SOLVED: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MELISSA BRANNEN

guys it's bella welcome back to my channel i hope you guys are all having an incredible day i hope you're having a wonderful holiday season so far so today we are going to be talking about a case that is technically solved it happened back in 1989 in fairfax county in virginia and this was a huge case like this was all over the media there this was probably one of the biggest cases in fairfax county but before we get into the case i just want to thank today's sponsor honey for making this video possible so if you guys haven't heard of honey it's basically an online shopping tool that helps you save some dash it's so good it's so easy to use and it probably works on a ton of websites that you're already using like for example my bed sheets i've been buying them from the same place for yonks now and i was like okay let me just have a little look-see lo and behold honey found a promo code so i have been unnecessarily spending more money on my bedsheets than i needed to what do you mean so basically honey searches for promo codes for you so you go onto whatever website you want to go on to and you click the little honey icon on the top of your browser and it will search for promo codes for that website and it will also test those promo codes out for you to see if they're working and it's that easy just like that you save some money like who doesn't love saving a bit of money it's like free savings and seriously it takes two seconds to get and you can get it for free at joinhoney.com bella and if there is one thing i can recommend to you it is honey because you're just saving money on things that you're already buying it is actually a no-brainer so i will leave all of the information in the description down below if you guys want to check it out and let's go ahead and get into today's case so today we're going to be talking about the disappearance of melissa brennan she was born on the 12th of april in 1984 to michael and tammy brennan and by 1989 her parents had recently divorced so she and tammy moved from texas to lawton in virginia to i guess you know get a new start start a new leaf a new chapter in their lives and tammy was working there as an accountant she was a single mom and according to friends and family she was an amazing mum she was super sweet and caring and she was very protective of melissa and she wasn't outgoing or anything she liked to keep to herself mostly but she did participate in pretty much everything that her apartment complex held so the apartment complex they moved into in lawton was the woodside apartment complex and it was a pretty huge complex but it was very tight-knit everyone was very friendly and it was very social they had a very active social program for the residents they had some sort of event on every friday night and then there were some special events and parties during the holidays as well so it was a really nice friendly community to raise your kids in and tammy felt very safe there so on the 3rd of december in 1989 they had the christmas party and about 200 people from the complex went to this christmas party and you know it was a good time everyone was enjoying themselves the kids were hanging out all night you know going around stealing food that sort of thing and at around 10 p.m tammy was ready to go she just quickly wanted to say goodbye to a friend so she told melissa go and get our coats while i said goodbye and then we'll leave but surely after getting their coats five-year-old melissa disappeared and obviously tammy was freaking out she searched the entire party looking for melissa and when she couldn't find her she immediately contacted the fairfax county police department so the police arrive and they obviously do their own search of the entire party and they don't find anything too odd except for in the furnace room you know where all of the utilities are in the furnace room there's a window open which leads directly outside which is obviously you know not a great sign but at this point they were hoping kind of the best case scenario they were hoping that she had just gotten lost or wandered off or she was just hiding or something she would be found alive and safe and just maybe a little bit scared so they went ahead and they questioned all 200 people that went to the party and no one had seen anything sketchy no one had seen her leave no one had seen anyone take her they obviously also questioned tammy asked her if she had noticed anything suspicious if there were maybe some you know weird neighbors that she had taken note of but there was nothing she you know had never had any problems with anyone while she had been living at that complex and they also looked into melissa's father michael and he was in texas the night melissa disappeared so he was very quickly ruled out as well and so police expanded their search they started doing an immediate search of the area surrounding the complex which was a wooded area and it was cold it was the third of december it was chilly out and melissa was five so they were really concerned that if she had wandered off and gotten lost in the woods that she wouldn't really survive that long in these conditions but the police did a search a bunch of people from the party from the complex also helped search and they found nothing there were no signs of melissa outside of the complex or inside of the complex so then later that night they decided to go and question all 400 residents of the woodside apartment complex and they also decide to question all of the employees and one name that kept coming up was caleb hughes he was 23 years old and he was a maintenance worker at the complex and he had been at the christmas party that night and his name had come up in questioning a few times because a few different women had said that he'd been hitting on them that night and he was making some really vulgar sexual advances towards these women and like you know just making them super uncomfortable and a few people also reported that he had been talking to the children at the party a lot and some of the parents were very uncomfortable because he was just touching them and you know something was just off about him people just didn't feel right about him and he had actually also been speaking to tammy about melissa and he even offered to take melissa to the bathroom if she needed to go it was just like you know just really odd behavior from this man so police decide to question him they go and pay a little visit to his house which is only four miles away from the complex but when they get there he's actually not home his wife answers the door and she's like yeah i've got no idea where he is and he doesn't get home until 12 30 a.m and you know once he gets home police go and question him and they're like why did it take you two and a half hours to get home when you only live four miles away from the complex and this man he has no excuse he basically just says oh it took me so long because i stopped to buy beers on the way home which doesn't make sense for like a multitude of reasons i mean first of all it doesn't take two and a half hours to buy beers and second of all in virginia at the time they actually stopped selling alcohol at 12 am so he physically would not have been able to buy beer like he said he did and if that wasn't even bad enough that he can't even come up with an alibi for the last two and a half hours and pretty much doesn't even try to he also tells police that he came home and immediately washed all of his clothes so police go and have a look at the washing machine and he has washed his clothes that he was wearing to the party he's washing his sneakers that he had worn to the party he's washing his belt and he's washing a knife sheath but the knife is nowhere to be found and they're like that's weird why are you washing your clothes from tonight as soon as you got home and a girl has gone missing that night make it make sense to me like explain this to me and this man goes oh i just i needed to wash it so i could wear it to work tomorrow and the police are like yeah okay that would make sense if you weren't washing your sneakers and your belt and a knife sheath and the knife wasn't missing and he didn't even really have a response to that and then if you guys were thinking well you know things couldn't possibly look any sketchier for this guy just you wait because police have a look at the shoes and turns out he has actually tried to shave away the sides of his shoes and they're like okay this is really weird let's do a luminal test and despite him trying to shave away the sides of his shoes and despite him then washing them as well there still are traces of blood on the shoes so obviously he had gotten blood on his shoes he had tried to shave it away and then was like okay just for safe measure let me also wash them and i guess you know it did the trick because unfortunately they couldn't actually test the traces of blood because there wasn't enough left on the shoes so for obvious reasons police decide to bring this guy down to the station for more questioning and they're hoping he might be a little bit more inclined to talk if he's not in front of his wife and they bring him in and this guy is still a grade a douchebag he's extremely invasive he's not cooperating with police at all and he sticks to a story that the reason he took two and a half hours to get home is because he stopped for beers and he apparently took the long way home i don't know what kind of long way you're taking that it takes you two and a half hours to drive four miles but that's all he's given him they questioned him for hours and he was smug and evasive the entire time he claimed he didn't even know who melissa was that he had never seen her never heard of her never met her and police were like look we know that you're lying and he just turns to them this man literally says prove it and the police officers were basically like okay bet so unfortunately detectives don't have enough evidence to hold him so they have to let him go after questioning but it definitely changes the whole investigation police by this point are like okay i don't think we're looking for a little girl who's run away or a little girl who's missing this is an abduction investigation so detectives ramp up the search and they decide to go and question caleb's wife again and for whatever reason i don't know what he's been doing behind her back but she is suss on him she does not trust him so before he left to go to the christmas party she actually went to his car and she checked the mileage on it and then the next morning before he left she actually checked the mileage again and he had driven 12 miles in that time which is obviously a huge help to detectives because it helps them figure out how far he could have driven that night where he could have gone you know a search radius the party was held at the woodside apartment complex and caleb and his wife lived in northern prince william county which was four miles away like i mentioned so detectives actually got a map out and they put pins in these two locations and then they took a string that was the equivalent of 12 linear miles and they tied the two ends of the string together and they put them over the pins to basically see how far he could have gone between leaving the party and returning back home later that night and this gave them a 25 square mile radius to search so they get over 500 volunteers they have police they've got military personnel they've got helicopters planes dive teams they have a ton of people out looking for melissa and they search through the woods they search along railroad tracks they search in lakes and rivers they search everywhere they could possibly think of they had specific instructions on what to do if they did find anything that they believed might be evidence they would basically have to stick like a little pin with a flag on it there and just leave it not disturb it not touch it at all and then a forensic team would come over to properly analyze that evidence they also printed and handed out hundreds of flies with melissa's face on them and they went to tamiya melissa's apartment and gathered up some of melissa's hair brushes nightgowns that sort of thing that they could potentially use for dna testing and they also went back to analyze the crime scene so you know the complex where the christmas party was held and as i mentioned earlier there was an open window in the furnace room and outside of this window they actually found adult-sized footprints that led from the outside of this window all the way to a parking lot right beside the complex they only found one set of footprints there were no children's footprints so they theorized that somebody likely caleb had picked melissa up they had carried her from outside this furnace room over to their car that was in the parking lot put her straight in the car and driven her away melissa's mother tummy and her father michael did a press conference pleading for their daughter's safe return which was super emotional they were both just i mean you could tell they were devastated of course i i can't even imagine i beg you to please call somebody anybody and tell us where she is no matter what happened she saw that i have please bring her back to me if you can hear mommy and get to a telephone call our number like i taught you too or call me we love you we miss you very much please come back to us mommy's waiting i also ask that if the person who took my daughter can hear me please let her go we love her very much a candlelight vigil for melissa was held at the apartment complex and people put bumper stickers on their car they tied yellow ribbons around trees in town and out the front of their houses in support it was just a huge case it was all anyone in the town was talking about because it could have happened to anyone so it was very scary for a lot of people and it was also a really tight-knit community a lot of people knew melissa a lot of people knew tammy it was just a horrible case a 10 000 reward was posted for any information that would lead to melissa's whereabouts and just five months earlier actually a ten-year-old girl named rosie gordon had been abducted while she was riding her bike and she was then raped and murdered and her killer hadn't been found and her mother met with tammy to help support her because she knew what she was going through it's obviously not something a lot of people can relate to and i just think it's really nice that someone going through something so horrible themselves can come out and you know support somebody else who's going through something horrible and try to help them out as well while they're also dealing with their own terrible terrible thing obviously the investigation into caleb continued and he was actually publicly named the prime and only suspect which was put all over the media he was put under around the clock surveillance and the fbi also got involved they went and they searched his house and they seized a few items that they thought might be of interest which they took back to the fbi lab for analysis and they also got a grand jury involved that ordered him to submit to blood and other type of forensic testing which the local authorities hadn't been able to do they also looked into his background and they found that he had grown up in an abusive dysfunctional home he had a record as a juvenile delinquent and he had a very long history of drug and alcohol abuse as well as a disturbing attraction towards children there was evidence that he had spent a lot of time with young kids none you know quite as young as melissa but a lot of kids in their early teens as an adult he had also been convicted of larceny car theft contributing to the delinquency of a minor and he was also currently on probation for an auto theft conviction from two years earlier and shortly after new year's a judge from the next county over actually received a letter or a call from his probation officer saying he had actually violated his probation so on the 24th of january the judge revoked his probation and he was put in county jail until at least november that was the earliest he could be released which at least you know gave investigators and gave police some time to build their case up against him while he was in prison and while all of this is going on and the police are looking into caleb about two months after melissa's disappearance tammy gets a call from this guy some anonymous guy who says he actually has melissa and he's holding her for ransom and he wants 75 000 by the next day or he would seriously harm her so tammy immediately calls her mom she calls the police and the police basically say look go ahead with the ransom demands we'll be there to support you we'll be there to make sure nothing goes wrong but go ahead with these ransom demands and they're hoping that they've been wrong they're hoping they've been wrong about caleb and once they get there they will be able to get melissa back safe and alive the fbi coordinates the whole thing because extortion falls under federal guidelines so the next day tammy shows up at the drop site and the fbi swat team is there ready for this guy to show his face and then these two guys show up to get the money and the fbi come out they arrested these guys they didn't have melissa they were just these two roommates who were students at the nearby uni who decided to make a quick buck out of a grieving mother it's so messed up but they were convicted on five counts including conspiracy and extortion and they were sentenced to seven years and five months and 3 years and 10 months so after that whole crazy unfortunate mess police go back to looking into caleb and they find out that the car he had been driving the night of melissa's disappearance actually belonged to his wife so they go and speak to her and she gave investigators permission to impound and search it and they were obviously searching for you know like fingerprints and blood and fibers and basically anything that would tie melissa to the car and usually they would use a vacuum in this kind of circumstance to gather up all of their hairs and fibers and that sort of thing because they're really hard to see with the naked eye but this car was a mess it was chaos there was a bunch of clutter debris dirt bags of books dog's hair like just a lot of mess and the crime scene investigator jim jorgen who was supposed to be collecting all of this evidence was like well damn how am i going to do this with a vacuum like i can't just use a vacuum like i normally would because there's so much stuff in here so he first sprayed the car with luminol and that found traces of blood on the foot pedals the floor mat on the driver's side and also the steering wheel so investigators obviously collected this blood to send off for dna testing because you know he shaved his shoes and he put his shoes in the wash and there was traces of blood found on his shoes investigators are just putting two and two together that he's gotten blood on his shoes and then tracked it back in the car probably from when he murdered melissa is what they're thinking so they send it off for dna analysis but unfortunately the results were inconclusive so gogan then used a piece of tape to pick up all of the hairs and the fibers inside the car and then he sent all of that tape off to doug diedrick from the fbi for analysis and on these pieces of tape they found like a bunch of animal hair a lot of it was dog hair because caleb and his wife had two large dogs but they also found three rabbit hairs that had been dyed black which were really similar to the hairs from a german rabbit hair coat tammy wore to the christmas party when melissa disappeared and as i mentioned when they were getting ready to leave tammy actually asked melissa to go and get their coats and melissa had put tammy's coat on kind of as a joke wanted to try on her mum's coat which is exactly how those fibers could have gotten transferred from the coat onto melissa and then from melissa into caleb's car so police went and spoke to tammy and she gave them the coat to test against the fibers found in the car and her coat the hairs on her coat were an exact match to the three rabbit hairs found on caleb's passenger seat they also found a single light blonde hair on his passenger seat and they tested this hair against the hair from one of melissa's hair brushes they had collected and it was an exact match but investigators needed more than this because it would be way too easy for caleb's attorney to just say he brushed past tammy while she was wearing the code at the party that night he brushed past melissa at the party that night and that's how he transferred those fibers into his car so they had actually also found a bunch of red and blue fibers on the passenger seat of caleb's car and the red fibers were cotton and they were super common but the blue fibers were acrylic and they were actually really rare 50 of those blue fibers had been found on his passenger seat and they had been man-made with acrylic and the night that melissa disappeared she had been wearing a pink nylon ski jacket a red skirt and a navy blue acrylic sweater with a picture of big bird from sesame street on it so doug diedrick from the fbi who was doing all the testing was like oh my god you know this is kind of all adding up it seems like these fibers could be from the clothes melissa was wearing that night but obviously melissa was still missing no trace of her had been found none of her clothes had been found so he didn't have anything to compare these fibers to to prove that these fibers came from melissa's outfit they went out and they questioned melissa's grandma because she had bought her the outfit she was wearing that night but her grandma could not for the life of her remember where she had purchased the outfit from so it's not like police could just go to wherever it was bought from get another one to compare the fibres from the cartoon they just they didn't have anything there was nothing they could do and then one night doug diedrick goes home and he's having a bit of a rant to his wife about how frustrating the case is and how he just really wishes he knew where this outfit was from so that he could compare the fibers and he tells her you know i think it's like either a winnie the pooh or a big bird outfit and his wife's like well i don't know anything about winnie the pooh but if it was big burp from sesame street then that's from jcpenney so let me go and have a look at some catalogs that i have from jcpenney to see if you know by some chance it's in one of these catalogues and we can find it because she had jc penny catalogs from like the last few years because they also had children that were around the same age as melissa so she goes she gets these catalogues she has a look through and in one of the catalogs from the christmas the year before melissa's disappearance on page 11 lo and behold it is melissa's exact outfit like just the odds of that that is just insane to me that the guy doing the fbi analysis on these fibers goes and just has a rant to his wife and his wife is like hold on let me have a look in my catalogues and it's there she finds it they went and showed this book to tammy and tammy was like yup that is exactly the outfit melissa was wearing that night so the fbi goes and talks to jcpenney and they're like look we need this outfit for a case that we're doing we need it so that we can test it against some fibers and jcpenney says sorry we've sold out of all of them but it was a catalogue only item so we can give you the name of every single person who purchased this one there were 7 000 of these outfits that were made and they were all sold within a few months and one of the people that had purchased one of these outfits was a man from kentucky and he had purchased it as a gift for his granddaughter but it was the wrong size so it had never been worn so he sends it off to the fbi for analysis and the fbi tests the fibers from caleb's car against this outfit the exact outfit that melissa had been wearing the night she disappeared so this particular outfit when jc penney decided to manufacture it they wanted to make it unique they wanted to make it something that nobody else could get they didn't want to use just a standard dye they wanted to create a brand new color so they made sure it was a dye that no one else had access to so that they could trademark it and they called the color plum navy 887 and they patented this dye and they only used this dye once on the seven thousand big bird sweaters and when doug diedrick compared the fibers from this sweater to the fibers found in caleb hughes's car they were an exact match and with almost 300 million people in the u.s at the time and only 7 000 of these sweaters ever having been made the chances of this sweater being in caleb hughes's car is so slim but doug diedrick wanted to be 100 certain so he goes around he asks a bunch of people at the fbi to give him any you know navy blue clothes that they may have had so that he could test them he managed to collect over 100 navy items and 126 different navy blue acrylic fibers from these items of clothing he made 7983 different comparison tests of these navy blue acrylic fibers against the navy blue acrylic fibers found in caleb hughes's passenger seat and the single only ones that match out of almost 8 000 comparison tests were the fibers from the big bird sweater that melissa had been wearing the night she disappeared now they still hadn't found melissa they hadn't found a body they hadn't found any trace of her but because of obviously the blood and the acrylic fibers they believed that caleb had done more than just kidnap her because as i mentioned she had been wearing a pink nylon coat on top of her big bird outfit and if she had continued to wear that in the car the fibers from her big bird outfit wouldn't have transferred they would have transferred to the inside of her nylon coat so he had obviously taken the coat off her and that's when the fibers transferred to his car and they believed that the reason he removed this coat and potentially her other clothes was to commit a sex act against melissa they believe that while melissa was waiting for her mum to say her goodbyes at the christmas party that she had gone to the water fountain to get a drink and this water fountain was located right near the furnace room where that open window was found and the footsteps from the open window were found and so they believed that while she was getting a drink of water at this fountain caleb abducted her as i mentioned he had tried to pick up a few adult women that night and when they all rejected him he decided to move on and find a substitute he hung out with the kids a lot that night as i mentioned a lot of people at the party saw him hanging out with the kids and they believed that he was doing so just kind of waiting for an opportunity where he could take one of these children so when melissa went for that drink at the water fountain near the furnace room he saw his opportunity they believe he then took her into the furnace room and out through that window he then carried her straight to his car in the parking lot next to the complex and drove her away and committed a sex act before murdering her it's unknown where he took melissa and her body has never been discovered but because of the blood found on his floor mat and his foot pedals and his steering wheel and the traces of blood found on his shoes as well as the fact that there was a knife sheath in his washing machine with all of the clothes he was washing but no knife has ever been found it's believed that he did likely murder her with a knife after committing this crime he then returned home at around 12 30 a.m and that is when he tried to scrape all of the blood off his shoes and tried to wash away all of the evidence in the washing machine so investigators bring caleb in for a polygraph test hoping that with all of this evidence they have against him that they would get a confession out of him because they still didn't have a body and in virginia you actually can charge someone with murder even if you don't have a body but you have to be able to prove where the homicide took place which they weren't able to do so they needed a confession in order to be able to charge him with murder and he pretty much tanked this polygraph test like if it was a math test he would have gotten an f an f minus but in the state of virginia polygraphs actually can't be used in chord i mean for good reason they're super unreliable but obviously police did not get a confession during this polygraph test and that's why he failed the whole thing because he denied everything he said he didn't have anything to do with it he stuck to his story so there was no confession and because of this the most that they could charge caleb with was abduction with intent to defile and he pled guilty his trial began on the 28th of february in 1991 and even at the trial he still didn't have an alibi and he still couldn't account for the two and a half hours between leaving the party and coming home the trial lasted eight days and after nine hours of deliberation the jury found caleb hughes guilty and he was sentenced to 50 years in prison unfortunately he was released early in 2019 after just 29 years in prison and melissa's body has still never been found to this day tammy did eventually move and remarry and she did take the last name of the man she remarried but in all listings she kept her name as tammy brennan so that if melissa was still alive somehow that she would be able to find her mother in the listings but that is everything for this case that's all for me today guys as always i would love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below because this case is just so heartbreaking honestly i mean this case is technically solved but there has never been anybody there's never been any traces of melissa ever found still to this day which is just heartbreaking it's horrible i think the theory that caleb murdered her likely defiled her murdered her with a knife is obviously i feel like it's one and done it's pretty obvious based on the blood the fibers everything else but it's just so heartbreaking for her family that they never recovered her body they were never able to find her and it sucks it sucks that this guy went to prison for 29 years and still could never just admit to where the body is you know give the family that little bit of closure but that is all for me today i hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your day and hopefully i will see you in tomorrow's video bye guys

Channel: Bella Fiori

Views: 1,043,590

Keywords:

Id: veberi8MSZk

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 23 2021