Arizona Woman Convicted of Manslaughter Spent Close to Three Decades Hiding Out in Another Country
A mother, whose daughter's killer managed to evade the law for decades despite being convicted by a jury, was disappointed with the justice system until her last breath.
Gloria Schulze fled from Arizona in 2001 just before she was about to go on trial for the murder of Angela Marie Maher, Arizona Republic reported.
Schulze was tried in her absence and found guilty of manslaughter and endangerment, according to the outlet.
“Twenty years out there,” Rose Marie, Angela Marie Maher's mother, shared a decade ago with Laurie Roberts, the outlet's correspondent. “Never one day did she spend in jail, not one day. It’s not right.”
In 1994, Angela Marie Maher left her home in Scottsdale to pick up one of her friends, the Arizona Republic reported. Rose Marie started to worry as her daughter was still not home after midnight. At around 1 a.m., the police arrived at her door to deliver devastating news: Gloria Schulze had slammed head on into Angela Marie Maher's car, the Arizona Republic reported.
Schulze was observed at the scene of the crash with bloodshot eyes, slurry speech, and boozy on her breath, the Arizona Republic reported. When she took a breathalyzer, her result was well over the legal limit.
Scottsdale Police did not arrest Schulze on the advice of a prosecutor.
Rose Marie never understood why Schulze wasn't taken into custody, the Arizona Republic reported.
“The day I buried my daughter I called the county attorney from the funeral home,” the mother said in July 1997. “I couldn’t understand why she was walking the streets while I was burying my daughter.”
Even after Schulze was charged with manslaughter and endangerment, the prosecutors did not demand she be taken into custody or post a bond, the Arizona Republic reported. The judge ordered Schulze to be tested for drugs three times and check in with police weekly.
Two weeks before Schulze's trial commenced in April 2001, she stopped following the judge's orders, the Arizona Republic reported. She also missed drug tests and a weekly check-in.
She sold two vehicles and maxed out her credit cards during this time. Authorities then learned Schulze fled after failing to show up for trial.
“The hard part is that they had her,” Rose Marie shared, the Arizona Republic reported. “The justice system allowed her to flee.”
Rose Marie's efforts resulted in shows like America's Most Wanted to focus on her daughter's case. She hoped that the publicity would get Schulze put behind bars. The FBI eventually was assigned the case, but agents could not get any leads on Schulze.
In 2020, the case was passed on to senior analyst Kelsey Cohen, the Arizona Republic reported. Cohen contacted Schulze's brother and discovered that in 2019, he had received an anonymous phone call informing him that his sister had died of cancer in Yellowknife, Canada.
After investigating, authorities discovered that a woman named Kate Dooley passed away from cancer on December 1, 2019, in Yellowknife, Canada, the Arizona Republic reported. Investigators found a photo of Dooley in a tribute article published after Dooley's death, which looked similar to the age-progressed picture of the convict.
Dooley was a beloved member of the community, the Arizona Republic reported. She used to regularly stage fireworks shows for her neighborhood. After she died, the community paid tribute to her with a New Year’s fireworks celebration.
Nobody in the community could provide investigators with a clear answer about when she arrived, CBC reported. In an obituary, one friend shared that Dooley arrived sometime in the early 1990s.
Dooley worked at mining camps and as a house painter in Yellowknife, the Arizona Republic reported. "She kept her personal life very private," her friend Kim Smale recalled.
For Dooley's friends, the revelation came as a shock. After Dooley's death, her friends found books in her possession that detailed how someone could change their identity.
In Yellowknife, Dooley was arrested for DUI in 2009, the Arizona Republic reported. Royal Canadian Mounted Police had kept her fingerprints from that case. These fingerprints were matched with those available to Scottsdale Police. The fingerprints matched.
On April 17, law enforcement confirmed that Dooley was Schulze and that the escaped convict did die of cancer in 2019, the Arizona Republic reported. Police closed the case after confirmation of Schulze's identity.
Schulze's family maintains they did not know the convict's whereabouts, CBC reported.
Rose Marie died in 2021 and never knew anything about Dooley, the Arizona Republic reported. She died believing that no one was interested in helping her avenge her daughter's death.
“Nobody really cares,” she once shared about the ordeal, the Arizona Republic reported. “The bottom line here: Nobody really cares and nobody does anything.”
Sgt. Allison Sempsis, the public information sergeant for the Scottsdale Police Department, always maintained that the case was never closed for them, CBC reported. "We would get random tips here and there throughout the years," she said, "but they never amounted to anything."