The dinner conversation went as most dinner conversations go—well, kind of. Throughout the meal and the beers, the men explained how they were doing in their classes, their like for some professors and extreme distaste for others, and how and what they planned to do when their collegiate ride came to its inevitable end. Jim discussed his plan to continue live gigging while supplementing his income by giving private teaching lessons for other up-and-comers. Charlie, in Charlie-like fashion, had decided he would see what opportunities came his way.
As both men became tired of talking about the same topic, Mrs. Graves took note and turned the conversation towards the news. Reclusive by nature, but polite and liked by those who knew her, Mrs. Graves explained how she had heard from a neighbor about a local news story stating that a thirteen-year-old girl’s head had been found inside of a paint can in the city of Astor. At that moment, Charlie burst into absolutely maniacal laughter. Almost in synchronicity, Jim’s head went spinning as his brain was thrust into the violent outer bands surrounding a storm of vicious thoughts:
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
“Charlie, stop!”
A grown man’s back riddled with bullets behind a bathroom door.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A thirty-seven-year-old mother carrying an eight-month-old life that would never see another day, past betrayal, lying limply in shattered porcelain.
The sound of a jammed gun being thrown onto a bedroom floor.
“Charlie, I love you! I love you!” through the gasp and gurgles of the dying mother, a sister’s plea. The glazed eyes of a thirteen-year-old staring back.
“You’re not going to leave me alone, are you?” he asks her.
“HELP! HELP!” A sister desperately runs from her own brother, and bangs on the neighbors’ doors.
A boat out in the warm waters of the Florida Keys. Two men, two friends, one cursing his former wife, maligning her to her own brother. Her brother, his friend, holds a knife in his hands. And then the glazed stare again: “Well, the perfect revenge is, you kill somebody and then eat their heart.”
Jim snapped out of the daydream of ominous memories and hints of future possibilities, coming to within the confines of his cold, now goose-bump-riddled skin. Clammy and with a racing heart, he wasn’t sure what to do next. The only thing he was sure of was that Charlie’s sadistic laugh was still serenading the dinner table.
After his stay at Jim’s mother’s house, Charlie moved in with his friends, Jim “Jimbo” Elbers and Lonie Weiner, and they all lived on San Juan Avenue in a huge house in Daytona Beach. They described themselves as a happy little family of hippies and they all lived upstairs in the three bedrooms, turned the bathroom into a fish room for storage, and built furniture together.
Lonie remembered that Jim Graves had told them about the dinner when Charlie busted out laughing about the head in the paint can, and about how creeped out he was, but they’d all brushed it off as, “Oh, that’s just Charlie.” Lonie suspected that maybe that evening had been the reason why Charlie had had to move out of Jim’s mom’s house. Maybe, based upon Jim’s mom’s knowledge of Charlie’s past, plus Jim’s own suspicions, Jim had suggested Charlie move out of his mom’s house, and into Lonie and Jimbo’s.
Charlie worked at Bahama Joe’s for a while, and then worked as a maintenance man at a condominium complex while he was attending Daytona Beach Community College and living with Lonie and Jimbo.
“Charlie loved working there at the condo complex, because he could leave school early and head out through Tomoka and fish for a while,” Lonie remembered. “And then Tomoka Road took him right to his job. Every day he could fish in between school and work, alone.”
Lonie stated that Charlie would bring home fish that he caught every night for dinner. She never remembered Charlie having a girlfriend.
“He was sweet; he was helpful, never strange, cruel, abusive,” Lonie said. “He was just gone fishing a lot. He would be up at like 6:00 a.m., be off to school, come home, get his fishing stuff, get in his Volkswagen, and leave.”
Lonie did remember that Charlie did a lot of fishing in Osteen. “In fact, he went to Osteen quite a bit,” she said.
Osteen was where Carol Lynn Sullivan was seen for the last time, at her bus stop, waiting to go to her junior high school.
ANDROS ISLAND
Jim did not hear anything from anyone until he found out what had happened on Tuesday, September 13, 2004. He placed a call to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) and said, “I don’t know why you people haven’t called me, but I think you really need to talk to me.” Jim was carrying two terrible burdens now. He was not absolutely certain Teri had known about Charlie when he was thirteen. It might have saved her life, and Michelle’s, if she had. And he had not paid attention to Teri’s story about Charlie, all bloody in the fish room. That might have saved them too, and some others.
Jim proceeded to tell the FDLE investigators the entire story about the club on Duvall Street in Key West, and how Teri had come to him with the fish room story. The investigators concluded that the timeline for that particular crime was accurate, as well the signature. It was clear Teri was right, that Charlie had done it.
The officers asked Jim about the different places where Charlie lived. He said, “You know, over there in the Bahamas he was living on that small island with you know, where there was this little black town and everything. If anybody went missing over there or anything, nobody would really give a shit, you know, so who knows?”
There was some irony to Charlie arriving in the Bahamas, according to Donald Withers, who visited Charlie there. “The drug culture in Daytona Beach at that time, in the late 1970’s, was through the roof,” Donald Withers observed.
Daytona Beach was a major party city back then, and Charlie had told his friend Donald it was going be nice to go somewhere to get away from all of that for a while. “Well, the day after Charlie was dropped off by helicopter at Alltech Site 3 at Big Wood Key in the Bahamas, where he was to work, all of a sudden a big bale of cocaine, the one Charlie would later sell, washed up on the shore,” his friend Donald Withers said. Donald Withers also remembered that, thirty yards west of the Alltech site on Andros Island, Charlie came across about four hundred yards of bales of coke under cargo netting. “The area was about four to five hundred yards long, and about a hundred yards deep. This meant thousands and thousands of bales! Whoever was trafficking in the coke would bring it to that site for drop-off and then the speedboats would pull up every night and pick up their load to deliver it to the United States. So if Charlie thought he would get away from the Florida drug culture, and kind of use the trip as a form of rehab, he ended up right in the middle of the monster. But perhaps he wanted it that way, who knows?”
Charlie told Donald that within the first four or five days he was there, they were snorting lines of coke off the radar screens that they were supposed to be using to find the planes the DEA had under surveillance.
“As I know, Charlie was a recreational drug user who was always very good about not letting himself get out of hand, and maintaining control,” Donald said.
Donald and two friends from New Smyrna Beach, near Daytona Beach, took a twenty-two foot sailboat down to Andros Island on vacation and stayed on Alltech Site 3 for about three weeks with Charlie in one of the trailers Raytheon provided. There were only about six to eight people on that base with Charlie, Donald said. Charlie had not yet begun working the blimp and was strictly working the drug radars at that time. He was working the blimp at the time when he moved to Big Pine Key with Teri. With some early coke money he made while working on Tech Site 3, Charlie bought an eighteen-foot outboard boat.
“Charlie would make trips in and out of the United States to make coke-selling runs, while working at Alltech Site 3,” Donald said. The friend believes that Charlie would catch trips back into the United States by Alltech planes going back and forth.
“After Charlie moved to Big Pine Key, we pretty m
uch lost contact with one another,” Donald Withers said. Withers stated he had gone to the Keys several times on vacation, and one time he went to Charlie’s house to say hello as he was passing by, but Charlie wasn’t home.
The investigators said that during the times Charlie traveled to Miami, the police found torsos and body parts. So they began to visit the scenes and found the same MO and signatures during the same time periods.
Jim also told the investigators about the head in the paint can, the head of the thirteen-year-old girl found on September 20, 1978 in Osteen, where his former roommate, Lonie Weiner, said Charlie used to go fishing all the time.
He also told them he and Charlie were at Jim’s mother’s house when they found out, and about Charlie’s reaction, and the look on his mother’s face. But they never did tie him to that crime. To this day, Jim still thought Charlie had killed her, that he’d killed that little girl over in Astor, just from the way his mom reacted and everything.
For his part, and in another strange coincidence, Donald Withers, Charlie and Jim’s high-school friend who was had witnessed Angie leaving Jim, said that when he heard about the head in the paint can story, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “I just got this feeling in my gut,” the now-successful businessman said.
After pondering the incident for a long while, Donald Withers said he remembered a kind of strange occurrence one night. He remembered he and Charlie used to frequent P’s Bar, now a nightclub on International Speedway Boulevard, where the Daytona 500 takes place. The friends stayed there drinking until the place closed, and usually, after a hard night of drinking, they crashed at whoever’s home was the closest to the place. Donald Withers recalled that one night, about three or four in the morning, he heard Charlie get up and leave without saying a word, which he found odd. For one thing, Charlie never did that and also, they had a fishing trip planned for the next morning.
The next day when Donald woke up, there was bad weather, so he thought maybe Charlie had somehow heard something about that and decided to go home. Donald brushed it off and never thought to question Charlie about it. Donald Withers does not remember the timeline for that incident, but added that, for some reason, when he heard the paint can story, that night that Charlie took off with no explanation, popped into his head.
Donald also made mention of the “glazed look” that would come over his friend at times, which he attributed to a kind of drifting off. “He would just get that kind of lost, glazed look, and I would have to say, ‘Hey man, come back!’ to make him snap out of it.”
As the officers were leaving Jim Graves’s apartment, Jim said to one of them: “Look, uh, how could I know this guy my whole life and this shit, uh, woosh! Over my head. You know what I mean?” One officer responded: “If your mind doesn’t work like the mind of a psychopath, sociopath, serial killer, that’s how you miss it. Because if you’re not like-minded you don’t make the connection.”
Charlie Brandt, serial killer. Charlie? His friend, Charlie?
Nobody had suspected: not Michelle’s best friends, who knew Charlie, not Michelle’s mother Mary Lou, Teri’s sister. And not Jim. Especially not his fishing buddy, Donald Withers.
Donald said he never heard any more about or from Charlie until their thirty-year high-school reunion. A couple of Donald’s friends went to the reunion and came back and told Donald they heard that Charlie had killed his wife and hung himself. “I was shocked,” Donald said. “I never even remotely saw that side of Charlie.”
After the CBS 48 Hours segment “Deadly Obsession” aired, Donald said Dave called Jim and told him he was furious that they had done the special and that the program was “demonizing” Charlie. Dave was also furious because it put his then-recently divorced wife through hell, having it all back in the spotlight.
“They (Angie and Dave) just didn’t want to believe anything more could have happened other than Charlie’s past with the mom,” Donald Withers said. “They said it was finger-pointing and just cops trying to close cold cases and so forth. They just did not want to believe it.”
This does not jell with Angie’s voluntary interview with Detective Rob Hemmert of the Seminole County Sheriff’s Department, but she might have just been angry over the publicity.
There are several indications, according to timelines, that Carl “Charlie” Brandt may have committed crimes throughout Florida, and also in Germany and Holland during the times he visited those countries.
Donald Withers remembered that when Charlie was doing “the blimp stuff” in the Keys, he got to be known as a pretty good programmer. They would send him to different places around the country and to Europe to do and teach programming, and he would only be gone for a couple of weeks at a time.
How many, Charlie? Jim was dying to ask. It was the only part of his life his friend had never bragged about. And if Charlie had been alive, and he and Jim were on his boat fishing, and Charlie had had his German knife, would there have been one more?
“You know how you have to fillet a fish properly before you cook it?” Detective Pat Diaz, from the Miami-Dade Police Department, Homicide Bureau, now retired, said. “Michelle Jones was filleted.”
Donald Withers had become good buddies with Charlie while fishing for shark, and Donald was very experienced, very good at filleting fish. For that reason, whenever Donald and his friends would catch fish he would tell them to just let him handle it, because the rest would screw it up. However, Donald said he noticed Charlie’s filleting and was impressed by it. After that, Charlie became the only person Donald would allow to fillet the fish with him. “Charlie was very, very good with a knife,” Donald said.
SATAN IN PARADISE
During the winter of 1988 and summer of 1989, the residents of the Florida Keys were gearing up, not for another hurricane, but for something like a witch-hunt. It seemed a deranged butcher had slain two women and a little girl in a period of eleven months.
“These are the first mutilation murders we’ve had on the Keys in as long as most of us can remember,” said one sheriff’s deputy. “But we don’t know if we’ve got a Satanic group, or just one lone nut.”
The stories had been circulating along the ten-mile radius of Big Pine Key. First there was the brutal murder of four-year-old Patty Lorenza. She had been brought to a booze-filled, drug-riddled party that was dubbed by the local police as a “who’s who of dirtbags.”
After she was reported missing, investigators found her crime-scene in two parts. First, the child’s panties and jumpsuit were found left as rape remnants in a patch of earth. Then they discovered the physical body, head smashed in, an image to be forever embedded in the detectives’ minds. Brutalized with a blunt object and left as a free meal for another predator, she was relegated to the pages of a book chronicling the savagery of yet another monster. Six months had gone by and the stirring image of the Patty Lorenza murder hadn’t rung any familiar bells in the minds of the locals. It was looked at as nothing more than an isolated, awful incident—until the evening of December 17, 1988.
A Michigan native, Lisa Sanders was a twenty-year-old petite woman who had challenged leukemia in a head-on battle and walked away alive, if not unscathed. Condemned to bone-weakening osteoporosis, she had decided to move into a little guesthouse of sorts behind her parents’ home. It was there that the neighbors directly behind her had extended her an invite to a party. Sheltered and sickly as she was, a chance to mingle with the average crowd was to lonely Lisa like being asked out to the prom she’d missed. The party was being thrown on No Name Key, a place not noticeable to the passerby but well frequented by the high-school-to- college party crowd. Most of it is a wildlife refuge, houses are few and far between, and the only action travels up and down a two-way road, as Keys teenagers speed up to the spot where they spend their Friday nights. Along this rocky seacoast, Lisa Sanders would party till she came to the end of the road, and her life. After a falling-out with friends, Sanders decid
ed to take the one-man path home. She never met her destination. Her mother became worried when Lisa did not meet her at a flea market the following day as planned, and she called the police. Deputies began to search but soon needed search no more. About a half-mile from the party where she went missing, vultures sounded the surrender of that scene, and Sanders’s body was found. The young woman had been strangled, and smashed in the head with a blunt object, and her eyes had been gouged out by the brutal blade of a knife. Blood was everywhere up to about a quarter-mile away, in a field behind a rusted-out abandoned Volkswagen. Most of her heart and several vital organs were missing. The invasion of her flesh was so savage that even autopsy reports could not determine whether the body had been mutilated by a killer, or by the birds feasting on her freshly killed corpse.
The fate of thirty-nine-year-old Sherry Perisho was more certain in terms of the manner of death.
Her years alive were more left to chance. It was not whether she knew, but more so when she knew, to let the dice roll where it fell.
With her gorgeous looks and valedictorian grades, she had conquered the high-school arena and kicked dirt in the face of convention, choosing to follow the fork in the road leading to personal freedom. The shackles of her old life would no longer impede her, and if palm trees and sweaty skies would give her a chance at isolation, and a new start among the unjudged, then that is where she would aim body and mind at the speed of soul. This former beauty queen was looking for anything to shed her past image and catapult her into the spiritual self she felt burning at her inner core.
Sherry Perisho spent years writing her autobiography, which she titled, “An Act of God.” She never got to finish it. She moved to Big Pine Key from New York, where she had relocated from Indiana. One of her entries read, “Spiritually, I didn’t want to be dead at 21 like most country wives.” Now she was thirty-nine, and no longer alive, but murdered.
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