Anatomy of Murder - Who Murdered Angela?

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

A young mom and her 6-month-old disappear in the middle of the day. A package left on the porch answers one question but there are still many more. Would baby clothes be a key?For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

It's still right now hard for me to believe that she's not here. I don't think it's a day goes by that I don't think about Angela. You know, it's just, I kind of blame myself that I wasn't there to help protect my sister. She didn't deserve to die like that. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder.

When I think about today's case, it's more in the big picture that I see it. Every case is tragic, but certain ones really strike a nerve. And this is one of those for me. Today's story takes us to Deerfield Beach, Florida, which is just a couple of miles north of Fort Lauderdale. And let's go back to the springtime of 1986. Deerfield is also the home of Daryl Adams, who is a true family man. He grew up with six brothers and sisters. And when I talked to Daryl, one sister in particular he felt the closest to.

Angela was the best sister you could ever wish for. She was very protective, especially of me. I was the youngest of seven kids. She would get out and she would play football with us. And if I got shoved around a little bit too much, she would be the first one to jump in and take my side and, you know, don't shove my little brother around. And you just couldn't ask for a better sister. Darrell talked about that his sister Angela he felt particularly close to, and by 1986, she was a stay-at-home mom. She had two kids, she had a young daughter who was five, and she had a baby who was six months old. Angela handed

her to me, and I was reluctant to handle her because, you know, growing up, they picked at me and said I was a little bit clumsy, so I was afraid that I would drop her. Her fiancé worked in a marble factory, Dwayne Sr., and he would go to work every day and she would stay home and not only take care of her kids, but also take care of her blind grandmother. Now on March 17th, 1986, darkness came to Deerfield Beach. So it was a normal routine every day for Angela to walk her daughter, Stacey, to school.

And it was also normal for her to be waiting after Stacey finished school to take them home. But on this day, something strange occurred. Angela was nowhere to be seen when Stacey got out of school. Now, whether you have kids or not, I don't think it's so crazy to have a parent not there right at the time. And whether as kids ourselves or whether you have kids, that's happened to most people, right?

You're five minutes late, you're running late, or your mom or dad or whoever's picking you up gets stuck on the phone. But Stacey waited, and five minutes became ten, and her mom just didn't show up. And I'm sure it felt like a lifetime for her, where she was normally greeted by her smiling mom after school. But after a while, she decided to walk home, because it really wasn't very far from the school to her house. Well, I just picture this little five-year-old girl kind of trotting along, making her way home. And, you know, whether she's just mad at her mom that she didn't show up or maybe she's kind of nonplussed and thinks, OK, mom isn't here and it's strange, but I'll just see her at the door. And maybe she even waited thinking she might surprise her mom, like the big girl that she was walking home.

But when she got to the house, the door was unlocked. The TV was on. No Angela. No mom. Well, when I got out of school that day, we got a call, and I was told that nobody had seen Angela. And that was unlike her. She was a stay-at-home mother. At the time, she was taking care of my grandmother, who was blind, and her fiancé would work. It was just unusual for her to disappear, and nobody had heard from her.

I mean, my brother Wayne had gotten off of work, and Wayne took it upon himself to walk down to angela's apartment which was only like three or four blocks away from my parents house and when wayne apparently got there duane senior was uh sitting in the house and uh he asked duane has he seen angela and he said no duane said he hadn't hadn't seen her and he had been at work and it was unusual for her to do something like Not only was Angela gone, but so was the baby. So we all started looking. have a six-month-old child, baby, that was missing. Our whole family was, like, frantic. So we all started looking. We knocked on every door. We went to all of the places that we thought she would be at.

You know, we looked, and we rode bicycles. We had every family member looking for her, my grandparents. Maybe 11, 30, 12 o'clock that night, you know, we ended the search for that night. That's when it really started to set in that something bad has happened. We were all getting very nervous at that time. Daylight turns to dusk, turns to darkness, and so far no one is able to locate her. We left no stone unturned. We exhausted every means of looking for her, and we didn't find her. And again, we're not talking about a big city. Deerfield Beach was a pretty tight-knit, small community back then. So everyone knew everyone and where everyone was.

And if they didn't know you, at least they had seen you. So after talking to everyone and looking and everything just coming up dead-ended, Angela's family went to the police and they filed missing person reports for Angela and baby Duane. And we needed to bring them home. We were doing everything possible to try and locate her. Scott, I just think it's important to kind of talk here about why those first hours, specifically the first 48, everyone knows that phrase by now, why those hours are so important in missing person cases? You know, Anastasia, the insiders refer to it as four shifts, right?

Because the average detective or police officer working in an investigation like this may work on 12-hour shifts. So you got a 12-hour shift, then you do a double. That's a 24-hour shift. And then the next team takes over, and that's a 12-hour shift. It doubles up to a 24-hour shift. And then the next team takes over and that's a 12-hour shift. It doubles up to a 24-hour shift. So you've got two 24-hour shifts that are on board. And that's kind of how the first 48 kind of came about through the insider's perspective. The next morning, with the school that day worried, I couldn't concentrate. And it was somewhere around 9, 30, 10 o'clock, and I was in my homeroom class, and I saw two Deerfield Beach police officers walk in there.

I saw the officers talking to Coach Bailey, and then Coach Bailey then called for me. He called my name and told me to come over. And of course, it was the whole class. They were looking like, you know, I had done something wrong or, you know, or whatever. And he just simply told me, you need to go with these two officers. And it didn't really dawn on me at the time. As we were walking to the principal's office, I asked, I was like, what's going on? And they were like, you need to call home. Dialed my parents' number. And when they picked the phone up at my parents' home, I heard my sister's marvel. She was just boo-hoo crying. I was like, what's wrong? What's

wrong? I kept asking her, what's wrong? What's wrong? And she was like, oh, she was just screaming. You know, they found Angela dead. I was like, what? She was like, oh, she said it louder. The second time they found Angela dead. And she was just, I could really understand that she was just boohoo crying. And I was like, oh no. And I just, I just dropped the phone. And I remember I just took off running out of the front door. And at some point I think I just fell down in the hallway crying, you know, really crying out really loud. I mean, why would someone do this to my sister? Why would someone kill my sister? Why?

You know, my sister was the sweetest person you would ever meet. Why would someone kill her? When I listen to Daryl describe to you, Scott, how he heard the news. I just think of this, you know, big strapping guy in high school that was literally brought to his knees in that high school hallway. And it is just a stark reminder of the incredible pain that too many people go through. It was just my worst nightmare. So let's go back to the crime scene and unpack it a little bit. So in the early morning hours of March 18th,

which is the next day after Angela and her baby were reported missing, a man was walking through a neighborhood cut through, and in a small area, a patch of ground, he discovered a body. And it was a woman. She was shoeless, but she was clothed. And he determined right there and then the first thing he needed to do was call police. He was just saying that they found her dead. Just the opposite side of the road where we live, like less than like four blocks away, five blocks away.

And she was found strangled. She had ligature marks, which you probably know, but if you don't, those basically mean that someone has been bound in some way. She had those marks to her wrists, her ankles, her neck. She had abrasions, almost like small cuts on both sides of her mouth as if she had been gagged. And while she was closed, it actually looked like she had been redressed. And what I mean by that was that her bra was still unclasped.

Her underwear was on, but not pulled all the way up. And so very quickly, police started to realize there was nothing natural about this death. So as part of the examination by the medical examiner, they did recover some semen from Angela's underwear. An important piece of physical evidence. But let's be reminded here what they didn't find. The thing that was still very much missing was baby Dwayne. We still have another family member that's missing. So as you have one set of investigators that are processing a crime scene and a medical examiner that's doing what they do to determine evidentiary information, you still have a full-on search for a young six-month-old baby.

You know, Scott, when I'm looking at the way she was found and then what the medical examiner found, there's evidence clearly of a sex crime that's very deliberate. It doesn't seem like she was killed there because there is nothing around that area to indicate that she was other than the body. But that at some point, this woman was abducted, she was assaulted, attacked, murdered, and then literally dumped on that path that is frequented by so many people every day, especially children, almost as if the killer would have had to know that path and how many people went there as if he had his way with her, did what he wanted to do, and then he was almost giving her back, left her body, almost like a picture of the hands going up.

I did what I wanted. Here you go. Further in that examination of Angela's body, they did find something else that nobody, and I mean nobody, was expecting. Now on top of the obvious things that the medical examiner discovered, the medical examiner discovered something else. Angela was four months pregnant. We didn't know. I didn't know. We didn't know until after they had the autopsy.

So now there's two murders here. You know, Scott, when I read that, it raises this homicide to a different level of disgust with me always when I hear that the killer not only killed one, but, you know, that the victim was pregnant as well. And while she's four months and for some that would be showing and some it would not, it's just it's always a different level of depravity to me. The number one non-medical cause of death in pregnant women is not dying in a car accident or in a fatal fire, or even during childbirth. The number one cause of death is murder. And as tragic as that sounds, I was pretty shocked when I read it as well.

It really is an interesting, and I use that term loosely for in our world, interesting stat. You know, the American Medical Association in 2001, they did this really pretty comprehensive study and that 20% of deaths in that group of women who are pregnant is due to homicide. But if you start to think about that, Scott, it does make a lot of sense. Because when a woman is killed that is pregnant, certainly if the killer knows, think about all, Scott, it does make a lot of sense. Because when a woman is killed that is pregnant, certainly if the killer knows, think about all the things that come into it. Unfortunately, domestic assault is too prevalent even before we get to homicide. But all these

different stressors that sometimes come out, did the father not know they were having a baby? Does this add a different wrinkle or a stress to their life? Maybe there's something going on that this man doesn't want the child. And I say man because by the numbers, it is men that most often kill women and certainly pregnant women. But it is a pretty interesting number, especially because the next thing, if you're wondering, well, what's next after homicide? It's heart disease. So it almost doesn't compute, but it is a startling, disturbing factor, as you said. So the investigation obviously has to circle around the people closest to Angela to determine the where and the who and the whys. Because clearly motive has to be one of the biggest questions for investigators. And for Angela, that was her fiancé, Dwayne Sr.

They kind of started hinting that Dwayne may be a suspect. We didn't think that Dwayne would do something like that. He was head over heels for my sister Angela. He really, really loved my sister Angela. And we didn't think that he would do something like that. But of course, when a girlfriend or a wife goes missing, the husband or the boyfriend is always the first suspect. Investigators quickly looked at where Dwayne Sr. had been that day, and he left like he often did for work. Remember, he worked in a marble factory.

He last saw her at about 6.15 a.m. on that morning, which was the 17th, on his way to work. According to him, he came home for lunch, but she wasn't there. He didn't think that was so unusual. She'd often be out doing something for one of the kids or some family member. So he went back to work and came home about 2. However, there are a couple interesting things. When they interviewed his co-workers, they said, sure, he was here, but there was timeframes within that day that were completely unaccounted for.

I never thought that he would do it. No, I didn't think that he killed my sister Angela. We knew whoever her killer was, that she knew the person. The family had already approached him to determine, were there any issues between them? Could he have been the person that took her life? And he was very adamant in the beginning that he had no involvement. But there was some question about his lack of emotion when he found out that his fiance was dead. Now, I have to step back and say, it's very hard to ever look at someone's reaction to getting that type of news and to really make any sense of it because unfortunately there is no sense. It's not supposed to be any sense because

getting news like that isn't supposed to happen. However, when you put the pieces together, it is something that investigators are certainly going to look at. And probably that's what factored in when they asked him to go ahead and take a polygraph test. Clearly they wanted to know, did he know that she was pregnant? And as it turns out, Dwayne Sr. was the only one in the family that did know that Angela was pregnant at the time. And when they went through their line of questions and they were preparing him to take a polygraph, they started going through some theories with him. And the one thing that the investigators noted was he began to stiffen up.

Actually, Dwayne told me about it. And Dwayne was, he kept saying that they kept trying to pressure me to say that I killed Angela. And he said, I kept telling them that I did not kill Angela. And he would start crying, you know, because, again, it was painful for him to talk about it. And then finally, Dwayne said, they asked me one last time, you know, and I told him, look, if I did it, prove it. He said, I looked him right in the eye and I told him if I did it, prove it. That raises some pretty big alarms for me. I mean, is he someone who's messing with law enforcement? Is it cockiness? Like, okay,

I know enough to say I didn't do it. But if you think I did, go ahead and prove it. Or is that just his own defense mechanism? So another piece of evidence comes in. He failed the test. And that raised some more suspicion around Dwayne Sr. There was one time that we had a conversation and we were just talking and I came straight out and I asked Dwayne, I was like, Dwayne, did you kill my sister? And he said, no.

I said, right away, he said, no, I didn't kill your sister. But if I wanted to do something like that, I could get away with it if I wanted to. But I didn't kill her. For me, Scott, you know, there's the question, well, is it that he's hiding something and being defiant for that reason, or is he just indignant about being even accused? I think for him, he was feeling potentially that he had to either hide his emotion

or let his emotion out because he was defiant now in this investigation. He was saying to them things like, yeah, if you think I did it, you'll have to prove it. And law enforcement, they were hot on Dwayne's trail. They went out and they got a search warrant for his home. And while they didn't recover anything that was incriminating, they just put the pieces together of the things that he said, the failed polygraph, you know, that he was the one closest to Angela, that she'd been pregnant. And that's the person that they really zeroed in on and they couldn't get away from. And one of the things that they really kept coming back to was how defiantly he acted towards them.

So all of those signs are troubling, but there's still no physical evidence pointing towards him being involved in this murder. But a very big turn did come in this investigation after they had their first interview with Dwayne. Because while there's still a big question mark to Dwayne, there's even a bigger, more important question mark. Where's baby Dwayne? And then all of a sudden they got a phone call. Because a woman who lived in the neighborhood got a knock at her door. She opens the door and there sitting on her porch,

just like you've seen in the movies, is a baby. There was this little baby that was crying and he was absolutely freezing. And he was in a car seat with a soiled diaper and a t-shirt on and it was freezing outside. That day it was in like the 40s. And That day, it was in, like, the 40s. And, I mean, it was just mind-boggling. How could someone just take a newborn baby

with just a diaper on, a soiled diaper, and a t-shirt outside? And I'm like, who would do something like this? This is a devil. I mean, who would do something like this? I mean, you have to think, Anasika, who would commit a crime like this. This is a devil. I mean, who would do something like this? I mean, you have to think, Anastasia, who would commit a crime like this and then just safely return a baby within the same neighborhood, potentially be seen dropping the baby off, potentially leave physical evidence in the baby basket. Think about the risks that person would take. What do you think of that? It says to me

that whoever did this to Angela knew her. Because even for killers, strangely enough, there are lines. And killers, some will do certain things, but not others. And while clearly there had basically no lines with what this killer was willing to do to a young woman, what he did or she did to Angela, this killer apparently had a line, and that was he wanted or she wanted to safely return the baby. I mean, I'm with you on this. You know, clearly, this is somebody that she knew. Why would they drop little Dwayne across town at four in the morning, and they pick this particular lady's house? So investigators are trying to zero in on who,

and all signs for them are pointing to one person and one person alone, Dwayne Sr. But then police learned that he wasn't the last person to see Angela alive that day. There was another man. So it became clear very quickly that it wasn't Dwayne Sr. that was last seen with Angela live that day. It was another man, a man by the name of Larry Florence. Witnesses saw him with her outside a convenience store at about 12.30 that afternoon. But it didn't take long for them to find out something else, that he actually had expressed an interest, a romantic interest in Angela. And on top of that, that she had rebuffed him, had said that she had no interest

in him at all. So now you have to start to go down that path. Was it rejection or rage or maybe even retaliation at being rebuffed that now police need to look at this new guy? I mean, this sighting, Anastasia, also really helps us build the timeline of the last time she was seen alive. Now, this was, as you can imagine, in Deerfield Beach, one of these mom-and-pop type convenience stores where everyone pretty much knew each other.

And the owner of the store told police that Angela had come in with the baby and had bought a pack of cigarettes and just walked straight out towards the same direction of that empty lot where she was found the next morning. And that lot was directly in the middle of where the convenience store was

and where her home was. So now building this timeline will only aid the investigation. But Larry Florence was quickly cleared by investigators because he had an alibi of where he was. And so whatever discussion they may have had that day was not involved in her homicide. So now this second lead goes nowhere. Well, we use the word cold case all the time. And really, in a sense, when you hear that,

you just think that nothing is happening. There's no new leads. And in fact, that actually is what happened here. There was no other information, no further information that came forward to detectives. So at this point, in a sense, the investigation was sort of put on a back burner. Well, it went cold for a while. I mean, it just, you know, we just kept telling my parents that they believed that Dwayne was the number one suspect and he didn't do well on the polygraph test.

And they told my parents about the story when he told them, you know, when he said that if I did it, prove it. Police still had in their mind that it was Dwayne Sr. But as we all know, that a suspicious mind is not evidence. So while he's the guy that keeps nagging at them, there's nothing they can do. And they just need to let it sit and see how it pans out in the end. But for the family, I mean, they were just left with no answers. The one thing that they all seemed clear on was that this had to be someone that Angela knew. But I think, too, about Stacey. Well, we were very protective of

Stacey. We didn't let her out of our sight. And she was very scared to even go out the house. I just remember Stacey saying a lot of times that she thought that someone would come back and kill her like they did her mom. She didn't want to go to sleep at night. The family said they wouldn't let her out of their sight, that she is literally looking over her shoulder. And this is a case that didn't go cold for days or months. It went on for years. At some point, we started feeling like, you know, are they really putting in the effort to find out who killed our sister? Or is this just a case that they want to sweep up under the rug, you know? Now, I believe my brother Ronnie ended up calling

up there, and Ronnie found out that they had closed the case. It didn't sit very well with us. They didn't tell us they were closing the case. And we, as a family, put pressure back on the Deerfield Police Department and the Broward Sheriff's Office to reopen that case. Four years after the homicide, the Deerfield Beach Police Department merged with the Broward County Sheriff's Office, which is obviously the county sheriff's department. And Broward County had a population of about 2 million people in Deerfield Beach, about 81,000.

And just to lay it out a little bit geography-wise and law enforcement-wise, the county is made up of about 26 different police departments, and it's not uncommon for a large agency to sort of gobble up smaller agencies who are struggling with finances, struggling with manpower. And the Deerfield Beach Police Department was going through just that. So police officers essentially became deputies. Detectives were detective sheriffs. So at this point, the case was given to the Broward County Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit. And that was a good thing because things started to happen. A new detective was put on the case, Michael Bolle, and he was a cold case investigator. And he took that file and really went through it right away. But he took extra steps. One of the things he did, which you really just picture this, he took up a billboard, a huge billboard along one of the highways there.

And he put a picture of Angela's parents holding a picture of her. And it had this huge caption that said, who murdered Angela? And by taking this billboard, it's giving an opportunity for people to call in tips. And when time moves on, when years pass, relationships change, meaning that somebody who had information in 1986 who may not have been willing to share that information may be willing to give information now.

And we see this all the time in law enforcement, where somebody comes forward and says, I was in a situation years ago, but now I'm willing to talk about it. And that is a huge break in a lot of big cases, Anna Seager. And he was hoping that that would do just that, that it would give him the big break. But unfortunately, he didn't get a whole lot of tips. I read in one report that he only got five, and that was really disappointing to him. However, something else really started to move this case forward. As he poured over the facts, something else kept tugging at him.

He noticed similarities between another case that he knew about, and he started to think about a guy who'd actually been convicted for another murder who was incarcerated, to him at least, for a very similar crime. The victim was Cassandra Scott. And listen to this. She was 17. She was pregnant. She was killed just six weeks before Angela was murdered.

And here's the kicker. Her body was discovered in the same neighborhood where Angela's murdered body was recovered. Let's talk about now this new young woman, Cassandra Scott. She was murdered, remember, in 1986. She was just a teenager, 17 years old, who was also pregnant. Her case had gone unsolved now up until 1994. But even more interesting and more disturbing, her death had been ruled undetermined, not even a homicide for

a lot of years. Her body had been found near a warehouse with a lot of signs that it was not death by natural causes, but there was some sort of a mistake along the way that her death was actually classified undetermined. And I think it's important to note that the case wasn't undetermined and then closed. I think it was undetermined and open for further investigation. So in a sense, you know, you can't determine something unless other evidence comes in. But let me go sideways for a second here, because, you know, we're talking about undetermined. That usually talks about a case where they're not sure if it's natural causes or a homicide.

So, for example, if someone has drowned, you know, did they fall into a river or were they pushed? A case of asphyxiation, for example, if you put a pillow over someone's face and there's no other signs, often the medical examiner cannot tell on its face because there's zero signs telling them which way it was. You know, here, there was evidence that later they looked at that this young woman had been strangled. So again, it's not to Monday morning quarterback, but always, you know, as a prosecutor, it's really interesting to kind of go around this and think about it. Was it that they didn't have enough? Or was it as I read, and again, it's just based on several articles that I read, that this had been a mistake that had been classified undetermined,

and it wasn't until they got information many years later that they realized what, in fact, they had. In these two cases, the similarities that stand out off the bat is that these two women were just grabbed off the street. When their bodies were recovered, they were also found in public view. They're both young females, both African-American. They were both four months pregnant. And that's this kind of really interesting side note to me.

They also both lived in the same neighborhood, which kind of goes back to maybe this killer knows them both. Cassandra and Angela, yes, we all knew each other, you know, because she was a childhood friend of mine. She played hide-and-go-seek with us out in the streets and played ball and basketball and raced in the streets. And so I remember the family, we were all very close. So I remember, yes, I remember when she was killed.

And then one day, the Cassandra Scott case gets solved. A woman had called police to say that she was a victim of a domestic assault. So in their investigation, they brought her husband in, Gary Troutman, to ask him questions about the incident. But something happened inside that interrogation room that no one would have expected. Police are trying to talk to this Gary Troutman about the dispute with his wife. But you could just see, like, his mind is racing. He's sitting there, clearly thinking about other things, and then he just starts

to spill the beans, not about assault, but about a murder. The murder of Cassandra Scott. He was so worried that his wife had given more about him than just this assault. The police didn't know anything about anything

more than something about a husband and a wife. But he says, I killed her and here is how. He describes that he knew Cassandra Scott, he'd known her from the neighborhood and that he knew her well. And he knew she was pregnant and that he got her to go with him that day by offering her. And this is the part that is just, I see when I hear this, he got her to go with him by offering her baby clothes this is the part that is just, I see when I hear this, he got her to go with him by offering her baby clothes. And when he got her inside, presumably his home, but it's not clear where, he restrained her, he sexually assaulted her, he strangled her to death,

he put her in the trunk of his car and dumped her. And he talked about it to police that he was acting out, he referred to it as some sort of a fantasy mob hit strangulation thing that he'd been thinking about for a while. And all of us, I think, right away, who else's murder sounds very, very similar. You have to imagine

that investigators quickly turned this into an investigation for him to be involved in the murder of Angela Savage. But they only had this information. He only talked to them about the murder of Cassandra Scott. So he was arrested for that. It didn't take long before he pled guilty and he was given 25 years for that crime. However, due to the sentencing guidelines at the time, he got out after only nine years. Now, detective, he did go to try to speak to him about the Angela Savage murder at some point while he was in prison, but he said nothing. You talk about him serving this such a short stint. Can you talk a little bit about how that works? You hear that someone is given 25 years and you just assume they serve at all. Well, almost never do they. You know, the correction laws has their own laws that once you are sentenced by a judge, you have to serve

a certain portion of that sentence. And it depends the jurisdiction, whether it's a state sentence, a federal sentence. And I don't want to get too far into the weeds here, but back then, it was a pretty small percentage of your sentence that if you didn't get in trouble for anything else during that time, that you could be let out. And that's exactly what happened to him. But certainly nine years for a crime like that, well, I think we can all shake our heads at that. By the time he was released in 2005, there was great advancements in science for DNA. And going back to Angela Savage's crime scene, you know they recovered some evidence from inside her underwear. So now they have some way to compare Gary Troutman and the evidence found with Angela Savage.

Because years back, they knew they had this sample of semen from her underwear. But DNA wasn't advanced enough to be able to come up even with a profile of anyone. But now fast forward to 2006, that same sample, you could obtain enough from it to get they got a full male profile. And when they had that male profile, they had a match. The DNA was a match to Gary Trautman. So right away, I go to think about, well, how did this guy lure Angela in? We know that he lured Cassandra in by offering her baby clothes. But according to her family and everyone that knew her, nobody knew that she was pregnant except for Dwayne.

So I have to start wondering, is this something that this guy is really into? I mean, is he literally staking out the doctor's offices to see what young women are going in and out of the OBGYN offices? You know, does he see her pick up a pregnancy test? Who knows? But I have to wonder, you know, how he got her inside. She never would have gone with anyone she didn't know. And we do know that these families knew each other very, very well. I knew his family. In fact, his older brother is one of my father's best friends.

Angela Savage actually went to high school with Gary Troutman. They both went to Deerfield Beach High. Their families went to church together. And that now makes total sense of why he would return the baby within that very same neighborhood. And 29 years after Angela Savage's murder, Gary Troutman is charged with her death. He pled guilty and received 30 years.

I wasn't fine with that. 30 years, he's going to be sentenced under guidelines when the murder happens. So I did go down to the prosecutor's office, and, you know, we were sitting down there, and I told them 30 years, that's nothing. 30 years, Anasiga. Sentence too small, too light for someone like Troutman?

I always think that's a tough call and I'm often glad it isn't. Us as prosecutors that have to make that call when you have a trial, at least here, no, you know, I think it's appropriate. I always start, I'm pretty conservative when it comes to sentencing. start, I'm pretty conservative when it comes to sentencing. And since I only dealt with murder cases for so much of my career,

everyone would say I always come out with a pretty high number. And to me, if you take a life, it starts off high. But then if there's mitigators, if there's things that kind of take time off, that's the only time that I often come down. And here, we're talking not one death, but two. And what he did to Angela Savage, took her life, that of her unborn child, the sexual assault, the sheer terror he must have put her through by abducting her and assaulting her and then killing her and literally leaving her out on the path like trash.

No, I think that's a pretty appropriate sentence in this case. I mean, for all of those years, Dwayne Sr. remained a suspect, not only to police, but to the family. You know, every murder case starts off with multiple suspects, but it's the ones who stay on police radar the longest, the innocent. They had the toughest road traveled. And I'm sure in this case, Dwayne Sr. had his difficult moments with Angela's family, trying to convince them that he was not responsible for her murder and not responsible for the murder of his unborn child.

I mean, he lost the love of his life. By all accounts, they were very close, which is why the family said they never jumped to him being involved. But he knew that law enforcement looked at him for years. And you feel for him and certainly by all accounts how great that finally he knows suspicion is off him and he can be left just to grieve. We so often end on a sad note after telling these stories that there's something that Daryl said that I kind of look, it's pretty uplifting. And so I think it might be nice to end on that positive. You know, love your, love your siblings, love your, your, your brothers, your sisters. I mean,

protect them, you know, communicate with them, pick up the phone and call them. Cherish every, every moment that you have with them because you never know. Don't miss out on an opportunity to tell someone in your family that you love them. Cherish every moment that you have with them because you never know. Don't miss out on an opportunity to tell someone in your family that you love them because you might not get that opportunity again because I didn't get a chance to tell my sister Angela that I love her and I appreciate her before she dies. Tune in next Wednesday when we'll dissect another new case on Anatomy of Murder

Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original a Weinberger Media and Forseti Media production, Sumit David is executive producer.