A guilty plea from a former St. Louis television news anchor has resolved the criminal case over her mother’s stabbing death. Angelynn E. Mock, 48, admitted on August 21, 2026, to one count of first-degree felony murder in the death of her mother, 80-year-old Anita L. Avers, who was stabbed on October 31, 2025, inside the south Wichita, Kan., home the two women shared.
Mock entered the plea before Sedgwick County District Judge Faith Johnson. It carries a presumptive sentence of life behind bars, with parole possible only after she has served 25 years. Johnson is scheduled to sentence her on October 5 at 11 a.m.
A Halloween Morning Attack
Court records show Avers was in bed shortly before 8 a.m. on Halloween when her daughter attacked her. The house stands on Wichita’s south side, in the 1500 block of East Crowley, near Hydraulic and Wassall.
Mock was outside the home and covered in blood when officers arrived. A probable cause affidavit records her telling them she had stabbed her mother “to save herself,” and that Avers, by her account, had struck first. Jealousy was the motive she assigned to her mother, who she said did not want her to land a job at a local television station, the affidavit says.
Inside, officers found a different story. Avers’ body lay beneath blankets in her bed. On a pillow beside her, the affidavit says, someone had arranged four bloody kitchen knives and a bloody cheese grater.
Officers arrested Mock that same day, October 31, 2025, and booked her into the Sedgwick County Jail. Prosecutors charged her on November 4, 2025, with premeditated first-degree murder — the count that became first-degree felony murder under the plea she entered on August 21, 2026.
Both Wichita Police Chief Joe Sullivan and Wichita Police Capt. Roderick Miller spoke publicly about the stabbing. A family mortuary posted an obituary for Avers online.
Delusions Detailed in the Affidavit
Long before that morning, the court file shows, Mock’s life had come apart. A St. Louis television news station let her go after an alcohol-fueled blowup described in the affidavit, and she moved into her mother and stepfather’s home, where she lived for roughly four or five years. Reporting published August 27, 2026, described a broadcasting career that “included several stations across the country” and identified her as a former Fox affiliate TV anchor, a wider résumé than the St. Louis job alone.
Schizoaffective disorder, a serious mental illness, brought her hallucinations, angry outbursts and delusional episodes, the affidavit says, and her mental health deteriorated as her career did. During those episodes, the document states, she said she was able to speak directly with God, took the people around her to be robots and threatened to blow up everyone.
Bipolar disorder was the diagnosis Mock’s stepfather told police she had received, one later revised to schizoaffective disorder. In the months that followed, those details from the affidavit would shape the case far more than the evidence investigators gathered inside the house.
A Case Halted by Competency Rulings
Barely underway, the prosecution stalled. A judge ordered Mock to Larned State Hospital — the state’s psychiatric facility for defendants in the criminal justice system — for a competency evaluation and treatment.
A finding that Mock was not competent to stand trial, and a pause in the case against her, were reported on January 18, 2026. The killing of an 80-year-old woman sat in legal limbo, with no trial date and no resolution for her family.
That held until a Sedgwick County District Court judge overturned the earlier ruling in July 2026 and found Mock competent to stand trial. A plea, rather than a jury, brought the revived case to a close.
Premeditation is not something prosecutors must prove under Kansas law’s first-degree felony murder provision; what they must show is that a death occurred during the commission of an inherently dangerous felony. That legal distinction changes little about the penalty ahead.
A life sentence is what Mock now faces, with the door to parole closed for at least a quarter-century. Viewers in St. Louis once got the news from Mock. Her final months of freedom passed in a house on East Crowley, unemployed and, according to the affidavit, increasingly detached from reality. Those two 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. Her guilty plea resolves the question of responsibility. It leaves the harder one open — why, for years, a daughter’s documented delusions went unchecked inside the home of the woman who had taken her in.
October is when Johnson is expected to hand down the sentence formally, at a hearing where relatives will be able to speak to the court. Mock remains in custody in Sedgwick County until then.