Angelynn E. Mock, a 48-year-old former St. Louis television news anchor, has admitted to killing the woman she lived with — her mother. Mock 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 inside the south Wichita, Kan., home they shared on October 31, 2025.

The plea, entered before Sedgwick County District Judge Faith Johnson, comes with 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

Avers was in bed shortly before 8 a.m. on Halloween when her daughter attacked her, court records show. The house sits in the 1500 block of East Crowley, near Hydraulic and Wassall, on Wichita’s south side.

Officers who responded found Mock outside the home, covered in blood. She told them 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. Mock claimed her mother was jealous and did not want her to land a job at a local television station, the affidavit says.

What officers found inside told a different story. 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.

Mock was arrested that same day, October 31, 2025, and booked into the Sedgwick County Jail. Prosecutors charged her on November 4, 2025, with premeditated first-degree murder — a count that became first-degree felony murder under the plea she entered on August 21, 2026.

Wichita Police Chief Joe Sullivan and Wichita Police Capt. Roderick Miller both spoke publicly about the stabbing. An obituary for Avers was posted online through a family mortuary.

Delusions Detailed in the Affidavit

The court file traces a life that had come apart well before that morning. For roughly four or five years, Mock had shared a home with her mother and stepfather, moving in after a St. Louis television news station let her go in the wake of an alcohol-fueled blowup described in the affidavit.

Her mental health deteriorated alongside her career. Mock suffered from schizoaffective disorder, a serious mental illness that brought hallucinations, angry outbursts and delusional episodes, the affidavit says. In those states, according to the document, she claimed she could speak directly with God, believed the people around her were robots and threatened to blow up everyone.

Mock’s stepfather told police she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis that was later revised to schizoaffective disorder. Those details, laid out in the affidavit, would shape the case in the months that followed far more than the evidence gathered inside the house.

A Case Halted by Competency Rulings

The prosecution stalled almost as soon as it began. 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.

On January 18, 2026, it was reported that Mock had been found not competent to stand trial and that the case against her had been paused — a status that left the killing of an 80-year-old woman in legal limbo, with no trial date and no resolution for her family.

That changed in July 2026, when 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.

Under Kansas law, first-degree felony murder does not require prosecutors to prove premeditation, only that a death occurred during the commission of an inherently dangerous felony. The distinction matters little to the outcome Mock now faces: a life sentence, with the door to parole closed 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, unemployed 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.

Mock’s own explanation to officers — that her mother had turned on her — was undercut by what investigators found in the bedroom. Her guilty plea resolves the question of responsibility. It does not answer the harder one, 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, when relatives will have the opportunity to address the court. Until then, Mock remains in custody in Sedgwick County.