February 27, 2024 • 32 mins
When Todd started looking into Steve’s unusual adoption, he was faced with different versions of events. The story Steve's adoptive mother Mary told him and the tale Sandi told don’t line up, except for one detail: the tiny Honda they both remember from the day Sandi left Steve with Mary. For a long time after, Sandi said she searched for her son. Steve is skeptical so Todd tries to figure out what obstacles stood in her way, back in 1975. We discover Sandi lost another child, too: a precocious daughter named Suzie.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Previously on Hello John Doe.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I think everybody's got an origin, and I would just
like to know you know where up again. I'm up
at all sad or disappointed how I grew up, But
I just I don't know, just it is a big
deal to me.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
You want to a relationship with her at all? I mean,
would you like to have that?
Speaker 4 (00:22):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Maybe I could answer that question better once I'll find
out why she gave me up, if that makes sense.
Speaker 5 (00:30):
So I was in Charlotte, and that's why I met
Franklin Floyd.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
But I knew hi, Miss Brandon Williams. I loved the
fact that he was going to.
Speaker 5 (00:38):
Help me get my kids back and take me away
from the situation. Love him, No, he's creepy. He was
always creepy.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
At twenty five years old, Sandy spent a month in
a Dallas jail. She had written a bad check trying
to get diapers. The days were long and boring, and
she wasn't allowed outside.
Speaker 6 (01:01):
And scarily to a point that I didn't ever want
to do anything illegal again as long as I lived.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
It was nineteen seventy five. By then, she was a
mother of four, and she was afraid of her husband,
but still when she got out of jail, she wasn't
prepared for what happened in her absence.
Speaker 5 (01:20):
While I was in jail, and he picked the kids up,
and he took Allison and Amy to an orphanage and
left him at the orphanage.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Her husband, Franklin Floyd, had left town and he had
forced Suzanne, Sandy's oldest daughter, to leave with him, and.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
That's when he took her. And that was the last time.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
That she was seen. That's Amy Winkles, Sandy's third oldest daughter.
She was one of the girls Floyd left in an orphanage.
When Sandy realized what Floyd had done, she went first
to the Dallas police station. She told him her husband
had taken Susie. That's what she called.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Her, Susie.
Speaker 6 (02:00):
And I kept screaming, she's not his child, he's not
her father, and finally they escorted me out of a
police station.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
They didn't think there was anything wrong with Floyd taking
off with his six year old stepdaughter. Lost were looser
before the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of nineteen eighty and
they buried state by state. So Sandy went Defy headquarters
in Dallas. They didn't help either. She was in such
a state, desperate, in heartsy, that she went to places
around town, at the grocery store to see if anyone
(02:30):
in Saint Floyd.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
When I couldn't find him, I packed. This is really stupid, but.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
I packed everything in a duffel bag, all of the
girls stuff in a duffel bag, and started. Because somebody
said he went to Michigan hitshriking sounds STERI well, but
back then it wasn't like that. I went to a
truck stop and a truck driver said.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
What are you doing? And I told him what I
was doing and why I was doing.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
And then I must have been really freaky looking, because
I don't worried about combing my hair.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
I was just I was going to find her. I
had to find her.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
One truck driver gave me to another truck driver, to
another truck that there was no nobody ever said anything
about sex, nobody ever said anything about money. They put
the girls in the beds in the back of the truck,
made sure everybody ate took me where I wanted to go,
said that there any king can do to help you.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
But there was only so much that they or Sandy
could do. Here's Sandy's youngest Dorothy, who hadn't been born
when all this was going on. She's forty two, a
motorcycling enthusiast with three kids of her own.
Speaker 7 (03:35):
You know, they didn't have the missing children's yet, they
didn't have none of that stuff. When she was talking
with the police, as she was going through the different
states and everything, they were telling her that there was
nothing that they can do because she was married to him.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
Legally, he had the right to take them.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
At that time, I called the FBI about it. They
couldn't comment on Susie's case in particular or what law
should have protected her, but they tell me something incredible.
They never found a missing person's report for Susy. Authorities
in North Carolina didn't take one, which is why Susy
was never in any databasis like NamUs. This was nineteen
seventy five. It wasn't a crime to take your step
(04:14):
child away from their biological parent. It wasn't kidnapping. But
Sandy's instincts told her something was really wrong, so she
went to the Salvation Army, which has a program that
reconnects lost relatives.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
I mean when I went to the Salvation Army and
told them what they said, You know, you were married
to him. There's nothing we can do to help. And
they looked at me like, you're a woman, Just get
on with the program.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
And Sandy said her own flesh and blood barely registered
that their granddaughter was missing.
Speaker 5 (04:44):
The Tulsa police called my mom and dad, and my
mom and dad said, oh, well, let her do what
she wants to do, and that was the end of that.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Her parents wouldn't come to Oklahoma and help her search.
Sandy looked everwhere she could think of, but never saw
her missing husband or her missing daughter.
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Susie never saw him, never saw them, didn't know anything
about what was going on.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Eventually, Sandy had to face what she didn't want to face,
that without the help of authorities, she had an uphill
battle ahead of her. She couldn't keep hitchhiking forever. She
had to settle down and make a home for the
children she still had. That's how it came to me
that two of Sandy's girls grew up with her in Virginia,
but Steve and Susie didn't. Sandy tell me some of
(05:32):
the story on the phone. What did you think could
have been happening to her. What was your imagination, like,
what is he doing with this child?
Speaker 6 (05:39):
No? No, at that point, I didn't think he was
doing anything like that at all. And I think now
that I look back on it, that was really naive
on my part, because to him, she was a princess.
He could do nothing wrong. If she hit Alison or
hit Amy, it was Alison or Amy's fault, it was
(06:00):
her faults.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
You know.
Speaker 6 (06:01):
She never did anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Sandy knew him as Brandon Williams, but his real name
was Franklin Floyd. By this point he had been terrible
to her. She knew he had a temper, but couldn't
imagine he had hurt Susie.
Speaker 6 (06:14):
And he just wanted her is what I thought. I
never thought it would be the nightmare it was.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
My name is Todd Matthews and this is hello John Doe,
A sleuth, a family, and a serial killer. The story
of a family torn apart by tragedy, and my quest
to bring them back together. Chapter four, The Honda. Since
I started digging into Steve's life, I learned that he
(06:47):
was living with his adopted parents in North Carolina, not
that far from where Sandy gave birth to him. But
Sandy didn't know that because, as it turns out, she
wasn't working with the same clues I had, And you
didn't know to find Mary.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
No, I did not know.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
That's because Sandy's recollection of the adoption is pretty different
than Mary's. Mary said she got Steve from a trailer
park in nineteen seventy four, just six weeks after he
was born. The way Sandy remembered it, she had six
months with Steve before Floyd started talking about moving. They
were going to pile into his Honda and head to
Saint Louis.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
And he said, we don't have room for everybody in
the car. And we drove one night to Mary's house
and took Steve and left him there. And I cried
the whole way back, and he said, we'll go back
and get him.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
We'll go back and get him. We'll go back and
get him.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Here's what's weird. Mary and Sandy's story seemed to diverge
at every turn, but in the then diagram of mary
Memory and Sandy's, the tiny car was the overlap. Sandy
said the car was too small to bring everyone, even
an infant, and Mary remembered a tiny car too. It
had two doors and a small engine in front. When
(08:13):
Sandy was handing Steve over to her in the trailer part,
Mary said she noticed Floyd in the front seat and
three little ones in the back. I'll admit this tripped
me up a bed. It made Sandy's story feel more
true either way. Sandy said she left Steve because she
thought they would come back and get him. Their separation
was only temporary.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
He said they were Georgia and Mary Washington, is what
he told me their names were. And of course I
was still thinking, I know, I was still not thinking
real clearly.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
How did you feel when they just dropped him off?
Speaker 5 (08:48):
Oh? I was upset, very upset. But I remember giving
him to Mary. I remember handing him to Mary and saying,
Mommy will be back to get you. Just give mommy
a chance to get where she's going to. Mommy come
back and get you, and kissing him.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
And they continued on their trip in the Honda that
apparently didn't have room for four kids.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
Well, when we lived in Saint Louis, we still had
the Honda and life always.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
You know, we're going this weekend to get Steve. We're
going this weekend.
Speaker 8 (09:19):
No, no, no, no.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
And then finally he said, you'll never get him back.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Even when she did look after she went to jail,
she couldn't find Steve.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
And I couldn't find Mary and George Washington anywhere in
North Carolina in that area.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Now it's possible Mary Washington is Mary Patterson. Floyd used
a ton of alienses. Maybe he changed Mary's last name
to make her untraceable. Still, the timing doesn't line up.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
But I don't know how he knew Mary. That's what
I don't understand.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Maybe from the hospital.
Speaker 5 (09:57):
He wasn't there when I had Steve. I didn't even
know him when I had Steve. I met him after.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
I had Steve.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
My producer Kate and I sat there with Sandy Parson
through the past trying to figure out how to square
Sandy's regulations with Mary's. Sometimes it was frustrating. I felt
like I'd shown up at Sandy's with a clear mission
to learn as much about Steve's adoption as I could
and bring those morsels of information back to him. But
(10:27):
there were some inconsistencies. Mary says Steve was adopted after
six weeks. Sandy says six months and the second thing.
They both remember the handoff happening in a trailer part,
but Mary thinks it's one in North Carolina, and Sandy
remembers driving out of state to give Steve up.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
I don't know what I could have done. I really
don't know what I could have done. And I tried
everything I could do, but it still wasn't enough. And
I could understand from his point of view, feeling like,
why didn't.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
You try hard?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Why didn't you you do more?
Speaker 3 (11:04):
This was nineteen seventy five, around the time the tent
Girl went missing and my father in law, Wilbur founder
in Kentucky. Finding missing children was even harder than it
is today. We used to say it name is that
children lay fewer clues behind, they leave smaller footprints. It
was hard. It was hard. We didn't have cell phones,
we didn't have the internet. It's exactly how he felt.
(11:26):
He doesn't understand why, because he felt like you knew
where he was, but you do.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Know, Oh, I wish I hadn't known where he was.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
What would you say to Steve if you could talk
to him right now?
Speaker 4 (11:37):
I still love him.
Speaker 5 (11:38):
I still see this little baby, and I'm I'm so.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Sorry about what I let be done.
Speaker 5 (11:51):
But on the other hand, what was done was a
blessing because he wasn't a part of all this.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Sandy didn't know it at the time, but in giving
Steve away, she shielded him from a serial killer. She
possibly saved his life. Later on, Sandy shared some of
Steve's Facebook messages with us. He'd sent them back in
twenty twenty one. When I read them, my heart just sank.
He wrote, why did you leave me? You said there
(12:25):
was an excuse? Was it me? Was I not good enough?
I am curious? Yet, in her telling, Sandy didn't intend
to give Steve up permanently, and she did look for
him in the immediate aftermath, but so many things stood
in her way, including not knowing Mary's real last name.
After I got home from my trip to see Sandy,
(12:47):
my mind kept racing. I had to tell Steve all
of this. I set up in time to play him
some of Sandy's interview. At this point that only ever texted.
They hadn't talked on the phone or met in person,
but Steve pushing off our meeting until one Saturday he
said he was ready. Janette, of course, was my side.
Speaker 9 (13:14):
He guys, I would expecting it today, but it's a
pleasant surprise.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Okay, are we all here?
Speaker 4 (13:20):
Let me speaker.
Speaker 10 (13:21):
We might walk out to the car and see if
we could hear better out in the car, because we
can't really hear you, guys, very good.
Speaker 11 (13:27):
Hold on, I gotta find the keys. I'm not prepared.
Speaker 8 (13:30):
I'm far Linda, we grabbed sleep per second. Thank you, honey.
Speaker 9 (13:36):
I'm a cat person.
Speaker 10 (13:38):
Are you a quieter?
Speaker 11 (13:40):
I promise you that.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I wanted him to hear what we heard when we
were with Sandy her side of the story this Saturday
in June. He was down to listen.
Speaker 9 (13:50):
We're going to let you hear a little bit of
a tape.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
So I had him listen to her story about the
tornado and how she started to spiral afterward.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
The girls were traumatized by the tornado because we were
in the trailer when the tornado hit and we had
no way out, and I guess I snacked at I
didn't know what to do.
Speaker 9 (14:16):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 8 (14:17):
All right? All right?
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Steve and Jeanette don't own a computer, so we were
talking on the phone, not on zoom. They connected the
phone to the car's bluetost that they could hear us,
which made Steve feel even farther away. I couldn't see
his face, but he seemed absent. Sandy says that she
was suffering from PTSD after a tornado wrecked her house,
and then she was barely functioning as a mother, and
(14:42):
she's admitted that. She said that there was a lot
of things she didn't remember, and she was traumatized, and
she said she didn't feel like she could take care
of kids. How seriously, Steve, do you take that Sandy
claims to have PTSD after a trailer was blown away.
Speaker 11 (15:00):
He still having a hard time.
Speaker 8 (15:03):
Thinking that she is not a terrible person.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Steve seem excited to get on the phone with us,
and I know Steve to be a pretty soft spoken dude,
but by this point in the call, he barely said
a word, and when he did, his emotions seemed muted.
I was hopeful they're hearing the tape would change something
for him. I wanted him to hear Sandy describe the
impact Franklin Floyd had on her, how he had taken
(15:28):
over her life.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
He destroyed all my pictures, most of my pictures of
my children, the girls, so.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
You take everything, every memory everything.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
How does that make you feel?
Speaker 8 (15:44):
He does yeh, he might need to say, okay.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
That's okay, let's take a minute.
Speaker 9 (15:51):
It was a very different memory, you know.
Speaker 10 (15:54):
He he doesn't know about any of the time that
he was with them, never heard about any of that.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
She doesn't remembered handing you off to Mary, which was
surprising to me. And I wonder if that's surprising to you, Steve.
Speaker 8 (16:09):
Okay, it's not to me, then why not. I just
think she's a manipulator.
Speaker 10 (16:18):
And I don't know, I want to I'm the type
of person that sees the good in anybody that after
watching how what he's went through, and I just hope
that she's just not trying to manipulate this as well.
Speaker 9 (16:38):
Well. And there wasn't a lot of resources. Just imagine
if we had do network or name this.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
Back in see if Y asked you wouldn't let us
call you a missing person. That we did anyway with
dot network because it's not regulating by the government, so
I could do whatever we.
Speaker 8 (16:50):
Wanting, which was a blessing for us.
Speaker 9 (16:54):
So it worked, I mean, it finally worked. It took
about a half about forty five years, but it finally worked.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
There's no doubt Sandy would have benefited from the dough network.
Think of all the volunteers who could have helped her
find clues. By now, Jeanette and I were the only
ones talking. Something was wrong with Steve. I recognize what
was happening because I've done it myself. I think Steven
drunk too much to numb himself. Maybe it's the only
way he could get on this call with us. There
(17:24):
was a lot to take in all this time. Steve
had assumed Sandy didn't want him, but she told us
that she didn't. We played him to take.
Speaker 5 (17:34):
I honestly thought we were leaving Steve with friends of
his to come back and get him, like in a week.
But I remember giving him to Mary. I remember handing
him to Mary and saying, Mommy will be back to
get you. Just give mommy a chance to get where
she's going and Mommy will come back and get you,
(17:56):
and kissing him.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
It was hard to tell how much of this sunk in.
He didn't say a thing after replayed him this stunning revelation.
Sandy or none of them want to force you to
do anything you don't want to do. But you're practically
begging have something to do with you. So does that
do you not feel loved and wanting? I do that
(18:19):
because you had to hear it with your own ears, right, Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Is there a part of that that changed for you?
Or what? What did anyone say that changed that for you?
Speaker 8 (18:32):
Got this? I want to be warning he wants to
be wanted.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
After about an hour on the phone with Steve, this
felt like something. Hearing Sandy's voice yielded a small breakthrough.
Steve admitted he wants to be wanting. In the weeks
that followed, I tried calling step again, wanting to update
him on the other things I'd learned. Sometimes he texted
me back and returned my calls, but sometimes he didn't.
(19:11):
I could tell this was hard on him. I think
he was reluctant to confront this hat on take on
fifty years of reckoning all at once. I think Steve
believed that Sandy had deliberately written him and Susie out
of her life, that once they were gone, they were gone.
But in talking to her other kids, I soon found
out that she never forgot about the two she lost,
(19:32):
even when she didn't always want to talk about it.
As she entered her late twenties, Sandy's life began to
fall into place. She went to a mental health group
where she talked about losing Susie and Steve. She got
married once more, and then finally to Carson Willett, her
husband of thirty years.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
My kids at first, believeing my kids. We were living
in an apartment and we didn't have much. We didn't
have a TV. The first thing he did was the
next day he came back and in at te for
the kids. He said, no kids should be without a TV.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
She had three more children, two boys and one more girl. Dorothy,
her youngest, told me that present day Sandy might be
unrecognizable to her younger self.
Speaker 11 (20:14):
She's a caregiver. That's all she is. She's just a caregiver.
She will give you anything and everything that she If.
Speaker 7 (20:22):
She's got five dollars in her pocketing, you need three
of it, she's gonna give it to you.
Speaker 11 (20:28):
Yeah, she's always taken care of us kids.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Dorothy only knows this Sandy. She never knew her mother
after the tornado, when she was inconsolable, when she could
barely take care of herself, let alone her children. But
that doesn't mean, Dorothy doesn't question some of her mom's choices.
Speaker 11 (20:45):
You know, I told my mom. I was like, you're stupid.
I was like, why don't you call your mom and dad.
Speaker 7 (20:50):
She said that her mom and dad didn't want anything
to do with her because they thought that she was
a whore. And my mom was never a whore. She
drank a lot, but she was never a whore. It's
not like she didn't look for them.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
She did.
Speaker 11 (21:09):
She was hitchhiking to go find them. It's not like
she gave.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Up, Dorothy said. Sandy always lived with hardape. Two of
her children were gone without a trace, maybe missing, maybe dead,
and it's the story her surviving five kids came to
understand too. Here's Amy again. She drives a school bus
in rural Virginia and it has an infectious belly laughing.
Speaker 12 (21:33):
I remember at one time, I saw a picture once
of the three of us sitting on Santa Claus's lap,
and I think I was two. I was really small,
and then Alison was sitting on one leg and Susan
was standing beside Allison.
Speaker 8 (21:55):
I think.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Amy's tried to conjure memories of her big sister. She
calls her Susan. But Amy was so young.
Speaker 12 (22:06):
I'm gonna have pictures of her now, But that was
the only picture I'd ever seen, and I tried so
hard to remember that, and I can't.
Speaker 8 (22:13):
It was that was it.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
In the past, Amy's been frustrated by the holes in
her mom's memory, just like Steve.
Speaker 12 (22:22):
It's always been an ongoing thing. But when you try
to talk to her about certain things when we were little,
she would change the subject real quick, just like, get
away from that, or tell you that's grown food business
in stead of grown folk business.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
Sandy doesn't dispute this. When the kids were young, she
didn't think they were old enough to understand. In fact,
she said, they wonder why Floyd didn't take them, as
if Susie was on a permanent vacation or something.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
We never had a lot of money or anything when
they were growing up, and they thought, I think that
she had a better life than Nigga, you know, like
they were kids, like they were missing out on something.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
But by the time Dorothy, the youngest, became an adult,
she got more of the full story. Because Sandy's way
of talking about the loss evolved over time, Dorothy knew
about Susie and Steve, who were gone before she was born.
She studied the pictures of Susie, trying to figure out
the whole story. She knew that she had two elder
siblings that weren't around, but that was it.
Speaker 11 (23:25):
My mom didn't have any baby pictures of them, but.
Speaker 7 (23:30):
I didn't know about Susie. I'm like, Mom, who's this?
You know, I don't see her. And then she went
into the long, you know, telling me what happened. And
then she said that she also had a son too,
and I was like, okay, I'm like, well, where's he at?
Speaker 11 (23:47):
I thing?
Speaker 7 (23:47):
I was like eight or nine years old when that happened.
She explained everything to me.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
I don't think Steve's wrong for expressing some skepticism about
his mom and why she doesn't remember. Even her daughter's
a little skeptical of their own mom. Dorothy name. You
lived close to Sandy and see her often. They know
she feels ashamed. Here's Dorothy again, and.
Speaker 7 (24:10):
Yes, she regrets that she didn't do everything that she could,
and yes she's putting a lot of the stuff on her,
the blame on herself. And I'm like, Mom, you know
it's not just your fault.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
The way Dorothy sees it, there's a lot of blame
to go around. She also points a finger at Mary,
Steve's adoptive mom.
Speaker 7 (24:30):
You know, I just I look at things different than
everybody else does. I guess you know you have my
brother the whole time, but yet you wouldn't give them
back to my mom.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
But Sandy didn't have any contact with Mary and Baum.
It's not like they knew she was looking for Steve.
Speaker 11 (24:47):
You know, I'm not just going to point the finger
at them.
Speaker 7 (24:49):
A point the finger at Franklin too, you know, And
I'm pointing the finger at my mom. I don't just
sit there and single out anybody.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
I can see where she's coming from. Each person played
a little role at keeping Steve loss for fifty years.
He grew up without knowing who his people were. But
in this story, there's only one man that broke up
this family, one kidnapper, one serial killer. I think he's
the one that deserves all of the anger and blame.
Sandy said she never gave up hope.
Speaker 6 (25:21):
I am friends on Facebook with seven Philip Stephen Brandenburg
because I always thought that one of them might be him.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Maybe she'd see a little blond boy who kind of
looked the same and watch him for a second too long,
wondering who he belonged to. Was he Philip Stephen Brandenburg?
Or should get a glimpse of a little girl with
curly hair and sapphire blue eyes at the shopping mall
and Philip pool is that her? In the early nineteen eighties,
(25:53):
missing kids became a bigger deal in America. This is
around the time the National Center for Missing and Exploited
chill and was founding. There was this campaign get the
faces of missing kids on the backs of milk cartons.
The idea was to get the word out.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
If there were faces on milk cartons, I would buy
everything of milk that they.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
Had to see if it was my kids.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
And at one point my parents told me that they
knew where Susie was.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Were they trying to make you feel better?
Speaker 4 (26:24):
Or oh no, trying to make me feel worse.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
And then in twenty nineteen, Steve found her. You know
the story. He found her on Facebook where she had
been looking for him.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
I was crying so bad.
Speaker 8 (26:40):
I don't even know.
Speaker 10 (26:42):
One.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
I didn't know how he found me when I couldn't
find him, because I thought I was doing everything, but
obviously I wasn't. But that's neither here nor there. And
I was so excited he was alive and at the
time he said he had a good life.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Was emotional. She had to process all of this, that
her child was alive and that maybe he had a
better life without her.
Speaker 5 (27:09):
Bittersweet, Yes, I cry a lot anyway, but happy tears
and sad tears because I missed all those years, but
happy tears that he was safe and he was happy
or fairly hey. He said he wasn't super happy, but
he was fairly happy.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Steve, for his part, still isn't sure he wants to
meet Sandy.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
I don't want to push him. It's at this point
in time, it isn't what I want. It's what he
wants and what he needs more.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
Than what I need.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
To Sandy, it was a miracle that Steve was alive
and came back into her life. I think that's part
of the reason she'd like to know him. She wasn't
afforded that miracle, was Susy. After she was taking at six,
Sandy never saw her again. When I was talking to
Sandy at her house in Virginia, her granddaughter Autumn was
(28:05):
kind of moving room to room. At this point, she
was nine months pregnant and ready to pop, starting to
think about the next generation of her family and the
stories that would be passed down. It seemed like she
was listening to our conversation or that she had something
to ask. Turns out she did.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
Why was it, Susie.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
It's the same question her aunts asked so many years ago.
Why Susie? Why deployed run away with the oldest?
Speaker 4 (28:31):
Okay, why did he choose her? Okay, I'll start at
the bottom.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
He didn't choose Amy because he thought Amy was a
little chubby Amy. Amy's always been, never been skinny of
day in her life. Not a bad thing, but she
was a cute, little chubby baby. He did not like
Amy because she was a hard headed to a herd
headed two year old. He didn't like it Alison, Alison
had health problems. Susie, he said, was the perfect child
(28:58):
sent from God to him. God. She says that God
gave her to him, That's why he took her.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Hearing this felt like a real punch in the gut.
How Sandy remembered exactly the way Floyd talked about her children.
Susie said her because Bloyd bleded she belonged to him.
The rest were saved because of their apparent imperfections. It's
this deranged thinking that would alter everyone's lives forever. Sandy
(29:33):
would find Steve in twenty nineteen, but Susie stayed missing,
even though her mother had been real close to finding
Susie back in her nineteen seventy five hitchhiking trip.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
In fact, I had stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that's
where he was.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
With her, but I didn't know he passed right.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Fine, Yeah, Floyd spent the next twenty years traveling with
her from state to state under the radar. We need
to realize that he had a criminal record.
Speaker 6 (30:06):
Maybe back until ten years after he had disappeared.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
He was a fugitive, had been on the run since
nineteen seventy three, before he had even met Sandy. He
was avayin charges for kidnapping. This kidnapping wasn't his first
and it wouldn't be his last. Next time on Hello
John Doe.
Speaker 13 (30:27):
Just the kidnapping was straightforward, like a lot of kidnapping cases.
And then when you find out that he kidnapped the
boy's mother and you find out he killed somebody else
and he had the evidence. Yeah, they got convoluted.
Speaker 8 (30:42):
Then for sure, people didn't talk about what happened in
people's houses, so nobody would have thought anything different.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
So after the story came out, it was very eye
opening for all of us because none of us would
have ever thought she lived the life she lived. Hello
John Doe is an original productions by Revelations Entertainment in
(31:14):
association with First and Last Productions from Revelation. Our executive
producers are Morgan Freeman and James Younger from First to Last.
Lindsay Moreno is the executive producer. Our producing partner is
ne On Hume Media. It was written and produced by
Kate Michigan. Our editor is Katherine Saint Louis. She is
also nil On Home Media's executive editor. Our executive producer
(31:36):
is Sharah Morris. Our development producer is Ian Lindsay. Our
associate producer is Rufaro Faith Maserua. Sound design and mixing
by Scott Summerville. Theme and original music composed by Jesse Pearlsting.
Additional music came from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions.
Frendall Faulton is our fact checker our production manager is
Samantha Allison from my Heart Media. Dylan Fagan is our
(31:59):
executive producer. Special thanks to Adelia Reuben at Nion Hume
and Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeartMedia. I'm Todd Matthews.
You can learn more about name us at nam us
dot com. The number for the National Center for Missing
Exploited Children's Call Center is one eight hundred the loss
that's one eight hundred, eight four three five six seven eight.
(32:20):
The National Sexual Assauld Hotline from the Rate Abuse and
Incest National Network is one eight hundred six five six
core six seven three. Okay, guys, this is the end
of the show. If you didn't like it, don't do anything.
But if you did like it, you make sure that
you rate and review the show. It helps more people
to find it and hear this wonderful story. Thanks again
(32:41):
for listening.
Previously on Hello John Doe.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I think everybody's got an origin, and I would just
like to know you know where up again. I'm up
at all sad or disappointed how I grew up, But
I just I don't know, just it is a big
deal to me.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
You want to a relationship with her at all? I mean,
would you like to have that?
Speaker 4 (00:22):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Maybe I could answer that question better once I'll find
out why she gave me up, if that makes sense.
Speaker 5 (00:30):
So I was in Charlotte, and that's why I met
Franklin Floyd.
Speaker 4 (00:34):
But I knew hi, Miss Brandon Williams. I loved the
fact that he was going to.
Speaker 5 (00:38):
Help me get my kids back and take me away
from the situation. Love him, No, he's creepy. He was
always creepy.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
At twenty five years old, Sandy spent a month in
a Dallas jail. She had written a bad check trying
to get diapers. The days were long and boring, and
she wasn't allowed outside.
Speaker 6 (01:01):
And scarily to a point that I didn't ever want
to do anything illegal again as long as I lived.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
It was nineteen seventy five. By then, she was a
mother of four, and she was afraid of her husband,
but still when she got out of jail, she wasn't
prepared for what happened in her absence.
Speaker 5 (01:20):
While I was in jail, and he picked the kids up,
and he took Allison and Amy to an orphanage and
left him at the orphanage.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Her husband, Franklin Floyd, had left town and he had
forced Suzanne, Sandy's oldest daughter, to leave with him, and.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
That's when he took her. And that was the last time.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
That she was seen. That's Amy Winkles, Sandy's third oldest daughter.
She was one of the girls Floyd left in an orphanage.
When Sandy realized what Floyd had done, she went first
to the Dallas police station. She told him her husband
had taken Susie. That's what she called.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Her, Susie.
Speaker 6 (02:00):
And I kept screaming, she's not his child, he's not
her father, and finally they escorted me out of a
police station.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
They didn't think there was anything wrong with Floyd taking
off with his six year old stepdaughter. Lost were looser
before the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of nineteen eighty and
they buried state by state. So Sandy went Defy headquarters
in Dallas. They didn't help either. She was in such
a state, desperate, in heartsy, that she went to places
around town, at the grocery store to see if anyone
(02:30):
in Saint Floyd.
Speaker 4 (02:31):
When I couldn't find him, I packed. This is really stupid, but.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
I packed everything in a duffel bag, all of the
girls stuff in a duffel bag, and started. Because somebody
said he went to Michigan hitshriking sounds STERI well, but
back then it wasn't like that. I went to a
truck stop and a truck driver said.
Speaker 4 (02:51):
What are you doing? And I told him what I
was doing and why I was doing.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
And then I must have been really freaky looking, because
I don't worried about combing my hair.
Speaker 4 (03:01):
I was just I was going to find her. I
had to find her.
Speaker 5 (03:04):
One truck driver gave me to another truck driver, to
another truck that there was no nobody ever said anything
about sex, nobody ever said anything about money. They put
the girls in the beds in the back of the truck,
made sure everybody ate took me where I wanted to go,
said that there any king can do to help you.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
But there was only so much that they or Sandy
could do. Here's Sandy's youngest Dorothy, who hadn't been born
when all this was going on. She's forty two, a
motorcycling enthusiast with three kids of her own.
Speaker 7 (03:35):
You know, they didn't have the missing children's yet, they
didn't have none of that stuff. When she was talking
with the police, as she was going through the different
states and everything, they were telling her that there was
nothing that they can do because she was married to him.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
Legally, he had the right to take them.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
At that time, I called the FBI about it. They
couldn't comment on Susie's case in particular or what law
should have protected her, but they tell me something incredible.
They never found a missing person's report for Susy. Authorities
in North Carolina didn't take one, which is why Susy
was never in any databasis like NamUs. This was nineteen
seventy five. It wasn't a crime to take your step
(04:14):
child away from their biological parent. It wasn't kidnapping. But
Sandy's instincts told her something was really wrong, so she
went to the Salvation Army, which has a program that
reconnects lost relatives.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
I mean when I went to the Salvation Army and
told them what they said, You know, you were married
to him. There's nothing we can do to help. And
they looked at me like, you're a woman, Just get
on with the program.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
And Sandy said her own flesh and blood barely registered
that their granddaughter was missing.
Speaker 5 (04:44):
The Tulsa police called my mom and dad, and my
mom and dad said, oh, well, let her do what
she wants to do, and that was the end of that.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
Her parents wouldn't come to Oklahoma and help her search.
Sandy looked everwhere she could think of, but never saw
her missing husband or her missing daughter.
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Susie never saw him, never saw them, didn't know anything
about what was going on.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
Eventually, Sandy had to face what she didn't want to face,
that without the help of authorities, she had an uphill
battle ahead of her. She couldn't keep hitchhiking forever. She
had to settle down and make a home for the
children she still had. That's how it came to me
that two of Sandy's girls grew up with her in Virginia,
but Steve and Susie didn't. Sandy tell me some of
(05:32):
the story on the phone. What did you think could
have been happening to her. What was your imagination, like,
what is he doing with this child?
Speaker 6 (05:39):
No? No, at that point, I didn't think he was
doing anything like that at all. And I think now
that I look back on it, that was really naive
on my part, because to him, she was a princess.
He could do nothing wrong. If she hit Alison or
hit Amy, it was Alison or Amy's fault, it was
(06:00):
her faults.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
You know.
Speaker 6 (06:01):
She never did anything wrong.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Sandy knew him as Brandon Williams, but his real name
was Franklin Floyd. By this point he had been terrible
to her. She knew he had a temper, but couldn't
imagine he had hurt Susie.
Speaker 6 (06:14):
And he just wanted her is what I thought. I
never thought it would be the nightmare it was.
Speaker 3 (06:27):
My name is Todd Matthews and this is hello John Doe,
A sleuth, a family, and a serial killer. The story
of a family torn apart by tragedy, and my quest
to bring them back together. Chapter four, The Honda. Since
I started digging into Steve's life, I learned that he
(06:47):
was living with his adopted parents in North Carolina, not
that far from where Sandy gave birth to him. But
Sandy didn't know that because, as it turns out, she
wasn't working with the same clues I had, And you
didn't know to find Mary.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
No, I did not know.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
That's because Sandy's recollection of the adoption is pretty different
than Mary's. Mary said she got Steve from a trailer
park in nineteen seventy four, just six weeks after he
was born. The way Sandy remembered it, she had six
months with Steve before Floyd started talking about moving. They
were going to pile into his Honda and head to
Saint Louis.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
And he said, we don't have room for everybody in
the car. And we drove one night to Mary's house
and took Steve and left him there. And I cried
the whole way back, and he said, we'll go back
and get him.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
We'll go back and get him. We'll go back and
get him.
Speaker 3 (07:53):
Here's what's weird. Mary and Sandy's story seemed to diverge
at every turn, but in the then diagram of mary
Memory and Sandy's, the tiny car was the overlap. Sandy
said the car was too small to bring everyone, even
an infant, and Mary remembered a tiny car too. It
had two doors and a small engine in front. When
(08:13):
Sandy was handing Steve over to her in the trailer part,
Mary said she noticed Floyd in the front seat and
three little ones in the back. I'll admit this tripped
me up a bed. It made Sandy's story feel more
true either way. Sandy said she left Steve because she
thought they would come back and get him. Their separation
was only temporary.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
He said they were Georgia and Mary Washington, is what
he told me their names were. And of course I
was still thinking, I know, I was still not thinking
real clearly.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
How did you feel when they just dropped him off?
Speaker 5 (08:48):
Oh? I was upset, very upset. But I remember giving
him to Mary. I remember handing him to Mary and saying,
Mommy will be back to get you. Just give mommy
a chance to get where she's going to. Mommy come
back and get you, and kissing him.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
And they continued on their trip in the Honda that
apparently didn't have room for four kids.
Speaker 5 (09:12):
Well, when we lived in Saint Louis, we still had
the Honda and life always.
Speaker 4 (09:16):
You know, we're going this weekend to get Steve. We're
going this weekend.
Speaker 8 (09:19):
No, no, no, no.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
And then finally he said, you'll never get him back.
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Even when she did look after she went to jail,
she couldn't find Steve.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
And I couldn't find Mary and George Washington anywhere in
North Carolina in that area.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Now it's possible Mary Washington is Mary Patterson. Floyd used
a ton of alienses. Maybe he changed Mary's last name
to make her untraceable. Still, the timing doesn't line up.
Speaker 4 (09:51):
But I don't know how he knew Mary. That's what
I don't understand.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Maybe from the hospital.
Speaker 5 (09:57):
He wasn't there when I had Steve. I didn't even
know him when I had Steve. I met him after.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
I had Steve.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
My producer Kate and I sat there with Sandy Parson
through the past trying to figure out how to square
Sandy's regulations with Mary's. Sometimes it was frustrating. I felt
like I'd shown up at Sandy's with a clear mission
to learn as much about Steve's adoption as I could
and bring those morsels of information back to him. But
(10:27):
there were some inconsistencies. Mary says Steve was adopted after
six weeks. Sandy says six months and the second thing.
They both remember the handoff happening in a trailer part,
but Mary thinks it's one in North Carolina, and Sandy
remembers driving out of state to give Steve up.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
I don't know what I could have done. I really
don't know what I could have done. And I tried
everything I could do, but it still wasn't enough. And
I could understand from his point of view, feeling like,
why didn't.
Speaker 4 (10:59):
You try hard?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Why didn't you you do more?
Speaker 3 (11:04):
This was nineteen seventy five, around the time the tent
Girl went missing and my father in law, Wilbur founder
in Kentucky. Finding missing children was even harder than it
is today. We used to say it name is that
children lay fewer clues behind, they leave smaller footprints. It
was hard. It was hard. We didn't have cell phones,
we didn't have the internet. It's exactly how he felt.
(11:26):
He doesn't understand why, because he felt like you knew
where he was, but you do.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
Know, Oh, I wish I hadn't known where he was.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
What would you say to Steve if you could talk
to him right now?
Speaker 4 (11:37):
I still love him.
Speaker 5 (11:38):
I still see this little baby, and I'm I'm so.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Sorry about what I let be done.
Speaker 5 (11:51):
But on the other hand, what was done was a
blessing because he wasn't a part of all this.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Sandy didn't know it at the time, but in giving
Steve away, she shielded him from a serial killer. She
possibly saved his life. Later on, Sandy shared some of
Steve's Facebook messages with us. He'd sent them back in
twenty twenty one. When I read them, my heart just sank.
He wrote, why did you leave me? You said there
(12:25):
was an excuse? Was it me? Was I not good enough?
I am curious? Yet, in her telling, Sandy didn't intend
to give Steve up permanently, and she did look for
him in the immediate aftermath, but so many things stood
in her way, including not knowing Mary's real last name.
After I got home from my trip to see Sandy,
(12:47):
my mind kept racing. I had to tell Steve all
of this. I set up in time to play him
some of Sandy's interview. At this point that only ever texted.
They hadn't talked on the phone or met in person,
but Steve pushing off our meeting until one Saturday he
said he was ready. Janette, of course, was my side.
Speaker 9 (13:14):
He guys, I would expecting it today, but it's a
pleasant surprise.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Okay, are we all here?
Speaker 4 (13:20):
Let me speaker.
Speaker 10 (13:21):
We might walk out to the car and see if
we could hear better out in the car, because we
can't really hear you, guys, very good.
Speaker 11 (13:27):
Hold on, I gotta find the keys. I'm not prepared.
Speaker 8 (13:30):
I'm far Linda, we grabbed sleep per second. Thank you, honey.
Speaker 9 (13:36):
I'm a cat person.
Speaker 10 (13:38):
Are you a quieter?
Speaker 11 (13:40):
I promise you that.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
I wanted him to hear what we heard when we
were with Sandy her side of the story this Saturday
in June. He was down to listen.
Speaker 9 (13:50):
We're going to let you hear a little bit of
a tape.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
So I had him listen to her story about the
tornado and how she started to spiral afterward.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
The girls were traumatized by the tornado because we were
in the trailer when the tornado hit and we had
no way out, and I guess I snacked at I
didn't know what to do.
Speaker 9 (14:16):
What do you think about that?
Speaker 8 (14:17):
All right? All right?
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Steve and Jeanette don't own a computer, so we were
talking on the phone, not on zoom. They connected the
phone to the car's bluetost that they could hear us,
which made Steve feel even farther away. I couldn't see
his face, but he seemed absent. Sandy says that she
was suffering from PTSD after a tornado wrecked her house,
and then she was barely functioning as a mother, and
(14:42):
she's admitted that. She said that there was a lot
of things she didn't remember, and she was traumatized, and
she said she didn't feel like she could take care
of kids. How seriously, Steve, do you take that Sandy
claims to have PTSD after a trailer was blown away.
Speaker 11 (15:00):
He still having a hard time.
Speaker 8 (15:03):
Thinking that she is not a terrible person.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
Steve seem excited to get on the phone with us,
and I know Steve to be a pretty soft spoken dude,
but by this point in the call, he barely said
a word, and when he did, his emotions seemed muted.
I was hopeful they're hearing the tape would change something
for him. I wanted him to hear Sandy describe the
impact Franklin Floyd had on her, how he had taken
(15:28):
over her life.
Speaker 5 (15:30):
He destroyed all my pictures, most of my pictures of
my children, the girls, so.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
You take everything, every memory everything.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
How does that make you feel?
Speaker 8 (15:44):
He does yeh, he might need to say, okay.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
That's okay, let's take a minute.
Speaker 9 (15:51):
It was a very different memory, you know.
Speaker 10 (15:54):
He he doesn't know about any of the time that
he was with them, never heard about any of that.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
She doesn't remembered handing you off to Mary, which was
surprising to me. And I wonder if that's surprising to you, Steve.
Speaker 8 (16:09):
Okay, it's not to me, then why not. I just
think she's a manipulator.
Speaker 10 (16:18):
And I don't know, I want to I'm the type
of person that sees the good in anybody that after
watching how what he's went through, and I just hope
that she's just not trying to manipulate this as well.
Speaker 9 (16:38):
Well. And there wasn't a lot of resources. Just imagine
if we had do network or name this.
Speaker 3 (16:42):
Back in see if Y asked you wouldn't let us
call you a missing person. That we did anyway with
dot network because it's not regulating by the government, so
I could do whatever we.
Speaker 8 (16:50):
Wanting, which was a blessing for us.
Speaker 9 (16:54):
So it worked, I mean, it finally worked. It took
about a half about forty five years, but it finally worked.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
There's no doubt Sandy would have benefited from the dough network.
Think of all the volunteers who could have helped her
find clues. By now, Jeanette and I were the only
ones talking. Something was wrong with Steve. I recognize what
was happening because I've done it myself. I think Steven
drunk too much to numb himself. Maybe it's the only
way he could get on this call with us. There
(17:24):
was a lot to take in all this time. Steve
had assumed Sandy didn't want him, but she told us
that she didn't. We played him to take.
Speaker 5 (17:34):
I honestly thought we were leaving Steve with friends of
his to come back and get him, like in a week.
But I remember giving him to Mary. I remember handing
him to Mary and saying, Mommy will be back to
get you. Just give mommy a chance to get where
she's going and Mommy will come back and get you,
(17:56):
and kissing him.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
It was hard to tell how much of this sunk in.
He didn't say a thing after replayed him this stunning revelation.
Sandy or none of them want to force you to
do anything you don't want to do. But you're practically
begging have something to do with you. So does that
do you not feel loved and wanting? I do that
(18:19):
because you had to hear it with your own ears, right, Yeah?
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Is there a part of that that changed for you?
Or what? What did anyone say that changed that for you?
Speaker 8 (18:32):
Got this? I want to be warning he wants to
be wanted.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
After about an hour on the phone with Steve, this
felt like something. Hearing Sandy's voice yielded a small breakthrough.
Steve admitted he wants to be wanting. In the weeks
that followed, I tried calling step again, wanting to update
him on the other things I'd learned. Sometimes he texted
me back and returned my calls, but sometimes he didn't.
(19:11):
I could tell this was hard on him. I think
he was reluctant to confront this hat on take on
fifty years of reckoning all at once. I think Steve
believed that Sandy had deliberately written him and Susie out
of her life, that once they were gone, they were gone.
But in talking to her other kids, I soon found
out that she never forgot about the two she lost,
(19:32):
even when she didn't always want to talk about it.
As she entered her late twenties, Sandy's life began to
fall into place. She went to a mental health group
where she talked about losing Susie and Steve. She got
married once more, and then finally to Carson Willett, her
husband of thirty years.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
My kids at first, believeing my kids. We were living
in an apartment and we didn't have much. We didn't
have a TV. The first thing he did was the
next day he came back and in at te for
the kids. He said, no kids should be without a TV.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
She had three more children, two boys and one more girl. Dorothy,
her youngest, told me that present day Sandy might be
unrecognizable to her younger self.
Speaker 11 (20:14):
She's a caregiver. That's all she is. She's just a caregiver.
She will give you anything and everything that she If.
Speaker 7 (20:22):
She's got five dollars in her pocketing, you need three
of it, she's gonna give it to you.
Speaker 11 (20:28):
Yeah, she's always taken care of us kids.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Dorothy only knows this Sandy. She never knew her mother
after the tornado, when she was inconsolable, when she could
barely take care of herself, let alone her children. But
that doesn't mean, Dorothy doesn't question some of her mom's choices.
Speaker 11 (20:45):
You know, I told my mom. I was like, you're stupid.
I was like, why don't you call your mom and dad.
Speaker 7 (20:50):
She said that her mom and dad didn't want anything
to do with her because they thought that she was
a whore. And my mom was never a whore. She
drank a lot, but she was never a whore. It's
not like she didn't look for them.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
She did.
Speaker 11 (21:09):
She was hitchhiking to go find them. It's not like
she gave.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Up, Dorothy said. Sandy always lived with hardape. Two of
her children were gone without a trace, maybe missing, maybe dead,
and it's the story her surviving five kids came to
understand too. Here's Amy again. She drives a school bus
in rural Virginia and it has an infectious belly laughing.
Speaker 12 (21:33):
I remember at one time, I saw a picture once
of the three of us sitting on Santa Claus's lap,
and I think I was two. I was really small,
and then Alison was sitting on one leg and Susan
was standing beside Allison.
Speaker 8 (21:55):
I think.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Amy's tried to conjure memories of her big sister. She
calls her Susan. But Amy was so young.
Speaker 12 (22:06):
I'm gonna have pictures of her now, But that was
the only picture I'd ever seen, and I tried so
hard to remember that, and I can't.
Speaker 8 (22:13):
It was that was it.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
In the past, Amy's been frustrated by the holes in
her mom's memory, just like Steve.
Speaker 12 (22:22):
It's always been an ongoing thing. But when you try
to talk to her about certain things when we were little,
she would change the subject real quick, just like, get
away from that, or tell you that's grown food business
in stead of grown folk business.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
Sandy doesn't dispute this. When the kids were young, she
didn't think they were old enough to understand. In fact,
she said, they wonder why Floyd didn't take them, as
if Susie was on a permanent vacation or something.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
We never had a lot of money or anything when
they were growing up, and they thought, I think that
she had a better life than Nigga, you know, like
they were kids, like they were missing out on something.
Speaker 3 (23:04):
But by the time Dorothy, the youngest, became an adult,
she got more of the full story. Because Sandy's way
of talking about the loss evolved over time, Dorothy knew
about Susie and Steve, who were gone before she was born.
She studied the pictures of Susie, trying to figure out
the whole story. She knew that she had two elder
siblings that weren't around, but that was it.
Speaker 11 (23:25):
My mom didn't have any baby pictures of them, but.
Speaker 7 (23:30):
I didn't know about Susie. I'm like, Mom, who's this?
You know, I don't see her. And then she went
into the long, you know, telling me what happened. And
then she said that she also had a son too,
and I was like, okay, I'm like, well, where's he at?
Speaker 11 (23:47):
I thing?
Speaker 7 (23:47):
I was like eight or nine years old when that happened.
She explained everything to me.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
I don't think Steve's wrong for expressing some skepticism about
his mom and why she doesn't remember. Even her daughter's
a little skeptical of their own mom. Dorothy name. You
lived close to Sandy and see her often. They know
she feels ashamed. Here's Dorothy again, and.
Speaker 7 (24:10):
Yes, she regrets that she didn't do everything that she could,
and yes she's putting a lot of the stuff on her,
the blame on herself. And I'm like, Mom, you know
it's not just your fault.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
The way Dorothy sees it, there's a lot of blame
to go around. She also points a finger at Mary,
Steve's adoptive mom.
Speaker 7 (24:30):
You know, I just I look at things different than
everybody else does. I guess you know you have my
brother the whole time, but yet you wouldn't give them
back to my mom.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
But Sandy didn't have any contact with Mary and Baum.
It's not like they knew she was looking for Steve.
Speaker 11 (24:47):
You know, I'm not just going to point the finger
at them.
Speaker 7 (24:49):
A point the finger at Franklin too, you know, And
I'm pointing the finger at my mom. I don't just
sit there and single out anybody.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
I can see where she's coming from. Each person played
a little role at keeping Steve loss for fifty years.
He grew up without knowing who his people were. But
in this story, there's only one man that broke up
this family, one kidnapper, one serial killer. I think he's
the one that deserves all of the anger and blame.
Sandy said she never gave up hope.
Speaker 6 (25:21):
I am friends on Facebook with seven Philip Stephen Brandenburg
because I always thought that one of them might be him.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Maybe she'd see a little blond boy who kind of
looked the same and watch him for a second too long,
wondering who he belonged to. Was he Philip Stephen Brandenburg?
Or should get a glimpse of a little girl with
curly hair and sapphire blue eyes at the shopping mall
and Philip pool is that her? In the early nineteen eighties,
(25:53):
missing kids became a bigger deal in America. This is
around the time the National Center for Missing and Exploited
chill and was founding. There was this campaign get the
faces of missing kids on the backs of milk cartons.
The idea was to get the word out.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
If there were faces on milk cartons, I would buy
everything of milk that they.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
Had to see if it was my kids.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
And at one point my parents told me that they
knew where Susie was.
Speaker 3 (26:22):
Were they trying to make you feel better?
Speaker 4 (26:24):
Or oh no, trying to make me feel worse.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
And then in twenty nineteen, Steve found her. You know
the story. He found her on Facebook where she had
been looking for him.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
I was crying so bad.
Speaker 8 (26:40):
I don't even know.
Speaker 10 (26:42):
One.
Speaker 5 (26:43):
I didn't know how he found me when I couldn't
find him, because I thought I was doing everything, but
obviously I wasn't. But that's neither here nor there. And
I was so excited he was alive and at the
time he said he had a good life.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Was emotional. She had to process all of this, that
her child was alive and that maybe he had a
better life without her.
Speaker 5 (27:09):
Bittersweet, Yes, I cry a lot anyway, but happy tears
and sad tears because I missed all those years, but
happy tears that he was safe and he was happy
or fairly hey. He said he wasn't super happy, but
he was fairly happy.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Steve, for his part, still isn't sure he wants to
meet Sandy.
Speaker 5 (27:31):
I don't want to push him. It's at this point
in time, it isn't what I want. It's what he
wants and what he needs more.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
Than what I need.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
To Sandy, it was a miracle that Steve was alive
and came back into her life. I think that's part
of the reason she'd like to know him. She wasn't
afforded that miracle, was Susy. After she was taking at six,
Sandy never saw her again. When I was talking to
Sandy at her house in Virginia, her granddaughter Autumn was
(28:05):
kind of moving room to room. At this point, she
was nine months pregnant and ready to pop, starting to
think about the next generation of her family and the
stories that would be passed down. It seemed like she
was listening to our conversation or that she had something
to ask. Turns out she did.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
Why was it, Susie.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
It's the same question her aunts asked so many years ago.
Why Susie? Why deployed run away with the oldest?
Speaker 4 (28:31):
Okay, why did he choose her? Okay, I'll start at
the bottom.
Speaker 5 (28:35):
He didn't choose Amy because he thought Amy was a
little chubby Amy. Amy's always been, never been skinny of
day in her life. Not a bad thing, but she
was a cute, little chubby baby. He did not like
Amy because she was a hard headed to a herd
headed two year old. He didn't like it Alison, Alison
had health problems. Susie, he said, was the perfect child
(28:58):
sent from God to him. God. She says that God
gave her to him, That's why he took her.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
Hearing this felt like a real punch in the gut.
How Sandy remembered exactly the way Floyd talked about her children.
Susie said her because Bloyd bleded she belonged to him.
The rest were saved because of their apparent imperfections. It's
this deranged thinking that would alter everyone's lives forever. Sandy
(29:33):
would find Steve in twenty nineteen, but Susie stayed missing,
even though her mother had been real close to finding
Susie back in her nineteen seventy five hitchhiking trip.
Speaker 5 (29:44):
In fact, I had stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that's
where he was.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
With her, but I didn't know he passed right.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Fine, Yeah, Floyd spent the next twenty years traveling with
her from state to state under the radar. We need
to realize that he had a criminal record.
Speaker 6 (30:06):
Maybe back until ten years after he had disappeared.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
He was a fugitive, had been on the run since
nineteen seventy three, before he had even met Sandy. He
was avayin charges for kidnapping. This kidnapping wasn't his first
and it wouldn't be his last. Next time on Hello
John Doe.
Speaker 13 (30:27):
Just the kidnapping was straightforward, like a lot of kidnapping cases.
And then when you find out that he kidnapped the
boy's mother and you find out he killed somebody else
and he had the evidence. Yeah, they got convoluted.
Speaker 8 (30:42):
Then for sure, people didn't talk about what happened in
people's houses, so nobody would have thought anything different.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
So after the story came out, it was very eye
opening for all of us because none of us would
have ever thought she lived the life she lived. Hello
John Doe is an original productions by Revelations Entertainment in
(31:14):
association with First and Last Productions from Revelation. Our executive
producers are Morgan Freeman and James Younger from First to Last.
Lindsay Moreno is the executive producer. Our producing partner is
ne On Hume Media. It was written and produced by
Kate Michigan. Our editor is Katherine Saint Louis. She is
also nil On Home Media's executive editor. Our executive producer
(31:36):
is Sharah Morris. Our development producer is Ian Lindsay. Our
associate producer is Rufaro Faith Maserua. Sound design and mixing
by Scott Summerville. Theme and original music composed by Jesse Pearlsting.
Additional music came from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions.
Frendall Faulton is our fact checker our production manager is
Samantha Allison from my Heart Media. Dylan Fagan is our
(31:59):
executive producer. Special thanks to Adelia Reuben at Nion Hume
and Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeartMedia. I'm Todd Matthews.
You can learn more about name us at nam us
dot com. The number for the National Center for Missing
Exploited Children's Call Center is one eight hundred the loss
that's one eight hundred, eight four three five six seven eight.
(32:20):
The National Sexual Assauld Hotline from the Rate Abuse and
Incest National Network is one eight hundred six five six
core six seven three. Okay, guys, this is the end
of the show. If you didn't like it, don't do anything.
But if you did like it, you make sure that
you rate and review the show. It helps more people
to find it and hear this wonderful story. Thanks again
(32:41):
for listening.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com