Fallen Angel

She should have been at high school. Instead, eighteen-year-old Angela Coffel had gotten into her dad's cache of airline liquor bottles and was busy drinking shooters outside her parents' trailer. This wasn't the first time Angela -- the girl nicknamed "Angel" by her grandmother -- had decided to skip, and it wouldn't be the last. Angel had moved back in with her parents just a few months earlier, and adjustment to life in Foley, Missouri, a mere speck on the map near St. Louis, was proving difficult. Her parents were still fighting, and though she'd given up alcohol just before moving back, here she was getting drunk again.

As another day slipped away, a neighbor spotted her and asked a favor: "Would you help my old lady clean the house?" Angel agreed, took her liquor bottles over to Lanae Collins' trailer, put them in the freezer and began to help the young mother with housework. Jeff, eleven, and Matt, thirteen -- brothers who also lived in the trailer park and were friends of Collins' -- ambled in. When Collins went to the kitchen to make dinner, she left Angel and the boys alone in the living room, watching TV. Angel was still drinking.

"Let's play Truth or Dare," the boys suggested.

"Have you ever had sex with a man?" one of them asked.

"Yes," Angel answered.

"Have you ever had sex with a woman?"

Again she answered yes.

When they asked whether she'd ever parachuted, Angel demanded another question.

"Have you ever gone out in the street naked?"

"Yes," she said, then elected to answer another truth question. But the boys insisted she was limited to three truth questions and now had to take a dare -- Angel must perform oral sex on them, they said.

After accepting, she went down on Matt for about five seconds but stopped because, she later recounted, "the shit felt nasty." Collins came back into the room and saw Jeff lying on top of Angel, his pants down. Outraged, she told Angel to leave and "never come back," but she didn't call the boys' mother.

Two days later -- on Saturday, October 8, 1994 -- the boys' mother reported the sexual assault to the county sheriff's department. Deputies investigated and confirmed the incident. They also discovered something Angel already knew -- she was HIV-positive.

On November 10, 1994, Lincoln County Prosecuting Attorney G. John Richards charged Angel with two counts of sodomy. Seven months later, in May, Angel pleaded guilty to the charges, and her father posted a $50,000 unsecured bond. She remained free until sentencing but was ordered to stay away from a sixteen-year-old boy with whom she was having a sexual relationship.

Because Angel had no prior convictions, a presentencing report recommended probation. But when Lincoln County Judge Ralph Jaynes learned that Angel had contacted the boy (the boy's uncle had sent the judge a letter), probation was out of the question. The judge was furious, and in March 1996 he handed her a five-year prison sentence.

Angel would spend those years calling several prisons home: the Chillicothe Correctional Center, the Renz Correctional Center, the Vandalia Correctional Center. She also racked up 73 conduct violations, most of them in her first 19 months. Prison officials were particularly upset with such violations as her kissing another female inmate in bed, pressing the front part of her body against a male corrections officer, walking down a hall wearing nothing but a gray state-issue shirt after taking a shower; hitting a wall instead of her cellmate; coming out of her cell with her jumpsuit unzipped, breasts hanging out; and burning herself with a curling iron to cover up a hickey.

While she was behind bars, Angel was supposed to attend the Missouri Sex Offenders Program. In June 1997, she began the first phase of the program, but her poor reading ability -- she tests at a first-grade level -- made the coursework difficult. Men in the sex-offender program with limited reading skills receive remedial help, but Angel's lawyers say that the same assistance wasn't available to her. She was terminated from the first phase of the program during the final session for being twenty minutes late to class, then inexplicably allowed to proceed to the second phase. But three weeks later, Angel quit the program altogether.

According to the "Participation and Examination" report prepared by Sally Taylor, an associate psychologist with the sex-offender program, Angel's participation was "wildly erratic." Angel, Taylor wrote in her report, made a point of describing "her behavior in a graphic and lewd manner, presumably with the intent to shock and offend the investigating officers." Angel was disrespectful to group members when she returned late from breaks, Taylor noted, and her daily assignments were "carelessly completed." Angel had the temerity to insist "that she could not spread the HIV virus through her saliva" during oral sex -- a point on which she and Taylor argued. (Another psychologist later would note that Angel, not Taylor, was right on this point.) Taylor concluded by writing that Angel was "an extremely high risk to reoffend sexually and engage in other criminal behaviors."

Having already served jail time on the sodomy charge before entering her plea, Angel was scheduled for release on July 31, 2000. As is standard for all state inmates on their way out, an "End of Confinement" report on Angel was completed. Rebecca Woody, whose title with the Department of Corrections is "associate psychologist," even though she's actually just a professional counselor, prepared the report on Angel. According to Woody, Angel is a sexual sadist who is "willing to risk infecting others with a deadly disease by having unprotected sexual contact with them."