transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:13] Brandy Lynn Hall was a 32-year-old firefighter and mother of two from Brevard County, Florida, who vanished on the evening of August 17th, 2006, after leaving her volunteer fire station in Malabar. The next day, her prized green pickup truck was found, deliberately submerged in a nearby pond with a significant amount of her blood inside, but no trace of Brandy herself. As time went on, scattered personal items surfaced miles away, but no body, no clear timeline, and no definitive suspect ever emerged. Despite connections to her husband's recent drug case and a long-term affair with a fellow firefighter, and a series of investigative missteps, Brandy's disappearance remains one of Florida's most mystifying unsolved cases. Hello, everybody, welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlowe.

Speaker 2:
[01:18] And I'm Derrick Levasseur.

Speaker 1:
[01:20] So we're starting a new case today, I'm so excited. I've been obsessed with this case for a while, by the way. And it's kind of one of those ones I keep looking into in the background. And finally, I was like, all right, let's cover it on Crime Weekly, because I want to get Derrick's take. And what drew me to Brandy Hall's case is how quickly it becomes clear that her disappearance just does not fit the pattern of someone who walked away from her life, right? It is true that at the time, Brandy's life was in flux and she was under pressure and things were not ideal. But who hasn't had seasons of life like that before? I mean, we all have. And Brandy Hall was the last person who was going to let a twist of fate take her down. She was a devoted mother who called home every night to talk to her kids, to pray with her kids. If she was working late, she was preparing to testify at her husband's sentencing hearing the next morning. And she had been actively looking for new work and building backup plans in the days leading up to her disappearance. So nothing about her actions, her routine or her relationships really suggests a woman quietly preparing to vanish. And when you look closely at the evidence, the submerged truck, the dried blood inside, the call logs, the inconsistencies in key witness statements, the backpack that surfaced months later, the picture becomes even harder to explain as anything other than foul play. And that's really why I'm glad to start talking to you about it, because this is a case that gets stranger the deeper you go. But I genuinely believe that if we examine it together, you, me, Derrick, everyone listening, I feel like if we do that, if we look at every timeline gap, every person in Brandy's orbit that night, the path forward might become a lot clearer. Someone else was involved in Brandy's disappearance, that I feel very certain of. The question is who and why, and hopefully we can get some theories kind of bubbling while we go through this.

Speaker 2:
[03:13] Yeah, there have been some cases that we've covered. The first one that comes to mind is Daniel Robinson, where there could be something more nefarious at play, but there's also a reasonable possibility that this is just a tragic set of circumstances, an accident, if you will, with a lot of unexpected behavior, which is making it harder for us to grasp how it occurred. But the reality is it's still possible. So when you give us that trailer like that, to me, the first thought is, oh yeah, there's definitely foul play here. But as always, if I feel differently about it, I will definitely voice my opinions. We'll see. I'm excited about it.

Speaker 1:
[03:49] I don't think you will, because ultimately we come from different places, but with something like this, because I've gone through the, well, what if she just ran away? Ultimately, I think we're gonna come to the same conclusions and we're gonna think the same things and be suspicious of the same people. So I have faith in us.

Speaker 2:
[04:08] We're usually on the same page when it comes to that stuff.

Speaker 1:
[04:11] All right. So first, I want to kind of set the stage as to where we are, because it's very important. So in the eastern part of Florida, just inland from the Atlantic Ocean and running along these slow shimmering waters of the Indian River Lagoon sits Palm Bay. This is the largest city in Brevard County and a gateway between suburbia and wild Florida back country. So Palm Bay sits in a stretch of Florida known as the Space Coast. This is a region shaped by decades of space exploration. With Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center just to the north, residents regularly witness rocket launches, booster landings and the constant hum of aerospace activity from NASA, SpaceX, the US Space Force and other major contractors. Palm Bay in the mid-2000s was one of those places that felt like two different worlds pressed up against each other. On one side, you had neat subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, new construction popping up as families from Orlando and the Northeast settled into Florida's Space Coast. On the other side, sometimes just a mile past the last stoplight, the pavement would give way to sand roads, scrub brush, palmetto thickets and long empty stretches of pine where the only sounds at night were insects and the low hum of the wind off the Indian River Lagoon. So it was a city that was growing fast, but not fast enough to tame the wilderness that wrapped around it. Now, if you drove along Malabar Road after dark back then, the landscape changed in a way that you could feel more than see. One minute you were passing convenience stores and gas stations, the next the streetlights thinned out, the air got still and the road slipped into pockets of near total darkness. The farther west you went, the more the city fell away, replaced by old drainage canals, hidden fishing ponds, fenced off utility easements and stretches of land that looked untouched for decades. Locals knew these areas well, especially the firefighters, hunters, air boaters, and outdoorsmen who grew up here. But to anyone else, Palm Bay could feel like a maze of backroads and blind corners, a place where it was surprisingly easy to vanish from sight. And that's part of what makes this case so unsettling. Palm Bay wasn't a crime-ridden city, but it had the kind of geography that could swallow things and people whole. Miles of scrub land, canals cut deep into the earth decades earlier and lined with thick vegetation. Borrow pits and retention ponds left over from old construction projects. Some sat right off well-traveled roads but were hidden by trees. Others were tucked behind overgrown dirt paths most people would never notice. Even residents who lived there their entire lives could tell you about ponds or cut-throughs they didn't discover until adulthood. It was the kind of place where, if you knew the land, you could get anywhere. Fast, quietly, and without being seen. And if you didn't want to be found, you picked a direction and headed into the dark. For someone like Brandy Hall, a firefighter, an airboater, a woman who grew up in an even more remote part of the county, Palm Bay was familiar terrain. But for someone who wanted to make her disappear, it was the perfect environment. Too many places to hide something, too many bodies of water, too many pockets of land, no one checked unless they had a reason. Palm Bay in 2006 was a city in between. Suburban enough for families, wild enough for secrets, and big enough that one woman could be there one moment and gone the next. And so that's kind of the environment, the landscape we're operating in.

Speaker 2:
[07:41] I have to imagine, and I think about Jennifer Kesey with this one, like Florida, gator country. I have to imagine that when you talk about these different bodies of water, that is also an element here that we have to consider. Gators, they can destroy evidence pretty quickly, especially when thinking about human remains. So that's just something I'm considering as well, as far as where she is now, why we may not have found her. Obviously, you can go with just her body being buried or removed, but also the possibility that if she was dumped in a body of water, and there's gators around there, it's going to be very quick for those things to... I'm trying to be respectful of how I say this, but dispose of that evidence.

Speaker 1:
[08:18] So it could be a factor. It could be.

Speaker 2:
[08:22] Again, we're super early in this. I'm just putting it out there. Here in Florida, it's one of the first things I think about, because we've all seen the videos where they take some meat from a bucket and they throw it in the water in the back of their yard. And all of a sudden, there's seven... The water looks calm, it's not moving. They throw this little bit of chum in the water, and there's nine gators that grab at it. And I think, I always think about the disposal of evidence, specifically organic material. And if you wanted to get rid of a body, that would be one of the top choices for the criminals out there, I would think.

Speaker 1:
[08:54] I mean, her truck was found in a body of water, submerged, like once again, kind of intentionally. And so, and there was, and her blood was in it, right? So you'd have to wonder, did somebody put her truck in the water and then just hope the gators would get to her? It was a pond, so the incidence of gators being in there would be a little bit less likely because it wasn't connected to any other major body of water.

Speaker 2:
[09:22] We have seen that in golf courses and stuff though with ponds.

Speaker 1:
[09:24] I know, I've seen videos like that, man.

Speaker 2:
[09:26] That's what I'm saying, man. So it's like, again, but I'm with you though, because it's possible that she wasn't even in that car at that point, but it still doesn't mean when we're thinking about the MO of our suspect, or suspects, right? They're clearly using water as a way to destroy evidence, right? Putting the car in the water, that's going to make it harder for investigators to forensically examine that vehicle. The same thing could be true for any other pieces of evidence, including a body, where it might not be in the same body of water, but it still could be a method used by our suspect.

Speaker 1:
[09:56] Yeah, for sure. And I mean, like you said, I was also thinking, maybe whatever happened to Brandy happened in the truck, then the truck was submerged in that pond, one location, and then her body, because like I said, her personal effects are going to show up strewn all over the place after this. So there definitely wasn't just one scene where something happened.

Speaker 2:
[10:16] No, I agree with you. This is definitely a secondary or maybe even a third crime scene. Just off the rip, you know there's more to this story.

Speaker 1:
[10:23] Yeah, so maybe the person who was involved with this, because once again, you can't convince me there wasn't someone involved with this, but maybe that person then took her body somewhere where there was gators. Possibly. Yeah, exactly. Because like you said, it's Florida, it's very kind of remote out here. This is the perfect area to do that.

Speaker 2:
[10:43] And obviously, we're still hoping that, because she's never been found, she's out there somewhere, but we're just trying to think reasonably that if she's no longer with us, these are the things, especially you're saying blood was found in that vehicle.

Speaker 1:
[10:55] Quite a bit. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[10:56] That's not a good sign.

Speaker 1:
[10:57] Yeah. So let me tell you who Brandy was. Brandy was born six weeks earlier than planned on September 14th, 1973, to her parents Debbie and Cliff Rogge. Although Cliff had a daughter from a previous relationship, Brandy was the only child born out of her parents' marriage, and the family lived in Melbourne, Florida until 1982, when Brandy was nine and they moved to the small tight-knit community of Bull Creek. Now Bull Creek sits in East Central Florida, roughly 30 miles inland from the Atlantic coast. It's tucked between the rural edges of Osceola County and the western border of Brevard County. It's part of the larger Bull Creek Wildlife Management Area, a mosaic of swamp, pine flatwoods, cypress stands, and open prairie that stretches for thousands of acres, far from highways, cities, or heavy development. And even today, it feels very remote, but in the early 1980s, it was practically frontier. So when Brandy's family moved there around 1982, the population of Bull Creek wasn't just small, it was tiny. Locals estimate there were around 100 families in the entire community, scattered across long dirt roads, isolated homesteads, and modest ranch style houses backed by thick woods and marshland. Your nearest neighbor might be a half mile away, and your nearest gas station or grocery store could easily be a 20 to 30 minute drive. So kids grew up with acres of land for a backyard, and you could go all day without seeing a stranger's car pass by. It was the kind of place where people lived by self-reliance. Many residents hunted, fished, raised livestock, repaired their own equipment, and knew how to navigate the swamps and canals as well as the roads. Airboats were very common. ATVs and three-wheelers were practically required. The land itself shaped the community, open, wild, and rugged with long stretches of nothing but scrub, water, and sky. So I wasn't familiar with airboating or an airboat. Are you familiar with what that is?

Speaker 2:
[12:55] Airboats? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've never been on one.

Speaker 1:
[12:57] What is it?

Speaker 2:
[12:58] It's basically a tube-like boat structure that's filled with air, I believe, or it could even be a hard plastic. Don't quote me on that. I don't know what the bottom of the bow of the boat is made out of, but there's a big fan on the back of the boat. And usually you have a guy who sits up on it with like a handle where he can kind of push the boat forward or backwards. And based on the way the fins are facing, you've definitely seen something like this before.

Speaker 1:
[13:20] I feel like I've seen them.

Speaker 2:
[13:21] You've seen airboats. They can also drive on land, I believe.

Speaker 1:
[13:24] I guess they're also known as swamp boats, right?

Speaker 2:
[13:28] Yeah, I've only seen them really in swampy areas, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[13:31] I wonder why they're only used in swampy areas, but I think it's because of the fact that they have like a flat bottom and...

Speaker 2:
[13:40] Yeah, so that would be it. So like my fishing boat has like a big motor that goes into the water. And if there's rocks or debris underneath the boat, you could get caught up on it. But those lakes and ponds are usually pretty deep, where a swamp at some points may be only 6 inches, 18 inches. And so by having everything above water level, you know that you can ride over anything. Like I said, I've seen videos where the airboat will ride on the water and then skip over a small part of land by literally driving over that as well.

Speaker 1:
[14:10] Probably. I feel like those are the boats that you see when people, like there's like, I think it was on the History Channel.

Speaker 2:
[14:15] You've definitely seen air boats before.

Speaker 1:
[14:16] It was like a Bayou show about people who were like out, like moonshine people or something. Yeah, you've definitely seen air boats.

Speaker 2:
[14:23] You've definitely seen the big fan on the back and yeah.

Speaker 1:
[14:26] But what is the fan, a propeller? Or is it just like...

Speaker 2:
[14:29] It's like a big fan, like a big fan that you would, like you'd see in a house, but it's huge and it propels the boat forward because it's basically on the surface that allows it to glide.

Speaker 1:
[14:39] Yeah, I looked it up. It says it's an aircraft type propeller. So that's probably why it can kind of glide over those like kind of portions of land because it's...

Speaker 2:
[14:47] I vote we have to go on an airboat now at some point. Like somewhere down in Florida.

Speaker 1:
[14:51] I guess there's like a whole like community, like people who are proficient with airboats. When they're good with it, they are good with it. Like they can really navigate.

Speaker 2:
[15:01] Oh, I'm sure they're incredible with it. Yeah, yeah, of course. And they're cruising too. Some of them are flying along this water.

Speaker 1:
[15:09] Well, for a kid like Brandy, Bull Creek was a giant playground carved out of raw Florida wilderness. It was the perfect environment to become fearless, mechanically skilled and connected to the land in a way that few people ever experience. And it explains so much about who she became. Tough, independent, sharp, and completely at ease in places where most people, like me, would feel lost. And some might say that Brandy's young life had already prepared her for a place like Bull Creek. She was tailor-made for it. Her mother Debbie said, quote, Before we moved out there, her daddy, he always had her driving everything, little dirt bikes, his airboat. He just started teaching her how to do everything about life, even when she was young, bringing her all the way up. When we moved out there, it was like all this property and her and her best friend, they grew up out there. That was like their playground. She rode horses. She had this one horse. She taught him how to bow and taught him to step sideways. She rode horses and she rode airboats. Her dad showed her how to drive the airboat and so she would go out with him on the airboats all the time. We all did. I mean, we were just a close family. We all loved each other. We were just a close family. Brandy was more like a boy. She did everything boys did. She drove the airboats. She drove the four-wheelers and three-wheelers, and she fed off that stuff. She loved it. She liked being better than the boys. She was a happy girl. She was always the one who had the bright ideas. End quote. So Brandy Hall was living a rough and tumble life, and she loved it. But an accident on March 30th, 1985 caught everyone by surprise. Brandy, who was just 11, was driving three-wheelers around the surrounding land with her friends and neighbors, the same thing she did almost every day. And at one point, she was driving uphill when the three-wheeler fell back on her and it pinned her beneath it and crushed her face. Brandy suffered from a skull fracture, a broken jaw, and several broken cheekbones, and she was rushed to the hospital where she went through an over 10-hour surgery. Afterwards, she spent a month in the hospital before going home where her recovery continued. But Brandy would have facial scarring from this accident that did cause her lifelong feelings of self-consciousness. But once she physically felt better after the accident, she wasn't shy to dive right back into things. She was right back to being her old self. She continued hiking, airboating, riding horses, fishing and welding. Yes, she was a master welder. We'll talk about that more later on. Brandy was who she was, absolutely unapologetically. And you can tell that an accident like that at 11, you would think that it would deter somebody from kind of doing the things they had before. Like it would scare them. I used to ride horses. I did horseback riding lessons. And when I started and I was young, I was like six. My parents said I was absolutely fearless doing it. And then I fell off and I got dragged by the horse. And the horse-

Speaker 2:
[18:00] That explains a lot.

Speaker 1:
[18:00] Yeah, the horse kept going through the jumps, right? The horse kept going through the jumps that she was used to us doing. And I was stuck. My foot was in the- My foot was stuck in the stirrup. And also, I think-

Speaker 2:
[18:15] I'm only laughing because you're okay.

Speaker 1:
[18:16] I think I was holding on to part of the saddle. Because I didn't want to let go because she was going pretty fast. And yeah, did my head hit a few of those jumps? Yeah. Mainly, I sat up. But I never got on a horse after that.

Speaker 2:
[18:32] That was it.

Speaker 1:
[18:33] It terrified me. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[18:34] Did you see my post this weekend?

Speaker 1:
[18:36] No.

Speaker 2:
[18:36] Peyton just started horseback riding lessons.

Speaker 1:
[18:38] Oh, I'm sorry for the story, then.

Speaker 2:
[18:40] I just literally posted it on my story this Sunday. But yeah, thanks for that.

Speaker 1:
[18:44] Yeah. But yeah, when I was young, so when she was young, she was 11. So when something like that happens to you when you're young, it traumatizes you and it programs in your brain. This is dangerous. But did not seem to deter.

Speaker 2:
[18:58] We all act as kids with this fearlessness because we don't know any better until we do. You know, you put your hand on that hot stove one time, and then for most people, you learn. That's it.

Speaker 1:
[19:10] Yeah. I mean, or you don't.

Speaker 2:
[19:13] Or you don't.

Speaker 1:
[19:13] Some people don't learn.

Speaker 2:
[19:15] We definitely have people like that in our lives for sure.

Speaker 1:
[19:18] I mean, I guess you could say maybe Brandy from early on was kind of an adrenaline junkie because I think those are the kinds of people that like doing that stuff, you know?

Speaker 2:
[19:25] Later to become a firefighter. You know, like she definitely had, she had a need for that. She needed to get her blood pumping.

Speaker 1:
[19:34] Excitement. She was a badass. I mean, let's be honest. She's a master welder. Are you kidding me? Her parents said that she really knew who she was, even as a kid. Like you can never talk her into doing anything. And she never wanted to wear a dress. And they did finally convince her to put one on for her eighth grade graduation only to later find out she had slipped her shorts underneath it. It was as if Brandy knew who she was, what she was capable of really early on in life. And therefore she had no need to please anyone else and no fear that she wasn't capable of doing something or that she wasn't pleasing somebody. A friend of Brandy's from St. Cloud High School remembered once she and Brandy got kicked out of the local Burger King because Brandy had caught a two and a half foot alligator and then taped his mouth shut and then let him loose in the fast food restaurant. So, she was a prankster and for her 16th birthday.

Speaker 2:
[20:30] I like her mentality.

Speaker 1:
[20:31] Yeah, I mean, there's the gators for you. And then for her 16th birthday, her father Cliff got Brandy her own airboat and her first pickup truck. Brandy was a capable badass. She was going to bring that into her future career of being a firefighter. Brandy's friends and family believe it was the ATV accident that she experienced when she was 11 that triggered her desire to become a first responder because she wanted to help people and save their lives and be that person who was there in a time of need. And in 1990, during her senior year of high school, Brandy volunteered at the Hollapaugh Fire Department where she met Jeffrey Hall, a firefighter at the Osceola Fire Department. And Jeff was 11 years older than Brandy. He also had dreams of being a firefighter since he was a kid, having joined the Orange County Reserves team at the age of 14 and becoming a full-time St. Cloud firefighter by 1983. Now, Jeff and Brandy, they kind of kept running into each other on emergency calls. They seemed to get along. They had things in common. So they started going out on dates. And Jeff remembered that even on their first date, he had impressed Brandy because it was the only first date that she'd ever been on where she wasn't brought to a fast food place. Jeff brought her to Fat Boys Barbecue in St. Cloud. And from there, the dates continued.

Speaker 2:
[21:50] First off, it may be because I'm starving right now, but barbecue sounds amazing.

Speaker 1:
[21:55] And then Fat Boys Barbecue sounds like it would be the best barbecue you've ever had, by the way.

Speaker 2:
[21:59] Yeah, it sounds like I would write to the face. But the other thing too, just from a little inside baseball, and I don't think it's specific to law enforcement or any type of first responder job or even hospitals. You see a lot of inter, what's the word I'm looking at, interrelationships where fire departments and you're working with different agencies and mutual aid calls, and you find yourself in the same circles with those people.

Speaker 1:
[22:24] You take trainings together too, by the way.

Speaker 2:
[22:26] Trainings together, all that stuff. So you're seeing the same people over and over, and it's quite common for firefighters to date other firefighters, or even cops to date firefighters. Another very common thing, and I know we got some doctors and nurses in here, something that you see the most of.

Speaker 1:
[22:43] Grey's Anatomy.

Speaker 2:
[22:45] You see the most of cops and firefighters dating nurses and doctors, for sure. Like that is...

Speaker 1:
[22:50] Also, you see nurses and doctors dating each other, right?

Speaker 2:
[22:53] That too, of course. But I will tell you, with the police officers and firefighters, and I know right now my nurses...

Speaker 1:
[22:59] What about EMTs? I feel like that would be another nurse and doctor thing.

Speaker 2:
[23:03] For sure. Well, firefighters are, for the most part, EMTs.

Speaker 1:
[23:07] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[23:07] So like my brother was, before he became a lieutenant, he was on the rescue truck. Now he's only on the fire truck. But in most agencies, you start as an EMT. You're still a firefighter. You're still going on fire calls, but you're also assigned to a rescue truck. And so those EMTs, yeah, they're going to the same hospitals every single day, and you're running into the same nurses and doctors every day. So it's very common for there to be a lot of...

Speaker 1:
[23:35] Crossover.

Speaker 2:
[23:36] Crossover. Yes. I remember a lot of disturbances and arguments and disagreements where people would find...

Speaker 1:
[23:44] You mean drama?...

Speaker 2:
[23:45] dating the same guy or dating the same girl.

Speaker 1:
[23:47] Oh, we're going to talk about that.

Speaker 2:
[23:49] That's a reality TV show right there. And I know firefighters, cops and nurses right now who are watching this are going, yup, there's going to be some comments this week, I can guarantee you on that part.

Speaker 1:
[24:00] So if anybody's new here or doesn't know our backgrounds, Derrick's brother is a firefighter. So Derrick went into law enforcement and then his brother went into being a firefighter.

Speaker 2:
[24:11] For many years, we were in the same municipality. So our departments were in the same building. So there was just a wall that divided the fire department from the police department. And I would come out in the middle of the summer, going to a shots fired call, and I'd look over to my left in the parking lot, and my brother would be shooting hoops and cooking on the grill with the music going. And he would just yell at me as I'm running to my cruiser, you took the wrong test. And then I'd get my cruiser and peel out.

Speaker 1:
[24:39] Well, here we have Jeff Hall and Brandy sort of being in the same kind of situation.

Speaker 2:
[24:46] Yeah, same thing. And that's why I bring it up. This is very common.

Speaker 1:
[24:49] Yep, they keep running into each other. And so that's kind of what you would, especially for people like first responders and firefighters who are very busy, work weird hours, they don't have the opportunity, I think, to meet people in the same way that your average person does. They kind of have to meet them through work.

Speaker 2:
[25:03] You're also being exposed to similar traumatic events, and it allows you to bond.

Speaker 1:
[25:08] And it's important to you. It's a passion in a lot of ways.

Speaker 2:
[25:11] But it's a way to decompress, and you kind of become desensitized to these things. And I've always said to you guys, there's a little bit of a humor that develops over that stuff. Some may see it as almost disrespectful if you're on the outside, but it's the only way to process it and not go crazy. And so like-minded people who are going through similar circumstances will often get that humor a little bit more, because it's not to be disrespectful, it's just to keep yourself sane.

Speaker 1:
[25:39] To survive, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[25:40] Honestly, honestly.

Speaker 1:
[25:41] Now, I don't know what you think about this, but Brandy, she starts running into Jeff a lot. She's a senior in high school. He's 29 years old. So she's 18, he's 29, right?

Speaker 2:
[25:55] When they started running into each other.

Speaker 1:
[25:56] When they started dating and stuff, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[25:57] Now let me ask you, because you said it a couple of times here, and I want to make sure I got it right. At this point, she's with what department? Because you said a couple of departments, there's Osceola that he was on at first, but then you mentioned another department that he went full time on.

Speaker 1:
[26:11] So she was only, because she's still in high school.

Speaker 2:
[26:14] That's right. She's still in high school. She's not full time yet.

Speaker 1:
[26:16] Yeah, she's volunteering at the Hollapaugh Fire Department. And then Jeff was with the Osceola Fire Department, and he had been involved in this since he was 14. So once again, a lifelong passion since childhood, just like Brandy. He was in the Orange County Reserves Team at the age of 14, and then he became a full time St. Cloud firefighter by 1983. And then he moves on to Osceola County. So I would assume that's kind of like moving up.

Speaker 2:
[26:46] Yeah, it's probably just a full time gig too, because there's a lot of departments that are smaller, where they sometimes only have volunteer firefighters. There's agencies where they can't afford a full time unit, and there's not enough fires in that town or municipality to justify a full time around the clock police department. A fire department. And so, yeah, if you can get a full time gig, that's often what happens.

Speaker 1:
[27:08] So I think St. Cloud probably was like a full time volunteer firefighter for him, and then he moved up to...

Speaker 2:
[27:14] You mean Osceola?

Speaker 1:
[27:15] No, I think when he was at St. Cloud in 1983, that was probably like a volunteer thing for him, because if you look at the time, if it's in 1983, when he's a full time St. Cloud firefighter, that would be right about 10 years after Brandy was born. So he'd still be a pretty young guy at that point, probably in the same situation as Brandy, like just coming out of high school or in college or in his early like 20s and doing something kind of on a volunteer basis. And then finally he gets with Osceola County, and that's when he's getting paid and it's a full time position.

Speaker 2:
[27:53] So I'm confused. He was with... It was St. Cloud and then Osceola.

Speaker 1:
[28:00] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[28:00] Okay. Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[28:01] So he's much older than her. She's 18, he's 29, but they have so much in common. And like we said, when you're in this kind of line of work, you're working weird hours, you're seeing things, you're responding to calls where you need someone to talk about it. It's helpful if somebody kind of aligns with you in that and is doing the same thing. And from what I can tell, Jeff was just absolutely smitten with Brandy. He said, quote, she wasn't much of a city type, so a lot of time we'd go to rodeos, go airboating out on the river and stuff like that. We'd go fishing, she loved fishing. We always went offshore fishing, deep sea fishing, fishing in the river, four-wheeling mudding. That was the kind of stuff she grew up doing, end quote. So in 1991, Brandy graduated from high school and she started taking fire training classes at Valencia Community College. She and Jeff got married in 1993 when Brandy was 19 and Jeff was 30. And the marriage seemed like a good thing because both of their lives seemed to steadily get better after they got married. That same year, Jeff Hall had been promoted to fire chief. So he was making $55,000 a year and he became the youngest person in Osceola County history to be the head of public safety, the fire chief and head of emergency management at the same time. So he's pretty important, right?

Speaker 2:
[29:20] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[29:21] Brandy's parents and family liked Jeff. He got along with them all. He seemed to make Brandy happy and Brandy was continuing to make strides to ensure her own future and career goals. While she was taking her classes, Brandy took odd jobs to make extra money. She worked for an airboat manufacturer for a time. She even took some welding work on the side. And her husband Jeff Hall said, quote, She was a true country girl, tomboy. She could outdo things most guys couldn't do. I mean, welding, fishing, hunting, shooting, everything. She's better than anybody I know. She could weld better than most men I know, end quote. On February 1st, 1993, Brandy took a job with St. John's Water Management District. And this seems random right now, but it is going to come back into play, trust me. So she worked for the Aquatic Life Management Department and she was only making about $6 an hour, but she loved it because she got to spend her days in airboats, which made her very happy. Brandy's job was to spray straw lines with weed killer. So straw lines are floating or submerged lines of decaying plant material that collect along the edges of ponds, canals, marshes and lake surfaces. And I guess these lines or mats can create breeding grounds for invasive aquatic plants and algae, which I guess cause all kinds of issues in waterways. Brandy's work would have taken her across a large portion of the state, including Brevard County. Now throughout this year, Brandy went through and passed her fire standards, which is the minimum certification required in Florida to work as a firefighter. She also completed her state testing to become an EMT. And in May of 1994, Brandy applied to several fire departments. And on October 10, 1994, she was hired at the Palm Bay Fire Department with a starting salary of $19,000. Now at this time, and probably even still today in some way, this job was dominated by men, and Brandy was only one of four female firefighters employed by the city. Brandy was fine with that as she felt more comfortable with men anyway, and she knew how to fit in. She may have become more comfortable with girly things as she had grown into an adult. I say girly, like quote unquote, because like her parents said, she was such a tomboy growing up. And as an adult, she kind of developed a real knack and an obsession with gold jewelry. And she would eventually get breast implants. I don't know how to say this, because I think I'm going to be attacked for it. But this is the way her parents and her husband describe her, that she was trying to, you know, appeal more to the male gaze and look more feminine. And people are going to think that this is me saying it, and that I'm saying this about. But that's not what she did. She just wanted to look more like, you know, a way that made her comfortable. That was what her decision was.

Speaker 2:
[32:08] That's how I take it. At the end of the day, she was self-conscious about certain things. Whatever that might be. And she relied on cosmetic surgery to help with whatever those concerns were, right? I mean, I think it's a reasonable assumption to say she wanted to look more feminine. Is that like a bad thing to say? Like ultimately she wanted different breasts, right? That's what we're talking about here. We're like beating around the bush, but she didn't get them to look more masculine, I don't think. But I think what we have here, especially when you're talking about, and this is a man talking about a woman's feeling, so I'm already on the outs, but when you talk about the interest that Brandy had in her upbringing, and also the tragic accident that she had that changed her appearance slightly.

Speaker 1:
[32:54] Which she was always self-conscious of.

Speaker 2:
[32:56] Always self-conscious about, but she was someone who wanted to be, I guess, viewed a certain way by men, or maybe had some things about her that she was concerned about and she didn't like about herself. So she decided to use her money to alter them. All should have zero issue with that.

Speaker 1:
[33:11] I don't have an issue with it, and I think it makes complete sense. When you're a kid, you're like, I don't want to wear a dress. I don't care what people think of me and how I look. But as you get older and you start dating and stuff, suddenly, you still want to be interested in all the same things you were interested in. And she still loved all the same things she loved, the airboating and the fishing and the welding. But outwardly, she wanted to present differently. And I don't have a problem with that, but I just don't want to be attacked and have people-

Speaker 2:
[33:35] No, I think it could be as simple as like, correct me if I'm wrong, tell me to shut up here. Like there are women who don't like the way their breasts look. And so whether they're smaller than they want or just the shape, whatever it might be, and they choose to get it done for themselves. Now that may be something that men are more attracted to, but in I think 99.9% of the situations, women aren't getting the boobs for the guy, they're getting them for themselves.

Speaker 1:
[34:00] Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2:
[34:00] There's gonna be some residual impact on that and probably a positive light, but most of the time the women are doing it because it's something they're concerned about.

Speaker 1:
[34:09] Yeah, I just didn't want somebody to think that I'm saying like, oh, if you have bigger breasts, you're more feminine. That's not my perception. I think it's just like the person getting the plastic surgery, it's their perception of what makes them feel better and look better in the way they want it.

Speaker 2:
[34:22] And that's something you can see from the outside, but there are men who get penis enlargements. That's not something you notice until, you know, you're up in that stuff, but you know, it is something they do because they're self-conscious about it.

Speaker 1:
[34:34] They even get like calf implants, men. That's a big, that's a big thing that men do.

Speaker 2:
[34:37] Yeah, yeah, because your shorts are on for sure. The guys who are like monsters up top, but like have chicken legs, like little legs.

Speaker 1:
[34:44] Yeah. So basically, you know, Brandy gets older. She's more concerned about how she's presenting outwardly. She really likes jewelry. She wants bigger boobs, all of that.

Speaker 2:
[34:54] But hey, more power to her.

Speaker 1:
[34:56] In her heart, though, Brandy was still just one of the guys. She felt comfortable around men. She could talk to them, she could hang with them. She was interested in the same stuff they were interested in. So, she's kind of like, you know, especially Jeff Hall's eyes, like the perfect woman. He was attracted to her, but you know, she could also hang with him, do all the stuff that he'd want to do that usually a man would only be able to do with like their buddies. And now he's like, hey, my wife is my best friend. We get to do everything together. She loves all the same things I do, and she's better at them. So.

Speaker 2:
[35:23] And I will say too, just being in the industry, I give women so much credit for being in a predominantly male workforce like that. It is difficult. Not only the job, like being a firefighter or being a police officer, but then to be inside a building with predominantly men all day long as one of the few women. And I'm not even talking just from a sexual perspective. I'm talking about from just like the uncomfortability of it, like showers and sleeping arrangements. Like that can't be fun. It can't be fun. But these women do it, they do their job and in many instances, better than their counterparts. And they also have those other dynamics that they're dealing with. So kudos to them, much respect.

Speaker 1:
[36:03] And I think just trying to get their respect, like not being judged at a glance.

Speaker 2:
[36:06] Well yeah, they have to work twice as hard to get that respect. Cause make no mistake about it, there are a group of men out there that are going to look at this woman and be like, why is she here? She's going to get someone hurt. So they're constantly having to prove themselves.

Speaker 1:
[36:19] And you'll see that Brandy did that. She was very much admired by her male colleagues.

Speaker 2:
[36:23] Cause there are dudes, I can tell you right now, I can only speak anecdotally for my police department. I won't say names, but there were guys on my job where the women who were also on my job would kick the shit out of them. But they were automatically given the pass because they were men. And I would much rather some of these women show up at a fight with me than these particular guys.

Speaker 1:
[36:43] I agree. I agree.

Speaker 2:
[36:44] It's just the truth.

Speaker 1:
[36:45] It's just the truth.

Speaker 2:
[36:47] And they know who they are.

Speaker 1:
[36:48] So on March 8th, 1996, Brandy and Jeff welcomed their first child into the world, a daughter named Taylor Lynn. Everything was going really well, but in 1999, Jeff Hall requested a demotion from Fire Chief. He claimed it was because he wanted to spend more time with his family, but at that time, it was well known that Osceola County was trying to cut costs and that two other Fire Chiefs had been demoted at the same time. So by volunteering to step down, Jeff Hall could keep his job, keep his penchant on track, and move into a role with guaranteed stability. So it was kind of like probably a strategic thing at that point to keep the penchant and, you know.

Speaker 2:
[37:28] Preemptive again in front of it.

Speaker 1:
[37:30] Yeah, so on May 29th, 2001, Brandy gave birth to their second child, a son, and the Little Hall family was then complete. Within a few years, Jeff, who was in his 40s, was completely retired. He and Brandy moved their kids to Melbourne and opened a welding and fabrication shop there. Now, at this time, they were actually doing really well for themselves financially. They had kept their property in Bull Creek and they made income from renting it out. And Jeff was bringing in good money from his pension and the shop in Melbourne was thriving. And on top of that, Brandy was doing really well in her job as a Palm Bay firefighter. She would take every training that was made available to her. She would volunteer for new jobs. And she made it her mission to master every skill a firefighter should have. By the time Jeff retired, Brandy had already been given several raises. Some were normal raises you would get after a certain amount of time, but others were merit based because she was just so good at her job. On one evaluation, Brandy scored 346 points out of 350. Her bosses said that she was an excelled employee and they recommended that she start preparing to take the lieutenants exam, which is the first major step from line firefighter to command staff. This wasn't just a promotion, it was a statement from Brandy's superiors about her talent and her trajectory and her potential, what they thought she was headed towards. She was excelling, she was on track to become one of the highest ranking female firefighters in Palm Bay, and leadership saw her as someone who could run a crew, command a scene, and represent the department. Brandy Hall was not just competent, she was a standout and the fact that others noticed was a big deal. Brandy's personal life was firing on all cylinders as well at this time. Everyone who knew her said that Brandy loved her children more than anything in the world, and the Halls spent a lot of time with other firefighters and their families, which I would say is probably also a pretty common thing. So not only do you meet people to date, but these people become your friends. They would all get together for cookouts, birthday parties, camping trips, spending so much time together that this handful of couples and their children became more like family to each other than friends.

Speaker 2:
[39:44] And that's what happens. I was saying it earlier where you have this community that's built amongst the industry, the occupation you're in where police officers tend to gravitate toward other police officers. Same thing with firefighters. You're with each other all day. You go on these calls and see the worst of the worst. And there's really nobody outside of your community that's going to understand what you're going through. So when you're off hours, you find yourself with the same people that you're with so often during the week. It's definitely not like most occupations out there. And you get through it together. And not only that, think about the bond you develop. You're going into this fire and the people that are going in with you are ultimately going to dictate whether you survive or not. They may be the people that have to pull you out of that fire if you get hurt. Same thing with law enforcement. So it's only natural that those people gravitate toward each other. The only negative to it, and I experienced this as well, and I was told by my friends after the fact that this was something that occurs. When you start to isolate yourself, and you're only surrounded by people in the similar career field, you develop this bubble, and it kind of makes you come off as an asshole, to be honest. It's not even the intention, but because you can't really relate to others, it changes you, and you find yourself only feeling comfortable around people who are in the same field, who can relate to what you've experienced. And it wasn't until many years later, after no longer being a police officer where my buddies were like, dude, you've completely resorted back to the guy we remembered from college, where you're not as cold, right? You're not as affected by what you were experiencing every day, and we feel like we got you back. But it wasn't even supposed to be like a dig. It was just something like, hey, it's cool to see you with a sense of humor again.

Speaker 1:
[41:34] I think a lot of it has to do with trust as well.

Speaker 2:
[41:36] Yeah, that's a big part of it, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[41:38] Like you're seeing really dark sides of life and people, and so not only are you developing this thought in your head that like, hey, humans are not to be trusted, but then you're also developing this thought in your head that the only humans that are to be trusted are the ones that are going into these dangerous situations with me day after day, and they have already proven to me that I can trust them with my life.

Speaker 2:
[41:57] Absolutely. You're not wrong. Nailed it.

Speaker 1:
[41:59] So for years, Jeff and Brandy Hall had built the kind of life that people envy, the kind of life people actually did envy when they looked at them, right? A young family, a steady pension, a successful welding shop, weekend spent camping and airboating with friends, and two kids who were growing up surrounded by love, adventure, and stability. Brandy was thriving in her career, earning top marks on her evaluations, stacking certifications, and being encouraged to start preparing for the lieutenant's exam. Their home life was full, familiar, and functional, and then almost overnight, it all collapsed. When Jeff was arrested in 2005 for running a marijuana growing operation on their Bull Creek property, and then the life they worked so hard to build screeched to a halt. So the unraveling began on July 2nd, 2005, when Osceola County deputies, who were tipped off by an anonymous caller, hiked through the woods to a Bull Creek property owned by Jeff and Brandy and discovered a sophisticated indoor marijuana operation hidden inside a mobile home. Inside, they found grow rooms lit by high-tech systems, a massive commercial generator powering the setup, and nearly 460 plants along with roughly 18 pounds of processed marijuana. The evidence seized valued $1 million, and Jeff and his partner, Paul Hirsch, had started this whole thing from 10 seeds that they'd ordered from High Times magazine. According to Jeff Hall, he really isn't sure how the operation started and got so big since the welding shop was doing well and he was making a good living, he said it just happened. One thing led to another, and it got to be kind of exciting to tell you the truth. Knowing it's wrong, but kind of exciting, and it was stupid, very, very stupid. Especially for somebody with my background, that's what really floored a lot of people. I used to shake hands with Bill Clinton and Dave Welton. I've been up in helicopters with him during disasters. Lawton Chisel was hunting with him in Osceola County. I got letters in my office from all these guys. My lawyers gave the judge these letters with my name written in by Bill Clinton. I really don't know. I don't know if it was the fact I was missing that excitement in my life from being in the fire department. One, it sounds like a Breaking Bad plot. Yeah, well, you just got done watching Breaking Bad, so that's all you can think about. Now, of course, we all know who Bill Clinton is, right? But I didn't recognize the other two names, so I had to look them up. So it looks like he might be talking about Dave Weldon, who surprisingly was originally from my neck of the woods. He was born in Amityville, New York. He went to the University of Buffalo, and then he eventually ended up as a congressman in Florida. Now, Lawton Chiles was the governor of Florida from 1991 until he passed away in 1998. So, I mean, yeah, Jeff Hall, he was rubbing elbows with some pretty important people, politically, so this marijuana business would have been a pretty steep fall from grace. And I think it's true what he said, like he was a firefighter for so long, and then he, you know, stepped down and retired, and then everything's just kind of good, you know, like good marriage, good family life, having fun with my friends, but there's not that same excitement or like stress.

Speaker 2:
[45:14] Yeah, he's an adrenaline junkie, and he was looking for a little excitement. I also think the money associated with that it's hard, it's hard to look the other way because it...

Speaker 1:
[45:22] They were doing really well though financially at the time.

Speaker 2:
[45:25] But the amount of money in drug dealing, especially if you can get away with it, and you're doing it at mass quantity, and you're selling in bulk, it's tax free. It's a massive amount of money. The issue with it is there's a lot of risk with it as well, because when you start to get to that level, not to bring it back to breaking bad, but you're dealing...

Speaker 1:
[45:44] I was just going to say, this is not Derrick's breaking bad experience. He was actually involved in like drug task forces as a police officer.

Speaker 2:
[45:51] Yeah, as a narcotics detective, we dealt with this all the time, but when you get to that level, you're not dealing with your everyday street dealer. You're dealing with people who are in high-profile positions. There's a lot of money exchanging hands. And if you do the wrong thing or you cross the wrong person or you tread on the wrong territory, it's not just an argument. There's usually someone who's killed at that level.

Speaker 1:
[46:13] Not really with marijuana though.

Speaker 2:
[46:15] You wouldn't see that. Oh yes, I mean, listen, again, it's all about quantity, right? When we're talking a couple pounds here and there, that's nothing. But when you start talking about a million dollar operation, especially when there's ego involved and there's a grab for certain territories, it doesn't matter what the drug is. The money is still green. And at the end of the day, if you're impeding on someone's finances, there are people out there that will kill you for that. The irony with these grow operations that I, especially when we're talking about a firefighter, one of the techniques that I use, and this isn't really like, I'm not giving away a trade secret here, but one of the things that I would do when we had alleged grow operations, there were a few firefighters, including my brother who I trusted at the other side of the building, and I would have them bring out their heat guns. And they were used to see if there was a fire in the ceiling or in the walls that you couldn't see, but that you could see the heat change. With the grow lights and with an environment that is a higher temperature, you could basically take that camera, I'd have to write up a search warrant for it, but you could basically take that camera and scan the house and see if there was a grow operation inside.

Speaker 1:
[47:23] Because they're basically like greenhouses, they're building them in these environments and they're kind of insulating them so the heat stays in to grow them. And I will point out that Jeff's operation was taken down by an anonymous tip.

Speaker 2:
[47:37] Well, that's either your competitor or it's someone you're dealing with who you burned.

Speaker 1:
[47:41] Somebody you're dealing with that knows about it and now maybe you're not in such good terms.

Speaker 2:
[47:45] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[47:45] Or a competitor, like you said.

Speaker 2:
[47:47] I'll add one more layer to it because we were talking about D4VD earlier this week, David. If it's also an acquaintance of yours, someone you are working with, but they get pinched, they may have to give you up in order to save themselves. That's also an option here.

Speaker 1:
[48:00] I would say in this situation, probably one of the two former, either someone he had trusted and knew who turned on him because whatever, something he did pissed them off or they were just jealous that his life was so good, or a competitor.

Speaker 2:
[48:15] Yeah, that would make the most sense. How many times have I arrested someone and they're like, I'll give someone up, and the person they're giving up is the direct person that they're in competition with.

Speaker 1:
[48:22] Yep.

Speaker 2:
[48:23] So I mean, it's like a no-brainer.

Speaker 1:
[48:24] We saw that in Breaking Bad all the time, didn't we?

Speaker 2:
[48:26] Yep. God, Breaking Bad, by the way, just such a good show.

Speaker 1:
[48:29] I keep telling them Better Call Saul is better.

Speaker 2:
[48:32] I was missing out, and the fact that I didn't get it spoiled over the last, you know, whatever, 20 years, it's been crazy, but I got through it. Anyways, I digress.

Speaker 1:
[48:40] So Jeffrey Hall, once the youngest fire chief in the county and a respected public servant, was arrested on charges of trafficking, possession with intent to sell, and manufacturing a hallucinogen. So his bail was set at $50,000, and his wife Brandy bailed him out that night. But strangely, she had to borrow money from someone in order to make bail. And I say strangely because it seemed that the Halls had a lot of money, especially from, I don't know, the drug operation. They had Brandy's salary, Jeff's pension, the income from the welding shop that was always busy and always had work, and the proceeds from the marijuana, which all added to the Hall family pulling in over $100,000 a year. But still, Brandy had to borrow $1,000 from this man, Charles Ronnie McClellan, an old family friend she'd known for years since she'd gone to high school with his daughter Tammy. Something important to also know is that Brandy always denied knowing about the girl operation. She claimed she had only learned about it once Jeff had been arrested. Everyone who has ever been talked to has agreed that Brandy was consistently staying with that story, that she'd been ignorant to the whole thing. Even her husband, Jeff, backed this up, and he still does to this day. Jeff said that he had told Brandy he was renting out the Bull Creek property to some tenants, and she had no reason to question his word on that. However, the police officers who arrested Jeff seemed to believe that Brandy did know, and one Osceola County Sheriff's Office detective wrote in his report, quote, Brandy Hall told me that she knew her husband was manufacturing cannabis, but she just looked the other way. Jeffrey Hall told Sergeant Devlin that his wife had warned him that he'd eventually be caught by law enforcement for manufacturing the cannabis, end quote. Another detective claimed in his report that when he went to the welding shop to talk to Brandy, she was unwilling and maybe even a little afraid to cooperate. Quote, I asked Brandy if I could talk to her about her involvement in the grow operation. She stated, quote, I don't want to talk to you guys, people will do anything to get even, end quote. So within a week of Jeff Hall's arrest, Brandy was also arrested and charged with cultivation. Now, although Brandy and her lawyers were certain that the charges wouldn't stick, Brandy suffered consequences because of this arrest. Apparently, the arresting officers had known they were going to take her into custody that day, but they waited for her to get dressed in her firefighter uniform and drive to work before they entered and put her under arrest in front of her coworkers. I know.

Speaker 2:
[51:16] Yeah, but that's to send a message though. That was done intentionally. You have one of your own, you are given this power as a firefighter, as a police officer, where you are overseeing the people in your community. You are held to a higher standard, as you should be. And so when you disrespect the badge in that way, because there's no way that Brandy didn't know what was going on.

Speaker 1:
[51:39] You think she did?

Speaker 2:
[51:40] I think she did. Like, again, I keep coming back to Breaking Bad, but when it starts off small, yes, there's a likelihood that you're not aware of what's going on. But when you have a multimillion-dollar operation or being ran out of one of your rental properties, there's always that chance she didn't know, but it's highly unlikely, especially if they were financially benefiting from it. You knew the money that was coming in unless he was laundering it through the welding business. Her being as smart as she was and as talented as she was, it's a high likelihood she was aware of what was going on.

Speaker 1:
[52:13] Well, Brandy's mother, Debbie, agrees with you that this was done intentionally and to humiliate Brandy.

Speaker 2:
[52:20] A hundred percent. Now, I'm not saying you have to agree with that for people who are listening. But I feel, and I can't prove this, but whether it was a man or a woman, that's what would have been done. They would have publicly embarrassed this person.

Speaker 1:
[52:33] Well, Debbie said, quote, they made a public spectacle out of her. She didn't do anything to deserve that. They should have known that you shouldn't be accountable for what someone else did, even if your name is on the property. They didn't need to do all that. That was uncalled for. They knew what kind of person she was. End of quote.

Speaker 2:
[52:48] If there's proof, without me getting into the specifics right now, but if they have proof that she was aware of what was going on, the same way she would want to be treated by one of the men at the fire department, you are wearing the same badge, the same uniform. If you're disrespecting that position, that opportunity, that privilege, this is what's going to happen. And it should.

Speaker 1:
[53:11] I don't think the issue was with her being a woman and that they were doing it because of that. I think Brandy's mom is saying that they knew what kind of person she was, like how dedicated she was, how many people she helped.

Speaker 2:
[53:20] Well, clearly they didn't know what type of person she was. Because if she was, again, I'm going off the premise that they had evidence to suggest at minimum she was aware of what was going on. That's your husband. If you're not putting the end to it, then you got to get out of it. And if you're still involved with him, then you're indirectly contributing to it. That's my opinion. Now, some may push back and say, still, I don't have to make an example out of her in front of her colleagues. Personally, I sit here every week and police the police. And when we find a bad one, I think it's important to make an example out of them, not hide it under the rug and just basically give them preferential treatment when everyday citizens are having their downfalls publicized in the newspapers, right? Doing the perp walks, having their whole business put out over the TV stations. When you have someone who's in one of these positions, do something like this or be involved with something like this, they got to be held to the same standard that you and everybody else is held to. That's my opinion.

Speaker 1:
[54:18] Well, here's where I think I'm coming in because, spoiler alert, the charges are not going to stick against Brandy.

Speaker 2:
[54:23] I get it and I could tell you were going that direction.

Speaker 1:
[54:25] I think that, yes, if the charges stick, if she is proven in a court of law to be guilty, then yeah, publicly humiliate her. But if she's supposed to be, according to the law, innocent until proven guilty. So maybe withhold the public humiliation until after the charges stick kind of thing.

Speaker 2:
[54:45] Well, let me push back here. And this is not only for you, but just for everybody listening and watching. Let's say hypothetically, Stephanie, you were working at Verizon still, and they had information or enough to at least charge you with a crime. I don't think they would afford you the respect to wait until you left work if they felt like they needed to grab you now.

Speaker 1:
[55:05] That's a crime I'm committing at work. She didn't commit a crime at work.

Speaker 2:
[55:08] No, I'm not saying you were committing the crime at work. I'm saying you worked for Verizon and were committing a crime outside of work. I don't think they would say, oh, you know what, we don't want to embarrass Stephanie in front of her Verizon employees. We're going to wait. I feel like it could be viewed as preferential treatment by waiting.

Speaker 1:
[55:22] I mean, it's not that big of a point, but Brandy's mom is saying they waited until she went to work to do it.

Speaker 2:
[55:30] I don't know the specifics. She would maybe know more than me.

Speaker 1:
[55:34] Or it could be her bias because that's her daughter.

Speaker 2:
[55:36] Of course it is. Of course she's biased, which is completely fine. But I would say the majority of people listening and watching right now would say, listen, if you do the crime, you're gonna be treated like everybody else. They had enough to arrest her. I don't think other people would be given that grace, depending on their profession. And there may have been even more of a reason to go get her at work because the detectives were concerned that it would be viewed as some type of preferential treatment if they had done it differently. I don't know. So I don't necessarily agree with her mother. I know we're here because it appears Brandy was a victim of a crime, but I can separate the two and say, listen, if she knew of what was going on, well, that's the risk you run.

Speaker 1:
[56:22] Well, as a result of this arrest and the suspicion, Brandy was suspended from her job as a Palm Bay firefighter. The one thing that outside of her children meant the most to her in the world. After her suspension, Palm Bay Fire Chief Larry Hellerman put out a public statement saying, she's been an excellent employee during her tenure here. She's had numerous commendations and awards for her services to the citizens of Palm Bay. Firefighters are expected to maintain the highest level of public trust. End quote.

Speaker 2:
[56:49] There you go.

Speaker 1:
[56:50] Now the charges against Brandy were dropped very quickly on July 11th, but this did not result in her return to work. Brandy was absolutely devastated and considered suing the city to get her job back. But in the meantime, she began volunteering at the Malabar Fire Department so that she could remain current with her trainings and be eligible for rehire if that time came. So everyone at Malabar seemed to love Brandy immediately and her coworkers found her to be easygoing, quick with a joke and a smile, easy to get along with, agreeable, but most importantly dependable and competent. Remember, she had taken every firefighter training known to man and aced all of them easily. So when it came to knowledge, skill, and experience, Brandy was stacked. The Malabar Fire Chief, Joe Giantonio, said quote, Brandy is the kind of person that comes around once in a lifetime. That's true and genuinely sincere about helping others. If you were going to be anybody in the fire service, you'd want to be like Brandy Hall. End quote. So while it is great that Brandy was able to keep her skills sharp and everyone liked her and appreciated that she was there, the Malabar Fire Department in 2006 was a true volunteer fire department, and Brandy would not have been paid to work there. So with Jeff being in a compromising position and facing jail time, and Brandy being unemployed, she had to figure out how to make ends meet and quickly. With their only income coming from the welding shop, Brandy desperately began taking any job she could, and she was highly skilled in a lot of areas, so it wasn't tough to find jobs. But between being a mom, a volunteer firefighter, and trying to make income through side jobs, it was obviously exhausting and stressful. So in August, Jeff Hall and his partner, Paul Hirsch, went to court and pleaded guilty to the charges of cultivating marijuana. The state dropped the other two charges. A deputy sheriff testified that the operation run by Hall and Hirsch was the largest he had seen in eight and a half years. Jeff's sentencing hearing was scheduled for August 18th, and his attorneys planned to have several notable figures present in court that day to vouch for Jeff and testify to his good nature, his service to the community, and the necessity to have him go home to his wife and children. They wanted to have character witnesses basically say, hey, Jeff's a good guy, he made a mistake, but his wife and his children really need him, so can we go a little easy on him, right? Basically, they knew that Jeff was probably going to face some time in prison, but they wanted to make sure it was as little time as possible. And obviously, Jeff's attorney wanted his wife Brandy to support Jeff in court with one of his lawyers stating, quote, she was a big part of our mitigating presentation to the court on why Jeff shouldn't go to prison. She was our number one, aside from Jeff himself, our number one witness that we were excited to present because she's bright, smart, intelligent, can testify very truthfully and believably about all the great attributes Jeff had to offer and why he shouldn't be incarcerated. End quote. Now, another person that was planning to be there on the morning of August 18th to stand up for Jeff Hall was a man named Randall Richmond, the Palm Bay Fire Department Chief and longtime family friend to both Jeff and Brandy Hall. Now remember, I said that the Halls had developed close relationships with several other firefighter families, and one of those families was Randall, his wife Anne-Marie, and their three children. You don't know it now, but Randall is going to play a huge part in this case, so stay tuned. Needless to say, by this point, nothing was really going right or well for Brandy, and she was stressed, overworked, and obviously angry with her husband Jeff. She told friends and family that she blamed Jeff for everything, and she was considering asking him for a divorce when he went to prison. Everyone knew Brandy was anxious and overwhelmed, but she tried to hide it. Brandy's friend, a sheer writer, said, The last time that I saw Brandy, she seemed okay to me, but she seemed like she was a bit stressed out. The most thing that was weighing on Brandy's mind was her bills. She just felt that she was kind of getting buried. She felt she was working and working and never getting ahead. We didn't talk about Jeff sentencing hearing a lot because the kids were around that day, but she did mention that she was nervous about the outcome and what was going to happen. End quote. Another friend, Stacy Jellison, said, The last thing she told me was that Jeff messed up her life. She held a huge grudge against him. It grabbed her job right out from under her. End quote. So this brings us to August 17th, the last day that anyone saw Brandy Hall. From what we can tell, Brandy woke up early that day because according to her phone records, she started texting someone at 5:54 a.m. Who was that someone? Palm Bay's fire chief, Randall Richmond. Why was Brandy texting Randall at such an ungodly hour? Well, because the two of them were having an affair, and according to the police, they had been having an affair for almost a decade. And apparently, this was the worst kept secret that Palm Bay had ever known. It was really kind of this thing that everyone seemed to know, except for, you know, maybe Jeff and Anne Marie, who's Randall's wife. But in the early 2000s, fire departments, especially in smaller tight-knit communities like Palm Bay, they functioned like extended families. People would work long shifts together, sleep in the same building, eat together, train together, respond to traumatic calls side by side. They would see each other at their best and their worst, and they shared a level of intimacy and trust that most workplaces never come close to. That's exactly what you said earlier, Derrick.

Speaker 2:
[62:26] Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1:
[62:27] And that means that everyone knows everything. Who's texting who, who's acting differently, who sneaks outside to take a call, who stays after their shift's over, who seems a bit too friendly and familiar with each other. Once again, it seemed really like the only two people who didn't know about the affair were Jeff Hall and Annemarie Richmond. The rumors ran rampant, and those rumors did eventually reach Brandy and Randall's respective spouses, but I guess they didn't believe it or they refused to believe it. Jeff Hall said that he'd heard whispers of this affair, but he and Brandy would joke and laugh about it. He said that people were always talking and sometimes he would get a text telling him that Brandy and Randall were at some motel, which amused him because Randall would be standing right in front of him at the welding shop when he got this text. Jeff said it was bullsh-t, but like I said, he was aware of the rumors and apparently so was Anne Marie because six months before Brandy went missing, there was a confrontation between Anne Marie and Brandy at the Grant Seafood Festival. So the Grant Seafood Festival is one of those classic Florida community traditions, the kind that feels more like a giant family gathering than a formal event. It's been held every year since the 1960s in the tiny riverside town of Grant of Alcaria, just south of Palm Bay, in its entirely volunteer run. Every bit of it, from the people frying hushpuppies and grilling mahi behind the tents to the locals directing traffic to the teams breaking everything down at the end of the weekend, nobody gets paid. Every dollar raised goes back into the community through scholarships, local programs, infrastructure, and support for the volunteer fire departments that serve the region. So for firefighters in Brevard County, especially those from Palm Bay, Malabar, Grand Valkyria, and the surrounding volunteer houses, the festival wasn't just an event, it was part of their livelihood and part of the firefighter culture. Fire crews always showed up to help, and one of the roles they traditionally took on was working the beer tent. It was a major duty post, long shifts in the heat, huge crowds, constant lines and a kind of nonstop chaos that only firefighters who are already used to hectic scenes, noise and quick problem solving could handle with a smile. It was also a social hub. Firefighters and their families mingled with neighbors, old friends and other departments. Everyone knew everyone, and everyone was there at the Grant Seafood Festival. So the personal drama between Brandy Hall and the Richmans was witnessed by dozens of people. So we got plenty of tea from that.

Speaker 2:
[65:04] Yep, this sounded like a great time.

Speaker 1:
[65:05] Yeah. Oh yeah, right?

Speaker 2:
[65:07] But just like these great times, and again, I think we've all experienced this, where everyone's having fun, but there's something boiling underneath, and all of a sudden, a couple of drinks get involved.

Speaker 1:
[65:16] There's tension that doesn't come out till you get to the beer tent.

Speaker 2:
[65:19] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[65:20] So according to multiple witnesses, the altercation started when Brandy confronted Randall about why he was wearing his wedding ring. And this alone was telling, right?

Speaker 2:
[65:31] And at this point, Brandy's still married.

Speaker 1:
[65:33] Brandy's still married, Randall's still married. They've been sleeping together for 10 years, man.

Speaker 2:
[65:37] But everybody knows about this.

Speaker 1:
[65:39] Everybody seems to know.

Speaker 2:
[65:40] And there's no way you wouldn't know inside that community. If you're a firefighter or even a cop, a lot of people are going to know about this stuff.

Speaker 1:
[65:48] And once again, like I said, rumors had gotten to Brandy's husband and Randall's wife. And according to Brandy's husband, Jeff, he's like, I didn't believe it was bullsh.t, but I wonder what Anne Marie thought about it, right? Because it's different for a woman. Women's intuition, you already knew something was going on, and now you're hearing rumors and it's just supporting it, where I feel like a man's ego, if he hears that, he's kind of going to be like, no, my wife, I'm the best thing she's ever had. She's not going to step out on me.

Speaker 2:
[66:16] Nobody's putting it down like me.

Speaker 1:
[66:17] She'd be dumb to step out on me, where a woman is like, oh, I already felt something was off with you, dude. And now this is proof, and now I'm going to investigate myself.

Speaker 2:
[66:25] You know, I will say, based on the speech I said earlier, and I'm kind of going to contradicting what I said, but based on the relationship and the dynamic of that relationship, is it more possible based on this new information that maybe Brandy and Jeff were keeping secrets from each other? Is there a possibility that because Brandy was out there doing other things, that maybe Jeff was also doing other things, including running a marijuana business, that he was not disclosing to her? And because she was caught up in the kids and also her extracurricular activities.

Speaker 1:
[67:00] And work and she's got her affair going, when he's off doing his thing, she's not asking where he's at.

Speaker 2:
[67:05] She's not asking because that's an opportunity for her to get away.

Speaker 1:
[67:08] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[67:09] So there does give a little bit more credence to the idea that she was unaware of what's going on. I'm not completely exonerating her, I'm just saying there's more of a possibility.

Speaker 1:
[67:18] Yeah, like Jeff's retired, he's got his own things going, he's supposed to be doing the welding shop and he's managing the rental property, quote unquote. And she's like, all right, I'm going up in my career, I have my side dude. And so the opportunity to have to kind of do things and not have Jeff around asking where I am, that's perfect. And so I'm not going to ask where he is.

Speaker 2:
[67:39] Yeah, no, definitely, there's a little bit more of a chance here.

Speaker 1:
[67:43] So Brandy asks Randall, and you know, Brandy's probably drinking too, even if she's working with the other time.

Speaker 2:
[67:49] Oh, they're all drinking, you know it.

Speaker 1:
[67:50] They're all drinking. She asks Randall, why are you wearing your wedding ring? And this is not the kind of comment a casual coworker would make, right? So according to the eyewitnesses, Randall tried to hush her. He was like, lower your voice, but she didn't. OK, her tone grew sharper and louder, and eventually Randall's wife Anne-Marie realized exactly what she was hearing. Well, now what followed wasn't a physical fight, but it was a raw, emotional public confrontation, the kind that instantly tells everyone in earshot that something inappropriate has been going on. One eyewitness claimed Brandy told Anne-Marie that she was, quote, nothing more than a two-year-old piece of s**t, end quote, a line that circulated widely among firefighters afterwards. I don't know what that means, a two-year-old piece of s**t. Maybe she's saying she acts like a two-year-old.

Speaker 2:
[68:39] Yeah, that's how I took it, just literally.

Speaker 1:
[68:41] Now Randall, OK, in later interviews with the police, he downplayed the scene, and he insisted it wasn't as dramatic as people said.

Speaker 2:
[68:49] As he would. Oh, that, that was nothing.

Speaker 1:
[68:54] It was nothing.

Speaker 2:
[68:55] Misunderstanding.

Speaker 1:
[68:57] That's not even what was said, but nearly every person interviewed by police remembered it vividly. Some said they had witnessed it firsthand, others said they heard about it immediately after. The people who were there, when it happened, it kind of felt like Brandy was telling Anne Marie that she could have her man anytime she wanted. It was almost like she wanted Anne Marie to know that the rumors were true and there was nothing to be confused about. Like there was nothing to kind of wonder about. I'm laying it out there for you. I'm sleeping with your husband and I'll continue to do it if I want to.

Speaker 2:
[69:31] I'll tell you what, too, and I was looking up some photos of Brandy as we're sitting here, like when we were talking about earlier about some women out there being able to beat up the guys that were on my police department. Take a look at the pictures of Brandy. I could tell you she got bigger arms than me.

Speaker 1:
[69:43] Oh yeah, she did not mess around.

Speaker 2:
[69:44] She's jacked.

Speaker 1:
[69:45] And if you're Annemarie, you're not going to be like, okay, let me just beat your ass now because you know.

Speaker 2:
[69:50] She'll put you in the press. I don't know what Annemarie looks like, but unless she's a wrestler or a gladiator, I'm going to assume that Brandy was bigger than her.

Speaker 1:
[69:58] Unless she's a Spartan warrior.

Speaker 2:
[70:01] The one photo I'm thinking of, if you're on audio, she's got this yellow cutoff sleeve shirt, and her arms are absolutely jacked. She's shredded.

Speaker 1:
[70:11] She found time to stay in shape, man. Yeah. All right. So back to the morning of August 17th, 2006. This is the last day sort of time period that Brandy has seen. Brandy woke up early, and she and Randall Richmond started texting at 5 54 a.m. Now for some context, the police say they have these texts and call logs, but they also claim they were unable to get transcripts of the messages, so they don't know what was said between Brandy and Randall. So between 5 54 a.m. and 8 1 a.m., Brandy and Randall exchanged 28 texts and Randall called Brandy three times. Now this communication between them continued until 9 46 a.m. when Brandy left her house to drive to West Melbourne, where she was getting her hair done by an old friend, Mindy Ford. Brandy was with Mindy for about an hour and according to Mindy, there was nothing unusual about Brandy's behavior during that time. After leaving Mindy's house, Brandy called another friend, Cindy Farrington, and she told Cindy that she was anxious about the outcome of her husband's sentencing hearing, which was scheduled to take place the following day. Now, according to Cindy, Brandy was still concerned that she would end up in trouble for Jeff's drug operation and she made Cindy promise to take care of her kids if she ended up in prison. After getting off the phone with Cindy, Brandy drove to the welding and fabrication shop that she and Jeff owned and she called Randall Richmond twice, with those calls combined lasting about 13 minutes. She arrived to the shop around noon and when she got there, she noticed that her old friend Stacey Jellison was installing laser cable off of Wickham Road, which was right near the shop. Now, I didn't know what that meant, so I had to look it up and it appears that Stacey was installing fiber optic cable along Wickham Road, so I think that's what Stacey did for a living. It's not like she was just there of her own volition being like, man, we really could use some better internet around here, let me put some cable down.

Speaker 2:
[72:07] They gotta install fiber optic in your area.

Speaker 1:
[72:09] That's a whole different story for another day.

Speaker 2:
[72:11] Stephanie doesn't have fiber optic and it drives me nuts.

Speaker 1:
[72:13] They're never going to. Yeah, I already...

Speaker 2:
[72:15] We've been dealing with this for five years.

Speaker 1:
[72:16] I've been fighting about it, but...

Speaker 2:
[72:18] We put in a request and it ain't happening.

Speaker 1:
[72:20] Okay, so Stacey Jellison would later say that she saw Brandy and Jeff fighting and that Brandy was crying. Brandy left the shop around mid-afternoon because she was expected at one of her side jobs working for holiday builders installing culverts on new houses. That afternoon, Brandy was working with a man named Terry Elrod. And that day, they both received a visit from their supervisor, Danny Coggins, between 4 and 4:30 p.m. Now, Brandy and Danny Coggins knew each other well. Not only was Danny a fellow firefighter, but he'd known Brandy for much of her life, having grown up in Bull Creek with her. Danny Coggins would later tell the police that he'd heard rumors about the affair between Brandy and Randall Richmond, but he and Brandy had never specifically talked about it. And a lot of people said that. They heard the rumors, they knew what was going on, but they never directly asked her about it. It was like if she's not going to bring it up, I'm not going to bring it up kind of thing. Let her keep the secret that she thinks she has, even though she doesn't.

Speaker 2:
[73:21] Yeah, this was so common in law enforcement where you see things. I think there's a lot of observative people in law enforcement where they're seeing two people who are constantly gravitating toward each other. They're flirtatious and they all leave around the same time, you know, at the end of the event, which is earlier than everybody else. And you start to put two and two together. You don't have anything definitive where you ask them outright. But it's kind of like, you know what? What I don't know, I can't be held accountable for. In some cases, you didn't want to know because you...

Speaker 1:
[73:54] You're right. You don't want to know because then you might feel compelled. Like you have to tell someone, right?

Speaker 2:
[73:58] Well, not only that, you are going to see this person's wife or husband later, and you may have a relationship with them. And so it's better off just kind of being ignorant to the whole situation.

Speaker 1:
[74:06] Ignorance is blessed, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[74:08] Can we go back like two minutes? Because I'm focused on this because I do think it's going to be a factor later in the story when we start to speculate on what happened with Brandy. But what's your opinion on her having this discussion? And I apologize, I didn't catch her name, but the person who was doing her hair or whatever she was doing where she says, if I go to prison, please take care of my children. Do you think that's just covering your bases? Or do you think that's an indirect omission that there may be something there that could lead to her arrest and conviction?

Speaker 1:
[74:40] Okay, so it was her friend Cindy Farrington that she called after she left the hair place. I don't know. To me, I don't have friends that I call and talk about vulnerable things with. So it could have been maybe just a venting thing, like tomorrow.

Speaker 2:
[74:57] Just in case.

Speaker 1:
[74:57] Yeah, tomorrow, things are going to change, right? Jeff's going to be sentenced and he's going to go to prison. Right now, he's not in prison. He's been bailed out. He's still home. He's able to help with the kids. He's there in presence. But tomorrow, he's going to be sentenced. That's going to change. So it could have been an anxiety of like, well, if he's gone and then they come for me again, then who's here for the kids? No one. And so she's just venting and nervous and scared because in her view, in her mentality, at least from what we can tell, she didn't have anything to do with that operation to begin with, and they arrested her and she lost her job. And so she's kind of maybe paranoid of like, hey, once they get him, are they going to keep going and try to come after me, even though the charges have been dropped, like will they try to find new stuff? And I'm the only person here for my kids once Jeff goes to prison.

Speaker 2:
[75:49] The only reason I'm focused on this is because when we're going to talk about her disappearance, we're going to explore different opportunities and different theories, and one of them is going to be her potential involvement in this operation, and could someone be coming after her because they can't get to Jeff? You know, these are things that I'm already starting to think about. My wheels are turning, and so I'm really trying to dial in her level of involvement, because it could be a factor. Even if she wasn't convicted of a crime, as we talk about these higher levels of operations, there could be some players in this game who are aware that the wife was involved, and did know what was going on, and feel that she's a loose end that needs to be taken care of. Just something to consider.

Speaker 1:
[76:30] Well, remember, according to the cops' police report, when he went to go talk to Brandy about it at the welding shop, she said to him, I don't want to talk about this with you, and then she said some people will do anything to get even, according to the police's report.

Speaker 2:
[76:43] Exactly. So that's why you might be wondering, and I want your guy's opinion on this too, do you think she's involved? Like everything you've heard so far, do you think this is a case where this was going on behind her back and she truly wasn't aware of it? Do you think that she knew of it but just chose to ignore it because the money was good? Or do you think she had some involvement with it where she was facilitating at a lower level to ensure that they avoided apprehension?

Speaker 1:
[77:09] I mean, at the most, I think she knew about it.

Speaker 2:
[77:12] And just turned the other way.

Speaker 1:
[77:14] I don't think she had anything to do with it. And it was in a completely different area than her kind of purview as a firefighter. It was way back out in Bull Creek where her and Jeff grew up.

Speaker 2:
[77:24] Yeah. Like I said, it's important, if you guys are wondering why I'm so fixated on it, because when we're trying to explore the potential theories and who might be involved, you have to entertain this possibility.

Speaker 1:
[77:36] Yeah, absolutely. So Danny Coggins, who's Brandy's supervisor at Holiday Builders, he's like, well, we didn't talk about Randall. We never did. He's like, but on that day, when I saw her on August 17th, Brandy did talk about her husband, and Brandy told Danny Coggins that all of their financial problems were Jeff's fault, and she was planning to leave him. Now, throughout this time period, texts between Brandy and Randall continued, and there was an 11-minute phone call between them that took place around 4:24 PM. Stacey Jellison would also later tell the police that she had talked to Brandy that afternoon as well, presumably after Brandy had left the shop. Maybe Stacey had called to see if Brandy was okay, because Stacey's doing a job and laying the wire, and then she sees Brandy and Jeff fighting at the shop, and maybe she called Brandy, and she was like, hey, like, I saw you guys fighting, is everything okay? But reportedly, Brandy told Stacey that she hated Jeff, and that he had, quote, made her into something she's not, end quote. So at some point after or around 430, it started to rain. So Brandy and the guy that she was working, building the culverts with, Terry Elrod, they had to stop work on the culverts, but Brandy promised Danny Coggins that she would be back early the next morning to finish the job before Jeff's sentencing hearing. Now, we know that Brandy was scheduled to work a shift at the Malabar Fire Department that night. Apparently, there was some special training session she had to be present for, and she arrived there at 630 PM. At 636, Brandy and Randall are again on the phone, and this call lasted for 11 minutes. At around 8 PM, one of Brandy's coworkers, TJ, was on the phone with his mother, Lynn, who also happened to be one of Brandy's closest friends. So Brandy took the phone from TJ and briefly spoke to Lynn, asking her friend to call Jeff because his spirits were low, and he would appreciate getting a call of support from a friend. So this is interesting to me because it's kind of like a back and forth here. Like Brandy's telling some people, like, I hate him. I'm so mad at him. I'm thinking about leaving him. And then she's also telling other people, like, you know, Jeff's having a really hard time. Can you call him and give him some support? So do you think it's like, I love him, but I'm like really upset with him right now. So I don't know how I feel. And my emotions about him are all over the place, but I'm still worried about him. And, you know, but I'm still mad because he got me into something that I shouldn't have been involved in. Like what's happening here?

Speaker 2:
[80:03] What's my opinion?

Speaker 1:
[80:04] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[80:05] Oh, man, I can't wait to hear everybody else's opinion. But my opinion is that maybe I'm being a little cynical here, but I believe she knew more than she's leading on. And she saw the results of that. She was arrested for it in front of her colleagues. And I think she's trying to distance herself from it, trying to put out a public narrative that she wants to spread because she knows Jeff is already done and she's trying to separate herself from that. But behind closed doors with people that she's closer to, she's also trying to still help Jeff because she does love him and she probably realizes that he could bring her down with him if he really wanted to. That's just my opinion. What's your opinion?

Speaker 1:
[80:41] I don't know. For me, it kind of just seems like an emotional roller coaster kind of thing. You ain't kidding. Your life was so great. Everything was going exactly the way it should have. You planned so much for this. And then all of a sudden this thing happens and like a domino effect, you start losing everything. And now you're worried about money and you have to work all these side jobs. And now you got the sentencing coming up tomorrow and the fear of the unknown and not having control over that when it seemed like Brandy was really somebody who liked to be mentally and physically strong so she could be in control of things. That's going to stress her out and maybe she's kind of going through just like as the day goes on a roller coaster of emotions like I'm mad at him. But then later she's like, the sentencing hearing is getting closer. It's evening now. I'm worried about him. I don't know. I can't really figure it out.

Speaker 2:
[81:28] But you don't think she knew what was going on.

Speaker 1:
[81:31] I kind of don't.

Speaker 2:
[81:32] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[81:33] I don't know if I'm just giving her like too much credit.

Speaker 2:
[81:36] No, I think it's fair. I think it's fair. I definitely want to hear each and every one of you's opinion on that. Like if you're on YouTube, leave a comment, let us know. Even if you're on audio, leave a comment on audio. Maybe we'll even throw up a poll because I think it's going to be pretty split on this one.

Speaker 1:
[81:53] It could even be something like she's mad at herself because she knew he was up to something.

Speaker 2:
[81:58] Just didn't know what.

Speaker 1:
[81:58] But she was so busy with her other stuff that she didn't like pry into it. And then she's thinking like this dumb idiot, like if I had known, I would have told him how to like to stop or I would have told him how to like hide it better, you know, kind of thing.

Speaker 2:
[82:12] I think if I had more context, I could come up with a more educated opinion on it. I would need to know the finances of it. Like how much was he profiting? Where was that money going? What was he utilizing to launder the money? Or was he just dumb enough to throw it right in the bank account? And if he was, and it was a shared bank account, from the conversations that we've had tonight and the description of Brandy that you've given us, she would be smart. She didn't get where she was in her career being dumb.

Speaker 1:
[82:37] I mean, that's assuming she was even in charge of the finances.

Speaker 2:
[82:41] That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1:
[82:42] She could have been not the person who paid the bills or looked at, you know, she's like, I'm making money. I know there's money in the bank. I can buy things. That's all I need to know.

Speaker 2:
[82:50] Well, that's the context of it, right? I would need to know those specifics and know her involvement to understand really if there's any world where this could have been going on around her and she wouldn't know.

Speaker 1:
[83:01] But I do think, and I'm not trying to be rude, that of the two, Brandy was the smarter one, right? I'm not saying Jeff is dumb. Obviously, he got where he got in his own career and was good at it.

Speaker 2:
[83:11] She's a go-getter.

Speaker 1:
[83:12] But she, I think, would have been more strategic about how the operation was happening if she was very much involved and to the point where like, hey, I know how we can not get caught.

Speaker 2:
[83:23] Like, well, she was preoccupied. She just from these conversations that you're talking about, all these texts and phone calls, like this wasn't an affair. This was a relationship. This was her boyfriend at minimum. This was a 10-year thing. And when she needed to confide in someone or when she was happy or sad, she was calling Randall, not Jeff.

Speaker 1:
[83:42] Yeah, especially after everything once goes down with Jeff's arrest, right? And now it's like, this is who I'm leaning on, Randall.

Speaker 2:
[83:49] Yeah, and it might even have been a part of her where it was like, this is horrible, but now it's going to be a chance for Randall and I to be together.

Speaker 1:
[83:55] I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with you, actually. So Brandy's mother, Debbie, claimed that she also talked to Brandy that night around 8:30 p.m. And they talked about the sentencing that was to take place the following day. And Debbie said, quote, I hated asking her about it because she became very emotional. I apologized, but she understood. I talked to her every day. I saw her every day. I talked to her the night before. She was at work at that time. But if she was working that day, she would always call me, call the kids and say their prayers. I told her I'd see her in the morning. She asked me if we were going to be at the courthouse. I said, yes. And that's the last time I talked to her. She was okay. I think she was trying not to let me know anything was wrong. When all this happened, she was trying to make sure the kids had a normal life so it wouldn't disrupt them. So maybe that's what she was doing with me too, trying to make me think everything was okay. End quote. Now at that same time, Randall Richmond was at work as well at the Palm Bay Fire Department, which was about five and a half miles away from where Brandy was at the Malabar Fire Station. At 8:44 p.m., Randall called Jeff Hall at home. We're going to talk about that later, okay? So we're going to talk about that next time. But right after calling Jeff, Randall called his wife Anne Marie, who was also at work. She had started her shift at the Palm Bay Hospital, where she worked as a nurse at 3 p.m. Isn't it funny? You were talking earlier about firefighters and nurses being in relationships? Yes.

Speaker 2:
[85:18] Hey, listen, your boy speaks the truth over here.

Speaker 1:
[85:20] Yep, Randall's married to a nurse. So at 9:02 p.m., Brandy's phone records show a call from her husband, Jeff, who was at home with their kids. Questioned about it later, Jeff claims he doesn't remember this call, and I'm not sure if he meant that he doesn't remember making it or he doesn't remember the context of the conversation. But then at 9:30 p.m., Brandy called Jeff at home so she could say good night to him and the kids. Brandy would be working an overnight shift that night, which she often did, and whenever she worked late like this, she would call her kids to tell them good night and say their prayers with them over the phone. Jeff Hall said that at the time he was in bed with the kids, and they were watching the finale of some reality TV show, maybe Big Brother. Maybe Big Brother, that's what he said, maybe Big Brother.

Speaker 2:
[86:04] Did he actually say that?

Speaker 1:
[86:05] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[86:06] Holy sh... I was just kidding. I wasn't even reading along with you.

Speaker 1:
[86:10] I think I looked it up to see if it was your season. It wasn't, but that's funny. So Brandy spoke to her children, and then she talked to Jeff about the sentencing hearing. Jeff said he was anxious at that point because he was worried that the judge was not going to let Brandy testify on his behalf as a character witness since she was his wife, and she'd also been initially charged in connection with the crime he was being sentenced for. Brandy told him she would see him the next day at the courthouse. They hung up, and Jeff says that he went to bed. So at 9:38 p.m., Brandy received a text from Randall Richmond, which she did not reply to until 10:18 p.m. At 10.20, Randall texted Brandy again, and they exchanged 10 more texts over the next 14 minutes. During that time, Brandy approached her boss, Malabar Fire Chief, Joe Giantonio, and she said she needed to leave work early that night, as she had to be in Kissimmee the next day for her husband's sentencing hearing. Giantonio said that he knew Brandy was under a lot of stress. She said she wasn't feeling well, she had a stomach virus, and she was concerned about how Jeff's hearing was going to go. So he told her to go home and get some rest. Now, at 10:32 p.m., Brandy was seen on CCTV preparing to leave the fire station. She entered the common area of the firehouse, where other firefighters were in the middle of doing various things that one does when no current emergency is happening. Three of them were sitting on couches, one was walking through the room with a bag, and one was standing by the door. Brandy was wearing a white, long-sleeved pullover top. She stopped to talk for a few minutes with the man at the door, and then she went out into the parking lot where her truck was parked. Now reportedly, there was a female firefighter outside who had a brief conversation with Brandy that went something like this. Hey girl, I just wanted to let you know that I'm dating Mr. X, one of the other firefighters we both work with, and I want to make it clear to you that he is now my man and he's off limits to you. Basically like, I'm dating this guy, and I know who you are and what you do, and just so you know, I'm staking my claim, and you can't say that you were ignorant to the fact that this man was in a relationship. Now, I don't know if this interaction was common for Brandy. I don't know if the female firefighter was being sassy about it, or just giving Brandy the heads up, like, friendly in a way, you know, not even trying to be an asshole about it, but just like even internally if that female firefighter knew about the rumors with Brandy and Randall, and she didn't want to come right out and be like, hey, Brandy, I know you like to sleep with people's husbands and boyfriends, but could you not do that with mine kind of thing? I don't know. I don't know if Brandy would have laughed this off or if it would have bothered her or hurt her.

Speaker 2:
[88:59] Well, at this point, it sounds like there might have been something else going on that was more pressing.

Speaker 1:
[89:03] With Brandy, you mean?

Speaker 2:
[89:04] Yeah, her deciding to leave. Doesn't seem like this was planned all night. It could have been. It could have been, but it seems like something happened where she felt the need she had to leave. So if this was an unexpected interaction, then she was probably like, yeah, whatever, dude, whatever. But again, something else that I can pull back the curtain on, this was not like an everyday thing, but this wasn't the most uncommon thing either amongst men and women, where there was interpersonal relationships happening in the building where there was a love triangle, maybe. And there were conversations that were had in both the guys and gals' locker rooms. So this is something that I think not even just specific to law enforcement or fire departments. I think it's a lot of different occupations. Like you said earlier, working at a hospital, nurses and doctors, I think this is something that's more prevalent than people care to admit.

Speaker 1:
[89:57] Well, I think that one thing this short conversation tells us is that, as we had already guessed, Brandy's affair with Randall Richmond was widely talked about.

Speaker 2:
[90:05] Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:
[90:06] And maybe she was seen as a woman who didn't have any qualms with sleeping with someone else's husband or boyfriend. And I mean, maybe this firefighter, this female firefighter had been talking to the guys and she heard it from the guy's side. And now she wants to address this, but not in a way of like being accused or because like you said, Brandy is not the girl to mess with, is not the girl to get mad at you. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[90:31] I also think there's like a disproportionate amount of hate put on the women as opposed to the men when it comes to affairs where the guy is like, he's just doing this thing, but she's a whore.

Speaker 1:
[90:42] It's her responsibility to be the moral one in the situation.

Speaker 2:
[90:44] And she could be having an affair with one guy, but now she's viewed as a slut and she's sleeping with everyone, where the guy, it's like, oh, it is what it is. So this other woman could have been like, oh, I know who you are and what you do. And in reality, I'm not justifying this, it seems like Brandy and Randall's relationship was much more than just a hook up.

Speaker 1:
[91:05] Oh yeah.

Speaker 2:
[91:05] It was a lot deeper than that. So there's a real chance that she was only talking to Randall.

Speaker 1:
[91:09] Yeah. So some people had speculated like, well, maybe Brandy was like a flirt, you know, and she was always flirting with the guys at the station. And that's why this female firefighter felt the need to say that. According to the way her coworkers talked about her, that wasn't the case. She was friendly, but not overly friendly. You know, everyone knew she had a husband and kids. It wasn't really, you know, I'm sure there's normal, like, I guess, friendly flirtatious stuff that happens at these places, but nothing to take too seriously. But I would never approach another woman and be like, hey, just so you know, I'm dating this guy, so hands off. That would be, I would tell my boyfriend, if this other, if, you know, if Brandy has a, it does have a reputation for being a flirt, I'd be like, hey, just so you know, like, I have boundaries here, and it would make me uncomfortable if you were overly friendly with Brandy, considering the whole Randall thing. That, I would tell my boyfriend that, but I don't know why the moral obligation to behave herself is put in Brandy's court by this other woman.

Speaker 2:
[92:06] Maybe they're friends. Maybe there's a deeper relationship there than we know.

Speaker 1:
[92:09] Yeah, something. Something.

Speaker 2:
[92:11] There seems like there's more to that story, if it happened at all.

Speaker 1:
[92:14] Yep. So at 10:50 p.m., CCTV captured the taillights of Brandy's pickup truck leaving the parking lot of the Malabar fire station. Now at this point, you need to know that Brandy had two phones, a personal phone and a Nextel phone that it seemed she may have used for work. So right after leaving the station, Brandy used her Nextel phone to call the voicemail of her other cell phone. And this detail left me with questions. And I researched it to see if anyone else had the same question or if it had been discussed online, but I really don't think it has been. Because like I said, I get deep into these cases, but let's discuss it now. So why would Brandy use her Nextel phone to call the voicemail of her other phone? Why wouldn't she just use the actual cell phone that she wanted to check the voicemail of in order to check it? Now, I can only think of two possible reasons. One, Brandy did not have her personal cell phone physically with her. Maybe she had left it at work. Maybe she left it at home. Maybe it was in the truck with her, but it was in like her bag or in a place where she couldn't reach it while she was driving. Now this is supported by statements made by her husband, Jeff Hall, who said he did not have confirmation about Brandy's affair with Randall until after she went missing, and he said he found one of her phones at home and went through it. Okay, now, however, I do want to say, I'm not sure still if he was referring to like an old cell phone that Brandy had deactivated after upgrading to a new phone because her and Randall had been talking for 10 years. So, you know, there could have been that. Or if he was talking about her second cell phone, which meant that Brandy would not have had that phone in her possession the night of August 17th. That's kind of where I'm still stuck and I'm trying to figure it out. I've actually been in contact with one of the reporters that covered Brandy's case very thoroughly at the time of her disappearance. And he's going to look into it and he's been looking into it because he doesn't know either. But I think that's an important thing to question and an important thing to know. And there's going to be more that kind of surrounds these cell phones and the calls that Brandy are making and the things she's doing with her cell phones and where the cell phones go and when they turn off and things like that that we're going to talk about in the next episode. So I guess my other kind of theory about why she would have been using her Nextel phone to call her voicemail of her personal phone is maybe because the personal phone was on a shared cell phone plan with Jeff, so maybe she's doing things with her Nextel phone that she doesn't want to pop up on the cell phone plan with Jeff, so that he can't look through it and see what's going on, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2:
[95:00] That was my first thought, but then I start to question myself, which I always do, and it's like, well, if it came up on the phone bill that I had called my voicemail while I was at work, that wouldn't raise any flags.

Speaker 1:
[95:12] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[95:13] If Jeff was going through the phone bill and he saw that I was calling my own cell phone to check my voicemail, I don't know. But there's more to the story. That just seems odd.

Speaker 1:
[95:23] Then why wouldn't you just use that next cell phone to do all the communicating? You know, or maybe...

Speaker 2:
[95:29] She probably was.

Speaker 1:
[95:30] Yeah. Maybe she didn't want to use that phone at all, the personal phone, because then that would show activity on that phone. And she wanted, you know, Jeff or whoever to think that she was at work at the time and she wouldn't be using her phone or at least using her phone while she was on the move. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[95:48] She might have also said, hey, I'm going to sleep. And now if he's able to look on there and see she was using her phone an hour or two later, I don't know. There's more to the story. It doesn't seem like common behavior. The only explanation that would be reasonable is the one you laid out first, which is that she didn't have the phone on her. And she wanted to check her voicemails for the night because she hadn't had it in a while.

Speaker 1:
[96:11] But if you're having an affair, would you leave your phone at home where your husband is?

Speaker 2:
[96:17] No, no, I would not, no, I would not. And from what you're telling me, and let's just recap this, you had talked about a series of exchanges between Randall and Brandy throughout the night, text messages, phone calls. What phone were they on?

Speaker 1:
[96:31] So that's unknown.

Speaker 2:
[96:33] Because that right there is your answer, right? If those exchanges, they had to be on a cell phone, it wasn't using the fire department's phone system because there were text messages. So it was either on the Nextel or it was on the personal phone. If we were to learn that it was on the personal phone, then it becomes that more suspicious why she would use her Nextel to check her voicemail when we know that when she left the fire department or when she was at the fire department, she had both phones. Can I add one more equation to it?

Speaker 1:
[97:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[97:02] Let's say she had the personal phone at work. We're talking 2006, okay? It's not what it is now with Find My iPhone, but there is a way to track. It's possible if she wanted to create the illusion that she was still at work if Jeff decided to check, she left her personal cell phone at the station.

Speaker 1:
[97:21] But she didn't, because they checked her locker and they checked the station after that.

Speaker 2:
[97:25] Okay, see, I thought I was on to something.

Speaker 1:
[97:26] I know. I thought the same thing.

Speaker 2:
[97:28] But that would make sense.

Speaker 1:
[97:29] That would make sense, like if he was tracking her some way through that. Now, here's the thing that you said earlier. You brought something up earlier when I talked about the conversation with the female firefighter outside the fire station before Brandy leaves. I said, well, maybe Brandy had something more pressing on her mind, and she was on her way somewhere. And so that conversation wasn't too important. She was trying to get through it and out of it. And if you remember, I say that Brandy and Randall have been texting each other and calling each other all day. And there was a flurry of messages between them right before she tells her boss that she's got to go home because she's not feeling good, right? So it's been always my belief that because, remember, police said that they knew Brandy and Randall were texting each other, but they weren't able to get the details of those text messages. And we're going to talk about Randall because he's going to be questioned by the police. He says he doesn't remember. He doesn't remember what they were talking about. It's been my belief that Randall and Brandy were texting each other because they were planning to meet up.

Speaker 2:
[98:25] Oh, no doubt. I thought, yeah, no doubt.

Speaker 1:
[98:28] Yeah, she wasn't going home.

Speaker 2:
[98:30] Whether it was premeditated or something that came up. And it sounds like it was something that came up because I don't want to bury this. You had mentioned that Randall had called home and spoke to Jeff.

Speaker 1:
[98:43] He called Jeff, yes.

Speaker 2:
[98:46] Like an hour before, like what was that call about? Were they friends? At this point, there had to be some...

Speaker 1:
[98:50] So they were friends, remember? They were friends. They were all friends. They were in this tight little, tight knit little like firefighter.

Speaker 2:
[98:56] But even at that point, after like the thing that happened at the festival and stuff, was it still?

Speaker 1:
[99:00] Yes, because Jeff says he didn't believe it and he didn't have confirmation until he read her phone after she went missing.

Speaker 2:
[99:06] So Randall, maybe he calls Jeff to make it seem like he's not with his wife.

Speaker 1:
[99:11] So here's why Randall called Jeff. I'm going to give you a little spoiler alert.

Speaker 2:
[99:14] Okay. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[99:15] Because remember Randall was supposed to go to the hearing, the sentencing hearing the following day and testify for Jeff as a character witness. According to Randall, he called Jeff and told him, I'm not going to do that anymore. I can't do that.

Speaker 2:
[99:30] Okay. No, I mean, there could be more there. And it could be as simple as she couldn't find her phone or was in a backpack or something.

Speaker 1:
[99:39] That's what I said. Maybe it was in her work bag that was in the trunk.

Speaker 2:
[99:42] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[99:43] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[99:44] But even that doesn't make a lot of sense because you have to imagine that she would have had her phone on her up until that point. And so if the phone had rang or she had gotten a call, like how much time had transpired between her leaving work and her getting in her car for her to need to check her voicemails.

Speaker 1:
[100:00] I mean, unless this was like a sort of pre-arranged thing, like, oh, hey, if I want to leave you a message, I don't want to text it to you because maybe she had let someone know, like, hey, I don't have my phone on me, so don't text me. And they were like, well, if I need to tell you something, I will call and leave a voicemail and you can just check it.

Speaker 2:
[100:21] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[100:21] I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[100:21] Oh, I got one more theory. This is a pretty good one too. What if she couldn't find her phone? It was somewhere in her bag or in the car, like she had dropped it and she said, where's my phone? So she calls it with her other phone and finds the voicemail though. No, she called the phone number.

Speaker 1:
[100:35] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[100:35] But it would go to voicemail if you were letting it ring until you found it.

Speaker 1:
[100:38] Maybe Brandy had left her phone at home and she didn't realize it until she got in her car to find it.

Speaker 2:
[100:44] To try to find it and call it.

Speaker 1:
[100:45] She was like, oh, I leave my phone at home. That would be bad.

Speaker 2:
[100:49] So my point to all this is you can't just assume that she was doing it for nefarious reasons. It could have been something as simple as, where's my phone? And she called it and we're sitting here speculating about it for 30 minutes. The reality is it's something super innocent. Just to put that out there.

Speaker 1:
[101:05] Yeah, so I mean, that's where we're gonna leave off now.

Speaker 2:
[101:07] Yeah, man, I'm ready. Can we do part two and we'll just let them here in a couple of weeks?

Speaker 1:
[101:11] I know, it's a really good case.

Speaker 2:
[101:12] Well, I mean, we just had so much groundwork to lay out. We're just scratching the surface and it's almost, we're looking at close to a two hours here. And some of you may say, well, we didn't really even get into the meat and potatoes of it, there's so much context, there's so much-

Speaker 1:
[101:26] All of the stuff we talked about today is going to be so relevant to understanding everything we talk about after this.

Speaker 2:
[101:32] Yeah, it's foundational. And it's not gonna make sense or give us a full picture of what might have happened if we don't have this. So it's necessary, it's tedious, but if you really wanna deep dive, this is what it involves. And I love this, this is where I feel like we're investigating as opposed to just telling the story. Because you could do this story in probably 45 minutes, it wouldn't be doing it justice. You wouldn't leave there knowing anything more than anybody else, but that's not what we do.

Speaker 1:
[101:59] No.

Speaker 2:
[102:00] That's not what we do. You're stuck with us for two and a half hours, sorry. Okay, a couple of announcements. I'm gonna start doing it at the end of every episode. So we're not leaving it for the beginning and annoying some of you, but I gotta start being more of a business owner here. We gotta start promoting it. So for anybody who doesn't know, if you're just joining the channel or you're just recently catching up on what we do, we have a coffee company called Criminal Coffee. If you go check it out right now, the link will be up on the screen. We donate a portion of the profits to solving cold cases. We got some amazing coffee and merchandise. If you wanna go check it out, you can go over to criminalcoffeeco.com. It's a really good coffee. We're biased, but we think you'll like it. Also, if you're looking for merch, the site's a little scarce right now, although there are some options there and there may be some discounts. We're trying to clear out space for the new stuff coming in. So if you wanna check that out, you can go to crimeweeklypodcast.com, check out all the merch. And finally, Patreon, you've heard us mention it a couple of times. We do have the Patreon membership where there's different tiers, depending on what you're looking for. You can get early and ad-free access to what we're doing. If you're on audio, you've probably noticed now we have Apple Podcasts. It's called Crime Weekly Plus. If you sign up for that, you're gonna get ad-free episodes as well for both Crime Weekly and Crime Weekly News. The one final thing I wanna bring up, because I've seen a couple questions about it. You're also getting access to our bonus episodes on these platforms, and it's gonna be our catalog based on when we started Patreon and Apple and Crime Weekly Plus. I've gotten some questions from people saying, hey, your earlier stuff still has ads in it, or I can't find the ad-free version of that. It doesn't exist. We're only doing these extra episodes with the ad-free content from when we started these programs. So whether you're on YouTube, whether you're on Spotify, whether you're on Apple Podcasts, or you're on Patreon, there's something for everyone depending on what platform you want to use. I feel like a salesman. Like I feel like I should be on QVC, but I got to do it. It's part of the job.

Speaker 1:
[103:59] Absolutely. I concur and I support that statement.

Speaker 2:
[104:02] Okay. Guys, as always, we appreciate you being here. Everyone stay safe out there. We'll see you next week.

Speaker 1:
[104:08] Bye.