Criminal - Angie

Episode Date: September 11, 2015

In July of 2002, Philadelphia Homicide Detective Pat Mangold was called to the scene of a gruesome murder on the Schuylkill River. When he wasn't able to determine the victim's identity, he expected the case to remain unsolved. But then, out of the blue, a professional soccer player named Adam Bruckner inserted himself into the investigation, and became obsessed with solving the crime. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things, and it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system,

you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. This episode contains descriptions of violence that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please use discretion. It was about 8 o'clock at night, and the Fourth of July festivities were on television in our office. And we were pretty much all just sitting around doing what we call doing our backup reports, typing reports, hoping that we didn't get a case because it was Fourth of July, it's a pretty big night in Philadelphia,

and we were all going to go out afterwards. This is Pat Mangold, for more than 20 years, who is a homicide detective in Philadelphia. He's talking about the 4th of July in 2002. As he and his fellow officers were watching the clock, hoping they didn't get a call, they did. A dead body had been cut up, put in garbage bags, and hung from a tree with slipknot. We immediately went out to the east bank of the Schuylkill River behind the art museum. We got on a Marine unit boat. We drove across the river to the west side.

The bags were hanging from a tree with rope. The Marine unit sergeant said, you know, if you feel this bag, you'll feel the foot or hand in this one. They cut down six bags in total, and inside the bags they found the dismembered body of a woman in her 50s. They transported the garbage bags to the medical examiner's office and began the work of trying to figure out who the victim was. You could see by her clothing that she appeared to be a homeless person. So the very next day I went up to the parkway, which is a very heavily concentrated area of Philadelphia homeless people. They sleep on the benches along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Someone up there handing my business card out, asking if anyone had been missing or they haven't seen a woman in her 50s, 5'4", Indian-Italian descent. The homeless men and women he approached were not interested in talking to a police officer.

He was shut down left and right. I thought, there's no way I'm going to solve this case. This will be an unsolved murder in Philadelphia. This was rare for Detective Mangold. In his 23 years as a homicide detective, he says there are only three cases he didn't solve. But the body in the bags appeared to have been decomposing for months, and no one had reported the victim missing. So he didn't think he'd ever even learn who she was, much less who had done this to her.

And the very next day, I walked into work, and in a message box, I received a note that said, had the name of a caller, Adam Bruckner. His phone number said, and on the note it said, he may know who your homeless victim is. I went to the police station right up the road and said, hey, I heard you guys were looking to find some information on Angie. And the guy just froze. And he said, how do you know her name? Adam Bruckner. It would be dramatic to say that they were suspicious of me, but they were definitely alarmed that I knew who it was. And so

they got my information. They sent me over to talk to Detective Pat Mangold over at the homicide unit. Adam Bruckner says he's always been the kind of guy who gives a dollar to homeless people. When he graduated from college, he decided he wanted to play soccer professionally. He traveled all over the country by bus to try out for different teams. He'd hitchhike sometimes, and he ended up meeting a lot of homeless people. And just had this crease in my heart for these guys

once I heard their stories and that they weren't just bums and drunks and lunatics. And I came out to Philly to play professional soccer and ended up meeting some of the guys on the streets and hearing some of the same stories and really believing that there was a chance to help these guys get back on their feet. And in doing this, he'd made friends

with an older man named Red Colt and his girlfriend Angie. Adam hadn't seen Angie or Red Colt for a while, and this is what he told the police. I let them know I thought this lady's name was Angie, and they said, thank you, we don't really know who it is, and it seemed like it was just going to go away at that point. But Adam Bruckner wasn't going to let it go away. Detective Mangold had no idea who he was dealing with.

It was on a daily basis after that first meeting that I spoke to him. He would call every day. I mean, some of the guys were making fun of him, not to him, but to me. And they kept calling him junior detective. They said, oh, your junior detective keeps calling here. Said he has some new information. The thing is, Adam Bruckner did have new information,

good information, and a lot of it. The homeless men and women on the parkway trusted him, and they were telling him things about Angie that they refused to tell the police. So Adam began a murder investigation of his own. He was a soccer player moonlighting as an amateur sleuth, and as it turned out, he was pretty good at it. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. So in February of 2002, I was just making regular runs down and bringing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches down to the Ben Franklin Parkway. And just trying to get to know the guys and just asking them, hey, what happened? How did you end up in this situation? Really, I was just saying, why are you homeless? And I met first Red Colt, who was distinct. He's about 65 years old, African American. He was pushing a shopping cart, like a laundry cart

that was lined with garbage bags. And he had no socks on. He had a tarp that was cut out and tied around his head that was fastened with a shoelace under his chin. And he spoke in a way that's so hard to describe, but he was almost poetic in his words. And he seemed like maybe a professor that had gone bad somewhere along the line. And then he had a girlfriend, Angie, who was a volatile bag lady. And she was kind of what you'd picture

an ornery, heavily clothed woman living on the streets. And it was a pretty interesting couple. And, you know, I was really fascinated by Red Colt. So when you, I mean, what was your first actual interaction with these two? Well, it was, I was first talking to Red Colt and I had come up and offered him a sandwich and I was making these peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And he said, well, I thank you, Adam, for the sandwich, which contains calcium that will fortify my bones and allow me to sustain a fall that would cripple another man my age. And that was when Angie came up and she was

cursing and really yelling about these white MFers around and Red Colt put his hand up like a stop sign and said, why Angie, if you hadn't noticed Adam here is a white male and what you're saying may be construed as offensive. And so there I was trying to work with these guys, and really Red Colt was the one working with me. And I just kind of glowed that he had stood up for me, and he had done it so politely. And that was just kind of a buy-in with Angie, because she knew if Red Colt was for me that I must be all right to have around their conversation. The other homeless people on the parkway described Angie as a caring grandmother figure, someone who'd bring them soup and vitamins when they were sick.

So when they heard of her disappearance, they did want to know what had happened to her, but they wouldn't open up to the police. Adam was the perfect intermediary. I went back down to the parkway and was talking to some of the guys, and I had this little buddy who's a homeless guy. And he told me that Angie had an apartment, and it totally just blew me away. But Adam did not call Detective Mangold with this. He took it upon himself to go check it out.

He went to the neighborhood and wandered around aimlessly, asking people on the street if they knew a woman named Angie. So you have no experience, right? You're a professional soccer player. Yeah, no, I watched L.A. Law growing up, and that was about it. But his technique worked, sort of. Adam recognized a guy in the neighborhood as one of Angie's ex-boyfriends. And this ex-boyfriend didn't understand

what Adam was talking about. And so he took me over to her apartment. He said, I swear it's not her. That's her window right there. The window's open. He said, I hung that teddy bear curtain right there. He said, it's the same one. You can see she's living in there. And from the ground level, you could see that it looked lived in. It didn't look like a place where, you know, somebody had gone missing. And so I automatically had, you know, this, this doubt that maybe I had gotten this

wrong. And then I rung some of the doorbells and a neighbor came out and said, no, she's not dead, she's alive. She's in New York City. She called the landlord and told him she was sick and she's paying rent every month. Adam called the landlord himself from a payphone who confirmed it. And then it was almost laughable.

And that ended a few minutes later when another neighbor, Sharon, came up and almost passively, she said, what's going on? I said, oh, we're looking for, I said, I was looking for Angie. And her face just shifted. As soon as I saw her face, I knew that there was something really wrong. And so I pulled her aside and she told me about the fight she had heard the day before Good Friday. And she heard a thud and choking and screaming. And she was from Angie's apartment. And that tipped the scale back to really thinking there was a problem.

In 2002, Good Friday was on March 29th. Angie's body wasn't found until July 4th, and yet someone had been paying the rent for the apartment and opening and closing the windows. Adam wanted to get inside and see what he could find, but he wasn't bold enough to break in on his own. He called Detective Mangold. I said, I have to get a search warrant for this location, and we did. Adam stayed with us. I said, listen, I don't want you to be in the dark here.

You're helping me out here. I want you to see how this process all works out. He was very interested in seeing how it did work. I was just standing there. They knocked. No one answered. Someone said, get the city key. And I really thought there was going to be this really technical city key.

And someone pulled out a sledgehammer and just bashed the door in. What happens next? I expected to see a bloody crime scene, but it was even crazier than that. It was a total mess. She was a hoarder and she had not thrown anything away for 40 years. She had collected every piece of mail. Newspapers were stacked up. I mean, we all just froze. And there were thousands of pieces of mail. And I mean, you name it, it was there. It was just, it would have taken a year to go through and get different

things. She had everything from a lawnmower up there, even though she didn't have a lawn, to a detailed account of every phone call she'd ever made since, like, 1960. The apartment was loaded with all these bottles of, like, ginger and all these different, not narcotics, but little vitamin supplements, things like that. And it had, like, a medicinal smell. It was like you walked into an old apothecary, a drugstore, back in the day when you were a little kid. Was there a bed in the apartment? There was a bed. Right when you walked in the door to the left,

there was a bed, and there were maybe a foot and a half, two feet of newspaper stacked up with a bed sheet over it. And one of the officers even thought that there was a body under there and said, oh, here's your body, and ripped back the sheets. But it was newspapers that were dated very recently. Adam thought this was a really important clue. Someone was bringing in newspapers on a regular basis

and adding them to Angie's existing stacks. Did you feel kind of like you were a little kid trying to get the police to take you seriously, you know, saying, I might not be a homicide detective, but I can put two and two together, and I think that there's something funny that's going on here. I was trying to stay unnoticed, but still kind of whispering my opinions. I did not want to leave the apartment, but I definitely wanted to be heard.

And so I would pull someone aside and say, I think she was killed in here. And they'd say, no, no, it would look different if she had been killed in here. If there was a struggle, it would be a mess. Sooner than later, it got too hot to be in there, and we all went outside. And that was when they did not invite me to come back up, but said, you know, if you can find any information on Red Colt, we would appreciate it. This is the first time that Adam realized that Red Colt was a prime suspect. He hadn't considered that this could be a possibility.

Because, you know, I had this personal relationship with him, I knew that he wasn't capable of something like that. He set out to find other possible suspects. Angie had restraining orders against several abusive boyfriends. Adam looked into those men, and he talked with friends on the parkway. He studied the place where Angie's body had originally been found in garbage bags by the river, and he went back to her apartment, a lot, without telling the police what he was doing.

You know, the things that made him a good soccer player, by being compulsively working harder than everybody else, he needed to find the next clue. He needed to figure out what was going on. And he just sort of wouldn't let himself stop. Here's one of Adam's teammates, Peter Pappas. Just saying, it's this guy, but it can't be this guy. But if it's this guy, then how come

X, Y, and Z happened? Or how come this guy's here? Why did this person know this? And it was just, wow, just going around and around, like, why couldn't it be this person? But, you know, Red Colt, it can't be Red Colt. I met Red Colt. I love Red Colt. You know, we're like kindred spirits. It was incredible. It was just,

I honestly got worried for his life. He was buying information with like sandwiches or packs of cigarettes. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new, reimagined Nissan Kicks.

Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Adam completely admits that he was obsessed. He was calling Detective Mangold constantly. I called way, way, way too much. And because I would leave information every time I got it. So he'd come back in and see this stack of papers. And at some point, I would page him. And he'd call me back at the

payphone I was at. And I would just blurt everything out that I had found. At this point, the police were certain that Angie had been killed at the river. But Adam was certain that Angie had been killed in her apartment. He was fixated on what she'd been wearing when her body was found. It was cold in Philadelphia in March. but Angie had been found wearing a t-shirt, sweatpants, and sandals, not warm enough to be walking around outside. That made me more and more sure she was killed in her apartment, which made me more determined to go back in and find something. And so I just kept digging through this paper in her apartment. And a couple of times, some of the neighbors would come in and this was pretty

awkward, but I just kept going. I don't understand. Would the neighbors be like, who are you? What are you doing in here in here I mean they knew that something really bizarre had happened and they knew that the reality was that with all the homicides in Philadelphia there just is not the time for the police to to do this kind of meticulous investigation and so sometimes they would let me in and sometimes the door the front door would be open and I would just come in on my own and they'd come up and see me on all fours like crawling around and you know pulling papers out from underneath the bed and I don't know what they said by my back but they were very nice to my face. Adam says he'd made something like 20 trips to Angie's apartment before he found the clue he

needed. Shortly after Angie's body had been found he went to the river and looked around. He found a piece of paper that said something strange about an underground American currency. He didn't pay much attention to it. Except that the handwriting was distinctive, large and blocky. He put the piece of paper in his backpack. And then when I was in the apartment, I saw the same handwriting. And it was like this gong went off. And I realized whoever had written that down by the river had obviously written it in the apartment, I saw the same handwriting. And it was like this gong went off. And I realized whoever had written that down by the river had obviously written it in the apartment. And if I could figure

out who had written that, it was like a clear case of who had done it. So how did you figure out who had written it? All of a sudden, I saw these four words that said, this is Red Colt. And all this time I had spent trying to prove that it was not him, it just fell off. On that same trip to Angie's apartment, Adam found a Rite Aid receipt for paint tarps and garbage bags. It was dated three days after Good Friday, which is when the neighbor had heard the horrible screaming fight. It became very clear at that point that Red Colt was the one in her apartment. Red Colt had dismembered her body. Red Colt had taken her body down the stairs in his cart line with garbage bags. Red Colt had, you know, kept the body down by the river, hanging over the ledge

tied to the tree with the slip knots. Adam called Detective Mangold and told him what he'd found. But then he also took it upon himself to find Red Colt. He talked to homeless people around the neighborhood and found out that Red Colt had a new girlfriend, and that the two of them had breakfast at a certain McDonald's every morning. I let Homicide know that he was going to be there. Homicide called police. They missed him that day. The next day, Detective Pat Mangold went out to get some Chinese food, and from the description that I had given and from a photo we were able to get, he recognized him in the cart with garbage bags lined was the biggest thing. And so he saw a guy

pushing a cart down the road and he said, Red Colt. And he said, it looked like Red Colt was going to run. And all the other police pulled up and Red Colt in this poetic voice of his said, it was prudent for you to call for backup. This was a physical battle you would not have won and we took him into custody for questioning and he had over 7 600 on his person in different denominations and pockets all over uh clothing and i took the shopping cart back into the homicide unit we did a search warrant for that looking for maybe the tool that he would use to cut her up. And in there, I opened up and found a Tasty Cake box. And as soon as I opened it, I could smell that medicinal, musty smell from her apartment.

It was identical. And I looked in the box, and then I saw there were huge amounts of cash in there. It turned out we called their forfeiture unit, and they counted it with machine. It was over $68,000. That he was walking around his shopping cart with yep and that's what i thought i had like that aha aha moment in homicide you know i thought he killed her for her money and i mean who what i mean i thought angie was home like who was angie um it turns out adam did a little investigating in that too

i found out that her grandmother had just passed away and the family knew that there was a large sum of money in the house because the grandmother sold a couple properties, didn't believe in banks, and kept the money safe in the house. So after the grandmother died, they found that all the money had been missing and they accused Angie, Josephine Angela, of doing it. How critical was Adam Bruckner in solving the kind of the Red Colt murder? Huge.

I would not have been able to do it without him. In Philadelphia, we have a lot of murder cases. We work hard on all our cases, especially in the summer, like 4th of July, August. I mean, the murder rates in the urban cities go up because of the heat and the problems in the neighborhoods. So you're working these cases every day. You get a new case every day as you go in. And it's not like they get put on a back burner, but it was huge. I mean, I couldn't have done it without him.

He went out of his way to thank Adam at press conferences and in interviews. And he even tried to get the city to officially recognize him. I put him in for a citizen's commendation through the mayor's office, and we joke around about that to this day, but he never got it. I have no reason why that didn't happen. One of the strangest parts of the story is that even after Adam had solved the case and found the evidence that incriminated Red Colt, he still didn't want to believe that it could be true.

Red Colt was his friend. He was one of the, in my journal, I would just write, I just wish there was something more I could do about, I could do for this guy. You know, it was simple stuff. He was writing this Kennedy assassination book and, you know, I was going to help him make the photocopies. There was just, he was fascinating. And he, you know, he defended me when Angie came up that first time. And he cared. He was genuine. He made eye contact. He was truly grateful for the advocacy. I don't think that he was faking it. I think that he just had a much different side than I knew.

And I think that people can be good and bad. And I think that he's one of those people. Red Colt was charged with first-degree homicide, robbery, and abuse of a corpse. He wanted to represent himself, but wasn't allowed. There was a mental health evaluation where he was found unfit, so that was definitely a part of the puzzle. But he definitely knew the difference between right and wrong, which was the really deciding factor of whether or not, you know, he would be in a mental institution or in a regular prison. And a guy that can, you know, clean up an apartment by taking a body out piece by piece on the third floor surely knew the difference between right and wrong and was able to cover it up. Red Colt was sentenced to life in prison. He died of cancer earlier this year. Angie's full name was Josephine Angelo.

The money that Red Colt stole from her was given to her biological son. He grew up in foster care. They had a funeral, and her son came. Detective Mangold is now a special agent for the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office. As for Adam Bruckner, he's retired from soccer and he's put his sleuthing days behind him. But he's more involved than ever with the

homeless community. He's youth director of the Helping Hands Rescue Mission in North Philadelphia. When you tell the story now, all these years later, do you feel like you're a different person back then? Yeah, it wrecked a little something in me. So yes, I think this whole thing changed me. Literally, instead of watching these horror shows or these homicide investigation tales, I stuck myself in the middle of one of these accidentally. And it just gives you a little different perspective on people in pain and on the world. And so just gives you a little different perspective on people in pain

and on the world. And so I can't, I can't really explain that, but I do know that it just, it sat on me really heavily. And, you know, and it was so sad what happened to Angie. She was, you know, she was a lady that brought soup to the homeless guys and she was in her apartment one day and the next day she's, you know, she's just vanished. Criminal is produced by Lauren Sporer and me. Audio engineering help from Rob Byers. Special thanks to Jennifer Hickson and Vicki Merrick. Julian Alexander draws original illustrations for each episode. Check them out at thisiscriminal.com. Starting this month, Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

Thanks to them for their support of the show. Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the 13 best podcasts around. Shows like Song Exploder. My name is Rishi K. Shirwe. You're listening to Song Exploder. In the fall of 2001, Phil Elverum released the album The Glow Part II on K Records. In Song Exploder, musicians take apart their songs piece by piece

and tell the story of how they were made. You know, there's just two piano tracks, but I put the mic like 50 feet away and just like slammed the notes down, let them resonate in the room. So they feel huge. Go listen. Criminal is coming to the West Coast to do a little tour in early November. You can find out more details on our website. We'd love to see you. Radiotopia is made possible with support from the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX.

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