The brutal murder committed in 1984 was solved thanks to the ongoing struggle of her best friend, who decided to become a private investigator to find the culprit after the police dropped the case.
Angela Samota was brutally murdered in Texas on October 13, 1984. He was 20 years old and studied computer science and electrical engineering at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
His bloody body was found naked, he was crossed on the bed and his legs dangled. He had 18 stab wounds, they injured his liver, lungs and broke his heart.
However, barbarism does not end here, his heart was pulled out and placed on his chest. The autopsy revealed that she had been raped while being murdered.
According to a publication by Infobae, the young woman was buried in Llano Cemetery, in Amarillo, Texas.
That night Angela went out with her friends Russell Buchanan and Anita Kadala. Her boyfriend Ben McCall did not go with her because he had to get up early for a job he had the next day.
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Angela was driving a Toyota car and after midnight she left the disco with her friends. She dropped them off at their house, went to her friend’s apartment to greet him, then went to his apartment.
At 1:45 am she calls her boyfriend and tells him that there is a man at the door who has asked her to use the bathroom and the telephone. She asks him to keep talking to her on the phone, but then hangs up and promises to call her back.
When Bess killed Angelica, she was on probation. He is now sentenced to death pending a date for his execution. Photo Texas Police Department
The last promise that Angela could not keep, Ben tries to communicate with her several times and when he doesn’t get an answer he goes looking for her. When she arrives at Ángela’s apartment, she does not receive an answer, she tries to open the door, but the door is locked and she decides to call the police.
He is seen by Officer Janice Crowther at 2.17 in the morning. A police duo goes to the scene. They see that Angela’s Toyota Supra car is parked outside, but there is no movement in the apartment. Through the window they have already seen that Angela’s shoes are in the kitchen that evening. The officer gets the keys from the building manager’s office. Janice’s cop comes in first. While in the living room, she hears him shout from the bedroom, “Hey Janice, I found her,” says Infobae.
Sheila Gibbons, Angela’s best friend
Angela’s best friend was Sheila Gibbons, they had met in 1982, on their first day of school in Dallas. They were roommates and became good friends. Two years later, when Angela was brutally murdered, Sheila desperately wanted to work with detectives.
Both of them had no parents and that helped create a strong bond of friendship. When Angela was murdered, Sheila’s life was frustrated, she dropped out of college, became depressed, and her only interest was to help find her friend’s killer.
However, it took years to resolve and she had to become a private investigator so that Angela’s case didn’t go unpunished.
From the outset, the police identified three suspects: Russell Buchanan, a 23-year-old architect who went out with Angela that night; Ben McCall, Angela’s boyfriend and her ex-boyfriend.
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Buchanan lived close to Angela, was able to walk to her apartment and interrupted the investigators. In addition, he was a non-secretor (a person with a genetic mutation that prevents his blood group from appearing in his fluids) and investigations showed that Angela’s killer was of this type, because the attacker’s sperm and saliva do not identify the blood group.
This detail excluded the young woman’s boyfriend and ex-boyfriend from the suspect list. In time, however, nothing was proven to Buchanan, although even Sheila met him at the request of investigators to investigate the matter.
My mother was shocked, but Russell came to pick me up and we went to a place called August Moon. I was nervous and not acting normally, thinking, ‘I’m sitting next to a murderer’ because of course I thought he was the culprit, ‘Sheila said in a report.
Russell told him he had traveled to Houston to see his parents the same morning Angela’s body was discovered. And he assured her that he didn’t find out until he got back to Dallas. The story Russell told the police was 100% consistent. The young student successfully passed the lie detector.
Detectives have not collected evidence to charge him.
Sheila didn’t stop chasing those responsible for the investigation, she called them every day. In fact, she got so close to the investigators and invited one of them to her wedding.
“(…) The detectives thought I would disappear over time. Most normal people would have given up and got on with their lives. But not me. He thought something was wrong and he just didn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer. So I kept calling. “
Sheila visited Angela’s grave when she solved the case. Photo courtesy of Dallas Cemetery / Image is illustrative and non-commercial https://bit.ly/3wVtkw6
Time passed and in 2004, twenty years after Angela ‘s murder, Sheila lived in Tennessee and had two children. One evening while working on his Bible studies, he had a vision that would mark a before and after the investigation of the matter:
I looked to the right, and there was Angie. I thought: am I dreaming? I am sleeping? what is happening? (…) There were no words, just that she was there and her big smile… I have a lot of faith and believe in the signs, and at that moment I thought, the moment has come. I leaned over my nightstand and picked up the phone to call the Dallas Police Department. I asked about the detective I knew and left him a message. He never answered any of the calls I made. That man knew me well enough because he was invited to my wedding, but he never called me. It left me with a bitter taste… The most discouraging thing was that they told me that in twenty years no one had called, only me. Not a single person. How is it possible that someone dies so violently and nobody calls and wants to know why or who it was? That still makes me cry. “
Then she decided to study to be a private detective.
“I told my husband I was going to be a private investigator. … In the evening, after dinner, my oldest son read to me all the state laws I needed to learn, and I recited them by heart. I pretended to go to Harvard or Yale, ”he said.
However, the excitement did not last long: “I thought the police would start working on me now that I had my investigative license. What a fool I was! They didn’t care at all. ‘
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He told People that he had called the Dallas Police Department about 750 times in all those years, and during one of those many phone calls, he was told that the test kit was lost in a flood.
He eventually got the case re-examined, and Detective Linda Crum was appointed as the case manager. Sheila assured that this change was positive for the study.
“By involving Linda Crum, the process of the case changed by one hundred percent. I think female researchers are generally better because of their commitment. Having her was a real plus ”.
22 years later, in 2006, the detective reported having Angela’s nails, sperm and blood from the attacker. Nothing was lost and newer techniques were now available to compare DNA with thousands of other DNA collected in databases.
“They had Angie’s fingernails, so it was clear she had resisted (…) I was excited because I knew that was going to be the key: DNA testing was in its infancy in 1984, only 20 years old. then DNA was a very powerful forensic tool, ”Sheila said.
Three years later, the detective informed Sheila that she had identified the attacker.
Sheila thought she would hear the name she had always associated with crime: Russell Buchanan. But no, the name sounded completely unknown to him. The strong DNA result indicated a man named Donald Andrew Bess Jr, who was born in Arkansas in 1948.
The beast
In October 1984, when Angela was murdered, Bess was 36 years old and on probation. In 1978, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for kidnapping and rape, by the time he was identified as the perpetrator of Angela ‘s murder, Bess was back in prison with life in prison for another kidnapping and rape committed in 1985 .
When the trial for the murder of Angela was underway in 2010, other women testified that they had been raped by him. Even his ex-wife testified that Bess had abused her and their children during their marriage between 1969 and 1072. That man was a fierce serial predator.
Sheila attended the trial and was pleased to hear the verdict on June 8, 2010: he was found guilty and sentenced to death. His appeal, which has since been filed, was denied. He is waiting, without a date of execution, on death row at Polunsky Prison.
“He has printed number 999559 on his clothes and they call him The Beast. The number of the Beast, those who always want to read a little more in the coincidences say, are those first three digits (999) reversed (666) of his condemned badge, ”the Argentine media reported.