I was also drawn to the story for the same reasons I went into theatre: to explore the human psyche. In this case, I would be exploring the darkest recesses of a serial killer’s mind.
Bill Jones, Michelle’s dad, was the second one to call. “I understand you’re writing a book about Michelle,” he said in his gravely soft Southern voice, and then allowed me to speak with his wife, Mary Lou.
I wasn’t just writing a book about Michelle by then, I realized, but about Teri too, and two other victims. I wasn’t so certain who they were.
But Mary Lou filled me in on the murders of her daughter, Michelle, and her sister, Teri.
Mary Lou Jones is one of the strongest women I know. She is a psychiatric nurse with a Ph.D. who had no reservations about delving into the darkest aspects of the crimes. “No, no,” she said softly but firmly, when I expressed my misgivings about asking her some of the questions. “You are writing a book and we want it to be as accurate as possible.”
Mary Lou also suggested that I contact some of Michelle’s friends. One of them I met without Mary Lou’s guidance: Lisa Emmons, who was in the 48 Hours episode, “Deadly Obsession.” Lisa was very straightforward, and contributed to the study of Charlie Brandt. They all did.
And then I met Debbie Knight.
Debbie, of all of Michelle’s friends, is possibly the one who carries the most hurt. She was her best friend. She also happens to be a good writer.
She was at Michelle’s house two nights before the murder. Debbie believed, and possibly still believes to this day, that she could have prevented the murder of her friend if Charlie had attacked the night that she was there. I tried to convince her otherwise—Charlie would have killed her too. I identify with all these women for different reasons—with Mary Lou, for her wisdom; Lisa, for her honesty; Peggy, for her diplomacy and sweet temper; and Debbie, for her conscience. This last haunts her still, and I wish it would not.
And then I received, via a flash drive, a police report about Sherry Perisho, dubbed “a homeless transient” by the media. She was anything but.
Sherry had a 136 I.Q., read Herman Hesse, and was homeless, apparently, by choice—something akin to “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
She intrigued me. I reached out to the only person who cared enough about her to keep emailing investigators in Monroe County for the Florida Keys, to find out how her cousin had been murdered. Sherry had been taken and eviscerated by Charlie Brandt.
Through the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department and Marilyn Angel, Sherry’s cousin, I found out about an autobiography she’d been was writing, which she’d kept in the dinghy she’d made her home. I found a woman I wanted to know. I would have wanted to know Sherry Perisho, and did not get to know her until after she was dead.
Marilyn Angel became a friend. Not an everyday friend, but a friend to whom I sent a Christmas card last year.
I also sent a Christmas card to Special Agent and profiler Leslie D’Ambrosia. She was with me every step of the way, and is a veritable walking encyclopedia of crimes and criminals. She never failed to respond to any question I asked of her, and answered back quite thoroughly and articulately. I could not have done the book without her.
And I also sent a Christmas card to Bill and Mary Lou Jones with a photo of my pets, who give unconditional love, as we all know. I hope it can give them some comfort.
Mary Lou, Michelle’s mother, told me she and Bill kept Michelle’s cat. They also adopted an injured puppy. They are good people whom I’m glad to know.
I encountered more people as this book progressed: good, kind people who wanted to help.
I went into theatre to explore the human soul in all of its facets. I can now say, after writing about Charlie Brandt, that his is the darkest soul I have ever encountered.
That being said, the good outnumber the bad; the good people, at least in my world, are more powerful, and are getting to be as proactive, or even more so, than the evil ones.
And together, I hope we can keep them from winning. They will not get to win.
Not if any of us have anything to say, or write, about them.
“HIS FRIEND, CHARLIE? A SERIAL KILLER?”
Jim Graves was devastated, and felt somewhat like a fool, when he heard the news about the murders in mid-September of 2004, after all the hurricanes. He was Charlie’s good friend. He was Charlie’s best man at Charlie and Teri’s wedding. Maybe if he told the story over and over from the beginning, it would become transparent, he figured. Just throw it in the cycle at the watering hole and the colors would fade—especially the red.
The colors had been so bright back when he was younger. Each morning had pulled a brand new day from its pocket, instead of this endless folding of moments and tedious hours, piling up for months till he got old.
He was already practically disabled now, from practicing and playing jazz on his guitar so much, and teaching it to others. He had spinal stenosis, four bulging disks and three herniated ones, and cubical tunnel syndrome, which ran from his arm to his hand. He had been a gigging musician, once.
But there was Charlie. Charlie who would never get old or infirm, Charlie who marked the time, Charlie who wouldn’t let go. His friend Charlie? A serial killer?
Jim used to go to the bar with Charlie, who’d regaled his buddies with his own tales, over and over till they became more intricate and even murky, splashed with dark hues as he told them. Charlie, who had been his shadow in high school, became the frontman at the joint.
If Charlie went fishing on his boat, he got an overload. When he did his illegal drug runs on that company balloon, it had made him a big stash, enough to buy a $250,000 house—expensive back then—for him and the wife. It became a running gag inside the bar: “How many, Charlie?”
But before Charlie, there was Angie.
Plate tectonics rocked the planet, wind rocked the water, and Charlie’s comment rocked the boat, Charlie’s boat, which was about to crash against a dark rogue wave of the soul.
As Charlie and Jim spoke, Jim ranted about the awfulness of his now ex-wife. The misunderstandings, the late nights, the lies, the fuck-yous and the goodbyes; everything predictable, everything kept inside, everything out in the open, everything hidden The ex was Charlie’s older sister, Angie. Angie and Jim had met four years earlier, at a concert.
The smell of pot and 1970s idealism had cloaked the audience, beer fueled the human engine, and an alchemist concoction of Quaaludes and Black Beauties kept it running at a high-octane level. Now Daytona Beach legends—then rock stars from Daytona—The Allman Brothers Band had taken the Jacksonville stage in what was to be a magical night for two members in the audience: one that would make them part of a story that would go down in infamy.
Jim and Angie were strangers to one another, but in the midst of being thrown together in a sea of hippie love, they shared a joint, some laughs, a love of rock’n’roll, and, before the night was over, their phone numbers.
After several phone calls, a realization they went to the same school, and a handful of dates, the love-child cherub, the product of expecting the high-school sweetheart myth to become an entitlement, had captured them.
It all ran smoothly for the first four years. What started in high school now led to an apartment, a car, and one individual no longer enjoying the novelty.
In the beginning, the idea of dating a musician was exciting and new to the imaginings of Angie Brandt. The same qualities that have enticed girls since the beginning of rock ’n’ roll were the ones that drew her into this union: rebellion, unpredictability, and the potential rock star inside her guitar-slinging significant other.
The turning point for Angie came when Jim transformed from budding guitar player to legitimate gigging musician. At first it had been refreshing. Now it was no longer a kick, but a big, boring pain. Jim strumming the guitar, singing Clapton covers to Angie was now Jim, amplifier cranked to eleven, blasting audio bombs in the faces of packed bars till a
ll hours of the night.
Drunk, smiling, and with money in his pocket, the fact that he was getting paid to have fun wore on Angie who would have to wake up a couple of hours later to work for minimum wage at a menial job as a server.
Angie was reaching her breaking point, and during the last year of their marriage, while Jim was out performing, she had an affair with Dave, the fry cook at the restaurant where she was employed.
When he arrived home one afternoon on his birthday, Jim was given the gift of goodbye. Their Datsun B210, in all of its awkwardly shaped, burnt-orange color, rust-frosted glory was sitting in the driveway, packed to the brim with all of Angie’s belongings. She, in matter-of-fact fashion, informed Jim that she was leaving him, and with the pathetic cough of an engine roar, she disappeared down the road.
Donald Withers was friends with both Jim and Charlie since high school. Donald said he’d gotten a call from a couple of friends who’d said they were over at Jim and Angie’s, and that Angie had just left Jim. Jim and Angie had been planning to move to St. Thomas because they both wanted to live “eco-friendly.” Donald had gone over to the house of another friend, David, when all of a sudden Angie had walked in the door and said, “I just left Jim.” Up until this point Donald hadn’t even known that Dave and Angie knew one another, but had been told earlier that evening, while hanging out with Dave, that there was a woman he worked with at the restaurant inside the Daytona Beach Airport. That night, as Dave was waiting at the bus stop, she’d approached him and said, “I’m going to go home and leave my husband for you,” and sure enough she did exactly that, that evening. Donald said it had been a very weird, coincidental scenario, because he knew all the people involved. The scenario would turn even weirder for Donald much later, when all its participants would do an unusual 180.
However, at the time Jim Graves was absolutely shattered. Through all the booze, gigs, and temptresses, the one thing he had always been was loyal in love.
THE PERFECT REVENGE
Through the years, Jim and Angie’s brother Charlie had become pretty tight. While all of Jim’s other friends had moved away and settled down, Charlie had always been there to hop in the boat, crack some beers, and go fishing. Desperate, Jim phoned in the Mayday call about his marriage, and Charlie, like the good best friend he was, took his distraught buddy on an escape mission from pain. Destination: the Florida Keys. It was in this land of beautiful, clear oceans, margarita smiles, and warm bright skies that something cold and dark would descend upon the waters.
It was the second day of their trip. They spent the first assaulting their lungs with THC, livers with alcohol, and brain with euphoria. They awoke early to get a head start on their fishing trip. They had been out on the water for a few hours, and Jim could not get Angie out of his head or his heart.
With tears flowing down his face, and anger spewing from his mouth, he lashed out on a diatribe of degrading, spiteful obscenities.
As thoughts of revenge consumed him, the conversation took a horrifying and revealing turn. Charlie sat, silent and understanding for about ten minutes as Jim slandered his sister’s name. Then he looked into Jim’s face, knife in hand, eyes piercing the soul, and posed the question: “You know what the perfect revenge is, don’t you?” Jim didn’t know how to respond. Charlie, never breaking eye contact, calculating and cold, continued icily: “Well, the perfect revenge is, you kill somebody and then eat their heart.” At that precise instant, a chill froze the orange Florida orb. And from that moment, Jim knew that this man—his friend, his pal, his confidant—was someone he did not know at all.
He told that to correspondent Susan Spencer on the 48 Hours that aired on CBS on May 25, 2006, two years after Charlie committed one of the most gruesome crimes in Central Florida history. It happened on Tuesday, September 13, 2004. After one look at the scene, three of the responders had gone outside and thrown up.
The question Susan Spencer posed to FDLE Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia was what Jim had wondered all of these years: “How many crimes did Charlie Brandt commit?” How many, Charlie? Jim had wanted to ask. But Charlie was no longer here.
THE WIFE WAS THE LAST TO KNOW
And then, after Angie, there was Nancy. Nancy who Jim was now dating. Nancy who was friends with Teri, and who made him forget Angie. Jim felt like he was in one of those Russian novels where everyone’s destinies are intertwined, except in this story it was easier to remember everybody’s names.
Charlie had graduated college in Daytona Beach with an electronics degree and immediately got a job with Raytheon, the U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation with core manufacturing concentrations in weapons. The job was in the Bahamas. Charlie was running, of all things, a drug interdiction operation, which involved the interception of illegal drugs being smuggled into the United States by land, air, or sea. Raytheon had this blimp called “Fat Albert” in the Keys, and Charlie ran it.
In the meantime, Jim had graduated from the School of Music at the University of Miami, was living in South Florida, and was playing with a band. Charlie would fly the guys in and out of West Palm Beach when they had time.
After Angie left, it was back to old times for Jim, hooking up and hanging out and cruising. But Jim’s band soon broke up and he moved back to Daytona Beach and got himself an apartment on Seabreeze Avenue, close to the ocean, where he could glue his inner Humpty Dumpty back together again.
One day, Charlie came over to Jim’s and told him, “I’m quitting my job in the Bahamas.” Jim said, “Well, what are you gonna do? That job’s been awesome—you go fishing every day, you say you smoke pot all the time, you got a pocket full of money.”
Charlie said, “Well, you’re never gonna believe what happened,” and he pulled out a fishing rod. “You know what this fishing rod is full of?” Jim shook his head, and Charlie said, “Pure coke.”
Charlie told Jim how they all lived in trailers or cottages or some sort of military-like housing tht Raytheon provided, and Charlie had been out there, fishing on the flats for bonefish, knee-deep to waist-deep in the water, and bumped up against a duffel bag full of sealed kilograms of uncut cocaine.
At the time Jim was playing guitar all over town and dating Nancy Carney, a very pretty blonde who worked at a radio station. And Charlie, Charlie now had all this money and he moved to Astor, of all places, with a buddy who came down with him from the gig. Astor is a rural area north of Orlando by the St. John’s River, a vacation spot for fishing and hunting; and Charlie, he was drinking like a fish and pissing through his money.
Charlie wasn’t stupid. He had hidden the duffel bag full of coke in the mangroves back on Andros Island, and just took out little baggies at a time. Initially he had gone back to the trailer and gotten everybody high, even the helicopter pilot.
The helicopter pilot had approached him in private and said, “Where’d you get that?” Charlie had told him, “Well, I bought it in Brown Town,” a little settlement there and God knows how many impoverished women he killed there because nobody gives a damn. And the pilot had laughed, “Bullshit, you didn’t buy that in Brown Town, there is no fucking way. They’ll kill you for five dollars down there. I know somebody who will take it off your hands and give you a ten percent finder’s fee.”
That turned out to be close to half a million. Jim never got the exact figure, but Charlie’s house cost over $250,000 and he paid cash for it.
Jim wasn’t religious back then; he just bought into the Kerouak, Ginsberg, and Leary stoner theories of higher power and doors of perception. But now he was a Christian, like folks get when they’ve been on the edge for so long and need some sort of steering mechanism to take over their lives, and he reflected on Charlie’s good fortune. He thought, it just goes to show the devil rewards his own. Here is this guy who murdered his mother and he gets to fucking retire at twenty-eight for finding a bag full of drugs he’s supposed to be interdicting.
Then Charlie came home and asked Jim, “Well, do you know any g
irls besides your girlfriend? I mean, I’ve been stuck on that fucking island for five, six years, and want to start getting into the scene.”
Jim asked his girlfriend Nancy. “Listen, I’ve got a buddy of mine here who’s been living on some island; and um, do you have a girlfriend that’s, you know, single? We could go out to the Ocean Deck.”
The Ocean Deck is party city, right on the boardwalk in Daytona Beach, right on the ocean, and it has three decks now—for karaoke, for the bands, for dancing, and especially for drinking. It’s been here for 40 years, and probably will be for 40 more. No hurricane has ever been able to deface it, or defeat the armies of the night out for a good time.
It was only one deck at that time, but still the place for drinking and dancing and fun in the sun right on “The World’s Most Famous Beach.” Jim and Charlie met up with Nancy and her girlfriend and roommate at the time, Teri Helfrich, at the Ocean Deck for drinks. Teri had curly blond hair, and was cute and vivacious. She talked up a storm and was funny as hell. Charlie seemed to like her; he was a slow talker and she kind of brought him out. He laughed a lot. They all laughed and drank a lot.
Nancy had moved back to Daytona Beach, after working for Club Med for two years.
“I went to stay with my mom in Daytona Beach for a while, and I met Teri at an aerobics class and we hit it off,” she recalls. “So then, when I was looking for an apartment, Teri had a two-bedroom and she said, ‘Why don’t you move in with me?’ So we did!” Nancy Carney never suspected, not even in her wildest imaginings, it would all end so badly.
Invisible Killer Page 2