Angie Lee was found brutally beaten and strangled in her East Gillespie, Illinois, home. She was a single mother with a 4-year-old son.
The murder investigation caused a lot of trouble in the community, but her boyfriend Jason was found not to be a suspect.
At the scene of the crime, DNA from a man that could not be identified was found. This led investigators to Anthony A. Ashby, whose DNA was a match.
Ashby was found guilty of first-degree murder in 2008 and given a prison sentence of 33 years.
The Case
Angela was a wonderful young woman whose life was cut short tragically when she gave birth to her son at the age of 17. There were rumours that Angela couldn’t keep going to school because of her situation.
But people who knew her well said that she was ambitious and wanted a bright future. She often said she wanted to go to college.
She was also kind to everyone around her. She was someone people always felt safe talking to, which made the tragedy of her death even harder for the community.
In the summer of 2003, Angela and her son were home alone because their father was late getting home from work. That day, tragedy struck. The details of what happened in this heartbreaking situation are still unknown.
When Jason got home around 9 p.m., he found his wife, Angela, lying in a pool of blood on the floor of their dining room. The scene was tragic and horrifying.
He heard a TV in one of the bedrooms and went to check it out. When he did, he found that his son was safe but still watching TV by himself.
First responders arrived on the scene and sadly announced that Angela had passed away.
Angela’s head and neck were badly hurt, and there were signs that her house had been broken into, but nothing seemed to have been taken. This was soon found out by a doctor.
An autopsy eventually confirmed she had been strangled and beaten to death.
Who murdered Angela?
The detectives had a hard time figuring out who killed Angela because they didn’t have any leads or witnesses.
They did a thorough investigation of the area, looked at the murder scene very carefully, and talked to a number of her friends and neighbours.
But, despite their best efforts, they weren’t able to make much progress in the case.
At first, the police thought Angela’s boyfriend Jason was responsible for the murder because he was out of town at the time of the crime.
But when they looked into it more, they found that he hadn’t done anything wrong. The focus then shifted to Brad, Angela’s ex-boyfriend, as law enforcement had cause to believe that he had committed crimes before this.
When asked about the murder, Brad said he had nothing to do with it, and a polygraph test showed that he was telling the truth. There were no other clues, so the case went on for almost four years without being solved.
But when the DNA of an unidentified man was found in Angela’s home, the investigation took a big turn.
After this was found out, a group of people got together to try to figure out who did it. After thinking about where the string was in the Cavallo Bus Lines parking lot, the team made a list of every worker who was there when Angela was killed.
When employee Rick Fenley said that he saw technician Anthony Ashby clock out late at night and drive away in his car, it was a very important clue.
This made the detectives curious because mechanics don’t usually hang out in the Cavallo parking lot at such an ungodly hour.
When they looked into Anthony’s past, they learned that he had been arrested for gun violence in the past. When they took his gun away, the grips were the same as those they had found in a ditch next to Angela’s house.
Angela’s DNA was found on the weapon, and Anthony was linked to the crime scene by his own DNA. The police arrested and charged Anthony Ashby with the murder of the 22-year-old based on this evidence.
The way this case was solved shows how important forensic evidence and expert investigation techniques are when trying to solve complicated crimes.
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