On November 5, 2005, a jogger found the body of 32-year-old mother of three Brandy Dyson floating in a lake behind the Lake Charles Civic Center.
Brandy had been struggling with mental health issues and with addition.
For a while she was doing well, and settled into an apartment. But then she lost her apartment after taking refugees in from Hurricane Katrina. She then moved to the Civic Center in Lake Charles with a lot of other evacuees from the storm.
After that, Brandy was caught drinking, which broke the rules of the Red Cross, the organization that was running things at the Civic Center, so she was asked to leave. This seemed to start what would turn out to be her final downward spiral.
Police believe she set up camp on a pier nearby and had been living there for a few weekends when the next massive hurricane, Hurricane Rita, hit and devastated the state.
Sometime in the midst of the storm chaos, Brandy was brutally murdered. The bruising on her neck was so bad that her father said that she had to be buried in a turtleneck sweater.
It’s been almost 20 years. The person arrested and at first charged with her murder has been released, and no new suspects have come forward. But the unsolved case is still on the minds of the detectives at the Lake Charles police department.
Down there, Brandy’s family tells me, they have a nickname for her. They call her The Lady in the Lake.
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