Invisible Killer

by Diana Montane

  Young Kemper wanted to go into law enforcement, but was not admitted into the police academy because of his height. However, he did frequent a bar that was a favorite watering hole of the local cops, and befriended many of them. They drank together, and Kemper was jovial and told jokes. The officers thought of him as a “gentle giant” until Kemper killed and dismembered six female college hitchhikers in the Santa Cruz area. Once the women got into his car, they were his, he stated. Kemper severed the heads of his victims, and engaged in necrophilic acts with their corpses. After that rampage, he went back home and butchered his own mother. He wanted to throw her vocal cords in the garbage disposal, to ultimately destroy the source of his torment, but was unable to. He then brought his mother’s best friend and neighbor over to the house, and choked her to death from behind so she couldn’t act as a witness.

  Finally, he called the cops, his friends who drank with him and liked him. The officers thought he was joking until he gave a detailed confession. He is currently serving a life sentence, and is a model prisoner.

  There is a prevailing feeling among people that violent juvenile offenders can be rehabilitated, and that life in prison is too harsh for teens.

  An article published by the Associated Press on Monday, June 25, 2012 reported that the Supreme Court had ruled it unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole for murder.

  The decision came in the robbery and murder cases of Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson. Miller was convicted in 2006 of capital murder for beating a man with a baseball bat and leaving him to die in a burning trailer after stealing his baseball card collection and $350. The killing occurred in 2003.

  Miller’s co-defendant testified against him in exchange for a lighter sentence for his own murder, robbery and arson charges.

  Colby A. Smith testified that he and Miller, who was 14 at the time of the murder, decided to kill Cole Cannon for money, according to reports from the sentencing. Smith testified that after he hit Cannon with a bat, Miller began bashing the victim with the bat and said: “Cole, I’m God and I’ve come to take your life.” They later set fire to his trailer, where the man’s remains were discovered.

  The Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the sentence on the grounds that Miller’s sentence was not overly harsh when compared to his crime, a ruling the Supreme Court disagreed with.

  “No one can doubt that (Miller) and Smith committed a vicious murder,” Justice Elena Kagan said in the court’s ruling. “But they did it when high on drugs and alcohol consumed with the adult victim. And if ever a pathological background might have contributed to a 14-year-old’s commission of a crime, it is here.”

  No doubt this is the subject of endless debates, and one might find oneself on the fence in that respect, but what about the expunging of records of violent juvenile offenders? In this case, the laws vary from state to state, and there is nothing definitive in the books as of yet.

  Charlie’s father was in critical care from his wounds, but recovered. Charlie was interviewed by a psychiatrist, a Dr. Green, who went to visit him. He described the day of the murder. Dr. Green’s assessment was that the youngster fit no particular diagnostic category for mental illness. Charlie had acted impulsively, the psychiatrist said, being a “victim of ill-defined impulses.” It was his opinion that Charlie was suffering from an uncontrollable impulse but was competent. The same had been said of Edmund Kemper.

  At the Allen County Jail, Charlie was evaluated by a psychologist, a Dr. Heineman, who said he had a schizoid personality. Another psychiatrist, Dr. Ronald Pancner, saw him on two different occasions. Charlie told Dr. Pancner that he didn’t have any trouble with his parents, but didn’t like school. He liked to be home, and liked to be by himself. The family had just moved to Fort Wayne from Connecticut, where Charlie had had friends in school. He didn’t like it in Indiana, he said. His EKG showed no abnormality, no health problems. Charlie was, for all intents and purposes, a normal thirteen-year-old boy.

  In May, 1971 the Department of Mental Health moved him to Central State Hospital in Indianapolis. He was officially admitted on May 25. until June 16 of 1972.

  West of downtown Indianapolis, reaching to West Washington Street, there are ten cold, institutional-looking brick buildings, spread out over 160 acres of land. This is also the address of the Indianapolis Medical History Musem. There are daily tours given, and people from all over attend to have a one-on-one with the dinosaurs of mental illness past. Here 146 years ago was the grand opening for the Indiana Hospital for the Insane, and the famous Kirkbridge architectural setup.

  The facilities had unfit bedding, improper staff training, lack of heat, lack of light, and cockroaches running through the kitchens. In 1883, under the supervision of Superintendent Richard Fletcher, Dr. Sarah Stockton was hired and became the first recognized female doctor in Indiana and one of only twenty-two female doctors in the United States. Superintendent Fletcher continued to make bold moves to implement reforms for the hospital and to provide dignity and respect for the patients, including publicly burning restraints and banning the anonymous burials of patients who had succumbed to death.

  In 1896, the hospital achieved another first under the mandate of Superintendent George Edenharter, by installing the very first pathology laboratories in the United States. At the same time, the world of criminology was plowing headfirst into new territory through the work of Dr. Max Bahr, who was spearheading studies into the links between crime and mental illness. During this time, the hospital would change the name on the marquee from “Central State Indiana Hospital for the Insane,” to simply “Central State Indiana Hospital,” and Dr. Bahr would create some of the first forensic psychiatric courses that would be taken by American lawyers.

  The 1950’s saw the downfall of the hospital.

  All that time pharmaceutical companies began to concoct drugs that could help patients with retardation and other controllable conditions. The patients under those categories were thrown into halfway houses or smaller hospitals, while the more serious cases remained at Central State. Because of this new scientific breakthrough in the legal-drug world, the population at the hospital dropped significantly and laid the groundwork for the eventual disposal of the world occupied by both the insane and the sane.

  By the mid-1960’s, the quality of care had diminished to frighteningly pathetic lows. Clifford Williams, who ruled as superintendent at the time, reported there only being one bathtub and three toilets to service all twenty-four wards.

  It would be 1971 when Charlie would see the inside of the asylum walls, walls that would hold so many screams and cries and hide deplorable situations that, frighteningly enough, he may have found comfortable or comforting. He never complained about it. It was a place where he would learn and practice the art of manipulation, and with doctors’ recommendations, he would be on the outside looking in, walking free and back into society, in just a year.

  During his hospitalization, he presented a very mild persona. He wasn’t argumentative, and his initial assessment showed only an adjustment reaction. He was seen by psychologists and social workers, but was able to go home on weekends. He was given individual psychotherapy. He attended his group therapy and participated. A social worker commented that he did not want to talk about his mother, and never gave them any clue as to why he shot her.

  The youngster only made one deprecating comment about his mother. He said she “nagged him,” and that when he complained, “she hollered a lot.”

  After the Christmas holiday he participated more in group therapy. He went to high school while in the mental hospital, but while there, he would just listen and not participate. This was a pattern that would continue later in life. Friends of Michelle Jones all commented that at gatherings, Charlie was attentive to Teri, seemingly to avoid participating in the goings-on.

  At the hospital, he played basketball with other inmates, though he said he didn’t want to. He became a model patient. He knew he had to c
onform and to fly under the radar to do what he wanted to do.

  Later, he would tell his older sister, Angela, “I knew when they wanted me to cry, so I did.” Charlie was learning how to mimic human behavior—how to be quiet, how to fit in, how to be a model patient, and how to appear a good friend and an ideal husband. In a word, he wanted to seem normal. Over time, he would strive for outward perfection.

  When Detective Rob Hemmert interviewed his father, the investigator noticed that Herbert Brandt appeared authoritative and very rigid.

  For her part, Mary Lou Jones, a psychiatric nurse, states: “I think there was something about his mother and his father that was extremely controlling.”

  Michelle Jones’s mother did not elaborate. It was just something she sensed, she said.

  Charlie remained at the hospital in Indiana for a year.

  If a love-hate relationship with his mother is the breeding ground for a potential serial killer, perhaps both Detective Pat Diaz and Mary Lou Jones were right. Did Ilse Brandt draw Charlie close, perhaps too close, to then admonish him in turn for something as simple as not doing his homework? No one will ever know.

  Dr. Michael Brannon is a forensic psychologist, often asked to give expert testimony in criminal trials, and who also has appeared on the Investigative Discovery Channel as a crime consultant.

  Dr. Brannon said he believes Charlie was already predisposed to engage in antisocial behavior. “We do know that there are positional as well as situational factors to this behavior,” he stated, “because circumstances may play a part as to how they act out that behavior. But I believe something was festering in him for some time, not just during the course of that day.” There had to be, for Charlie to have gone upstairs to the night-stand, gotten his father’s Luger, and concealed it as he did his homework in the kitchen before walking upstairs and beginning his deadly rampage on his own family.

  During the CBS 48 Hours episode, “Deadly Obsession,” about the murders of Michelle Jones and Teri Brandt, correspondent Susan Spencer interviewed Dr. Ronald Pancner and asked him several questions about Charlie’s mental health, to which the psychiatrist replied that his patient didn’t have a “diagnosable disease,” that he “seemed well-adjusted.” Finally, Spencer, a tad exasperated, told the doctor, “You are telling me everything that was not wrong with him.”

  Dr. Michael Brannon had a plausible hypothesis concerning Charlie’s undiagnosable disease.

  “Personality disorders are not a disease,” the psychologist stated. “They are not diagnosed like schizophrenia, for instance. Personality disorders are a certain set of behaviors that go with that personality trait.”

  When his son was finally released, Herbert Brandt sold the family home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and relocated with his entire family to Ormond Beach, Florida, to the same small house where they used to vacation, and where they had been only twenty-four hours before the incident. They never spoke of that incident again. Apparently Herbert, influenced by his rigid training as a youth under the Third Reich, did not believe in airing the family’s secrets in public, while Angela did her father’s bidding, and Jessica and Melanie were too little to remember anything. In time, it seemed they simply compartmentalized it.

  Herbert remarried, and left again for Indiana with his new wife and two younger daughters. Angela and Charlie were left behind, and their grandparents came over from Germany to look after young Charlie, who was sixteen at the time. Angela was eighteen. Again, did Charlie experience fear of abandonment, as he had when he’d asked his sister not to leave him after the murder of his mother, the attack on his father, and the attempted assault on Angela herself?

  According to the Fort Wayne Gazette Journal’s Ron Shawgo, his father described Charlie as a quiet, shy kid. Everyone knew Charlie was unhappy when he moved from Connecticut, where he had grown up, to Indiana. His sister Angela said Charlie was overweight and was picked on by his peers. Charlie admittedly disliked school very much.

  But he made a few friends while attending public school in Daytona Beach—especially his sister’s boyfriend, Jim Graves. Seabreeze High School is a school of mostly surfers and jocks, yet Charlie collected stamps and played chess. He was never a discipline problem and made good grades. He was rather passive, his dad said. Charlie told his father that if he ever joined the military he’d be a medic, because he didn’t believe in violence. Other, more popular kids would call someone like Charlie a nerd; he was so non-violent, his buddy Jim said, that he would rather pick up a bug and throw it outside than kill it.

  However, at Seabreeze, Charlie seemed to blossom somewhat. Jim remembers Charlie was a year behind him. “I only saw him after class, like when he came over to see Angie and me, and when we went fishing. He had girlfriends in high school, had two that I remember. He seemed just like everybody else. It wasn’t until I went on that vacation on the Keys when he went on about the heart that I thought, ‘That was weird,’ especially knowing what I knew.”

  Jim was obviously remembering the time on Charlie’s boat, when, two days after his birthday, his wife Angie, Charlie’s sister, left him, and he was berating her in very deprecating, derogatory terms. “I wanted to break her heart like she broke mine and I told Charlie.” But Jim was not prepared for Charlie’s recipe for revenge: “The best revenge is when you cut someone’s heart out and eat it.”

  Jim said he wouldn’t have thought anything of it; he would have thought the statement was one typical of young studs talking at a bar about killing a rival football team. However, Jim already knew what he knew. And he still had a week left with Charlie in the Keys. After all, the vacation away from heartbreak was fashioned for him, for Jim, by Charlie.

  “After that came out of his mouth. I slept with one eye open. That was the first time around him that I felt trepidation and fear. And I couldn’t talk to my friends about it, because nobody knew what I knew, and they would have laughed at me. And I was still brainwashed by the family’s statements and by the psychiatrists’ evaluations, and even by my family’s statements that he deserved another chance.”

  Jim remembered that Charlie had done coke, after the bounty he found in Andros Island. “And he did dabble in psychedelic drugs, like LSD.”

  As to how Charlie had learned to make the precision cuts with which he dismembered some of his victims, the answer did not only lie in his proficiency with fishing, although that is a minor clue. “Charlie was already fishing when I met him,” Jim said. “And he liked to cut the fish open while they were alive. We just figured he liked his fish freshly bled.” That is not normal for most seasoned fishermen.

  Kevin Shore, who went to the same high school as Charlie, lived with Charlie for a good bit in the early 1970’s, fished with him, and went out on the town with him.

  Kevin Shore first stated, “I don’t really have much to say about Charlie, because it’s all good things.” Charlie’s friends all seemed to think of him as “a good ol boy.” But Kevin claimed Charlie was very smart. He had that “German intellect,” he said, also mentioning that Charlie was not into any sports other than fishing.

  And when the two friends went shark fishing, Kevin said, “Charlie would always gut and/or want me to gut the shark immediately. Charlie said, ‘Hey man, there might be a foot or a leg or an arm in there.’” After Charlie’s bloody crimes and dismemberments, Kevin now says he finds some significance in that sort of curiosity. It is not the curiosity of an avid sports fisherman, to be sure.

  Kevin remembered they used to go down to Ponce Inlet where the boats would come in. Ponce Inlet is at the southernmost point of Daytona Beach and past Daytona Beach Shores, and is a town unto itself. It has several marinas and its residents pride themselves on their boats and on the quality of their catch.

  The fishermen used to take bonito fish, and use the back-strap piece of them as bait. Bonito are very bloody fish, and Charlie either bought some of this bait off the fishermen, or procure his own. But in the freezer at the house Kevin and Charlie shared, Charlie
stored large ice cubes, almost like ice blocks, made out of bonito blood. It was frozen blood cubes from the bonito fish. Either this was Charlie’s clever way of preserving some valuable chum, or bait to attract fish, or perhaps the ice cubes contained something else. It is not too much of a stretch, considering Charlie’s deviancy. In any case, it was an original strategy on his part, one way or another.

  Donald Withers also said that Charlie was a great fisherman. The fishing buddies used to pay kids fifty cents to paddle their surfboards out into the ocean to throw their bloody bonito fish and blood ice blocks and buckets of meat blood which Charlie would get from restaurants, into the water so they could catch all sorts of sharks: blacktip, bull, and lemon sharks ranging between six and ten feet.

  Kevin remembers that after Charlie found the coke in the Keys, “He came back home, got connected with the buyer, and drove to Miami and sold the stash.” He stayed in Miami for a while. “When Charlie got back from Miami,” his friend remembered, “he was broad-shouldered, had a shaved chest, was drinking vodka straight from the bottle, and was completely blown out on coke. I had seen Charlie drink before, but nothing like this.” The image is sort of chilling, like something out of “Natural Born Killers” or “Apocalypse Now.”

  Kevin explained how much easier times were back then: “The partying, the drugging, getting away with it all.”

  Kevin and Charlie and Jim were all friends, and had gone to high school together; and one day, Kevin said, Jim unloaded the “secret” he had been withholding for all those years—the secret about Charlie’s past.