Twenty-one-year-old Angela Maher was about to begin her senior year at Creighton University. Shortly before the school year began, she made the 1,300 mile drive from Omaha, Nebraska, to her Scottsdale, Arizona, home to celebrate her mom’s birthday. It was supposed to be a joyous occasion, but instead it became one of tragic and awful irony.

At 10:30 p.m. on the evening of July 29, 1994, Rose Maher heard a knock on her door. Upon answering, her heart sank. Standing on the doorstep was a policeman with a look of dread on his face. He informed Rose that her daughter had been killed in a car accident.

The awful irony of Angela’s death was soon learned. The devastation is exacerbated in that her perpetrator never paid for claiming her life.

Angela Maher

While attending Xavier Preparatory High School in Palm Desert, California, Angela’s friend, Jeffrey Dawes, had been killed while driving drunk. Afterwards, Angela established her high school’s S.A.D.D. (Students Against Drunk Driving) chapter. She organized several fundraisers and presentations at which she spoke about drunk driving accidents.

Furthermore, Angela resolved to be a designated driver. When she and her friends painted the town, Angela always refrained from alcohol to ensure that everyone would get home safely. She also insisted her friends promise her that if they had had too much to drink, they would call her to give them a ride home.

One of Angela’s friends had hit the bottle a little too hard on the evening of July 29, 1994. She remembered Angela’s order and phoned her.

The Designated Driver

Angela told her mom she would get her friend home, but they would probably chat at the bar for a little while. She said she would be home by midnight.

Around the same time Angela departed in her mom’s Oldsmobile for Stixx, a local bar/nightclub, an inebriated woman entered her van after stumbling out of Thunder & Lightning, another local evening establishment.

Moments later, after the van initially struck another car, the two women’s vehicles collided head-on with the van running over Angela’s car. A fourth vehicle struck her car’s rear as the driver attempted to hurriedly stop.

Angela’s Car

The Van

Paramedics arrived quickly, but by the time they were able to cut Angela from her car, it was too late. She was pronounced dead at the scene. An autopsy showed she had succumbed to blunt force trauma to her head resulting from the injuries sustained in the accident.

In a bitterly “sad” irony Angela Maher, the crusader against drunk driving, had become a drunk driving victim.

The Awful Irony

The drunken driver, thirty-one-year-old Gloria Schulze, survived the accident relatively unscathed, suffering only a broken jaw.  When police arrived at the scene, she was lucid enough to be questioned. Her speech was slurred and her breath wreaked of alcohol.

Schulze admitted to having consumed multiple glasses of beer. Tests showed her blood alcohol level to be nearly double the legal limit for driving in Arizona. A urinalysis also detected traces of marijuana, although it could not show definitively whether she had been stoned at the time of the accident.

Gloria Schulze

Upon being released from the Scottsdale Memorial Hospital on August 8, Gloria Schulze was charged with manslaughter and reckless endangerment. She was not charged with the lesser offense of DUI (driving under the influence), because prosecutors did not want that to be a conviction option for a jury.

At her arraignment, Schulze’s attorney, Larry Kazan, who was considered the go-to lawyer for those charged in DUI cases, persuaded Judge Barbara Jarrett to release his client under her own recognizance. Judge Jarrett did so with the stipulation that Schulze submit to pretrial drug testing three times a week and report to the court by telephone once a week. She did not have to post bond or surrender her driver’s license.

Kazan asked, and was granted, six postponements for Schulze’s trial over the following eight months. In addition, the prosecutor and judge originally given the case were reassigned, further delaying the legal proceedings.

All the while, Schulze complied with the court-ordered testing and never missed an appointment.

Schulze Is Charged

In August 1995, just over a year after Angela’s death, Schulze was offered a plea bargain. If she waived her right to a trial and pled guilty to reckless endangerment and manslaughter, she would receive a reduced sentence. A pretrial hearing was scheduled for September 15. She faced anywhere from seven to twenty-one years in prison; the most likely sentence would be between fourteen and sixteen years.

But Gloria Schulze had other plans.

Schulze Is Offered A Plea-Bargain . . .

After maxing out her credit cards and selling her two cars, Schulze did not arrive for her court date and went into hiding.  It was subsequently discovered that she had not arrived for five drug tests dates scheduled between September 1-13, nor had she attended an appointment with a counselor four days earlier.

Neither the court nor Maricopa County prosecutors were notified of Schulze’s no-show’s.

. . . But She Fleas Instead

The following six yeas produced few substantive clues to Gloria Schulze’s whereabouts.  In 2001, she was convicted in absentia of manslaughter with sentencing to be imposed upon her capture. That day never came.

Convicted in Absentia

Because Schulze came from a family of means, police believe relatives helped her elude capture. On October 19, two months after she fled, her parents, who lived in California, sold the Scottsdale home they rented to their daughter for $115,000 in cash, which authorities believe was given to their fugitive daughter.

Schulze may have lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for several years after fleeing. In the last twenty years, reports placed her with family in California, Michigan, and even abroad in Turkey.

A Computer-Aged Image of Gloria Schulze

In 2020, over a quarter-of-a-century after Gloria Schulze had absconded, her estranged brother received an anonymous phone call saying his sister had passed away the previous year. The caller said the fugitive had been living under the name of Kate Dooley in remote Yellowknife, Canada, the capital of the Northwest Territories, over 2,600 miles from Scottsdale, Arizona, and only two-hundred-fifty-miles from the Arctic Circle.

Canadian investigators discovered that Dooley had been arrested by the Royal Canadian Mount Police (RCMP) for drunk driving in 2009. By 2020, most of the records relating to the arrest had been purged, but copies of her fingerprints were found still on file.

In May 2024, the FBI confirmed the fingerprints matched those of American fugitive Gloria Schulze. She was found to have died of cancer on December 1, 2019, at age fifty-seven. A tribute celebration remembering “Kate Dooley” was found online.

The investigation into Schulze’s fugitive life far north of the border is still ongoing. It has not yet been determined how long she had live in Yellowknife. Acquaintances say the woman they knew as Kate Dooley was friendly and largely kept to herself. She had worked at mining camps and as a house painter. In going through her possessions following her 2019 death, friends recalled finding several books on how a person can change his or her identity as well as other “odd things” which have yet been specified by authorities.

Dooley was considered a local “pyrotechnics master” for her longtime involvement in organizing Yellowknife’s local fireworks shows and Fourth of July and New Year Eve’s fireworks displays.

Is has also not yet been explained why “Kate Dooley” was not identified as Gloria Schulze following her 2009 DUI arrest in Yellowknife.

“Kate Dooley”

 In Reality Fugitive Gloria Schulze

In May 1995, while Gloria Schulze was free on her own recognizance, she attended her younger sister’s college graduation ceremony in California.

On May 13, the day Angela Maher would have graduated college, Creighton University awarded her a posthumous honorary diploma in her major of political science. Rose Maher accepted the diploma on her daughter’s behalf.

Rose died in 2021 at age eighty-four.

Rose And Angela

The obvious lesson of Angela’s Maher’s story is to not drink and drive, but another important lesson it is that a motorist should always wear the seat belt. As inebriated as Gloria Schulze was, she had the wherewithal to buckle up and it probably saved her life.

Angela Maher was not was wearing her seat belt; doing so may have saved her life.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/130928642/angela-marie-maher

Buckle Up

SOURCES:

• America’s Most Wanted
• Arizona Republic
• Associated Press
• Phoenix New Times
• Tucson Citizen
• Unsolved Mysteries