Background
Angela Marie Samota was born on September 19, 1964 in Alameda, California. Not much was shared about her childhood, but we do know that she attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX where she studied computer science and electrical engineering.
At the university, she joined the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority where she became close friends with Sheila Wysocki in 1982.
According to Sheila in an interview with British news agency, Barcoft, Angela was “so incredibly vivacious” Sheila shared that her friend was always the type to lend a helping hand whenever someone was in need. She also goes on to explain that while the two were different in many ways, they found common ground through some shared experiences. Both girls grew up without a father.
If you take a look at any photos of Angie, you can just tell that she’s such a beautiful, outgoing, and just all around enjoyable person to be around.
Leading Up
On October 12, 1984, Angela and two of her friends, Russell Buchanan and Anita Kadala, started their night at the Texas State Fair and later decided to go to a dance club called the Rio Room. According to her two friends, the night was completely normal, they were hanging out and socializing with others in the club like normal. Buchanan states, "Angie was going table to table, talking to people. She knew everyone."
After a fun night, the three friends decided to call it. Angela first drove Russell home, then Anita and before going home herself there are reports that she stopped by her boyfriend’s, Ben McCall, to say goodnight and then drove home.
At 1:45am, Ben got a call from Angela in which he described her as in a panic. She told Ben that there was a man in her apartment and that he had requested to use her phone and also requested to use her bathroom. In our research, we were unable to determine when exactly this man arrived at her apartment. It is unclear whether Amanda let the man in or if he was there when she arrived home.
According to Ben, Amanda said she would call right back and then hung up abruptly. Ben called her back, but after no answer he decided to drive to her apartment. Ben knocked on her door, but Angela didn’t answer. Luckily, he had an early version of a mobile phone for work and was able to call information who connected him to authorities.
Police arrived at the scene at 2:17am and were able to break her door down, but unfortunately they were too late. They found Angela lying naked on her bed with a large amount of blood surrounding her. After conducting her autopsy, the medical examiner determined that Angela was raped and then stabbed repeatedly in the heart.
Investigation, Evidence & DNA Lost
Ben McCall did not join Amanda, Russell and Anita because he had work early the next morning. We also know that he was the one who called the police and was the first one at Angela’s apartment.
After the murder of Angela, her best friend and roommate at the time, Sheila, was more than devastated. Sheila was not there the night of the incident because she was at her mother’s house that night. Heartbroken and afraid, Sheila never returned to college. Instead, she dedicated herself to figure out why this happened to her friend and who was responsible for it.
Investigators pretty quickly suspected three individuals: Russell Buchanan, Ben McCall and an old ex-boyfriend of Angela's from her hometown. This ex allegedly once cut up Angela’s clothes and threatened to stab her with a knife.
Because DNA testing was in its early stages at this point, investigators relied on the blood type that was found at the scene. Once tested, it was found that the blood type of McCall and the ex-boyfriend was not a match to their sample, while Russell’s was a match. This was the only evidence that authorities needed to hone in on Russell.
Due to the blood type match and the fact that Russell did not have a solid alibi that could be backed up, investigators promptly got to questioning him. He was very cooperative with police, agreeing to let them search his apartment and agreeing to a polygraph test which he passed.
Even after offering all he can to investigators, Russell was regularly picked up and questioned by police for months after the murder.
When reading about the harassment Russell got from police, it made us believe that they were trying to pin him with the crime whether he was responsible or not. Almost like they just wanted to wrap up the case as quickly as possible. Either way, they were convinced that Russell did it, and they treated him as such.
Unfortunately this happens a lot where law enforcement is looking to charge a suspect quickly just to close the case. Instead of doing a full scale and proper investigation, investigators set their eye on Russell and continuously tried to pull a confession from him. From a excerpt in an article about the case, *quote* “Detectives had clearly decided he was guilty, even re-examining his lie-detector results and deciding they were inconclusive. They began directly accusing him. Buchanan vividly recalls them holding up graphic crime-scene photos of Samota's ravaged body and demanding his confession.”
Eventually, Russell got an attorney and they finally stopped interrogating him, but they immediately put 24-hour surveillance on him. They even got Sheila to work with them in an attempt to catch him confessing or giving up information that would link him to the crime. Investigators set Sheila up with a wire and conducted several phone conversations between her and Russell.
One night, she collaborated with investigators to make plans to have dinner with Russell in the hopes of catching him slipping up. Sheila states "I thought I was having dinner with a murderer.” Throughout all of these operations, police never collected any incriminating evidence or statements from Russell.
They had no evidence against him and no reason to pursue him any longer. Sadly for Russell, his reputation had been tarnished already. Many people associated him with the case and suspicions didn’t seem to die down.
There was some evidence gathered including blood from the crime scene and semen from the rape kit performed on Angela. But, we have to remember that this happened in 1984 and there really wasn’t much that could be done with the DNA. Because of this, the case went cold.
Best Friend Becomes PI and Pressures Authorities
For two whole decades after her death, Angela Samota’s case was cold due to a lack of enough evidence to convict anyone. However, around the mid-2000s, Sheila couldn’t put it out of her mind any longer.
One source stated that one Sheila had a vision of Angie smiling at her, which led her to start pressuring authorities to reopen the case. Whatever it was, she fully realized that it was her duty to get to the bottom of it. Who knows, now that DNA evidence testing technology has become more advanced, maybe they could uncover the truth of who committed this awful crime.
Sheila and her friends began calling the police department, asking over and over again for investigators to reopen the case. The majority of the time, her calls seemed to be ignored. When they did pick up the phone, they would tell her that the case has been cold for years, and there’s just nothing they could do about it.
One source said that one time they even tried to tell her that the files and the blood and semen evidence had all been destroyed in a flood incident, which was just a lie to try to get Sheila to give up.
Overall, no one was taking her very seriously. This is when Sheila decided to train to become a private investigator, with the sole purpose of solving Angie’s case. She passed all the training, and eventually got her license.
It was then that she was able to convince the police department to put an investigator on Angela’s case and to also get her hands on the evidence from the case and sent the DNA samples for another test.
DNA Match & Perpetrator
Sheila says she will never forget the moment she got the call from police, who said they found the perpetrator. Although it was not who everyone expected. It was not Russell Buchanan. The DNA found at the crime scene matched the DNA of a man by the name of Donald Andrew Bess. Bess is a twice-convicted rapist of 60 years old at the time who had already been serving a life sentence for these crimes. Apparently, Bess was out on parole the night of Angie’s murder, and most likely caught sight of her earlier that evening when he decided that she would be his next victim.
The police sergeant, after finding out about the true killer, actually reached out to Buchanan and gave an apology, stating, “I'm looking through your file. And boy, Mr. Buchanan, you went through quite an ordeal." Buchanan had stated that he doesn’t hold any bitterness towards the police for so aggressively pinning him to the crime, and that he knows they were just doing their job and trying their best to do what was right.
Bess was convicted of Angie’s rape and murder in 2010. At the end of his trial, it was decided that he would be sentenced to death.
Bess actually made several appeals to the court in the time he has been in prison, attempting to make the case that his sentence was ‘too harsh.’ All of these requests were denied.
Sheila is Still a PI
After the case was solved, Sheila felt that she had fulfilled her purpose as a private investigator. She almost retired until she began receiving letters from so many other families and friends of victims whose cases went cold. They wanted her help to try to solve these cases in hopes that they might be solved, or at least something new might be uncovered. To this day she still works as a private investigator in hopes of helping these families and friends of victims find answers.
In addition to Sheila continuing her PI career, the Dallas police department actually formed a unit that would specifically work to solve cold cases just like Angela Samota’s case. So she quite literally changed the history of the Dallas police department.
Even though this was a horrible thing that happened to an innocent woman, at least Sheila’s efforts to solve the case brought authorities to wake up and say “oh shit, we really need to go through all these cold cases.”
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