The KILLER Kid: The Case of Charlie Brandt

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Every town has a dark side. If you had lived next to Charlie Brant, you would have liked him. Everybody did. It was a good, kind-hearted guy who had a career, marriage, and a nice $600,000 beach house in the Florida Keys, and this was back in the late '80s. So he was by every external measure a completely normal man living a totally normal life. As it turns out, he was also one of the most prolific killers in all of Florida's history. And for 33 years, nobody knew it. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to every town with a night. We're in Fort Wayne, Indiana, then Orman Beach, Florida, and then Big Pine Key because this case moves. And it all starts with a 13-year-old boy killing his pregnant mother and then just continuing on from there in a very dark and methodical way. This is the story of Charlie Brant, they kill their kid, they let go. Charlie was born on February 23rd, 1957 in Connecticut. His parents Herbert and Ilso were first generation German immigrants who had arrived in the States two years earlier and were doing what immigrant families tend to do. And their heads down, working hard and trying to build up a foundation that would last. Now Herbert had landed a respectable engineering job at International Harvester and that work met the family moved around quite a bit. Connecticut first, then Texas, then Indiana. Charlie was the second of four kids, older sister Angela and two younger girls, Jessica and Melanie. In the early years he was known to be a good kid and a solid student, little shy though which didn't help but making friends every time the family landed in a new place, but he just kept to himself mostly and was fine being the shy kid in the back of the room. In September of '68, Herbert was transferred to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and this time the family finally settled in. And Charlie was 11 years old by then and things were finally stable and every Christmas the family packed up and drove down to warm and beach Florida for their annual holiday, some warm weather, the beach and Charlie and his father hunting small game together out in the scrub land. So normal family stuff really, and from the outside there was absolutely nothing to see just yet. The inside though is always a harder read because whatever was forming in Charlie during those years, whatever was quietly building toward the night of January 3rd, 1971 is something that nobody has ever been able to fully explain. Not his family, not the investigators who spent years trying to understand them, and not the three psychiatrists who were eventually brought into try, all three of them failed. Up to this point in his life there were no outward signs that Charlie was a troubled kid whatsoever, but what happened that night is the turning point, and here's how it went down. The branch had just come home from their Christmas holiday down south, was a Sunday evening and late enough that the kids had been sent off to bed. Herbert was in the bathroom, shaving for the work day ahead while Ilsa, who was eight months pregnant at the time, was soaking in the bathtub reading time magazine, just unwinding from their travels. At 13 years old, Charlie got up from his bed and walked into his parents' room, headed straight for the nightstand, whereas father kept a 9mm handgun. He opened the drawer, took it out, walked to the bathroom, and then without hesitation, he shot both his parents at point blank range. His mother, well she died instantly, and the baby died with her. His father survived, though he was seriously injured after taking a bullet to the back. Well, after that, Charlie then walked to his older sister, Angela's room, and he tried to shoot her too. "And I get up and ab, I'm getting up, he comes into my room, Charlie, brandishing the gun, a gun, I didn't even realize what it really was, I mean, until he aimed at me, and he pulled the trigger." And what happened next is a very creepy, and very real moment that is rare in cases like these. Angela was 16 years old, her mother was dead down the hall and her father was bleeding out, and her little brother, standing in front of her, pointing a gun at her. "I saw the weird look on his face, the madness, the glazed-over look, I thought to appear." "He just looked more like himself and he said, 'What am I doing?' or 'What have I done?'" And she didn't scream though and she didn't run, instead she went completely still and spoke to him. She calmly told him that she would help him figure out what to do, and then asked him to go upstairs and get blankets for their infant sisters, and he listened like a normal younger brother would, and the moment he turned and went upstairs, well, she took off running. She got out of the house and went to a neighbor's, the ratcliffs, and banged on the door, but Charlie was close behind, so she took off to the next house hoping someone would answer. "And then I ran to the next house, and by the time I got to the next house, my brother apparently came down the steps, he was outside, and all my life I've heard him screaming after me, Angie, you promised you wouldn't leave me, you promised you wouldn't leave." A 16-year-old Sandy Ratcliff by the time she opened the door didn't find Angela, but instead Charlie. Standing right in front of her, he looked at her and said rather bluntly, "I just shot my mom and dad." The police descended on the brand family home quickly, apprehended the young teen, and of course asked him what had happened and why he did it. Charlie said he wasn't really sure, and in that moment everything inside him just snapped. He explained that he had felt something that he never felt before. He mentioned school stress, tests he needed to make up, and a report card. In his words, he said, "It was like I was sort of programmed to do it. I hesitated, but the next thing I knew, I had shot them." And three psychiatric evaluations were ordered, but none of them could establish what had driven him to do it. There was no diagnosis or explanation that satisfied anyone, just a 13-year-old boy would kill his pregnant mother and could not or would not account for why. But here's something that is very much so worth mentioning. Now, during that particular Florida Christmas vacation, Herbert took Charlie out hunting as he always did and the family dog came along. At some point that dog ran into some bushes and refused to come out. A Herbert got frustrated and he shot it, right there in front of Charlie. And Charlie was on the verge of tears the entire rest of the trip, but tried not to cry in front of his dad because Herbert had always pushed him to be tougher and stronger. That was actually the whole point of the hunting trips after all, to toughen Charlie up. And so, Charlie held it in, held it together externally, while falling apart inside. Then on the long 16-hour drive back to Indiana, the reality of it hit him hard. That dog was his best friend, his one reliable source of comfort and a family that moved constantly [BLANK_AUDIO] struggle to make friends and his father had just shot it for being inconvenient. Indiana law at the time didn't allow murder charges against a child Charlie's age, so he was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Indianapolis where he served one year. By June of 1972, he was released back into the custody of his family and the family made a decision that is perhaps understandable on a human level, but would have consequences that stretched across the next three decades. And they made a decision to never speak of that night again. In Charlie's two younger sisters, Jessica and Melanie, were told their mother had been killed in a car accident and they would live under that impression for the next 32 years. Together, the branch closed the door on what had happened in that bathroom and moved forward as if it could simply be left behind. But spoiler alert, it could not. Here is release and that decision to keep things a secret, the family needed a fresh start so they relocated to Orman Beach, Florida. The same place they had spent every Christmas. A year later, Herbert remarried and moved back to Indiana with the two younger girls while Charlie and Angela stayed behind in the care of their grandparents. And here is where the story shifts into something harder to get your head around. As Charlie Brant, the boy who had killed his pregnant mom at 13, he proceeded to build what looked from every external angle like a completely ordinary life. He studied electronics. By 1984, he had a degree in a job as a radar specialist with Ford Aerospace in Astor, Florida. In 1986, he married a woman named Terry Hellfrich, who owned a retail store in Daytona Beach. In 1989, the couple built a $600,000 beach house on Big Pine Key in the Florida Keys. So Charlie had a career, a home, a marriage. He waved to his neighbors from the driveway and they thought he was a genuinely nice guy. Easygoing, reliable, the kind of neighbor anyone would hope for. Angela had urged Charlie to be honest with Terry about what he had done as a teen and whether he actually did that, though remains unclear to this day. What is clear is that Terry's personal diaries from around 1993 contained some entries that suggested something wasn't quite right in her world. Inside it were writings referencing depressive episodes she saw Charlie fall into to what she called "weird talk." A general sense, it seems, that something about the man she had married wasn't quite adding up. And she wasn't wrong. And then there was one other thing, something Terry confided to a family member and never took to police. Something that only came to light years later when investigators were trying to piece together everything they could find out about Charlie Brand. As she believed, he had come home one night with blood on his shirt, and he told her he had been filying fish but Terry didn't believe him. And that date was July 16th, 1989. Sherry Parisho was 38 years old. She'd been living on a small dingy more near the North Pine Channel bridge on Big Pine Key. No fixed address, no close support network, and no one checking in on her regularly. As she was to put it plainly, the kind of person whose absence could go unnoticed for a long time. His murder, say, could land in a filing cabinet and collect dust for years without anyone pushing hard enough to move it forward. And that's exactly what happened. On July 16th, 1989, her partially-closed body was found floating in the water near the bridge. What had been done to her was extreme, even by the standards of people who investigate violent crime for a living. Her throat had been slashed so severely she was nearly decapitated. Her body had been extensively mutilated and her heart had been removed. I remember that because that keeps showing up. The body was found less than a thousand feet from Charlie Brand's beach house, a composite sketch of a man seen near the scene that night match Brand. That case, though, went cold and it stayed cold for 17 years. But Terry reportedly suspected her husband from the moment she heard about it. The blood on the shirt, the fish full-laying stories shouldn't believe, and the date matching perfectly. She said nothing, though, or at least nothing that ever reached law enforcement at the time. Also, between 1989 and 2004, Charlie just kept on living. He kept waving to those neighbors and going to work and kept being the guy nobody looked at twice. But a storm was coming, a big one in fact, and when it cleared out, the truth would finally be revealed once and for all, but not before a few more lives were lost. On September 2nd, 2004, Hurricane Ivan was building in the Gulf and heading toward the Florida coast. Charlie and Terry evacuated their big pine-key home and drove north. These niece Michelle lived in Maitland, which is a suburb just outside Orlando, and she was kind enough to invite them to ride out the storm at her place. As the kind of person Michelle was, warm and generous, who was 37 years old, worked as an executive over at the Gulf Channel, and was well liked by everyone who knew her. Then on the evening of September 13th, one of Michelle's closest friends, Lisa Emmons, was planning to come on over, but Michelle called her and told her she'd better not. She said that the brand may have been drinking and that there had been an argument, so the vibes in the place were off and she should just stay home that night, and that was the last anyone ever heard from her. In two days later on September 15th, another friend Debbie Knight drove to Michelle's house to check on her, and she was on the phone with Michelle's mother when she pulled up. The front door was locked and nobody answered, so she walked around to the garage and looked through the window. In there, she saw Charlie's body hanging from the rafters from bedsheets, and he had been dead for two days. As she called 911 and when officers arrived and entered the house, the scene got much more intense, and Terry was found on the couch in the living room and she had been stabbed seven times in the chest. And Michelle Jones was found in her bedroom, and she had been decapitated and disemboweled. Her heart and organs had been removed, and her head had been placed deliberately beside her body, arranged as if with intention. The weapons used in all this were kitchen knives taken from Michelle's own home, and Charlie had seen that killed his wife, killed his niece, and then it walked into the garage to finish the whole thing off. He left no note or explanation of any kind, he simply ended it, and in doing so it took every answer there ever could have been with him. In 33 years after he shot his pregnant mom in a bathroom in Indiana, it all ended here in a suburb outside Orlando. In the days that followed, investigators searched the brand home, and what they found inside removed any remaining doubt about who Charlie Brant actually was. This was not a man who had snapped in a moment of domestic crisis, and this was a man who had been living a concealed life for a very long time hiding it in plain sight. He had an extensive collection of surgery-themed books, posters, and clippings, the kind of library that gets built deliberately over years, not something that one would stumble into. He was a regular subscriber of Victoria's Secret catalogs. His computer searched history, it was filled with odd-topsie photos and websites hosting graphic violence against women. Add that stuff up to this guy's history, and the way Michelle Jones had been killed, and methodical removal of organs and deliberate placement of her head beside her body. Well, it told investigators this was not his first time, not by a long shot. Now, Charlie's job had required frequent travel around Florida, across the country and also internationally, so police began cross-referencing his movements with unsolved murders. They filed requests for similar reviews and jurisdictions across the U.S. and abroad, and almost immediately one case came roaring back, Sherry Parishow, a woman found floating in the water less than a thousand feet from his front door in '89. May 6, 2006. when Row County officially closed the Paris show case and attributed her murder to Charlie Brandt. But, Sherry wasn't the only name that kept coming up, and were others. Cases that couldn't be proven beyond a doubt, but couldn't be dismissed, either. (soft music) (soft music) And the first is Carol Sullivan. Carol was 12 years old, and on the morning of September 20th, 1978, she was standing at her school bus stop in Volusa County. The same spot she stood at every weekday. She never got on that bus. She was abducted and brought daylight from a place so familiar that nobody saw a coming. She was never seen alive again. Her skull was later found in a bucket. Authorities concluded she had been murdered and decapitated. Charlie, he was 21 years old and living in Volusa County at that very time. There is no forensic evidence directly tying him to Carol's death so the case remains officially open, but when investigators mapped his movements against the geography of her disappearance, it definitely could have been something Charlie did. And the second name is Lisa Saunders. Lisa was 20 years old in December of 1988, seven months before Sherry Parisho was pulled from the water. Now she was beaten, stabbed, and dragged from her car on big pine key. When her body was found, her heart was missing. Investigators have never been able to determine conclusively whether it was removed by an attacker or by scavengers in the time before she was discovered. And that ambiguity is really the only thing keeping this case from being more clearly connected to Bran. Everything else fits though, the location, the timing, the method. And Charlie Bran, I've been living nearby for months. And then there's Darlene Toller. In November of '95, Toller's body was found wrapped in plastic and blankets and dumped beside a highway near Miami. As she too had been decapitated and her heart had been removed. As she was 38 years old, the same age as Sherry Parisho, but nobody had reported her missing in time to matter. And Bran, he used that highway regularly for work. After his death, investigators examined his personal mileage records. And they were meticulous and detailed records of a careful and organized man. On the day Darlene Toller was murdered, there was a single entry, 100 miles. Just about the exact distance from big pine key to where her body was found beside that highway. Police believed Charlie's true victim count could be anywhere from seven to more than 30. That number doesn't go down easy for a guy described by everyone who knew him as genuinely nice. And the worst part of this story is that very early on the system, well, they had him. 1971 in Indiana at 13 years old, with a dead woman in the bathtub and a wounded father in the hospital, assigned statement in which Charlie described feeling programmed to pull the trigger. The system had him and it held him for one year till his father petitioned for his release. Family then packed up and moved south and nobody ever spoke of it again. (gentle music) I think about what that silence actually cost. Two of his sisters spent 32 years believing their mother had been killed in a car accident. Cherry Parishel spent 17 years at the bottom of an unsolved case file. Michelle Jones spent the last days of her life in her own home with the man who would go on to kill her. And Terry Brant spent 15 years married to him. And the boy who felt programmed turned out to be the man who never stopped. (gentle music) And Charlie Brant died on September 13th of 2004. He was 47 years old. He may have started killing out of revenge for what had happened to his dog or maybe he just used that as an excuse he told himself before he opened Pandora's box. Either way, he never stopped. Even among all those meticulous records he kept, he never left an explanation of any sort. In the cases of Carol Sullivan, Lisa Saunders and Darling Toller remain officially unsolved. And dozens of other murders reviewed in the wake of 2004 have not been conclusively closed either. And likely are tied back to Charlie. And Angela Brant, the 16 year old who stayed calm in a doorway. And Ram, when she could, gave interviews in the years following her brother's death. She had spent most her life watching Charlie from a distance, knowing what he had done at 13, hoping she was wrong about what it meant. She had advised him to tell Terry the truth and she had tried within the limits of what she knew and what she could control to do the right thing, but it wasn't enough. And there is no clean ending to this one. No conviction and no final victim count. Just a garage in mainland, a mileage log, and a cold case list that is longer than anyone will ever know. And Charlie Brant knocked on a neighbor's door in 1971 and said, "I just shot my mom and dad." And the world believed it was over. But in reality, it was barely the beginning. (soft music) So that's gonna do it for today's episode of Every Town. Thank you so much for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the episode. If you're tired of all the ads, well, then go watch our episodes over on Spotify. If you're subscribed to Spotify Premium, you don't get any Spotify ads on my video, so have at it. I remember to come on back next week for another episode of Every Town, filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories because you never know. Every year, Town will be next. (soft music)