Murder With My Husband - 152. The Heartless Serial Killer

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

On this episode of MWMH, Payton and Garrett discuss the known and potential victims of possible serial killer, Charlie Brandt. Links: https://linktr.ee/murderwithmyhusband Case Sources: Invisible Killer: The Monster Behind the Mask (2013, Titletown Publishing, LLC), by Diana Montane murderpedia.org/male.B/b/brandt-carl.htm wikipedia.org, Charlie_Brandt wikipedia.org, Hurricane_Andrew cattstruecrimecorner.com/the-invisible-killer Florida Keys Missing and Unsolved (Facebook group) Newspapers.com sources: Associated Press, Palladium-Item, "Psychiatric Test Ordered For Boy Who Shot Mother," 6 January 1971, archived (www.newspapers.com/image/247927790), citing print edition, p.4 United Press International, Muncie Evening Press, "Fort Wayne Boy Faces Exam in Mother Slaying," 6 January 1971, archived (www.newspapers.com/image/250996134), citing print edition, p.28 The Miami Herald, "Murder mystery missing key element," 28 November 1995, archived (www.newspapers.com/image/640035555), citing print edition, p.2B Wanda J. DeMarzo, The Miami Herald, "Lurid case hangs on dog-hair tests," 3 February 2007, archived (www.newspapers.com/image/655322441), citing print edition, p.1B Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody welcome back to our podcast. This is murder with my husband. I'm Payton Moreland and I'm Garrett Moreland and he's the husband. I'm husband. All right well today we can jump right into Garrett's 10 seconds. Well most of the week I've just been putting up stuff in our house blinds, mirrors, who would have thought it'd be such a hangover. You know what I'm saying? He really does walk around with his little girl. No, but I don't know. We've just been putting up. I ordered, so before we've done it, we get blinds. Like cast someone come in, get a quote, and they install them.

And so I just went to the website, measured everything, ordered them, and just installed all them. Just scam. Yeah, I saved us so much money, and it looked great. So if you do that for a living, sorry. But yeah, okay, we won't say it's a So if you do that for a living, sorry. But. Yeah, okay, we won't say it's a scam if you do it for a living.

Yeah. No, but it worked out good just to do it ourselves. We just saved it a bunch of money. Yeah, it was great. And it was good for me to learn how to do it. So that's what we did this week. Been hanging out with Daisy. She's currently chewing on the plant in front of us.

But it's okay, because it keeps her distracted. Because last time we were recording ads. She's a little demon. She's a little demon. She was a little demon. Oh yeah, she was. She was biting the mics. She's going crazy. She's in the little mood.

Anyways, short and sweet today. So let's hop right into it. Also, if I do sound a little different today or out of breath, I am currently just fighting off a cold. So that is why and I'm sorry in advance. Alright our episode sources are Invisible Killer, the monster behind the mask, Murderpedia by Diana Montaine, Murderpedia.org Wikipedia, CaseTrueCrimeCorner.com, Florida Keys missing and unsolved, and newspapers.com. So for our listeners who live in Florida, you know that Hurricane season is simply just

a fact of Florida life. And you can't escape it, and you've got to be prepared. From June to November, each year, every news report of a new tropical depression puts you on edge, because you've at least seen images of the devastation a hurricane can cause. Most recently, it was Hurricane Ian that destroyed so many homes on Florida's Gulf Coast. Even the strongest shutters can't protect your house from being leveled by a direct hit from a category 4 or 5 hurricane. Sometimes the only thing to do is protect your house the best you can and then evacuate the area. So, in September 2004, that's exactly what Charlie and Terry Brant decided to do. When it seemed inevitable that Hurricane Ivan would reach category 5 strength and sweep over their

home in the Florida Keys. And when you think of the Florida Keys, you may only think of Key Largo and Key West, but actually there are 800 keys in the Florida keys. Among them are raccoon key, little duck key, sunset key, long key, no name key. That's creepy. Why not name the key? And then there's big pine key, and that's where the Brant's lived. Charlie Brant was a 47-year-old radar technician who worked for Lockhead Martin and he'd been married to his wife Terry since 1986. While Charlie earned pretty good money as a radar specialist, Terry also earned through working reception in a dentist office to be financially self-efficient. And they ended up not having kids, so both of them were

able to maintain full-time jobs, and with their combined incomes, they built a house on Big Pine Key in 1988. And now, in September 2004, they were faced with the possibility that this house, the one that they'd now shared for over 15 years, could possibly be destroyed by the forces of nature. So they shuttered it, they boarded it up well, and they got ready to evacuate. Terry's 37-year-old niece, Michelle Jones, had a house up in mainland, which is just outside of Orlando, and also away from the projected path of the hurricane. And so that's where the Brant's were headed to stay.

That's so scary, hurricanes. Oh, it's so devastating. Charlie and Terry had actually stayed with Michelle once before a few years earlier when their house was undergoing repairs and her door was always open to them. So after accepting the invitation, Charlie and Terry packed some bags and drove their Subaru out back across the seven mile bridge to the Florida mainland and then north on I-95 and the Florida turnpike, making the six-hour trek to Michelle's house arriving there on Saturday, September 11. Now, the mood was a bit off from the get-go, from the moment that the

branch arrived. Charlie seemed preoccupied and had this kind of far away look in his eyes and he seemed really uneasy. I mean, he was probably worried about his house, you'd think. But by the time they arrived, it was in fact already looking like the hurricane had changed its path and wasn't going to hit the keys after all. So maybe Charlie was just annoyed that they'd gone through all of this trouble and made this trip for nothing. That happens every year. That's hurricane season 4. You go through all this prep and then. That happens every year. That's hurricane season for you. You go through all this prep and then nothing happens. But I guess it's better to be safe than sorry. For sure. So Florida seems to have a devastating hurricane once every three decades. And at the time,

Hurricane Ivan was threatening Florida in 2004. Hurricane Andrew had happened only 12 years earlier, and that hurricane absolutely obliterated residential parts of Miami. 65 people died, and over 60,000 houses were destroyed, causing 27 billion dollars in damage. So, hurricanes are serious business. Like I said, it was probably better safe than sorry for them to board up their house. But it looked like Hurricane Ivan was going to show Florida some mercy. However, their Charlie and Terry were anyway, seven hours away from the comforts of their home.

Once they settled into their niece's house, Charlie phoned his dad and sister Jessica to tell them that they'd arrived in town. His dad and sister lived about an hour away in Ormond Beach, which is a city on Florida's coast near Daytona Beach. Charlie made plans to go see his dad the next day, and Terry had, for a long time, recognize that Charlie had kind of an uneasy relationship with his family.

Shows an actually that sure why Charlie didn't talk much about his family history, it did seem like kind of a complicated relationship though. In fact, Charlie didn't even invite his family to the wedding, but then again, neither did Terry. They had a small wedding with only close friends, even though that wedding was in Ormond Beach where Charlie's family lived. So it's a little weird, but not all couples

are as close with their family. The day after they arrived at their niece, Michelle's house, Charlie and Terry set out for his dad's house, and they got there at around two in the afternoon. They drank some beers and then drove to his little sister's house for a dinner. Hopefully they weren't driving under the influence, you know, but Charlie continued to be in a weird mood. He was distracted. He was a little bit irritable. It was almost like he didn't want to be there. Charlie told Terry during the visit, I think it's safe for us to go back home.

He almost had an urgency in his voice. He began insisting that they pack up and return as soon as possible. Which is not like they were in a boring area. Right. Right. Like they're still on the coast. They haven't seen a family forever. They hadn't even been away from their home for 24 hours.

Yeah. He explains to his family, he didn't even want to evacuate in the first place. He then informed everyone that they would be leaving the next day. No one really quite understood what the hurry was, though the tension between Charlie and Terry felt obvious at this point, like you could tell the couple was fighting. No one knew what may have been going on between them, but it felt like something was a mess. Meanwhile, Charlie's older sister, Angela,

wasn't able to join the family get together, but Charlie gave her a call just to check in. She told him that she was sorry she hadn't been able to attend, but asked him if they can maybe get together the following day, but Charlie said it wasn't possible. Sorry, I have plans, he said. We're staying with Michelle, maybe next time.

At the end of the evening, as Charlie and Terry were saying goodbye to his family, Charlie's clipped demeanor suddenly changed. Maybe it was all that alcohol that made him finally open up, because Charlie hugged his family as though it was the last time he'd ever see them. They then drove back to their niece Michelle's house, and by this point, Hurricane Ivan had already bypassed the keys, shifted its path path and appeared to be headed toward Alabama. I'm curious what he could have done. I mean, he sounds like he was just gone with his family, but they left the house like what, like he's dead body in the house, like what's going on.

I know why he's so urgent to get back. So urgent, yeah. I mean, well, if you drive this seven hours thinking you're just going to wait out the hurricane and then the hurricane doesn't come It's not like you had any plans there. So he's like I just want to get home Yeah, maybe I don't know either way Florida had been spared entirely But then the next day on Monday Charlie appeared to be as fickle as the hurricane

He now wanted to stick around another day and Terry was growing annoyed by her husband's indecisiveness. What? Yeah, she's like, what do you mean? As the day wore on, both Charlie and Terry were drinking pretty much non-stop. And their interaction was growing denser and more contentious. It was uncomfortable for Michelle, not just because they were in her home, and not just because they were her family. She didn't like seeing them fight, but it was a total contrast with their personalities.

They were both a bit eccentric in their own specific ways. Terry was what you'd call a free spirit, a late blooming flower child who pretty much said whatever was on her mind at any given time. Charlie had an engineering brain with a kind of goofy awkward presence. And he was the sort of guy who always wore shorts and the Hawaiian shirts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no talk. He had a rugged, outdoorsy kind of charm. But now, in the presence of their niece in her home, there was no trace of that charm. It was just pure acrimony from the time they got up, tell the sunset.

That evening, Michelle got a call from a friend of hers, a friend named Lisa Emmons. Lisa was checking in on plans that they'd had to hang out that night at Michelle's place. But on this particular night, Michelle discouraged Lisa from coming over. Things were tense. She explained her aunt and uncle were staying with her. They'd been drinking all day, and they just had had a huge argument. Lisa was like, okay, that's okay, that sucks, I'm sorry, that's an awkward situation to be in, a third will in your own home, basically. So she says, I'll just check in tomorrow.

Michelle was grateful to her friend for her flexibility and looked forward to giving her the play-by-play, the following day, once her aunt and uncle hopefully had gone back home. I don't know where this is going. I have no idea right now. Well, I'm not gonna tell you. Oh, okay. So the next day

Lisa called Michelle's house, but the phone just rang and rang. No one answered. She waited a little while longer and called back But again, there was still no answer. Then another friend of Michelle's called the house a friend named Debbie Knight And she also got no answer and she'd called the house several times that day, as did members of Michelle's family. The calls all went unanswered all day long. On Wednesday, the next day, Debbie called her mom and told her she was worried about her friend Michelle. She couldn't figure out why she'd

be unavailable for so long. It was out of character for her. She says, I'm going to go over to the house, stay on the phone with me. I just want to check. So she drove over to Michelle's house, which was pretty close by. She got out of her car and knocked on the front door and waited. But no one came to the door. She couldn't hear anyone inside. She tried turning the knob, but it was locked, and the window shades were all drawn. So she went around to the garage and tried pulling up the garage door and it started to move. It was unlocked.

She pulled it up and walked into the garage and once inside she was shocked by what she saw. It was Charlie Brandt, Michelle's uncle, hanging by his neck from the rafters. He was hanging by bed sheets and he had already begun decomposing. Debbie was shaken and her mother could hear it. What's wrong? Her mom asked. Debbie told her Michelle's uncle Charlie. I think hanged himself. He's dead right in front of me. So her mom urged her to hang up the

phone and call the police so she did. Police in paramedics arrived and police entered the house and immediately realized that Charlie brand hanging from the rafters was only a preview of the horrors that awaited them inside. I was going to say where's the rest of them. Right? Slumped over on the couch in the living room was the body of Terry Branch, that's Charlie's wife. She had seven stab wounds and in her bedroom was Terry's niece Michelle and the condition of Michelle's body made all the first responders lose their composure. She hadn't just been stabbed,

she had been decapitated. What? Disembowled. Her heart was cut out of her, as well as all of her other organs. Her left leg was removed with what appeared to be surgical precision, and both of her breasts had been cut off. How is this even possible? And then Michelle's head had been placed on the bed next to her and turned towards her as though facing the rest of her body. And it's, I mean, obviously the most shocking scene that these law enforcement professionals had ever seen. In Michelle's kitchen police found knives that appeared to have been the instruments used to kill and dismember this appeared to be no ordinary

murder suicide, which is what it looked like. Not that there's any such thing as an ordinary murder suicide, but there was clearly something deeper at work here. Something sick. A search of the branch house down in Big Pine Key, the house that they had just temporarily evacuated, revealed a few of the pieces to the puzzle. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Have you ever found yourself

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surgery, as well as posters and clippings of both images from surgery, as well as lingerie pictures. Charlie was a monthly subscriber to Victoria's Secret catalogs. The search history on his computer revealed that he frequently searched online for stuff like autopsy photos and sexual violent images, even visiting snuff film websites. A snuff film for those who don't know is an amateur movie made for the purpose of documenting an actual murder for the entertainment of the sickos behind the camera and whatever sickos might be drawn to that.

I don't know, but I thought it was something else completely. So sickos obviously liked Charlie Brandt, but what investigators began learning, and maybe this is the reason Charlie didn't want his family at his wedding, was that everyone in Charlie's family already knew he was a murderer. What? And he had worn this title for most of his life. It all began back on January 4th, 1975. Why is the white even with him?

When Charlie Brant was only 13 years old. Charlie and his family had moved around a lot up to this point because of his dad's career, but at this time they were living in a two-story house in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And they had just returned home from a vacation in Florida, which was where the kids' grandparents lived. At this time, Charlie's immediate family consisted of himself, his father Herbert, his mother Ilsa, and his three sisters, Angela, Melanie, and Jessica. Angela was older than Charlie, shoes 15, while Jessica and Melanie

were three years old and two years old respectively. So there was quite a big shift in between. And their mother Ilsa was eight months pregnant with what would be another child. Now, Charlie had never up to this point had any significant issues. He seemed like a normal kid. Described by those who knew him, he was quiet and well behaved. I don't think that would be a normal kid. Yeah. Quiet and well behaved. But on that evening, Charlie did something no one could have expected. While his father was shaving and getting ready to turn in for the evening, and his very pregnant mother was soaking in the bathtub a few feet away, and his sister Angela was

reading in her bedroom, and his two younger sisters were already in bed, Charlie walked into the bathroom where his mother was bathing and his father was shaving, and he walked in with his father's fully loaded luger pistol, which Charlie had plucked from his dad's nightstand. His parents were distracted, talking to each other, and didn't even notice, as Charlie, 13 year old, raised the gun and pointed it at his dad. And just as his old man looked into the mirror and saw what was happening, he yelled, Charlie don't. Right as Charlie fired one bullet into his father's back.

Oh my gosh. He then walked over to the bathtub where his mother watched in horror as her 13 year old son fired five rounds into her at nearly point blank range. I'm so confused. The last words Ilsa managed to yell out were Angela, call the police, and she then slumped into the bathtub and died. Angela approached the bathroom door and saw the horrific scene inside and just then Charlie

pointed the gun at his sister and pulled the trigger but the gun jammed. Angela begged her brother to stop but he appeared unreachable. He had a far away look in his eyes. A cold glazed over expression like he was in a daze. He then lunged at his sister and attacked her. And as they struggled, Angela kept telling her brother that she loved him over and over again. And she saw that blank expression start to disappear as though wherever Charlie had gone, he was returning. He was coming back to his senses. He then asked his sister,

what did I do? Angela told him she didn't know but they'd work through it and everything was gonna be okay. Gosh, I have a hard time with this I don't know I I don't know how I feel. I don't think I'm gonna express how I feel because I don't know how I feel. I just think it's crazy He killed his mom and dad at 13 years old. I mean 13's you know Between what right and wrong at that point and he didn't go to jail you know between what right and wrong at that point and he didn't go to jail. Obviously some things not right. 100%. So how is he out in the world? We'll get there. Okay. She gave him some blankets and asked him to take them upstairs and get Melanie and Jessica so they could leave the house and seek help. Angela watched as Charlie walked up the stairs

backwards, facing her the entire time, begging her not to leave him. And she assured him, she wasn't going to. But once Charlie was far enough away, Angela made a run for it, darting from the house toward the nearest neighbor. Charlie gave chase, with betrayal, oozing from his voice as he called out, you said you wouldn't leave me. While Angela banged on her next door neighbor's door. Charlie got closer and Angela again ran. But just then, the neighbors opened the front door to find out what all the commotion was about and that's

when they found Charlie standing on their porch. I just shot my mom and dad, he told them. At the scene, cops and medics found Charlie's mother dead and they were unable to save her unborn baby. Charlie's father was in serious condition with a gunshot wound to his back. He was able to gather enough strength to tell police that it was Charlie, his own son, who was responsible, before being rushed to the hospital in an effort to save his life. Charlie was handcuffed and taken down to the police station. During the interview, police of course asked him why he'd done it, why he'd shot his parents and attempted to shoot his sister.

Charlie could offer no explanation other than to say, I just felt the urge. Everything seemed to snap. Oh my. He indicated that it may have been due to pressures at school and pressures at home. Earlier that very evening, he had been sternly reprimanded by his mother for not finishing a homework assignment. And then he told police that while they were out of town in Florida, while they were out hunting, his father shot and killed the family dog. Charlie's beloved beagle, which Charlie considered his only friend. Now because Charlie was only 13 years old when he killed his mother and shot his father,

who ended up surviving, state law at the time prohibited criminal prosecution of minors under the age of 14. So a grand jury decided that he was not criminally responsible. Charlie was evaluated by a mental health professional and was deemed to suffer from, quote, a serious psychiatric disorder. Oh, you think? And so Charlie was committed for treatment at a psychiatric hospital in Indianapolis, which gosh, it's just, it's so hard, but I'm glad that he hopefully is getting the help he

needed, but obviously it's not going to turn out. It's just hard because I am all about people changing. Don't get me wrong, but I don't know if you can change that. It wasn't just like, so I think there's a big difference between breaking and entering, and then maybe killing someone and what Charlie did. There's obviously a big difference between going up to your parents and killing them for zero reason. I mean,

like, I don't think breaking and entering and killing someone's obviously okay, but I mean, I think I can wrap my brain around why they might have killed someone, like if it was they were stealing something, right? Yeah, I'm motive, but there was zero motive. Well, he was bait like possessed almost. We're really in deep mud here because he's 13 and this is a hard conversation. There's going to be a lot of opinions. I'm just telling you my opinion and we can move on. It's just insane. Okay, but here's the issue. He goes to the psychiatric hospital, but he ends up only spending a year there. After which, he was released back to his father who had forgiven Charlie for what he had

done. And Herbert imposed a strict family policy for bidding any discussion of what had happened that evening in 1971, which, okay. But the Fort Wayne community didn't forgive and forget as easily as Charlie's dad and the weight of public perception because of the degree to which Charlie's offenses were publicized in the local media became too much for the brands. Because of this, Herbert moved his family down to Orman Beach, Florida, where Charlie was able to resume living a normal life, attending high school, getting fairly good grades, Herbert

eventually met someone new and remarried, and that's when he packed up the family, his new wife, and the two younger daughters, Melanie and Jessica, and moved them back to Fort Wayne, Indiana, leaving Charlie and his sister Angela behind in Orman Beach, where Charlie lived with his grandparents until he finished high school. And then the rest of Charlie's life seemed to be average, maybe even above average. Charlie went to college and earned an associate degree, and then became an electronics technician specializing in radar. He got a job with Raytheon, one of America's largest defense contractors, and that job took him to the Bahamas where Charlie was put in charge of intercepting the smuggling of illegal drugs into the United States. Charlie ran a

surveillance blimp called Fat Albert that was based out of the Florida Keys where he would later live. When Charlie first met Terry, his sister Angela pushed him to be open with her and come clean about his past and about what had happened when he was 13 years old. But Charlie couldn't do it. And he asked Angela to keep it to herself. This was a secret he didn't want to share. He didn't want his future wife Terry knowing what he had done. And that in all likelihood is why Charlie didn't invite his family to the wedding and generally kept his family away from his new wife. And was probably why he was nervous that day. And by all accounts their marriage really was a

happy one. Their friends and colleagues saw them as affectionate, both with established careers, both living in what many saw as a dream house, a beach house in the Florida Keys, a tropical paradise. But then in 1989, the same year they moved into their newly built house, something grisly happened not far from where they lived. Jumping into an ad and it is native. I use their body wash, I use their shampoo, we use their sunscreen, everything. We are deodorant.

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Yes, you energy. Energy for everything. Tap the banner now to learn more. Downtown by the A1A Causeway, beneath the bridge, connecting Big Pine Key to Little Torch Key, lived a woman named Sherry Perisho. Now Sherry was 39 years old

and known to locals as the transient who lived down by the bridge. But Sherry was homeless by choice. She was like Terry Brant, whom she didn't know a free spirit. Her spirit was merely free in a different way. She was a Terry Brant, whom she didn't know a free spirit. Her spirit was merely free in a different way. She was a former beauty queen with an IQ approaching genius level. She was well-read and had a broad range of interests,

and she was just a bit touched as they used to say about people who straddled the fine line between eccentric and mentally ill. On the morning of September 7, 1989, a group of fishermen were down by the causeway when they hooked what they felt like was their biggest catch of their life. And it was Sherry. She was dead, dead from, based on what the medical examiner could determine, blood loss. But it wasn't just blood that Sherry lost. Sherry, in addition to having had her throat slit, was missing her heart.

Whoever killed her had also cut her heart out very cleanly with clear precision. And it wasn't the first murder in this part of the keys in recent years where the victim had been found without a heart. So I'm just going to be mind blown if he's killed multiple people this whole time. Like that's insane. And no one ever knew. Well in December of 1988, a 20 yearold leukemia survivor named Lisa Sanders attended a party on no-name key and a house at the end of no-name road. The last time Lisa was seen alive was around

9.30 that night when she left the party and walked away on foot. The next day, only a couple hours after her parents reported her missing when she fell to return home. Lisa's badly battered body was found in a gravel pit. She had been stabbed, beaten and tied to a car with a rope around her neck and dragged, and her heart was also missing from her body. But these two murders in the span of just 10 months, both in the same general area where the victims' hearts were missing, left authorities and the press speculating that there may be some kind of devil-worshipping cult in the area, making human sacrifices. Again, this was the 1980s. But one person who wasn't convinced that it was a cult was Terry Brant, the wife of Charlie Brant.

She'd heard about Sherry's murder, I mean obviously, it was just a quarter mile away from the brand's home. And there was a composite sketch of a suspicious man seen crossing the highway the night of Sherry's murder and that sketch sort of looked like Charlie, her husband. But the thing that really shook Terry was that very same night she came home to find Charlie inside the fish cleaning room of their house. That's right, they had a fish cleaning room. And Charlie was covered in blood, her husband. The sink also was just bathed in blood. And there was not a fish to be seen anywhere. And if there had been a fish, it would have had to have been the size of a Marlin to produce

that much blood. Yeah. Now during dinner one night with Charlie and his brother-in-law, Charlie stepped away to use the restroom and Terry took this opportunity to confide in Jim her concerns. It was probably a fish, he told her, but Terry didn't think so. She suspected that her husband, Charlie, may have been responsible for the mutilation murder down by the bridge. I don't know what you do.

She asked him, should I call the sheriff, but Charlie's brother-in-law told her she would be doing so at her own risk. Because if it turned out that Charlie had nothing to do with it, and most likely he didn't, he said, then that would probably spell the end of their marriage. And as that of risk, she was willing to take. Terry decided it wasn't, and that was the last time she spoke of it,

until the second half of September, 2004, upon talking to Angela, and learning about his childhood and about how he killed his mother. And upon talking to Charlie's brother-in-law and learning about Terry's suspicions in 1989, investigators were beginning to suspect that Charlie Brant not only did a murder suicide, but was also probably a serial killer. Authorities down in Monroe County in Big Pine Key were satisfied that Charlie Brant was probably responsible for all of these murders.

So they closed Sherry's case. But then they began looking at other murders Charlie may have been responsible for. Other murders of women where the victims' hearts were removed. And they found one. In Miami in 1995. It was on November 24th of that year that a woman's body was found inside a black plastic bag wrapped tightly in a sheet and dumped near a building materials plant on the western edge of Miami-Dade County. Fingerprints identified the victim

as 38-year-old Darleen Toller, a sex worker from Detroit who had lived in South Florida for the previous few years. An notably, Toler had been decapitated and had her heart cut out of her body. Police had no leads whatsoever until Charlie Brant's gruesome murder suicide in 2004. When they closed Sherry's case and realized that Charlie's niece's body was treated much the same as Darleens in Miami-Dade County, looked into it and learned that Charlie Brant frequently traveled the same highway off of which Darleen Toller was dumped. And he also kept meticulous mileage records of all of his travels and the day that Darleen was estimated to have been killed, November 23rd, Brant's mileage

log showed an entry for 100 miles, which would have been exactly the distance to and from Big Pine Key and where Darleen's body was found. Why would he cut the hearts out? Like, what does this have to do with anything? Oh, I think he just had some problem. That's so weird, like killing someone, but then doing what he did afterwards is a whole another.

I thought maybe he was selling them or trying to get money, but no, he was just doing it because he's insane. It's surreal killer. And so police are like, dang, this guy has killed more than we think. And they look further back in 1978, a 12-year-old girl named Carol Sullivan was abducted from a school bus stop in Volusa County where Charlie Brant was living at the time. Her school was later found in a bucket. And it was because of this, because of the likelihood that she had been decapitated, that police also consider Brant a possible suspect in her murder.

In all, the lead investigator in Seminole County, where Brant killed himself and his two family members found 26 different murders that bore some similarities to Charlie Brant's M.O. That would make one of the biggest serial killers ever. But it was only Sherry Perisho and darling toller that they were able to link to him for sure. Got it. And so those are the only two who have been closed with Charlie Brant as the killer, but there's still 26 other open murders where he is the main suspect. And he's dead.

So that's not like where we're going to get any more information on this, obviously DNA, but that's probably what it has to point. Also, like resources, I mean. Yeah. Because it means dead. Right, right. I mean, I think part of them is like not that they should do this, but why should we continue to look in these murders, but it sucks because they're never going to know

who it is as well. Yeah, and that was the story of the victims of Charlie Brandt and also the possibility that there are way more and he's a way bigger prolific serial killer than we think. I never understand, I'll never understand serial killers that have a wife and like a full on relationship and seem to really love their wife because they're not killing them.

I mean, he did at the end, but that's cause maybe he assumed he was gonna get caught. Yeah, I know. I don't understand the psychology behind all that. Oh, I think on that trip, obviously, Terry found out and then voiced her suspicions and says, and he that's why he was freaking out. I know what you did to your mother. And now I know you were responsible. And it's also possible. She said, I'm going to turn you in, which is like, songs. That whole thing is so bad. Oh, it's devastating possible she said I'm gonna turn you in. Which is like, uh, songs, that whole thing is so bad. Oh, it's devastating.

Alright you guys, that is our case for this week and we will see you next time with another episode. I love it. And I hate it. Goodbye. you