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Phoebe Judge: This episode contains
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing
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to some listeners. Please use discretion.
Pat Mangold: It was about eight o'clock at
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night and the Fourth of July festivities were on
television in our office, and we were pretty much
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all just sitting around doing what we call 'doing
our backup reports,' typing reports, hoping that
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we didn't get a case, because it was Fourth of
July, it's a pretty big night in Philadelphia,
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and we were all going to go out afterwards.
Phoebe Judge: This is Pat Mangold. For more
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than 20 years he was a homicide detective
in Philadelphia. He's talking about the
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Fourth 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,
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and hung from a tree with slipknots.
Pat Mangold: We immediately went out to the east bank of the Schuylkill River behind
the art museum. We got on a Marine Unit boat.
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We drove across the river to the west side.
The bags were hanging from a tree with rope.
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The Marine Unit sergeant said, "If you feel this
bag you'll feel a foot or a hand in this one."
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Phoebe Judge: They cut down six bags in
total, and inside the bags they found the
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dismembered body of a woman in her 50s.
They transported the garbage bags to the
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medical examiner's office and began the work
of trying to figure out who the victim was.
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Pat Mangold: You could see by her clothing that
she appeared to be a homeless person, so the very
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next day I went up to the Parkway, which is a
very heavily concentrated area of Philadelphia
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homeless people. They sleep on the benches along
the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. So, I went up there
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handing my business card out, asking if anyone
had been missing, or they haven't seen a woman
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in her 50s, 5'4", Indian, Italian descent.
Phoebe Judge: The homeless men and women he
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approached were not interested in talking to a
police officer. He was shut down left and right.
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Pat Mangold: I thought, there's no
way I'm going to solve this case. This will be an unsolved murder in Philadelphia.
Phoebe Judge: This was rare for Detective Mangold.
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In his 23 years as a homicide detective, he
says there are only three cases he didn't solve.
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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,
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much less who had done this to her.
Pat Mangold: And the very next day I walked
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into work and in a message box, I received a note
that had the name of a caller, Adam Bruckner,
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his phone number, and on the note it said,
"He may know who your homeless victim is."
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Adam Bruckner: I went to the police station
right up the road and said, "Hey, I heard
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you guys were looking to find some information
on Angie," and the guy just froze and he said,
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"How do you know her name?"
Phoebe Judge: Adam Bruckner. Adam Bruckner: It would be dramatic to
say that they were suspicious of me,
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but they were definitely alarmed that I knew
who it was, and so they got my information,
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they sent me over to talk to Detective
Pat Mangold over at the homicide unit. Phoebe Judge: Adam Bruckner says he's always been
the kind of guy who gives a dollar to homeless
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people. When he graduated from college, he
decided he wanted to play soccer professionally.
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He traveled all over the country by bus to try out
for different teams. He'd hitchhike sometimes, and
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he ended up meeting a lot of homeless people.
Adam Bruckner: And just had this crease in my
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heart for these guys once I heard their stories
and that they weren't just bums and drunks and
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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
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really believing that there was a chance to
help these guys get back on their feet.
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Phoebe Judge: And in doing this he'd made
friends with an older man named Red Colt
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and his girlfriend Angie. Adam hadn't
seen Angie or Red Colt for a while, and this is what he told the police.
Adam Bruckner: I let them know I thought this
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lady's name was Angie, and they said, "Thank you,
we don't really know who it is," and it seemed
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like it was just going to go away at that point.
Phoebe Judge: But Adam Bruckner wasn't
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going to let it go away. Detective Mangold
had no idea who he was dealing with.
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Pat Mangold: It was on a daily basis after that
first meeting that I spoke to him. He would call
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every day. I mean, some of the guys were making
fun of him. Not to him, but to me, and they
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kept calling him 'junior detective.' They said,
"Oh, your junior detective keeps calling here.
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Said he has some new information."
Phoebe Judge: The thing is, Adam Bruckner did
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have new information, good information, and a lot
of it. The homeless men and women on the Parkway
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trusted him and they were telling him things
about Angie that they refused to tell the police.
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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.
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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
Adam Bruckner: So, in February of 2002 I was just making regular
runs down and bringing peanut butter and jelly
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sandwiches down to the Ben Franklin Parkway,
and just trying to get to know the guys and
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just asking them, "Hey, what happened? How
did you end up in this situation?" Really,
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I was just saying, "Why are you homeless?"
And I met, first, Red Colt, who was distinct.
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He's about 65 years old, African-American. He was
pushing a shopping cart, like a laundry cart, that
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was lined with garbage bags, and he had no socks
on. He had a tarp that was cut out and tied around
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his head that was fastened with a shoelace under
his chin, and he spoke in a way that's so hard to
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describe, but it was just — he was almost poetic
in his words, and he seemed like maybe a professor
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that had gone bad somewhere along the line.
And he had a girlfriend, Angie, who was a
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volatile bag lady. And she was kind of what you'd
picture: an ornery, heavily clothed woman living
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on the streets. And it was a pretty interesting
couple, and I was really fascinated by Red Colt.
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Phoebe Judge: I mean, what was your first
actual interaction with these two? Adam Bruckner: Well, I was first talking to
Red Colt, and I had come up and offered him a
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sandwich, and I was making these peanut butter and
jelly sandwiches, and he said, "Why, thank you,
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Adam, for the sandwich, which contains calcium
that will fortify my bones and allow me to sustain
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a fall that would cripple another man my age."
And that was when Angie came up, and she was
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cursing and really yelling about these white
mf'ers around, and Red Colt put his hand up like
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a stop sign and said, "Why, Angie, if you hadn't
noticed, Adam here is a white male, and what
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you're saying may be construed as offensive." And
so, there I was, trying to work with these guys,
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and really, Red Colt was the one working with
me, and I just kind of glowed that he had stood
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up for me and he had done it so politely. And that
was just kind of a buy-in with Angie because she
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knew if Red Colt was for me that I must be all
right to have around their conversation.
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Phoebe Judge: The other homeless people on the
Parkway described Angie as a caring grandmother
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figure, someone who'd bring them soup and vitamins
when they were sick. So, when they heard of her
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disappearance, they did want to know what had
happened to her, but they wouldn't open up to
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the police. Adam was the perfect intermediary.
Adam Bruckner: I went back down to the Parkway
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and was talking to some of the guys, and I
have this little buddy who is a homeless guy,
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and he told me that Angie had an apartment,
and it totally just blew me away. Phoebe Judge: But Adam did not call Detective
Mangold with this. He took it upon himself to
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go check it out. He went to the neighborhood and
wandered around aimlessly, asking people on the
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street if they knew a woman named Angie.
So, you have no experience, right? You're
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a professional soccer player.
Adam Bruckner: Yeah, no, I watched LA Law growing up, and that was about it.
Phoebe Judge: But his technique worked — sort of.
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Adam recognized a guy in the neighborhood as one
of Angie's ex-boyfriends, and this ex-boyfriend
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didn't understand what Adam was talking about.
Adam Bruckner: And so he took me over to her
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apartment. He said, "I swear it's not her. That's
her window right there, the window's open."
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He said, "I hung that teddy bear curtain right
there." He said, "It's the same one. You can see
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she's living in there." And from the ground level
you could see that it looked lived in; it didn't
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look like a place where somebody had gone missing,
and so I automatically had this doubt that maybe I
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had gotten this wrong. And then I rung some of the
doorbells and a neighbor came out and said, "No,
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she's not dead, she's alive. She's in New York
City. She called the landlord and told him she
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was sick and she's paying rent every month."
Phoebe Judge: Adam called the landlord
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himself from a payphone, who confirmed it.
Adam Bruckner: And then it was almost laughable,
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and that ended a few minutes later
when another neighbor, Sharon, came up, and almost passively she said, "What's going
on?" I said, "Ah, we're looking for... " I said,
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"I was looking for Angie." And her face just
shifted. As soon as I saw her face, I knew that
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there was something really wrong, and so I pulled
her aside and she told me about the fight she had
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heard the day before Good Friday, and she heard
a thud and choking and screaming. And it was from
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Angie's apartment, and that tipped the scale
back to really thinking there was a problem.
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Phoebe Judge: In 2002 Good Friday was on March
29th. Angie's body wasn't found until July 4th,
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and yet someone had been paying the rent for the
apartment and opening and closing the windows.
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Adam wanted to get inside and see what he could
find, but he wasn't bold enough to break in on
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his own. He called Detective Mangold.
Pat Mangold: I said I'd have to get a search warrant for this location, and
we did, and Adam stayed with us. I said,
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"Listen, I don't want you to be in the dark
here. You're helping me out here, I want you
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to see how this process all works out." He was
very interested in seeing how it did work.
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Adam Bruckner: I was just standing there,
they knocked, no one answered. Someone said,
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"Get the city key." And I really thought there
was going to be this really technical city key,
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and someone pulled out a sledgehammer
and just bashed the door in. Phoebe Judge: What happens next?
Adam Bruckner: I expected to see a
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bloody crime scene, but it was even crazier than
that. It was a total mess. She was a hoarder,
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and she had not thrown anything away for 40 years.
She had collected every piece of mail. Newspapers
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were stacked up. I mean, we all just froze.
Pat Mangold: And there were thousands of pieces
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of mail. I mean, you name it, it was
there. It would have taken a year to go through and get different things.
Adam Bruckner: She had everything from
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a lawnmower up there, even though she didn't
have a lawn, to a detailed account of every
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phone call she ever made since, like, 1960.
Pat Mangold: The apartment was loaded with all
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these bottles of ginger and all these different...
Not narcotics, but little vitamin supplements,
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things like that. And it had a medicinal smell.
It was like you walked into an old apothecary,
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a drugstore back in the day
when you were a little kid. Phoebe Judge: Was there a bed in the apartment?
Adam Bruckner: There was a bed. Right when
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you walked in the door to the
left was a bed, and there were maybe a foot and a half, two feet of
newspapers stacked up with a bed sheet
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over it. One of the officers even thought that
there was a body under there and said, "Oh,
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here's your body," and ripped back the sheets, but
it was newspapers that were dated very recently.
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Phoebe Judge: 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.
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Did you feel kind of like you were a little kid
trying to get the police to take you seriously,
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saying, "I might not be a homicide detective, but
I can put two and two together and I think that
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there's something funny that's going on here"?
Adam Bruckner: I was trying to stay unnoticed,
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but still kind of whispering my opinions. I did
not want to leave the apartment, but I definitely
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wanted to be heard, and so I would pull someone
aside and say, "I think she was killed in here,"
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and they'd say, "No, no, it would look different
if she had been killed in here. If there was a
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struggle it would be a mess." Sooner than later
it got too hot to be in there and we all went
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outside, and that was when they did not invite me
to come back up, but said, "If you can find any
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information on Red Colt we would appreciate it."
Phoebe Judge: This is the first time that Adam
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realized that Red Colt was a prime
suspect. He hadn't considered that this could be a possibility.
Adam Bruckner: Because I had this
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personal relationship with him. I knew that
he wasn't capable of something like that.
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Phoebe Judge: He set out to find other possible
suspects. Angie had restraining orders against
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several abusive boyfriends. Adam looked into
those men, and he talked with friends on the
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Parkway. He studied the place where Angie's body
had originally been found in garbage bags by the
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river, and he went back to her apartment a lot,
without telling the police what he was doing.
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Peter Pappas: The things that made him a good
soccer player by compulsively working harder
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than everybody else, he needed to find the next
clue; he needed to figure out what was going on,
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and he just sort of wouldn't let himself stop.
Phoebe Judge: Here's one of Adam's
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teammates, Peter Pappas.
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,
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and Z happened?" Or, "How come this guy is here?
Why did this person know this?" It was just,
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wow, just going around and around, like why
couldn't it be this person, but Red Colt,
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it can't be Red Colt. I met Red Colt, I
love Red Colt. We're like kindred spirits.
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It was incredible. I honestly got worried
for his life. He was buying information
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with sandwiches or packs of cigarettes.
Phoebe Judge: Adam completely admits that
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he was obsessed. He was calling
Detective Mangold constantly. Adam Bruckner: I called way, way, way too much
because I would leave information every time
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I got it. So, he'd come back in and see
this stack of papers, and at some point
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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.
Phoebe Judge: At this point the police were
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certain that Angie had been killed at the river,
but Adam was certain that Angie had been killed in
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her apartment. He was fixated on what she'd been
wearing when her body was found. It was cold in
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Philadelphia in March, but Angie had been found
wearing a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sandals — not
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warm enough to be walking around outside.
Adam Bruckner: That made me more and more sure
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she was killed in her apartment, which made me
more determined to go back in and find something,
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and so I just kept digging through this paper
in her apartment. And a couple times some of
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the neighbors would come in, and this was
pretty awkward, but I just kept going.
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Phoebe Judge: Wait, I don't understand.
Would the neighbors be like, "Who are you,
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what are you doing in here?"
Adam Bruckner: I mean, they knew that something really bizarre had happened and
they knew that the reality was that with all the
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homicides in Philadelphia, there just is not the
time for the police to do this kind of meticulous
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investigation. And so, sometimes they would let
me in and sometimes the front door would be open,
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and I would just come in on my own. And they'd
come up and see me on all fours, crawling around
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and pulling papers out from underneath the bed.
I don't know what they said behind my back,
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but they were very nice to my face.
Phoebe Judge: Adam says he'd made something
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like 20 trips to Angie's apartment before he
found the clue he needed. Shortly after Angie's
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body had been found he went to the river and
looked around. He found a piece of paper that
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said something strange about an underground
American currency. He didn't pay much attention
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to it, except that the handwriting was
distinctive: large and blocky. He put the piece of paper in his backpack.
Adam Bruckner: And then, when I was in
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the apartment, I saw the same handwriting, and
it was like this gong went off. And I realized
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whoever had written that down by the river
had obviously written it in the apartment,
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and if I could figure out who had written that,
it was like a clear case of who had done it.
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Phoebe Judge: So, how did you
figure out who had written it? Adam Bruckner: All of a sudden I saw these
four words that said, "This is Red Colt."
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And all this time I had spent trying to prove
that it was not him... It just fell off.
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Phoebe Judge: On that same trip to Angie's
apartment, Adam found a Rite Aid receipt for
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paint tarps and garbage bags. It was dated three
days after Good Friday, which is when the neighbor
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had heard the horrible screaming fight.
Adam Bruckner: It became very clear at that point that Red Colt was the one in her
apartment. Red Colt had dismembered her body,
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Red Colt had taken her body down the stairs in
his cart lined with garbage bags, Red Colt had
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kept the body down by the river, hanging over
the ledge tied to the tree with the slipknots.
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Phoebe Judge: 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
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the neighborhood and found out that Red Colt had
a new girlfriend, and that the two of them had
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breakfast at a certain McDonald's every morning.
Adam Bruckner: I let homicide know that he was
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going to be there. Homicide called police, they
missed him that day. The next day Detective Pat
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Mangold went out to get some Chinese food, and
from the description that I'd given him from a
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photo we were able to get, he recognized him,
and the cart with garbage bags lined was the
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biggest thing. So, he saw a guy pushing a cart
down the road, and he said, "Red Colt," and he
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said it looked like Red Colt was going to run,
and all the other police pulled up, and Red Colt,
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in this poetic voice of his, said, "It was
prudent for you to call for backup. This was
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a physical battle you would not have won."
Pat Mangold: We took him into custody
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for questioning, and he had over $7,600 on his
person in different denominations and pockets
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all over his clothing. I took the shopping
cart back into the homicide unit. We did a
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search warrant for that, looking for maybe
the tool that he would use to cut her up.
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In there, I open up, find a TastyKake box, and as
soon as I opened it, I could smell that medicinal,
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musty smell from her apartment. It was
identical. And I looked in the box, and then
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I saw there were huge amounts of cash in there.
We called the forfeiture unit and they counted it
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with a machine. It was over $68,000.
Phoebe Judge: That he was walking around in his shopping cart with?
Pat Mangold: Yep, and that's when I thought... I
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had that 'aha' moment in the homicide unit.
I thought, "He killed her for her money."
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Phoebe Judge: I mean, I thought
Angie was... Who was Angie? Pat Mangold: It turns out — Adam
did a little investigating in that,
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too. Found out that her grandmother had just
passed away, and the family knew that there
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was a large sum of money in the house. Because
the grandmother sold a couple properties,
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didn't believe in banks and kept
the money in a safe in the house. So, after the grandmother died they found that
all the money went missing and they accused
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Angie, Josephine Angelo, of doing it.
Phoebe Judge: How critical was Adam Bruckner
00:17:48
in solving the — kind of, the Red Colt murder?
Pat Mangold: Oh, huge. I would not have been able
00:17:54
to do it without him. In Philadelphia we have
a lot of murder cases. We work hard on all our
00:17:58
cases, especially in the summer. Like, Fourth
of July, August, I mean, the murder rates in
00:18:04
these urban cities go up because of the heat
and the problems in the neighborhoods. So,
00:18:07
you're working these cases every day. You
get a new case every day as you go in and...
00:18:12
It's not like they get put on the
back burner, but it was huge. I mean, I couldn't have done it without him.
Phoebe Judge: He went out of his way to
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thank Adam at press conferences and
in interviews, and he even tried to get the city to officially recognize him.
Pat Mangold: I put him in for a citizen's
00:18:28
commendation from the mayor's office, and we joke
around about that to this day, that he never got
00:18:34
it. I have no reason why that didn't happen.
Phoebe Judge: One of the strangest parts of the
00:18:40
story is that even after Adam had solved the case
and found the evidence that incriminated Red Colt,
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he still didn't want to believe that it
could be true. Red Colt was his friend.
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Adam Bruckner: In my journal I would just
write, "I just wish there was something more
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I could do for this guy." It was simple stuff.
He was writing this Kennedy assassination book,
00:19:00
and I was going to help him make the photocopies.
He was fascinating and he defended me when Angie
00:19:07
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
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just had a much different side than I knew,
and I think that people can be good and bad,
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and I think that he's one of those people.
Phoebe Judge: Red Colt was charged with first
00:19:25
degree homicide, robbery, and
abuse of a corpse. He wanted to represent himself, but wasn't allowed.
Adam Bruckner: There was a mental health
00:19:33
evaluation where he was found unfit, so that
was definitely a part of the puzzle, but
00:19:38
he definitely knew the difference between right
and wrong, which was the really deciding factor of
00:19:42
whether or not he would be in a mental institution
or in a regular prison. A guy that can clean up an
00:19:49
apartment by taking a body out piece by piece on
the third floor surely knew the difference between
00:19:55
right and wrong and was able to cover it up.
Phoebe Judge: Red Colt was sentenced to life
00:19:59
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
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to her biological son. He grew up in foster
care. They had a funeral and her son came.
00:20:19
Detective Mangold is now a special agent for
the Pennsylvania attorney general's office.
00:20:24
As for Adam Bruckner, he's retired from soccer
and he's put his sleuthing days behind him.
00:20:30
But he's more involved than ever
with the homeless community. He's youth director of the Helping Hands
Rescue Mission in north Philadelphia.
00:20:38
When you tell this story now, all
these years later, do you feel like you were a different person back then?
Adam Bruckner: Yeah. It wrecked a little
00:20:48
something in me. So, yes, I think this whole thing
changed me. Literally, instead of watching these
00:20:55
horror shows or these homicide investigation
tales, I stuck myself in the middle of one of
00:21:01
these accidentally. And it just gives you a little
different perspective on people and pain and on
00:21:08
the world. So, I can't really explain that, but
I do know that it sat on me really heavily. And
00:21:16
it was so sad, what happened to Angie. She was
a lady that brought soup to the homeless guys,
00:21:21
and she was in her apartment one day, and the
next day she's, you know... she's just vanished.
00:21:27
[Music.]
Phoebe Judge: Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer and me.
Audio engineering help from Rob Byers. Special
00:21:42
thanks to Jenifer Hixson and Viki Merrick.
Julienne Alexander draws original illustrations
00:21:47
for each episode. Check them
out at thisiscriminal.com. Starting this month, Criminal is recorded in the
studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.
00:21:57
Thanks to them for their support of the show.
Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX,
00:22:04
a collective of the 13 best podcasts
around. Shows like Song Exploder. Hrishikesh Hirway: My name is Hrishikesh
Hirway. You're listening to Song Exploder.
00:22:11
In the fall of 2001 Phil Elverum released
the album "The Glow Part 2" on K Records.
00:22:16
Phoebe Judge: In Song Exploder, musicians
take apart their songs piece by piece
00:22:20
and tell the story of how they were made.
Phil Elverum: You know, there's just two piano
00:22:24
tracks, but I put the mic, like, 50 feet away
and just, like, slammed the notes down, let them
00:22:29
resonate in the room, so they feel huge.
Phoebe Judge: Go listen. Criminal is coming to the West Coast to
do a little tour in early November. You
00:22:38
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,
00:22:46
celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
Jingle: Radiotopia, from
00:22:57
PRX.