• He had obviously changed clothes before hanging. His other bloody clothes were in Michelle’s room.
• He knew he what he was going to do. He had visited his dad (one day or two days before) in Melbourne while they were staying with Michelle. Essentially he said goodbye to dad. He told dad he loved him, etc. He’d never done this before; they didn’t have that kind of relationship where they told each other this (so I was told)
After the September 2004 deaths of Charlie and Teri Brandt and Michelle Jones, their families issued a brief statement through the sheriff’s office. It reads: “Like everyone, we struggle to understand why.”
Police will probably never know how many people Charlie killed in his lifetime.
But Special Agent D’Ambrosia believes there was a precipitating stressor to the final murders, and to Charlie’s suicide.
“I believe Charlie was faced with a precipitating stressor before the murder of Michelle,” said the profiler. “Charlie’s employer was in the process of either selling the company or being absorbed into another corporation. In other words, there was a major change in employment management. As a result the employees were required to undergo a background investigation. Charlie had worked for this company for a long time and had not had to face the prospect of people learning about his murdering and attempting to murder his family in Indiana. This would have likely come out in the background—or at least he was likely concerned with the prospect of this coming out. He worked for a radar installation company and security was a major issue, especially in a post-911 world. Adding to his likely concern and/or paranoia on this issue was the fact that he had wanted to be a pilot in his younger years, and when he submitted his licensing application and indicated (or the background determined, I don’t know which) he had been a murderer, he was not licensed. So he already had an experience of not attaining a cherished goal because of his background. From what we could determine, he was concerned about the background, and about his employer learning of his past. He would have lost the great career he’d established.”
From the crime scene reconstruction, D’Ambrosia describes a perverse possible scenario as well:
“It is entirely possible that Charlie had worn Michelle’s panties. I deduced this from the scene details. Her lacy panties were removed from her dresser opposite the bed in which she was lying dismembered. Those panties were on the floor in the midst of the trash can containing her organs, et cetera. If the scene is reconstructed, the panties were put there after the murder, and they were all cut on one side. So, we thought logically, why would someone cut away one side? There is no overtly functional reason for her to have done that. But a reason could be that someone cut the side so that they could pull them up on themselves. So there is the possibility that he wore them, or tried to. This is not a leap in behavior for him. Since he was engaging in dismemberment and had necrophilia fantasies, he obviously was engaging in paraphilic behavior. Research has proven that if you determine an individual has engaged in one form of sexually deviant behavior, the likelihood is that they are engaging in between three and ten sexually deviant behaviors. This is why it is said that paraphilic behavior is clustered. They engage in more than one behavior. So to dress in women’s clothing is completely plausible in his case.”
Also, both employers and authorities would have known about his not only botching the drug interdiction operation, but turning it into a drug-dealing business, and taking the drugs himself. Who knows if they might have found out about Andros Island?
There is, of course, again, the shocking case of Russell Williams, a colonel of the Canadian forces who, as a star pilot, flew Queen Elizabeth on several occasions. Williams, unbeknownst to his neighbors in Tweed, Canada, who referred to the stalker as “the Tweed Creeper,” was convicted of creeping into female neighbors’ homes, taking their underwear, and shooting his own photo wearing them. He then escalated to murder and was convicted and sentenced to two life sentences.
It is still shocking to see the photos of Williams, which he carefully preserved and saved, wearing women’s underwear.
D’Ambrosia and Sergeant Dennis Haley were dispatched on hurricane detail in 2004, the summer of the three deadly storms. As they were told the details of the Jones/Brandt murders, Haley said they looked at each other and had an “aha!” moment when they both said: “That’s the guy who killed Perisho!” They had been trying to solve the Sherry Perisho murder, a cold case by now, since she had been found floating on the water under the Big Pine Key Bridge in 1989.
After the September 2004 slayings of Teri Brandt and her niece, the Seminole County Sheriff’s office sent out an international bulletin to other agencies around the country and the world, to find out if there were any matching crimes.
“We knew right away it wasn’t the first time he’d done this,” Seminole County Sheriff Donald Eslinger said.
Charlie’s travel placed him in Germany and Holland at the time some similar crimes were committed there. But no concrete evidence came back. And no concrete evidence was found in the Carol Lynn Sullivan case. In Andros Island, nobody looked for any evidence.
“And, of course, nothing is just that simple in behavior,” noted D’Ambrosia. “I find there are coexisting motivations/reasons for most everything. Add to the above: Charlie and his wife had evacuated the Keys because of hurricanes twice that season. Both times they relocated to Michelle’s house. It was determined in the investigation that Charlie had a ‘thing’ for Michelle. So he is obsessed, as someone said, with her and now he has to be in her presence for an extended period of time. (The ‘carrot’ dangling before him perhaps—the object of his affection and his obsession.) Putting all these stressors together for Charlie likely created a serial killer perfect storm.” And yes, Charlie and Teri had been at Michelle’s house for a week in 2000, before she bought her home, when she lived in a sprawling two bedroom apartment.
What follows is an interview with Detective Rob Hemmert, of the Seminole County Sheriff’s Department, dated September 21, 2004.
Ernest “Skip” Taylor is an electronics technician who has worked the “Fat Albert” Blimp since 1992 with Charlie. Skip and his ex-wife had met Charlie and Teri a couple of years prior to the murders, met playing volleyball out on the ball field on Big Pine Key. Skip Taylor described their relationship as “very good friends,” and when Hemmert asked him what kind of a guy Charlie had been, Skip’s response was not unlike the consensus about good friend Charlie and good neighbor Charlie and good husband Charlie.
“The only fault Charlie had was that he had no faults. Just a nice guy,” his friend Skip said. “All-around sweetheart of a guy. When you got into work he was always pleasant, always, ‘Hi Skip, how ya doing?’ I don’t know, just a really nice guy.”
He hadn’t been as close friends with Teri, he clarified when prompted by the detective.
And then Hemmert, who had taken his time, got to the question:
“Did he ever talk about Teri’s family at all?” the detective asked for an opener. And there was the obsession: “Yeah, he talked about the niece and the sisters; although I had met the sisters at a social function a few years back, I didn’t really know them, and I never met the niece. But he talked about her all the time…Michelle this, Michelle that.”
Then Hemmert wanted to know:
“Did he talk about Michelle coming down here at all, or him going up there?” Skip remembered quickly: “He mentioned that they were gonna go up to his father right before he left work the last time I saw him, and that then they would be staying at Michelle’s, is all he said.”
Now Hemmert dove right into the core of Charlie’s deep desires:
“What other kind of things did he talk about, regarding Michelle?”
“He did mention a boyfriend and how she didn’t have much luck with men. He said she was a good-looking woman. She didn’t have much luck with men. Something about this latest boyfriend didn’t have a car, rode a bicycle, and several other things. And for
Charlie to say he doesn’t like somebody was more than he usually said, because he was the epitome of that old cliché, ‘If you don’t have anything good to say, then don’t say anything.’ So usually you knew when Charlie didn’t like something, because he didn’t talk about it. But he mentioned this boyfriend and how he didn’t think much of him.”
Then Hemmert asked another question and received an odd answer: “Did anyone refer to Charlie as anything other than Charlie?” Skip Taylor replied: “His real name is Carl. E. Brandt. And Teri once told me that that sorta morphed from Carl E. to Charlie. And that’s just Charlie; he just shrugged it off and accepted Charlie as his name. It was more of a nickname. But a lot of people didn’t know Carl was his real name. A lot of people at work didn’t know that was his real name.”
And then Skip mentioned something curious about Charlie’s relationship with Teri that others would allude to again and again. Hemmert had simply asked him, “They were very close then, huh?”
The friend answered, “Yeah, when they were separated Charlie was always talking about her. I’ll give you an example. The last time we went to dinner, we drove my 930 Porsche up. We were playing ping-pong and he said he had never been in a Porsche, so I said, ‘Let’s go for a ride!’ So I took him out some of the back roads, got the speeds up pretty good, going around corners, and he was having a really good time. And three or four times he said, ‘I wish Teri was here to enjoy this with me.’ So that’s the kinda, you know, when he wasn’t with her he was wishing he was with her. And I noticed if we went out on the boat and she didn’t go, she would come up a lot. Most of the time we went out on his boat and it was the four of us. And like uh, right after the first hurricane. One of the other guys, Larry McLane, was leaving, he had a party at his house and Charlie showed up by himself and everyone was like, ‘Oh, where’s Teri?’ Well she was kind of down-in-the-dumps because they had planned a trip, her sisters were coming into town and the hurricane canceled that. So for Charlie to show up to a party without Teri was kind of odd, but he said she was just down-in-the-dumps and kind of upset that she didn’t get to see her sisters. But other than that, usually whenever you saw one you saw the other. When they were separated, even if it was just for a few hours, he’d be wishing she was there.”
Skip also mentioned that the couple drank a lot. “They were, I guess, what you would call happy drunks. When Teri got over the line she would get laughing. It wasn’t bad to be around them. I’d never known Charlie to get trashed—he’d get inebriated, but not trashed. Teri would get trashed but didn’t go over the line because he was watching out for her. They drank wine and beer. I don’t know what kind of liquor he drank, if he drank liquor at all. I know they liked their beer, he liked his Budweiser, and she liked to drink wine. Out on the boat it was always beer.”
And then, the clincher—the one person who not only referred to Charlie as a “sweetheart of a guy,” but was in complete denial about his carnage. “I have total disbelief Charlie was part of this,” said Skip. My gut feeling is, knowing Charlie, he came upon the scene and was so grief-stricken and he lost it and went and hung himself. But that’s my gut feeling. And I know you guys can’t say a whole lot, but from what I hear, and knowing Charlie, I can believe when he came home and found that, and realized he couldn’t help her, he went out and did it.”
Then Skip, remembering an occasion when Charlie refused to lie at work, capped it all by saying, “It was just the kind of person he was. He was honest to a fault. And we’re gonna miss him. There’s a big hole in the site out there now. I may just quit. I had a hard time the week after it happened. I told my wife, ‘I’m going to take this week off and see how it goes’, I may not go back out there. It’s affected everyone. Everyone has a lot of respect for Charlie.”
Everyone?
Al Palladino did. At the end of his interview with the detective, he stated: “Emotionally, it sickens me to sit here and talk to you, because I know what it’s about. But intellectually, if it is what it is, why? I’ll go to my death saying, ‘Why?’ I could sit here and praise this guy for hours!”
Hemmert simply said: “I’m sure you could.”
Newspaper article detailing the murder of then 13 year-old Charlie’s pregnant mother. (Courtesy of Tom Pellegrene, Ft. Wayne Journal Gazette)
Composite sketch by police artist from eyewitness testimony, describing a man running away from the site of Sherry Perisho’s homicide. (Courtesy of Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia)
Charlie’s class photo at Sea Breeze High School, taken two years after he murdered his mother. (Courtesy of Jim Graves)
Jim Graves class photo at Sea Breeze High School, where he befriended Charlie. (Courtesy of Jim Graves)
Angela Brandt, Charlie’s sister and Jim’s ex-wife (Courtesy of Jim Graves)
Angela Brandt with her mother-in-law, Jim’s mother Mrs. Graves, Òwho allowed Charlie to stay at her house. (Courtesy of Jim Graves)
Jim and Angie’s wedding with Charlie as Best Man. (Courtesy of Jim Graves)
Charlie and Teri Helfrich toasting their new marriage. (Courtesy of Nancy Carney)
First kiss after the wedding. (Courtesy of Nancy Carney)
Charlie and his Best Man Jim after the wedding. (Courtesy of Nancy Carney)
Toasting the newlyweds. L-R: Teri, Charlie, Nancy Carney, Jim. (Courtesy of Nancy Carney)
Teri holding a bouquet after her wedding to Charlie. (Courtesy of Nancy Carney)
Teri and Charlie during a relaxing moment. (Courtesy of Nancy Carney)
A view of Andros Island, where Charlie operated the drug interdiction radar. (Courtesy of Donald Withers)
Charlie in Andros, proud of a fresh big catch. (Courtesy of Donald Withers)
Sunglow Pier, where Charlie often went fishing. (Courtesy of Donald Withers)
Charlie, Teri, and Nancy in the Keys. (Courtesy of Nancy Carney)
Charlie feeding a deer on his property at Big Pine Key. (Courtesy of Nancy Carney)
A young Sherry Perisho, who lived in her dinghy under the Big Pine Key Bridge. (Courtesy of Marilyn Angel)
Sherry wading in the canal adjacent to the Big Pine Key Bridge. (Courtesy of Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia)
Sherry’s boat floating upside down under the Big Pine Key Bridge. Charlie had used the boat’s bottom as a cutting board to eviscerate her. (Courtesy of Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia)
Memorial for Sherry and the other victims by the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department. (Courtesy of Marilyn Angel)
Charlie (with back to camera), Teri, and friend’s children at the “Swimming Hole” in Big Pine Key, where Sherry often moored her boat. (Courtesy of Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia)
Charlie and Teri at a picnic spot at the “Swimming Hole.” (Courtesy of Mary Lou Jones)
The Jones Family Christmas during happier times. L-R: Sean, Michelle, Mary Lou, and Bill Jones. (Courtesy of Mary Lou Jones)
Michelle and Teri in Key West. (Courtesy of Mary Lou Jones)
Michelle Jones (center) with her best friends Lisa Emmons (left) and Debbie Wheeler Knight (right) at the Ocean Deck. (Courtesy of Mary Lou Jones)
Charlie (in back), Michelle, Teri, and a group of friends in Key West. (Courtesy of Suzy Hamilton)
Michelle Jones’ house.
Carol Lynn Sullivan, 13, vanished from her school bus stop in Osteen, FL.; Her head was later found inside a paint can. She may have been Brandt’s first victim. (From poster for Missing and Exploited Children)
Replica anatomy chart from behind Charlie and Teri’s bedroom door. (Courtesy of Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia)
The investigators. L-R: Det. Bob Jaynes, Supervisory Agent John Vecchio, Special Agent and Profiler Leslie D’Ambrosia, Det. Sgt. Dennis Haley, and Det. Rob Hemmert.
IF…
This story is plagued with “ifs:” conjectures, opportunities, and telltale signs missed; avoidable or unavoidable coincidences; and seemingly inevitable unhappy endings, almost like a Greek tragedy. And like a G
reek character, be it hero or villain, Charlie Brandt turned out to be larger than life, and wore a mask: a mask of normalcy.
When he had first began to manufacture that mask, it is difficult to say; but what is likely is that he perfected it as he grew up, as he fooled a lot of people—psychiatrists, his own parents, his friends, and ultimately, his wife, her niece, and their friends.
The first “if” occurred on the night of that snowstorm in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when Charlie went upstairs and shot his parents. How did he get access to his father Herbert’s Luger, and what would have happened if he had not?
Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia has a ready answer, informed by logic: Charlie would have carried out the crimes anyway.
“Yes, I do think he would have sought some other means to accomplish his goal,” D’Ambrosia says without hesitation. “His actions were so calculated: to go upstairs, acquire the gun from his father’s nightstand in their bedroom, go back downstairs and sit down at the kitchen table and wait—while finishing his homework—and then return to the second floor and shoot his parents. It was so predatory in nature that I think it supports the theory that he had a mission he intended to accomplish. He would have found a way, whether by knife or blunt-force trauma.”
Invisible Killer Page 17
