Her mother was also her roommate. Angelynn E. Mock, 48, a former St. Louis television news anchor, pleaded guilty on August 21, 2026, to one count of first-degree felony murder in the death of 80-year-old Anita L. Avers, who was stabbed on October 31, 2025, inside the south Wichita, Kan., home the two shared.
Mock entered the plea before Sedgwick County District Judge Faith Johnson, and it carries a presumptive sentence of life behind bars, with the possibility of parole only after she has served 25 years. Johnson is scheduled to sentence Mock 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 in the 1500 block of East Crowley on Wichita’s south side, near Hydraulic and Wassall.
Wichita police who arrived at the home found Mock outside, covered in blood and holding a towel over her bloodied hands. She told officers she had stabbed her mother “to save herself,” a probable cause affidavit says, and insisted that Avers had been the one to attack first. Mock claimed her mother was jealous and did not want her to land a job at a local television station, the affidavit says. During questioning, she also told investigators she had walked into her mother’s bedroom and found Avers “sharpening knives.”
Inside the house, officers found an account that did not match hers. Avers’ body lay in her bed beneath blankets. On a pillow beside her, according to the affidavit, someone had arranged four bloody kitchen knives and a bloody cheese grater.
Police records say Avers was found unresponsive in her bed with multiple stab wounds to her face and torso, was taken by ambulance to St. Francis Hospital and was pronounced dead at 8:26 a.m.
Officers arrested Mock the same day, October 31, 2025, and booked her into the Sedgwick County Jail. On November 4, 2025, prosecutors charged her with premeditated first-degree murder; the count was amended to first-degree felony murder for the plea she entered on August 21.
Wichita Police Chief Joe Sullivan and Capt. Roderick Miller both addressed the killing publicly in the days afterward. 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 in the wake of an alcohol-fueled blowup described in the affidavit, and she moved in with her mother and stepfather, sharing the home for roughly four or five years.
Her mental health deteriorated alongside her career. The affidavit describes schizoaffective disorder, a serious mental illness that left her with hallucinations, angry outbursts and delusional episodes. In those states, the document says, she believed the people around her were robots, claimed she could speak directly with God and threatened to blow up everyone.
The probable cause affidavit says Mock told investigators she went to her mother’s room to discuss an upcoming job interview at KSN, and that Avers came at her with a blade and the two fought. She also told investigators she believed her mother was the devil.
Mock’s stepfather told police she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that was later revised to schizoaffective disorder. In the months that followed, those details from the affidavit would shape the case far more than anything investigators gathered inside the house.
A Case Halted by Competency Rulings
The prosecution stalled almost as soon as it began. Judge Jeffrey Goering ruled in January that Mock was not competent to stand trial and ordered her to Larned State Hospital — the state’s psychiatric facility for defendants in the criminal justice system — for evaluation and treatment.
The finding, and the pause it forced on the case, was reported on January 18. The killing of an 80-year-old woman sat in legal limbo, with no trial date and no resolution for her family.
July broke the impasse. A Sedgwick County District Court judge reversed the earlier ruling and found Mock competent to stand trial. The case resumed, and it ended not with a jury, but with a plea.
First-degree felony murder in Kansas requires no proof of premeditation — only that a death occurred during the commission of an inherently dangerous felony. For Mock, the distinction changes little: a life sentence, with parole out of reach for at least a quarter-century.
Mock once delivered the news to St. Louis viewers. She spent her final months of freedom in a house on East Crowley, out of work and, according to the affidavit, increasingly detached from reality. The two facts sat side by side in a courtroom on the day she pleaded guilty.
What investigators found in the bedroom undercut Mock’s own explanation to officers — that her mother had turned on her. Her guilty plea resolves the question of responsibility. It does not answer the harder one, the question hanging over a case in which a daughter’s documented delusions went unchecked, year after year, in the house of the woman who had taken her in.
Relatives will have the opportunity to address the court in October, when Johnson is expected to formally impose the sentence. Mock remains in custody in Sedgwick County until then.