A Florida Firefighter Was Set to Testify in Her Husband’s Drug Case—Then She Disappeared

Jeff Hall awoke on the morning of August 18, 2006, to find that his wife Brandy was not home. He called her thrice. Then, he called the Florida fire station where she works.

Surveillance footage showed her leaving Malabar fire station at around 10:45 p.m., about an hour after speaking with her husband, 10-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son over the phone. Twenty years later, Brandy is still missing.

Brandy began working as a firefighter and medical technician in the Palm Bay Fire Department in 1994. Her husband was the chief of Osceola County’s fire department, until he stepped down in 1999. In July 2005, their lives were turned upside down.

Authorities raided Jeff’s property and confiscated $1 million worth of marijuana and equipment. He was arrested and charged with manufacturing a hallucinogen, trafficking marijuana and possession with intent to sell. 

Within a week, Brandy was arrested in connection with his case and suspended from the fire department, pending investigation. Five months later, she was fired for “failing to maintain public trust.” Ultimately, the drug charges against Brandy were dropped, though she was still charged with commercial littering and pollution, for which she was scheduled to go to trial in October 2006.

The mother-of-two had been volunteering at the Malabar fire station to win her job back, which is where she was last seen. That night, Brandy had a 10-minute and 46-second-long phone call with Palm Bay Fire Captain Randall Richmond, with whom she was having an extramarital affair per his admission to investigators. That is her last known conversation.

Brandy was set to testify at Jeff’s court hearing the morning of her disappearance. That day, Jeff pleaded guilty to cultivation of cannabis and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, 42 months of probation and fined over $9,000. 

“She was going to testify positively for him,” Jeff’s attorney, Kepler Funk, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “She would have testified to his fine character as a man, a husband and a father.”

Funk says that Jeff and Brandy were good people going through a rough time but sticking together. “I know Jeff is heartbroken,” he says.

The week after Brandy’s disappearance, Jeff told Channel 9, “Somebody has to know something. They need to contact the authorities and let them know where she's at. We beg you. Your children need you. We really need you.”

As authorities looked for Brandy in the following days, her firefighting gear and green Chevrolet pickup truck were located by a fisherman in a pond in Palm Bay—a pond near where she and Richmond would allegedly meet in secret. Other personal items also later emerged in the area. 

The Palm Bay police drained part of the pond to aid the investigation and their dive team searched the area. Large quantities of Brandy’s blood were found in the truck, leading investigators to believe she was likely murdered.

Private investigator Nicolas Sandberg tells A&E Crime + Investigation that it is likely authorities would have discovered Brandy’s body when they found large amounts of her blood, had the incident been in any way self-inflicted. The lack of a body suggests foul play. 

Some have raised the question of whether Brandy ran away. Her daughter, Taylor, told Florida Today, “My mom…knew our father was going away and there is absolutely no scenario where I believe she would have willingly left us…I believe my mother was murdered.”

In 2007, Brandy’s family announced that they would be increasing the reward for information on her disappearance from $1,000 to $10,000.

Four years later, the FBI began assisting the Palm Bay police.

But on August 18, 2015, Brandy was officially declared dead at her family’s request.

In the following years, Sandberg says there was a breakthrough. “We found some details that kind of made [the case] not cold anymore and they started to reinvestigate it and assigned an actual detective from the department on it,” she explains. “The community was very active in doing searches.”

A private citizen, Gail Sheldon, is said to have funded her own search. Ohio-born psychic Gale St. John was also engaged to investigate. St. John later accused an unnamed person, who had reached out asking for help in Brandy’s case, of being the killer. She told Florida Today in 2018 that “bits and pieces” of evidence have been recovered where she said they would be, but, “we’re still off on the timing.”

Working with a psychic is not an everyday investigation approach, though Sandberg notes: “Out of respect for the family in an investigation like this, you don't turn away any type of help and support. You gather information and you evaluate.” 

In 2026, the Palm Bay police conducted a new search. 

Each Palm Bay police detective is assigned to various cold cases to consistently re-examine evidence, as technology and scientific methods progress over time, Sgt. Vincent Galioto of the Palm Bay police department tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “We received new information that led to a location being searched in March of this year,” Galioto says.

Though it did not ultimately lead the department to new evidence, the search resulted in police receiving many new tips from the public. There have never been any arrests in the case.

The detectives, dive team, officers and firefighters who were looking into this incident at the time that it occurred are all retired now and older. “You've got a new generation looking on this,” Sandberg says. “You've got some new advances in technology.”

Sandberg notes that “there is a detective currently that is working this case,” who she describes as “hands on”: “It's not something that's just sitting on a shelf.”