She vanished after killing a woman while driving drunk. Thirty years later, cops have cracked the case

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A woman who fled Arizona after killing a college student in a drunken car crash 30 years ago has finally been traced to a far-flung region of northern Canada.

Gloria Schulze, then 31, was charged with manslaughter in July 1994 over the death of 21-year-old Angela Maher in Scottsdale, Arizona, but vanished before she could stand trial. Prosecutors said that Schulze had been driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, and she was eventually convicted in absentia in 2001.

Now, police say they have tracked Schulze to the remote Canadian town of Yellowknife, population 20,340, where she died of cancer in 2009 having changed her name to Kate Dooley.

“It really tormented my mom, not knowing what happened to Gloria Schulze,” Maher’s older brother, Don Maher, told Fox 10 Phoenix. “At least now, the story is done. We can turn the page and move on.”

After being featured on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries in 1996, Schulze’s case went cold for nearly three decades, and her family said they never heard from her again.

In 2020, however, Schulze’s brother contacted the Scottsdale Police Department and said he had received an anonymous phone call claiming that Schulze had died in Canada.

Investigators found online tributes and obituaries for Kate Dooley, with photos that closely resembled a police mock-up of how Schulze might look at age 47.

Scottsdale police then liaised with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who confirmed that Dooley had been arrested in 2009 for driving under the influence and that they had her fingerprints on file.

In April this year, the results came back: the fingerprints matched, and Dooley and Schulze were the same person.

Yellowknife is the only city in Canada’s vast, rugged Northwest Territories, which are the historic home of various Inuit, Dene, and Cree indigenous nations and have an estimated population density of just 0.08 people per square mile.

“To be honest, we always thought she was in Mexico. But it makes sense that you would go somewhere that remote... [where] people don’t pay attention,” Don Maher told Fox 10.

“It’s bittersweet. It’s sad that my mother passed away before knowing the outcome. But it’s also a happy ending in the sense that we now know what happened to [Angela].”