Speaker 1: Previously on Hello John Doe.
Speaker 2: So we had this missy person case Philip Brandenburg, and
Speaker 2: now Philips is identified and he's really a real person
Speaker 2: and he was really born, and it would just set
Speaker 2: such an amazing feeling.
Speaker 3: I knew the whole time. It just in my mind,
Speaker 3: in my heart. I knew that that test was don't
Speaker 3: come back positive.
Speaker 1: You blew their minds. Yeah you did. You wasn't supposed
Speaker 1: to be here, but you were.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well I chose him. If he hadn't been born,
Speaker 4: I wouldn't have got him. I couldn't love him anymore,
Speaker 4: with his mind or not.
Speaker 1: I was very worried and through the whole process, because
Speaker 1: you know, it changes a person when you find out
Speaker 1: so many crazy things. To find their birth mother, some
Speaker 1: adoptees have to look through paperwork, housed and musty warehouses,
Speaker 1: or they have to make lots of calls to adoption agencies.
Speaker 1: But for Steve Patterson, once we had proven he was
Speaker 1: really Philip Stephen Brandenburgh, finding his original mom was as
Speaker 1: easy as getting on Facebook.
Speaker 3: And I texted her and that's when she said she
Speaker 3: had been looking for me for all these years. And
Speaker 3: then she finally found her long lost son stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Her long lost son looking for him. That didn't make
Speaker 1: a look of sense to Steve.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was boring to find out who my
Speaker 3: mom was too, on my biological mom. But I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: He found her so quickly online. Couldn't she have done
Speaker 1: the same, After all, she must have known Mary's last name, right.
Speaker 1: Steve didn't know what to think about Sandy at first,
Speaker 1: but he did want to find out why she gave
Speaker 1: him up. You want to find your father, right, or
Speaker 1: at least know who you know who he is? For
Speaker 1: us to at least find out, Yeah, that would be
Speaker 1: pretty cool.
Speaker 3: I think that's one of my biggest things.
Speaker 1: But in twenty twenty one, he worked up the courage.
Speaker 1: He was wishing Sandy have your mother's stay on Facebook
Speaker 1: and he wrote, Hey mom, who is my dad? I
Speaker 1: imagine him holding his breath as he clicked in, wondering
Speaker 1: if Sandy would respond. And then Sandy did respond. She
Speaker 1: wrote I'm sorry, I don't have an answer for you, and.
Speaker 3: I got angry and I text her I probably shouldn't have.
Speaker 3: I was like, I just don't know who my dad is.
Speaker 3: Can you not tell me who my dad is and
Speaker 3: she was like, I can't remember.
Speaker 1: She presumably had a one night stand with someone and
Speaker 1: got pregnant, but she didn't have specifics up until then.
Speaker 1: I think there was a part of Steed that had
Speaker 1: been looking for a fairy tale reunion with this mom
Speaker 1: and dad, something satisfying, something that made sense to him.
Speaker 1: But this he couldn't cope with being the result of
Speaker 1: a fleeing to Steve. I think it took on additional
Speaker 1: weight that maybe Sandy didn't want him in the first place.
Speaker 3: And I hadn't really talked to her since well, I mean,
Speaker 3: I ask her Sevil times. I think everybody's got an origin,
Speaker 3: and I would just like to know, you know where
Speaker 3: up again. I'm not at all sad or disappointing of
Speaker 3: how I grew up, but I just I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's just it is a big deal to.
Speaker 1: Me, and enough for him to reconsider everything. He wasn't
Speaker 1: sure anymore if he wanted to keep getting to know Sandy,
Speaker 1: why should he meet her if she wasn't going to
Speaker 1: give him answers for Mary, his adoptive mama. None of
Speaker 1: this was much of a surprise.
Speaker 4: There's no way she know who Steve's daddy is because,
Speaker 4: like my mom always told me, you get up turned
Speaker 4: around through a briar patch, which one amedbriar stuck you.
Speaker 4: They ain't no way you could know who his daddy was.
Speaker 1: The not knowing nagged at Steve. He took to drinking
Speaker 1: more than usual. He'd gone all this way almost fifty years,
Speaker 1: and once he got to the end of the tunnel
Speaker 1: and found Sandy, he didn't find what he was looking for.
Speaker 3: I'll talk true, maybe maybe ten or twelve times. I
Speaker 3: mean she'll text me Happy Birthday and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: You want a relationship with her at all? I mean,
Speaker 1: would you like to have that?
Speaker 3: I don't know. That's I don't know. Maybe I could
Speaker 3: answer that question better once I'll find out why she
Speaker 3: gave me up. If that makes sense, that's just me.
Speaker 3: Maybe later I'm down the road again, revisit that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, but to me, it's Sandy. Sandy didn't feel
Speaker 1: the same way she wanted to know Steve. His adoptive mother,
Speaker 1: Mary confirmed that she.
Speaker 4: Keeps begging me and I want text her back, please
Speaker 4: have Steve come see me, And I said it's up
Speaker 4: to him, as not my cult.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just Steve. You had questions. I'd come up
Speaker 1: with some of my own through the years. Remember I've
Speaker 1: been looking for him for almost twenty years. I needed
Speaker 1: to lay some things to rest, and this woman, Sandy Brandyburg,
Speaker 1: held the keys to a lot of my questions. When
Speaker 1: I first heard about this family, I couldn't stop thinking
Speaker 1: about their two boys and Sandy not only was she
Speaker 1: Steve's mother, she was also the great mother of the
Speaker 1: other missing boy, the schoolboy named Michael, who disappeared in
Speaker 1: the mid nineties. As I've told you, a serial killer
Speaker 1: named Franklin Floyd tore this family apart. He wormed his
Speaker 1: way in by Mary and Sandy when she is in
Speaker 1: a desperate situation. That's part of why I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk to Sandy. I wanted to find out why did
Speaker 1: she end up Mary to Floyd, Why did she give
Speaker 1: up Steve and not the girls? And since Steve wasn't
Speaker 1: clamoring to meet Sandy in person, I got his blessing
Speaker 1: to reach out. My producer Kate and I were nervous
Speaker 1: about even calling her on the phone, figure sheould hang up,
Speaker 1: or worse, stay on the phone and tell us to
Speaker 1: go to hell, and I can see why it would
Speaker 1: be hard to dig back into the past and talk
Speaker 1: about the son she lost track of. It might be
Speaker 1: hard to cope with what kind of mom loses track
Speaker 1: for kids. But when Kate called her up, she was
Speaker 1: real sweet. She told us to come over anytime, so
Speaker 1: we didn't. What we found completely changed my mind idea
Speaker 1: of who Sandy was. Flip the story I had him
Speaker 1: my head for twenty years upside down. My name is
Speaker 1: Todd Matthews and this is Hello John Doe, a sleuth,
Speaker 1: a family, and a serial killer.
Speaker 5: The story of a.
Speaker 1: Family torn apart by tragedy and my quest to bring
Speaker 1: them back together. Chapter three, Sandy. We drove straight from
Speaker 1: Steve's neighborhood in North Carolina to Virginia as he san you.
Speaker 1: Turns out it was only a day trip. Think about that.
Speaker 1: So many of Steve's answers to his life are just
Speaker 1: a car right away. Sandy lives in Hampton, Virginia, a
Speaker 1: Chesapeake Watershed town across the bay from the world's largest
Speaker 1: naval base. It's absolutely beautiful out there. Look anywhere and
Speaker 1: you'll see a body of water going to Sandy scared
Speaker 1: me in a way. I guess because I wasn't sure
Speaker 1: what to make of her. I didn't understand how she
Speaker 1: had lost track of Steve and lack the wherewith all
Speaker 1: to find him, especially Ben's so close and Steve and
Speaker 1: Mary's descriptions to her weren't the most flattering. But there's
Speaker 1: something about this line of work that's taught me you
Speaker 1: just never know. People can surprise you. I've seen that
Speaker 1: once or twice before.
Speaker 5: My name is Sandy Willer. I'm seventy three, being in
Speaker 5: and out of Hampton for the past fifty years.
Speaker 1: Sandy welcomed us into her house. She uses a wheelchair
Speaker 1: to get around. Live us right next to her adult
Speaker 1: grandchildren summer in autumn, who came in and out of
Speaker 1: the room while we chatted.
Speaker 5: She's a TikTok star.
Speaker 4: Shy.
Speaker 1: The house was tidy enough but had no furniture. She
Speaker 1: had apparently recently gone through a move. My producer Kate
Speaker 1: and I sat on a couple of desk chairs and
Speaker 1: set the recorder on her walker. Sandy kind of looks
Speaker 1: up Jonnie Mitchell nowadays. She has this hippie beautiful air
Speaker 1: about her. Her skin is tan, her long hair singlessly
Speaker 1: term from blonde to white with old age. She has
Speaker 1: this essence about her, like she's got stories. Nowadays, her
Speaker 1: life is fairly simple.
Speaker 5: You're writing for fun. I keep my four year old
Speaker 5: great granddaughter, and I'm going to keep autumns and new
Speaker 5: baby when he's born.
Speaker 1: She lives in her family, stays at home mostly. She
Speaker 1: told me about growing up.
Speaker 5: We moved all over the place. My dad worked for
Speaker 5: GM and we moved all over the place.
Speaker 1: Born in Washington, d C. Then ended up spending a
Speaker 1: lot of her childhood in Detroit. She loves school, especially
Speaker 1: history classes. She used to invite neighborhood kids over in
Speaker 1: charge them a dime to play school. She was the
Speaker 1: oldest of three kids.
Speaker 5: I was the quiet. My sister was a model at
Speaker 5: one time. My brother was a trucker. I don't know
Speaker 5: what my brother does now. I think he's been chied.
Speaker 5: My parents were very Let me see how I can
Speaker 5: I put. I love my parents to death. Parents were
Speaker 5: very strict.
Speaker 1: Not only were they streak, she says, they were also fearful.
Speaker 1: They lived in a mostly white neighborhood outside of the city.
Speaker 5: My mother sat during the riots in Detroit. My mother
Speaker 5: sat in the suburbs with a gun at the window
Speaker 5: at night to protect us from all these rioters that
Speaker 5: were going to come and get us a night.
Speaker 1: Sandy's referring to the nineteen sixty seven race rights in Detroit.
Speaker 1: It was one of many cities that saw upheaval around
Speaker 1: the time. It's called the long Hot Summer of sixty seven.
Speaker 3: Detroit police raided that bar, called in paddy wagons and
Speaker 3: hauled off about eighty people to jail.
Speaker 1: That's when all hell broke loose.
Speaker 5: I do hereby officially recommend the immediate deployment of federal
Speaker 5: troops in the Michigan.
Speaker 3: Forty three Americans died in these streets. The city of
Speaker 3: Detroit was shut down.
Speaker 1: It was a time of flux for Detroit, which then
Speaker 1: had a population closer to one point five million people.
Speaker 1: It was a time attention, but also of motown manufacturing,
Speaker 1: the Detroit Tigers, and the World Series win. But at home,
Speaker 1: Sandy's dad was kind of living in the past. According
Speaker 1: to Sandy, he was a tough nut who had a
Speaker 1: lot of rules. Let's just say there were more don'ts
Speaker 1: and dues in this household, particularly if you were just
Speaker 1: a girl.
Speaker 5: I got grounded one time for six months because I
Speaker 5: said I was going to get my ears picture. When
Speaker 5: I was seventy, I wasn't allowed to get my driver's
Speaker 5: license because I was a girl. My mother became an
Speaker 5: interior decorator when I was in my forties. She stayed
Speaker 5: home the rest of the time. My mother didn't drive
Speaker 5: till she was twenty six or twenty seven.
Speaker 1: Sandy dated, but not in a way you or I
Speaker 1: might recognize as dating.
Speaker 5: Oh No, I dated, but usually very few single dates.
Speaker 5: It was all we did things as a group. I mean,
Speaker 5: there were like nine of us that hung out together.
Speaker 5: They followed us on dates, my sister and I. It
Speaker 5: was just really strange. Now that I look back at it,
Speaker 5: it was really strange, you know. At the time, she.
Speaker 1: Just didn't know anything else. Back then, Sandy's parents were overbearing,
Speaker 1: and you can imagine the toll that would take on
Speaker 1: a person constantly told what she was allowed to do.
Speaker 1: Sandy wanted a life of her own where she could
Speaker 1: get away from all of that. So when she met
Speaker 1: a nice guy who was part of the group, she
Speaker 1: jumped at the chance to gain some independence.
Speaker 5: Clip se Vegas. He was part of the group. He
Speaker 5: was part of our group.
Speaker 1: Sandy's family had moved down the street from him when
Speaker 1: they were in high school. Clip was a few years older.
Speaker 1: They were friends, but it wasn't some sort of meet
Speaker 1: cute situation. For Sandy. Clip was an opportunity.
Speaker 5: I wanted to get away from home. I wanted to
Speaker 5: do what I wanted to do, and so we got married.
Speaker 5: We didn't tell anybody at first when we got married,
Speaker 5: and then we broke it to him gently, furious. Furious.
Speaker 1: Sandy was only eighteen. This was her first chance at
Speaker 1: having the life she wanted. She could move to the
Speaker 1: big city and fulfill her dreams.
Speaker 5: I ended up teaching in a school in the inner
Speaker 5: city in Detroit, and we didn't teach history in government.
Speaker 5: I taught how to fill a job applications, how to
Speaker 5: get a bank account.
Speaker 1: Then Clip was drafted and Sandy was left to her
Speaker 1: own devices. Vietnam is often referred to as the first
Speaker 1: television war. It had a serious global impact, but it
Speaker 1: also reverberated in America's living rooms.
Speaker 4: By nineteen sixty nine, more than half a million men
Speaker 4: and women were stationed in South Vietnam.
Speaker 1: All these men are in the army, Some are draftees,
Speaker 1: some regulars.
Speaker 3: We've lost something over forty thousand men, now forty thousand
Speaker 3: American lives plus.
Speaker 5: Was in Vietnam while I was pregnant. I had my
Speaker 5: own apartment. I've met the girl Life store. Her husband
Speaker 5: was a military to everybody was back then.
Speaker 1: About a year after they were married, Sandy gave birth
Speaker 1: to her first child. She was named Suzanne Sebakas.
Speaker 5: When she was born, she had this little curly little
Speaker 5: girls and big blue eyes. I was so excited.
Speaker 1: You look a lot like her.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 1: There are baby photos of Suzanne in the house. They
Speaker 1: both have those same sapphire blue eyes, that big grin,
Speaker 1: the bleach blonde hair. Suzanne was precocious, a standout from
Speaker 1: the start.
Speaker 5: She was just always so happy. She I don't know.
Speaker 5: She had a strong personality. She loves school, she loved
Speaker 5: learning things, she loved doing things. I think she wouldn't
Speaker 5: have been a teacher, I really do.
Speaker 1: Suzanne, whom Sandy sometimes called Susie, was almost two years
Speaker 1: old when Cliff came back from Vietnam. By then, the
Speaker 1: couple realized they had no real bond. They divorced pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: After my dad was drafted. I've seen firsthand the war's
Speaker 1: lasting impact. Cliff was never the same.
Speaker 2: I had a little PTSD. I had the crumbling marriage,
Speaker 2: which doesn't help to go get off the plane at
Speaker 2: the airport and have the hippies call your names and
Speaker 2: spit at you.
Speaker 1: Cliff caught me a few months after I talked to Sandy.
Speaker 1: We talked about other stuff, but he didn't want to
Speaker 1: talk about her. He set that boundary early on. All
Speaker 1: I'll say here is that the two probably weren't all
Speaker 1: that well matched in the first place. By our early twenties,
Speaker 1: Sandy decided being her own with the kid was better
Speaker 1: than being under her parents' roof, and better than being
Speaker 1: hitched to Cliff. But beyond that, she hadn't thought that
Speaker 1: far ahead. And remember, this was the time of women's liberation.
Speaker 1: The peal was suddenly accessible. Women were becoming free from
Speaker 1: the constraints of motherhood and unwanted marriages. That wasn't the
Speaker 1: case for everyone. There were still many pockets of the
Speaker 1: country where that change hadn't set in yet. Getting birth
Speaker 1: control was all but a nightmare, a challenge at every turn.
Speaker 5: The first thing, you had to find a doctor that
Speaker 5: wasn't Catholic, Catholic doctors did not give birth control to anyone.
Speaker 5: And you asked for birth control, and they'd give you
Speaker 5: a lecture about how it could kill you, how it
Speaker 5: could hurt you, and then they would give you the
Speaker 5: lowest dose of whatever they could give you, unluxurre you.
Speaker 5: The whole time you were doing it. You had to
Speaker 5: be married, and you endured the lecture because it was
Speaker 5: your job as a woman to have as many kids
Speaker 5: as you could, as fast as you could have.
Speaker 1: Sandy wouldn't stay single for long. She met a man
Speaker 1: at a restaurant who couldn't be further from the straight
Speaker 1: last Vietnam veteran that Cliff was. If Cliff was by
Speaker 1: the book, Dennis was a wild card. They got married
Speaker 1: pretty quick.
Speaker 5: He was a lot of fun. He was a professional gambler.
Speaker 1: There's this paradox about it. Sandy. She was always on
Speaker 1: the hunt for freedom as a woman, but she only
Speaker 1: seemed to find it through marriage, through the men in
Speaker 1: her life. Two years after she married him, she got
Speaker 1: pregnant with her second daughter, Alison, then came amy her third.
Speaker 1: That marriage didn't last either. The way she puts it,
Speaker 1: it was her parents. It pushed tennis out the door.
Speaker 1: That's her view.
Speaker 2: At least my.
Speaker 5: Parents made it so hard that he left, and I
Speaker 5: think he went to California. He would pop up from
Speaker 5: time to time to visit us, but he'd never stayed.
Speaker 5: I never knew where he was.
Speaker 1: By this point, Sandy was now a mother of three girls,
Speaker 1: with no second income and no second parent to help out.
Speaker 1: She relied on neighbors to watch the kids while she
Speaker 1: worked at the sow and mell here's my producer. Tate
Speaker 1: again didn't cost the kids.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 1: Mighty at that time. It was the woman's.
Speaker 5: Problem, exactly. Yeah, I take some real winners.
Speaker 1: Sandy married five times in her life. Most of her
Speaker 1: husbands didn't pay child support. When they decided to split,
Speaker 1: she'd be left with the kids, and that was that. Cliff,
Speaker 1: Sandy's first husband, wouldn't talk about it. Dennis Brandenburg died
Speaker 1: years ago. Sandy tell me her parents weren't much help,
Speaker 1: but they were living outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and
Speaker 1: told her to move closer to them. She figured it
Speaker 1: might help out that she was on her own. Sandy
Speaker 1: and her three kids moved to a trailer park in
Speaker 1: North Carolina, the one that Mary remembers going to up
Speaker 1: Church's trailer park. When I think about Steve's story, I
Speaker 1: think about the patchwork of circumstances and decisions that impacted
Speaker 1: his life, The butterfly effect, I guess you'd call it.
Speaker 1: If Mary hadn't worked at the sewing factory, if she
Speaker 1: hadn't known Sandy, if she hadn't have tragically lost two
Speaker 1: infants of her own, but she have adopted Steve. If
Speaker 1: Steve never found my number, what he found out his
Speaker 1: real story for Sandy to some of those wady moments
Speaker 1: happened in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 5: There was a tornado and the tornado twisted my house.
Speaker 1: It basically decimated her home. It had a catalyzing effect
Speaker 1: on Sandy's mental health. The storm made all the things
Speaker 1: she was already dealing with that much worse.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm out there saying people, come stay in my house.
Speaker 5: People that had lost their house in the neighborhood, come
Speaker 5: stay in my house. I didn't realize my house was
Speaker 5: seven feet off the ground until I went to go out.
Speaker 1: Sandy suffered immense pain, both mentally and financially.
Speaker 5: The girls were traumatized by the tornado because we were
Speaker 5: in the trailer when the tornado hit and we had
Speaker 5: no way out.
Speaker 1: Her daughter Amy barely remembers it, but it's become part
Speaker 1: of family lore.
Speaker 6: There was a tornado and I was lost for a
Speaker 6: brief period of time, and they found me in the refrigerator.
Speaker 6: It had fallen with the doors open and I was inside.
Speaker 6: So I have been protected by her for in.
Speaker 1: The second WhatIf moment that year, Sandy happened to get
Speaker 1: pregnant again. Steve is right. Sandy tell me she doesn't
Speaker 1: know who Steve's father is, but she figured it might
Speaker 1: be her second husband, Dennis Brandenburgh.
Speaker 5: Dennis would come when my parents weren't around and see
Speaker 5: the kids all the time and see me, and every
Speaker 5: time he came, we had sex, playing and supple. So
Speaker 5: when I came up pregnant with Steve, I thought okay.
Speaker 1: But she wasn't certain and she came under fire for
Speaker 1: that uncertainty.
Speaker 5: My mom and dad thought I was a prostitute. That's
Speaker 5: why I don't know his father. Whose father is not
Speaker 5: true at all, I don't I didn't don't ever remember
Speaker 5: having boyfriend back then, but I drank some back then too.
Speaker 1: Drinking and trauma don't go so well together, you can
Speaker 1: erase big swaths of memories that way. Sandy suspect she
Speaker 1: was having blackouts. Here's her daughter Amy again.
Speaker 6: Well asked questions and she was like, I can't remember.
Speaker 5: I drink a lot. I can't remember. You just gets
Speaker 5: tired of hearing that.
Speaker 1: But Sandy seems to remember some bright spots, like parts
Speaker 1: of her pregnancy was Steve.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I was excited. The girls were excited. We
Speaker 5: had all these little baby clothes.
Speaker 1: After the tornado, she didn't have a home or a car.
Speaker 1: She was in temporary FEMA housing. She didn't have a
Speaker 1: husband who could help her with her children. She was
Speaker 1: excited about Steve's arrival. But this must have been a
Speaker 1: time of unimaginable stress too.
Speaker 5: We were in the hotel. I said, Mom's gonna go
Speaker 5: have the baby. Now can we come too? And the
Speaker 5: girls were so excited. We were all excited. We must
Speaker 5: addressed him in ninety outfits a day at.
Speaker 1: First, and she picked out a name for him.
Speaker 5: Philip Stephen PS. He was supposed to be PS.
Speaker 1: The end of the line, You're done, I'm done. But
Speaker 1: reality quickly set in. She was now a single mother
Speaker 1: of fourr living in temporary housing she couldn't manage, and
Speaker 1: her daughter Amy wasn't the only one having trouble coping
Speaker 1: after the tornado.
Speaker 5: And I guess I snapped. I didn't know what to do,
Speaker 5: so I went to Social Services in North Carolina and said,
Speaker 5: you have to take my kids because I can't take
Speaker 5: care of them. I need help, mental help. And that's
Speaker 5: exactly how I put I need mental help. I couldn't
Speaker 5: function if it rained. I sat in the corner and cringed.
Speaker 1: Sandy doesn't know exactly why she snapped in she just
Speaker 1: knew she had hit a while. It might have been
Speaker 1: postpartum depression. Sandy told me she thought she had PTSD
Speaker 1: from the tornado. At any rate, Sandy was at a loss.
Speaker 1: She didn't know what to do. She didn't live with
Speaker 1: another adult who could help her weather the mental illness,
Speaker 1: So the best thing to do, she reasoned, was to
Speaker 1: give up her kids. While Sandy was struggling with her
Speaker 1: mental health, her oldest, who she called Susie, stepped up.
Speaker 5: It wasn't fair to ask Susie at five years old
Speaker 5: to take care of a newborn baby, but she did,
Speaker 5: and a two year old. Yeah, but she did. And
Speaker 5: I couldn't go It couldn't go on like that. It
Speaker 5: wasn't fair to the girls, It wasn't fair to Steve.
Speaker 5: Anything could have happened back then. If you asked for help,
Speaker 5: they treated it like it was a joke. I mean,
Speaker 5: come back next week. We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1: Now in her seventies, she's gotten a diagnosis and meaningful help.
Speaker 1: That's how she ended up being a grandma who takes
Speaker 1: care of her grandbabies and great grandbabies when she couldn't
Speaker 1: take care of the first four children she had. The
Speaker 1: day Sandy decided to give up her children to social
Speaker 1: Services was a moment of clarity, the fog lifting. She
Speaker 1: had to get them to a place where they would
Speaker 1: be okay. So she did, But after that Sandy missed them.
Speaker 1: It was a mother's pull to be back with her kids.
Speaker 1: She would do anything. Around this time, Sandy went to church.
Speaker 1: It was the first Baptist church in Charlotte, North Carolina,
Speaker 1: and she met a guy that seem fairly nice in pictures.
Speaker 1: He has dark hair than he sometimes parts to the side,
Speaker 1: handlebar mustache, and big square glasses, which were in vogue.
Speaker 1: Then this guy listened to her story and offered to
Speaker 1: help her get the kids back.
Speaker 5: So I was in Charlotte, and that's why I met
Speaker 5: Franklin Floyd. But I knew miss Brandon Williams, and he
Speaker 5: said that he would go with me to get the
Speaker 5: kids and everything would be all right.
Speaker 1: This was Franklin Floyd, the man who would later be
Speaker 1: convicted for murder, who already had quite a wrap sheet
Speaker 1: with more fake id's than a bandit. This was a
Speaker 1: guy who came up in Steve's Google searches when he
Speaker 1: started looking for himself.
Speaker 3: And then I started typing in Franklin's name, started reading
Speaker 3: about him.
Speaker 1: What he read startling. He couldn't believe that he just
Speaker 1: barely cross pass with this man, a serial killer now
Speaker 1: sitting on death row.
Speaker 3: I got lucky, kind of lucky. I feel, oh yeah,
Speaker 3: one hundred percent, no doubt, because she wouldn't have got
Speaker 3: me out of I would have had to go with
Speaker 3: Sandy and Franklin and that went. It turned out good.
Speaker 1: And this made him rethink the events that led up
Speaker 1: to this, how different his life could have been if
Speaker 1: Sandy didn't give him to marry. Floyd made an impression
Speaker 1: on Mary when she adopted Steve I.
Speaker 4: Saw him at a distance, and what they left him
Speaker 4: was a little masta to citter Masda with them three kids.
Speaker 4: I never did get to talk to him. I kept
Speaker 4: my distance from him.
Speaker 3: She said that she got a bad feeling from him,
Speaker 3: that he was standing when they switched me off or whatnot.
Speaker 3: He was far off, just staring. She just there was
Speaker 3: something about.
Speaker 1: Him, But Sandy didn't know there was something about him
Speaker 1: when she met him, not yet. At least. Sandy was
Speaker 1: simply grateful to meet a man way to help her out.
Speaker 5: I don't think mentally at that time I was capable
Speaker 5: of loving anybody. I really really needed serious mental health.
Speaker 5: I loved the fact that he was going to help
Speaker 5: me get my kids back and take me away from
Speaker 5: the situation.
Speaker 1: Love him, No, she married him anyway. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: just that Sandy always needed a man by her side,
Speaker 1: though she ad meant that's probably true. Floyd been the
Speaker 1: helpful many scene, saved the day and reunited Sandy with
Speaker 1: her family. But then he went off script and.
Speaker 5: We took the kids back to the trailer, and we
Speaker 5: stayed there for a couple of weeks, and then he
Speaker 5: said we're moving moving.
Speaker 1: Who was this guy. The guys before were just flings
Speaker 1: or bad matches or impulsive relationships. Maybe if those guys
Speaker 1: were bad matches, this guy was a bad man, plain
Speaker 1: and simple.
Speaker 5: And by this time I was afraid of it all.
Speaker 5: He's creepy. He was always creepy. And now that I
Speaker 5: look back, I was so stupid and so naive. I mean,
Speaker 5: I remember dumb little things. He had false teeth. The
Speaker 5: false teeth, said Franklin Floyd on him was engraved in him.
Speaker 5: He told me that was the dentist name. And I believe.
Speaker 3: Him, you know.
Speaker 5: And then he went out one time and killed a
Speaker 5: squirrel and he was skinning the squirrel and I don't
Speaker 5: eat squirrel. And the girl said they're not eat the
Speaker 5: squirrel and he said, y'all will eat it, or y'all
Speaker 5: be just skinned just like this thing. So you did.
Speaker 5: I threw it up, but yeah, and I made the
Speaker 5: girls through it too.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 5: He slept with the gun under the pillow, and he
Speaker 5: always had a knife. No way out. We're shocked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when he said they were moving, it wasn't really
Speaker 1: a discussion. This is what Steve didn't know. When he's
Speaker 1: a baby. Floyd had come into their lives and taken over.
Speaker 1: If they disobeyed him, Hit threatened to skin him alive
Speaker 1: like squirrels.
Speaker 5: He had a Honda, and back then Hondas, the original
Speaker 5: Hondas had motorcycle engines. They were little teeny weeny, tiny
Speaker 5: little cars. And he said, we don't have room for
Speaker 5: everybody in the car. And we drove one night to
Speaker 5: Mary's house and took Steve and left him there. And
Speaker 5: I cried the whole way back, and he said, we'll
Speaker 5: go back and get him. We'll go back and get him.
Speaker 5: We'll go back and get him. And then when we
Speaker 5: got to Saint Louis, he said, I'll never see him again.
Speaker 1: This is where memory gets pretty weird. There's a lot
Speaker 1: that Sandy doesn't remember about this period in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1: She says so herself. She says she'd drink a lot
Speaker 1: during this time, though she denied doing any drugs. Some
Speaker 1: of Sandy's memories are just shades of what happened. Some
Speaker 1: are infused with the stories she's heard over the years
Speaker 1: other people's memories. What she remembers about Steve's adoption was
Speaker 1: very different from Mary's story. We'll get to Sandy's story
Speaker 1: of the adoption in the next chapter. But all you
Speaker 1: need to know right now is that, according to Sandy,
Speaker 1: she employed drop Steve off with Mary and took off
Speaker 1: for Saint Louis with the three little girls. In hindsight,
Speaker 1: meet him Franklin employed seemed like a catalyst. For Sandy,
Speaker 1: everything in her precarious life would completely fall apart.
Speaker 5: I went to jail for writing a bad check. I
Speaker 5: wrote a check for a dollar and seventy eight cents
Speaker 5: to get diapers for Amy seven eleven. Made it a
Speaker 5: point to prosecute every everybody. All I had to pay
Speaker 5: was that ten dollars fee, and my parents will lend
Speaker 5: me the ten dollars to pay it, and even the
Speaker 5: judge when I went to court kind of laughed.
Speaker 1: Thirty days, that's how long she was behind bars. She
Speaker 1: left her three daughters with a friend to keep them
Speaker 1: away from her husband, who by then she was terrified of.
Speaker 1: That didn't matter well she was in jail. Floyd picked
Speaker 1: up the girls. He dropped two of them up in
Speaker 1: an orphanage and took off with Susie. It would be
Speaker 1: years until Sandy found out what really happened to her daughter.
Speaker 1: Next time owned Hello John Doe.
Speaker 5: I won't worry about it comb my hair. I was
Speaker 5: just I was going to find her. I had to find.
Speaker 6: Her, and that's when he took her. And that was
Speaker 6: the last time that she was seen.
Speaker 5: Who just wanted her is what I thought. I never
Speaker 5: thought it would be the night pret.
Speaker 1: Hello John Doe is and original productions by Revelations Entertainment
Speaker 1: in association with First and Last Productions from Revelations. Our
Speaker 1: executive producers are Morgan Freeman and James Younger. From First
Speaker 1: to Last. Lindsay Moreno is the executive producer. Our producing
Speaker 1: partner is Neo on Hume Media. He was written and
Speaker 1: produced by Kate Michigan. Our editor is Katherine Saint Louis.
Speaker 1: She is also ni on Home Media's executive editor. Our
Speaker 1: executive producer is Sharah Morris. Our development producer is Ian Lindsay.
Speaker 1: Our associate producer is Rufaro Faith Maserua. Sound design and
Speaker 1: mixing by Scott Summerville. Theme and original music composed by
Speaker 1: Jesse Pearlstein. Additional music came from Epidemic Sound and Blue
Speaker 1: Dot Sessions. Bendall Faulton is our fact checker. Our production
Speaker 1: manager is Samantha Allison from my Heart Media. Dylan Fagan
Speaker 1: is our executive producer. Special thanks to Adelia Ruben at
Speaker 1: NEI on Hum and Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeartMedia.
Speaker 1: I'm Todd Matthews. You can learn more about NamUs at
Speaker 1: amos dot com. The number for the National Center for
Speaker 1: Missing Exploited Children's Call Center is one eight hundred the
Speaker 1: loss that's one eight hundred eight four three five six
Speaker 1: seven eight. The National Sexual Assault Popline from the Rate
Speaker 1: of Abuse and Incest National Network is one eight hundred
Speaker 1: sixty five six four six seven three. Okay, guys, this.
Speaker 3: Is the end of the show.
Speaker 1: If you didn't like it, don't do anything. But if
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