Arizona Woman Who Fled DUI Manslaughter Charge Found Dead in Canada After 30 Years

A woman who fled Arizona after killing a college student in a drunken vehicle accident 30 years ago has been tracked down to a remote region of northern Canada.

Gloria Schulze, then 31, was charged with manslaughter in July 1994 for the death of Angela Maher, 21, in Scottsdale, Arizona, but she disappeared before her trial. Prosecutors said Schulze was driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, and she was convicted in absentia in 2001.

Police said they have tracked Schulze to the isolated Canadian town of Yellowknife, population 20,340, where she died of cancer in 2009 after changing 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 the story is finished. We can flip the page and move forward.”

After appearing on the television show Unsolved Mysteries in 1996, Schulze’s case went cold for over three decades, and her family claimed they never heard from her again.

In 2020, Schulze’s brother called the Scottsdale Police Department, stating he had received an anonymous phone call indicating Schulze had died in Canada.

Investigators discovered internet tributes and obituaries for Kate Dooley, including images that closely mirrored a police mock-up of Schulze’s appearance at age 47.

Scottsdale police then contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who confirmed that Dooley was arrested in 2009 for driving under the influence and that her fingerprints were on file.

The results were returned in April of this year: the fingerprints matched, indicating that Dooley and Schulze were the same individual.

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

“To be honest, we always assumed she was in Mexico.” But it makes sense to go somewhere secluded… [where] people don’t pay attention,” Don Maher told Fox 10.

“It is bittersweet. It’s unfortunate that my mother died before knowing the outcome. But it’s also a good ending because we now know what happened to [Angela].”