A former St. Louis television news anchor has admitted to killing the woman she lived with — her own mother. Angelynn E. Mock, 48, pleaded guilty on August 21, 2026, to one count of first-degree felony murder in the death of her mother, Anita L. Avers, 80, who was stabbed on October 31, 2025, inside the Wichita, Kansas, home Mock shared with her mother and stepfather.
Mock entered the plea before Sedgwick County District Judge Faith Johnson, who is scheduled to sentence her on October 5 at 11 a.m. The count carries a presumptive life sentence, with parole possible only after she has served 25 years.
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 sits in the 1500 block of East Crowley, on Wichita’s south side near Hydraulic and Wassall. A neighbor told police he saw Mock run from the house with blood on her hands and bang on his truck, asking him to call 911; he speaks only Spanish, understood the word “police,” made the call and handed her his phone. Officers found her outside the home, a towel pressed over her bloodied hands. She told them she had stabbed her mother “to save herself,” a probable cause affidavit says, insisting that Avers had been the one to attack first.
Her mother was jealous and did not want her to get a job she was interviewing for at a local television station, Mock claimed, according to the affidavit. A belief that Avers was possessed has also been described as her motive. “I had to kill her, she wasn’t going to stop,” the affidavit quotes her as saying. Talking to herself in an interview room, she said: “I’d kill that bi*** to have my mom back any day. I don’t even know who she is anymore. I know, I believe she’s the devil.”
Inside the house, the scene did not match that account. Avers had suffered multiple stab wounds to her head, face and torso, and an ambulance took her to Ascension Via Christi St. Francis, where she was pronounced dead at 8:26 a.m. On a pillow beside her bed, the affidavit says, someone had arranged multiple kitchen knives and a cheese grater, all of them bloodied.
Officers arrested Mock that same day and booked her into the Sedgwick County Jail. Prosecutors charged her on November 4, 2025, with intentional and premeditated first-degree murder, a count amended to first-degree felony murder under the plea. Wichita police Capt. Roderick Miller briefed reporters at the scene that morning. “Right now we believe it’s a domestic type situation inside the residence,” he said.
An obituary posted by Smith Family Mortuaries gives Avers’ full name as Anita Louise Bradley Avers, born November 5, 1944. She died five days short of her 81st birthday.
Delusions Detailed in the Affidavit
The court file traces a life that had come apart long before that morning. Mock had shared a home with her mother and stepfather for roughly four or five years. She moved in after a St. Louis television news station let her go in the wake of an alcohol-fueled blowup described in the affidavit, and her career’s collapse was matched by deteriorating mental health.
The affidavit says Mock suffered from schizoaffective disorder, a serious mental illness that brought angry outbursts and bouts of delusion mixed with periods of depression. In those states, the document says, she claimed to talk to God and to be the Anti-Christ, said of the people around her that “they’re all robots” and “they’re not real people,” and told her family, usually from her stationary bicycle, “I could blow everyone up if I needed to.”
Her stepfather, Barry Avers, told police she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis later revised to schizoaffective disorder. In the months that followed, those affidavit details — not the evidence collected inside the house — would drive the case.
A Case Halted by Competency Rulings
Almost as soon as it began, the prosecution stalled. Mock was ordered to Larned State Hospital, the state’s psychiatric facility for defendants in the criminal justice system, for a competency evaluation and treatment.
Sedgwick County District Judge Jeffrey Goering found Mock not competent to stand trial at a hearing on January 15, and paused the case against her. The killing of an 80-year-old woman sat in legal limbo — no trial date, no resolution for her family.
Goering reversed that ruling on July 30 and found Mock competent to stand trial. The case resumed, and it ended with a plea rather than a jury.
First-degree felony murder in Kansas carries no requirement that prosecutors prove premeditation; they need only establish that a death occurred during the commission of an inherently dangerous felony. That distinction changes little for the defendant. Mock faces a life sentence, with the door to parole closed for at least a quarter-century.
Morning news had been her beat. Mock anchored at KTVI in St. Louis from 2011 to 2015 and at KOKH in Oklahoma City from 2007 to 2011, and in recent years, according to her LinkedIn profile, she worked at a data management software company. She spent her final months of freedom unemployed in a house on East Crowley 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 the explanation Mock gave officers that her mother had turned on her. Her guilty plea resolves the question of responsibility. It does not answer why 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.
That hearing will allow relatives to address the court. Mock remains in custody in Sedgwick County until then.