrongful Imprisonment of Christopher Tapp.
And check out Will's own blog as well.
It's FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com I think probably the first maybe two or three in this series were written before the Institute.
So you might have to go back to the beginning at Pro Libertate FreedomInOurTime.blogspot.com And hey, while I'm at it, if you like some Scott Horton and some Will Grigg, it's our big inaugural fund drive here.
I shouldn't use the word inaugural.
It's our big first fundraiser for the Libertarian Institute.
Check out all the goodies and kickbacks and all the great stuff you get when you help support at libertarianinstitute.org slash support.
And thanks everybody.
Because everyone deserves to drink great coffee.
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