Then an officer took her back to her house and told her to put her clothes on and her overcoat on. They picked up the gun from under the bed. “I remember they searched me. But then it was fine; I didn’t have anything on me. I wanted to be a hippie; I had Beatles posters all over my walls. Then we went to the police station, where I told them what I knew. I don’t remember if at this point I had any family members with me. I didn’t know if my dad was still alive; I knew that my mom was dead. I said, ‘Before you take me to the hospital I have to see my brother.’ And they said no. And they said, ‘It’s not normal procedure.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s not a normal night.’ And they brought him to me. And he was all chained up. And he just looked up at me, and he immediately started crying, and he said he was so sorry, and I said, ‘I know.’ And we both started crying. And I had no animosity towards him whatsoever.”
After that, Angie talked about her father’s hospital stay, and about their mother’s funeral, and how the family came home from Germany.
Her father wanted to take everything out of the house; he took a year’s absence from work, and they moved to Florida, to Ormond Beach. “To people who came to Florida from Berlin, this was Paradise.”
At this point, Detective Hemmert asked Angie if she remembered anything her father had told her that night. “He sat on the toilet and wept, and said, ‘I’m nothing without my wife.’ He never had counseling; he didn’t believe in counseling.”
Now that Angie was somewhat calmer and well into the story, Hemmert asked her if she remembered how her parents were shot.
And now her demeanor was more casual, even somewhat upbeat.
“This is as I remember. My mother was in the bathtub reading Time Magazine and catching up on the mail; my father was shaving, getting ready to work the next day. And apparently my brother shot my dad, and I don’t remember who was shot three times and who was shot twice. The chamber held nine bullets and there were only five in there. And I only learned this the other night. My father was very frugal, and he said if the gun was full, it compressed the spring or something. My father told me how he pulled the drain out of the bathtub. He told me how he pulled his body together and crawled to the phone, and then he went unconscious. I know he was shot in the abdomen, and I think my mom was shot in the heart. I don’t know if it went to her abdomen.”
While Charlie was in jail, his father had milk delivered to him, because the inmates were only allowed coffee and water. “I was ill! I cried for five months in a row! I was sedated to sleep. But the first thing my father said to me was, ‘Your mother…’ and I said, ‘She’s dead, Daddy.’ And he said, ‘What about your brother?’ And I said, ‘He’s in jail.’ And he said, ‘Oh the poor kid, he must have snapped!’ Charlie had a Grand Jury but he was not convicted. From what I know, my brother was in jail for five or six months; he went into the state mental hospital. And… can a state or a town make you leave? Because I was under the impression he could no longer reside in the community.” Detective Hemmert told Angie that this varied from state to state but that it probably applied.
From the Indiana State Mental Hospital Charlie went to live with his father in his new apartment in Fort Wayne.
Shortly after that, they moved to Florida, to Ormond Beach. “I could have been a lawyer, too; believe me, I’m no idiot,” Angie said disparagingly. “This has basically pretty much ruined my life, okay? I went from a straight A and B Honor Roll student to D’s and F’s. When I was sixteen years old I quit high school to take care of Melanie and Jessica. I got a GED, and got a job.”
Hemmert wanted to know, “Prior to this happening on January 3rd of 1979, was there anything you saw, growing up with Charlie? Did you see something in Charlie that would have given any indication that he could…”
Angela was quick to answer, “No—my dad and I have talked about this for thirty years. I didn’t know people did things like that! I thought it only happened in crime novels I wasn’t allowed to read.”
The detective asked if Charlie had said anything to her while he was trying to strangle her. She said he hadn’t. “It was all basically like a night-mare.”
Angela remembered when Charlie was ten or eleven, when it was dinnertime, he would crawl in her bed. “And he would say, ‘There are monsters in my room!’ There were never any monsters in my room!”
Dennis Rader, “the BTK Killer,” (for Bind, Torture and Kill) said monsters were driving him to commit the murders that rattled Kansas City for three decades. But then, in Charlie’s case, it might have just been the imaginings of a lonely child.
The detective asked what their relationship was like when they became adults. “At first, my boyfriend and I lived with Charlie. Then I stayed away from him, but I know why—because once I was a mom, I didn’t want him near my children. I let myself at the time think that we had just grown apart. But now I think it was because as I gained more wisdom, and I’m almost fifty now, subconsciously I was trying to protect my kids from what may or may not be. I don’t know why I didn’t see him that much anymore.”
Hemmert wanted to know if there were any more visits. “I thought to myself, he has a house in the Keys; he has a boat! Why don’t I go there?” she almost laughed. I know exactly why deep in my soul. I thought, I didn’t want to sleep in his house; he tried to kill me! Intellectually I thought, no. In my heart, there were questions. The first night he ever stayed in the Fort Wayne apartment with us, I never slept a wink. I had that door locked; I had whatever jammed under that door. But in the morning I was sociable with him, and we made breakfast. I guess I thought he only killed at night!”
The detective asked if they had spoken on the phone since.
“Yes, that Sunday!” Angela meant right before the murders.
“Only because of the evacuations! I came home from work and there was a message from Jess, from Jessica! It said, ‘I’m going to the store now to make lasagna, why don’t you come?’ I wasn’t going to go over there at six-thirty at night. But what I did say to my brother was, ‘I can’t come tonight, but what about tomorrow night?’ He said, ‘No, we’re staying at Michelle’s.’ But I didn’t know who Michelle was.”
Detective Hemmert wanted to know if their father was a strict disciplinarian, if there were any family disputes. “He was very strict but he never beat us or anything.”
“Was he strict across the board with each child?” Hemmert then wanted to know.
“He expected Charlie to be manly,” Angela said.
“And was he?” Hemmert asked.
“No,” Angela replied, explaining that Charlie was bullied in school.
And then, Charlie went to work in Andros Island.
Detective Hemmert wanted to ask about his relationship with Teri, and she said they always appeared very loving.
“Let me ask you this: ever since you found out what Charlie did, what has the discussion been like with your dad?”
She said her father called her on Wednesday in the middle of the night and said, ‘Angela, I have very bad news. You know, your brother and Teri have been missing for a couple of days. And where Teri’s niece lives, in that house, they found two bodies. And in my mind immediately I thought, poor Charlie, to have such a violent end after all he’s been through in his life. And my dad said, ‘But Charlie was killed also.’ And then I said, ‘Really? But there are evacuations all over.’ And he said, ‘I just feel it. It just couldn’t be, not after all this time.’”
Angela finally asked Detective Hemmert: “You are going to give us some kind of closure, aren’t you? Even though the perpetrator is dead, you want to give some closure to the family, don’t you?”
“I have to,” Hemmert said with finality.
THE WINTER OF CHARLIE
These eyes will deceive you, they will destroy you. They will take from you, your innocence, your pride, and eventually, your soul. These eyes do not see what you and I see. Behind these eyes one finds only blackness, the absence of light. These are the eyes of a psychopath.
>
– Dr. Samuel Loomis, Halloween
Jim was the one who introduced Teri to Charlie.
And back when Jim and Angie were shacked up, Angie told him the story, the story about that night, that Sunday in January 1971.
The summer of 1973, Jim was looking forward to being a senior in high school. He and Angela were sixteen, and Charlie was fifteen.
“I live in the Ghetto-by-the-Sea,” Jim told his friends, referring to Cypress Circle in Ormond Beach. And his friends were warning him about “the pregnant story.” They said, “You know, one of these days you’re gonna come home and she’s gonna be bawling and say, ‘I have something to tell you, and it’ll be the ‘I’m pregnant’ story.’”
One day, Jim came home and there she was, Angie, crying on the couch.
He thought to himself, “Oh man, here it comes, and I don’t even know what my answer is gonna be. I just thought my friends were full of shit.”
Angie just looked up at him and said, “I gotta tell you something.”
It was Sunday January 3, 1973 and Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” dominated the airwaves. And that’s when Angie told Jim about the winter of Charlie.
Jim had met Charlie only a few months before, when the Brandts moved to Ormond Beach from Fort Wayne. Jim met the brother through Angie, and of course when he started to meet her family and relatives, he and Charlie became friends.
Angie went off to work and left Jim just sitting there, with no outlet other than to crack a beer. He couldn’t tell any of his friends this! He couldn’t believe it—in fact, he was just going to blow it off it was so farfetched. He could have handled the pregnant story from Angie, but the pregnant mother in the bathtub, and Charlie?
Jim was growing more agitated as he lit up a joint and did more damage to the six-pack in the fridge. “C’mon! I met her brother and he’s completely fucking normal!”
On Thanksgiving Day, Jim and Angie decided to go to her father’s house and his parents’ house, since their two families lived in town.
They decided to first visit her father in Ormond-by-the-Sea, the furthest point south from Ormond Beach, which was adjacent to Daytona Beach, and part of Volusia County.
Herbert Brandt was mowing the lawn, and he was shirtless. Jim spotted the bullet scars in the man’s back, since Charlie had not only killed his pregnant mother, but shot his father, tried to choke his sister, and left the two little ones, his younger sisters, alone.
Jim felt sick, like he’d just chugged a twelve-pack of warm ones and was about to vomit. He decided to go back to his parents’ house later that night. How could he deal with this situation he asked them? Well, they both kind of said, especially his mother, if you like him, and he is a good friend, and if God has forgiven him, you can too.
But Jim was not satisfied. He sat Angie down and said, haltingly, “You know…I saw your father today.” And she replied, “Uh, yeah.” He was firm. “You know, you know if we’re going to continue this relationship…”
She knew what he meant. He wanted the entire story.
They were full-blooded Germans, the Brandts, straight out of Berlin. Angie’s grandfather on her mother’s side had been in both World Wars. Angie’s father had been in a Hitler Youth camp during World War II. “You mean, where they brainwash the kids to believe that Aryan Nation stuff?” Jim said. “Well, I don’t know how old he was, but he was in one of those camps.” Angie looked down.
Charlie and Angie’s parents, immigrated to America. Herbert Brandt got an engineering job at International Harvester in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the two began raising a family.
Angie was born first, and then Charlie.
Charlie was an introverted, shy and chubby kid, who had no friends in school and got picked on all the time. Herbert was probably not very pleased that his only son wasn’t living up to the expectations of the Aryan Nation.
But they took vacations back then, in the sixties, when folks actually took family vacations every year, and they came down to Florida when Charlie was twelve or thirteen at the time. They stayed at the Coral Sands in Ormond-by-the-Sea, and the whole time Daddy was mulling around trying to decide what to do with his sissy kid, and decided to take him hunting.
This was west of I-95 before the building boom, and it was all swamp and hammocks. And it turns out the only friend Charlie really had was the family dog, a beagle, and they took the dog with them, he and his dad.
The story Jim heard was that Herbert shot the dog. Jim was thinking maybe Charlie shot the dog; maybe the rage boiled over that early, his way of controlling something, anything. Herbert said he didn’t mean to shoot the dog, just to scare him out of the bushes so he would come home with them.
When the vacation was over, they went back up to Fort Wayne. The really bad thing happened a week after they got back home from vacation.
Charlie was an introvert. His dad had shot his best friend, maybe. That’s the story anyway; that the dad shot the dog, and maybe that’s what set him off. Maybe the father wanted to make a man out of Charlie and teach him a lesson. Who knows what happened out there in the swamp? But the dog got shot.
Anyway, they were back home in Indiana, and everyone remembers the date now, like that other date in 2004, when Hurricane Ivan was threatening the Florida Keys.
On Sunday, January 3, 1971, there was an ice storm in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was after dinner, after dark, and Charlie was sitting at the kitchen table. Charlie’s mother Ilse chided the boy for not having his homework finished, and both father and mother went upstairs to the bathroom, like Angie told Detective Rob Hemmert.
The real sequence of events that Angie did not see was culled from investigators and newspaper accounts.
The mother was reading Time Magazine and the father was shaving when, suddenly, the silence was punctured by the sound of gunshots.
Herbert screamed, “Charlie, stop!” and Charlie fired several times at his mother, who slumped down in the bathtub, dead. She was eight months pregnant.
Then he went after his sister, Angie. The gun jammed and he tried to strangle her. Angie fought him as hard as she could, hitting him and scratching him and pleading, “Charlie, I love you! I love you!” She asked him to go upstairs, to the linen closet, to get warm blankets for her little sisters, Melanie and Jessica. She told Charlie they would run away, but she was biding her time until she could get to the door, open the bolt, and run out. Charlie was doing as his sister told him, but she noticed, with a fear that was colder than the weather outside, that he was walking backwards. “You’re not going to leave me alone, are you?” he said, and the glazed, manic expression on his face dissipated. “No, of course not!” she said. But she did. And she ran, ran for her life, ran in fear of her own brother. But this fear of abandonment would surface again later throughout Charlie’s life.
It was a year later, when Charlie was freshly released from the asylum, that the doctors explained there was no threat that he would ever act out again. Little did they, or his possible twenty-six future victims, know the fury that had begun in the core of the thirteen-year-old boy. A boy who should have carried a tombstone as a nametag. A boy who had discovered the surge of power that comes from plunging a knife into a beating heart. A boy who was a reaper from the Midwest encased in the confines of flesh, bone, and a convincing smile that would have the world welcoming him as their friend Charlie. A boy they described as compassionate, friendly, and willing to do anything for anyone. The truth was this: He was a son, brother, husband, and friend. But, also a child, an adult, and a depraved horror story that took forty-seven years to end.
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
— W. H. Auden
A HUMAN HEAD INSIDE A PAINT CAN
Jim thought back to the time when he was studying music at a state university and Charlie decided to go to Daytona Beach Community College.
It was the spring of 1977, and hotter than a volcanic cavern. F
resh off the lukewarm winter winds of the previous months, Floridians squirmed with anticipation. The youth, conditioned through this climate, understand that it is now only a matter of weeks before they can surf the waves with beet-red burnt skin and the smell of late sunscreen. On the other hand, the elderly are beaming with excitement that the bonechilling sixty-five-degree weather of the “cold season” has now passed and the humid blanket will soon be heating their thinned blood through its hair-dryer breeze. This is the transition and the preparation period. It will soon be summer.
In the midst of this changing of the seasonal guard, in a calm white Daytona Beach neighborhood there was a quaint, pink house. The owner, Mrs. Graves, had had a forgive-to-be-forgiven philosophy ingrained in her by a strong religious upbringing. She knew of her son Jim’s friend Charlie’s past atrocities. She had heard the stories from Jim. However, she decided that if doctors agreed and the Lord absolved Charlie, she did not have the right to turn someone out on the street. With her son off to FAU (Florida Atlantic University), welcoming her son’s best friend Charlie into her home seemed like the appropriate thing to do.
Although his childhood goal had been to become a pilot, Embry Riddle Aeronautical College would not accept Charlie; nobody knew why. This, coupled with the fact that Charlie’s roommate was going to be moving on from their current dwelling, left the young man in need of a place to reside while finishing his new plan for the future: earning a degree in Electronics from Daytona Beach Community College. Jim, having had a successful stint at FAU, saw the upcoming spring break on the horizon as a perfect time to not only take a break from the grueling hours of guitar practice and study, now accountable for his many ailments, but also a perfect time to visit his now ailing mother while also catching up with his best friend Charlie. Mrs. Graves planned to have the boys over for dinner, and figured it would give them all a chance to reconnect, laugh, and enjoy the comforts of a mother’s home-cooked meal.
Invisible Killer Page 5
