by Tanya Biank
And I got to know Andrea Floyd, the wife of Sergeant First Class Brandon Floyd, through her family, who, along with friends and detectives, have helped me tell her tale. Since this book is partly about sacrifice, I thought it was important to tell the story of one woman who had paid the Army with the ultimate price, her life. I was shocked to find soldiers who thought she deserved her fate.
Not much had been reported about Andrea Floyd’s life or marriage, but there were plenty of rumors swirling around. The more I researched her background and found people willing to talk, the more I uncovered a relationship with many twists and turns. My goal from the beginning was to humanize both Andrea and her husband, showing their admirable qualities as well as their faults. Their story is an extreme example of what can go wrong for an Army couple with a marriage already in serious trouble.
In August 2001 I had a chance meeting with Brandon Floyd at Fort Bragg’s legendary Green Beret Club, famous for its bar fights and colorful characters. It was a late Friday afternoon, and I was working on an article, when Brandon asked me to sit down at the table he was sharing with friends. I stayed for a couple of hours. Our conversation added firsthand insights into his character. Later, through the help of those who served with Brandon, I was also able to shed some light on his off-limits world: He belonged to Delta Force, the “black operations” group at Fort Bragg that specializes in secret high-risk missions, including hostage rescues and attacks on terrorists.
The fifth character in this book is Fayetteville itself, known to many people by its nickname, Fayettenam. When I was first heading here, I told an old veteran where I was going. “Ah, Fayettenaaam,” he said, as if he was recalling his favorite porno. Green Berets had branded the town with the name during Vietnam days, when thousands of draftees passing through raised hell before heading to war. Fayettenam was sin city back then, and it became synonymous with wild times and rebellion. It takes more than a cursory visit or a trip down Bragg Boulevard to get to the heart of Fayetteville.
Today, on the post itself soldiers carry on with a focus and intensity rarely found in young men. Whether they joined the Army for college money or for God and country, they come to understand their mortality each time they parachute out of an open plane door at night or are on foot patrol in a third-world country far from home. They are indoctrinated to believe that they can save the world, but they can’t always save themselves. Often your own demons are the hardest enemy to defeat.
If you ask me, Army wives serve too. My mother was an Army wife, and by watching her I learned the true meaning of resilience and resourcefulness. It’s not an easy life, and it deserves acknowledgment. I wrote this book as a tribute. And for those who know nothing about the Army, I hope they come away with a better understanding about life “on the inside.”
I cast my lot in with a soldier, and where he was, was home to me.
—Martha Summerhayes, nineteenth-century Army wife
INTRODUCTION
Lieutenant Sam Pennica wished the hearse would hurry up. He was forty-nine, and after thirty years in law enforcement the smell of decomposing flesh still nauseated him. But the shock of what one human being could do to another had worn off long ago. At his feet, stuffed inside an Army-issue parachute sack, was the crumpled body of an Army wife named Jennifer Wright.
Pennica checked his watch and took a drag on a cigarette. It was 2:30 P.M. on Friday, July 19, 2002, and the temperature had just hit one hundred degrees.
The veteran cops I’ve known generally fall into two categories. The first are those who have become jaded from dealing day in and day out with dirtbag criminals and a mostly unappreciative public. These policemen seem like discarded bullet casings, spent shells, long separated from the fire that had inspired them to join the force in the first place. Then there are those longtime lawmen who still have the passion and smarts for crime fighting and for life in general. Pennica fell into this second category. He still had the spark, along with a ready smile, but at the moment he was pissed.
“Where the hell is he?” The coroner should already have arrived. Years of chasing criminals in North Carolina had turned Pennica’s Midwestern accent into a gravelly drawl. Because of his olive-toned skin and black hair, people often mistook Pennica for a Lumbee Indian from nearby Robeson County. He grew up in a Sicilian family in Cleveland, where he attended Catholic mass every day. He became a Southern Baptist with an affinity for vinegar-based barbecue, boiled potatoes, and slaw, but his bulky frame never could adjust to the inferno of a windless, Southern July afternoon. Pennica kept his arms akimbo, occasionally swatting the mosquitoes and deerflies swarming around his head. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and seeped through his polo shirt. Acres of spindly longleaf pines, which form a buffer between Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, offered skimpy shade. In Fayetteville, where concrete and asphalt carpet everything, this was the perfect spot to bury a terrible mistake.
I knew it was a great hiding place when I saw the site myself. No one ever would have looked for a body in a gully with snakes, pine straw, and pinecones and so thick with vines and underbrush that one of Pennica’s detectives, Sergeant Rick O’Briant, had to use a machete to hack a path.
Master Sergeant Bill Wright remembered the exact spot, though. He had trained for war in these woods and hunted for squirrel here. Bill Wright was thirty-six and had a head full of thick, wavy hair the color of tar that he kept neatly trimmed and combed to the side with a low side part. Despite a farm-boy face, he was a seasoned soldier, providing wise counsel to his soldiers. He was also known to be one of the nicest guys in his company.
Everyone I met who knew Bill Wright extolled his virtues: great father, husband, and NCO. Even the cops had compassion for him. It was harder, in this town at least, for me to find people who had compassion for the wife he had just murdered.
To many at Bragg it was Bill Wright who was the victim, a politically incorrect point of view that was never part of any media coverage, including my own. At the time I never asked the one unthinkable question: Did she deserve what happened to her? The question seemed absurd. Since I didn’t ask it, I couldn’t learn what I know now. More than a few soldiers who either knew the Wrights or had heard about the case later told me, “She got what she deserved.” Or “She had it comin’.” These quick-trigger outbursts (they were never said casually) always caught me off guard. To understand the root of such venom, I had to take a step back and realize that these men identified more with Bill Wright the patriot, Bill Wright the war vet and family man, than they did with his supposedly cheating wife. An unfaithful Army wife might as well be a terrorist, soldiers hate them that much. Soldiers tend to consider infidelity as a personal slight on their own manhood. When a woman cheats on a buddy, she is desecrating not only her husband but also the flag and all those in uniform. Of course none of this applies when soldiers cheat on their wives.
Rumors of Jennifer Wright’s alleged affairs had been flowing through her husband’s unit for a long time before her death. And in the Army rumors are as good as reality; here perceptions are reality. Sadly Jennifer Wright was never able to defend her reputation. In the end the “great” father had orphaned his three boys.
On Monday, July 1, Wright had reported his wife missing, telling investigators she had run off with another man. Something seemed wrong to the police. Jennifer, a thirty-two-year-old mother, who sang in the choir at Aaron Lake Baptist Church, would never have abandoned her sons. And she hadn’t taken anything with her. Her purse, makeup, and money were still in the house. Detectives started looking more closely at her husband.
The morning of July 19, almost three weeks after he reported her missing, Bill Wright had failed a polygraph test at the Cumberland County Law Enforcement Center. Informed of the results, he confessed to strangling his wife twenty-one days before. He told deputies he had accused her of infidelity and killed her in a fit of rage—shattering her jaw with a baseball bat and then strangling her with her underwear. He had buried her body in the woods
off Plank Road near Fort Bragg.
Sergeant Charlie Disponzio, a homicide detective, felt sorry for the guy, more than he ever had for any murderer. He saw a man who wasn’t a criminal at heart, just an Army soldier who loved his kids and who’d been screwed over so much he couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t condone what the man had done by any means, but he could understand how it happened.
Now Wright was staring blankly down into a gully, fifty feet off a dirt road. “It’s right there.” He pointed to a depression in the ground covered with fresh dirt. Pennica had decided not to shackle or handcuff the man. He didn’t want Wright to change his mind about leading them to the body.
The detectives pulled out the shovels they always traveled with, and Corporal Kenny Cain, a crime-scene investigator, and Sergeant Disponzio started to dig.
“Wait,” Pennica interrupted. He motioned to Bill Wright. “Take him back to the car.” No telling what the guy might do. It gave Pennica the creeps just thinking about it.
Just a few inches down they found her, wrapped in a black garbage bag inside a canvas parachute bag with handles and broken zipper. The detectives opened it just enough to make sure the body was inside. A black sports bra, tied in a perfect, single overhand knot, was tight around her neck.
Sergeant Disponzio pushed the shovel handle through the bag’s carrying handles, and he and Corporal Cain lifted the bag from the grave. It was lighter than Sergeant Disponzio had expected. The smell every homicide detective comes to know intimately assaulted his nostrils like a punch.
She was the third Army wife to be murdered by her husband in a matter of weeks, but Pennica hadn’t thought much about that. In his business there wasn’t time. To him a murder was a murder no matter who did it. Ten days earlier there had been the Griffin murder, a particularly gruesome one. Sergeant Cedric Griffin, a black cook who worked at the commissary, had stopped by the trailer home his estranged wife, Marilyn, had just rented. After an argument later in the evening, he walked into her bedroom and stabbed her seventy times before piling her bedsheets on top of her and setting them on fire. Sergeant Griffin then ran from the trailer, leaving Marilyn’s two daughters, ages two and six, to fend for themselves. The girls were able to escape the fire. Why such hatred? Marilyn was threatening to go to her husband’s superiors and say he’d gotten a subordinate pregnant.
A month before that, Sergeant First Class Rigoberto Nieves, a Green Beret back from Afghanistan for just two days, had shot his wife, Teresa, in the head in the couple’s master bathroom before killing himself. The couple had had serious-enough marital issues that Nieves was granted leave to come home early from deployment to deal with the problems. At the funeral one of Nieves’s superiors lamented to the Green Beret’s mother he never would have allowed him to go home early had he known what would happen.
And now this: a wife stuffed in a garbage bag like grass clippings and buried in the woods. Three dead Army wives in six weeks. Even in Fayettenam this was a first, but not much fazed Pennica anymore. After he retired from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation in Greensboro, his former colleagues thought he had lost his mind when he accepted a position as the chief detective for the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department in Fayetteville in 1996. Murders, car thefts, drug busts, burglaries, bank stickups, and fast-food restaurant robberies were so common that they garnered just average publicity in the local media unless the crime was particularly dreadful or sensational. The sheriff’s department had a good working relationship with Fort Bragg when it came to such things as determining jurisdiction or sharing paperwork on a case. But Fort Bragg had its own ways, with a culture and quirks that outsiders like Pennica could never quite penetrate. Although Fort Bragg was just a ten-mile drive up Bragg Boulevard from his downtown office, the post might as well have been a world away.
Wright told the detectives he’d thrown the baseball bat and the couple’s bedsheets into a Dumpster in a McDonald’s parking lot on Raeford Road. While Cain and O’Briant waited for the hearse, Pennica and another detective, Mike Casey, made their way back to photograph the Dumpster. As Pennica snapped pictures, Casey got out of the Crown Victoria and approached his boss: “Damn, we got a Code 3/Code 5.”
Pennica stopped taking pictures. “Where?”
“I’m not sure.”
Of all times for a murder-suicide. Pennica started back to his office and got on the radio with the dispatcher. Across town, on the outskirts of Stedman, a husband and wife had been found in their master bedroom, dead from gunshot wounds to the head. Pennica divided up his homicide team.
Sergeant Disponzio was on his way to McDonalds himself, to get a double burger and fries. The day’s macabre turn hadn’t spoiled his appetite. It was 5:07 P.M., and he was famished. There hadn’t been time for lunch, and there was still work to finish. He needed to get back to his office to do paperwork, and he wanted to talk with Bill Wright again.
In the meantime, though, Disponzio heard the same dispatch as Detective Mike Casey. A second radio call from the patrol unit on the scene asked for a detective. Soon after, Pennica called Disponzio.
“I need you to go to Stedman,” Pennica said, “and get control of this situation and see what we got out there.”
If there was any doubt that this was a suicide, they would need a homicide detective. The burger would have to wait. Disponzio got out of the drive-through lane and headed to the scene. Disponzio was a short, well-muscled scrapper of an Italian from Brooklyn. His old street smarts and choppy accent had stayed with him and, like Pennica, he could still stomach life’s dark side. At forty-seven Disponzio had black hair, and his mustache showed just a few specks of gray. Like many of the cops in Fayetteville, he had been a soldier first. His tanned forearms were covered with blurry five-dollar tattoos that hinted at his past.
As a private in 1972, a drunken Disponzio had walked into Poison John’s on Bragg Boulevard, a yellow trailer with a single lightbulb hanging from a wire. He looked up at the wall and ordered himself a number 2 and a number 7, as if he were ordering two fast-food meals. Poison John sucked down a cigarette and left his tattoos on the young soldier’s flesh.
Those were the days when Hay Street, in downtown Fayetteville, was wall-to-wall bars, and the nights ended with drunken fights and paddy-wagon rides back to Fort Bragg. When a new kid got to the unit, the platoon sergeant would tell the other soldiers: “Take ‘em downtown, get ’em drunk, get ’em laid, break ‘em in. Give ’em a big Fayetteville welcome.”
Disponzio got his nose broken at the Saigon Lounge. As for the Tavern, the Pink Pussy Cat Lounge, Rick’s Lounge, the Town Pump—he knew them all.
He had gone on to serve in Grenada and the Gulf War and spent sixteen of his twenty Army years stationed at Fort Bragg. During that time he’d broken thirteen bones in his legs, hips, and shoulders while parachuting from airplanes.
Still, Disponzio had only good memories and remained fiercely loyal to the military. Yes, Fayetteville had a terrible reputation within law enforcement circles. At cop conventions Fayetteville lawmen would always get the “Oh, shit” response when they mentioned where they were from, as in, “Oh, shit, we know you guys are busy down there.” Disponzio thought soldiers got a bad rap, since it was the civilians who committed most of the crimes in Cumberland County.
I’d lived in Fayetteville long enough myself to know he was right. Sure, young soldiers especially get speeding tickets and get into bar fights. Some get DUIs, get busted for drugs, or have bill collectors after them. But the soldiers aren’t the ones snatching purses, stealing pedigreed dogs from yards, or plotting the break-ins, bank robberies, and Chinese restaurant stickups that seem to plague the town. Are soldiers more upstanding individuals? Well, there are a lot of good kids in the Army, and some thugs, too. More likely the service is a deterrent, since soldiers stand to lose everything if they get into serious trouble. Even minor infractions, such as speeding tickets, are compiled by military police each morning into electronic reports and then acc
essed by leaders. Out-of-line soldiers can get busted in rank, lose months’ worth of wages, or face time in the brig. A dishonorable discharge from the military is not only humiliating but it also makes it virtually impossible to get hired at a good job in the civilian workforce.
Disponzio was alert to all the criminal possibilities when he pulled into the driveway at 1617 Carl Freeman Road forty minutes later. Yellow crime-scene tape enveloped the property like tape on a mailing package. Detective Joel Morissette pulled up at the same time. A patrolman approached them: “There’s two bodies in there.”
A neighbor had heard arguing and shots the night before but never bothered to call authorities. The police only got involved because the woman who lived here hadn’t showed up for work. When she was four hours late, the manager of Dick’s Sporting Goods had his wife drive out to the house. Both of the couple’s vehicles were there, but no one answered the door, so she called her husband, who summoned the sheriff.
The detectives entered the house through a side door. Nothing was out of place. In fact, the house was extremely neat. There was no forced entry, the windows were locked; nothing had been stolen or upset. He followed the patrolman upstairs into the master bedroom. On the bed he saw a woman with blond hair, her arms folded across her chest, her face turned sideways toward the headboard. To the left of her, on the floor, a man was facedown, his torso and legs twisted like those of a discarded doll. A pistol lay next to his left hip.
“Let’s get some photos,” Disponzio ordered. While the crime scene photographer snapped away, the detective looked around the room. Pine paneling extended partway up the wall. Framed photographs of smiling children sat on the dresser. No signs of a struggle. No evidence of violence—except for the bed.
