FAMILY DRAMA FOLLOWS MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF CONGRESSMAN ROBINETTE
By Rowena Meigs and Conley Hawkins
Silver Bay, Florida—Both the widow and son of U.S. Rep. Symmes Robinette (R-Florida) have announced that they will run for his unexpired term, a development that is sending shock waves through Silver Bay and the Thirty-fifth District.
The seventy-seven-year-old, eighteen-term congressman died last week in a fiery, early-morning, single-car crash in rural Bronson County. Bronson sheriff Merle Goggins said the incident remains “under investigation.”
On Monday, Robinette’s widow, Vanessa Robinette, in an exclusive interview with The Beacon, confirmed her intent to run in a special election, which will be held in November.
“Of course, I am heartbroken over the sudden loss of the love of my life,” Mrs. Robinette told the Beacon on Monday. “But public service has long been the focus of my life with Symmes, and I can think of no better way to honor his legacy than to continue serving his constituents in Washington.”
Earlier on Monday, Mrs. Robinette disclosed that Robinette received a diagnosis of end-stage non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma last September. Although the congressman was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his diagnosis was kept a closely guarded secret.
A few hours earlier, Mrs. Robinette’s only son, Charles S. “Charlie” Robinette Jr., announced that he has already formed a campaign committee, headed by Miles Schoendienst, a retired railroad executive and top political fund-raiser in North Florida.
“My father made it clear to me, even before his recent illness, that he believed I would be the best candidate to represent the Thirty-fifth District,” Robinette said. “Of course, we’d hoped I wouldn’t have to announce before his retirement, but cancer has a way of cheating the best-laid plans.”
Charlie Robinette, a partner in the Robinette Law Firm in Silver Bay, said his mother’s announcement took him completely by surprise.
“She didn’t discuss her decision with me or with anyone else in the family or [Symmes Robinette’s] close circle of associates as far as I know.… My mother is her own woman,” Robinette said. “Clearly, I think my father’s decision that I should run for his seat, should he not be able to complete his term, is one that should be respected.”
He downplayed the potential for a family feud stemming from clashing political ambitions.
“Thanksgiving could get a little awkward, but we’re a political family.… We’re used to finding ways of compromising.”
Charlie Robinette defended his father’s decision to hide his cancer diagnosis from voters. “We felt it was a private, family matter. Dad felt well enough to be in Washington, attending to the people’s business in Congress, right up until the end of his life.”
The body of Charles Symmes Robinette, a fourth-generation native Floridian, will lie in state Tuesday in the Capitol Rotunda, where government officials, including the president, vice president, Speaker of the House, and Florida governor Roy Padgett, along with other dignitaries, will gather to pay tribute to Robinette’s decades of public service.
Following the memorial in Washington, D.C., services will be held this Saturday at Silver Bay Presbyterian Church. The family will receive Friday night at McFall-Peeples Funeral Home.
But in the meantime, Robinette’s sudden death has revealed long-hidden cracks in the façade of the family life of the decorated Vietnam veteran and conservative congressman who also served in the Florida senate.
The obituary written by Robinette’s widow, Vanessa Monck Robinette, fifty-nine, and submitted to the Beacon, lists as survivors, in addition to Ms. Robinette, his thirty-four-year-old son Charles.
No mention is made in the death notice of Robinette’s older children from his marriage to his first wife and high school sweetheart, Emma Todd “Toddie” Sanderson Robinette, who married Robinette in 1962, when he was nineteen and she was eighteen. Hank Sanderson Robinette is fifty-two. and Rebecca Robinette Bouillotte, age fifty.
“Damn straight I left them out,” Vanessa Robinette said when asked about the omission. “They weren’t mentioned because they weren’t a part of Symmes’s life. You know what? I don’t even know their names. I doubt my husband could remember them either. That’s how estranged he was from all of them.”
But according to Bronson County tax records, Symmes Robinette transferred title to Oak Springs Farm, a working quail-hunting plantation that includes a 3,500-square-foot farmhouse and eight hundred acres of timberland, to Toddie Sanderson for one dollar “and other considerations,” the day before his fatal accident.
On the same day, Robinette also transferred title to his former home in Silver Bay to Charlie Robinette, who has resided at the Trinity Street home since his parents moved into their 4,200-square-foot oceanfront mansion on Sugar Key, the gated country club subdivision developed in 2017 by Miles Schoendienst, Robinette’s longtime business associate and campaign contributor.
Vanessa Robinette was apparently blindsided by the news of her late husband’s largesse in deeding the farm to his first wife.
“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’t step 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.