CHAPTER FOUR: The Honda

Previously on Hello John Doe.

I think everybody's got an origin, and I would just like to know you know where up again. I'm up at all sad or disappointed how I grew up, But I just I don't know, just it is a big deal to me.

You want to a relationship with her at all? I mean, would you like to have that?

I don't know.

Maybe I could answer that question better once I'll find out why she gave me up, if that makes sense.

So I was in Charlotte, and that's why I met Franklin Floyd.

But I knew hi, Miss Brandon Williams. I loved the fact that he was going to.

Help me get my kids back and take me away from the situation. Love him, No, he's creepy. He was always creepy.

At twenty five years old, Sandy spent a month in a Dallas jail. She had written a bad check trying to get diapers. The days were long and boring, and she wasn't allowed outside.

And scarily to a point that I didn't ever want to do anything illegal again as long as I lived.

It was nineteen seventy five. By then, she was a mother of four, and she was afraid of her husband, but still when she got out of jail, she wasn't prepared for what happened in her absence.

While I was in jail, and he picked the kids up, and he took Allison and Amy to an orphanage and left him at the orphanage.

Her husband, Franklin Floyd, had left town and he had forced Suzanne, Sandy's oldest daughter, to leave with him, and.

That's when he took her. And that was the last time.

That she was seen. That's Amy Winkles, Sandy's third oldest daughter. She was one of the girls Floyd left in an orphanage. When Sandy realized what Floyd had done, she went first to the Dallas police station. She told him her husband had taken Susie. That's what she called.

Her, Susie.

And I kept screaming, she's not his child, he's not her father, and finally they escorted me out of a police station.

They didn't think there was anything wrong with Floyd taking off with his six year old stepdaughter. Lost were looser before the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of nineteen eighty and they buried state by state. So Sandy went Defy headquarters in Dallas. They didn't help either. She was in such a state, desperate, in heartsy, that she went to places around town, at the grocery store to see if anyone in Saint Floyd.

When I couldn't find him, I packed. This is really stupid, but.

I packed everything in a duffel bag, all of the girls stuff in a duffel bag, and started. Because somebody said he went to Michigan hitshriking sounds STERI well, but back then it wasn't like that. I went to a truck stop and a truck driver said.

What are you doing? And I told him what I was doing and why I was doing.

And then I must have been really freaky looking, because I don't worried about combing my hair.

I was just I was going to find her. I had to find her.

One truck driver gave me to another truck driver, to another truck that there was no nobody ever said anything about sex, nobody ever said anything about money. They put the girls in the beds in the back of the truck, made sure everybody ate took me where I wanted to go, said that there any king can do to help you.

But there was only so much that they or Sandy could do. Here's Sandy's youngest Dorothy, who hadn't been born when all this was going on. She's forty two, a motorcycling enthusiast with three kids of her own.

You know, they didn't have the missing children's yet, they didn't have none of that stuff. When she was talking with the police, as she was going through the different states and everything, they were telling her that there was nothing that they can do because she was married to him.

Legally, he had the right to take them.

At that time, I called the FBI about it. They couldn't comment on Susie's case in particular or what law should have protected her, but they tell me something incredible. They never found a missing person's report for Susy. Authorities in North Carolina didn't take one, which is why Susy was never in any databasis like NamUs. This was nineteen seventy five. It wasn't a crime to take your step

I mean when I went to the Salvation Army and told them what they said, You know, you were married to him. There's nothing we can do to help. And they looked at me like, you're a woman, Just get on with the program.

And Sandy said her own flesh and blood barely registered that their granddaughter was missing.

The Tulsa police called my mom and dad, and my mom and dad said, oh, well, let her do what she wants to do, and that was the end of that.

Her parents wouldn't come to Oklahoma and help her search. Sandy looked everwhere she could think of, but never saw her missing husband or her missing daughter.

Susie never saw him, never saw them, didn't know anything about what was going on.

Eventually, Sandy had to face what she didn't want to face, that without the help of authorities, she had an uphill battle ahead of her. She couldn't keep hitchhiking forever. She had to settle down and make a home for the children she still had. That's how it came to me that two of Sandy's girls grew up with her in Virginia, but Steve and Susie didn't. Sandy tell me some of the story on the phone. What did you think could

No? No, at that point, I didn't think he was doing anything like that at all. And I think now that I look back on it, that was really naive on my part, because to him, she was a princess. He could do nothing wrong. If she hit Alison or hit Amy, it was Alison or Amy's fault, it was her faults.

You know.

She never did anything wrong.

Sandy knew him as Brandon Williams, but his real name was Franklin Floyd. By this point he had been terrible to her. She knew he had a temper, but couldn't imagine he had hurt Susie.

And he just wanted her is what I thought. I never thought it would be the nightmare it was.

My name is Todd Matthews and this is hello John Doe, A sleuth, a family, and a serial killer. The story of a family torn apart by tragedy, and my quest to bring them back together. Chapter four, The Honda. Since I started digging into Steve's life, I learned that he was living with his adopted parents in North Carolina, not

No, I did not know.

That's because Sandy's recollection of the adoption is pretty different than Mary's. Mary said she got Steve from a trailer park in nineteen seventy four, just six weeks after he was born. The way Sandy remembered it, she had six months with Steve before Floyd started talking about moving. They were going to pile into his Honda and head to Saint Louis.

And he said, we don't have room for everybody in the car. And we drove one night to Mary's house and took Steve and left him there. And I cried the whole way back, and he said, we'll go back and get him.

We'll go back and get him. We'll go back and get him.

Here's what's weird. Mary and Sandy's story seemed to diverge at every turn, but in the then diagram of mary Memory and Sandy's, the tiny car was the overlap. Sandy said the car was too small to bring everyone, even an infant, and Mary remembered a tiny car too. It had two doors and a small engine in front. When Sandy was handing Steve over to her in the trailer part, Mary said she noticed Floyd in the front seat and three little ones in the back. I'll admit this tripped

He said they were Georgia and Mary Washington, is what he told me their names were. And of course I was still thinking, I know, I was still not thinking real clearly.

How did you feel when they just dropped him off?

Oh? I was upset, very upset. But I remember giving him to Mary. I remember handing him to Mary and saying, Mommy will be back to get you. Just give mommy a chance to get where she's going to. Mommy come back and get you, and kissing him.

And they continued on their trip in the Honda that apparently didn't have room for four kids.

Well, when we lived in Saint Louis, we still had the Honda and life always.

You know, we're going this weekend to get Steve. We're going this weekend.

No, no, no, no.

And then finally he said, you'll never get him back.

Even when she did look after she went to jail, she couldn't find Steve.

And I couldn't find Mary and George Washington anywhere in North Carolina in that area.

Now it's possible Mary Washington is Mary Patterson. Floyd used a ton of alienses. Maybe he changed Mary's last name to make her untraceable. Still, the timing doesn't line up.

But I don't know how he knew Mary. That's what I don't understand.

Maybe from the hospital.

He wasn't there when I had Steve. I didn't even know him when I had Steve. I met him after.

I had Steve.

My producer Kate and I sat there with Sandy Parson through the past trying to figure out how to square Sandy's regulations with Mary's. Sometimes it was frustrating. I felt like I'd shown up at Sandy's with a clear mission to learn as much about Steve's adoption as I could and bring those morsels of information back to him. But there were some inconsistencies. Mary says Steve was adopted after six weeks. Sandy says six months and the second thing.

I don't know what I could have done. I really don't know what I could have done. And I tried everything I could do, but it still wasn't enough. And I could understand from his point of view, feeling like, why didn't.

You try hard?

Yeah?

Why didn't you you do more?

This was nineteen seventy five, around the time the tent Girl went missing and my father in law, Wilbur founder in Kentucky. Finding missing children was even harder than it is today. We used to say it name is that children lay fewer clues behind, they leave smaller footprints. It was hard. It was hard. We didn't have cell phones, we didn't have the internet. It's exactly how he felt. He doesn't understand why, because he felt like you knew where he was, but you do.

Know, Oh, I wish I hadn't known where he was.

What would you say to Steve if you could talk to him right now?

I still love him.

I still see this little baby, and I'm I'm so.

Sorry about what I let be done.

But on the other hand, what was done was a blessing because he wasn't a part of all this.

Sandy didn't know it at the time, but in giving Steve away, she shielded him from a serial killer. She possibly saved his life. Later on, Sandy shared some of Steve's Facebook messages with us. He'd sent them back in twenty twenty one. When I read them, my heart just sank. He wrote, why did you leave me? You said there was an excuse? Was it me? Was I not good enough?

He guys, I would expecting it today, but it's a pleasant surprise.

Okay, are we all here?

Let me speaker.

We might walk out to the car and see if we could hear better out in the car, because we can't really hear you, guys, very good.

Hold on, I gotta find the keys. I'm not prepared.

I'm far Linda, we grabbed sleep per second. Thank you, honey.

I'm a cat person.

Are you a quieter?

I promise you that.

I wanted him to hear what we heard when we were with Sandy her side of the story this Saturday in June. He was down to listen.

We're going to let you hear a little bit of a tape.

So I had him listen to her story about the tornado and how she started to spiral afterward.

The girls were traumatized by the tornado because we were in the trailer when the tornado hit and we had no way out, and I guess I snacked at I didn't know what to do.

What do you think about that?

All right? All right?

Steve and Jeanette don't own a computer, so we were talking on the phone, not on zoom. They connected the phone to the car's bluetost that they could hear us, which made Steve feel even farther away. I couldn't see his face, but he seemed absent. Sandy says that she was suffering from PTSD after a tornado wrecked her house, and then she was barely functioning as a mother, and

He still having a hard time.

Thinking that she is not a terrible person.

Steve seem excited to get on the phone with us, and I know Steve to be a pretty soft spoken dude, but by this point in the call, he barely said a word, and when he did, his emotions seemed muted. I was hopeful they're hearing the tape would change something for him. I wanted him to hear Sandy describe the impact Franklin Floyd had on her, how he had taken over her life.

He destroyed all my pictures, most of my pictures of my children, the girls, so.

You take everything, every memory everything.

How does that make you feel?

He does yeh, he might need to say, okay.

That's okay, let's take a minute.

It was a very different memory, you know.

He he doesn't know about any of the time that he was with them, never heard about any of that.

She doesn't remembered handing you off to Mary, which was surprising to me. And I wonder if that's surprising to you, Steve.

Okay, it's not to me, then why not. I just think she's a manipulator.

And I don't know, I want to I'm the type of person that sees the good in anybody that after watching how what he's went through, and I just hope that she's just not trying to manipulate this as well.

Well. And there wasn't a lot of resources. Just imagine if we had do network or name this.

Back in see if Y asked you wouldn't let us call you a missing person. That we did anyway with dot network because it's not regulating by the government, so I could do whatever we.

Wanting, which was a blessing for us.

So it worked, I mean, it finally worked. It took about a half about forty five years, but it finally worked.

There's no doubt Sandy would have benefited from the dough network. Think of all the volunteers who could have helped her find clues. By now, Jeanette and I were the only ones talking. Something was wrong with Steve. I recognize what was happening because I've done it myself. I think Steven drunk too much to numb himself. Maybe it's the only way he could get on this call with us. There was a lot to take in all this time. Steve had assumed Sandy didn't want him, but she told us

I honestly thought we were leaving Steve with friends of his to come back and get him, like in a week. But I remember giving him to Mary. I remember handing him to Mary and saying, Mommy will be back to get you. Just give mommy a chance to get where she's going and Mommy will come back and get you, and kissing him.

It was hard to tell how much of this sunk in. He didn't say a thing after replayed him this stunning revelation. Sandy or none of them want to force you to do anything you don't want to do. But you're practically begging have something to do with you. So does that do you not feel loved and wanting? I do that because you had to hear it with your own ears, right, Yeah?

Is there a part of that that changed for you? Or what? What did anyone say that changed that for you?

Got this? I want to be warning he wants to be wanted.

After about an hour on the phone with Steve, this felt like something. Hearing Sandy's voice yielded a small breakthrough. Steve admitted he wants to be wanting. In the weeks that followed, I tried calling step again, wanting to update him on the other things I'd learned. Sometimes he texted me back and returned my calls, but sometimes he didn't. I could tell this was hard on him. I think he was reluctant to confront this hat on take on

My kids at first, believeing my kids. We were living in an apartment and we didn't have much. We didn't have a TV. The first thing he did was the next day he came back and in at te for the kids. He said, no kids should be without a TV.

She had three more children, two boys and one more girl. Dorothy, her youngest, told me that present day Sandy might be unrecognizable to her younger self.

She's a caregiver. That's all she is. She's just a caregiver. She will give you anything and everything that she If.

She's got five dollars in her pocketing, you need three of it, she's gonna give it to you.

Yeah, she's always taken care of us kids.

Dorothy only knows this Sandy. She never knew her mother after the tornado, when she was inconsolable, when she could barely take care of herself, let alone her children. But that doesn't mean, Dorothy doesn't question some of her mom's choices.

You know, I told my mom. I was like, you're stupid. I was like, why don't you call your mom and dad.

She said that her mom and dad didn't want anything to do with her because they thought that she was a whore. And my mom was never a whore. She drank a lot, but she was never a whore. It's not like she didn't look for them.

She did.

She was hitchhiking to go find them. It's not like she gave.

Up, Dorothy said. Sandy always lived with hardape. Two of her children were gone without a trace, maybe missing, maybe dead, and it's the story her surviving five kids came to understand too. Here's Amy again. She drives a school bus in rural Virginia and it has an infectious belly laughing.

I remember at one time, I saw a picture once of the three of us sitting on Santa Claus's lap, and I think I was two. I was really small, and then Alison was sitting on one leg and Susan was standing beside Allison.

I think.

Amy's tried to conjure memories of her big sister. She calls her Susan. But Amy was so young.

I'm gonna have pictures of her now, But that was the only picture I'd ever seen, and I tried so hard to remember that, and I can't.

It was that was it.

In the past, Amy's been frustrated by the holes in her mom's memory, just like Steve.

It's always been an ongoing thing. But when you try to talk to her about certain things when we were little, she would change the subject real quick, just like, get away from that, or tell you that's grown food business in stead of grown folk business.

Sandy doesn't dispute this. When the kids were young, she didn't think they were old enough to understand. In fact, she said, they wonder why Floyd didn't take them, as if Susie was on a permanent vacation or something.

We never had a lot of money or anything when they were growing up, and they thought, I think that she had a better life than Nigga, you know, like they were kids, like they were missing out on something.

But by the time Dorothy, the youngest, became an adult, she got more of the full story. Because Sandy's way of talking about the loss evolved over time, Dorothy knew about Susie and Steve, who were gone before she was born. She studied the pictures of Susie, trying to figure out the whole story. She knew that she had two elder siblings that weren't around, but that was it.

My mom didn't have any baby pictures of them, but.

I didn't know about Susie. I'm like, Mom, who's this? You know, I don't see her. And then she went into the long, you know, telling me what happened. And then she said that she also had a son too, and I was like, okay, I'm like, well, where's he at?

I thing?

I was like eight or nine years old when that happened. She explained everything to me.

I don't think Steve's wrong for expressing some skepticism about his mom and why she doesn't remember. Even her daughter's a little skeptical of their own mom. Dorothy name. You lived close to Sandy and see her often. They know she feels ashamed. Here's Dorothy again, and.

Yes, she regrets that she didn't do everything that she could, and yes she's putting a lot of the stuff on her, the blame on herself. And I'm like, Mom, you know it's not just your fault.

The way Dorothy sees it, there's a lot of blame to go around. She also points a finger at Mary, Steve's adoptive mom.

You know, I just I look at things different than everybody else does. I guess you know you have my brother the whole time, but yet you wouldn't give them back to my mom.

But Sandy didn't have any contact with Mary and Baum. It's not like they knew she was looking for Steve.

You know, I'm not just going to point the finger at them.

A point the finger at Franklin too, you know, And I'm pointing the finger at my mom. I don't just sit there and single out anybody.

I can see where she's coming from. Each person played a little role at keeping Steve loss for fifty years. He grew up without knowing who his people were. But in this story, there's only one man that broke up this family, one kidnapper, one serial killer. I think he's the one that deserves all of the anger and blame. Sandy said she never gave up hope.

I am friends on Facebook with seven Philip Stephen Brandenburg because I always thought that one of them might be him.

Maybe she'd see a little blond boy who kind of looked the same and watch him for a second too long, wondering who he belonged to. Was he Philip Stephen Brandenburg? Or should get a glimpse of a little girl with curly hair and sapphire blue eyes at the shopping mall and Philip pool is that her? In the early nineteen eighties, missing kids became a bigger deal in America. This is around the time the National Center for Missing and Exploited

If there were faces on milk cartons, I would buy everything of milk that they.

Had to see if it was my kids.

And at one point my parents told me that they knew where Susie was.

Were they trying to make you feel better?

Or oh no, trying to make me feel worse.

And then in twenty nineteen, Steve found her. You know the story. He found her on Facebook where she had been looking for him.

I was crying so bad.

I don't even know.

One.

I didn't know how he found me when I couldn't find him, because I thought I was doing everything, but obviously I wasn't. But that's neither here nor there. And I was so excited he was alive and at the time he said he had a good life.

Was emotional. She had to process all of this, that her child was alive and that maybe he had a better life without her.

Bittersweet, Yes, I cry a lot anyway, but happy tears and sad tears because I missed all those years, but happy tears that he was safe and he was happy or fairly hey. He said he wasn't super happy, but he was fairly happy.

Steve, for his part, still isn't sure he wants to meet Sandy.

I don't want to push him. It's at this point in time, it isn't what I want. It's what he wants and what he needs more.

Than what I need.

To Sandy, it was a miracle that Steve was alive and came back into her life. I think that's part of the reason she'd like to know him. She wasn't afforded that miracle, was Susy. After she was taking at six, Sandy never saw her again. When I was talking to Sandy at her house in Virginia, her granddaughter Autumn was kind of moving room to room. At this point, she was nine months pregnant and ready to pop, starting to think about the next generation of her family and the

Why was it, Susie.

It's the same question her aunts asked so many years ago. Why Susie? Why deployed run away with the oldest?

Okay, why did he choose her? Okay, I'll start at the bottom.

He didn't choose Amy because he thought Amy was a little chubby Amy. Amy's always been, never been skinny of day in her life. Not a bad thing, but she was a cute, little chubby baby. He did not like Amy because she was a hard headed to a herd headed two year old. He didn't like it Alison, Alison had health problems. Susie, he said, was the perfect child sent from God to him. God. She says that God gave her to him, That's why he took her.

Hearing this felt like a real punch in the gut. How Sandy remembered exactly the way Floyd talked about her children. Susie said her because Bloyd bleded she belonged to him. The rest were saved because of their apparent imperfections. It's this deranged thinking that would alter everyone's lives forever. Sandy would find Steve in twenty nineteen, but Susie stayed missing, even though her mother had been real close to finding Susie back in her nineteen seventy five hitchhiking trip.

In fact, I had stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that's where he was.

With her, but I didn't know he passed right.

Fine, Yeah, Floyd spent the next twenty years traveling with her from state to state under the radar. We need to realize that he had a criminal record.

Maybe back until ten years after he had disappeared.

He was a fugitive, had been on the run since nineteen seventy three, before he had even met Sandy. He was avayin charges for kidnapping. This kidnapping wasn't his first and it wouldn't be his last. Next time on Hello John Doe.

Just the kidnapping was straightforward, like a lot of kidnapping cases. And then when you find out that he kidnapped the boy's mother and you find out he killed somebody else and he had the evidence. Yeah, they got convoluted.

Then for sure, people didn't talk about what happened in people's houses, so nobody would have thought anything different.

So after the story came out, it was very eye opening for all of us because none of us would have ever thought she lived the life she lived. Hello John Doe is an original productions by Revelations Entertainment in association with First and Last Productions from Revelation. Our executive producers are Morgan Freeman and James Younger from First to Last. Lindsay Moreno is the executive producer. Our producing partner is ne On Hume Media. It was written and produced by