Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, June 14, 1993                   TAG: 9306140290
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: HERNDON                                LENGTH: Long

WAS IT SUICIDE - OR MURDER?

Tommy's car was out front. The house was dark. The dogs, strangely, didn't greet them.

His father went upstairs to Tommy's room and knocked. No answer. His mother heard the door open, then slam shut. "Don't go in there! Don't go in there!" her husband screamed. "I have to call 911."

While he was dialing, she hesitated outside the door. Then she went in. Tommy was sitting up in a corner of his red couch, facing her. His ankles were crossed, hands cupped in his lap, mouth open, eyes shut. A revolver lay in his hands, barrel pointed down. Blood trickled in a line from his right ear to his shoulder.

It was a gunshot Beth George and Tom D. Burkett never heard, but it has echoed through their lives ever since that Sunday, Dec. 1, 1991. The Burketts - she uses her maiden name - don't believe the official police conclusion that Tommy committed suicide. They have spent $30,000 on lawyers and investigators, they say, and last fall had their son's body dug up for a second autopsy.

The questions they've been able to raise are so disturbing, the only possible explanations are stark: Either the Burketts are being consumed by grief and delusion, or Tommy's death was not what it appeared.

Thomas Calvin Burkett, 21, went to a party the night before he died. It was the end of Thanksgiving break and almost time to go back to school. He was a junior business and psychology major at Marymount University in Arlington.

His friend Derek Hemeon was hosting the party at a town house he shared with three other guys. About 20 people were there. Derek didn't know a lot of them; Tommy seemed to. Everyone got drunk.

As usual, Tommy had promised to call his parents if he was going to be late, so he phoned his dad and said he'd be staying over.

Tommy woke up at Derek's around noon on Sunday. As he got ready to leave, he told his friend he would stop by again that night on his way to school.

Tommy's mother, Beth, 46, was an adjunct poetry instructor at George Mason University and, sometimes, at Marymount. She was going to read some of her work at an artists' co-op in Maryland that afternoon. Tom, 47, also dabbled in poetry and taught English at Oakton High School.

The Burketts live on a cul-de-sac in a manicured, middle-class neighborhood near Dulles Airport. The street is next to an open field, so every car that comes down it is conspicuous.

At 5:10 p.m. a few doors away from the Burketts, Melinda Yost noticed the time on her VCR and realized she had to return a newspaper to another neighbor and then finish some housework. As she cut across yards in the rainy twilight, Yost noticed Tommy Burkett's blue Mustang approaching. It made a wide turn and came down the street with no lights on.

It was exactly one hour later that the Burketts came home to find Tommy dead in his room.

That night was a jumble. Police and paramedics were everywhere. Neighbors came out to watch. The Burketts' pregnant daughter, Amy, rushed over to be with her parents.

When the commotion cleared, shock set in. Beth walked the two dogs; she had found one huddled on the living room couch, terrified. Tom spent several hours writing lesson plans; he knew he'd be out of school for a while. They called their families in upstate New York. All night, they stayed up talking with their daughter.

Tom believed his son had killed himself. Beth did not.

She had spent several minutes with Tommy's body before police arrived. A number of things bothered her.

As she knelt next to the body - "It's all right," she whispered to him, "we'll find who did this to you" - Beth studied the gun in his hands. It was her husband's .357. Along with Tommy's own gun, it usually was stored in her bedroom. Tommy and his dad were target shooters.

Beth realized she could read the caliber on the cartridges in the chambers. The cylinder, she says, was not completely closed. The gun could not fire like that.

She got up and looked at her son's head. He had been shot in the mouth. There was a bullet hole about the size of a fingertip near the base of his skull. At the angle he was sitting, a bullet passing straight through would have smashed a window to the left. But the bullet was in the wall behind the couch, about seven feet up and to the right. Beth thought the slug would have had to turn in mid-air to wind up there.

She also noticed that Tommy's right ear looked damaged, as if he had been beaten.

Her suspicions festered over the next few days. Police showed her a note they said was in Tommy's pocket. Written in big block letters on a bank deposit slip dated July 19 was the sentence, "I want to be cremated." The Burketts refused to believe it was penned by their son, who had small, cramped handwriting.

Then there were the stains on the walls. They appeared to be blood. As she cleaned, though, she began noticing dots on the walls. There was a fine, brown stippling next to the doors and on a wall under the stairs.

She found the same thing at the top of the stairs, on both sides, mostly near the baseboard but also close to the ceiling. A dollhouse sitting at the top of the steps was covered on one side with little brown dots. It all looked like blood.

Nearby, on the landing, several houseplants had been smashed.

Tom, meanwhile, found damage on Tommy's car. Scratches on the right side and dinged-up wheel rims. None was present when he helped Tommy do engine work the Friday before.

One neighbor told Tom he had seen Tommy's car being chased through the neighborhood the day he died. Two other neighbors said they had seen a dark sedan sitting for 20 minutes or more across from the Burketts' house just before Tommy's body was discovered.

And Yost was certain that Tommy's car pulled up only an hour before the Burketts got home that night. Yet the paramedic report shows that because of the coolness and stiffening of Tommy's body, death "appeared to have occurred several hours prior." The Burketts decided someone else must have been driving Tommy's car.

Increasingly unsure that the death was a suicide, Tom went to the medical examiner's office to get information from the autopsy. He says he saw several photos, at least one of which clearly showed a mangled right ear. A drawing of the right side of Tommy's skull, Tom says, had fracture lines radiating from the ear. As if something had bludgeoned Tommy on that side of the head.

The autopsy report makes no mention of such wounds. When Tom later requested copies of the photos and drawings, he was rebuffed.

"Your specific allegation that a drawing of the right side of the head exists and is allegedly being withheld from you is totally unsustainable," the state's chief medical examiner, David K. Wiecking, wrote Burkett last summer. "Such a drawing never existed."

It was more than the Burketts could stand. No longer would they even consider the possibility that their son took his own life. He was murdered, they knew. And they were suspicious of everybody.

Good friends?

When Tommy died, he was wearing the white sweater, baggy blue jeans and high-top sneakers he had worn to the party at Derek's. But his jacket, his eyeglasses and his wallet were missing.

Several days later, Tommy's driver's license turned up in the hands of Phillip Howley, a fellow student at Marymount. Howley was part of a group Tommy sometimes partied with. The Burketts and others say the group made Tommy's last days miserable. Howley says they were good friends.

"He was a mellow guy. He didn't really care what went on. He did his thing, he was happy," says Howley, who now goes to Clemson University in South Carolina. "We went out and got drunk a lot. Hung out. Watched TV a lot."

Tommy had a car and spending money from his part-time job in the school admissions office. When Howley and his buddies cooked up things to do, they could make Tommy - only 5 feet 9 and 150 pounds - go along. "He was easily persuaded, I have to say," Howley says. "We talked him into driving us places, here and there. If he wanted to talk us into something, he wasn't as effective. . . . Everybody in a group of friends has one like that."

One time when Tommy passed out drunk, Howley took his car. Two weeks before Tommy died, Howley beat him up.

"Pounding on Tom," is how Howley puts it. Late, after a party, Tommy burst into Howley's dorm room. "He was drunk, and he was screaming and yelling, then I, like, hit him [in the face]. The [resident assistants] came and separated us, and he's saying I hit him in the [testicles] at the party and I'm like, `I didn't do it.' "

Howley says they laughed about it the next day, even though Tommy's face was swollen from the beating. "I felt bad; he was smaller than me," Howley says. "It was the wrong thing to do. But I did it."

Some who knew Tommy and Howley say the beating culminated a pattern of abuse by the group of friends.

"It seemed like they used him a lot," says Chris George of Virginia Beach, who transferred last year from Marymount to James Madison University. "I can say he was depressed. I mean, I didn't enjoy school at all, but people didn't take advantage of me like that. I don't think he was very happy."

A few days before the beating, Tommy called his mother and sounded upset. Someone had broken into his mailbox and stolen his paycheck. But that wasn't all: "I don't know what else they found," he said.

"What do you think they were looking for?" his mother asked.

"I can't say."

It sounded sinister, and the Burketts have seized on the conversation. Everything has significance now. The way he kept looking pensively out the window the day before he died. How pale and frightened he seemed. The fact that his bank machine card was stolen three times in the months before he died, and that his savings plummeted from more than $1,000 to only $47.

Tommy went to a cash machine the night of Derek's party. The Burketts have obtained pictures from a bank video showing Tommy, in his white sweater, getting $10. In the last three frames, he looks right, left, then you see two young men standing behind him. The Burketts say both were from the Marymount crowd that Phillip Howley ran with.

Howley says he was home in Pennsylvania at the time. He was devastated, he says, to learn of Tommy's death when he got back to school. Chris George remembers going out drinking with a group that night and seeing Howley crying and wailing that he must not have been a good enough friend to Tommy.

At some point, Howley realized he had Tommy's driver's license. He says Tommy lent it to him to buy alcohol because Howley was underage. Howley opened a drawer to look at the license. "It was like he was saying goodbye to me," Howley says.

He says he still thinks of Tommy constantly, partly because the Burketts appear to suspect him of being involved in the death. Last fall, someone sent a note to the Clemson Police Department made of cut-out, pasted-on letters, saying that Howley was a drug dealer and had beaten and killed people. The campus police interviewed Howley, and he says he was frightened by the experience.

He believes the Burketts had something to do with the letter. They deny it. Either way, Howley thinks their grief over Tommy's death has pushed them too far.

"My personal rationale of it is, that's what keeps them going," he says. "Now, I feel sorry for Mrs. Burkett. What she has gone through is a tragedy; I'm sure it's hell on earth . . . . But I think she's gone over the edge."

The hell for both Burketts is that so much died along with Tommy. Writing poetry, which they have stopped. Hunting, which Tom can no longer enjoy. Faith in others, gone.

Now life has but a single dimension. Beth will call reporters from gas stations or shopping malls with new ideas about the case. When Tom learned a forensic specialist was lecturing a science class at his high school, he hurried over to ask questions about state autopsy policy.

"Most of the things we enjoyed doing, we did with Tommy," Tom says. "There's not much we can enjoy now."

Tommy was a different person with his parents than with Howley and the other guys. He liked to read - Chaucer, John Updike, Stephen King - and he wrote poetry and short stories, though he dropped out of a college writing class. He critiqued his parents' poetry. He saved every Valentine he had gotten since kindergarten.

Tommy might spend an afternoon target shooting with his dad, then go to a movie that night with his mother. Their relationships were unusually open. When Tommy tried LSD in 11th grade, he told his parents, and they stayed up all night talking about it.

He helped his mother in the kitchen. He did his own laundry. He wanted to be a business counselor and talked about decorating his own office.

When Tommy was in the fourth grade, he got a story published in a children's magazine. It was about an African boy who made friends with a baby elephant. To save the elephant from ivory poachers, the boy had to drive it away with rocks. Love, the story seemed to say, means loss.

A second autopsy

They dug Tommy's body up last November, almost a year after he died and was buried in upstate New York. Tom Burkett went to see it.

"The medical examiner said that usually bothers people," Tom says. "I said, `Nothing's happened to him since he died that's as bad as what happened in the last few weeks of his life. At least that's natural.' And so I insisted on viewing his body."

Dr. Erik K. Mitchell, a New York state medical examiner, won't release findings from the autopsy. He is still trying to get police information from Virginia - seven months after the autopsy - before drawing any conclusions. The Burketts say Mitchell's work confirmed that the right ear was damaged and that the skull was fractured on that side.

The body also had scratches on the chest, they say. And the second autopsy confirmed the strangest medical fact reported in the first one: There were no powder burns in the mouth. Experts agree that a gun fired in the mouth should leave extensive burns.

Mitchell sent the Burketts to private criminologists in Corning, N.Y., to have them collect information the local police did not. The family has left Tommy's room just as it was, and hasn't washed the stains off the walls.

Paul Kish of the Laboratory of Forensic Science - which the Corning district attorney's office says has "a national reputation" - tested the splatters on the walls and confirmed that the brown dots are blood. Kish cannot say conclusively that the blood is human.

Fairfax County police will not discuss their investigation. Robert Horan, the county commonwealth's attorney, has reviewed the case and rejects all the Burketts' claims.

Blood on the walls? "The police said there was none," Horan says.

The bullet hole being at an odd angle? "I don't think that's true."

The missing wallet and the found driver's license? "That's not relevant."

The car returning after Tommy was dead? "Those people don't say that . . . . They saw it come up, but they don't have any idea when he died. They don't say they saw who got out."

The gun cylinder being unlatched? "That's a new claim. I don't think I have ever heard that claim before. . . . As I understand it, that firearm was in perfect working condition."

The harassment from the college students? "It was typical college kinds of stuff: too much to drink, too much talking. None of that relates to this. It just was not that kind of altercation."

The Burketts, Horan says, simply won't accept the truth. "Everybody who disagrees with them, they've gone after," he says. "They have had contact with everybody in the Western world. I totally agree with the Fairfax police that the evidence is suicide."

Other investigators who have handled scores of suicides caution that they are among the trickiest incidents to investigate.

The mere fact that the body and the bullet hole seemed out of line might not mean anything sinister, said one veteran state police officer who agreed to listen to the evidence but asked that his name not be printed.

Tommy could have leaned forward, fired the gun, then fallen back, he said; no one can predict how a gun and a body will come to rest. A gunshot to the mouth with the bullet traveling upward is a common type of suicide for males, the investigator said.

Still, he and another veteran police officer said they always run tests on the victims' hands just to be sure the victim really fired the gun. Fairfax did no such test.

Fairfax also won't give the Burketts access to the files on Tommy's death, claiming on one hand that "investigations into allegations of alleged criminal activity" are confidential, but insisting on the other that there is no investigation, and the case is a closed suicide.

So the Burketts are ready to believe anything. Even a police cover-up. They write long, accusatory letters to the governor, the state departments of health and public safety, the police, Horan and politicians at every level. Even their neighborhood homeowners' association has been writing letters.

Many seem put off by the strong claims. U.S. Sen. Charles Robb tried to involve federal investigators but ended up saying only local officials have authority to do anything.

So the Burketts have put their hopes in the reports being prepared by the New York medical examiner and the crime scene specialists. They have a lawyer and a private investigator making phone calls, doing interviews.

And they have the unswayable drive of parents who have seen things - the wounds, the exhumation - no one should. Their daughter lives with them now, along with her 18-month-old son, Alan. He is a loud, curly-headed toddler, a fresh life in the wake of Tommy's loss.

Surely, that helps.

"No," Tom says sharply. "Alan would've been here anyway. That doesn't change the fact that Tommy's gone."

Keywords:
FATALITY