Caleb Hughes Makes a Child Vanish
(“Innocence Lost,” Forensic Files)
Note: This post was updated in October 2020
I try not to use clichéed phrases, but this one seems unavoidable in telling Melissa Brannen’s story: every parent’s worst nightmare.
Melissa, age 5, vanished while attending a holiday party with her mother in Lorton, Virginia.
The little girl, dressed in a red skirt and blue Sesame Street sweater, strayed from single mother Tammy Brannen’s field of vision for a minute.
Challenge for prosecutors. Unfortunately, that was all it took for Caleb Daniel Hughes to grab her, exit via a window, put her in his red Honda Civic, and take off on the chilly night of December 3, 1989.
At the time Forensic Files first aired “Innocence Lost” in 1999, Melissa was missing — and she still is. No one figured out what Hughes did with her or her body.
Because the state of Virginia requires a proven location of a body to get a murder conviction, prosecutors charged Hughes with abduction of a minor with immoral purpose. That got him a sentence of 50 years, initially.
Struggling single mother. For this week, I looked around for epilogues for Caleb Hughes and Tammy Brannen, but first here’s a recap of “Innocence Lost,” the Forensic Files episode about the case, along with additional information from internet research.
Tammy Brannen was a 27-year-old accountant when she moved to northern Virginia with her daughter after a divorce. Her ex-husband lived in Texas.
She got a job with a defense contracting company, CACI Inc., and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in the Woodside complex.
On the weekends, she worked at a jewelry store. Her parents helped take care of Melissa.
The holiday party took place in Woodside’s clubhouse and drew about 200 residents.
Wolf loose. Woodside was known for its friendliness and sense of community, which is nice to hear (I lived in a couple garden apartment complexes in New Jersey, and they were cesspools). Tammy Brannen had no reason to worry about her daughter’s safety among her neighbors.
At least one person who wasn’t an actual tenant, Caleb Hughes, attended the party. He was a newlywed in his mid-20s who worked as a maintenance man for the complex.
Guests recalled that Hughes paid attention to Melissa at the party and spoke to her, although he would later deny it.
After Tammy said her goodbyes to her neighbors at the party, she all of a sudden couldn’t find her daughter. Melissa had asked permission to take home some potato chips just a few moments before.
Tammy discovered an open window in the utility closet in the back of the room. That was the only clue.
Laundry’s a giveaway. The police, citizen volunteers, and 300 military personnel quickly mobilized a search effort for Melissa. They distributed 35,000 fliers and 10,000 bumper stickers in the Washington, D.C., area. Some local movie theaters played home video footage showing Melissa. A $100,000 award was offered for help.
Still, no sign of Melissa.
But investigators had already come up with a suspect on the night of the disappearance. Caleb Hughes told a fishy-sounding story about his whereabouts when detectives interviewed him at his house. They looked in his washing machine and discovered the outfit he’d worn that night, including his leather belt, knife holder, and shoes; everything had already gone through the wash cycle.
In an exchange that sounded like TV police-show dialogue, a detective told Hughes, “I think you took Melissa out of that party.”
“Prove it,” Hughes replied.
Media frenzy. The police did so using evidence retrieved from Hughes’ car. They identified fibers from Melissa’s Big Bird sweater. Retailer J.C. Penney had manufactured it using material in a rare patented shade of blue named Plum Navy 887.
Meanwhile, the massive media coverage surrounding Hughes’ prospective guilt compelled Baltimore Sun columnist Roger Simon to condemn it as “media justice” akin to mob justice in a piece he wrote for the January 10, 1990 edition.
“There was a stampede among local stations in Washington to ‘own’ the Melissa Brennan story,” Simon wrote, noting that at least one TV anchor’s voice choked with emotion on air when she spoke of Melissa.
Hughes, on the other hand, clammed up about the disappearance. But his wife, Carol, was happy to cooperate with police. Carol, who worked as a supply buyer for the local public school system, helped investigators establish a timeline for Caleb Hughes’ movements the night Melissa vanished.
Cruel game. Investigators believe Hughes took off Melissa’s pink coat in the car, sexually assaulted her, and then killed her. Forensic Files noted that most strangers who kidnap children murder them within three hours.
As if Tammy hadn’t experienced enough of an emotional roller coaster following the disappearance, a couple of moronic young adults perpetrated a cruel hoax against her. They said they were holding Melissa and would release her for $75,000 in ransom.
An FBI agent posing as Tammy Brannen handed the money to a courier whom they subsequently followed to an apartment shared by Emmett Muriel Grier III, 20, and Anthony Girard McCray, 24
Grier, a college dropout whose father was a sheriff’s deputy in Detroit, and McCray were charged with extortion in 1991. Grier got a prison sentence of just shy of 4 years, and McCray, who allegedly devised the plan, received 7 years.
Authorities believe they had nothing to do with Melissa’s disappearance, however, and that Hughes acted alone as the kidnapper.
Bad guy wins. The 50-year sentence with no possibility of parole the judge handed to Hughes in May of 1991 was an impressive achievement for the justice system considering no body ever turned up. Prosecutor Robert Horan Jr. would later call the Brannen disappearance the most haunting case he ever worked on.
So where are the parties today?
On June 22, 1993, a Virginia appeals court overturned Hughes’ conviction for intent to molest, meaning he could end up resentenced on charges of abduction alone.
Sure enough, a Washington Post interview with Tammy from 1999 referred to a 2013 release date for Hughes — a huge letdown considering his original sentence would have kept him behind razor wire until 2041.
It’s not clear what happened with the plan to spring Hughes in 2013, but as of 2016, he was still incarcerated in Fairfax County’s Augusta Correctional Center as inmate number 1058054.
A state of Virginia website lists a release date of August 2, 2019 for him — and it looks as though he’s out (thanks to reader Marcus for writing in with the update) after serving 29 years of his sentence.
The Virginia state police lists his status as probation supervision. I plugged his current address into Google and, unfortunately, it’s a house rather than a prison.
Since his release, he has worked at a fast food restaurant, a cosmetics manufacturer, and a job staffing company, according to the Virginia state police website.
At least in the last two jobs, there’s limited chance of his coming into contact with children, but the Burger King gig sounds like a bad idea.
Still hopeful. And what happened to the protagonist in this story? Tammy Brannen went back to school and completed an MBA and got married again, to a widower with four children, Leon Graybill, she met at karaoke night, according to the Washington Post interview.
She told reporter Sara Davis that she uses her husband’s last name but still lists her phone under “Brannen” so that Melissa can find her in the event that she turns up alive one day.
The article notes that Caleb Hughes refused Tammy’s requests for information about what he did with Melissa.
Fairfax County Prosecutor Robert Horan Jr., who viewers may remember from his appearance on Forensic Files, turned up in the national news for a different case, in 2003. He successfully prosecuted Lee Boyd Malvo, a sniper who terrorized the Washington, D.C., area with random serial murders.
Horan retired in 2007.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
