Invisible Killer

by Diana Montane

  On October 14, 2004, Det. Sgt. Van Allen advised that a query of over 160,000 cases was conducted country-wide. There were no reported unsolved cases involving the removal of a heart.

  Although investigators, especially the Canadian police, are basing Charlie Brandt’s linkage to the crimes there on the removal of the hearts, is it not possible that at some point Charlie changed his signature, either at random or to escape detection?

  Nobody will ever know.

  What follows are the cold crimes that could, or could not, be connected to Carl “Charlie” Brandt:

  CAROL LYNN SULLIVAN (Could be connected to Charlie Brandt)

  On September 20th, 1978, Carol Sullivan left her residence en route to her bus stop on Doyle Rd. near Courtland Blvd. in Deltona, FL. and was never seen alive again. Several days later her remains were found. (Charlie would have been 21 and it might have been his first crime.)

  MARY LOUISE REDDICK (Before Teri’s diary, and when Charlie was in the Daytona area.)

  On February 10th, 1979 Mary Reddick’s body was found near the intersection of Green St. and S. Delaware Ave., in Deland, FL. Her body showed signs of violent trauma and her death was ruled a homicide.

  JANE DOE #1 (This crime may have been committed by Gerald Stano or Charlie Brandt while they were both working in the Daytona area)

  On November 5th, 1980, the skeletal remains of a deceased white female, approximately 18—25 years of age, approximately 5’-8” tall, brown hair, and approximately 124—135 lbs., were found on MM 257 SB, I-95 side approximately one mile north of Taylor Rd., Port Orange, FL. The remains showed signs of violent trauma and her death was ruled a homicide.

  PAMELA SUE JONES (Before Teri’s diary and when Charlie was in Daytona)

  On December 12th, 1980, Pamela Jones’s body was found in a wooded area near Howard St. and Courtland Blvd., in Deltona, FL. Jones was known to frequent the Daytona Beach area and was believed to be from Indiana. Her body showed signs of violent trauma and her death was ruled a homicide.

  ON DECEMBER 9TH, 1988, TERI REPORTED THEY CLOSED THE DEAL ON THEIR HOUSE ON BIG PINE KEY; THIS FACT HELPS GIVE PERSPECTIVE ON THE NEXT GROUP OF CASES.

  DENISE DANSBY

  In May of 1989, Denise Dansby arrived in Volusia County from Texas and checked into a motel in Daytona Beach Shores, FL. Her family reported her missing on June 12th, 1989. Days later her rental car was located but Dansby was not located.

  On December 9th, 1989, Dansby’s skeletal remains were found off of Osteen Cemetery Rd., Osteen, FL. The remains showed signs of violent trauma and the death was ruled a homicide.

  TERI’S DIARY AT THAT TIME: April 27th till May 7th—both she and Charlie go to New Orleans, LA.

  May 8—weird day

  June 7 till June 10th—Teri goes to Ft. Lauderdale, FL

  July 11—rough conversation

  June 12th—Denise Dansby’s family reported her missing, which means they were used to hearing from her frequently and hadn’t for a brief amount of time.

  Teri Helfrich Brandt was gone for three of the five days leading up to them filing this report.

  JANE DOE #2

  On April 23rd, 1990, the skeletal remains of a white female were found in a wooded area east of Clyde Morris Blvd., and 1.5 miles north of Strickland Range Rd., Daytona Beach, FL.

  The victim was killed approximately 3—8 weeks prior to being discovered. The victim was approximately 5’-4” tall, medium build, brown hair in pigtails with red bands, extensive dental work with unusual teeth.

  Teri reports that both she and Charlie were in West Palm Beach from March 15th to March 17th. From April 26th till May 1st they were in Ft. Walton Beach, FL.

  ZOE ANNA GUMBY

  On August 8th, 1990, the body of Zoe Gumby was found in a wooded lot on Walker St. in New Smyrna Beach, FL. Gumby’s body showed signs of violent trauma and her death was ruled a homicide.

  (Teri’s planner shows nothing about their whereabouts at this exact time. Closest date noted is from July 6th till July 9th when they were in Homestead, Vanderbilt Beach, and Sanibel, FL. From October 12th till October 16th Teri in Boston, at a family reunion.)

  JANE DOE #3

  On August 19th, 1991, the remains of an unidentified female were discovered in the area of Little Lake in Osteen, FL. The remains showed signs of violent trauma and the death was ruled a homicide.

  (Teri reports that on July 22nd, Charlie got no contract news, and that on August 13th it was a “weird day, rough, runaway [sic] and hide feeling.” Three days, there may be a stressor.)

  LARALEE SPEAR

  On April 25th, 1994, Laralee Spear was reported missing by her family after she failed to return home from DeLand High School. The victim’s body was located in a secluded area behind a home on Deerfoot Rd., DeLand, FL. The remains showed signs of violent trauma and the death was ruled a homicide.

  (Teri reports that they were in the Bahamas from March 1st until March 4th then says nothing till May 31st. Open ended.)

  MYRTLE REXROAD

  On May 6th, 1997, the victim was found deceased under the I-4 overpass off of Old Deland Rd. in DeBary, FL. Upon autopsy of Rexroad, her death was ruled as a homicide.

  (Teri’s reports in her planner note no more than the fact that January 1 was very emotional, and that from September 9 till September 17 they were in California. But Teri had been, at that time, alone in California, attending another family reunion.)

  THE MAKING OF A SERIAL KILLER

  In January, 2006, two years after the murders of Teri Brandt and Michelle Jones, the Fort Wayne, Indiana newspaper The Journal Gazette published a two-part series entitled “The Darkness in Charlie.” Reporter Ron Shawgo wrote the story, defining it with this slugline:

  “Carl ‘Charlie’ Brandt never explained why. And what he started here 35 years ago may always remain a mystery.”

  It probably will remain a mystery. Charlie is no longer around to explain it, or divlulge as Ted Bundy wanted to do in a last-ditch effort to postpone his execution for yet another round. Charlie, con man that he was, probably would have.

  Ilse Brandt, Charlie’s mother, has long been dead at her son’s hands, and both his father, Herbert Brandt, and Angela Brandt, his older sister and the only other living relative with any memories of him, have refused all requests for interviews. The two younger sisters had no prior knowledge of their mother’s murder, and were always told their mother had died in a car accident. They, of course, do not remember anything. Herbert and Angela Brandt not only refused an interview with CBS’ 48 Hours, but were unreachable for this book as well. Herbert’s phone at his residence in Ormond Beach has the message: “This number is not available for incoming calls.” Angela’s number in St. Augustine, her last recorded address, has been disconnected. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found,” her ex-husband, Jim Graves, commented.

  After the suicide/murders, Angela told the police she was glad Charlie was dead. She had been afraid of him all of those years following their mother’s murder. Even in the Florida heat, she would shut off her air-conditioner, close the windows, and lock them. It is not unlikely she would still be afraid of her brother’s past, like a family curse, were he still alive. And she might be afraid he would come back.

  Donald Withers remembers that when Angie was married to Dave, and Angie and Dave and Donald were hanging out, Angie had said on a few different occasions that when she had moved in with Jim after living with Charlie, she’d had trouble sleeping. “She was worried Charlie was going to come over, and scared of how Charlie was going to take her moving out.” Donald just took it to mean that Angie was worried Charlie would be upset that she’d moved out, but not worried to the extreme that he now knew.

  For his part, retired detective Pat Diaz thinks that “it all goes back to the mother.” Perhaps the private investigator, with twenty-six years experience as a homicide detective in Miami, was subscribing to the Freudian account of matricide; a boy’s early Oedipal relationship with his mother would
engender such a love-and-hate dichotomy.

  What is known, according to Charlie’s statement to psychiatrists, is that his mother “nagged him too much.”

  Speaking to investigators after Charlie had murdered his mother, Charlie’s father said: “He’s a good kid. He was just having a bad day.” A bad day? A kid might have a bad day and go for a walk and slap some trees with a stick, or smash his model airplane; but kill his eight-month-old pregnant mother?

  Perhaps in part it did “go back to his mother,” as Pat Diaz concluded. But what about his father?

  Angela Brandt had told Jim Graves, when they were married and when she first told her husband about her brother’s past, that their father Herbert was born in Germany—as was their mother—and that Herbert had belonged to the Hitler Youth.

  It is worthwhile and apropos here to take a look at this phenomenon, part of one of the most nefarious and deadly regimes in history:

  “My program for educating youth is hard. Weakness must be hammered away. In my castles of the Teutonic Order a youth will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes.…That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication.… That is how I will create the New Order.” — Adolf Hitler, 1933.

  Twenty-three years of a rampant ideology of xenophobia and extermination had finally come to an end in 1945. In September, 1944, one year before the end—yet in year six of World War II—Hitler Youth Leader Artur Axmann spewed these words:

  “As the sixth year of war begins, Adolf Hitler’s youth stand to fight resolutely and with dedication for the freedom of their lives and their future. We say to them: You must decide whether you want to be the last of an unworthy race despised by future generations, or whether you want to be part of a new time, marvelous beyond all imagination.” Herbert Brandt, according to the timeline, was already enlisted in the Hitler Youth camps.

  It was 1922 when the Hitler jugend or Hitler Youth was formed. Created to be a paramilitary organization for the Nazi party, it was composed of two sections. Males fourteen or older would go on to comprise the Hitlerjugend proper, while those younger would build the Deutsches Jungvolk section. (This section didn’t come into fruition until 1930.)

  The organization was set up with nothing more than the intention to turn the children into faithful defenders of the anti-Semitic doctrine, creating future soldiers who would go blindly into battle without truly understanding the big picture of what the Third Reich was trying to accomplish. The common reading material amongst the youths were monthly magazines entitled Wille und Macht (Will and Power) and Die Kameradschaft (Comradeship), and a yearbook called Jungen eure Welt (Youth: Your World).

  The original mission of the Hitler Youth was to instill strict loyalty to Nazi doctrine and to bring Hitler to power. With those missions accomplished, the youths began to find the routines of attending weekly meetings a drag, and as of 1936, the whole program had hit a stagnant wall. When the war began in September of 1939, a second wind had hit the organization and the youths felt revitalized with a new sense of purpose. They handed out draft cards, collected scrap metal and other war materials, and delivered ration cards while acting as impromptu postmen. As the war progressed, they were instructed to man antiaircraft batteries. Having flak guns stationed near their homes kept them in the battle, but saved them from having to travel. Not long after the implementation of the flak guns, youths ended up being sent all over Germany. Jobs included operating searchlights and riding their bikes around dispatching communication, all the while at risk of losing their lives to incoming bombs. After bombing had commenced, youths would take part in the cleanup crew and funnel civilians into new living locations.

  At the peak of the Hitler Youth movement, the membership count was at 8.8 million. One of the young boys partaking in these activities and making up this figure was Herbert Brandt.

  Born in 1931, he would have been recruited by the Deutsches Jungvolk around 1941. The exact specifics of what he did and did not do, we do not know. Whether he truly bought into the ideology of the Nazi movement or was just doing as he was told, we also will never know for sure. The only clue is a possible coincidence (or not?) that Herbert would later name his first son Carl Brandt. Why would this be a clue? Karl Brandt was a well-known member of the Nazi movement who acted as Hitler’s personal physician while co-heading the Euthanasia Program. This is someone Herbert would have known about as a boy.

  Psychiatrists were baffled by the murder of his mother and the serious wounding of his father by thirteen-year-old Charlie. It is possible that neither the young Charlie nor the adult Charlie were ever able to understand the reasons for his desire to kill.

  But if Ilse, Charlie’s mother, “nagged him too much,” Herbert, his father, had to be a strict disciplinarian, according to his background.

  Psychologist Michael Brannon concurred:

  “From that sort of background and indoctrination, and what we know about it, we can assume those people would grow up to be less empathetic of other people, and of how their behavior would impact someone else. They would feel superior to others, and this would interfere with their feeling remorse.” That was precisely the goal of Hitler’s and the Third Reich’s indoctrination and programming.

  Many seem to want to attach the label “stressor” to the shooting of the family dog by Herbert. Charlie said the dog was everybody’s pet, but he had become very attached to the beagle. The Brandts had only been home less than twenty-four hours after they returned to Fort Wayne from their vacation in Florida, where Herbert had taken Charlie hunting and shot the dog by mistake, he said.

  Charlie’s father explained to the officers that the dog had run away the day before, so they’d had to go back and look for him the next day. The dog never obeyed commands, which made Herbert angry. And he was angrier still that the dog wouldn’t come out of the bushes. So, he claimed, he shot at the bushes to scare him out, and accidentally shot and killed him.

  The natural explanation for Charlie’s act would have been a reaction to losing his best friend at the hands of his father. However, that wasn’t what he told police.

  When an investigator asked him, “What did you say to your dad when he shot the dog?” Charlie responded: “I didn’t think that he would do it. I heard two shots. He just didn’t say anything. I asked him if he missed him ‘cause I didn’t see anything. I wanted to cry but I stopped myself, and we just kept on hunting for the last few hours.”

  If Charlie wanted to cry, why didn’t he? Because the tears would not come, or because of Herbert’s disciplinary attitude? And how could he have kept on hunting animals with his father after his beloved dog had been shot dead?

  Less than a week after the shooting of his mother, two experts determined that Charlie had no mental disabilities. One told a judge that Charlie should not be placed in jail or a hospital.

  The other said Charlie had acted on an irresistible impulse and had a moral, not mental, defect.

  When he answered the police officer’s question as to why he’d originally gotten the gun to inflict damage on his parents, Charlie replied, quietly, “It was like I was programmed.” He had not wanted to do that, he said. He “loved” his family.

  From the county jail, where he was placed for a few months, Charlie attended his mother’s funeral in shackles. By all accounts, he expressed neither remorse nor sorrow.

  A Fort Wayne grand jury had cautioned that thirteen-year-old Charlie might kill again if he did not receive the proper therapy. Did he?

  There was a precedent to Charlie’s juvenile barrage on his parents, but on the other side of the country, in California, where a monster who later received the moniker “the Co-ed Killer” was born, and where he carried out his deadly rampage.

  On August 27, 1964, seven years before Charlie Brandt murdered his mothe
r, fifteen-year-old Edmund Kemper was living at the seventy-acre home of his paternal grandparents in North Fork, California. Already an imposing figure at six-foot-four, the shy and awkward teen was deemed a problem by both his father and his mother, the latter of whom he despised. His grandmother was equally strict. As an adult, Kemper would describe himself as a “walking time bomb” on account of his anger. This was turned into inner rage by the disparaging treatment of his mother and then his grandmother, both of whom seemed to do nothing but give him orders in shrill, admonishing voices.

  In Murder and Madness, psychiatrist Donald Lunde states that as a child, Kemper had fantasies about killing and mutilating women. In fact, he wished everyone in the world would die, and he wanted to kill them himself. On that August afternoon, he argued loudly with his sixty-year-old grandmother, Maude. Dr. Lunde, who was able to interview Kemper at length in later years, states that the boy projected his rage at his mother onto his grandmother. He took a rifle, and when his grandmother yelled at him not to shoot the birds, he shot her instead, twice in the back, then stabbed her with a kitchen knife.

  Like Charlie’s, Edmund’s was an impulsive act, and not premeditated—although Charlie had sat at the dining-room table doing his homework with his father’s Luger concealed. How could young Kemper hide from his kindly grandfather the murder of his wife at her grandson’s hands? It was his own seventy-two-year-old grandfather, also named Edmund, who had given his grandson the twenty-two caliber gun the previous Christmas.

  The first order of business for the big kid was to hide the grandmother’s corpse in the bedroom. With his size and strength, he had no problem dragging the lifeless old woman there.

  Then, as his grandfather drove up to the front of the house, young Kemper went to the window, trained his rifle on the older man, and shot him dead.

  At age fifteen, Kemper was committed to the Atascadero State Hospital, where he befriended his psychologist and even became his assistant. Tests during his time at Atascadero revealed that he had an I.Q. of 136. Later, during adulthood, he tested at 145. Kemper was released from prison in 1969, after serving fewer than five years. At the time of his release, he had grown to 6 feet 9 inches and weighed close to 280 pounds. Against the wishes of several doctors at the hospital, he was released into his mother’s care.