Alabama 1990 cold case solved — arrest shocks community | HO

It was impossible. That’s what everyone said in the days that followed the disappearance of Marcus De Angelo. Six foot three, 215 pounds, a star athlete with a presence that filled any room, Marcus wasn’t the kind of young man who simply vanished. But on the night of March 17, 1990, somewhere between the laughter of a team celebration and the cold silence of dawn, Marcus De Angelo disappeared from Birmingham, Alabama as if the earth had swallowed him whole.

The party itself was unremarkable, held at the Delta Kappa house on the edge of the university campus. Marcus arrived around nine, still wearing his varsity jacket, the crimson and white emblem stitched over his heart. Teammates remembered him laughing, arm slung over the shoulder of his best friend Tony Rizzo, a linebacker with a grin as wide as the field they played on. The air inside was thick with cheap beer, sweat, and cologne. Music pounded from a corner stereo—a forgettable pop song that would later haunt everyone who’d been there.

But Marcus left early. He wasn’t a drinker, not really. He had a scholarship riding on his performance, a future that felt as solid as the ground beneath his feet. Around 11:30, witnesses saw him walking toward the parking lot, hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets, head down. One girl, Jennifer Callahan, waved at him from the porch. He didn’t wave back.

The next morning, Marcus’s car—a 1986 Chevrolet Cavalier, dark blue—was found parked at an odd angle near the edge of Shades Creek Park, three miles from campus. The driver’s side door was ajar, keys still in the ignition, headlights dead from draining the battery overnight. The air inside the car smelled faintly of iron—metallic, wrong. When the trunk was popped by Detective Harold Pritchard, what he found made his stomach turn: blood, not a lot, but enough to know something violent had happened. Enough to know Marcus De Angelo hadn’t just walked away.

There were no fingerprints, no signs of forced entry, no weapon, no body.

A City in Shock

Birmingham was a small city in 1990, the kind of place where everyone knew someone who knew someone else. By evening, Marcus’s face was on every local television station. His mother, Diane De Angelo, appeared on camera, flanked by Marcus’s younger sister Angela, who clutched a stuffed bear and refused to speak. Diane’s voice shook as she begged for information: “If anyone knows anything, please. He’s my son. He’s my boy.”

But no one came forward. Not that night. Not the next day. As hours stretched into weeks, the silence became deafening. The disappearance wasn’t just a tragedy—it was a rupture in the community, a wound that bled into every street corner, every classroom, every Sunday service.

Within 48 hours, the university mobilized a massive search effort. Hundreds of volunteers—students, professors, business owners, even rival teams from neighboring schools—combed through Shades Creek Park, moving in lines like soldiers sweeping a battlefield. They called out Marcus’s name until their voices went hoarse, but found nothing. No clothing, no clues.

Local news ran segments every evening. Channel 6 aired interviews with teammates who spoke in halting, disbelieving tones. “He was gonna go pro,” Tony Rizzo said, eyes red-rimmed and glassy. “Scouts were already looking at him. He had everything ahead of him.”

Flyers went up everywhere. Marcus’s senior portrait—confident smile, dark eyes, close-cropped hair—became a constant reminder that something was terribly, irreversibly wrong.

Detective Pritchard worked around the clock, his desk a monument to the case: stacks of witness statements, photographs, maps of the park marked with red X’s. He interviewed everyone who’d been at the party. Most stories lined up: Marcus had seemed fine, quiet maybe, but fine. No arguments. No confrontations. He’d just left.

But there were inconsistencies. One student said Marcus had been talking to someone in the parking lot, a figure he couldn’t quite make out in the darkness. Another claimed Marcus had gotten a phone call earlier in the evening, stepping outside to take it, returning distracted. When pressed, memories became hazy—maybe they’d imagined it, maybe it had been someone else.

The blood in the trunk was Marcus’s type, O positive. The amount suggested injury, possibly serious, but not necessarily fatal. No hair fibers. No skin cells. No foreign DNA. This was 1990—genetic fingerprinting was still in its infancy.

Years of Silence

Diane De Angelo stopped sleeping. She sat in Marcus’s bedroom at night, surrounded by his trophies and team photos, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for a knock at the door. Her husband Vincent, a factory worker, paced the house until the floorboards creaked. He wanted to do something, anything, but there was nothing to do. Angela withdrew, dropping out of college, moving to Atlanta, cutting contact with almost everyone from Birmingham.

The university retired Marcus’s jersey in 1993. Diane and Vincent attended the ceremony, Diane sobbing into her hands while Vincent stared straight ahead, jaw clenched, eyes dry. Every year on March 17, Diane held a vigil at Shades Creek Park, standing near the spot where Marcus’s car had been found. The crowds grew smaller. By the late 90s, it was just Diane, alone in the gathering dark, whispering her son’s name to the wind.

The case became a ghost story, the kind of thing people mentioned in hushed tones when the conversation turned to Birmingham’s darker history. Rumors spread—drugs, secret shame, running away—but those who knew Marcus rejected them outright. Marcus wasn’t running from anything; he was running toward everything.

A Break in the Case

The case might have stayed buried forever if not for a bureaucratic reshuffling in late 2023. The Birmingham Police Department’s cold case unit received a modest budget increase and two new detectives. One was Rachel Kovatch, 34, sharp-eyed and relentless. She’d grown up in Birmingham, remembered the vigils, the posters, the way the city had held its breath.

Kovatch pulled Marcus’s file and spent days in the archives. She noticed something Pritchard had noted but never pursued: the blood in Marcus’s trunk had been tested for type, but never for DNA. In 1990, DNA analysis was rare and expensive. But in 2023, the technology had advanced exponentially.

Kovatch requested the original blood samples be sent to the state forensic lab for modern analysis. The process took months, but in March 2024—almost exactly 34 years after Marcus disappeared—the results came back. The blood was Marcus’s, but there was something else: trace amounts of foreign DNA, skin cells likely too degraded to be detected in 1990, but visible now.

The DNA didn’t match anyone in the national database, but it was a starting point. Kovatch began reinterviewing witnesses, tracking down people who’d been at the party that night, most now in their 50s. One name kept coming up: Brian Hastings.

Brian Hastings—a backup quarterback, rarely mentioned, a shadow in the original investigation. In 1990, he’d given a brief statement: he’d seen Marcus leave around 11:30, hadn’t spoken to him. Pritchard hadn’t followed up; Brian was quiet, unremarkable, the kind of person who faded into the background.

But Kovatch had learned that the most dangerous people are often the ones no one remembers. She discovered Brian had dropped out six months after Marcus disappeared, moved from state to state, changed his name in 2001 to Brian Cole. People who change their names are usually running from something.

She obtained a current address for Brian Cole in Asheville, North Carolina. With help from local police, she arranged for a DNA sample to be collected from a discarded coffee cup. The sample was sent to the Alabama State Forensic Lab. The wait was excruciating, but when the results came back, Kovatch felt her pulse quicken: it was a match. The trace DNA found in Marcus’s trunk belonged to Brian Hastings—now Brian Cole.

Justice, At Last

Kovatch contacted the district attorney and began drafting an arrest warrant. She needed context, motive, a story that would hold up in court. She found a complaint filed by Marcus against Brian in February 1990—harassment, following him, making him uncomfortable. The complaint had been dismissed after a single mediation session.

She reinterviewed Tony Rizzo, who remembered Marcus being unnerved by Brian. Kovatch found a former classmate who recalled Brian talking about Marcus obsessively, jealous and resentful. On May 3, 2024, Rachel Kovach and federal marshals arrested Brian Cole at his apartment in Asheville. He showed no emotion, just a blank, empty stare.

The news broke on a Friday evening, spreading across Birmingham like wildfire. Local stations interrupted programming: “Arrest Made in 1990 Marcus De Angelo Cold Case.” Social media exploded with old photographs, emotional tributes, and disbelief.

The trial began in January 2025. The courthouse was packed every day. Diane De Angelo, now 73, sat in the front row, her face carved with decades of waiting. Angela sat beside her, expression unreadable.

Brian Cole, formerly Brian Hastings, sat at the defense table in a suit that hung loosely on his thinning frame. His attorney argued contamination, procedural errors, innocent explanations. The prosecution presented the harassment complaint, the timeline, the obsessive behavior. The most dramatic turn came when Brian’s former roommate testified: Brian had come home trembling and covered in sweat the night Marcus disappeared, later scrubbing the trunk of his car with bleach.

Other witnesses came forward—teammates who’d seen Brian following Marcus, a bartender who recalled Brian muttering about people not deserving what they had, a woman who’d dated Brian and remembered his disturbing fantasies about Marcus.

Verdict and Aftermath

The verdict came on a gray February morning. The jury deliberated for six hours before finding Brian Cole guilty of murder in the first degree. Sentencing followed: life in prison without parole. As Brian was led out in handcuffs, he glanced at Diane, who met his eyes and saw only emptiness.

Outside the courthouse, Diane gave a brief statement: “No verdict, no sentence can ever bring Marcus back. For 34 years, I lived in suspended grief. Now, that chance is gone. Forgiveness is for people who want peace, and I don’t want peace—I want my son back.”

Angela spoke, her voice steady: “Marcus was more than a victim. He was my big brother. The trial revealed uncomfortable truths about complicity and cowardice, about the ways ordinary people enable evil through inaction.”

For Birmingham, the case was more than a crime—it was a reckoning. The arrest and conviction of Brian Cole shocked a community that had spent decades haunted by Marcus’s disappearance. Justice had come, but at a price: the painful realization that silence and indifference can be as destructive as violence itself.

And so, on March 17, 2025, as Diane stood once again at Shades Creek Park, the city remembered. They remembered Marcus De Angelo—not just as a missing person, but as a son, a brother, a friend. And they remembered the lesson learned too late: that justice, though slow, can still find its way through the darkness.