I Solved My Best Friend’s Murder: CHASING JUSTICE

AN AMATEUR sleuth turned private detective has devoted her life to cracking unsolved crimes after helping to track down the killer of her college friend 26 years after her death.
Sheila Wysocki, 55, who now lives in Tennessee, met Angela Samota -
who went by the name “Angie” - at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, in 1982. Despite being very different personalities, the pair quickly became inseparable, but Sheila’s life changed forever, aged 22, when she got a call from one of Angela’s sorority sisters saying Angela had been brutally raped and murdered in her own home. The case quickly went cold, and Sheila left college and moved back home, eventually meeting her husband and starting a family. But in 2004 she had a vision of her murdered friend and, unable to convince local police to reopen the case, trained as a private detective, qualifying in 2005. By 2006 her persistence paid off, and Dallas police tasked detective Linda Crumb with reopening the case, including sending off the DNA found at the scene for analysis, and they found a match with Donald Andrew Bess, a convicted rapist serving a life sentence at Huntsville Prison in Texas. In 2010 he was convicted of Angie’s murder and sentenced to death - it was the only cold case solved in Dallas that year. Sheila set up her own agency in 2011 and has helped many other families who have been chasing justice in cases that have gone unsolved. In 2016, Bess unsuccessfully appealed against the death penalty, but was unsuccessful, and he remains on death row.