Page 102 of Hello, Summer
“That’s not possible,” Vanessa said when told of the deed transfer. “I don’t know what that woman has told you, but it’s impossible. Symmes would never have done something like that.”
Toddie Sanderson, who has lived at Oak Springs Farm since her 1986 divorce from Robinette, declined to comment for this story.
Charles Symmes Robinette Sr. was the only child of Marva Franklin Robinette and Clyde D. Robinette. He grew up in the Plattesville community where, following the death of her husband at the age of forty-two, Mrs. Robinette worked at a now-defunct textile mill. Mrs. Robinette met and married her second husband, Gordon Pancoast, who was a plant manager, when Symmes Robinette was twelve.
Robinette enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1965 and, following a tour of duty in Vietnam, returned home to Silver Bay in 1967. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Florida State University.
He was elected to the Florida senate in 1978 and ran for his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1984.
During his terms in Congress, Robinette was instrumental in delivering tens of millions of dollars in federal funding to Florida and the Thirty-fifth District, including funds for new wastewater management systems, highway improvements, and the establishment and construction of a new Veterans Administration clinic in Silver Bay.
During his first term in office, Symmes Robinette hired a vivacious brunette named Vanessa R. Monck as a legislative aide.
According to Vanessa Robinette, a romance soon blossomed between the then forty-three-year-old legislator and his twenty-five-year-old protégée. “I was young and just starting out. Symmes was so kind and generous. He was always one to encourage young people,” she recalled this week.
Mrs. Robinette stated that the congressman’s marriage to Toddie Robinette “had been over for years. His alleged wife wouldn’tstep foot in D.C. He was lonely and so unhappy. He’d been asking for a divorce for years, but she refused.”
But when Vanessa Robinette became pregnant with the congressman’s child, the divorce was quickly granted. The two were married in a private ceremony in Washington, D.C., in 1986, three months after the birth of Charles S. Robinette Jr.
According to several longtime residents, by the time Symmes Robinette brought his new bride and infant son home to Silver Bay, his first wife had withdrawn her children from local schools and moved with them, forty-five miles away, to Oak Springs Farm in Bronson County.
The farm is less than ten miles from the secluded stretch of county highway in Bronson County where Symmes Robinette died last Thursday.
At three o’clock that morning, two witnesses encountered a late-model black Escalade SUV, which had flipped upside down. The driver of the vehicle appeared unconscious and trapped inside the vehicle. The witnesses called 911, but their attempts to free the driver were unsuccessful, and when the Escalade caught fire, they were driven back by the flames. Fire rescue units from Bronson County responded to the 911 call, but the driver, later identified as Symmes Robinette, was unresponsive.
The witnesses said they saw no other cars in the vicinity. The weather that night was clear. Bronson sheriff Merle Goggins said that the cause of the accident remains under investigation. And although the congressman sustained massive head injuries, the district medical examiner’s office still has not determined the cause of death.
Vanessa Robinette blamed her husband’s accident on what she called “chemo brain,” saying that his cancer treatment made him “confused and disoriented,” and that in recent weeks, he’d begun to awaken in the middle of the night and go for long drives. “He hadn’t been himself,” she said. “That’s why he was home… to get some rest.”
That same impairment, she said, would be the only reason her husband would have deeded such valuable property to his long-estranged ex-wife.
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Conley was sound asleep when her cell phone rang shortly before six Tuesday morning. She groped for it in the dark, dropped it onto the floor, and finally answered on the sixth ring.
“Nice story, Hawkins.” It was Roger Sistrunk, her former editor in Atlanta.
“Roger?” She yawned, still groggy from a restless night. “What are you talking about?”
“Isn’t this your byline inThe Silver Bay Beacon? It’s seven o’clock. Did I wake you up or something?”
“Hell yeah, you woke me up. The Florida Panhandle is in a different time zone from Atlanta. Are you talking about the Robinette thing? Where’d you hear about it?”
“Google Alerts,” Sistrunk said. “Hell of a story.”
She swung her legs over the bed. “Yeah, it’s gotten kind of crazy with the widow and her son both declaring they’re gonna run for Robinette’s seat.”
“I was gonna send Felker down there to do a follow-up, but then I thought, why not hire Conley?”
That got her attention. “Me? I thought you had a hiring freeze.”
“We do. I’m talking about freelance. I want to hire you to write mea Sunday piece. Say, eighteen hundred words? And we want that video and your still photos to go with it.”
“Which video? The car fire or the video of Charlie Robinette? I shot the car stuff because a friend and I were the first ones on the scene that night. My colleague Michael Torpy scored the video of Charlie Robinette.”
“Both,” Sistrunk said. “The video makes the story. Especially the part where the son talks about his mom ruining Thanksgiving by running against him. You guys own the video, right?”
She went to the closet and started pulling out clothes. She was wide awake now, and the wheels were turning. If Sistrunk was waking her up at seven his time, they had a bona fide hot story on their hands. And she’d need to stay cool to leverage it into more than a one-shot Sunday reader piece.
