In the early morning hours of April 1st, 1982, Charlie Hope left the Redfish Seafood and Steakhouse restaurant after having a drink with his uncle and vanished into the night. The ensuing investigation into his disappearance would ultimately fail to discover what had become of Charlie or why.
Even today, over 40 years later, there are more questions than answers in a bizarre case that has inspired many theories—some more believable than others—including drug-related homicide, a private island, a jealous husband, and more. Similar cases would even lead investigators to wonder if there was a serial killer out there who was targeting realtors.
What really happened to Charlie Hope?
Charles David Hope
One of six children, Charles “Charlie” David Hope was born on September 30th, 1940, in Brooksville, Florida, to parents William (“Buck”) and Geraldine. The Hope family had resided in that region for generations and could trace back their ancestry to one of the first two European families to settle the western coast of Florida.
Charlie was outdoorsy and loved fishing and hunting. He knew the swamps and wooded areas of Hernando County as well as any and better than most. Growing up, he excelled both academically and athletically.
He married his first wife, Alice, at 17 and the couple went on to have three sons and one daughter together.
He worked in construction before a change in career trajectory led him into the real estate industry, where he became a prominent and successful businessman.
Additionally, he was elected chairman of the Hernando Valley Port Authority, a board of commissioners in charge of maintaining navigable waterways (Charlie would resign from this position in February 1982).
The outgoing Charlie was known to everyone in the Brooksville area and was well-liked by most, being described as a kind and generous person who would do anything for anybody.
Yet there were others who had a less favorable impression of him due to his affinity for harsh practical jokes, as well as his outspokenness and reputation as a womanizer—the latter ultimately being the cause of two failed marriages.
Following his divorce from Alice, the two remained close friends.
“Alice Hope was his best friend. If she called him at three in the morning and needed something, Charlie was up and gone,” said Albert Richardson, another friend of Charlie’s
In 1977, Charlie remarried, this time to a woman named Adele. Their union would be short-lived, lasting only three years before she’d had enough of his philandering.
Uncharacteristic Behavior
In the days and weeks leading up to Charlie’s disappearance, those closest to him noted that something was clearly bothering him.
When he traveled to Georgia to see his son Scott, who was graduating from military boot camp, he made a point to say that if anything ever happened to Charlie, Scott would be taken care of.
On March 30th, 1982, he stopped by Alice’s home to visit with his one-year-old grandson. According to Alice, he stayed much longer than usual and was uncharacteristically taciturn.
“I should have known something was wrong. He was just sitting there not saying anything. I caught tears in his eyes a couple of times. I should have known,” Alice said.
He also received a phone call while at her house, during which he reportedly sounded agitated and agreed to meet with someone. The identity of the caller, as well as the reason for the meeting, is still a mystery.
Was He Saying Goodbye?
That same day, Charlie also stopped by his parents’ house.
“He didn’t talk too much. He wanted to see his mama,” stated Buck Hope, Charlie’s father. Unfortunately, Geraldine was busy with guests and unable to speak to her son that day. Charlie asked Buck to have her call him that evening.
“We had a house full of people that night and I never called him. That was my last chance to talk to him,” Geraldine would later remember with regret.
The following day, March 31st, he went over to the home of friends Joe and Karen Nicolai for dinner. The Nicolais were surprised to see him, as he hadn’t been over in a while. While there, Charlie also spent time playing with Dan, a beloved pit bull whom he had gifted to Joe two years earlier.
In retrospect, the couple would later wonder if Charlie’s visit had been a goodbye of sorts, though he didn’t mention that anything was wrong.
That night, Charlie met his Uncle Dave at the Redfish Seafood and Steakhouse. He spoke to a member of the staff soon after arriving, asking where a particular waitress was. During his conversation with Dave, he also mentioned that he was going to his girlfriend’s house after he left.
Like others who knew him, Dave noticed that Charlie seemed uneasy about something.
“The boy was worried about something. No doubt about it. I guess I should have said something to him… should have tried to pull it out of him, but the way Charlie was… if he wanted to talk about it, he would.”
Strangely, no one could recall the boisterous Charlie, who never exited any place quietly, departing the restaurant that night. Sources vary as to exactly when his absence was first noted, but most agree that it was sometime after 1 a.m. In another uncharacteristic move, he’d left behind a half-finished drink.
Charlie Hope would never be seen or heard from again.
Charlie’s Truck Is Found
When her birthday came and went on April 2nd with no phone call or visit from her son, Geraldine knew that something was wrong. The family-oriented Charlie never missed his mother’s birthday. The Hopes tried to get in touch with him but had no success.
When Carol, Charlie’s secretary, arrived at the real estate business on April 6th, she found his truck parked out front. This in itself wasn’t odd. However, Charlie wasn’t inside his office. She contacted his parents to see if they knew where he was and found out that they too had been unable to locate him.
He was reported missing that day.
The police started their investigation by examining Charlie’s truck, discovering that it was locked—something Charlie apparently never did—and that some of his guns, fishing equipment and other belongings were inside, which would later be valued at approximately $2,000. There were no signs of foul play.
Law enforcement began interviewing everyone who knew Charlie, but were unable to find anyone who’d seen him since that final night at the Redfish or who could provide insight on his current whereabouts.
They even tracked down the waitress he’d been looking for that evening, learning that she’d gone on a canoe trip with Charlie Hope a few days before he went missing. According to her, they were just friends, and authorities went on to conclude that she had no connection to his disappearance.
Investigation
Fruitless searches were conducted on land and in the nearby bodies of water. Boats and helicopters were utilized in the search efforts. Investigators and volunteers, as well as Charlie’s friends and family, spent weeks combing the marshes and wooded areas around Hernando County, but ultimately discovered nothing.
Hope’s Parents Find Margo Delimon
This was a particularly frightening year for Floridians. In only a few months, four different women went missing from neighboring counties and residents feared a serial killer was on the loose.
On May 23rd, 1982, in another eerie turn of events, Charlie’s parents stumbled upon a human skull on their land while picking blackberries.
The skull, which was located in brush approximately 250 feet away from the highway, was later identified as belonging to 39-year-old Margo Delimon, another real estate agent who went missing in 1981.
Investigators soon learned that she had been murdered by serial killer James Winkles.
Connection With a Third Murdered Realtor?
Detective Thomas Blackman of the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office said there was “no end to the tips coming in,” but they were of no value. That was until Blackman swapped information with a neighboring county and learned that yet another real estate agent had been reported missing—within hours of Charlie’s own disappearance—in nearby Pasco County.
Authorities began to consider the possibility that someone was targeting realtors.
The third missing realtor, Roman Stangherlin, was a locally beloved former Catholic priest. Strangely, he was allegedly spotted all over town during the time in which he was missing, according to Detective William Scott Phillips of the Pasco County Sheriff’s office.
Many residents speculated that there were connections between Charlie and Roman. Investigators were uncertain about this, but what they did know was that the local roads and airstrip near where the two men had vanished were commonly used by drug smugglers.
They would soon learn that Roman’s case was a murder.
Law enforcement received a phone call from an attorney representing Stanley Modzelewski, who was subsequently granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony against others involved in Roman’s murder and assistance in locating the victim’s body.
Modzelewski and his son confessed to burying Roman’s lifeless body on their farm, which proved to be true.
While another suspect suggested that Charlie Hope might also be buried on Modzelewski’s property, Modzelewski himself vehemently denied any knowledge of Charlie’s fate, and exhaustive searches failed to uncover any additional remains on the farm.
Two of the three missing real estate agents had been murdered. While Charlie’s disappearance is now believed to be unconnected to both cases, the question remained: Was Charlie Hope murdered as well? And if so, by whom?
Mysterious Clothes
Eight months after Charlie vanished, a man discovered a stack of neatly folded clothes while clearing an area overgrown with palmettos, roughly 100 yards away from Charlie’s office.
The clothing was clean and had no blood on it. Although the blue Hawaiian shirt that he was last seen wearing was not among the garments, the Hope family was “pretty well positive” that the articles of clothing did in fact belong to Charlie.
However, no explanation for why the clothes might have been there has ever been established and, like many other elements of this case, it remains a mystery.
Theories
Charlie Hope’s bizarre disappearance has inspired countless rumors and theories over the decades.
He Ran Off (to a Private Island)
One theory suggests that Charlie ran away to live on a private island off of Belize. However, it’s unknown what he could have been running from, if anything.
“We know he talked to the man at Scuba West for some time that day about the island off Belize. It was a place you could just go and disappear,” said son David Hope.
It’s unclear where this information came from, as other sources claim that no one at Scuba West could remember the 41-year-old stopping by that day, much less having a lengthy conversation with him.
Whether or not Charlie still had a passport is another unanswered question. One was not found among his belongings. His ex-wife Adele stated that his passport had been stolen years before when they visited her family in Colombia, and it’s unknown if he ever replaced it.
However, neither Alice nor Adele believed that he left willingly. Both women noted that he’d specifically told them that he would never leave Hernando County. They also knew that he was too devoted to his children to just abandon them like that.
Furthermore, at the time he went missing, he’d been working on a lucrative commercial real estate deal, providing further incentive to stay in Brooksville.
“I was negotiating with him to buy half of his (real estate) business. We’d had a couple of meetings on it. I was leaving the bar about one o’clock and Charlie waved to me and said, ‘I’ll get with you on it again in a couple or three days,’” said Glenn L. Harris.
Drug-Related Murder
Many in the area believed that his disappearance might be related to narcotics in some way, as the remote marshes in the county were known to be a haven for drug activity. Could he have become involved in something like that? Or had he perhaps witnessed something he wasn’t supposed to?
Charlie’s attitude towards drugs is hard to pin down, as his friends and family had vastly different impressions on that point.
According to his close friend Albert Richardson, Charlie “was as adamant about that stuff (drugs) as I am. He hates it and wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
Alice and several others agreed with this sentiment.
Yet other friends of his claimed that Charlie wasn’t staunchly anti-drugs at all and smoked marijuana from time to time. Perhaps he was only against hard drugs, but it’s impossible to say at this point.
For their part, the Hope children felt certain that illegal narcotics lay at the heart of why their father went missing.
“We all have believed that drugs was involved in Dad’s disappearance, whether Dad was selling drugs or undercover investigating,” said his daughter Tami.
Charlie Haggett’s Claims
Roughly a year before Charlie vanished, a young couple named Ricky Merrill and Dori Colyer were injected with drugs and burned to death in Merrill’s vehicle in downtown Brooksville. While the authorities didn’t think this had any connection with Charlie’s later disappearance, some weren’t so sure.
An amateur sleuth named Cindy Crane, claiming to be working with a Hernando County sheriff’s detective, came forward with a shocking story. She claimed that Charlie Haggett, a business associate of Charlie Hope, had referred to the missing man as “fish bait” sometimes, while at other times he’d say that Charlie was merely visiting a girlfriend in Mexico.
Detective Blackman said they received many tips indicating that Charlie was dismembered and dumped into the Gulf.
He Knew Too Much About Arson Plot?
Haggett reportedly also claimed that the reason Charlie was murdered was because he knew too much about an arson plot involving the Redfish. Crane spun a convoluted story about how Charlie had known about this plot and even spoke about it at the Redfish the night he vanished. For this, he was allegedly murdered and the arson plan was put on hold.
“… they snuffed him and they couldn’t burn it until the investigation was real old,” Haggett supposedly told Crane, claiming that the missing man was buried beneath a nearby Kmart. (Interestingly, the permit for the construction of that Spring Hill Kmart was issued less than a month before Charlie disappeared.)
The Redfish did have a fire—although it’s unclear exactly when this happened—but it was determined to have been accidental, caused by faulty wiring. As the business was underinsured, no one benefitted in any discernible way from the incident.
It’s also worth noting that the police have never believed it was related to Charlie’s case, and the sheriff’s detectives later clarified that Cindy Crane was neither employed by nor affiliated with their office in any capacity.
In another bizarre, apparently unrelated, twist, Haggett was later found dead in his locked bedroom. A boarder confessed to killing him.
It was also theorized that Charlie Hope had gone into the witness protection program and had been an informant, but this was eventually debunked by law enforcement.
Jealous Husband
Given his notoriety as a womanizer, some, including Charlie’s ex-wife Adele, believed that he was likely killed by a jealous husband or boyfriend. But, as with the other theories, nothing to support this ever surfaced.
The Hope Family’s Quest for Answers
“I keep thinking that there’s somebody, in fact we know there’s somebody, who knows what happened to him. He didn’t walk from his office to South America. Somebody knows what happened to him,” said Geraldine Hope, who passed away in 1991.
His children have never given up on finding out what happened to their father. David Hope, now an adult, spearheaded the successful campaign to reopen Charlie’s case in the 1990s.
“I think I owe it to my father to find out what happened, wherever the trail leads and whatever the facts are. He deserves better than just a big question mark,” said David. “If it was me or one of my brothers or sister who disappeared, he would never have let go of it.”
In 1992, sheriff’s detective Tom Holly spoke about the challenge posed by the lack of evidence, adding: “Just about all we have to go on is rumors. And we do have that—plenty of rumors.”
Hernando County Sheriff Tom Mylander commented on the sloppiness of the initial investigation:
“Unfortunately, things were done differently here back then. Records were kept haphazardly at best and not centrally. It wasn’t unusual for an officer or detective to just keep things in his head, and if the detective left, so did the information.”
He also noted that they no longer have the option of requesting Charlie’s medical or dental records for potential identification purposes.
“Nobody bothered to obtain them, and they were purged by the doctors or whoever had them.”
As of the early 1990s, the Redfish was now a vacant lot and the building which once housed Charlie Hope’s office was the site of a barbecue restaurant.
The missing man was declared legally dead in 1992.
In the absence of any evidence or clues, Charlie’s case is at a standstill. However, his remaining family and friends are still hopeful for a resolution one day.
If you have any information regarding the disappearance of Charlie Hope, you are encouraged to contact the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office at (352) 754-6830.