by Tanya Biank
Andrea had to admit she was troubled by what she was doing. She knew right from wrong. Her husband was away serving his country, and here she was with another man. That didn’t look good. But, she’d ask herself, how could it be wrong or selfish for her to be happy? She had spent her whole married life appeasing her husband, trying to please him. Now it was her turn; she was ready to leave Brandon and the Army behind and start a new life.
She was tired of pretending everything was okay when it wasn’t. She was never going to have a figure like Barbie or be the June Cleaver kind of mom and housewife her husband wanted her to be. With Brandon gone so much, she was finding out how much more she enjoyed life without him and his put-downs. She didn’t need his shit. She could make it on her own. The new house had been her last attempt to make the marriage work. She was ready to give that up, too.
It was now the third Thursday in July, and Brandon was due home from Washington in four days. The kids were still in Ohio. Yesterday she had called her mother to make arrangements to pick them up. She would leave on Friday after work and drive all night. That’s the way Andrea liked to travel. She’d arrive early Saturday morning, catch a few hours of sleep, then stay for the weekend. She could leave with the kids Sunday night and be back in Stedman before Brandon got home on Monday.
The conversation with her mother had put her in a good mood. She told Penny she was thinking of coming home for good.
“I’m going to see if I can get a transfer through Dick’s. I still have to look into that. I’m going to have to give up the house.”
“We’ll make arrangements so you and the kids can stay with us,” Penny said, talking on her cell phone from her city truck. She was a code-enforcement official and zoning inspector in Alliance. “Is everything else okay? How are you holding up?”
“I’m fine. Things are good.”
“Just remember, verbal abuse is as bad as physical abuse, Andrea.”
“I don’t need a counselor, Mom. When he gets back from Washington, we’re going to start the divorce proceedings.”
“Okay, I’ll see you when you get here. Be careful. Have a safe trip. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
In truth, Andrea was torn. She loved her job in Fayetteville and didn’t really want to leave it. Plus she wanted to see where her relationship with Danny would go. She had to take advantage of the time they had.
Thursday was her day off, and she spent it with him. She and Danny and his roommate went out four-wheeling in the afternoon. At 7:30 P.M. they were getting ready to watch TV when her cell phone rang. It was Brandon.
“Hey, it’s me. I’m back. We got in earlier today; I’ve been trying to reach you. Where have you been?”
“Are you at the house?”
“You sound really thrilled. I’ve been here all day mowing the lawn. It’s hot as hell.” Mowing had taken much of the afternoon. It was a way for Brandon to channel his frustration and give himself time to think. “I want us to drive up and get the kids on Sunday.”
Andrea answered him coolly. “I’m going up to get them Saturday and drive back Sunday.”
“I can’t go up Saturday, I’ve got to go in to work.”
“Well that’s too bad, I’m driving up Saturday. It’s already set.”
“Andrea, that’s bullshit. I want to go up for them. It’ll give us a chance to talk.”
“Too bad.”
Brandon was irate now. It was 7:30 in the evening; where was she anyway? “I know you’re not still at work, so where the hell have you been?”
“Look, Brandon, I told you this is it—”
“Give me a chance to work this out.” Brandon immediately tempered his anger. “We’ll get counseling. Give me a chance, Andrea. This is all I’ve been thinking about since I’ve been gone.”
“No, Brandon. When I get home, we’re gonna pack your stuff up, and you’re going.”
“I’m serious. We’re going to talk about this,” Brandon said. “What can we do to make things work?”
“Look, Brandon,” Andrea said calmly. “You can pack yourself or I’ll pack my stuff—but one of us is leaving tonight.”
“What can we do to make things work? I don’t want a divorce—”
“Brandon, my mind is made up.”
Andrea hung up abruptly and looked over at Danny.
“He’s back. I guess you gathered that.”
“What are you going to do?”
She looked intently into Danny’s blue eyes. “Maybe I’ll tell him I’m in love with you.”
“You better not,” Danny said, not sure if she was joking.
“No, I would never do that. I’d never put you at risk.”
One night a few weeks ago, while Danny and his roommate were over at Andrea’s house, he had asked: “What would your husband do if he came home right now?”
“He’d kill all three of us,” she had told him matter-of-factly. “He’s a very possessive man, and he’s been trained to kill by the military.”
Now Andrea gave Danny a hug and gathered her purse and keys. She still had on the white T-shirt and tan shorts she’d been wearing all day.
“I’ll either call you later, or if things don’t go well tonight, I’ll be back.”
As she left Danny’s house and pulled out onto the road, she felt confident and determined in a way she never had before. She’d gotten a big dose of what life was like without Brandon, and she liked it. He was gone so much, it was as if they had already separated, she reasoned.
As she turned into her driveway and parked next to Brandon’s truck, she took a deep breath. It was just past eight o’clock. This is it, she thought. He better budge, because I’m not going to. What I want is worth something, too. She purposely left her car keys in the van and got out.
She couldn’t help being relieved, though, that she’d cleaned the house. At least Brandon couldn’t give her shit about that. Then she remembered she hadn’t finished vacuuming the upstairs, and that she’d left the vacuum in the hallway outside the spare bedroom. Well, it was too late now. It annoyed her that she was still wearing the press-on nails Brandon liked and she hated. That didn’t really matter right this moment. She needed a good night’s sleep. She had to work the next day, and then she’d be driving all night.
How events unfolded next, what exactly was said—or shouted—only Andrea and Brandon would ever know. Based on crime-scene evidence, though, investigators were able to reconstruct what probably happened on the night of July 18. Andrea entered the house through the side door that led into the kitchen. She set her purse down on the counter and soon came face-to-face with her husband. Brandon had two days’ worth of stubble on his face, and his normally shaved chest hair was growing back in, too. Their words became an argument, turning to taunts that rose in volume until even the next-door neighbors could hear the shouting. Then suddenly it was quiet.
Brandon went to bed in a spare bedroom, then got up, walked into the master bedroom. He was shirtless and wearing only his gray boxers. Andrea was in her closet, beginning to pack for her trip. He picked up the argument once again.
What could she have said to him? Did Andrea insist she was leaving? Did she compare him with her new lover? Brandon had worked hard his whole life to be strong and sure and confident, to be a man whose actions spoke for him. More than anything he wanted to command respect. That’s all he’d ever wanted. He served his country in ways others couldn’t or didn’t want to do. Did the mother of his three children strip away his armor, transforming his vulnerability to venom?
By now Andrea was lying crossways on the bed near the pillows when Brandon climbed off her. Her black bra, which snapped open in front, was open under her T-shirt, and her tan panties dangled around her right ankle.
Andrea grabbed the edge of the blue-checked bedsheet and pulled it up to cover her genitals. She crossed her arms over her chest, like a mummy—the classic victim’s posture—then turned her head toward the pillows, which were stacked against
the headboard.
Brandon walked across the room to his chest of drawers and opened the right door. There on a shelf was the Bryco .380, a semiautomatic handgun. It was a cheap pistol, the one he had bought for Andrea when they first married. He walked to the right side of the bed, the side he slept on. His sunglasses and cell phone and a glass of water rested on the nightstand. Andrea was still facing the pillows, her arms still crossed, her panties still wrapped around her ankle. Investigators believe she had no idea Brandon was still in the room.
Brandon peered down at his wife’s head. Methodically, as if he were finishing off one of his wounded bucks, he leaned over the bed and angled the gun downward. He put the muzzle above and behind Andrea’s right ear and pulled the trigger, execution style. The bullet passed through her left temple, severing her brain stem and killing her instantly.
A new bullet automatically rechambered. Brandon raised the muzzle to the center of his forehead and squeezed the trigger. By the time his body slumped on top of Andrea’s, he was dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was now July 26, Friday afternoon, exactly one week since Master Sergeant Bill Wright had led detectives to where he had buried his wife, Jennifer, and since the bodies of Sergeant First Class Brandon and Andrea Floyd had been discovered. For the last few days, I had been putting together a story about those two dead wives and Teresa Nieves and Marilyn Styles-Griffin, raising questions over whether hardships of military life were a factor in their deaths, if the military did enough to help families cope, and what would happen now.
My story ran that morning. Within hours a media frenzy had erupted. It took me a while to fully grasp what my story had unleashed. News crews and writers flew in from New York City and LA, and over the weekend crews from London, Tokyo, Toronto, and Frankfurt would arrive. Journalists couldn’t resist this one: Four soldiers—three of whom had served in Afghanistan—kill their wives, two then commit suicide, all in one summer in one Army town. In the weeks to come, magazine, newspaper, and TV reporters would swarm over the story like moths on a back porch light. Attention-getting headlines were everywhere:
RASH OF WIFE KILLINGS STUNS FORT BRAGG; DEATH AT FORT BRAGG; FORT BRAGG KILLINGS RAISE ALARM AND STRESS; FOUR MURDERS IN SIX WEEKS AT FORT BRAGG.
The national media seemed particularly interested in the Wright case, partly because the husband was still alive. Bill Wright was sitting in a cell at the Cumberland County jail, the last place those who knew him would have expected this former Green Beret to end up. Over time I learned why. Bill had enlisted in the Army right out of high school and during his eighteen years in uniform he had served all over the world as a Green Beret in the 3rd Special Forces Group. Bill was now a master sergeant in the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion. As in his Special Forces days, he was deployed for long stretches of time throughout the year. But his wife, thirty-two-year-old Jennifer, had grown weary of the long separations.
At five feet eight inches, Jennifer was a bit taller than her husband, slender and attractive, with long, dark brown hair. The pair had met in Mason, Ohio, in high school, and as soon as Jennifer had graduated, they got married. They had three boys—Ben, thirteen, Jacob, nine, and John, six. Bill was bright and articulate, a good father and husband, and he loved to take his sons fishing at the lakes on Fort Bragg when he was around. The family spent Wednesday evenings and Sundays at church. Jennifer sang in the choir at Aaron Lake Baptist, which was near the modest three-bedroom house they had bought the previous May.
There were problems. Jennifer told friends she was tired of Army life, and the deployments seemed to have changed Bill’s demeanor and personality, too. There were rumors flying around the battalion among soldiers and their wives that Jennifer had been with other men, including someone from her church choir and a man she’d met at the airport after dropping Bill off there. Some of the talk eventually got back to her husband.
When confronted, Jennifer denied the stories as preposterous, but she did want a different life and was ready to move on. Bill was desperate to save his marriage and keep his family intact. In mid-May he requested leave to come home from Afghanistan to work out his marital problems. He’d been deployed two months. By then Jennifer had told people she was already divorced, and that Bill moved into the barracks on post at her request.
On that last Saturday morning in June, at the first sign of daylight, Bill, now living in the barracks, had returned home and found Jennifer—wearing a red T-shirt, leopard-print bikini panties, and a black bra—still in bed. As they yelled at each other behind closed bedroom doors, the fight escalated till Jennifer threw a coffee mug at her husband. When one of the boys came to see if everything was okay, his father reassured him. But things weren’t okay Bill felt as if his world was crumbling, as if his life and everything he defined himself to be—a loving spouse and father, a good NCO—was about to disappear.
Though he had never been violent toward his wife before, Bill took a baseball bat and swung it hard at Jennifer’s face, shattering the right side of her jaw. She tried to defend herself, but she was no match for her husband’s rage. Next Bill reached for a black sports bra and used it to strangle Jennifer to death. He put her body in a black garbage bag, tied it with a knot, and placed it inside a canvas parachute kit bag. Later he put it in the back of his pickup truck and buried her body in the woods. He went on to the construction job he worked to earn extra money. The next day, a Sunday, he took his sons fishing.
For three weeks Wright had been able to keep up the pretense that his wife was missing, then he crumbled and confessed. He was now awaiting trial.
As I continued to pursue my story, I came to know Lieutenant Sam Pennica. Weekends were now workdays for him. His phone was ringing constantly with calls from reporters, his detectives, and victims’ relatives. As many as eight of his men were on the wife-murder cases, following up leads, gathering evidence, waiting for forensic results and autopsy reports, and interviewing neighbors, friends, and soldiers who knew the Army couples. There were also older homicide cases that needed attention. Bragg’s CID had been calling for updates, too. The two offices didn’t work side by side, because all the wife murders had happened off post, in the jurisdiction of either the sheriff’s department or the city police department. Still, CID was helpful in gathering most information the cops asked for, including records of deployment schedules and names of soldiers and friends for interviews.
None of the wife murders were premeditated; investigators had already established that. A rape-kit procedure had been performed on Andrea Floyd, and authorities needed to find out if the semen found on her body was her husband’s or someone else’s. The semen had no sperm, meaning the man had had a vasectomy. The Army had stalled on handing over Brandon Floyd’s medical records, eventually saying they had been “lost.” No one in the sheriff’s department bought that one. Investigators later confirmed Brandon’s vasectomy through a close relative.
To Pennica a murder had always been a murder, but recently his attitude had changed. Now, when the phone rang in the middle of the night about a homicide, his first question to the deputy was, “Did a soldier do it?” It wasn’t that he thought soldiers were more likely to kill, it was just that he didn’t want to be involved with the media circus surrounding the case.
“If we have one more soldier involved with a murder, CNN is gonna land its helicopter on top of the jail,” Pennica told his boss, Sheriff Earl “Moose” Butler, a large beefy man with white hair and a drawl as deep as well water. For twenty minutes one hot July night, the men stood outside in front of the sheriff’s department, their pockets filled with paper towels to wipe the drip off their faces, as they waited to be interviewed live by Connie Chung. Another time police had to strike the fear of God into one national news crew that tried to break into the Nieves house to get footage. A neighbor had called authorities.
For my part, as I drove up Bragg Boulevard to a press conference Fort Bragg had hastily arranged the day my story broke, I couldn’t help
thinking about how a relationship could go from love to violence to death. I’d seen it before. More than 50 percent of all homicides in the county were domestic. People never think they’d be capable of killing a loved one, but then few people have ever been pushed to their emotional limit.
Inside the car I reached for my sunglasses and cranked up the air conditioner. It had reached ninety-one degrees outside. I don’t know why I bothered with makeup anymore—it just melted off my face. To make things worse, that summer the county, along with more than fifty others in the state, was experiencing the worst drought in North Carolina since the 1930s. Cotton and corn withered in fields, and the Cape Fear River dipped lower with each passing day. Mandatory water restrictions in town helped with conservation, but the result was dirty cars, wilted flowers, and grass that had turned a matted yellowish brown that crackled underfoot.
I parked my car and walked into Mulligan’s, the clubhouse at Stryker Golf Course, for the press briefing. All day phones had been ringing incessantly in the public affairs offices at Bragg. If the Army hated operating on the defensive in combat, it hardly enjoyed being backed into a corner on Dateline NBC and 20/20. In the aftermath of 9/11 and with the war in Afghanistan, the spectacle of uniformed men in disgrace was made for prime time, and the post dug in for a spin-control battle on the home front. I entered a back room overlooking the golf course; it was crammed with reporters and producers who had just arrived in town.
TV cameras on tripods, lights, and wires formed an arc around Colonel Tad Davis, Fort Bragg’s garrison commander. Soon reporters shot out their questions: “Is this a trend?” “Did these couples ever seek counseling?” “Is this combat-stress related?” “Did the units know there were problems?” “What made these men do it?”
The room got stuffier as the barrage of questions continued. Davis was forty-five and a West Point grad with a masters in Public Administration from Harvard. He had been in the Army twenty-four years. With each question Davis squinted his deep-set eyes, which were set under a prominent brow. He knew Bragg well; it was one of the many posts he lived on as a child. He couldn’t say whether the killings were related to the soldiers’ duties and missions in Afghanistan, and he didn’t know if any of the couples had sought help from their unit or post counseling programs. Each case, he said, would be closely examined.