Fact and fantasy collided for Michael Usry Jr with a knock on his door in December 2014. Officers from the Louisiana State Police were outside, asking the then-35-year-old to come downtown for a conversation.
Usry was living in New Orleans with his wife. He was a low-budget filmmaker who had ground out a few short movies. Up until that knock, the most attention Usry had attracted had been for “Murderabilia,” a 2010 production about the violent killing of a young girl. Usry knew he had done nothing wrong, so he agreed to go with the detectives.
Confused about why he was there, Usry did his best to answer the questions the investigators were rolling his way. They seemed to perk up when he mentioned he had been on a trip to Idaho in 1996. Eventually, the detectives told Usry he was a suspect in a high-profile unsolved crime.
“The majority of the time that I was in the interrogation room, I just didn’t know what they were talking about,” Usry told “48 Hours” in 2017. “They finally had to look at me and go, ‘No, we think that you, Michael Usry, we think that you’re involved in this murder case.'”
The crime was the brutal June 1996 murder of 18-year-old Angie Dodge in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Usry’s shock was soon supersized when he learned how he landed in the investigation’s crosshairs: a genealogical analysis of the suspect’s DNA from the crime scene had led investigators to Usry’s family tree. His 1996 trip to Idaho, and his bloody film work, only further spiked the investigator’s suspicions.
“Nobody thinks they are going to be picked up by police and questioned about a murder,” Usry explained to “48 Hours.” “When it happens to you, it’s definitely a game-changer.”
But they had the wrong guy. Within six weeks, more DNA tests cleared Usry in early 2015.
He was actually the second man wrongfully connected to Dodge’s death. The other, Christopher Tapp, spent 20 years in prison for the woman’s murder until he was freed in 2017 thanks to the work of the Idaho Innocence Project.
Police now believe they finally have their man. On Wednesday, authorities announced they had arrested 53-year-old Brian Leigh Dripps Sr for Dodge’s murder, the Idaho Statesman reported. The break came thanks to forensic genealogy, the same science that has revolutionized cold-case investigations. But it is also the same technique that wrongly landed Usry in an interrogation room in 2014.
