Their lives were so much larger than their deaths. As an example, here was a picture Shelby and Cassidy Brannon signed, with love, to their father, Dewey Brannon. I found it among the crime investigation files available to the public. And that is the answer to the question Dewey asked me about why I had to use their real names instead of pseudonyms, why I was writing the story at all, 20 years later. “Nobody cares after all this time,” he said.
I told him I had to think about my answer. Until he asked, I had never considered using any names but the real ones. Charlie Wells and I are writing a book of non-fiction, and one of the reasons we are writing it is because we think there needs to be accountability for the crime and for how it was investigated. Charlie is extremely proud of the work his investigators and staff did to solve the crime quickly and he wants the world to know about it. He’s angry that a profiler led them down a wrong path and briefly delayed the progress of the investigation as a result.
He and his colleagues were especially affected by this crime because it involved children. I heard that over and over from the investigation team leader, Major Connie Shingledecker, from Captain Rick Gerken who led the day-to-day investigation, and from Dianna Taylor, the supervisor of the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office forensics unit that processed the crime scene. All of those investigators had young children, and I had three teen sons by the time the murders were committed in 1999. We all wanted the murderer to be held accountable in the strongest possible way for what he had done. Having the world know him and his crimes was one way to do that.
My interviewee’s queries brought me to some fundamental questions about what I was doing. I knew I was fascinated by this particular case, but could not tell you why, and using pseudonyms seemed dishonest somehow. We had unearthed tons of unflattering facts about people involved in the case, yet not all of them were relevant…or were they? It was not always possible to know.
After a lot of soul-searching, this is what I have concluded: the story we are writing is a story about a family. In it are births and deaths, joy and anguish, problems and solutions, facts, guesses, and conclusions. Those are the elements of all lives. We think we are unique, and in the details we are, but looking at the whole picture we are not so very different.
While some parts of life are unbearably cruel, it is not necessary to inject gratutitous detail into the story, thus adding pain to survivors who may decide to read the book. The lives of the victims, survivors, and perpetrator are much longer and more involved than what was revealed in the murders and their solution. That fullness, with its richness and beauty, needs to frame the story of the homicide.
Dewey Brannon told me he had spent the last 20 years of his life trying to forget what he had seen that day. We will tell the story as kindly as possible, as completely as we are able. I hope this will help Dewey and the other survivors of these tragic murders remember the girls’ energy and their sweetness.
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