Angelynn E. Mock, a 48-year-old former St. Louis television news anchor, pleaded guilty to one count of first-degree felony murder on August 21, 2026, in the stabbing death of her mother, 80-year-old Anita L. Avers. Avers was stabbed on October 31, 2025, in the south Wichita, Kan., home the two shared.
Mock reached a plea agreement with prosecutors, the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office announced. She entered the plea before Sedgwick County District Judge Faith Johnson, and it carries a presumptive life sentence, with parole possible only after she has served 25 years. Johnson has set sentencing for October 5 at 11 a.m.
A Halloween Morning Stabbing
It was shortly before 8 a.m. on Halloween, with Avers in bed, when her daughter attacked, according to court records. The address is in the 1500 block of East Crowley, close to Hydraulic and Wassall on the south side of Wichita.
Mock called 911 from a neighbor’s phone after the attack and told the dispatcher her mother tried to kill her, so she stabbed her in return. When police reached Mock outside the house, she was holding a towel over her bloodied hands, and she said she had gone into the bedroom and found Avers “sharpening knives,” according to the affidavit.
She was covered in blood. Mock told officers she had stabbed her mother “to save herself,” according to a probable cause affidavit, and insisted that Avers had been the one to attack first. Her mother, she claimed, was jealous and did not want her to land a job at a local television station, according to the affidavit.
Mock also told investigators she believed her mother was possessed by the devil, according to reporting on the affidavit. “I had to kill her, she wasn’t going to stop,” she said, and: “I’d kill that **** to have my mom back any day. I don’t even know who she is anymore. I know, I believe she is the devil.”
The scene inside told a different story. Avers had suffered multiple stab wounds to her head, face and torso and was wearing only underwear and a bra, and a bed sheet was left with at least 12 puncture holes. An ambulance took her to a hospital, where she later died of her injuries. On a pillow beside where she had been lying, according to the affidavit, someone had arranged four bloody kitchen knives and a bloody cheese grater.
Police arrested Mock that same day, October 31, 2025, and booked her into the Sedgwick County Jail. The charge prosecutors filed on November 4, 2025, was intentional and premeditated first-degree murder. Under the plea agreement, that count was amended to first-degree felony murder, the charge she pleaded to on August 21.
Wichita Police Capt. Roderick Miller briefed reporters at the scene that morning. A family mortuary later posted an obituary for Avers online.
The court file traces a life that had come apart long before that morning. Mock had moved in with her mother and stepfather roughly four or five years earlier, after an alcohol-fueled blowup described in the affidavit cost her a job at a St. Louis television news station.
Delusions Laid Out in the Affidavit
Her career and her mental health gave way together. Schizoaffective disorder, a serious mental illness, brought angry outbursts and stretches of delusion, the affidavit says. In those states, according to the document, she claimed direct conversations with God, described the people around her as robots and threatened to blow up everyone.
Her stepfather, Barry Avers, told police she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that was later revised to schizoaffective disorder. In the months that followed, those affidavit details would drive the case far more than anything investigators collected inside the house.
A Case Stalled by Competency Rulings
Almost as soon as the prosecution began, it stopped. Mock was ordered to Larned State Hospital, the state psychiatric facility for defendants in the criminal justice system, for a competency evaluation and treatment.
On January 15, Sedgwick County District Judge Jeffrey Goering found Mock not competent to stand trial and paused the case against her, a ruling that left the killing of an 80-year-old woman in legal limbo, her family facing no trial date and no resolution.
The impasse broke in July, when a Sedgwick County District Court judge reversed the earlier ruling and found Mock competent to stand trial. The case moved again, and it ended with a plea instead of a jury.
First-degree felony murder in Kansas does not require prosecutors to prove premeditation, only that a death occurred during the commission of an inherently dangerous felony. For the outcome Mock now faces, the distinction matters little: a life sentence, with the door to parole closed for at least a quarter-century.
Mock anchored morning news at KTVI in St. Louis and at KOKH in Oklahoma City, part of a career that included several stations across the country, and in the years before the killing she had been working in software sales. Her final months of freedom passed in the house on East Crowley, unemployed and, according to the affidavit, increasingly detached from reality. Both of those facts sat side by side in a courtroom on the day she pleaded guilty.
What investigators found in the bedroom undercut the account Mock gave officers that her mother had turned on her. Responsibility is settled by her guilty plea. It does not answer the harder question, the one that hangs over a case in which a daughter’s documented delusions ran unchecked for years inside the home of the woman who took her in.
Johnson is expected to formally impose the sentence in October, at a hearing where relatives will have the opportunity to address the court. Mock remains in custody in Sedgwick County until then.
