And as he had so many times before, the monster walked away in the clear daylight while all eyes were diverted the other way.
Charlie’s lifelong dream was to be a pilot. He wanted to go to Embry Riddle to do so, even with his juvenile record sealed, Embry Riddle said no. Was it Charlie who had killed the young girl? Was she his first?
JoAnn Sullivan cancelled the plans for Carol Lynn’s thirteenth birthday. The Sullivans wanted answers after Charlie Brandt’s murderous rampage in Central Florida. He did, after all, decapitate his victims.
Paul Crow, now retired Daytona Beach Chief of Police and then a homicide investigator for Volusia County, arrested a suspect whom he thought was likely to have committed the crime. His name was Wayne Earle Delisle. Delisle had stopped a car with a female driver inside it on Highway 11, beat her mercilessly and left her near death, and then took her out into a wooded area, took off her clothes, and stuck a knife in her genitalia. The woman survived and identified Delisle several times in photo lineups.
As to Carol Lynn Sullivan’s manner of death, Crow points out Delisle was a pig farmer who boiled the heads of pigs to get the hair off. Delisle’s “job” ar the sites of homes under construction was to pick up paint cans.
Crow even went so far as to take his unsolved crime, the murder of Carol Lynn Sullivan by Wayne Earle Delisle, to the FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, where he was one of a handful of detectives invited to take their profiling seminar.
“With the short timeframe, it appeared to them that the skull had been boiled,” Crow stated of his colleagues at the Bureau. “People who are most involved in this practice come from a farm/ranch background. They boil pigs to remove the hair. I recognized he did come from that background. When I interviewed him he also mentioned that he removed empty paint cans from homes being developed, and sold them.”
For his part, Carol Lynn Sullivan’s father, Herbert Sullivan II, stated at the time, “Our family has waited for twenty years for an answer of some kind.”
Carol Lynn Sullivan was one, among many, being investigated as victims of Charlie Brandt.
Herbert Sullivan held out hope.
“I think it’s good, because we haven’t heard anything in all these years. I mean, everything’s been a deep silence for years. Nobody’s ever given us anything substantial to go on, until now,” he said.
Carol Lynn Sullivan’s murder file remains among the cold cases.
Charlie Brandt has been twenty-one years old at the time of her murder.
If it holds true that serial killers never stop killing, and they don’t—they usually move to another hunting ground, as Ted Bundy did, or are incarcerated or die first—young Carol Lynn Sullivan might have been Charlie’s prey. “I think she was his first,” Jim Graves said. Jim has never been able to forget his friend Charlie’s demonic laughter at his mother’s dinner table when Mrs. Graves was having both young men over for dinner and mentioned the girl’s head in the paint can.
Dr. Michael Brannon believed Charlie did not ever stop.
“It is very likely there are other victims,” said the forensic psychologist. “He had a predatory nature. Most murders are impulsive, but Brandt’s murders are more like those of a predator hunting for a prey, or stalking a victim until the right opportunity or circumstances presented themselves. That behavior stays with a person. Although we don’t know, we may assume that predatory behavior may have led to other murders. He would have no inhibitors. It is a rampant disregard for other people; it is like the killer has to dehumanize the victims somehow, in order to make themselves feel superior. It is almost like they deserve the fate that they get.”
Edmund Kemper, “the Co-Ed Killer” took as his first victims, in 1972, Mary Anne Pesce and Anita Luchessa, both eighteen-year-old Stanford University freshmen. He beheaded them both. Eventually, the rest of Mary Anne Pesce’s remains were found. Only Anita Luchessa’s head was found.
Darlene Toler, a transplant from Michigan now living in Miami, should have been celebrating the day after Thanksgiving and looking towards Christmas with her three children and her boyfriend in the trailer park where they all lived.
But Darlene had to maintain a drug habit, a crack cocaine addiction, and sometimes went hooking along the seedier side of Eighth Street in Little Havana. She had been trying to turn her life around, but had been unsuccessful in that in Detroit, and relapsed time and time again.
Eighth Street is known as Calle Ocho in the heart of Little Havana. It’s where its Latin residents celebrate Carnival Miami and the Calle Ocho Festival. But as it meanders further south and morphs into Tamiami Trail, it became sprinkled with cheap motels and traversed by prostitutes plying their trade in the night.
It was there, near the Rinker Cement Company, that Darlene Toler’s body was found on the day after Thanksgiving, 1995. Miami Homicide Detective Pat Diaz now retired and turned private investigator, was called to the scene.
“Right after the murders of 2004 happened, they put out a press release across the state, looking for any cases that were similar,” Diaz said. “They were aware of mine so there was immediate contact.”
Diaz went to Charlie and Teri Brandt’s house in Big Pine Key, and noticed Charlie kept pads with records of his mileage. Diaz looked at Thanksgiving Day of 1995, and he was certain this was his man. “There was a significant spike in his mileage,” he noted. Then he noticed the anatomy chart behind the bedroom door.
“He left Darlene for us like a package, wrapped in a blanket inside a garbage bag, in pieces. He cut out her heart. Her head was never found.” The experienced detective noticed the wounds the perpetrator had inflicted on his victim. “They were precise,” he said. “He dissected her without cutting cartilage or anything; that’s a skill.”
When Diaz found out Charlie was an expert fisherman, that pretty much sealed the deal for him, except for one thing: the dog hairs found on the blanket in which Darlene Toler was wrapped before she was placed inside the garbage bag. Charlie and Teri did not have a dog—they had a cat.
Diaz would get his answer from Mary Lou Jones, Teri’s sister and Michelle’s mother.
“Melanie Fecher was Teri’s best friend in Big Pine Key, one of the first people Teri met when she moved there,” Mary Lou remembered. “Melanie and I had a number of conversations, when we were talking about that dog-hair business. Melanie and her husband Mark had spaniels and Charlie offered to take the dogs to the vet. “Teri worked in the daytime, and Charlie, he worked in the evenings,” Mary Lou explained.
Melanie remembered that when she and her husband decided to move to Bradenton, Teri was at their house every night. “Teri was at my house crying every night when I was moving to Bradenton from the Keys,” Melanie said. “In my mind I thought, no big deal, you’ll come see me and I’ll come see you.” And the friends did visit, with Charlie and Teri making trips to Bradenton to see Teri’s friend Melanie and her husband Mark, and Melanie and Mark driving down to Big Pine Key. That was, until 2004, the “Summer of Hurricanes,” the summer of the murders.
“The last time Teri was supposed to come up, I was out playing golf and I couldn’t even concentrate on golfing, I was so excited. I called her and said, ‘At what time do you think you’re coming? And she said, ‘I don’t know if we’re coming; Charlie wants to see his dad.’ I said, ‘What? Charlie never sees his dad!’ But she didn’t say anything. And she didn’t even invite me over to introduce me to them. I said, ‘Okay, Teri, whatever,’ and I hung up the phone. I still feel guilty over that.” There seemed to be a lot of survival guilt going around over the murders of both Teri Helfrich Brandt and Michelle Jones.
And Melanie realized it was one of her dogs, since deceased, that tied Charlie to the gruesome murder of Darlene Toler in Miami.
“He was so good with my dogs,” Melanie interjected, referring to her then-friend, Charlie Brandt. “One morning, I had to take my dog to the vet, and Charlie was very punctual about his job. But he called in to say he would be a little la
te and he took my dog to the vet.”
Melanie Fecher, like so many others, only saw the mask of normality, except, again, for one incident.
Melanie told of a letter Charlie had written to her twelve years ago, in the year 2000.
“He wrote me a three-page love-letter telling me he was in love with me, and he wanted me, and wanted to be with me. He gave it to me before I went on vacation for two weeks. When I came back into town I said, ‘I love you Charlie, and I also love Teri; I love her like a sister and you like a brother. You know there could never be anything between us.’ But afterwards I was never alone with him again. For the longest time I had dreams of him chasing me and trying to kill me, and I would try to warn Teri and she wouldn’t listen.”
On the CBS 48 Hours special “Deadly Obsession,” Pat Diaz told correspondent Susan Spencer that he had wanted to have the dog hairs tested for DNA. “That would give me my hundred percent instead of my ninety-nine,” he said.
Diaz eventually got his hundred percent. The dog hairs were tested. They were a match for Melanie and Mark Fecher’s dog.
Like Teri Helfrich Brandt, Michelle Jones, Sherry Perisho, and possibly Carol Lynn Sullivan and others in Andros Island and around Florida, and even as far as Germany and Holland, Darlene Toler, for completely different reasons than the other women, didn’t stand a chance.
Laura Welch is Darlene’s sister-in-law, married to Darlene’s brother, who had since passed away from cancer.
Darlene had moved to Florida ten years before her murder to hopefully begin a new life she says.
Darlene’s mother, Betty Jo, worked in a bar, and all her five children had different fathers. “My sister-in-law said she did what she did to take care of her three children,” Welch said. “My mother-in-law told me, while she was living, that she had made a lot of mistakes. And, sure enough, one of her girls died young from being obese, and the other four were drug addicts.” Darlene was the second-oldest, and little did Betty Jo knew, or her brother or sister-in-law the fate that awaited her on that dark thoroughfare on Tamiami Trail.
“She’d hook when she needed drugs, and then she’d get clean and then go back,” Laura remembered of her sister-in-law when she was still in Detroit.
Darlene’s boyfriend worked as a butcher at a Cuban grocery store during the day, and cared for her children at night, when she went hooking. According to Laura, he was a good man who cared for Darlene and the kids. “Of course, the whole family thought the boyfriend did it, including my brother. He was Cuban and they were all very racist.”
But Darlene’s boyfriend was not the culprit. It was another butcher: a fisherman, who loved cutting up his catch while it was still alive; who studied anatomy, and even kept a diagram of a human heart inside his Gray’s Anatomy book, who was obsessed with body parts, and killing and disemboweling women, who had killed and disemboweled Darlene Toler and left her on the side of the Tamiami Trail in Miami “like a package.”
Pat Diaz believes the killer of Darlene Toler and the others was evil. “Absolutely!” he said. “He never got rehabilitation. That rage stayed with him as part of his life. He had deep dark secrets.”
But at least Darlene Toler’s murder and disembowelment would not remain a secret.
The murders of Teri Helfrich Brandt and Michelle Jones in Orlando would lead investigators back to both Toler and Sherry Perisho.
What follows is the police report of the investigation, and the conclusions to both murders, which are now closed:
On September 1, 2005, Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia was contacted by Detective Rob Hemmert of the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office concerning the homicides of Michelle Lynn Jones and Teresa Brandt committed by Carl Brandt prior to his committing suicide.
Detective Rob Hemmert advised that the DNA analysis indicated that Carl “Charlie” Brandt’s DNA was identified in the rectal area of victim Michelle Jones.
On October 7, 2004, Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia consulted with Detective Pat Diaz of the Miami-Dade Police Department, Homicide Bureau, concerning the unsolved homicide of Darlene Toler.
In November 1995, the remains of Darlene Toler were discovered along the roadside in western Miami-Dade County. Toler had been wrapped in a shower curtain that was secured with cord.
Her head and heart had been removed with a cutting instrument. Neither has been recovered.
Toler was last seen in the City of Miami several miles east. She was a known prostitute and narcotics user.
SA D’Ambrosia and Det. Diaz discussed the possible linkage of the Toler homicide to the Perisho, Brandt and Jones homicides. Det. Diaz further advised that he possessed information on several homicides involving prostitutes in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties that necessitated a review and analysis for linkage puposes.
Mark Coleman Monroe County Sheriff’s Office
Detective Corey Bryan Monroe County Sheriff’s Office
Investigator Rob Hemmert Seminole County Sheriff’s Office
Investigator Robert Jaynes Seminole County Sheriff’s Office
Investigator Mark Smeester Escambia County Sheriff’s Office
Detective Sergeant Jim Van Allen Ontario Provincial Police
Dr. Peter Collins Ontario Provincial Police
Sergeant Eric Latour Quebec Provincial Police
At the conclusion of the consultation, an opinion was offered that it was likely that Carl Brandt was responsible for the murders of Sherry Perisho in Big Pine Key in 1989 and of Darlene Toler in Miami-Dade County in 1995.
This opinion was based on the similar crime details and their indication of a signature behavior involving the cutting and removal of the victims’ hearts and heads.
Signature behaviors are unique and are an integral part of the offender’s behavior that go beyond the actions needed to commit the crime.
As offenders fantasize about their crimes, they develop a need to express their violent fantasies.
When they are finally acted out, the totality of some aspects of the crime demonstrate a unique personal expression, or ritual, based on these fantasies.
When committing the crime does not satisfy the offender, this insufficiency compels him or her to go beyond the scope of the offense to perform a ritual. Any ritual displayed at the crime scene is the offender’s signature aspect. In the homicides of Sherry Perisho and Darlene Toler, the signature included the removal, or attempted removal of the head and the heart of his victims, as well as the unique methodology utilized. Additionally, the method of removal was similar in both cases to Carl Brandt’s known murder of Michelle Jones in Seminole County in 2004.
Although there are historical cases involving organ removal or decapitation it is rare to have both the heart and head removed at the same time.
In the case of Jessica Schuchman in Escambia County in 2001, her body was found dismembered on a beach near the US Naval Base and appeared to have been in the water for a short period of time.
Other body parts were recovered on another beachfront. It was determined by analyzing the crime-scene details that the offender removed the victim’s limbs, but did not attempt to cut the torso or remove the heart, or any other organ. The offender in this case also did not make any attempt to remove the victim’s head.
Since the offender would have spent a considerable amount of time cutting the limbs from the victim’s body, it would be expected that he would have had the time to remove the heart and/or head of this victim as well.
It would be expected that, since time was not an issue to this offender, he would have engaged in those behaviors that were gratifying to him, specifically those signature aspects seen in the linked homicides.
In this case it was more likely that the victim was dismembered for transportation and disposal purposes.
The opinion was offered that the Schuchman homicide was not related to Perisho, Toler, or Jones.
Charlie Brandt had not raped any of his other victims.
As to why he sodomized Michelle Jones after sh
e was dead, Special Agent and profiler Leslie D’Ambrosia states:
“It was the ultimate desire for him, and since he knew he could not get away with it, he chose to commit these acts and kill himself. Obsessive sexual fantasy wins over the reality of consequences. He thought this out. He pretty much said goodbye to his dad when he visited him.”
Herbert Brandt had thought during Charlie’s last visit to him, right before he and Teri headed out to Michelle’s home in Altamonte Springs, that Charlie had held him tighter than he ever had, as if saying good-bye for the last time.
OTHER CRIMES?
This information is from another police report from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
In October 8, 2004, Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia and Special Agent Tom Davis, FDLE Melbourne Office, discussed possible linkage analysis of several cases involving subject Carl Eric Brandt, who murdered his wife and niece in September 2004.
SA D’Ambrosia advised that crime scene reports, autopsy reports and photographs were needed to complete an analysis of some unsolved homicide, possibly committed by Brandt.
SA Davis advised that he would obtain the necessary information for analysis from the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office. Additionally he advised that he would be constructing a timeline of Brandt’s whereabouts from data/documents seized from the Brandt residence.
This report is in conjunction with the ongoing investigation into a series of homicides committed throughout the State of Florida, which may be related to two homicides committed by Carl Eric Brandt in Seminole County, Florida, in September 2004. Brandt hung himself following the murders of his wife and his wife’s niece.
On October 13, 2004, Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia contacted Detective Sgt. Jim Van Allen of the Ontario Provincial Police in Orillia, Canada. SA D’Ambrosia requested a query of the Canadian ViCLAS system to determine if any homicide had been reported involving the removal of a victim’s heart.
Invisible Killer Page 12