Hometown Actress Revisits 1980s Murder in New Podcast

On July 7, 1988, Angela Stevens was murdered by three teenage boys. Stevens, a Princeton High School student, was only 16 when she was beaten to death and abandoned in an empty hayfield. One of the three killers was a boy whom Stevens had dated off and on for some time.

In 1988, Princeton, about 40 miles northeast of Dallas, was a tiny town of barely 2,000 residents. It’s 10 times that size now. Similar to the exploding suburbs around it such as Prosper, Celina and McKinney, Princeton is a much larger, more complicated place than it seemed to be in the late 1980s.

A new podcast, True Texas Crime: The Significant Life of Angela Stevens aims to bring the grisly story to life in a new way and from a different perspective. The podcast is hosted by Julie Dove, a Princeton native who went to high school with Stevens and is now an actress in Los Angeles. She’s currently playing the role of Connie Viniski in Days of Our Lives and has had roles in The Office, Angie Tribeca, Happy Endings and other comedies.

“I absolutely remember the Monday morning after they found her [Angela Stevens'] body,” Dove says. “I remember talking about it and being like, ‘Oh my God, I knew her.’” When I say I knew here, it’s that Princeton small town thing, where everyone felt like they knew each other because you’d pass by everyone in the school hallway. She was this little, petite, upbeat, sweet girl.”

But Dove added that Stevens was also an “imperfect victim,” a so-called wild child. Dove, who taught school in Princeton after college in the early '90s, found out along with the rest of the town during the murder trial that Stevens was a 16-year-old who had sex with boys who were dating other girls, drank and even once stole her mom’s checkbook.


That such details came out during the trial and become the topic of conversation around town didn't sit well with Dove. Nor did the fact that few seemed to be talking or wondering about the family that was shattered and left behind. For the podcast, the host compiled interviews with some of Stevens’ family members, people Dove feels like didn’t have the voice back then that victims and their families often seem to have today.

“Her father, Jack, immediately became suicidal and was never the same. Sadly, he just died last week on July 8,” Dove says. “They were in their 30s; they just lost their middle daughter. They had a younger daughter still at home that they were still trying to raise and I don’t feel like they had community support to rally behind them.”

During the trial, Angela’s mother was questioned on the stand about her daughter’s partying and misdeeds, although Angela was the victim of the heinous crime. Dove found that the Stevens family were ready to talk, possibly because of the amount of time that has passed since the murder.

“I don’t feel like her parents had the mental strength to do more than just survive and, honestly, who would?” Dove asks.

The topic has stayed with Dove, but it wasn't until those shutdown days of the pandemic that a podcast began to be more than just an idea. In 2022, Dove and one of her former students from Princeton began researching the murder in order to get rolling on their own production.

In some ways, the case seems rather open and shut. It’s not a mysterious cold case, and the assailants were brought to justice in short order. But for the actress raised in Princeton, that’s not enough for the whole story to truly be known.

“We started pulling up all the news articles again, and we started listening to other true crime podcasts,” Dove says. “And we realized there’s no mystery here in that we know who killed her. But there is a kind of mystery as to why it happened still. We can read what was said in the court case, but I mean, honestly, it just feels like it was evil and none of the explanations we had heard hold any water.”

True Texas Crime: The Significant Life of Angela Stevens premieres on July 18.