Solved cold cases in Idaho
3 documented cases.
Angie Raye Dodge
Angie Dodge, 18, was raped and killed in her first apartment in Idaho Falls, Idaho, in the early hours of June 13, 1996. DNA from the scene came from one unknown man. In January 1997 a 20-year-old acquaintance confessed after more than twenty hours of questioning and seven polygraph sessions, although the DNA was not his, and in 1998 a jury convicted him. Angie's mother, who at first wanted him executed, came to believe the confession was false, helped win his release in 2017, and kept pressing the police to identify the DNA. In 2019 genetic genealogy led to Brian Leigh Dripps Sr., who in 1996 had lived directly across the street and had been spoken to by officers five days after the murder. He confessed, the convicted man was exonerated in July 2019, and Dripps pleaded guilty in 2021 and was sentenced to 20 years to life.
Regina Krieger
Regina "Gina" Krieger, 14, was reported missing on the morning of February 28, 1995, when her father went downstairs to wake her for school in their Burley, Idaho home and found a trail of blood leading from her basement bedroom into the backyard. Her body was found on the bank of the Snake River east of Rupert in April, and an autopsy showed she had been stabbed. No one was charged for more than two decades. A 1996 newspaper report had named Gilberto Flores Rodriguez as a suspect, but the case went cold, and a former sheriff later said detectives had made mistakes in the early investigation. In 2017 the FBI joined the Cassia County Sheriff's Office, and on February 20, 2019 Rodriguez, then 56, was arrested after at least three witnesses, according to court documents, linked him to the killing. A Cassia County jury convicted him of first-degree murder in May 2021 after deliberating less than four hours, and on October 15, 2021 he was sentenced to life in prison. The case rested on witness testimony; the murder weapon was never found. His attorney told jurors the witnesses were liars, said DNA evidence in the case does not match Rodriguez, and said he would appeal. Rodriguez says he did not kill her.
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.