Iowa Woman Names Killer in Final 911 Call Before Murder

On the morning of October 8, 2022, Angela Prichard, 55, arrived at Mississippi Ridge Boarding Kennels in Bellevue, Iowa—a town of 2,500 where murders were rare enough to shock the whole community. She had less than six minutes to live. At 7:34 a.m., surveillance video captured her pulling into the parking lot, gathering her things, walking through the door. At 7:39 and 43 seconds, a gunshot rang out. Two minutes later, a man appeared on camera walking away from the kennels toward the tree line. That man was her estranged husband, Christopher Prichard. But the most damning evidence came not from the video, but from Angela's own voice on a 911 call made in those final moments—a call that would become the linchpin of the case against him.

When the dispatcher asked where she was, Angela's voice came through, urgent and strained: "Please get out of here. I have customers coming in." Then, unmistakably: "Chris!" A gunshot followed. In the background, a male voice—his voice—could be heard swearing. Those were her last words. Special agents Dustin Henningsen and Ryan Kedley, brought in by the state to lead the investigation, knew immediately they had their suspect. The 911 call was the first clue, but it would not be the last. Inside the kennels' washroom, where Angela bathed the dogs, investigators found her body lying face down in pools of blood. She had been shot at close range, a large wound to the chest. A barely visible blood trail led from the washroom through the dog kennel area and out a door facing the woods—"The Wilderness," locals called it, hundreds of acres of farmland and forest stretching to the Mississippi River.

Chris Prichard had vanished into that landscape. For hours, he was gone—a fugitive with a shotgun, potentially armed and dangerous, with knowledge of the terrain and survival skills honed by years of hunting and outdoor work. Police dogs lost his scent. Helicopters and drones swept the area. But Prichard's old friends, cattle farmer Jeff Junk and his girlfriend Kim Klein, received a warning from a Jackson County deputy that he might come looking for help. Around 8:15 p.m., there was a knock on their door. Junk opened it to find Prichard standing in the dim light, holding a 20-gauge shotgun. "You need to hand that gun to me," Junk said, and Prichard complied without resistance. The couple kept him talking, playing along while they waited for the right moment. Prichard told them he'd been running all day from police and their dogs. When they told him Angela was dead, he showed no reaction—no remorse, no shock. He sat in a La-Z-Boy chair, drinking and laughing, talking about old times. Kim Klein snapped a photo to document his indifference. Around midnight, after Prichard passed out, Junk texted the deputy. When police arrived, Prichard was still unconscious in the chair.

Twenty-one hours after Angela's death, Prichard waived his Miranda rights and spoke to investigators. He claimed the shooting was an accident—that Angela had shoved him, he'd hit a cabinet, and the gun just went off. But the evidence told a different story. Prosecutors Nicole Leonard and John Kies built a case for premeditated murder. On October 7, the day before the shooting, Angela's temporary restraining order became permanent. That same day, Prichard borrowed a white pickup truck from neighbors Lori and Mike Blaser, parking it in their barn with a note saying he'd gone hunting. Surveillance footage from the Blasers' property showed him entering the barn and the horse trailer inside. He hiked through the woods to the kennels in the middle of the night, arriving around 4 a.m.—the moment dogs on the surveillance video began to bark. He waited nearly four hours for Angela to arrive. When she did, he was ready.

At trial in February 2024, prosecutors presented the medical examiner's testimony: the gunshot had a downward trajectory, meaning Prichard held the weapon in his hands when he fired. Angela was shot dead center in the chest and died in seconds. Prichard's own words during police interviews contradicted his accident story—he kept changing details, claiming the gun was leaning against cupboards, then that it fell when he reached for a backpack. He said he thought the shot hit her arm, that she was yelling at him afterward. But the 911 recording proved otherwise. There was no yelling back. There was only silence after the gunshot, and his profanity-laced voice in the background. "You definitely don't say what he said at the end of the phone call, after you accidentally shoot someone," Angela's son Joshua Close told investigators. The jury deliberated for less than an hour. On February 23, 2024, they found Prichard guilty of first-degree murder and robbery. In March, he was sentenced to life without parole.

But Angela's family and their attorney, civil rights lawyer Dave O'Brien, saw a larger failure beneath the conviction. From September 1, when Angela obtained her second protective order, until her death 37 days later, Prichard violated the no-contact order repeatedly. He sat outside her sister's house. He drove by six times in one hour. He cut grass at the kennels while she wasn't there. He placed guns throughout the house to intimidate her. He installed tracking devices in her car and hidden cameras in the home. Angela documented it all in sticky notes—a diary of escalating terror. "I think Chris is capable of anything," she wrote. "Always looking over my shoulder to see if he's around." She called police a dozen times. Each time, Bellevue police responded but took no meaningful action. When Angela and her sister went to the house with police present to retrieve her belongings, they found it destroyed—ink and paint thrown everywhere, picture frames broken, furniture demolished, the mattress rubbed in dog feces, guns placed throughout to terrorize her. Police told them there was nothing they could do; it was his house too. Under Iowa law, with a no-contact order in place, police should have confiscated his weapons. They didn't. Nine days before her death, the Jackson County attorney emailed Bellevue police warning that Prichard had 24 hours to turn himself in, adding: "I'm afraid he might try to do something tonight." When he didn't appear, an arrest warrant was issued. Seven days before her murder, bodycam footage showed Police Chief Dennis Schroeder telling Angela and her sister: "My biggest fear is he's going to try to hurt you and then hurt himself. My job is to protect you at all costs." Yet during the final week of Angela's life, police never executed that warrant. Prichard's Jeep had a customized license plate reading "0Dark30"—impossible to miss. But there was no record of any effort to find and arrest him.

O'Brien filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Bellevue and three officers, arguing they created a "state-created danger" by failing to enforce the protection order, thereby increasing the threat to Angela's life. In October 2024, Chief Federal Judge C.J. Williams dismissed the case entirely, ruling the police "did not put Angela in a more dangerous situation" and that the officers "simply did not commit outrageous conduct." The judge found no evidence of favoritism. O'Brien was granted a hearing in December after learning the three officers had allegedly withheld evidence and made false statements about their friendships with Prichard—accusations they deny. In January 2025, Judge Williams refused to reverse his dismissal. The Bellevue Police Department issued a statement saying they were "pleased with the decision" and would "continue to strengthen our services." Angela's family has appealed. Wendy Budde, Angela's sister, still carries the weight of that day. "I have a lot of guilt," she said, "because I think, what if I would've went with her that day? Maybe I could have saved her." But she also spoke of pride in her sister's final act—naming her killer on that 911 call, helping bring him to justice. The family's message is clear: protection orders mean nothing without enforcement. Nearly three women in the United States are killed by an intimate partner each day. Angela Prichard was one of them—and her case raises a question that extends far beyond Bellevue: when police fail to enforce a judge's order, who bears responsibility for what comes next?