True Crime Database

Charlie Brandt

Following Hurricane Ivan occurring in their hometown on September 2nd 2004, Charlie Brandt's niece, Michelle Jones, invited him and his wife, Teri Brandt, to stay at her home in Central Florida. Michelle was someone who was very close with her family and friends, and was described as a lovely person, who would be the glue that held together friendships. She kept in very close contact with her mother when her aunt and uncle visited; her friend Lisa was due to visit on the 13th of September but was discouraged to do so due to Charlie and Teri having a drunken argument. Afterwards, Michelle had stopped answering any phone calls sent to her, worrying those closest to her.

Michelle's other friend, Debbie Knight, worried about Michelle, decided to check up on her on the 15th of September, staying on the phone with Michelle's mother. As the front door was locked, she tried to enter the garage but instead came across the body of Charlie Brandt; he had hung himself and his body was already in a state of decomposition. Debbie phoned the police and entered the house, where she then discovered the bodies of Teri and Michelle lying next to each other – Teri had been stabbed several times with a knife, while Michelle had been decapitated and disemboweled – her heart and various other organs had been harvested. It had become clear that Charlie had killed the two of them and decided to kill himself afterwards.

While investigators were trying to figure out a potential motive for the brutal killings, the police received a call from Charlie's elder sister, Angela Brandt, who revealed a prior incident years ago.

In 1971, Charlie had attempted to kill his father and sister and did kill his eight month pregnant mother. He was supposedly a normal kid, aged 13 at the time, who was doing well in school and didn't have many problems, so his reasoning for this was never truly known. On January 3rd, Charlie walked into his parents bathroom with a gun, and shot his father in the back of the head while he was shaving. He then fired several shots at his mother, who was in the bathtub at the time. His father survived the attack. Charlie then walked into the room of his sister, Angela, aged 15 at the time, who was able to talk him down after an initial physical struggle, and ran to tell the neighbours what had happened and to get help. In that time, Charlie had confessed to others of the (attempted) murder.

Considering Charlie was 13 and was too young to be put on trial, he was sent to a psychiatric hospital – psychiatrists who interviewed him reported that he didn't seem to show any signs of diagnosable mental illnesses, which made it more difficult to fathom as to why he would want to shoot his parents on this particular night. His father, surprisingly, was forgiving of what Charlie had done, and fought for Charlie's release. After only being held in the hospital for one year, he was released back into his family, who tried to forget about the incident and have a normal life.

It is not known whether Teri was aware of Charlie's past or not at the time of their marriage or before. Her sister, Michelle's mother, Mary Lou Jones, believes that had she known about Charlie's past, there is absolutely no way that she would have gone through with the marriage and that she wasn't one to be able to keep a secret. She had also never written anything regarding Charlie's past in her diaries. However, Angela Brandt's ex husband and a close friend of Charlie's, Jim Graves, believes the opposite, how he would have had conversations with Teri where they would talk about "the past" - in one particular conversation, he had asked if the couple were planning on having kids, to which Teri responded with no, considering everything that had happened.

One possible motivation for the killing of Michelle, some believe, was due to obsession/infatuation. While taking a close look at some of his diaries, he had spoken of Michelle in a more disturbing manner, always calling her by Victoria Secret and never by her first name – her father said she would have been livid if she had known about this. In addition, he had a poster of the female anatomy in his room – neither he or his wife were in a medical profession where it would be considered appropriate to own such a poster. In turn, detectives found that he had been viewing very ghastly/graphic websites, including those depicting necrophilia, death fantasies and violence against women. It was clear that he had been planning on killing Michelle for a while now, as he was apparently insistent on staying for an extra night at Michelle's despite their bags being packed and it being safe for the Brandt's to return home.

Due to the nature of Charlie's past and obvious psychiatric problems, police wondered whether it may have been possible that Charlie had perhaps killed others in his lifetime, and they sent out multiple alerts to other police departments asking them to look for any patterns in various cold cases. One cold case, which matched the way in which Michelle was killed, was that of Sherry Perisho in 1989, a homeless woman, who was found partially clothed, nearly decapitated, severely mutilated and her heart having been cut out of her chest. She was found less than 1000 feet from where he lived. After composite sketches showed a man who looked suspiciously like Charlie Brandt, police determined they had discovered the killer and closed the case in 2006.

The Jones', while also putting full responsibility on Charlie, also blame his father, Herbert Brandt, his sister, Angela Brandt, and the Illinois Criminal Justice System for allowing him to be released when he clearly wasn't ready and for not doing anything to stop him, or even giving the Jones' a warning as to his past. They believe that had the family done so, Michelle and Teri's deaths would have been avoided. They believe that the best way to go forward would be to have a public register of those who have offended in terms of murder, the same way a sex offender's register works.

While I personally believe there was a huge element of sexual frustration involved, due to Charlie's weird and bizarre infatuation with his daughter and the websites he had visited in his spare time, I also some fault lies in an undiagnosed mental illness that was never properly treated or addressed – had he been kept in a psychiatric facility for longer, this issue may have been fixed or treated with much more caution in such a way that an event like this would never have occurred. As for his subsequent suicide, I believe he did so in an act of guilt – he had claimed beforehand, after the murder of his mother, that he didn't know why he did it and seemed to feel remorse for what he had done, showing that he wasn't too completely disconnected from reality. But until then, this all remains speculation and we will never truly know what was going on inside the head of Charlie Brandt.

If anyone has any suggestions or requests of things for me to write about, please comment or message me, all are welcome. I hope to be able to have written enough of these little biographies to publish the best ones someday so anything will be well appreciated.

Thank you x