Invisible Killer

by Diana Montane

  Charlie talked to his friends about Michelle. He called her his “Victoria’s Secret,” though, of course, not to her face. She wasn’t the kind of girl you could kid around with, not like that. “She would have been livid!” recalls her father, Bill Jones, still angry at the notion.

  Al Palladino, a co-worker of Charlie’s, emphasized time and again that “Charlie was very respectful, to everyone.” When Al Palladino was interviewed by lead Detective Rob Hemmert in the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in 2004, after the murders, one of the questions the detective asked him was if Charlie had told him where he and Teri were going during the evacuation.

  Al Palladino answered: “On Thursday, he specifically told me, ‘If this comes, I’m going up to Victoria’s Secret’s house. This girl has it all! She’s intelligent, she has a good job, she has a good home, and she cannot find a good boyfriend. The last guy that she had was divorced. He didn’t even have a car! I just don’t understand it!’ He said she had bad luck. He called her Victoria’s Secret because the woman was beautiful and looked like someone out of the pages of Victoria’s Secret. To him, Victoria’s Secret exemplified beauty.” He was quick to clarify that Charlie was never disrespectful to anyone. Notice that he did not refer to the magazine as Playboy, Al Palladino pointed out.

  Michelle was very close with her mother, Mary Lou, who lived in North Carolina with Michelle’s father Bill. Mary Lou Jones also kept close tabs on the hurricane, and knew of Michelle’s plans with Teri and Charlie.

  By Wednesday, September 15, Mary Lou Jones was worried. She had placed several calls to Michelle, and they had gone directly to her voice mail. It wasn’t like her daughter not to return her calls.

  Michelle had three close friends, and the three were inseparable. All pretty girls, with good careers and bright futures. The other girls were married, but not Michelle. Michelle had had a four-year relationship with a man who lived with her, but she had broken up with him a year before, on account of his infidelity. Michelle did not seem to have good luck when it came to men.

  Mary Lou phoned one of Michelle’s friends, Debbie Knight, who lived close by, and asked her to go over to Michelle’s house and see if she was there, and if she was okay.

  Mary Lou told Debbie that someone from Teri’s office had called because Michelle didn’t show up at work as expected. Debbie tried to sound casual, but she was starting to sense something strange. “Yeah, I haven’t heard from her either and she hasn’t answered my messages or emails,” the friend answered hesitantly to the mother. Michelle and Debbie were supposed to fly to Vegas later that week for a little getaway, and had been emailing back and forth much more than usual, anticipating the excitement of the trip. This definitely was strange, and not like Michelle, her friend thought.

  “Well, would you mind driving over to her house?” Mary Lou asked Debbie, seeking reassurance that her only daughter was all right. She and her husband Bill only had one other child, a boy, Sean, six years younger than Michelle. But she was their baby girl. Debbie immediately replied, “Yes, I will go over right now. I have a house key.” She started to walk over to the large wooden bowl on the kitchen counter where she and her husband Pat threw all of their keys. Debbie suddenly felt sick to her stomach. She reached into the bowl to find Michelle’s house key. She was heading down the stairs as she quickly told her husband Pat, “Michelle’s mom called. She hasn’t heard from her either, and wants me to check on her.” Pat Knight asked his wife, “Do you want me to go with you?” How unlike him, Debbie thought. Does he think there is something wrong too? Debbie certainly felt there was something very wrong. But she shrugged off her husband’s offer to accompany her because she was in such a hurry. “No, I’m fine,” she said, and drove off, with the worst feeling of apprehension in her gut. She phoned their other friend, Lisa Emmons, who also had a key to Michelle’s house. All the girls had keys to each other’s houses, just in case. Michelle had invited Lisa over for dinner much earlier that night, but Lisa was running late and called Michelle to tell her she would be right over. “Oh, don’t bother,” Michelle had said on the telephone. “Teri and Charlie have been drinking and arguing, and it isn’t very pleasant around here. I’m going to go to my room.” Lisa had thought about it for a few seconds, considered going over anyway, and then turned around and gone home. Now, several hours later, Debbie was calling Lisa, and she sounded frantic: “Listen, Mary Lou called me and asked me to check on Michelle and I’m here.” Lisa immediately got it. “I’ll meet you there,” she said.

  Debbie was now pulling into the driveway. The first thing she noticed was Teri and Charlie’s SUV right there in front of her, in the driveway, blocking the closed garage door, where she assumed Michelle’s car was parked. She pulled into the driveway quickly, and stopped in a random spot. As Debbie got out of her car, her mind was flashing terrible scenarios. Maybe they’d died of asphyxiation in the garage inside Michelle’s car. Or perhaps they were electrocuted in the Jacuzzi? Ever the careful young mother, Debbie had warned Michelle many times about that Jacuzzi, and now her imagination was getting the better of her. She wanted to run around the back and look in the Jacuzzi, but she was afraid, just terribly afraid, and an inner voice told her no, don’t go back there. She ran to the front door and grabbed the key she thought fit Michelle’s front door, but she was shaking so badly and she couldn’t seem to get it to fit into the keyhole. She tried a few times. The door lock would not budge. At this point Debbie didn’t even know if she had the right key. So she turned around facing the street, and then turned back around again to the front door. She was desperate now, and worried to death for her best friend. She started banging on the door with both hands and screaming, “Michelle, open the door!” About five or six times she screamed, knocking loudly, “Michelle, open the door!” Then she ran to the family room windows and started banging on the glass. Her heart was racing and the thumping reverberated in her ears. She ran to the right of the house and squeezed herself in between the hedges to get to the bedroom windows. She was banging again at the windows of Michelle’s bedroom. Debbie was not screaming anymore. She felt paralyzed with fear. And she did not know why.

  Debbie managed to turn helplessly towards the road, looking around the upscale, quiet neighborhood, now drowned in total darkness. She ran to the neighbor’s house next door. Debbie started banging on their door and heard herself screaming, “Help! Help! Please someone help me!” No one answered. It was dark inside. No one was home. She then ran across the street, to another house, panting, gasping for air. She spotted someone walking out of the next house, coming out of the garage.

  Debbie ran over to the man. “Please, can you help me? My friend is in that house and I think something is wrong, I fear something bad has happened, I haven’t spoken to her in days!” She was blurting it all out very rapidly. “My key isn’t working and if you could help me break in the front windows to get in the house.” The man looked very nervous, but he ran over to his car. Debbie followed him. He grabbed a gun from his car, and a flashlight, and both Debbie and the neighbor ran across the street. The neighbor tried to open Michelle’s front door with Debbie’s key but to no avail.

  “Please! Please, please, please, you have to break a window in the family room!” she pleaded. “We need to get inside the house!” Debbie kept on begging for what seemed like a very long time. The man turned to her and said, “No,” cautiously, but firmly. He then proceeded to walk to the back of Michelle’s house. Debbie followed the neighbor as he walked toward the garage door and looked through it. Debbie looked through it too and she saw. For a brief second she saw the first horror before the neighbor turned around and pushed her back, so hard she fell to the ground. The man had not wanted Debbie to see, but she saw.

  Then the neighbor pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and called 911 to report what Debbie had seen for an instant. “I think there is a man hanging dead in the garage,” he told the operator. Then they told the operator something about “multiple deaths.” Debb
ie was certain he said that.

  Then Lisa arrived, and so did police officers, who pushed the women back and across the street, and began circling Michelle’s house with yellow tape. Then the paramedics arrived, and more police cars and fire trucks. Debbie and Lisa stood in stunned silence, looking at their friend’s house from across the street and watching three of the first responders walk out and throw up.

  Inside there was, in the parlance of police officers, “a difficult scene,” so Seminole County Sheriff Don Eslinger arrived to inspect it as well.

  Then a female officer approached both Debbie and Lisa and began asking them questions. She told Debbie, “I need you to describe Michelle to me.” Debbie was then certain of what she’d known all along, that something was terribly wrong inside that house, something evil, the depths of which she didn’t even dare fathom.

  Once she was told outright about the murders of Teri and Michelle, she called Bill Jones in North Carolina and uttered the dreaded words: “Michelle is dead. Michelle is dead.” Debbie repeated the phrase to Michelle’s father about five times, like a tearful mantra, as she heard the deafening silence on the other side.

  Inside, the detectives and Sheriff Eslinger found a crime scene filled with horror and depravity. Teri Brandt was slumped over on a livingroom couch, covered in blood. She had been stabbed seven times.

  Michelle, or what was left of her, was in her bedroom, lying on her bed. She had been stabbed once in the chest, decapitated, and her head was placed beside her body, as if to view all of the carnage. Her heart was cut out and her breasts had been severed, and also placed on the bed. Her intestines were deposited in the trash bin in the bedroom.

  Detectives Rob Hemmert and Bob Jaynes had never encountered anything like this.

  “It was absolutely stomach-turning; it was horrific,” recalls Steve Olson, a Seminole County sheriff’s spokesperson. “It was rough, even for some of the more seasoned people.”

  And strewn all over the bedroom floor, as if with grim irony, were Michelle’s panties and bras, all shredded with the same knife. The brand: Victoria’s Secret.

  This almost raises the question: why did Charlie refer to Michelle as “Victoria’s Secret?” Did he know she wore that brand of underwear, or was it just on account of the beautiful models?

  But then, why did he order and keep Victoria’s Secret catalogues? And when did he start doing this? After he and Teri stayed at Michelle’s house while their home on Big Pine Key was being repaired? Had he rummaged through her drawers? Even more perversely, had he worn the underwear, like disgraced Canadian Air Force Colonel Russell Williams?

  Detectives Hemmert and Jaynes concluded that, after stabbing his wife Teri with one of Michelle’s kitchen knives, Charlie Brandt had spent a long time with Michelle Jones. The investigators spent two days examining and inventorying Michelle’s house, the beautiful Florida home she’d so carefully decorated, now a house of death.

  When Hemmert and Jaynes checked the FBI database, the MO and signature of the killings matched exactly that of Sherry Perisho in Big Pine Key, the homeless former beauty queen who was found about a thousand yards from Charlie and Teri’s house.

  Special Agents Leslie D’Ambrosia and Sergeant Dennis Haley had been dispatched on hurricane detail when they were called to the crime scene of the Brandt/Jones murders. After they were briefed on the details of those crimes, Haley said he and D’Ambrosia looked at each other and exclaimed, almost in unison: “That’s the guy who did Perisho!” Sherry Perisho had been killed and eviscerated under the Big Pine Key Bridge, a few blocks away from the Brandt home, in 1989.

  There had also been another similar crime in Miami-Dade County, plus twenty-six others with the same ritualistic characteristics. The investigators then proceeded to the garage. There was Charlie.

  Apparently, after he was done with Michelle, he had showered changed into clean clothes—a white polo shirt and blue shorts. He then found a long, white bed sheet, got a metal stepladder from the garage, and hung himself by the neck from the rafters.

  Then Angela Brandt came forth with the story, the secret the family had so carefully guarded since 1971, about the winter of Charlie.

  Angela told Detective Rob Hemmert, during that interview, that in the house in Fort Wayne, Indiana, she’d lived with her parents, Ilse and Herbert, and her two little sisters, Melanie and Jessica.

  “It was the day after Melanie’s second birthday, and Jessica was three but almost four. I was fifteen.”

  It was 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., she said. “We had just gotten a color TV. We were all sitting around watching The FBI. I’d gotten a book like I always did before I went to sleep. My mom was reading Time Magazine.”

  Angela said she remembered her two little sisters’ room was “in the bedroom right behind me.” She seemed to also recall her mom was thirty-seven, and her dad was two years older.

  “I was in my bedroom reading, and I heard really loud noises, which I perceived to be firecrackers,” Angela stated. “So I started pulling my covers down to find out what it was, and then I heard, ‘Charlie, no!’ or ‘Charlie, don’t!’ and I heard my mom scream, and then say, ‘Angela, call the police.’ So like I said, I was pulling the covers off my bed, and getting out of the bed. And this had to be less than a minute later. And Charlie comes into my room brandishing a gun, a handgun. I didn’t realize what it really was, until he aimed it at me, and he pulled the trigger!” Angela related it almost casually, but was obviously still surprised by her brother’s action. “I could hear it click,” she almost whispered now. “I guess when he realized the gun didn’t have any more bullets, that must be when he threw it on the floor. I guess I was lucid enough to kick it under the bed. I didn’t even know the gun didn’t have any more bullets. And that’s when a physical altercation ensued. I imagine, I think, he struck me! I had blood, and… bruises! And I fought back! This is the only physical altercation I’ve ever been in my life, and I guess I won because I’m here to tell about it!” she said, becoming more agitated now. “I was only fifteen and I was still trying to assimilate what was going on and I was still trying to get away from him; he was very strong! I really don’t know what happened in the next five or six seconds; I was laying here at the foot of my bed, and he was sitting on me, and he was strangling me. I don’t think that I got him off of me physically. I saw the weird look on his face, the madness, the glazed-over look, disappear. I could see his face, and he looked more like himself and he said, ‘What did I do?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, but I think you shot Dad. And he said, ‘Oh, I did?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know but get off me so we can figure it out!’ And he did, he got off of me. If I did anything wrong when I was fifteen you’ll have to forgive me. I was trying to save my life.”

  Her thoughts got confused at this point, and then she remembered again. “He got off of me. He said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know because I don’t know what you’ve done!’ I said, ‘I think you’ve killed or done something to Mom and Dad; I think we ought to go downstairs.’ And the only reason I wanted to go downstairs was because at the bottom of the stairs was the door, to get out! So I decided I’d make up a story. It was the seventies, so I said, ‘We’ll run away to a hippie commune!’ And he said, ‘Oh! Well, okay!’ But I had to get him away from me so I could turn the knob and get outside, because my dad was all about bolting the door, and I hadn’t seen my mom and dad. But I do remember one bizarre thing. This was in Indiana; it was cold. And we hacked wood, we had two fireplaces, and my dad remembers me telling him this the other day. There was a bucket and there was an axe. Apparently when you live up north you keep your axe in the water, something about the shrinking of the wood. I remember walking by that axe, and turning around and going, ‘Let’s go in another room!’ because I didn’t want him to see the axe. Charlie was gonna pick it up and hack me to death!”

  Angela now began to talk very, very rapidly. “And I don’t remember what gibberish I was telling him, something abou
t running away! And I remember telling him, ‘It’s very cold outside. You need to go upstairs and get a blanket for Melanie and Jessica,’ because of course I was going to take them with me! I was fifteen, I couldn’t even drive! Where were we going to go? I just wanted to get out of the house. And he bought it. And he began to go upstairs but backwards. And he was saying, ‘Angie, if I go up here you’re not going to leave me, are you?’” And now Angie burst into tears, into frightening and terrifying tears. “And of course I said no! And as soon as I knew he was far enough away, I ran! Have you ever seen ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?’ I saw it once in my life, and I could never see it again! You remember the girl screaming, the girl running down the road screaming? That was me! I was just a little girl, and I was running through the snow in my bloody and torn nightgown, screaming!”

  Angela ran to neighbors’ houses; she knocked on two doors and there was no one there. Then she ran to the next house, and by that time Charlie was outside, and the whole time, Angie heard him screaming, “Angie, you promised me you wouldn’t leave me! You promised you wouldn’t leave me!” And now Angela was sobbing again as she said, “And I did!” Detective Rob Hemmert tried to console her, telling her under the circumstances it was understandable. But she went on.

  She said she’d burst into the neighbors’ house without knocking; they were playing cards, and she was screaming, “I think Charlie killed my mom and dad!” and the next thing, all the men went across the street “because all this time, unbeknownst to me, my father had picked his guts off the bathroom floor, crawled to the phone and called the operator. So all these officers came, and they picked up Jessica. She was all bundled up, and someone said, ‘I’m so sorry honey, but your mom is dead,’ and then someone picked up Melanie. So there I was, sitting there, trying to understand what was going on.”