Charlie would follow several people throughout his life. Why he followed Lisa Emmons, Michelle’s friend, as she was swimming, nobody will know, but his intentions were certainly not good.
It was around 11 o’ clock, and Lisa Emmons had decided to sneak away for a swim in the lake. She was knowledgeable of the water and knew that alligators were always awaiting a new feast, so she cut her way through the lily pads and walked through the muddy banks. Two eyes followed.
The water rippled with every move Lisa made, her body a point sending energy in all directions. It was a peaceful scenario for her—a few moments alone from the noise of the crowd and a refreshing way to clear her head. Two eyes watched. Thoughts of water moccasins began to creep into Lisa’s head not too far along into the swim. The Florida snakes could shoot venom up the arteries with one deathblow. These reptilian visions sent Lisa into a quick rush back up the bank.
She struggled to get to her feet along the marsh but as she regained her footing and hoisted herself up, she was met by the face of a predator far more lethal than any snake. His eyes glazed over, absent of anything outside of obsession, and peered into Lisa’s, as if holding some dark mystery. Her heart began to race and cold bumps raised up on her skin. All this time she thought she had been alone. She finally began to speak and asked the only thing she could manage to verbalize.
“Charlie, what are you doing here?” He did not say a word.
Two eyes stared, leaving an imprint on the young woman’s mind that she would never be able to erase.
“Sometimes he was really odd,” Lisa said as an afterthought. “But that was the creepiest time ever. He never even offered to help. I have no idea how he got there, but he snapped away from everyone else, in the dark of night.”
Nancy Carney, Teri’s former roommate and good friend, remembered another instance where a woman was accosted more directly by Charlie.
Teri and Charlie were inseparable. That is the warm exterior that they presented. Whether it was traveling together, having dinner with friends, or out for a drink, they would always be seen right next to one another, in some photos arm in arm, hand in hand. But below the surface of this façade were the icy and erratic undercurrents coldly calculated like some matrix destined to be only fully understood by its creator, a creator of lies and a destroyer of lives. The creator was Charlie Brandt. Did he want Teri, gullible Teri, as his partner in apparent perfection?
Maybe he did not even love her after they were married.
Nancy, the woman who was responsible for the initial introduction of Charlie and Teri, had finished packing her things and picked up her friend Lesa Cravey. It was a trip they had planned, and like so many other times, the trip would entail partying in the Keys with the Brandts. It was a fairly straight shot of a drive, and with the windows down, the sun blared down on the two young women as they pummeled the I-95 South pavement all the way to the South Florida Turnpike, over the famous 7-Mile Bridge and into Key West. They also were unknowingly already playing into the puzzle in Charlie’s mind.
One evening, the foursome, Charlie and Teri and Nancy and Lesa, headed out to the Tiki Lounge nearby. Nancy found herself enjoying the conversation of a man she had met earlier in the night. The group spent the first few hours downing tequila shots with beer chasers, and Teri at this point had pushed herself to the point of inebriation, Charlie had explained to both Nancy and Lesa that he was going to take Teri back to the house, and that they should feel free to join them. Nancy decided to stick around for a few more hours. She wasn’t drunk, after all. Lesa had decided to call it an evening. The next day the two friends departed the Brandt house on their way back to Daytona Beach, both carrying a smile—and one of them carrying a secret.
Time and time again Nancy would make the same routine trip, every time inviting Lesa to join her; yet for some odd reason, Lesa would decline. Nancy wondered what was wrong with her longtime traveling companion, but never could seem to get an answer. Lesa spoke up after the crimes.
“Nancy and I went there; they were friends of Nancy’s whom I never met,” said Nancy’s friend. “It was Memorial Day weekend. It was the end of May 1990. We went there on a Friday night, got there kind of late. Next morning we had breakfast, went out on the boat, and they were a nice couple, as sweet as they could be!” Then Lesa Cravey said something others had said as well: “We spent the weekend, and Charlie was the designated driver.”
She went on: “We went to a place close to home, stopped at a tiki bar, stayed there for a while, and Nancy was not coming home with us. Teri went into the bedroom. Charlie and I were in the living room, and he asked me if he could kiss me. I said, ‘Charlie what are you talking about, Teri is Nancy’s friend! And she is sleeping in the other room!’ Again he asked if he could kiss me, and I talked my way out of it. It freaked me out at the time, because Nancy had told me about this couple that adored each other. I didn’t tell Nancy for a long time because Teri was her best friend, and she had this idea. I told him, ‘No, this would ruin my friendship with Nancy’.”
As Nancy said, Lesa never went back to Big Pine Key to Teri and Charlie’s house with her again. “Every time she went back I always had an excuse not to go. She finally cornered me and asked me, ‘Why won’t you go back?’ And I told her very briefly that he had made a pass at me. Nancy was very upset.”
Lesa said that it didn’t bother her so much at the time, since married men had done that before and she’d rebuked them successfully. “But after the murders happened, I thought, What if? Why me? What did I do?” She did not know Charlie had come onto other women.
“When Nancy did tell me about what happened, I couldn’t believe it!” Lesa offered. “They seemed a perfectly happy couple until he made a pass at me. It freaks me out when I heard about the woman he’d killed right before we went down there.” Lesa was referring to Sherry Perisho, whom Charlie murdered in 1989.
It was through these words that Nancy got to take a look into a matrix so carefully constructed by Charlie; and through Brandt’s own actions that Lesa got to have a brief glimpse at the monster behind the mask
Some people believed Charlie was very lovey-dovey with Teri, waiting on her hand-and-foot at parties. Lisa Emmons, thought it was because he never wanted to participate.
Melanie Fecher, Teri’s best friend on Big Pine Key, remembered pretty much the same thing.
“No matter where we went, the women would sit together, and Teri would sit by Charlie. He was always asking, ‘Where is Teri? Where is Teri?’ We would say, ‘Charlie, she just went to the bathroom!’
Charlie first expressed this fear of abandonment to his older sister, Angela, after he had shot their mother and wounded their father. He said to her at the time, “Promise me you won’t leave me!” What did this mean? Again, probably, we will never know. It was this fear of abandonment that had been the trigger for Jeffrey Dahmer to keep the body parts of his male lovers.
Lisa Emmons, Michelle Jones’s friend, also thought Teri harbored thoughts of divorcing Charlie.
“When they came up here for Hurricane Ivan, I had talked to Teri, because my divorce started August 27, 2004, and they came in September. Michelle had told Teri I had just filed for divorce. I talked to Teri on the phone much earlier, late afternoon I would say. Charlie was grilling fish. I believe they were making margaritas. They were not getting along at that time.
“Teri knew I had just started the divorce process. I can remember Teri saying, ‘I’m considering divorce, too, Lisa. I want to move away from the Keys, I’m just tired of this laid-back lifestyle; I want something more to my life.’ Lisa had asked Teri why she could not just move to the mainland. She could hear Charlie talking to Michelle in the background, about the fish. “Well, Charlie is just adamant about not leaving the Keys,” Teri had said with despair in her voice. “He just wants to stay there and stagnate. We’re just growing apart, that’s all.”
Lisa remembered, “Teri really wanted to talk to me about what it was like, the divo
rce process. She said it wasn’t definite, but that she was thinking about it. She said Charlie was becoming unmotivated, and he wasn’t growing with her.”
Was that how the argument escalated? Lisa did not hear anymore, until the time she was in her car going over to Michelle’s for dinner and she was running late. And Michelle told her not to bother, that Teri and Charlie were drinking and arguing.
And some time after that, it happened.
Melanie Fecher, Teri’s best friend on Big Pine Key, also remembered:
“A couple of months before the murders, Teri was very depressed because she didn’t have a job, and Charlie said, “If she doesn’t straighten out, I’m going to get a divorce.”
Mary Lou, Teri’s sister and Michelle’s mother, said Teri had expressed her dissatisfaction on more than one occasion a few months before the murders.
Charlie had told Mary Lou, and several other people, that his mother had died in a car accident. “When someone says that, you don’t pry,” said Mary Lou, who is very polite and respectful of others’ privacy. “But in the spring of 2004, Teri was very despondent and wanted to move to the mainland. That was whenever she and I talked, several months prior to September 4. She not only said she wanted to relocate to the mainland, but also pointed out that Charlie’s work opportunities were limited because of the type of work he did. I remember that, on a number of occasions, when we would say good-bye at the end of the conversation, she had a catch in her voice, like she was going to cry. I did ask her about that, but she denied being upset. After her death, this is one of the areas I continued to reflect on. Perhaps he wanted to keep Teri isolated. And after the murders we did learn that one of his co-workers had been terminated from the company after he had been discovered to be involved with drugs.”
What would have happened if Teri had moved out? By her sister’s account, she seemed so depressed as to be almost resigned and immobilized.
M. Scott Peck seems to corroborate this in “People of the Lie” by explaining the relationship between an evil person and a healthy one:
“The feeling that a healthy person often experiences in a relationship with an evil one is revulsion. The feeling of revulsion may be almost instant if the evil encountered is blatant. If the evil is more subtle, the revulsion may develop only gradually as the relationship with the evil one slowly deepens.”
According to investigators, when Charlie and Teri evacuated their large house in Big Pine Key because of Hurricane Ivan, everything was boarded to perfection, to specification—even the wood around the door handles was cut in perfect circles. The home was also spotless and orderly. And Charlie did seem like a model husband. But here’s the rub, according to Peck:
“There is another reaction that the evil frequently engender in us: confusion. Describing her encounter with an evil person, one woman wrote, it was ‘as if I’d suddenly lost the ability to think.’ Once again, the reaction is quite appropriate. Lies confuse. The evil are ‘the people of the lie’, deceiving others as they also build layer upon layer of self-deception.”
If Teri was confused and despondent, perhaps the urgency of surviving the hurricane and going to visit her beloved niece provided a little spark, a bit of hope. Also, she was looking forward to her upcoming chat with Lisa Emmons about Lisa’s divorce.
And if one considers Teri’s entries in her daily planner, it is evident that it is filled with despondency and fear.
And what if Lisa Emmons had gone on to Michelle’s house, as she’d briefly considered? Would she have been able to divert the massacre? It is doubtful, since a violent argument was already in progress.
“As I look back on how weird Charlie was that night,” Lisa recalled the evening she went swimming in the dark when the girls were twenty-three, “if I didn’t have my wits about me, judging from the look on his face, I could be dead.”
Lisa had been right on the corner, close to Michelle’s house during the murders. She had keys to the house. She said the music inside was blaring really loudly, and they would not have heard anybody knocking. Lisa thought of letting herself in, but she did not.
“Michelle was the most awesome person ever. My life is not complete since she’s not here,” her friend reminisced. That night, she added, “my keys got the cops inside the house, but they would not let anyone else in. There were helicopters flying overhead, and Debbie was already there before me, and she knew everything. She knew Charlie was dead.”
And what about Debbie Knight? What if she hadn’t left early Sunday morning and stayed for the entire weekend like the two friends had planned? Debbie was not unlike Michelle. She had the same body type and was also an attractive young woman. Surely he would have taken her with him, and it is probably what he had planned.
Lisa remembered she was standing outside Michelle’s house for hours, along with Debbie. “When they put spotlights on in Michelle’s garage, from where I was sitting I could see the silhouette of Charlie’s body swinging. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. Realizing he was evil and that night he followed me to the lake he was up to no good.”
Jim Graves admitted that, if he could go back and do everything over, “I would make sure Teri knew about Charlie’s mother. After seeing the gunshots wounds on his father Herbert’s back when I visited with Angie that time, I went to my mom and dad and I said, ‘I don’t know what to do here.’ They said, ‘If you like him, and he’s a good friend, then leave it as a youngster who made a bad decision, and leave it be.’ If I could take anything back it would be telling Teri not to call the cops after the girl was murdered in Big Pine Key. I wondered for a long time if that was the right thing to do. I am also convinced in my heart that he killed that girl in Astor. He would have been living at my mom’s house at the time, but her house was right down Highway 40; it’s not too much of a stretch to Astor.”
As to what would have been the outcome had Charlie not killed himself, that does seem like the only inevitable conclusion.
Both employers and authorities would have known about his not only botching the drug interdiction operation, but turning it into a drug-dealing business, and taking the drugs himself. Who knows if they might have found out about Andros Island?
It is altogether possible that before his final exit he’d planned on enjoying himself. He wanted Michelle; that is a known fact. The fight with his wife Teri was yet another precipitator.
And his suicide pointed to his knowledge. As Detective Diaz stated simply, “He knew that the jig was up.”
As to the question of whether Charlie was born evil, Diaz is unequivocal.
“Evil? Absolutely. He never got rehabilitation. That anger stayed with him as part of his life. Once a killer, always a killer. He had deep, dark secrets.”
Lisa Emmons, Michelle’s friend who encountered Charlie at the lake all those years ago, concurs. “Afterwards I realized he was purely evil, and he meant me harm that night,” she said.
Debbie Knight, from the psychic Rosemary Altea’s account and from her own writings, agrees. “I encountered pure evil,” Debbie says, remembering the violent brush with his spirit.
One might think Special Agent, Leslie D’Ambrosia, with all of her years in law enforcement and looking into the hearts of serial killers, would have another explanation.
D’Ambrosia did hesitate before drawing a conclusion, but then stated, “Evil? I cannot answer with any support. I have an opinion and I think he was devoid of feeling anything real for others. This was exhibited from an early age. Is that something he was born with? That is a topic argued by academicians and psychiatrists, et cetera, for a long time. It can be a combination of genetics and environment, but we don’t know. ‘Evil’ is a descriptive word not based in genetics or science, so saying he was ‘born evil’ is an opinion—one I’m sure many have for Charlie.
“I found no information to indicate he suffered any abuse or trauma in his life. So his environment was good. The worst thing I heard he had experienced was that he wasn’t too happy about moving to
Indiana. So do I personally think he was evil? For the record, yes. How could I not?”
The biggest “if,” is still, of course, the murder and evisceration of Sherry Perisho under the Big Pine Key Bridge in 1989.
It was only after the murders of Teri Helfrich Brandt and Michelle Jones, and Charlie’s suicide, that Sergeant Dennis Haley and Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia went back to review the case of Sherry Perisho.
What follows is the official police report:
On October 5, 2004, Special Agent Edward Royal and Special Agent Leslie D’Ambrosia met with Special Agent Dennis Haley, FDLE Key West Office, and members of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office Homicide Unit in Marathon, Florida. A briefing was provided by Det. Sgt. Patricia Dally and Detective James Norman, concerning the unsolved homicide of Sherry Irene Perisho that had occurred in 1989.
The purpose of the meeting was to gather information for an assessment of the linkage of the Perisho homicide to a double murder/suicide that had occurred in Seminole County, Florida, in September 2004.
It was reported that Carl Eric Brandt and his wife Teri Brandt had traveled to Maitland, Florida, from the Florida Keys in September 2004, to escape Hurricane Ivan, projected to strike the state.
The Brandts evacuated to the residence of Teri Brandt’s niece, Michelle Lynn Jones, on September 15, 2004. The bodies of all three were discovered on Monday, September 20, 2004, when the Brandts did not return to work in the Florida Keys.
Teri Brandt was discovered deceased on the sofa with a stab wound to the chest area.
Michelle Jones was discovered deceased in her bed. She had been decapitated and her head was placed beside her torso on the bed. She was eviscerated; some internal organs had been removed and placed inside a wastebasket nearby. Her heart had been removed. Her breasts had been cut off and were placed nearby. Her leg also had been disarticulated. There was underwear belonging to Jones in the bedroom, which had been cut on one side. Carl “Charlie” Brandt was found in the garage hanging by a bedsheet, deceased as a result of suicide.
Invisible Killer Page 19