Sheila trained
to become a private
investigator herself
and her persistence
finally led to Angie’s
killer Donald Bess
(right) being caught.I SOLVED
MY BES T FRIEND’S
‘I became fearful... You didn’t
know if it was her boyfriend.
You didn’t know if it was an
acquaintance that we all ran
around with. So going out was
off the table. I dropped out of
college, I moved back home and
I was done.’
Police had three suspects in
the case. Angie’s boyfriend, an
old ex from her hometown of
Abilene, and another friend,
Russell Buchanan, who had been
at a bar with Angie and a mate
the night she died.
DNA science was in its
earliest stages at the time of the
murder, but police were able to
collect blood and semen samples
from Angie’s body.
The blood type excluded the
boyfriend and the ex from the
scene of the crime – but Russell
was a match. While he passed
a lie-detector test about the
night in question, Sheila was
asked by the police to take him
to dinner in a bid to gather
evidence.
She agreed and went there
wearing a wire, as undercoverofficers sat at tables nearby.
‘I thought I was having
dinner with a murderer,’ Sheila
recalls. ‘I wasn’t brave, I was just
doing what I thought was right.’
But nothing incriminating
came from that meeting – and
just six weeks after Angie’s
murder, the case went cold.
Sheila tried to move on. She
moved to a new town, fell in love
and started a family – but she
never forgot the horror that had
befallen her friend.
Watching the OJ Simpson
trial on TV, Sheila learned about
how DNA technology was being
used to crack cases.
‘I was pregnant with my
second child and I remember
sitting in bed and watching the
trial thinking, “Oh, so there’s
this thing called DNA,” ’ Sheila
says. ‘I thought, “Well, we got
a little hope here.” I knew we
had semen. I knew we had
fingernails and I knew that we
had a blood type.’
Sheila tried reaching out to an
organisation that tackled cold
cases but since she wasn’t in thepolice, they wouldn’t work with
her. It wasn’t until 2004, that
a vision of her friend prompted
her to try again.
‘I was lying down reading my
book, when all of a sudden I saw
Angie exactly the way I saw her
the very first time I ever met her,
walking down the hall, the same
vibrant face,’ Sheila explains.
‘The very first thing I did was
pick up the phone because I
knew it was time. One of the
relationship things that Angie
and I had was she would call me
when something happened.’
Sheila made hundreds of calls
to the police to try and persuade
them to reopen the case.
‘I’m a little obsessive when
people don’t return a phone call.
I’m the type where if you don’t
return a call, I’m going to start
calling even more,’ Sheila admits.
‘I started calling more and
more and more. And I kept
getting blown off each time.’
That’s when she made
a decision – to become a qualified
private investigator herself in
order to be taken more seriously
by the police.
She qualified in 2005 and the
following year her persistence
finally paid off.
Dallas police tasked detectiveLinda
Crumb with
reopening the files, and
sending off the DNA found at
the scene for analysis.
A backlog in the system
meant the results took two years
to come through, which ruled
out any of the previous suspects.
But then they discovered a
match. Donald Andrew Bess,
a convicted rapist serving a life
sentence at Huntsville Prison
in Texas.
Sheila was shocked.
‘I could feel my world turning
upside down. For 23 years, in my
mind, Russell Buchanan was the
murderer,’ she later admitted.
‘And in one split-second,
everything I thought I knew
was no longer correct. I had
made it my life goal to get this
man behind bars and suddenly
I felt so guilty.’
In 2010 Bess was convicted of
Angie’s murder and sentenced
to death. An appeal against the
death penalty was unsuccessful
and he remains on death row.
While Sheila struggles to feel
a sense of ‘closure’ as her friend
is still gone, she set up her own
detective agency in 2011 and has
helped many others chasing
justice for their loved ones.
‘No families should go
through nightmares trying to do
the right thing,’ she says.
By Tom Midlane
and Katherine DavisonMURDER
REAL-LIFE