He had served as a deacon for 11 years.
He had carried the collection plate down the center aisle of the First Redeemer Baptist Church of Callaway, Alabama, every Sunday morning for more than a decade, nodding to the same families in the same pews, shaking the same hands at the door when the service ended.
He had helped organize the church picnic in 1987 and the building fund in 1991 and the memorial service in 1985 for a young woman whose name appeared in the church directory right up until the Sunday she stopped appearing in the pew.
That is not a story about religious hypocrisy in the abstract.
That is a story about the specific and calculated evil of a man who understood that the best place to hide what he had done was behind the very institution that her family turned to for comfort after she was gone.
And it would take 40 years.
A Dena sample preserved in a Calhoun County evidence locker through four decades and two facility relocations.
And a forensic genealogy process that did not exist when the crime was committed to pull Walter Dean Sims out from behind the collection plate and into the light of what the evidence had always known about him.
But before any of that, we have to go back to the spring of 1984.
Because to understand what was taken, you first have to understand who Angela was.
Callaway was a small city in Calhoun County, Alabama, the kind of place that had grown just large enough by 1984 to have a shopping center on the east end of town, and a community college that drew students from the surrounding rural communities without ever quite losing the quality of a town where everyone’s business was.
One way or another, everyone else’s.
The textile mill that had employed two generations of Callaway families had been running reduced shifts since 1980, which meant that the economic anxiety of the early Reagan years had arrived in Callaway ahead of schedule and settled in the particular way that economic anxiety settles in small towns, not dramatically, but persistently, like weather that never quite clears.
Angela Rose Demerest was 22 years old.
She had grown up in Callaway, the middle child of three, the daughter of a man named Curtis, who managed the parts counter at an auto supply store on the main road, and a woman named Nell, who had worked for 19 years as a seamstress at the textile mill, and who was in the spring of 1984, 3 months into the reduced schedule that the mill’s management had described as temporary, and that everyone on the floor understood was not.
Angela had attended the community college for two years and was working as a receptionist at a dental practice on Wheeler Avenue.
Saving money with the methodical discipline of someone who had grown up watching her parents make every dollar account for something, she was planning to transfer to the University of Alabama in Aniston the following fall to complete a degree in business administration.
She had the application on her desk at home with the financial aid forms already filled out in her careful, even handwriting.
She sang in the choir at First Redeemer Baptist.
Had done so since she was 14.
Her voice was the kind that the choir director described as a balancing voice.
Not the loudest, not the most technically accomplished, but the one that made the people on either side of her sound better.
The kind of voice that holds a chord together from the inside rather than pulling it in any particular direction.
She practiced on Tuesday evenings and sang at Sunday services and was in the informal social architecture of the church.
The young woman that the older congregation members felt they had watched grow up, which meant they felt when she disappeared that something had been taken from them personally, not just from her family.
Walter Dean Sims had been a member of First Redeemer Baptist since 1979.
He was 38 years old in 1984, a married man with two children, a foreman at a manufacturing facility on the industrial park at the edge of town.
He had been elected deacon in 1982 and served the role with a visible conscientiousness that the pastor found reassuring and that the congregation found appropriate.
He knew Angela Dearis the way members of a congregation of 400 know each other by name, by family, by presence in the pew.
He had no documented personal relationship with her beyond the institutional one.
That was what the investigation would find in 1984.
It was not the complete picture.
On the evening of April 19th, 1984, Angela left her parents house at 7:15 after Friday dinner.
She told her mother she was meeting a friend at the shopping center to return a borrowed jacket and would be home by 9.
Nell walked her to the door.
Curtis was in the living room watching the evening news.
Angela drove away in her 1981 Chevet, the burgundy one with the cracked dashboard that she had been meaning to have looked at, and that was the last time either of her parents saw her alive.
By 9:30, Nell called the friend.
The friend had not seen Angela that evening and had made no plans to meet her.
By 10:00, Curtis had driven to the shopping center himself.
By 11, he had called the Callaway Police Department.
Angela’s car was found the following morning in the rear parking lot of the shopping center.
Driver’s door unlocked, her purse on the passenger seat, the borrowed jacket folded on the back seat as if it had been prepared for delivery.
The lot had no security lighting on the western perimeter.
The nearest street light was 40 ft from where the car was parked.
The Callaway Police Department assigned a detective named Roy Pitman to the case.
He was 46 years old, 21 years into a career that had given him a thorough and largely melancholy education in the ways that small cities fail their most vulnerable residents.
He began in the standard places.
He interviewed Angela’s co-workers at the dental practice, her friends from the community college, the members of the choir.
He constructed a timeline of her movements in the days preceding the 19th.
He found no conflict, no threat, no documented reason for her to have been afraid of anyone she knew.
He interviewed Walter Sims on the fourth day as part of a canvas of church members who had known Angela.
Sims was cooperative.
His wife confirmed he had been home on the evening of the 19th from 7:00 onward.
Pitman noted the interview in his file as completed and without apparent relevance and moved on to other names.
He had two more promising leads.
The first was a man who had been arrested twice for harassment related offenses in Calhoun County and who lived within half a mile of the shopping center.
His alibi for the evening of the 19th was documented but relied on a single witness whose account Pitman found internally inconsistent in minor ways that he could never fully resolve.
The man was interviewed three times across two months and never charged.
The second lead was a former co-orker from the dental practice who had left the position six months earlier following what the practice owner described as a difficult professional separation.
He had no documented contact with Angela since leaving and his whereabouts on the 19th were confirmed through credit card records.
A biological sample collected from Angela’s vehicle was preserved and submitted for analysis.
In 1984, DINA profiling for law enforcement had not yet been adopted in Alabama.
The sample was cataloged and stored.
A partial fingerprint recovered from the driver’s side door frame was run through available records and returned no match.
By the fall of 1984, the Callaway Police Department had exhausted the investigative resources available to a midsized Alabama city’s detective division in that era.
The case was reclassified as inactive.
Angela Rose Demerest’s file was moved to the cold case archive.
Roy Pitman, who had spent 6 months on the investigation and had not found the thing he was looking for, retired the following year and spent the decade after that periodically calling the department to ask if anything new had developed.
The answer was always the same.
Angela was found in October of 1984, 5 months after her disappearance, by a groundskeeper maintaining the cemetery behind First Redeemer Baptist Church.
The ground behind the back wall of the cemetery in an area that was not part of the maintained burial section, but that the church used for storage of landscaping equipment had been disturbed.
The groundskeeper noted it because the soil in that area was different from the surrounding ground.
Not freshly turned, but settled in a way that the rest of the area was not as if something had been done to it and then deliberately obscured.
He reported it to the church’s facilities coordinator.
The facilities coordinator called the police.
What was found was Angela.
She had been buried in a location that required specific knowledge of the church property.
Knowledge of which areas were maintained and which were not.
Knowledge of access points.
Knowledge of where a disturbance in the ground could go unnoticed for months.
The groundskeeper who found her had been hired in September.
His predecessor had left in March.
Roy Pitman reintered Walter Sims within 48 hours of the discovery.
The interview produced nothing new.
Sims’s wife again confirmed his whereabouts.
Pitman noted in his file that the location of the burial required insider knowledge of the church property and that Sims, as a deacon with facilities access, could not be excluded on the basis of opportunity.
He also noted that excluding him required more than access.
It required evidence and the evidence in October of 1984 did not point to Sims specifically enough to sustain an investigation.
Pitman wrote those notes and filed them and retired the following year and kept calling the department for 10 years after that.
Curtis Demerist went to church every Sunday for 6 years after Angela disappeared.
He sat in the same pew his family had occupied since they joined First Redeemer in 1971.
He sat three rows behind where Walter Dean Sims sat with his wife and two children.
He did not know when he watched Sims carry the collection plate down the center aisle what the evidence that had been sitting in the Callaway Police Department archive since April of 1984 already knew.
He stopped attending in 1990 because Nell’s health had declined to a point where Sunday mornings required different priorities and he did not go back after that.
He said later that he had not missed it the way he expected to and that he had not fully understood why until the phone call in 2024.
Nell Demerest died in 2003.
She had kept Angela’s application to the University of Alabama in Aniston in the drawer of the desk in Angela’s old bedroom.
The financial aid forms filled out in Angela’s careful, even handwriting were still in the envelope with the application.
Curtis did not move them after Nell died.
He did not open the drawer with any regularity, but he did not remove the application either, for the same reason that James Puit’s uncle kept the toolbox organized, and Vera McKay kept her Tuesday and Thursday coffee ritual, because some things deserve to stay where they were put by the person who put them there.
The choir director at First Redeemer retired in 1997 and gave an interview to the Callaway Curier on the occasion of his 30-year anniversary with the church in which he mentioned Angela by name unprompted as the voice he had never fully replaced.
The interview was clipped by a woman in the congregation who had known Angela’s family and was mailed to Curtis at his house without a note because no note was necessary.
He kept it in the same drawer as the application.
Walter Dean Sims served as a deacon at First Redeemer Baptist until 2006 when he retired from the position sighting age and reduced energy.
He was given a recognition at the Sunday service on his final week, a framed certificate, a round of applause from the congregation, a handshake from the pastor who had succeeded the pastor who had presided over Angela Dearrist’s memorial service in 1985.
He had carried the collection plate down the center aisle for 11 years after he buried Angela behind the cemetery wall, nodding to the same families in the same pews.
Including the pew where Curtis Dearis sat for six of those years.
Every case on this channel is built from weeks of careful research through archived police files, court records, and the real histories of families who refused to let silence be the final answer.
If this work matters to you, take a moment to like this video, subscribe, and drop a comment below telling us where in the world you’re watching from.
Your support makes this possible.
Now, back to Curtis Dearrist and back to the evidence that had been waiting in a Calhoun County archive since the spring of 1984.
Then in the winter of 2023, the Alabama law enforcement ay’s cold case unit submitted biological evidence from the dearest case to a forensic genealogy laboratory as part of a statewide initiative targeting pre990 homicides with viable biological samples.
The sample from Angela’s vehicle had been assessed for viability in 2021 as part of the same inventory that had identified the Harrove sample in Missouri and the Whitfield sample in Tennessee.
The growing national effort to audit what was sitting in evidence archives and what science could now do with it.
The sample was viable.
It had been viable since 1984.
40 years in a Calhoun County evidence locker had not touched what the spring of 1984 had left behind.
The genealogy laboratory built the family tree over 5 months.
The process traces Dina from crime scene evidence through public ancestry databases.
Databases built by millions of ordinary people seeking their own family histories.
Working backward through genetic relatives until the branches of the tree narrow to a single contributor.
The tree built from Angela Dearest’s case evidence narrowed in March of 2024 to a name that Roy Pitman had written in his case file in 1984 and underlined once and been unable to move past for want of the evidence that now 40 years later existed.
Walter Dean Sims was 78 years old.
He had been living in a retirement community outside Aniston since 2018, the same city where Angela had applied to complete her business degree.
His wife had died in 2015.
His two children visited on holidays.
His neighbors described him as a quiet man, a churchgoing man, the kind of man who kept to himself and caused no difficulty and required no particular attention from anyone around him.
A covert dena sample was collected from a drinking cup discarded by Sims at a community room table in the retirement facility on a Thursday morning in April 2024.
The sample was submitted for comparison the same afternoon.
The results came back in 8 days.
The match to the evidence collected from Angela Demerest’s vehicle in April of 1984 was confirmed.
40 years had passed.
The science had not been available for 38 of them.
For the two years it had been available, the sample had been waiting in the queue of an understaffed and underfunded cold case unit working through a backlog of evidence that stretched back decades.
The queue had reached Angela’s case in 2023.
The tree had reached Walter Sims in March of 2024.
An arrest warrant was issued on April 22nd, 2024, 40 years and 3 days after Angela Rose Dearis had driven away from her parents’ house in a burgundy chevet to return a borrowed jacket and had not come home.
Walter Sims was taken into custody at the retirement facility on a Monday morning.
He was sitting in the community room when investigators arrived.
A cup of coffee on the table in front of him, a newspaper folded to the crossword.
He looked up when they entered.
He did not appear surprised.
He did not speak.
He was escorted out of the building past the table where the community room’s daily puzzle was pinned to a corkboard and past the window that looked out onto the facility’s garden and into a patrol vehicle that took him to the Calhoun County Jail.
Where he was booked on a charge of firstdegree murder.
His attorney entered a not-uilty plea at arraignment.
Sims sat at the defense table and looked at nothing in particular for the duration of the proceeding.
Investigators returned to First Redeemer Baptist Church in the days following the arrest.
The groundskeeper who had found Angela in 1984 was located.
He was 71 now and living outside Birmingham and interviewed again with the benefit of everything that had since been established.
The church’s historical facilities records from the 1980s were requested and reviewed.
The records confirmed that Walter Sims, as a deacon with a specific facilities portfolio, had held a key to the rear gate of the church property in April of 1984.
The records confirmed that the area behind the cemetery wall had been within his designated maintenance oversight.
Roy Pitman’s notes from 1984, which had been preserved in the cold case archive, were entered into evidence.
The note about insider knowledge of the church property.
The note about Sims having access.
The note about access not being sufficient without evidence.
40 years later, the evidence had arrived to finish the sentence that Roy Pitman had started and been unable to complete.
Curtis Dearrist was 81 years old when the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency called him on a Tuesday afternoon in April 2024.
He answered the phone in the kitchen of the house he had lived in since 1969.
The house where Angela had grown up.
The house where the desk with the application in the drawer still sat in what had been her bedroom.
The investigator on the call told him they had a match.
Told him who it was.
Told him that Walter Dean Sims was in custody.
Curtis was quiet for a long time.
Then he said he had sat three rows behind that man for six years.
He had watched him carry the collection plate.
He had shaken his hand at the door after services.
He said this not with the anger that the information deserved.
The anger would come later in its own time, but with a kind of flat exhaustion that comes from understanding all at once the full dimensions of what you were standing inside without knowing it.
He asked if they had found where it happened.
The investigator told him the evidence from the vehicle had been sufficient for the charge.
He asked whether Angela had been frightened.
The investigator told him what could be said and did not say more.
Curtis thanked her.
He hung up the phone.
He sat at the kitchen table for a while.
Then he went to Angela’s room and opened the drawer and took out the application and held it.
Walter Dean Sims was convicted of first-degree murder in September 2024.
The jury deliberated for 4 hours.
He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
He made no statement at sentencing.
He was 78 years old.
Angela Rose Dearrist was 22 when he decided her life was something he could take and conceal behind a church wall and then attend services above for the better part of a decade.
At sentencing, Angela’s younger sister, a woman named Brenda, who had been 16 in 1984 and was now 56, read a statement that took 9 minutes.
She spoke about the application in the drawer.
She spoke about Nell keeping it because it was Angela’s handwriting and Angela’s planning and Angela’s future in a single envelope and about how Curtis had kept it after Nell died because you do not throw away the last thing a person organized toward the life they were going to live.
She said that Walter Dean Sims had not understood when he made his choice in April of 1984.
That he was not only ending a life, he was ending a future that had already been written down, already been planned, already been filled out and careful, even handwriting, and placed in an envelope on a desk.
She said the handwriting was still there.
The envelope was still there.
And now finally, so was the record of what he had done.
Angela Rose Dearis saved money with the discipline of someone who understood that every dollar needed to account for something.
She sang the balancing voice in the choir, the one that held the cord together from the inside.
She had a cracked dashboard she kept meaning to have fixed and a jacket to return and an application on her desk with the financial aid forms already filled out and everything.
In the spring of 1984, still ahead of her, Walter Dean Sims carried a collection plate down the center aisle of a church whose cemetery wall held the truth of what he had done.
He did it for 11 years.
He shook hands at the door.
He organized the picnic and the building fund and the memorial service for the young woman he had put in the ground behind the wall he walked past every Sunday morning.
He did all of this and then retired to a community outside the city where she had planned to finish her degree and spent six more years doing crossword puzzles and drinking coffee at a community room table until investigators walked through the door on a Monday morning in April and the 40 years of performance finally ended.
What does it say to you that Walter Sims was reintered in 1984?
That Roy Pitman noted his access and his knowledge and his opportunity, and that the investigation could go no further without the biological evidence that science could not yet interpret?
Does a life sentence at age 78 feel like justice?
Or does it feel like the accounting arrived too late for the debt to be fully settled?
And what do you make of the fact that the evidence in this case was viable in 1984?
Viable in every year between 1984 and 2024.
And that the only thing that changed was the science available to read it.
Meaning Angela’s case was solvable from the beginning in the only way that mattered and the world simply had not caught up yet.
Justice found Angela Rose Dearis after 40 years.
Stories like hers are why this channel exists.
If you believe the truth is worth pursuing, no matter how long it takes, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.
More cases are waiting in the description below.
Thank you for being here.
