Invisible Killer

by Diana Montane

  Rosemary felt him trying to get into her mind. And she heard his voice, she writes, as an obscene, hoarse whisper: “I’m going to get you, and I’m going to get her too.”

  His plan had been to take Debbie and Michelle together.

  “Not all killers are evil. Not all killers are dark souls, but Carl Brandt was a dark soul. Some would call him insane, but not me.”

  Both Michelle and Charlie were inside her, waging a battle. There were loud footsteps on the stairs. The shutters of the windows and the cabinet doors flung open; it was icy cold. This is what everyone present states they witnessed and felt.

  “Get out! I am not afraid of you!” Rosemary shouted. And then, softly but firmly, she addressed the young dead woman: “Michelle, these are your choices. You can hold on to the monster and continue to be a victim, continue to give him power over you. If you do that, you will stay in that terrible dark place. Or you can look up; you can look to the light. Look to the light, Michelle, look to your angels. Let them take you to the light.”

  The room was now bathed in light, all present recount.

  “You have no power over us, for your evil is useless here,” Rosemary shouted to the entity she calls “the monster.”

  And then, Rosemary states, Michelle talked to Debbie. “Can you tell my mom that I’m okay? I’m with my angels. And Debbie, I will always be with you.”

  As for Debbie’s state of mind after her best friend’s brutal murder, and after the encounter, she wrote, and shared:

  “Sick to my stomach.

  Is this really happening?

  I want to see my best friend again

  Denial

  Anger

  Crying

  Scared

  Very, very scared!”

  Why was Debbie so scared? A wife, a mother, a businesswoman who owns and runs a private school?

  She explained:

  “Shortly after Michelle’s death, I became isolated from my family and friends. I never wanted to leave my house. I tried to keep my children home from school to be with me. Although physically there, I was checked-out emotionally, almost non-existent. My entire happy life as I once knew it was now in disarray; it was surreal. As weeks started to pass, I would start to encounter another very, very evil power…Charlie. I started to think I was crazy. I saw things, a lot of things that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It was evil, it was dark; it was undeniably a part of my life I wish not to re-engage. He was lurking over me, haunting me and my home and bringing pain and an enormous amount of fear to me, every night. I saw things that no one should have ever seen; no one.”

  Debbie never discussed what “the things” that she saw were. About them, she has said: “I don’t wish to open that door again.”

  She then speaks of a “specialist.” “She came to my home and basically got rid of the evil spirits that plagued me. Since that visit, I have felt safe and although now our bedrooms and mainstay is in another part of my home (that was all in the guesthouse, before our main house was built), I still hear my family and friends who stay the night on occasion say that they have heard weird noises and have witnessed bizarre things in our guest home.”

  Apparently, to all present, Charlie, in whatever manifestation, was gone. And fortunately for her, Debbie sums up: “Eventually, over the years, things got better—never easier, just better.”

  Peggy Moore had a different, but somewhat similar experience.

  “This happened about three weeks before the murders,” Peggy, possibly the most levelheaded of Michelle’s friends, recounted. Peggy Moore is a businesswoman who manages several properties. She has four children and does a lot of volunteering. She is hardly the sort of person who might fear spirits, or the beyond. Yet she was now admitting to some terrible premonitions.

  “We had all agreed to meet one another at least once a month,” she said of her close friends.

  At this time, Peggy was living in the D.C. area with her husband, Joe, and in 2002 she agreed to fly in to Orlando to stay the weekend at Michelle’s new house, which she had never seen.

  “The minute I walked in I had this awful feeling,” Peggy said. “It was oppressive, and I told Michelle, Debbie, and Lisa, who were there too. I told them, ‘I feel awful! Like something very bad is going to happen here, something violent.’”

  Michelle understood her friends, and tried to appease Peggy. “Sweetie, you are overworked,” she told her. “Why don’t you come in the hot tub with me and I will bring you a beer?” Peggy went in the hot tub, Michelle brought the beer, but Peggy states she did not feel any better. She got out.

  Then, Michelle, now worried, tried to coax her: “Look, I got these new bed sheets and a down comforter. Why don’t you lie down for a while?” Michelle then tried to offer an explanation to her friend. “Maybe it’s because I took down the wallpaper in the kitchen and painted it mustard,” she said. It was a desperate, last-minute attempt by Michelle to keep her friend Peggy staying for the weekend, as they had planned.

  Peggy, not wanting to offend Michelle or say anything negative about her new house, a house her friend was so proud of, laid down for a while. Peggy did not think it was the kitchen’s mustard paint that was getting her so out of sorts.

  “I had to get up!” Peggy said. “I felt just awful! And I told them all again, ‘I feel something violent is going to happen in this house. I cannot stay here!’”

  The other girls were somewhat taken aback. This was not like Peggy, the rational mediator Peggy, who was always so intellectually inclined, and not prone to these outbursts at all, ever. But Peggy had to leave.

  “I got in my car and went to my parents’ house,” Peggy said, adding that her parents were most surprised to see her, since they knew she planned on spending the weekend at Michelle’s with the rest of the girls.

  But being at her parents’ home was not enough for Peggy at that point.

  “I just had to get out of there, out of the entire area,” she said. “I called my husband, Joe, and told him, ‘I have to get out of here!’ and he got me on the next flight back to D.C.”

  Once Peggy was back home, Michelle called her.

  “You’re not coming back, are you?” Michelle asked.

  “No, Michelle,” Peggy answered. “I’m not.”

  It was the last time Peggy saw her friend alive.

  In his landmark book, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence, author Gavin de Becker postulates that women have a certain instinct. “Theirs is viscerally named a ‘gut feeling,’ but it isn’t just a feeling,” De Becker explains. “It is a process more extraordinary and ultimately more logical in the natural order than the most fantastic computer calculations. It is our most complex cognitive process and at the same time the simplest.

  “Intuition connects us to the natural world and to our nature. Freed from the bonds of judgment, married only to perception, it carries us to predictions we will later marvel at. ‘Somehow I knew,’ we will say about the chance meeting we predicted or about the unexpected phone call from a distant friend, or the unlikely turnaround in someone’s behavior, or about the violence we steered clear of, or did not steer clear of. ‘Somehow I knew…’”

  Somehow, Peggy Moore knew.

  Gale St. John is a psychic, a bona fide one. Larry King introduced her on his show as “the only psychic who has ever prevented a murder,” and she did. She goes on searches with her cadaver dogs, for the missing and presumed dead. But she also gets answers from the world beyond. And members of law enforcement, as well as families of the disappeared, respect her.

  This may again sound laughable to some people, but we have seen Gale in action, and one of us wrote her book, entitled Blind Drive. The title refer to the fact that when Gale goes searching, she does not want to know anything about the victim beforehand. And she drives through an area without knowing anything about it. She does not charge one penny for her services, except sometimes, if a place is far from her, for gas and lodging. It is her wa
y of giving back. Her training with her dogs, border collies Kimber and Simon, is very arduous. Gale lives in Indiana, very close to Fort Wayne, where Charlie Brandt lived with his family in 1971, when he shot and killed his eight-month-pregnant mother and critically wounded his father.

  Since Gale lives close to Fort Wayne, we asked if she would take a photo of Charlie’s house for us. She said she would, and she did. And then she began to speak about Charlie.

  For some reason, she said she’d begun to see him. She did not know who he was at all at the time, and did not know anything about this project. She said she’d perceived a foul smell of rotten fish.

  Gale now despises Charlie. And she can be very humorous, with that dark humor that comes from dealing with death. One time, she said outright, “He is here; do you want to ask him anything?” The question was, through Gale: “Charlie, did you kill Carol Lynn Sullivan?” Again, Gale knew next to nothing about the case, let alone about Carol Lynn Sullivan, who remains a very guarded secret and not yet connected to Charlie. We even had to ask our colleague, Kathy Kelly, to dig up a couple of stories about the murder of Carol Lynn from the Daytona Beach News-Journal archives, it was so hidden.

  Gale blurted out, “Oh, I hate him! Can you smack the dead? He is laughing and holding up the number thirteen!” Carol Lynn Sullivan had been about to turn thirteen when she vanished from her school bus stop. Gale did not know this, nor did she have the time to do any research on any of it.

  Gale then added, “Oh, he is proud of all of this! He was proud when he killed his mother, and then he learned the system. And he has shown me absolutely no remorse. He is still a dark soul and he won’t go.” That was the way psychic Rosemary Altea had referred to Charlie too, as a “dark soul.”

  Then Gale said something significant: “He killed women with his eyes. He looked at women while thinking of the process of killing them.”

  This could be a psychological explanation for some of Teri’s actions when Charlie and her marriage was becoming somewhat turbulent. Teri had wanted to call the sheriff on Charlie after she saw him covered in blood in the fish room; especially because, as she told Jim Graves, there had been a girl murdered nearby. Charlie’s wife had wanted to move to the mainland, but did not. She was thinking of divorce, but she did not go through with it.

  Was this part of the “anemic numbness” of which Dr. M. Scott Peck writes in his book, People of the Lie. Dr. Peck claims that the gradual effect of an evil person on a healthy person is exactly that: confusion and immobilization. Was it the “glazed-over look” that shrouded his wife with a blanket of inaction?

  Perhaps for a few months before her murder, if not a year, Teri Brandt had been living in an alternate world, a world of Charlie’s creation. She may have been living his reality. She certainly died by it.

  DARLENE AND CAROL LYNN: NIGHT AND DAY

  One was taken at dawn and the other in the shadow of night. The woman who was hooking in Little Havana was thirty-five. The twelve-year-old girl about to turn thirteen was waiting for her school bus.

  September 20 was like any other Florida morning when Carol Lynn Sullivan woke up to a new day. Her mother, who acted as her alarm clock every morning, informed her it was time for her to get ready for school. The sun was shining through her bedroom window, and, like a lot of youths on the brink of breaking into their teenage years, Carol Lynn had a gnawing sense of independence brewing in her belly. She was eight days away from leaving the first twelve years behind. As she checked out her school clothes in the mirror and parted her hair down the middle, she faced the morning with a fresh sense of self. After breakfast, JoAnn Sullivan, got ready to walk Carol Lynn to her bus stop as she always had, and send her off to Deltona Junior High School. But this time, and from a new sense of pride rather than spite, which the girl never showed in her polite behavior, Carol Lynn emancipated herself for the day, exclaiming, “Mother, that’s ridiculous! I’m grown up now!”

  As Carol Lynn made her way out the front door to conquer the moderate walk to the bus stop, JoAnn smirked to herself as so many parents do when they see their little girl go off on her own for the first time. This is the brief period in a child-parent relationship in which this behavior is more humorous than harmful, and as any parent realizes upon self-reflection, they too had put their parents through the same routine. As JoAnn began the dishes she heard the front door close and let her mind wander back to the birthday party she had been planning for Carol Lynn’s thirteenth birthday, and her entrance into young adulthood.

  A few short minutes away a monster was breathing heavily, his eyes a piercing torch of terror, his intentions nothing short of destruction. In the early morning he had first seen the girl standing there, on the corner of Doyle Road and Courtland Boulevard, letting go of her mother’s hand and stepping onto the yellow school bus. His obsession—an obsession that had consumed his life and destroyed so many others—was ignited, and for weeks he’d planned out his callous crime. Numerous times he had driven by, gazing with a glazed-over look, plotting and counting down the days until prey would fall victim to predator.

  Now that day had come and just from behind the overgrowth on the corner he peered—waiting and watching. And then, there she was. A smile on her face, backpack over her shoulders, brown wavy hair parted down the middle. His pulse began to race and he could hardly contain himself. After a few moments she was within a mere couple of feet. Her back was to a vicious fate—one that could not stand to see innocence roam free.

  On September 2, 1978, Carol Lynn Sullivan was standing alone waiting for her school bus at 7:00 a.m. She lived in Osteen, and the bus would take her to Deltona Junior High School. She never arrived at the school, and she was never seen again.

  The Volusia County Sheriff’s Department conducted extensive ground and air searches, to no avail.

  His watch read 7:00 a.m. and just then, he saw two cars drive by. Using his hand as a makeshift muzzle, in a blitz-like fashion he came from behind the girl, covered her mouth, and dragged her back through the overgrowth and onto the other side in which he had meticulously placed his vehicle. After subduing the young Carol Lynn, he calmly drove back into society with the face of normalcy that had kept the beast within, masked for so many years. He did not take her back into his truck. He never took them outside; at least, not until 2004.

  Eight days had gone by, and JoAnn Sullivan could only think one thing to herself: “I wish I would have driven her down.” Carol Lynn’s school had contacted her after Carol Lynn had not attended her first two classes that day, and JoAnn had called the authorities. This, combined with the twelve days since she had last seen her baby girl walk out the door, had been enough to make any parent worry, while enabling their worst nightmares to encompass their entire being. Then, on October 12, day twelve, just southwest of Doyle Road and Saxon Boulevard, about two miles from the bus stop, a fisherman trudging his way through a heavily wooded area near St. John’s Lake stumbled upon the first major clue. Until this moment in the day his biggest worries had been how to fend off the oversized Florida mosquitoes constantly on the attack. It was just then, as his mind was elsewhere, that he’d noticed a rusted old paint can randomly lying at his feet. Unsure of its placement, yet curious of its contents, the fisherman pried open the can to find a human skull, badly decomposed, with only a small patch of hair remaining like a death flag raised high above its metal coffin.

  When detectives were confronted with the find, they were baffled. None of them entertained the idea that the skull could have belonged to the Sullivan girl, since nature, and wildlife, had cleaned it clear of everything but the patch of hair.

  Further searches were put in place to put an end to the mystery only leading to an answer to the question brought about by their suspicion. This was not the Sullivan girl, they thought.

  The scene was an all-out assault by land, air, and sea. The galloping sounds of horse hooves ripping divots into the ground below were accompanied by the firing-up of alternators on the search
engines known as four-wheelers. Dive teams infiltrated lakes and ponds searching for the slightest sight sign of bone, flesh, or discarded murder weapons. Through bubbles and murk they would spend hours searching only to come up short of anything other than suits plagued with bacteria from the warm Florida water. The sound of engines from the blades of a helicopter chopped its way through the air. Thorough as it was, the search produced nothing more than a team of people left utterly exhausted and frustrated. The skull would provide them with the way out of any further fruitless endeavors.

  In a last ditch-effort, detectives had gone not only to Deltona Junior High School where Carol Lynn had attended, but also to South Seminole Middle School, where she had been a student the year before. They hit a dead end. A month would go by before an Orlando forensic odontologist would announce that Carol Lynn’s dental records matched that of the skull found by the fisherman.

  With all hopes demolished of finding the girl safe, attention was now focused on trying to paint a picture of the kind of person would commit such a heinous crime.

  The few years leading up to the murder of Carol Lynn Sullivan had elicited more than suspicions that there might be someone out there abducting young women and snuffing out their lives. Local newspapers informed their readers that “some bodies have been found; others have never been heard from.”

  The sheriff on the case, Ed Duff, picked up the phone. On the other end was the voice of Dr. Walter McLaughlin, a Pennsylvania resident, retired FBI agent, and nationally renowned specialist in sex crimes.

  This effort proved nothing more than another dead end in which the case became a mystery that would linger far longer than anyone involved could ever comprehend.

  “The little girl was very obviously abducted, probably mutilated, even dissected,” Sheriff Duff stated, not knowing those words would be the last hint at any resolution in the case of Carol Lynn Sullivan and what the paper deemed “probably Volusia County’s most grisly unsolved murder in recent years.”