Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Angela Savage

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

Sometime after dropping off her young daughter at the school bus, Angela Savage and her 6-month-old son were abducted. Angela's body would eventually be found on a dirt path near her home, having been assaulted, tied up and left with no shoes. Despite being a small community the case goes cold for almost 30 years until a strange incident connects Angela's murder to the death of another young girl and police are able to solve the case. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-angela-savage/    

Hi, Crime Junkies, Ashley Flowers here. And before we jump into the episode today, which by the way is a solved case, so for those of you who love some resolution, this one is for you, I wanted to ask you a favor. Please tell a friend today about Crime Junkie. I don't know if you know this, but 66% of the population have never listened to any podcast and they don't really know what it is or what kind of content they can expect. So if you know a Crime Junkie, share the love, spread the word, share it on social media, let them know how they can find them, let them know that it's free.

We want to get more people into podcasting so we can keep making great episodes like the one you're about to hear. Our story today starts in Deerfield, Florida in March of 1986. A 24-year-old mother of two named Angela had walked her five-year-old daughter to the school bus that morning and promised to be there waiting for her at two o'clock like she was every day to pick her up, and usually she came with Stacey's younger brother doing junior in tow. But that day, March 17, when Stacey got off the bus, her mother was nowhere to be found.

She waited and waited, and finally she just decided to run the couple of blocks back home on her own. Surely, her mother was just caught up doing something and was going to be there waiting for her. When she gets to their home, the front door is unlocked. In the living room, there's no mom, kitchen, no mom, and no sign of her six-month-old brother crying or even making a peep inside the house. The only sound in the house was of a TV that had been left on.

Though Stacey was only five, her instinct told her to get out of the house. She actually ran next door to her neighbor and told them that she couldn't find her mother. The neighbor, also not wanting to think the worst, assumes that maybe she had stepped out, she would be back anytime, so she tells Stacey, why don't you just stay here until your mom gets home? Several minutes pass, and then hours pass, and this neighbor is keeping one eye on the window waiting for any sign of Angela when she sees Angela's brother walking home from

work. She stops him in the street and tells him that Angela is gone. She's missing, she's never picked up her daughter, and she thinks something might be wrong. Angela's brother, Wayne, goes next door to Angela's house to see if there is any clue to where she might be. When he walks in, they're sitting in the living room as if nothing were wrong, was Angela's fiance and the father of her young son, Dwayne Jr.

Wayne asks Dwayne's senior, where is my sister? And somewhat nonchalantly, he just says, I don't know, like I came home, no one was here. Wasn't it kind of weird that neither her or the kids were home? You know, it could have been an Angela's character, maybe to leave the house with the kids for just a little while, so maybe them not being there didn't set off Dwayne's alarm bells right away, or at least that's what he says. Now Wayne, her brother, springs into action and starts calling frantically everyone that

they know, Angela's friends, Angela's family, wondering where she could be, trying to see if anyone has seen her. And Wayne learns that Angela's other brother had a kind of pseudo interaction with her around one o'clock in the afternoon. Apparently, this brother, Rodney, had gone into a convenience store and the clerk said, Oh Rodney, you actually just missed your sister. She was in here just a few minutes ago. And Rodney said he like popped his head out and tried to look down the road either way

to see if he could find her, but she was already long gone by that time. Now beyond this one semi-citing of Angela, the family wasn't finding anyone who knew where she was or had seen her or had any kind of interaction with her that day. By 10 30 that night, the family all agreed that a report needed to be filed, and Dwayne would be the one to file it. Although he wasn't alarmed by Angela and the kids not being home when he got there, Wayne said that he was very upset by the time he started actually filing this report and the family could tell that he was very concerned.

Now the family continued to search the streets around her home and they spent a very sleepless night waiting for any sign of Angela or her baby. But unfortunately, the family wouldn't have to wait long before they got the answer that they had been dreading. Early on the morning of the 18th, police officers got a call that the body of an African American woman had been found off of an access road near an abandoned house, and immediately when detectives arrived on the scene, they knew that this was the woman who had been reported missing just nine hours earlier.

When Angela was found, she was found fully clothed with only her shoes missing. Now it did appear however that she had been sloppily redressed. Her bra had been placed back on her but it hadn't been hooked and her pants were on but they were unzipped and unbuttoned. Now this was the first sign that made police think perhaps she knew her killer. Perhaps it was someone who cared for her and in their own twisted way, they didn't want her to be fully naked because they didn't want her to be so exposed when she was found. The second thing that made them think her killer knew her was the location of her body

and the fact that she was found so quickly. This access road was highly trafficked in the area and anyone who lived there knew that it was, so investigators are thinking that whoever put her there wanted to make sure that she would be found and she wouldn't be left out in the open for a long time by herself. When they examine Angela's body more closely at the scene, they're able to tell that she was strangled and before her death, her hands and her feet were restrained. And she had actually been gagged because there was what looked like marks like maybe rope burns or drag lines, all those lines on her wrists, her ankles and across her mouth.

The location of her body was clearly a secondary site and not where her murder took place. So there wasn't much to go off of there and it wouldn't be until they get her to the medical examiner's office that they were able to get more details on the condition of her body. But before they were able to transport her, there was one glaring thing that was missing from the scene. Where was Angela's six month old son, Dwayne Jr. There was no sign of the baby that went missing with her.

He wasn't at the scene, which was both a relief and a pain to the family. They didn't want to find Dwayne like his mother, but at the same time, they have no idea where he was and not the slightest clue where to start looking for him. The detectives went to notify Angela's parents first. And it was really a one to punch for them. They had to inform them that their daughter was brutally murdered, but then right after they have to tell them that their grandson is still missing. As police are making the notifications to the family, they get a stunning call.

Baby Dwayne had been found. A woman who was actually family friends with Angela's family and who lived close to her was at home one day when all of a sudden, she hears a loud knock at her door, followed by the distinct sound of someone running off. When she opened the door, there on her porch was Baby Dwayne. Did she see the person who left him at all? Was there any sort of description she could tell police? No.

The detective said that if she could have just looked out of her window when she heard the knock or even gotten to her door 20 seconds earlier, she would have seen Angela's killer. But by the time she opened the door, the man was long gone. Now Baby Dwayne is healthy. He gets returned to his family and it seemed like the whole time he was gone, he had been taken care of, which is one more thing that makes police believe that this is someone who knew Angela and someone who would care for her children. And when police start to look at the people in Angela's life, they keep thinking, who

knew Angela, who would want to kill her, but would still want to make sure that her young son was safe and taken care of, like it almost is two totally contradictory things. Well, and not even take care of him, but kind of risk blowing his cover by dropping him off at a family friend. Exactly. He risked everything and he could have been seen so easily to make sure that this baby was found right away. And when police asked themselves this question, like who, who would be willing to do this?

They could only come up with one answer, Angela's fiancee, Dwayne Sr. Not only did Dwayne Sr. seem to be the one who would have the most reason to keep Angela's son safe while also murder her, police found that their interactions with him were very suspicious. When police first told him that his fiancee had been murdered, they said he had almost no reaction whatsoever, and he wasn't the grieving fiancee that they expected to see. To top it off, he had no alibi for the time that they think Angela could have been left out on that access road, and they think that was sometime between one and five in the morning.

Not only was it that he had no alibi, he couldn't even tell them what he was doing during that time. Which by the way, one to five in the morning, I think the right answer for anyone is sleeping. But I guess he told the police that he didn't know what he was doing. He couldn't even try and help them give him an alibi. Totally normal. Right. Now, the last known sighting of Angela was at that convenience store at one o'clock.

But that doesn't mean she was taken then. Dwayne was verified to be at work during that time, so police thought maybe he did something to her after he got off of work, and she just managed not to run into anyone between the time she left the convenience store to the time she met up with Dwayne. Police eventually brought Dwayne in for an interview and told him that they thought he had something to do with Angela's murder. And his response does nothing to help him, and everything to make police think they have the right guy.

Dwayne doesn't deny being involved. He isn't outraged. He just tells police that if they think he was involved, they were going to have to do their jobs and prove it. The police eventually give him a polygraph, and it plays right into their hand because of course, he fails it. When they tell him the results, he kind of gives them the same line. If you want to come after me, you got to prove that I did it, which is just something you

should never say to someone looking to put you away for murder. Right. Like, I don't necessarily disagree, but don't put that out there. Yeah. It is their job, and they do need to make sure that you're the right guy, but like, my God, you don't have to be like, I dare you to put me in prison, which is basically what he's saying. Right.

Like, no need to taunt the police. And at this point, Dwayne isn't just their prime suspect. He is their only suspect, but everything they have against him is circumstantial. There was nothing physical to tie him to Angela's murder. When Angela's autopsy was done, it was found that she had been raped, and there was a biological sample taken from her body, but this was 1986 and even with their prime suspect sitting in front of them, they couldn't connect him to the murder. They couldn't even try to test the samples against one another.

But with her autopsy, it did give them more circumstantial evidence against Dwayne. It gave them motive. You see, Angela was actually four months pregnant at the time of her death. And the theory that police put forward was maybe Dwayne was cracking under the pressure of another baby. Maybe he didn't want this second baby, so he decided to get rid of Angela. So kind of two questions. If he was so, like, pressured by the fact of taking care of another kid, one, why not just

peace out? And two, why take such good care of Dwayne Jr. in dropping him off at the family friend, making sure he was okay, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I'm not 100% sold on the motive, and neither was Angela's family. They actually believed Dwayne wholeheartedly. Angela's brother said that when his sister went missing, he looked Dwayne in the eye and said, did you kill my sister? And Dwayne replied, no, man, you know how much I loved her, I would have never done anything

to hurt her. And Wayne said that he knew from that moment on, Dwayne wasn't the guy. He fully believed him, and the entire family stood by him as weeks turned into months and months turned into years. And the case would end up going cold, but all of the investigators and all of the people in the community continued to look at Dwayne like the man who just got away. With each year that passed, Angela's case got colder and colder, and there were no leads. The investigator said the case was as stale as they come.

But finally, eight years after her murder, a cold case detective was assigned to Angela's case file. He was convinced that someone in Deerfield held the answers to what happened to her back in March of 1986, and he put it kind of poetically. He said Angela lived in Deerfield, she was killed in Deerfield, and I know the answers are still in Deerfield. The new detective decided what he was going to do to kind of drum up some publicity and kind of rock people's brains as he would put up a billboard about Angela's case to

try and get people talking again. He made this billboard a picture of Angela's parents holding her picture at her grave site, and he put the billboard near the road where Angela's body was found. Not too long after the billboard went up, police got a call, but it was not the call that they were expecting. 911 gets a call one day from a woman who says her husband is trying to kill her, trying to strangle her, and when police go to the scene, it's the home of a man named Gary Trout.

And for the life of me, I cannot explain what happens next, and it's never been fully explained in any of the news articles on this case. Gary swears that he was not trying to kill his wife, that they were just having an argument that got out of hand. But Gary says, I did kill somebody else. What? Yeah, and it's not Angela. Gary says that in 1986, he killed a girl named Cassandra Scott.

Police were baffled by this confession, and of course they bring him in, but they're totally stumped because there were no homicides solved or unsolved from 1986 where the victim's name was Cassandra. But after doing some digging, police find what Gary is talking about. Just six weeks before Angela's murder, another young African American girl, this time just 17 years old, was found on the side of the road in Deerfield. She was completely dressed, except she had no shoes. In another bizarre similarity to Angela's case, Cassandra was exactly four months pregnant

at the time of her death. Now like I said, this was just six weeks before Angela was murdered. So you would have thought that back in 1986, someone would have made the connection between these two eerily similar cases. But they didn't because Cassandra's case was never ruled a homicide. And that's why, when Gary confessed, police also had a hard time finding what exactly he was talking about. Apparently, the medical examiner had a hard time determining the cause of death, and he

couldn't rule out the possibility that her death was from a seizure. So her death was just ruled as suspicious, and no one ever investigated it as a homicide, despite the fact that her family was insistent that she had been the victim of foul play. For whatever missteps were made back in 1986, it was now almost a decade later, and the cold case detectives who were assigned Angela's case immediately made the connection when they heard about Gary's confession in the murder of Cassandra. Gary was someone who was never on their radar before. His name had never come up in any of the files, but detectives were now hoping that they could

get a confession from him in the same way that he confessed to killing Cassandra. But when police go to talk to him, he won't give them a thing. He won't talk, swears he has nothing to do with Angela, and he sends police away with nothing. At the time of both murders, Gary was living in the city of Deerfield, and he had actually known both women. Cassandra's family said they saw him almost every single day, and Gary was also known to Angela's family as well.

Now Gary ends up getting convicted of Cassandra's murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Having a confession is great to close a case, but it doesn't really provide any answers. And to this day, no one has any real idea about motive in the case. Gary told officers how he got Cassandra alone. He said that he told her he had some baby clothes that she could have if she would just come get them from his house. And while they were alone in his home, he killed her. But he provides no reason for why he planned this, or if he planned it at all, or if it

was just a spur-of-the-moment attack. Investigators in Angela's case wondered if maybe he used the same bruise on pregnant Angela, and that's when they had an idea. He wouldn't confess, but they still had that DNA sample. So detectives asked the lab to run a comparison between what they had at Angela's crime scene and Gary, and they're hoping that this would be the end to the saga, and maybe they could finally give Angela's parents and her brother and her children some kind of closure. But when the lab attempted to make a comparison, they found that the sample from Angela was

too small to test against back in 1996. So the evidence went back into storage, Gary went to jail for Cassandra's murder, and Angela's family still had no justice. Now the family this whole time was still backing Duane. They thought he was innocent, so when they got a new suspect, they were quick to jump on board and believe that he was their man. But there was nothing they could do to actually get him. It was another 10 years before things would shake out again.

In 2006, at the 20th anniversary of Angela's death, her family did a lot of pushing to get anyone to try and pick up her story in the media, and they convinced one journalist to pick up the story, and she starts kind of poking around asking questions. With this journalist kind of poking around, it sparked the original detective on Angela's case to go back to the file and see if there was anything else that could be done. Well now 10 years had gone by, and 10 years is a long time in science, so DNA had advanced by leaps and bounds at this point. He has the samples re-sent to the lab again to see if a full profile can be found, and

then they also decide to go back and talk to Gary again. Now in 1996, Gary had been sentenced to 25 years for Cassandra's murder, so you would think he would still be in prison. But by 2006, he was already out of prison because he had gotten out on good behavior. There's a new law in the state that you have to serve at least 85% of your sentence before you can be up for any kind of release or parole, but the crime he committed was before that law was enacted, so he was not held to those rules. So he's out, he's a free citizen, police bring him in for questioning, and they start

asking him questions about Angela, and he swears, again up and down, I don't know her, I've never heard of her, I've never touched her, and I certainly didn't have anything to do with her murder. Which for someone who just randomly confessed to a crime, you kind of want to believe him. Yeah, I think it threw police for a little bit of a loop as well, and they were really counting on this DNA sample. Well the DNA sample comes back, and so everything that Gary said was almost better than a confession. Because his denial of any contact or knowledge of the victim will make it impossible for

him to explain away the fact that after they got the full profile from Angela's crime scene and they loaded it into CODIS, it came back as an exact match to him. For some time, Gary maintained his innocence, and it wasn't until right before the trial that he decided to change his plea to guilty. Angela's family said they will never forgive him for what he did to their sister, and they will never forgive him for what he took from them. This is one of those cases that has some kind of closure. We know who the bad guy is, but just because there's closure doesn't mean there are answers.

We still have no idea why Gary did what he did to these women. Were there any other women that he did this to? Maybe women like Cassandra, whose case maybe didn't get attention, or wasn't even ruled a homicide and no one knows that they should be looking at. Something that I can't get over was, is there something about the fact that these women were four months pregnant that made him target them? For what reason? He obviously cared about children, which is evident by the way he made sure baby Dwayne

was safe after murdering Angela. So was them being pregnant a target, or was that a weird coincidence? These attacks seem so specific. African American woman, four months pregnant, left on a busy road with no shoes. There had to be some kind of reason. What made him start and what made him stop? Yeah, the crimes just seem so specific, like the no shoes thing. It's very weird.

You would think that that would show up somewhere else and just no motive to go off of. That's just, it's really kind of incredible. These cases didn't get a lot of media attention, so I think if maybe the victims were different or maybe if this was in a more recent time, we would have more information. More people asking questions around the case because I don't even know, did Gary have like a weird foot thing? He was married for some time and obviously had a tumultuous relationship with his wife. If someone would have been asking her the right questions, was there stuff in his past

that would be like, oh yeah, he was this like weird foot guy or he was like weirdly into pregnant women? Well, and like who even just is like, oh, I wasn't trying to kill her, but I did kill this other person. Oh my God, Britt, that is like my biggest question is nowhere can I find why he confessed to something that they would have never connected him. First of all, they would have never connected him to Angela. They're certainly not going to connect him to a murder that they didn't even know was

a murder. Well, and then on top of that, to deny that he was involved in Angela's murder for so long, like confess to this murder after being accused of attempted murder, but never coming clean, like never wanting to come clean about this other murder. It just, there's so many layers that just confuse me. Yeah. I don't know if this case makes sense and that's why I'm happy that there's closure for the family and he didn't put them through a trial, but at least at a trial, they would

have had to go into motive. Like they have to present some kind of theory about the case. Yeah. And there doesn't seem to be any. And again, I always wonder if there's like other people because I find it so strange when, when killers do this, when they have these like two spurts, again, there were six weeks apart so close together and then nothing else again. Yeah.

If there's such specific markers in like the victim profile, you'd think that somewhere out there, there would be more. I kind of wonder as well if maybe there isn't some mental health things at play, because like you were saying, nothing he's doing is making sense, confessing to something they're not asking him about, then saying he's innocent when he's clearly guilty and they actually have something on him. Yeah. I wonder if there's something like that at play, but you would think you'd have to go

through some kind of evaluation before he was able to plead guilty. I, again, there's nothing on this case. One of those that's like got very little media out there. So I would love if we knew someday, but the truth is we probably never will. Gary hasn't felt the need to disclose anything to law enforcement or the families all these years later. And he may die with these answers either in prison or even out because Gary could be released from prison as early as 2026.

Thank you guys for listening. If you want more information, you can always go visit our blog at crimejunkiepodcast.com. Be sure to follow us on Twitter at crimejunkiepod and on Insta at crimejunkiepodcast. And don't forget, there's always extra episodes you can get at patreon.com slash crimejunkie. And for anyone who wants to hear an amazing adoption story, we're going to have our Puppet of the Month segment up next. This week's episode of Crime Junkie was written and hosted by me. All of our editing and sound production was done by David Flowers.

And all of our music, including our theme, comes from Justin Daniel. Crime Junkie is an audio chuck production. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Okay Ashley, I have a great Puppet of the Month this month. They're never not great, but I'm really excited. I will tell you. And even our listener told us it is a roller coaster, so be prepared.

Oh boy. Okay. It has a good ending, I promise. Okay, good. So like, keep that in the back of your mind. Okay, so this is from our listener named Kamiko, and I hope I'm saying that right. I apologize if I'm not. And she wrote in to tell us about her Puppet Mason.

And honestly, her story was great, so I'm not going to do much to it. So I'm just going to read what she's sent us, okay? Yes, awesome. I had always wanted a dog of my own growing up, she's about 21 now, and especially because to help with anxiety and depression. So when she was 14, she convinced her mom to help her buy a dog. If she committed to like researching and do, you know what parents say, like, you can get a dog if you really put in the work to get a dog.

Yeah, like prove to me you want this dog. And she specifically wanted a doberman. And I'm not really sure why she didn't really just like explain that, but she basically contacted breeders and over and over and over, and every single inquiry fell through. And she was kind of just like, that's it. I'm just not going to get the doberman puppy that I really wanted. And her mom eventually decided to go to an adoption event. And they inquired about this little puppy who was days away from death row.

Stop it. Which I feel like, wait, is this puppy a doberman or just like a mutt puppy? It's just a mutt puppy. Oh, the Judas. I know the best kind. And I feel like all of our stories are like, and they almost died when it came to puppets. But it just really hits me in the feels like my Niles, he's from a kill shelter and a rescue up here literally went states away to get him.

And so death row puppies are just like the best rescues. Death row puppies. That sounds like a great Netflix show. Oh, I'll produce it. So I mean, he was a baby and she said he was a cutie. She didn't send me any puppy pictures, but based on the pictures that I have of him, he was definitely a cutie. And it was just mind blowing that no one was going to take this little guy.

And so they get approved and they were incredibly and instantly inseparable. Mason immediately bonded to Kumiko and they've been like buddies ever since. And she even had to leave him for a year or so to do mission work in Mexico. And her mom would like constantly send pictures and videos and updates on how he was dealing with like her being gone. And even though it broke her heart, it helped her get through that distance away from him. And when she came home about a month after she got home, she found a lump. A lump on her or on Mason?

A lump. Humans. A lump on Mason. Oh no. I mean, not that it's worse if she had one either. It's just, oh no. And I mean, she's in college. She just spent a year abroad on mission and didn't have any income coming in.

And she's horrified at a lot of losing him, but really doesn't have the funds to do anything about it. And so she just kind of pushes it to the back of her mind and I don't know how she could have done it because I would have like just quit my job and like died with him. Yeah. That's what I always say. It's like when it's time for Charlie to not be here, I was like, you're going to have to put me down with him.

So like I'll take two of those shots. Yeah, exactly. And she's just kind of like putting it in the back of her mind like nothing's changed about him. He's fine. He's a happy-go-lucky mason that he is and she basically, she basically comes to the fact that like he saved her life and she has to do everything she can to save his. And he's just a dog, but this is really important.

And girl, if you listen to our show, they are not just dogs. Never. No. Never just dogs. It's never a mannequin and they're not just dogs. That is great actually. So she eventually takes him to the vet, they get it biopsied. It's just fatty tissue.

Mason is 100% okay. That's actually, I was kind of thinking in the back of my mind, I've had so many friends whose dogs have had lumps and they freak out and everyone started crying because Roz has a lump. You like felt it and you're like, she has a lump. Have you checked it? Oh my God. Charlie got a lump after his vaccinations and I found out obviously after an emergency

trip to the vet that cost me a few hundred bucks that it was just a reaction to the vaccinations. But like Eric and I were like trying to plan our life without him and I would just like wept and couldn't go on. And it was nothing. Yeah. So Mason's 100% okay, but it was kind of a reality check for Kamiko and she is giving him all the extra snuggles, all the extra hugs, all of the extra pictures, even though she says he's not a huge fan of the camera.

And she knows he won't live forever, which girl, we don't say things like that in this house. That's not accurate. They might. You don't know. First time for everything. But I'm super glad that Mason's okay. I'm going to post some pictures of him because he is the cutest Cuddlebug.

He actually has a lot of Doberman markings. So he's black with like the brown tips on his eyes and his nose and stuff like that. But he's long hair and shaggy and just looks like an adorable Cuddlebug. I, you were talking about her taking pictures and how he doesn't love it. So Charlie's kind of the same way. I take a lot of pictures of him sleeping. And have you seen that meme where somebody's like, like how creepy would your dog think you were if they found your phone and saw all of the pictures of them sleeping?

It is like my favorite meme that I've ever found. I literally just like got out of a photo shoot of Niles where he was just sleeping. Well, I'm so glad Mason's fine. I love a happy prepped story. I hope you all had an amazing Monday and we didn't make you cry this week. So you're welcome.