Solved cold cases in Idaho
2 documented cases.
Angie Raye Dodge
Angie Dodge, 18, was raped and stabbed to death in her Idaho Falls apartment on June 13, 1996. Christopher Tapp was wrongfully convicted in 1998 based on a coerced false confession despite DNA excluding him; he was released in 2017 and fully exonerated in 2019. Investigative genetic genealogy by Parabon NanoLabs identified the actual killer, Brian Leigh Dripps Sr., who pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2021.
Shirley Ramey
Shirley Ramey, a 79-year-old woman who had served the tiny town of Hope, Idaho as its city clerk for more than two decades, was shot twice in the head at her home on Trestle Creek Road on April 5, 2017. There was no forced entry and no obvious motive; a family Savage Model 99 rifle was taken, but the killing looked random. The case stalled for two years. The break was almost entirely ballistic: Bonner County investigators had recovered 9mm shell casings at the scene, and in February 2018 an ATF agent submitted them to the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network. On May 18, 2019 NIBIN matched those casings to test-fires from a Glock 19 9mm pistol that Lincoln County, Montana deputies had seized from Judith Carpenter, a 57-year-old real-estate appraiser from Coeur d'Alene, when they arrested her in a road-rage incident on Bull Lake Road on the very day Ramey was killed. Carpenter had no known connection to Ramey. The Savage rifle deputies took from her that day proved to be the gun stolen from the Ramey home. Authorities said it was the first homicide ever solved in Idaho through NIBIN. Carpenter was arrested on August 1, 2019, and in May 2021 entered an Alford plea to second-degree murder; First District Judge Barbara Buchanan sentenced her to 15 years to life in prison.