Murder of Angela Samota

On October 12–13, 1984, Angela "Angie" Samota, a 20-year-old computer science and electrical engineering student at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, spent the evening with two friends at the State Fair of Texas and later at the Rio Room dance club. After dropping off her companions, she stopped by her boyfriend's apartment before returning to her own condo on Amesbury Drive. According to her boyfriend's later account, Samota called him around 1:45 a.m. to say a man had come into her condo asking to use the phone and bathroom. She told him "Talk to me," said she would call back, and hung up. When she did not call, he tried phoning her and then drove to her apartment; getting no response, he contacted police via an early mobile phone. Officers arrived at 2:17 a.m., broke down the door, and found Samota dead, having been raped and stabbed eighteen times in the chest. The autopsy determined she died from wounds to the heart.

Investigators initially focused on two men connected to Samota — the male friend who had accompanied her and her boyfriend that evening — but the case went unsolved for more than two decades. Samota's friend and former SMU roommate, Sheila Wysocki, later stated she pressed police for years to reopen the investigation, eventually prompting the assignment of Dallas police detective Linda Crum to the case in 2006. Crum used preserved DNA evidence — blood, semen, and fingernail samples from the crime scene — to search criminal databases. In 2008, the DNA matched Donald Andrew Bess Jr., who at the time of the murder was on parole after being convicted in 1978 of aggravated sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping, for which he had received a 25-year sentence. Police had previously told Wysocki the rape kit was lost in flooding, before it was later located and tested.

Bess, already serving a life sentence for an unrelated 1985 Harris County conviction for aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping, and sexual assault, was charged with Samota's rape and murder. His 2010 Dallas County trial included testimony during the punishment phase from multiple women who said Bess had also raped them, as well as from his ex-wife, who described physical abuse during their marriage. The trial was paused for three days after Bess suffered a heart attack following this testimony. The jury found Bess guilty of first-degree murder, rape, and related charges, and on June 8, 2010, he was sentenced to death.

Bess's subsequent appeals were unsuccessful: the Texas courts affirmed the trial court's judgment in March 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in January 2014, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected a further appeal in April 2016. Bess died of a heart attack on October 8, 2022, while on death row at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit, awaiting execution. Samota's mother, Betty Ruth Samota, died in 2021 at age 96, having lived to see her daughter's killer identified and sentenced.