“Teri was the youngest in our family,” her sister Mary Lou recalls, who remembers Teri as a very seemingly lighthearted person. Teri was born in Japan at the Tachikawa Air Force Base while their father was stationed there in the Army Air Corps. He then transitioned to the Air Force.
“She looked like the Sunbeam girl on the bread,” said the older sister. “Teri was a fun-loving person and when our Michelle was born,” she said referring to their daughter, Bill was in Vietnam on the carrier Roosevelt. Michelle and Teri were very close. When Teri graduated from high school she came to live with us. Michelle was in fifth grade.”
She was energetic and bubbly, Mary Lou remembered. “We had a brother, Robbie, and he and Teri were very close.” Unfortunately, the only boy in a bevy of girls died of leukemia in 1965.
Mary Lou recalled her youngest sister was popular in high school, and had a lot of friends.
Then, Mary Lou went to nursing school in D.C. “Teri was four and a half and didn’t remember me when I came back!” Mary Lou said. By then their father had retired from the Air Force in Maryland. He worked for the government after he retired, for the National Oceanographer’s Office. When Teri graduated their parents relocated to Gulfport, Mississippi.
Bill Jones married Mary Lou Helfrich in 1965, and Michelle Jones was born in 1966, while her father was in the Navy, in Vietnam, aboard the Carrier Roosevelt. Mary Lou moved back home, and Michelle was born at the Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, “When he got out of the service we set up housekeeping as a family.”
After highschool, Teri decided to go to a business college, Jones College, in Winter Park, Florida. She attended the college for one year, and when Bill and Mary Lou moved to Longwood, Florida, Teri lived with them during her first year of college.
However, she decided to move back to Mississippi and ended up going to the University of Southern Mississippi, where she graduated with a degree in business. “She wanted to go into business management,” Mary Lou said.
Teri lived with her sister Mary Lou, and her brother-in-law Bill, until 1977, when she graduated from college and went to work at Ivey’s Department Store, an upscale department store in Central Florida which is now known as Dillard’s. She then transferred to the store in Melbourne, and after one year, she was offered the opportunity to become the store manager at the Ivey’s in Daytona Beach in 1984. Every circumstance, every step in her career, was bringing her closer to Charlie Brandt.
Teri then met Nancy Carney, who would introduce her to her future husband and executioner.
Teri was managing all the departments at the Ivey’s store in Daytona Beach when she ran into Nancy at an exercise class. The two hit it off, they became friends, and decided to room together in 1984. Nancy worked at a radio station and was dating Jim Graves at the time. Jim and Nancy set up Teri and Charlie on a blind date in 1985, and shortly after dating for a while, the couple moved into an apartment together.
“I remember going over to the apartment for dinner, and to meet Charlie,” Mary Lou recalled. Her first impressions of Charlie were that he was laid back and soft-spoken.
“And Teri was an effervescent, outspoken, happy person. They seemed to complement each other.” And perhaps Teri was also somewhat gullible.
Around Mother’s Day, Mary Lou and Bill went over to Teri and Charlie’s place for dinner, and this time they had not only their daughter with them, but also their son, Sean, who was six years younger than Michelle.
Then the two, Charlie and Teri, got married, at Memorial Gardens in Ormond Beach. Jim was the best man and Nancy the maid of honor. They did not invite any family.
For that, Mary Lou stated, Teri had a ready explanation later, when questioned by her sister as to why she and her husband and their parents had not been included. “She said to me, ‘If I couldn’t have everybody there, I wasn’t going to have you there.’ That made perfect sense to me at the time, and I did not question it further. But in hindsight I think there would have been some questions asked and Charlie would have been very uncomfortable.” What questions would have made Charlie uncomfortable? Questions about his family, perhaps? He told everyone his mother died in a car accident, which was far from the truth.
When Charlie initially came to his best friend Jim, with the news, “I’m going to ask Teri to marry me,” Jim said he remembered “flipping out at the time.” Jim was twenty-eight years old, and Charlie was twenty-seven. And Jim knew what he knew, and Charlie knew Jim knew. And Jim said, “Uh, well, Charlie, you have to tell her.” And Charlie said, “Well, I’m not gonna tell her.” And Jim snapped back, “No, you’re gonna tell her!” And they went back and forth like kids. After a while Jim tried to put a lid on it, and told Charlie, “Okay, let me put it this way if you’re gonna get married and you don’t tell her, I’m gonna fucking tell her.”
Charlie assured Jim he would tell Teri about that awful night of January 3, 1971, when he had been just thirteen. To this day, nobody knows whether he did tell Teri or not.
Jim knew that Teri had never told Nancy about Charlie, but didn’t know if Charlie told Teri at all.
BLOOD RED
After the wedding, Charlie took his profits, the couple moved down to Big Pine Key, and Teri got a job as a receptionist at a dentist’s office to make her own money and stay busy. Then she went to work at the Little Palm Island Resort, in the Human Resources department, and Charlie went back to work and ended up running the drug interdiction blimp in the Keys again. Life was good. Charlie and Teri were very lovey-dovey. They would pack each other’s lunches because they both said it always tasted better when someone else made your lunch, especially the one you love.
Jim wasn’t certain whether Charlie had ever told Teri about the winter in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when Charlie was thirteen, but after Teri dropped the bombshell on him, he was certain he must have. Otherwise, why would she have reacted the way she had?
Five or six years after Charlie and Teri were married, Jim ended up getting a job with Floyd Miles, who was Greg Allman’s road manager, to play with a band called Sauce at the grand opening of a place called Hammerhead’s, which is two doors down from Sloppy Joe’s in Key West. Hammerhead’s is not there anymore, but Sloppy Joe still stands, with its Hemingway look-alike contests. It was at an Allman Brothers concert that Jim and Angie had first met. Jim had certainly come full circle.
Jim still had Charlie and Teri’s phone number, so he called them up and said, “Look, I’m down here, you know, doing a grand opening for this bar called Hammerhead’s on Duvall Street. Why don’t y’all come to the club and, watch me play guitar, and we’ll hang out and visit and everything?”
As Jim played his guitar, Teri and Charlie walked in and sat. On his first break between sets, Jim went over to their table. Charlie had gone to the bathroom. Teri looked at Jim, with urgency and fear on her face, and said: “I need to talk to you real, real bad. You’re not gonna believe what fucking happened and I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do!” She grabbed Jim’s wrist.
Jim had been playing really well, and enjoying his newfound local fame. He was in a good mood and full of drink. Charlie, for his part, could tip a few, but was mainly a beer drinker and had to go to the bathroom a lot. And now he was back.
When Jim’s next break came up and Charlie headed for the john, Jim went back to the table and asked his friend’s wife, “Okay Teri, what’s going on?”
She sure showed signs of wear and tear for someone living off the fat of the land, so to speak, and she looked really scared. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do!” She looked around, casing the joint, to see where Charlie was.
“Well, just come out with it!” Jim prompted.
“Well, I’m thinking of calling the sheriff on Charlie.”
Jim thought, for what? For drugs? Other than Charlie’s comment about the heart after Jim and Angie had divorced, Charlie and Teri appeared to Jim like a normal, happily married couple. They had a house built on stilts, like many in
the Keys, on account of the storm surge from the hurricanes; and underneath they had a two-car garage. They were on a canal and their boat was parked in the driveway. One had to go upstairs to get to the house, but downstairs they had a little fish-cleaning room with a sink and running water.
Teri went on.
“Well, I came home early from work one night and Charlie was in the fish room. He was all covered in blood, and the whole sink was covered in blood.”
Jim offered an explanation he knew too well. “Well, yeah, I mean, you know, it’s the fish-cleaning room.” Teri’s expression showed a mixture of rage and terror. “Well, that’s fine and dandy if it’s the fish-cleaning room, but there was no fish in the room! And he was all covered in blood!” and Teri was whispering, hoarsely, and her eyes widened and kind of welled up.
Now it was Jim who was looking around for Charlie. “Well, you know, maybe he, he caught some jacks or something, and, just threw ’em in the canal.”
Teri was adamant. “No, there were no signs of fish anywhere!” “Maybe Charlie threw the fish away,” Jim insisted. And Teri said, “Well, what you don’t know is, there was a girl that was murdered, down at the bridge, just a block away or so from the house; they found her in a rowboat, mutilated, and, you know, I’m worried that he might have done it and I’ve been thinking about calling the sheriff.”
Jim was in the middle of this gig, of putting his life back together, of opening this club, and he really didn’t want to hear all of this, but Teri kept on. “Well, what do you think I should do, what do you think I should do?” Jim tried to sort out his thoughts.
Jim told Teri: “Here’s the deal, Ter. If you call the sheriff, and Charlie has nothing to do with it, your marriage is going to be over. I mean, you can’t call the fucking sheriff and say, ‘Hey listen, man, this woman died around the corner and I came home and my husband was covered in blood,’ so what you have to decide is, like, if it’s worth ending your marriage over this kinda far-flung, uh, incident.” After all, Charlie did go fishing all the time. It was a fish-cleaning room.
Teri did not speak anymore. Jim got up to play. Then Teri and Charlie were gone.
THE SUMMER OF HURRICANES
Hurricane Season extends, officially, from June 1 to November 30, and the Florida peninsula is a magnet for the fiercest storms, jutting out beckoningly between the Atlantic and Caribbean Oceans.
Floridians don’t really worry about their ‘canes or begin preparations in earnest until late August and the beginning of September. And “conchs,” as people in the Keys call themselves for the hard-shelled mollusk indigenous to the islands, hardly worry at all. They don’t voluntarily leave their islands, and prefer to ride out the storm. Since semi-apocalyptic Hurricane Andrew in 1992, there was little reason for concern in South Florida. But 2004 became The Summer of Hurricanes, when two severe storms, in a row trained their fury on Central Florida. One of them was Frances. The other one was named Charley.
On September 2, 2004, it was Hurricane Ivan that lashed the Caribbean, killing 68 people. Now its path pointed straight at the Keys.
Monroe County Emergency Management officials began to issue mandatory evacuations.
In Altamonte Springs, near Orlando—the area that had experienced a direct hit from Charley as a Category 1 hurricane—Michelle Jones, Teri Brandt’s niece, worried, and kept a close eye on Ivan’s track on the local news. Little did she know the lethal combination of rage, fury and desire that was about to strike her in the form of another Charlie, a Charlie she knew.
Michelle, thirty-seven, a successful sales executive with the Golf Channel, which has its headquarters in Orlando, owned a sprawling home with a pool and a Jacuzzi, made cozy and inviting inside by her decorator’s touch.
“She was the Accounts Director for Direct Consumer Advertising and International Sales at the Golf Channel,” her proud mother Mary Lou recalls. “For her age, she earned a hefty salary, and was able to afford to buy her first home in 2002. It was a four-bedroom house, a neat little house, thirty-five years old but redone inside, with hardwood floors and butter yellow walls. In her living room she had accents, wall mostly, and cushions on the furniture; reddish and yellow, all warm colors. It had a pool in the backyard and two bathrooms. She loved to shop and accessorize.”
Mary Lou Jones remembers her only daughter as “a happy baby, friendly; she was a joy, very intent, and she had a lot of friends. She was in the Brownies, she went to an elementary school in Orlando and a Catholic school for a year, and then we moved to Longwood, Florida. When she finished high school, she worked, when she was old enough to work.”
Like every high-school teen who wants to earn her own money, Michelle babysat, but she seemed to manage her money well. When she turned sixteen she worked at some of the stores at the mall. She went to summer school, eagerly, every year, so she could graduate early from high school. And indeed, she graduated when she was sixteen. She went to high school with her best friends, Debbie Wheeler Knight and PeggyAnne Waters Moore. Michelle attended Valencia College for a year, and then all three girls went to the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1984.
But then, her mother explained, “she had a challenge with one of her classes and withdrew from the University of Florida, and decided to finish her Associate’s Degree from Valencia College, which she finished in 1988.”
Michelle Jones seemed to be as business-driven as her aunt Teri. Once Michelle finished her Associate’s Degree she went to work for Channel 35, FOX Network, as Traffic Manager, responsible for communications and for scheduling all the commercial spots that would go on the air. Michelle stayed with FOX until 1994; then, in Saint Petersburg, Florida, she was recruited by one of the major networks, where she remained for six months. In the meantime, Bill and Mary Lou had moved to Pennsylvania, where Mary Lou, who was already a practicing nurse, earned her Doctorate degree. Then Michelle went to work for a marketing firm that did video education promotions, and moved on to the Defalco Advertising Company.
Suzy Hamilton met Michelle Jones at the Golf Channel. Suzy became a steadfast client, and the two young women became close friends.
“I work at a media agency and we did a lot of work with the Golf Channel,” Hamilton explained. “She was very loyal and dedicated, and we had a very interesting relationship, because I was working for my clients and she was working for the station.”
“We had a thirty-million-dollar account with her, with the Golf Channel—a lot of air, as we call it. And we trusted her implicitly with that kind of money; Michelle was honest to a fault.”
Michelle Jones had worked hard to build her career. She was sociable, charming, and persuasive. She asked—she insisted—that her aunt Teri and her husband Charlie wait out the hurricane with her. They’d have fun, she said. They would make dinner and drink wine.
Michelle’s aunt and uncle had stayed with her before after Hurricane Georges, which skirted the Keys as a Category 2 and did considerable damage to their home in 1999. Teri and Charlie also had stayed at Michelle’s for a week in 2000, while their house was being repaired. There she was, every day for a week in her housecoat, fixing breakfast with “the old lady” Teri. Then she’d get dressed for work and come out of her room smiling, in her high-heeled shoes and her tailored skirts that outlined her round firm bottom. And there she was, every day, for a week, late in the evening, coming back from work, taking her bath, and coming out in her bathrobe with a towel around her head. Now they were there again, going through the same routine.
Charlie and Teri packed a couple of canvas travel bags, hopped in their Subaru Outback, and proceeded to make the trek over the sevenmile bridge connecting the Keys to the Florida mainland.
Hurricane Ivan had reached a dangerous Category 5, but both its strength and path kept fluctuating as Charlie and Teri drove over the bridge on their way to Altamonte Springs. It was the summer of raging, unpredictable natures, and ineluctable, fatal destinies.
The couple arrived at Michelle’s house on
Saturday, September 11.
From there, Charlie dutifully phoned his father and younger sister Jessica to tell them they had arrived, and to make plans for a family visit.
Since Orlando is about sixty miles, or a little over an hour’s drive, from Ormond Beach, where Charlie’s father and his youngest sister Jessica resided, Charlie and Teri made plans to see them over the course of the weekend.
They got to Herbert Brandt’s house at 2:00 p.m. on Sunday, visited for a while, drank some beers, and then went over to Jessica’s for dinner. At Jessica’s, Charlie kept telling Teri that it was safe to return to the Keys the next day, and that they ought to begin packing for the trip back. He hadn’t wanted to evacuate in the first place, he said. It was all her idea, and Michelle’s, he said. They would leave tomorrow, he said. There was a strange insistence, an urgency almost, in his voice.
When he called his older sister Angela from Jessica’s house. Angela excused herself for not being able to go to Jessica’s, and asked if they could meet the next day. “Sorry, I have plans; we’re staying with Michelle,” he said. “Maybe next time.”
In hindsight, both Charlie’s father Herbert and his sister Jessica had noticed that as they said their good-byes, Charlie held each one of them longer and tighter than he ever had.
After the visit, they left to go to back to Michelle’s, arriving at her house early in the evening.
They stayed there on Monday too, and Teri was surprised and somewhat miffed, given Charlie’s repeated complaints about the pointlessness of evacuating and the need to get back to their home on Big Pine Key. By now the hurricane had bypassed the Keys, veered north into the Gulf of Mexico, and posed a direct hit to Alabama, and now Charlie wanted to stay one more day.
Michelle was beautiful. And she was fun company, too. She and her friends always thought Charlie a little strange; “eccentric” they called him. Michelle thought that he and her aunt Teri made a good pair. Michelle loved her free-spirited aunt who had a mouth on her and reminded her of a hippie girl. Together, Teri and Charlie were adventurous, and Charlie was kind of good-looking, in a sort of goofy, outdoorsy way. He always wore shorts and Hawaiian shirts.
Invisible Killer Page 3
