Posted by Carl “Charlie” Brandt seemed a model husband. In September 2004, staying with his niece Michelle Jones in Maitland, Florida, during Hurricane Ivan, he killed her and his wife Teri and then took his own life. Investigators discovered that at 13 he had shot his parents, killing his mother, and that in 1989 he had killed and mutilated Sherry Perisho. He is suspected of other murders.
Carl Brandt was a model husband, a trusted friend, a caring uncle. Or at least that’s what everyone believed. But everyone’s perception of Charlie changed one day in September 2004, when Charlie was found dead in his niece Michelle Jones’s garage.
What the police would find inside the house, however, would change the lives of Charlie’s family and friends forever.
Hurricane Ivan
In early September 2004 the terrible Hurricane Ivan threatened the Florida Keys, where Charlie and his wife Teresa, whom everyone called “Teri”, lived on Big Pine Key. On September 2 the couple left their beach house and Michelle, Teri’s niece, put them up at her home in Maitland, near Orlando, until the hurricane had passed.
On the evening of September 13 Michelle was expecting a visit from Lisa, one of her best friends, but called her back to tell her not to come: her aunt and uncle had had a bit too much to drink and were arguing.
Michelle was very close to her mother, Mary Lou, Teri’s sister, and spoke to her almost every day. But after that evening Michelle stopped answering the phone.
Worried, on September 15 her mother asked Debbie, a friend of Michelle’s, to go and check, while she stayed on the phone with her.
Debbie found the front door locked and tried to get in through the garage. There she found Charlie’s lifeless body: he had taken his own life. Frightened, she called the police.
The tragic discovery
Nothing, however, could prepare investigators for what they found inside the house. Teri, Charlie’s wife, lay on the couch, killed with seven stab wounds to the chest. Michelle was found on her bed.
Michelle’s body had been decapitated and disemboweled: her heart and other organs had been removed and her head placed next to her body. The weapons were knives from her own kitchen.
What was clear from the start was that whoever had committed that monstrous act was no beginner. The precision with which Michelle had been killed and mutilated suggested someone who had done it before.
But how could an apparently normal man, a good husband and a caring uncle, kill his wife and his niece?
Perhaps Charlie was not the man everyone thought they knew.
A family secret
Charlie was born on February 23, 1957 in Connecticut, the son of German immigrants. After the tragedy investigators contacted Angela, his older sister, who revealed a disturbing secret.
On January 3, 1971, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Charlie, then 13, had taken his father’s gun and walked into the bathroom, where his father was shaving and his mother, eight months pregnant, was taking a bath. He shot them both at point-blank range.
Then he went to Angela and pointed the gun at her, but it wouldn’t fire. After a struggle, Angela managed to calm him down and run to the neighbors. Charlie followed her and, when a neighbor opened the door, told her:
“I just shot my mom and dad.”
His mother and the baby she was carrying died, while his father survived. Charlie said he couldn’t remember what he had done and that “everything sort of just snapped” in his mind. Three psychiatric evaluations failed to find out why. Too young to be tried, he spent a year in a psychiatric hospital and was then returned to his family.
The family never spoke of the episode again: until 2004 his two younger sisters believed their mother had died in a car accident. It is not known whether Charlie ever told Teri, but a revelation by one of her relatives, which I’ll tell you about later, suggests she suspected something.
The motive
After discovering Charlie’s past, police searched his and Teri’s house on Big Pine Key and made some important discoveries. First of all the house was kept in maniacal order: even the boards put up to protect the windows from the hurricane had been cut with millimetric precision.
Charlie had a real obsession with human anatomy: the house was full of surgery books, posters and clippings, and online he searched for autopsy photos and websites showing violence against women.
Victoria’s Secret lingerie catalogs, to which he subscribed, were also found. A coworker said Charlie had an unhealthy attraction to his niece and never called her Michelle, but “Victoria’s Secret”. According to investigators the murder stemmed from this obsession, and Teri was killed because she was a witness.
But why was Charlie such an expert in human anatomy?
A possible serial killer
Charlie traveled often for work, as a radar specialist for Ford Aerospace, and detectives began reopening unsolved murder cases in Florida from 1973 onwards.
That’s how they discovered he was probably a serial killer. We will never know how many people he killed: some believe there could be more than thirty.
On July 16, 1989 Sherry Perisho, a 38-year-old woman who lived on a dinghy near a bridge on Big Pine Key, had been found dead in the water less than 1,000 feet from Charlie’s beach house. She had been nearly decapitated, mutilated and her heart had been removed. Charlie matched the sketch of a man seen near the crime scene. On May 6, 2006 police officially closed the case, attributing the murder to him.
Charlie is also suspected of three other murders: that of Carol Sullivan, a girl abducted in 1978 in the county where he lived at the time; that of Lisa Saunders, 20, killed on Big Pine Key in 1988; and that of Darlene Toler, 38, found without her head and heart near a Miami highway in 1995. That day Charlie had logged 100 miles of travel, roughly the distance between his home and where the body was found.
The most surprising thing, however, was a revelation made to police by one of Teri’s relatives. Teri had confided that she suspected Charlie of killing Sherry Perisho and told him that, on the night of the murder, Charlie had come home with blood on his shirt. When she asked him about it, he said he had been “filleting fish”.
Teri decided to believe him and asked no more questions. Perhaps she didn’t want to believe that the man she had married was a murderer. But if she had called the police that day, perhaps both she and Michelle would still be alive today.
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