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How far would you go, how long would you wait to get justice for a friend who killed her? He needed to pay for it. They've been college roommates super close till that terrible night.

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That many wounds would certainly suggest rage at the victim. Absolutely. Who could have done it? Her boyfriend. Something just didn't seem right. Her new friend. Things weren't adding up. Her ex, he was very obsessed with Angie. The trail went cold for more than two decades, but she was sure she knew who the killer was. Even got a private detective license to help prove it. I said I'm a private investigator and I need you to tell me where is the evidence?

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All of that wasn't well received at all. Finally, the break they needed.

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We got the match leading to one of the greatest twists of all time. He could not have shocked me or what really happened in the middle of the night. It was a Saturday morning in October 1984 when Sheila White Saki's phone rang, it was girlfriend, and she said that there's been an accident. An accident involving Sheilas, good friend, freshman roommate and fellow student at Southern Methodist University, Angela Samona, and I initially thought that and she had been in a car accident.

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And of course, I went through the issue in the hospital. Where is she? And I wasn't getting any information from her. And my girlfriend was crying. That's because it wasn't an accident.

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That same morning, Angie's sorority sister, Evelyn Sanday, was given the news straight out by two friends.

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They told me that Angie had been murdered. She had been found naked with a lot of stab wounds. It was absolute shock.

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Angie Samona had not only been killed but butchered, repeatedly stabbed in her own bedroom. It was a bloody end to a life that had so much promise. She was the most amazing person, she was full of life, she could light up a room, she was a very hard worker and she knew where she was going. She was very, very driven.

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And she had grown up in Amarillo, Texas, and attended the exclusive All Girl Hockaday School in Dallas. She just bought a condo near the SMU campus.

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And she was this amazing shining star to so many people that she knew she was absolutely brilliant before her time.

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She was a double major in engineering and computer science at SMU at a time when girls were not doing that. She had this amazing joy to be.

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This absolute love of life was really the life of the party, beautiful, intelligent, single and 20 years old. It's a combination that attracts men of all kinds.

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She used to get notes on her car, she give flowers, she come in and show me who wrote her that day. She had a lot of attention, absolutely a lot of attention.

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Am I right in thinking that she didn't always have the best taste in guys like any other eighteen to twenty year old? She didn't choose wisely at that point in her life.

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Some of those choices and some of those men would figure prominently in the interlocking stories of Angie Simitis life and of her death.

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There was Lance, whom Angie had dated back home in Amarillo and through her freshman year in Dallas. According to her friends, Angie said she was afraid of Lance because he had a temper and had once pulled a knife on her. There was Bam, Angie's boyfriend at the time of her death. Older and already out of school. He was a construction supervisor in Dallas, so he was kind of the opposite of Lance.

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I would say he is the opposite of Lance. And there was Russell, a new friend of Angie's, who had gone out that evening with her and her friend, Anita Catala, another female engineering student at SMU. You saw that last night?

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Yes. How was she? She was Angie.

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I mean, she was fine that night. Anita accompanied Angie and Russell on an expedition to a series of bars and clubs. Angie's boyfriend, Ben, was not present.

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Ben was aware of the fact that Angie Russell and I were all going out together, at least to Angie's friend, Evelyn.

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Ben didn't seem like the type to get jealous or violent. You could never imagine Ben hurting Angie.

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I could absolutely never, ever imagine Ben hurting Angie.

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The evening ended at 1:00 a.m. Angie dropped Russell off at his apartment, which was walking distance from her home and then took Anita home. Anita had thought about spending the night at Angie's but decided against it. What was the last thing you said to each other that night?

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See you tomorrow at the football game. She doesn't meet me there. Very strange because Angela was pretty much a woman of my word. I remember saying, I wonder where Angie is. I came home and my roommate said, there's something I need to tell you, she said. But you might want to sit down with Angie was murdered last night and the police are wanting you to call them back. What do you think? I didn't want to believe it at first.

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Beyond that, I started with the whole woulda, coulda, shoulda. Would I could I have prevented it, should I have spent nine? More things have been different, but she was not the last person to see Angie alive, it turns out Angie's boyfriend, Ben, was that person. She had stopped by his place on her way home after dropping off Anita later that night. It was Ben who called police to Angie's condo. And what got their attention was not just what Ben said, but how he sounded when he said it right there at the door.

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Does he sound frantic? Panicked? Investigators didn't think so. Coming up, police start focusing on Ben, but soon the list of suspects gets longer. He was pretty scary. Guy is creepy when in the middle of the night continues.

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In the fall of 1980 for SMU, college student Angie Simola had been found murdered, arriving officers walked in on a bloodbath. They found one shoe in the den, another shoe somewhere else than all her clothes stacked up, all in one neat pile. And then Angie laying on the bed covered in blood. Her chest area was pretty caved in with stab wounds. So this was a vicious assault. There were 18 stab wounds, 10 of which punctured the heart, breaking the breastbone and going through the body.

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Josh Healy and Patrick Kollin were assistant district attorneys in Dallas. They said whoever stabbed Angie was intent on killing her. That many wounds could certainly suggest rage, anger at the victim. Absolutely.

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From what you could tell Angie, Angie, to have any enemies seemed like she had maybe broken some hearts, but enemies. She was the type of person that did not have enemies. Everyone seemed to like her a lot. The only people seem to be mad at her ex-boyfriend or people that want it to be her boyfriend. Police immediately focused on the man in Angie's life, starting with Ben, her then boyfriend, Ben, told police a story that sounded a bit suspicious.

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He said that after dropping off night after their night out, Angie had stopped by his place, waking him up for a brief visit and that she then drove home within minutes of reaching her condo. Then says Angie called him at around one forty five a.m. in that phone call. Says Angie told him she had let a man she didn't know into her home in the middle of the night. A man who asked to use her phone and bathroom then says Angie then hung up, promising to call him back a few minutes later.

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But she never did, Ben said, and she didn't answer his calls. Concerned then told police he drove to her condo, but Angie wasn't answering her door either. And now Ben was locked outside, calling police on the early generation mobile phone in his truck and sounding to them oddly calm. My girlfriend called me, said there was a man in our apartment using the bathroom in the phone, and now I cannot get her to answer the phone, knock on, answer the door and answer the door.

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He broke. No, no, he didn't let them in. I'm not sure I believe this. You know this man. I don't believe that now she won't answer the phone. So police weren't sure what to make of Ben and his version of events.

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So there was no way to tell whether the story that Ben had told police on the night when one tape actually happened.

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The only thing we had was Ben's word, no cell phone records back then and no records of local phone calls. So that call that Ben talked about, that may never have happened.

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That is correct. I would expect someone to be. I can't find her. I don't know where she is. She's not answering. It was a very mellow it was a very feeling, this phone call.

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I mean, it was somebody who didn't seem too concerned, then waited in the living room while police went into Angie's bedroom. They came out and told him Angie was dead, the first responding officer.

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What he remembered most was even after he had discovered the body and said so, Ben didn't even ask what condition, how she was or anything like that.

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And sometimes people who don't ask that question don't ask it, because they already know the answer. Exactly. They didn't ask how she was killed, whether it was gunshot, whether her stab wounds. That's unusual. And there was something else. Ben's story may have been suspicious, but Ben himself was squeaky clean. This was approximately two o'clock in the morning. He had been awakened from sleep and he arrived at the location in a clean pressed shirt and he smelled of soap as if he had just cleaned up.

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That tended to raise some suspicions with the first responding officers that something just didn't seem right.

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While police were trying to process the story, Ben was telling, they widened their investigation to include Angie's ex-boyfriend, Lance, the boy next door in Amarillo, the boy Angie had trouble with, it was something Angie's friend Sheila knew all about. He was very obsessed with Angie. He was so obsessed with her, he would come down all the time to to school to see her.

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They had dated through Angie's freshman year.

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One night I got a call from Angie. She was crying and she said that Lance had gone crazy and I needed to get over there. She was screaming and Lance had taken a knife and shredded all of her clothes.

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Did he threaten her? Yes. Yes, he did. Physically, verbally, verbally. And you have a weapon, whether it's a knife, scissors. He threatened her. He was pretty scary.

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Guy is creepy. Suddenly, Lance was at the top of the investigators list. Prime suspect. Absolutely. Especially when we have a 18 wound stabbing. There was no forced entry. That's right. Suggesting that whoever had gotten into her apartment had either figured out some way of getting in undetected or Angie knew them and let them in. Yes.

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And all of that pointed either to the ex-boyfriend, Lance, or to Angie's current boyfriend, Ben, or maybe to a new man in her life, the man she'd been out with the last night of her life.

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Russell soon police would ask Sheila, then a college student, to help narrow down that list of suspects and solve the crime. They killed her.

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They needed to pay for it. Coming up, sheilas nerve wracking night with a suspected murderer and then investigators get a break.

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They had their guy now when Dateline continues.

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Buckle your seat belt and prepare for a bumpy ride in the new HBO Mack's original series, The Flight Attendant, based on the best selling novel. And from the cocreator of you, Kaley Cuoco, stars as a flight attendant who wakes up in the wrong hotel in the wrong bed with a dead man and no idea what happened. Get ready for a deadly mystery with a turbulent descent in this thrilling and darkly comedic new series. Don't miss Kaley Cuoco in the flight attendant now streaming only on HBO.

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Who wanted Angie Samona dead? An autopsy determined she'd also been sexually assaulted just before she was stabbed to death her friend Sheila, I find out she had been raped. And I can't think of anything else. It was overwhelming emotionally.

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It was hard for Angie's friends to hear, but the rape did help law enforcement because they now had the perpetrator's DNA profile. But back in the mid 80s, that wasn't the help it would be today.

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Back in 1984, they could at least do a type of blood testing where they can determine whether or not an individual is a secretan or a non sequitur. Basically narrow it down to 20 percent of the population.

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Roughly 80 percent of Americans are Secretan, meaning their bodily fluids contain markers for blood type. The other 20 percent known as Nansook. Readers don't have those markers.

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The killer was a non sequitur. Correct. And that meant it couldn't be Lance, the ex-boyfriend. Angie's friends say she told them Lance had threatened her with a knife. Blood tests revealed Lance was a secretory. In addition, Lance had an alibi putting in 370 miles away on the night of the murder.

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He was staying with his parents in Amarillo, working at the local gym there. And so they were satisfied that he was not in town. This took place. So he was eliminated based on that.

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And what about Ben, Angie's oddly unemotional boyfriend who officers thought acted strangely the night of the murder?

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The police check to see whether there were scratches or bruises on him.

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They checked that. They checked his vehicle. They checked his apartment for any type of blood and bloody clothes, anything like that.

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Nothing, nothing. And tests showed Ben was also a secretory. Whoever had raped and killed Angie was not so cross crossbeam off the list, which leaves Russell. And he was a non sequitur and so he could not be eliminated.

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His alibi was that he was home in bed, not exactly the strongest.

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There was no witness that could confirm where he was after he was dropped off by Angie and Anita. No one can confirm they went to bed. No one can confirm where he was after that. He ever move off that story? No. No.

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And Russell said there was nothing romantic about the evening. It was just a night out for three young people. He continued to insist that he didn't have any feelings for Angie, that he didn't perceive that evening as a date and that he wasn't romantically interested in her. Correct. And I get the feeling we believe that no one did.

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A lot of things weren't adding up soon. Police were questioning Angie's friend, Anita, about Russell Buchanan.

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Was there some specific thing they want to know about Russell? Did I think that he was romantically interested in Angie? That's the primary question. So I think they sort of were piecing together that. We went out that night that he had some romantic interest in her and maybe she had rebuffed him. And since he lived within walking distance that he had, you know, that he had committed the crime.

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What Anita didn't know was that the day after the crime, Russell left town for about twenty four hours. It seemed suspicious when he returned, police paid him a visit. He told them he didn't know anything about Angie's murder, even though it was in the headlines and all over local news, it seemed hard to believe police saw both motive and opportunity. And while there was no witness placing Russell at the crime scene, there was also no one to back up his alibi.

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Angie's friend Sheila met with the lead detective who laid out for her the police theory.

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Russell snapped is the word he used. And then he grabbed a knife, took her into the room and proceeded to rape her. This is probably the one and only murder he will do that. It was just a passionate moment and he snapped and he's going to be back to his old calm self.

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Investigators asked Sheila to have dinner with Russell and ask him about his whereabouts the night of the murder. She agreed it was so uncomfortable. Here I am sitting across from this man thinking I'm eating dinner with a murderer. I'm getting into a car with a murderer.

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This guy murdered my roommate, but even to Sheila Russell stuck to his story just as he had a couple of weeks after the murder when police asked him to take a lie detector test. In fact, Russell was found to be truthful when he was asked questions about Angie's murder. But about three months later, Dallas police took a second look and they looked at the polygraph again and came to a consensus that he was deceptive on those questions.

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That's a big difference from the way his original polygraph results were perceived.

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Huge. They had their guy. No, I did not want to believe that it was somebody close to her. It was more than I could handle.

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Did you think police were going to charge Russell?

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Oh, yes. Little, but they didn't. Russell hired an attorney and stopped talking with police. They told me that he had lawyered up and they couldn't touch him. They also said that Russell was leaving the country. So, of course, he was leaving the country. He lawyered up. He is hiding. It's done. He's going to get away with murder. Not so fast. Russell Buchanan is about to tell us a story that will make you re-evaluate everything you just heard.

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Coming up, Russell answers the tough questions, the police theory was that you attacked or you had sex with her and then you stabbed her to death.

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And then will investigators finally have a way to know if he's telling the truth? They did have a sample that in today's technology could be tested to try and find a DNA standard when in the middle of the night continues. Several months after Angie Simola was raped and murdered, the prime suspect, Russell Buchanan, hired an attorney and refused to speak with police. Several months after that, he left the country. It seemed suspicious, but without enough evidence to arrest Russell.

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Police could not stop it.

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Russell was never arrested or charged with Angie's murder. He went on to become a successful architect years after Angie Simona's death. Russell talked once again about what happened that night and about Angie.

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Her friends describe her as the kind of girl that guys get crushes on and maybe so possible that you had a crush on her.

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Oh, no, no, not at all. I hardly knew her.

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But after questioning Angie's friend Anita about that shared night out, investigators wrote that she told them that the evening centered around Russell and Angie and that Anita felt as if she were along for appearances sake only.

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It certainly didn't occur to me that it was Angie and Russ event. It was the three of us, I remember. And he and I were sitting at the table visiting while Angie was out on the dance floor dancing.

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Russell told police Angie and Anita had dropped him off around 1:00 a.m. and he then went to sleep for him. That was the end of the night. Your alibi was your home and bed.

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Yeah, and there was no way to prove it. Unfortunately, the police theory was that you, after you were dropped off, walked back to Angie's house, knocked on the door. She let you in because she knew you. You already had a thing for something went wrong. You attacked her. You had sex with her, you raped her. And then since she knew you and she could identify you, you stabbed her to death. That's what I thought.

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And so in the days after the murder, police started picking up Russell after work and bringing him down to the station for questioning.

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It seemed like two or three times a month for six months. As they got towards the five to six month time period, there was a significant shift. And the tone and tenor of the interrogations, more accusatory, outright accusatory. I recall in detail the detective leaning back in his chair with an envelope of photographs of the crime scene, that they were absolutely horrific. He would hold them up in front of me and his questions were Russell.

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This looks familiar, doesn't it? You remember this, don't you, because you did this, we think you did this. No, it wasn't. We think it is. You did this. You had sex with her, you killed her, you stabbed her 18 times, but Russell continued to deny it. That steady drumbeat of accusation and denial ended only when Russell hired the attorney and refused any further free trips downtown.

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And the murder of Angie Samona then went cold for years. Then in 2004, 20 years after the current, his friend Sheila, by then living in Nashville, decided to act on something she thought about for a while. I actually had failed Angie around me for a while, and then I was doing homework for the Bible study class. And all of a sudden I look up and as you're sitting there, there was Angie. And then I thought, it's time.

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And I called the police and said I wanted to know about the Angela murder, who was working on it, if they were working on it, and if they weren't, would they reopen it? And at that point told me nobody in 20 years had called, not one single phone call. That prompted Sheila to take a big step, she decided to get a private investigators license to see if she could learn enough about crime and criminals to actually help solve Angie's murder.

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At the very least, she wanted Dallas police to take her seriously. She earned her license in 2006 and called the police again.

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I said, I'm a private investigator. You need to send me all the information on Angelas the Motus case. And I need to talk to the detective. And I need you to tell me what has been done, what hasn't been done, where's the information, where's the evidence? All of that wasn't well received at all, but they met with you to talk about the case.

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No, no. They gave you the evidence now and they gave you regular updates. No, no, no, no. It doesn't sound to me like it helped to be a private eye. It did not.

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So after finding out they were not going to welcome me into the investigation, I started making phone calls to them. And the first 50 phone calls went to the lead detective who had been moved to traffic, got nowhere with him. And finally, one day, six months into it, I talked to a receptionist who said he's in retirement. He's not even working traffic.

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Wait a minute. You left 50 messages in one month?

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Yes, I'm a little obsessive.

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Sheila's persistence paid off. She eventually was put in touch with the investigator looking at cold cases. A woman who dusted off the old Angie summative files took a look inside and found some promising evidence. In 06, when she decided to reopen the case, she went over to a lab and realized that they did have a rape kit that did have a sample that in today's technology could be tested to try and find a DNA standard.

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By 2006, of course, DNA testing had evolved. Some of Angie's other friends also approached police about reopening the investigation. But it was Sheila who eventually made more than 700 phone calls over the years trying to move Angie's case forward. She even offered to pay for the DNA testing herself.

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And I said, OK, I'll send you a check. I'll overnight it. How do I make it out to. She said, we can't do that. You can't do that. That's a lab. That's something police departments.

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But if we're not right, finally in 2008, the DNA sample from Angie Simonas cold case was entered into the national database. To Sheila, why the frightened coed turned mom turned private eye. The pieces were about to finally fall into place. You still focused on the theory that Russell Buchanan did it and got away with murder.

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Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

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Found out he was still in Dallas, that he was actually a professional. And I kept thinking, why is this man having a good life after he had murdered and it was going to be solved and Russell was going to go to jail? Well, just a minute. If it were that easy, do you think this story would be on Dateline? Coming up, the case is correct, the detective said, we got to my mind immediately went to Russell.

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Who else could have done it?

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Good question, but the last thing she was prepared for was the answer. When Dateline continues, we get support from best friends, when I cross something off my to do list or finish my latest podcast binge, I'm always left with one question. Now what? Instead of diving straight into my next project, I like to give myself a little unwind time. And that's where Best Fiends comes in. Best Friends is the infamously impossible to put down puzzle game that's free to download with over 100 million downloads.

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That's friends without the best fiends.

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March 2008, the DNA from Angie Simonas killer was entered into CODIS, the national DNA database, and finally police had the answer that had eluded them for 23 and a half years.

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We got the break we were looking for. We got the match. I received a call and it was the detective and she said, we got him. My mind immediately went to Russell.

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Who else could have done it?

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And then she says to you, It's not Russell, it's not Russell, it's not Russell. You could not have shocked me any more. Everything I had known my whole life was just gone this whole time. I thought this guy had done it and it wasn't him. It wasn't him.

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DNA, as we now know, does not lie. The sample taken from Angie Simona's body did not match Russell Buchanan. Did you feel guilty for having done everything to put somebody behind bars?

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Yeah. Everything you could to convict Russell and send him to death row? Yes, absolutely.

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Of course I did. You know, I thought this guy was it and absolutely I was going to get him and he wasn't the guy. So everything that I thought was truth was not truth anymore. And yes, I felt very guilty still.

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Did she feel guilty? Russell felt anything. But all those years he'd been unaware of how hard Sheila had worked to convict him. All he'd known was the intense heat police had applied. But even now, Russell just can't seem to get the words I told you so out of his mouth. It doesn't change anything. Andrea's life hasn't been resurrected, but my role or lack of role in this case was was put to rest. I no longer had to wonder any more about who perpetrated this horrible crime.

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I no longer had to live with the idea that there were people in the police department that thought I had perpetrated this crime.

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The Dallas police called him on the phone to apologize.

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The police sergeant was very, very thoughtful. He said on behalf of the Dallas Police Department, I want to tell you that we apologize for anything that we may have done to have accused you of a crime in this case. And we wish you well. Wait a minute. Didn't hurt my feelings at all. They made me feel great. And you were OK with that?

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That's that's all it took you about. How many interrogations? I have no idea.

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The crime scene photos in front of me. Yeah, not not a happy experience.

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And then they apologize and you're like, well, all right, fine. Yeah, that's that's fine. I refuse to allow this incident to define who I am. I have moved on. I harbor no ill feelings towards the Dallas Police Department. Never have I happened to be a an innocent bystander falsely accused. But life goes on. And in fact, I was thrilled that they called me to offer an apology. But he does think about what might have happened, what if I had said I could not go out that Friday evening, I wouldn't be here, I would not have even been considered a suspect.

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So the fate of that one decision to go out one evening cast a very long shadow and not only for Angie, but but for everyone else involved.

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And there's an even bigger question for Russell. What if he hadn't been able to hire a lawyer? He was, prosecutors say, an eyelash away from being arrested for Angie's rape and murder. If you believe that he was attractive and he had motive, the opportunity if he didn't have an alibi.

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Now, you add failing a polygraph, all the evidence pointed towards him, it was all circumstantial, correct, in the mid 80s, that was the kind of thing that got you locked up, got a lot of people locked up.

[00:36:03]

So who was the man behind the DNA match and what story would he tell? Coming up, a killer revealed, I remember the air being sucked out of the room and the feeling that I'm in the presence of pure evil, but what would a jury see when in the middle of the night continues?

[00:36:38]

More than 23 years after the rape and murder of Andrew Zamora, the man behind that DNA was finally identified. It was not, as we now know, Russell Buchanan, it was not Lance, the ex-boyfriend, and it was not then the boyfriend who never asked police how Angie died. The man whose DNA was found in Angie Simitis body is Donald Andrew Besse, the other name you had heard before?

[00:37:10]

Never, never had hit the radar of the Dallas Police Department. Not someone she knew never crossed paths. Why was Mr. Bess's DNA on file in the national database?

[00:37:21]

He had previously been arrested and convicted of two different rapes.

[00:37:32]

Donald Bass had been out on parole only seven months on a rape charge when Angie was raped and killed. Prosecutors say she clearly had no idea of his history when he came knocking on her door and Angie let him in the house. Why would she do that a different time? A little more innocent? Nineteen eighty four. If they said, hey, can I use the bathroom? Can you give me directions? She was the type of individual that would help.

[00:37:59]

She wouldn't have thought twice about it. He's never admitted to it, has not. He still has yet to admit that he actually had sexual relations with her.

[00:38:09]

In May 2008, Donald Best was charged with Angie's rape and murder. The trial took place two years later. His DNA hit was fresh, but everything else in the case was more than 20 years old and the murder weapon was never found. By now, Donald Besse was sixty one.

[00:38:27]

Angie would have been forty five. Her college friend Sheila walked in the courtroom on the first day of trial and I just remember feeling shaky all over.

[00:38:38]

She got a close look for the first time at the man accused of robbing Angie of most of her life. And he walks in the door and I remember the air being sucked out of the room and the the the feeling that I'm in the presence of pure evil. Anita and Russell, the friends with whom Angie spent her last night, both testified, both it emotional. Just keep reliving a situation that is just difficult. It was just a flood of emotion of how could you do something like that?

[00:39:16]

It was tough. It's very tough.

[00:39:19]

You look at the defendant when you were there. Yeah, yeah. That was scary. And think to yourself, that was scary. You're the reason that I was under suspicion for so long.

[00:39:28]

No, that was not what was going through my mind at all. What was going through my mind was, dude, do not come after me.

[00:39:38]

Prosecutors had DNA on their side, which sounds like a slam dunk, but nothing ever is in a jury trial. The mere fact that his DNA is found in her doesn't necessarily put him at the crime scene. It doesn't necessarily make him her murderer. The defense team, including Robbie McClung, went on the attack.

[00:39:58]

Oh, you can assume from DNA is that he had sex with her. It's up to the facts and the evidence to determine whether or not it was consensual or on consensual.

[00:40:06]

You're going to tell me Angie Samona chose to have sex with a convicted rapist. Donald, best I can tell you, no one can tell you.

[00:40:15]

No one was there. But Angie smouldered, dumbass.

[00:40:18]

And the defense did the same thing police did in the first hours after Angie's murder made her boyfriend, then a suspect, the man who made that call, nine one one call that police found suspicious to assume that a very intelligent young lady is going to throw the door open to some stranger at one 30 in the morning to come into her apartment to use the bathroom, but then is so afraid of this person that she picks up the phone and calls her boyfriend and then hangs up the phone willingly.

[00:40:49]

And yet this is supposed to be the assailant that kills her. It doesn't make sense.

[00:40:54]

You find Ben's actions suspicious, extremely suspicious.

[00:40:59]

She and the others on the defense team didn't point their fingers only at them, but also what ex-boyfriend Lance Russell, and that any other man who could have been invited by Angie into her home, it almost seems as if she were overcome by someone she knew, someone in close proximity or someone holding a knife.

[00:41:17]

And she was terrified. It still could be someone that she knew, but it still could be someone other than Donald best, someone like Ben, the defense suggested. And they put the blame on Angie herself for possibly making him jealous.

[00:41:31]

A bouncer at the club where she had been that night talked about the way she was dressed, the way she was acting, that she was extremely flirtatious with him and that's how she got in the club and just kind of the general tenor of her behavior. You're kind of making her out to be. I know if she feels that way, doesn't it? Sort of trampy drapey seems to be a harsh word. What I'd say is that things weren't exactly as they seemed that there maybe had been some reckless behavior, maybe a little bit more fun and flirtatious than certain people would have liked and that maybe someone found out about it.

[00:42:15]

You think Ben was angrier than they let on? How much angrier, even though he appeared calm?

[00:42:21]

There are a lot of suspects out there that can appear calm when they need to be calm. They put on a defense of anything they could that would stick. And the best way to do that is to attack the victim and the victim's reputation and credibility. And she wasn't there because he had murdered her to defend herself. And so that's what they did. And shame on them. And it didn't work. It didn't work.

[00:42:48]

Despite the defense's attack on Angie and its suggestions about the men in her life. The jury deliberated for less than an hour.

[00:42:57]

The verdict was guilty. The same jury sentenced Donald best to the death penalty. For Angie's friends, this was the end of a very long and very sad trail. I can only guess that Angie would have been. Probably overwhelmed, though, so many of you were still thinking about her all those years later, and she was really special and I mean, she never left our hearts and minds. You still think about her? I did. You fought pretty hard to find out who killed her.

[00:43:33]

I did. I did. You should feel some accomplishment at that. I feel that maybe she can rest in peace. She died such a horrific death that she deserved to rest in peace. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt, thanks for joining us. Hi, I'm John Thrasher, and I'm Darren Karp, and we're the hosts of Oxygen's True Crime podcast, Martinis and Murder. Are you like us and always looking for a new true crime podcast, a bench?

[00:44:18]

Well, you're in luck. Martinis and murder is a perfect blend of true crime.

[00:44:23]

Good laughs and of course, delicious drinks that you're going to want to enjoy while listening to the show from high profile cases everyone has heard of to tiny, lesser known ones that have gone under the radar. We are breaking down all the details of a new case every week.

[00:44:37]

And not only that, we're interviewing some of the biggest names in the true crime world, people like Nancy Grace, Paul Holes, and, of course, the king of true crime himself, Keith Morrison. So what are you waiting for? Come have a drink with us.

[00:44:50]

Yeah, come join us, download and subscribe to martinis and murder wherever you listen to podcasts.