CHAPTER THREE: Sandi

Previously on Hello John Doe.

So we had this missy person case Philip Brandenburg, and now Philips is identified and he's really a real person and he was really born, and it would just set such an amazing feeling.

I knew the whole time. It just in my mind, in my heart. I knew that that test was don't come back positive.

You blew their minds. Yeah you did. You wasn't supposed to be here, but you were.

Yeah. Well I chose him. If he hadn't been born, I wouldn't have got him. I couldn't love him anymore, with his mind or not.

I was very worried and through the whole process, because you know, it changes a person when you find out so many crazy things. To find their birth mother, some adoptees have to look through paperwork, housed and musty warehouses, or they have to make lots of calls to adoption agencies. But for Steve Patterson, once we had proven he was really Philip Stephen Brandenburgh, finding his original mom was as easy as getting on Facebook.

And I texted her and that's when she said she had been looking for me for all these years. And then she finally found her long lost son stuff like that.

Her long lost son looking for him. That didn't make a look of sense to Steve.

I mean, it was boring to find out who my mom was too, on my biological mom. But I don't know. I don't know.

He found her so quickly online. Couldn't she have done the same, After all, she must have known Mary's last name, right. Steve didn't know what to think about Sandy at first, but he did want to find out why she gave him up. You want to find your father, right, or at least know who you know who he is? For us to at least find out, Yeah, that would be pretty cool.

I think that's one of my biggest things.

But in twenty twenty one, he worked up the courage. He was wishing Sandy have your mother's stay on Facebook and he wrote, Hey mom, who is my dad? I imagine him holding his breath as he clicked in, wondering if Sandy would respond. And then Sandy did respond. She wrote I'm sorry, I don't have an answer for you, and.

I got angry and I text her I probably shouldn't have. I was like, I just don't know who my dad is. Can you not tell me who my dad is and she was like, I can't remember.

She presumably had a one night stand with someone and got pregnant, but she didn't have specifics up until then. I think there was a part of Steed that had been looking for a fairy tale reunion with this mom and dad, something satisfying, something that made sense to him. But this he couldn't cope with being the result of a fleeing to Steve. I think it took on additional weight that maybe Sandy didn't want him in the first place.

And I hadn't really talked to her since well, I mean, I ask her Sevil times. I think everybody's got an origin, and I would just like to know, you know where up again. I'm not at all sad or disappointing of how I grew up, but I just I don't know. It's just it is a big deal to.

Me, and enough for him to reconsider everything. He wasn't sure anymore if he wanted to keep getting to know Sandy, why should he meet her if she wasn't going to give him answers for Mary, his adoptive mama. None of this was much of a surprise.

There's no way she know who Steve's daddy is because, like my mom always told me, you get up turned around through a briar patch, which one amedbriar stuck you. They ain't no way you could know who his daddy was.

The not knowing nagged at Steve. He took to drinking more than usual. He'd gone all this way almost fifty years, and once he got to the end of the tunnel and found Sandy, he didn't find what he was looking for.

I'll talk true, maybe maybe ten or twelve times. I mean she'll text me Happy Birthday and stuff like that.

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

I don't know. That's 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, that's just me. Maybe later I'm down the road again, revisit that.

Yeah, yep, but to me, it's Sandy. Sandy didn't feel the same way she wanted to know Steve. His adoptive mother, Mary confirmed that she.

Keeps begging me and I want text her back, please have Steve come see me, And I said it's up to him, as not my cult.

It wasn't just Steve. You had questions. I'd come up with some of my own through the years. Remember I've been looking for him for almost twenty years. I needed to lay some things to rest, and this woman, Sandy Brandyburg, held the keys to a lot of my questions. When I first heard about this family, I couldn't stop thinking about their two boys and Sandy not only was she Steve's mother, she was also the great mother of the other missing boy, the schoolboy named Michael, who disappeared in

The story of a.

Family torn apart by tragedy and my quest to bring them back together. Chapter three, Sandy. We drove straight from Steve's neighborhood in North Carolina to Virginia as he san you. Turns out it was only a day trip. Think about that. So many of Steve's answers to his life are just a car right away. Sandy lives in Hampton, Virginia, a Chesapeake Watershed town across the bay from the world's largest

My name is Sandy Willer. I'm seventy three, being in and out of Hampton for the past fifty years.

Sandy welcomed us into her house. She uses a wheelchair to get around. Live us right next to her adult grandchildren summer in autumn, who came in and out of the room while we chatted.

She's a TikTok star.

Shy.

The house was tidy enough but had no furniture. She had apparently recently gone through a move. My producer Kate and I sat on a couple of desk chairs and set the recorder on her walker. Sandy kind of looks up Jonnie Mitchell nowadays. She has this hippie beautiful air about her. Her skin is tan, her long hair singlessly term from blonde to white with old age. She has this essence about her, like she's got stories. Nowadays, her life is fairly simple.

You're writing for fun. I keep my four year old great granddaughter, and I'm going to keep autumns and new baby when he's born.

She lives in her family, stays at home mostly. She told me about growing up.

We moved all over the place. My dad worked for GM and we moved all over the place.

Born in Washington, d C. Then ended up spending a lot of her childhood in Detroit. She loves school, especially history classes. She used to invite neighborhood kids over in charge them a dime to play school. She was the oldest of three kids.

I was the quiet. My sister was a model at one time. My brother was a trucker. I don't know what my brother does now. I think he's been chied. My parents were very Let me see how I can I put. I love my parents to death. Parents were very strict.

Not only were they streak, she says, they were also fearful. They lived in a mostly white neighborhood outside of the city.

My mother sat during the riots in Detroit. My mother sat in the suburbs with a gun at the window at night to protect us from all these rioters that were going to come and get us a night.

Sandy's referring to the nineteen sixty seven race rights in Detroit. It was one of many cities that saw upheaval around the time. It's called the long Hot Summer of sixty seven.

Detroit police raided that bar, called in paddy wagons and hauled off about eighty people to jail.

That's when all hell broke loose.

I do hereby officially recommend the immediate deployment of federal troops in the Michigan.

Forty three Americans died in these streets. The city of Detroit was shut down.

It was a time of flux for Detroit, which then had a population closer to one point five million people. It was a time attention, but also of motown manufacturing, the Detroit Tigers, and the World Series win. But at home, Sandy's dad was kind of living in the past. According to Sandy, he was a tough nut who had a lot of rules. Let's just say there were more don'ts and dues in this household, particularly if you were just a girl.

I got grounded one time for six months because I said I was going to get my ears picture. When I was seventy, I wasn't allowed to get my driver's license because I was a girl. My mother became an interior decorator when I was in my forties. She stayed home the rest of the time. My mother didn't drive till she was twenty six or twenty seven.

Sandy dated, but not in a way you or I might recognize as dating.

Oh No, I dated, but usually very few single dates. It was all we did things as a group. I mean, there were like nine of us that hung out together. They followed us on dates, my sister and I. It was just really strange. Now that I look back at it, it was really strange, you know. At the time, she.

Just didn't know anything else. Back then, Sandy's parents were overbearing, and you can imagine the toll that would take on a person constantly told what she was allowed to do. Sandy wanted a life of her own where she could get away from all of that. So when she met a nice guy who was part of the group, she jumped at the chance to gain some independence.

Clip se Vegas. He was part of the group. He was part of our group.

Sandy's family had moved down the street from him when they were in high school. Clip was a few years older. They were friends, but it wasn't some sort of meet cute situation. For Sandy. Clip was an opportunity.

I wanted to get away from home. I wanted to do what I wanted to do, and so we got married. We didn't tell anybody at first when we got married, and then we broke it to him gently, furious. Furious.

Sandy was only eighteen. This was her first chance at having the life she wanted. She could move to the big city and fulfill her dreams.

I ended up teaching in a school in the inner city in Detroit, and we didn't teach history in government. I taught how to fill a job applications, how to get a bank account.

Then Clip was drafted and Sandy was left to her own devices. Vietnam is often referred to as the first television war. It had a serious global impact, but it also reverberated in America's living rooms.

By nineteen sixty nine, more than half a million men and women were stationed in South Vietnam.

All these men are in the army, Some are draftees, some regulars.

We've lost something over forty thousand men, now forty thousand American lives plus.

Was in Vietnam while I was pregnant. I had my own apartment. I've met the girl Life store. Her husband was a military to everybody was back then.

About a year after they were married, Sandy gave birth to her first child. She was named Suzanne Sebakas.

When she was born, she had this little curly little girls and big blue eyes. I was so excited.

You look a lot like her.

Thank you.

There are baby photos of Suzanne in the house. They both have those same sapphire blue eyes, that big grin, the bleach blonde hair. Suzanne was precocious, a standout from the start.

She was just always so happy. She I don't know. She had a strong personality. She loves school, she loved learning things, she loved doing things. I think she wouldn't have been a teacher, I really do.

Suzanne, whom Sandy sometimes called Susie, was almost two years old when Cliff came back from Vietnam. By then, the couple realized they had no real bond. They divorced pretty quickly. After my dad was drafted. I've seen firsthand the war's lasting impact. Cliff was never the same.

I had a little PTSD. I had the crumbling marriage, which doesn't help to go get off the plane at the airport and have the hippies call your names and spit at you.

Cliff caught me a few months after I talked to Sandy. We talked about other stuff, but he didn't want to talk about her. He set that boundary early on. All I'll say here is that the two probably weren't all that well matched in the first place. By our early twenties, Sandy decided being her own with the kid was better than being under her parents' roof, and better than being hitched to Cliff. But beyond that, she hadn't thought that

The first thing, you had to find a doctor that wasn't Catholic, Catholic doctors did not give birth control to anyone. And you asked for birth control, and they'd give you a lecture about how it could kill you, how it could hurt you, and then they would give you the lowest dose of whatever they could give you, unluxurre you.

Sandy wouldn't stay single for long. She met a man at a restaurant who couldn't be further from the straight last Vietnam veteran that Cliff was. If Cliff was by the book, Dennis was a wild card. They got married pretty quick.

He was a lot of fun. He was a professional gambler.

There's this paradox about it. Sandy. She was always on the hunt for freedom as a woman, but she only seemed to find it through marriage, through the men in her life. Two years after she married him, she got pregnant with her second daughter, Alison, then came amy her third. That marriage didn't last either. The way she puts it, it was her parents. It pushed tennis out the door. That's her view.

At least my.

Parents made it so hard that he left, and I think he went to California. He would pop up from time to time to visit us, but he'd never stayed. I never knew where he was.

By this point, Sandy was now a mother of three girls, with no second income and no second parent to help out. She relied on neighbors to watch the kids while she worked at the sow and mell here's my producer. Tate again didn't cost the kids.

It was.

Mighty at that time. It was the woman's.

Problem, exactly. Yeah, I take some real winners.

Sandy married five times in her life. Most of her husbands didn't pay child support. When they decided to split, she'd be left with the kids, and that was that. Cliff, Sandy's first husband, wouldn't talk about it. Dennis Brandenburg died years ago. Sandy tell me her parents weren't much help, but they were living outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, and told her to move closer to them. She figured it

There was a tornado and the tornado twisted my house.

It basically decimated her home. It had a catalyzing effect on Sandy's mental health. The storm made all the things she was already dealing with that much worse.

Well, I'm out there saying people, come stay in my house. People that had lost their house in the neighborhood, come stay in my house. I didn't realize my house was seven feet off the ground until I went to go out.

Sandy suffered immense pain, both mentally and financially.

The girls were traumatized by the tornado because we were in the trailer when the tornado hit and we had no way out.

Her daughter Amy barely remembers it, but it's become part of family lore.

There was a tornado and I was lost for a brief period of time, and they found me in the refrigerator. It had fallen with the doors open and I was inside. So I have been protected by her for in.

The second WhatIf moment that year, Sandy happened to get pregnant again. Steve is right. Sandy tell me she doesn't know who Steve's father is, but she figured it might be her second husband, Dennis Brandenburgh.

Dennis would come when my parents weren't around and see the kids all the time and see me, and every time he came, we had sex, playing and supple. So when I came up pregnant with Steve, I thought okay.

But she wasn't certain and she came under fire for that uncertainty.

My mom and dad thought I was a prostitute. That's why I don't know his father. Whose father is not true at all, I don't I didn't don't ever remember having boyfriend back then, but I drank some back then too.

Drinking and trauma don't go so well together, you can erase big swaths of memories that way. Sandy suspect she was having blackouts. Here's her daughter Amy again.

Well asked questions and she was like, I can't remember.

I drink a lot. I can't remember. You just gets tired of hearing that.

But Sandy seems to remember some bright spots, like parts of her pregnancy was Steve.

Oh yeah, I was excited. The girls were excited. We had all these little baby clothes.

After the tornado, she didn't have a home or a car. She was in temporary FEMA housing. She didn't have a husband who could help her with her children. She was excited about Steve's arrival. But this must have been a time of unimaginable stress too.

We were in the hotel. I said, Mom's gonna go have the baby. Now can we come too? And the girls were so excited. We were all excited. We must addressed him in ninety outfits a day at.

First, and she picked out a name for him.

Philip Stephen PS. He was supposed to be PS.

The end of the line, You're done, I'm done. But reality quickly set in. She was now a single mother of fourr living in temporary housing she couldn't manage, and her daughter Amy wasn't the only one having trouble coping after the tornado.

And I guess I snapped. I didn't know what to do, so I went to Social Services in North Carolina and said, you have to take my kids because I can't take care of them. I need help, mental help. And that's exactly how I put I need mental help. I couldn't function if it rained. I sat in the corner and cringed.

Sandy doesn't know exactly why she snapped in she just knew she had hit a while. It might have been postpartum depression. Sandy told me she thought she had PTSD from the tornado. At any rate, Sandy was at a loss. She didn't know what to do. She didn't live with another adult who could help her weather the mental illness, So the best thing to do, she reasoned, was to give up her kids. While Sandy was struggling with her mental health, her oldest, who she called Susie, stepped up.

It wasn't fair to ask Susie at five years old to take care of a newborn baby, but she did, and a two year old. Yeah, but she did. And I couldn't go It couldn't go on like that. It wasn't fair to the girls, It wasn't fair to Steve. Anything could have happened back then. If you asked for help, they treated it like it was a joke. I mean, come back next week. We'll talk to you next week.

Now in her seventies, she's gotten a diagnosis and meaningful help. That's how she ended up being a grandma who takes care of her grandbabies and great grandbabies when she couldn't take care of the first four children she had. The day Sandy decided to give up her children to social Services was a moment of clarity, the fog lifting. She had to get them to a place where they would be okay. So she did, But after that Sandy missed them. It was a mother's pull to be back with her kids.

So I was in Charlotte, and that's why I met Franklin Floyd. But I knew miss Brandon Williams, and he said that he would go with me to get the kids and everything would be all right.

This was Franklin Floyd, the man who would later be convicted for murder, who already had quite a wrap sheet with more fake id's than a bandit. This was a guy who came up in Steve's Google searches when he started looking for himself.

And then I started typing in Franklin's name, started reading about him.

What he read startling. He couldn't believe that he just barely cross pass with this man, a serial killer now sitting on death row.

I got lucky, kind of lucky. I feel, oh yeah, one hundred percent, no doubt, because she wouldn't have got me out of I would have had to go with Sandy and Franklin and that went. It turned out good.

And this made him rethink the events that led up to this, how different his life could have been if Sandy didn't give him to marry. Floyd made an impression on Mary when she adopted Steve I.

Saw him at a distance, and what they left him was a little masta to citter Masda with them three kids. I never did get to talk to him. I kept my distance from him.

She said that she got a bad feeling from him, that he was standing when they switched me off or whatnot. He was far off, just staring. She just there was something about.

Him, But Sandy didn't know there was something about him when she met him, not yet. At least. Sandy was simply grateful to meet a man way to help her out.

I don't think mentally at that time I was capable of loving anybody. I really really needed serious mental health. 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, she married him anyway. But it wasn't just that Sandy always needed a man by her side, though she ad meant that's probably true. Floyd been the helpful many scene, saved the day and reunited Sandy with her family. But then he went off script and.

We took the kids back to the trailer, and we stayed there for a couple of weeks, and then he said we're moving moving.

Who was this guy. The guys before were just flings or bad matches or impulsive relationships. Maybe if those guys were bad matches, this guy was a bad man, plain and simple.

And by this time I was afraid of it all. He's creepy. He was always creepy. And now that I look back, I was so stupid and so naive. I mean, I remember dumb little things. He had false teeth. The false teeth, said Franklin Floyd on him was engraved in him. He told me that was the dentist name. And I believe.

Him, you know.

And then he went out one time and killed a squirrel and he was skinning the squirrel and I don't eat squirrel. And the girl said they're not eat the squirrel and he said, y'all will eat it, or y'all be just skinned just like this thing. So you did. I threw it up, but yeah, and I made the girls through it too.

Oh.

He slept with the gun under the pillow, and he always had a knife. No way out. We're shocked.

Yeah, when he said they were moving, it wasn't really a discussion. This is what Steve didn't know. When he's a baby. Floyd had come into their lives and taken over. If they disobeyed him, Hit threatened to skin him alive like squirrels.

He had a Honda, and back then Hondas, the original Hondas had motorcycle engines. They were little teeny weeny, tiny little cars. 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. And then when we got to Saint Louis, he said, I'll never see him again.

This is where memory gets pretty weird. There's a lot that Sandy doesn't remember about this period in nineteen seventy four. She says so herself. She says she'd drink a lot during this time, though she denied doing any drugs. Some of Sandy's memories are just shades of what happened. Some are infused with the stories she's heard over the years other people's memories. What she remembers about Steve's adoption was very different from Mary's story. We'll get to Sandy's story

I went to jail for writing a bad check. I wrote a check for a dollar and seventy eight cents to get diapers for Amy seven eleven. Made it a point to prosecute every everybody. All I had to pay was that ten dollars fee, and my parents will lend me the ten dollars to pay it, and even the judge when I went to court kind of laughed.

Thirty days, that's how long she was behind bars. She left her three daughters with a friend to keep them away from her husband, who by then she was terrified of. That didn't matter well she was in jail. Floyd picked up the girls. He dropped two of them up in an orphanage and took off with Susie. It would be years until Sandy found out what really happened to her daughter. Next time owned Hello John Doe.

I won't worry about it comb my hair. I was just I was going to find her. I had to find.

Her, and that's when he took her. And that was the last time that she was seen.

Who just wanted her is what I thought. I never thought it would be the night pret.

Hello John Doe is and original productions by Revelations Entertainment in association with First and Last Productions from Revelations. Our executive producers are Morgan Freeman and James Younger. From First to Last. Lindsay Moreno is the executive producer. Our producing partner is Neo on Hume Media. He was written and produced by Kate Michigan. Our editor is Katherine Saint Louis. She is also ni on Home Media's executive editor. Our

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