TACOMA: Ann Marie Burr
The case I’m covering on this episode of Washed Away comes from Tacoma, Washington and involves a missing little girl, a DNA scavenger hunt, and a possible serial killer suspect. Oh and this case has been cold for almost 60 years. Let me tell you about the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr. Plus retired detective Lindsey Wade not only discusses her work on this mystery, but also how she managed to track down Ted Bundy's DNA.
Sources for the episode include: Charley Project, History Link, Lindsey Wade, and Wikipedia.
Any tips about what happened to Ann Marie Burr should be called into the Tacoma Police Department at 253-798-4721
This was the house that the Burr family lived in- in 1961.
Transcript-
Ashley: The case I’m covering on this episode of Washed Away involves a missing little girl, a DNA scavenger hunt, and a possible serial killer suspect. Oh and this case has been cold for 60 years. Let me tell you about the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr.
Ashley: In 1961, Ann Marie Burr was just 8 years old. She had hazel eyes, blonde hair, and stood slightly above 4 feet tall. She studied piano and her parents described her as both artistic and intelligent. She was also pretty independent and regularly walked several blocks to school alone. She had three younger siblings: Julie, Greg, and Mary. The Burr family lived on 14th Street in Tacoma, Washington … which at one time was known as The Kidnapping Capital of the West. That nickname came from some high profile cases in the 1930s… like the kidnapping of 9 year old George Weyerhaeuser which happened in 1935. George’s father J.P. Weyerhaeuser was a prominent lumberman at the time and after he paid a ransom, George was returned to his family. The very next year, in 1936, Charles F. Mattson, who was only 10, was kidnapped from his living room by a masked man with a gun. Sadly, Charles was murdered and his body was found a few weeks later. Both boys lived in Tacoma… and less than 3 decades later… that city would again make headlines for a local missing child… Ann Marie Burr.
Lindsey: It, it's just such a bizarre crime and such a brazen crime to go into a home in the middle of the night with the whole family there, sleeping and, you know, walk out of the house with the child.
Ashley: That’s Lindsey Wade, a now retired Tacoma Police Officer
Ashley: You actually worked on this cold case, right?
Lindsey: Yeah, it was when I was still with the police department. So I was with Tacoma PD for 21 years. And, uh, I spent the last 14 of it as a detective workin’ sex crimes and homicide, missing persons. And I spent the last three years of my career as the cold case detective. But even before that, I was helping out with some of our cold cases, just kind of as a collateral duty, just because I was interested in them. And my partner, my former partner at the time was our actual assigned cold case detective for the department. And he, uh, had opened up the Ann Marie Burr case. And this is probably 2010, somewhere in that ballpark. And so we got to talking about the case and my involvement with that case really was, um, trying to track down Ted Bundy's DNA.
Ashley: We’ll talk more about Ted Bundy’s DNA in a little bit. But first… here’s what happened to Ann: She went missing in the middle of a stormy night on August 31st, 1961. At some point after the whole family had gone to bed, Ann Marie went into her parent’s room to let them know her little sister Mary who had a cast on her arm at the time, was crying. The parents told the girls to go back to bed and supposedly, they did. The parents’ sleep was disturbed again when they heard their dog bark at least once that night, but they assumed it was due to the noise of the storm. At 5:30am the next morning, Ann Marie’s mother Beverly woke up and realized that Ann was missing. The front door was found unlocked and open, a small window in the living room was also found to be open and a red thread was stuck on the windowsill. Outside, a garden bench was discovered under that window - which is not where it was usually located. On the bench, a barely there footprint could be seen.
Ashley: Is the only evidence in the Ann Marie case, the like footprints that were found outside the window. Is there anything else to go on at this point?
Lindsey: At her house there was a footprint that was observed. There was a, like a partial palm print that was found on a bench that was probably a child's palm print. Cause it, it might've had makeup or something on it. And it was small, you know, there were some like fibers and, you know, little pieces of wood that they chipped off at the, uh, bedroom well on her headboard and on the window sill where they believe the point of entry was so, you know, nothing great like, you know, blood, uh, you know, semen, uh, you know, nothing, there there's no clothing recovered, like, you know, nothing that would, we would look at today and say, yeah, that'd be a really good source of DNA.
Ashley: So the footprint was small enough to probably belong to a teenager or smaller adult… which is interesting. And it’s thought that the kidnapper entered through the window and left out the front door. You have to be fairly small to get through a window or at least smaller and agile enough to go through a window without waking up everyone inside. Also - the neighbors of the Burr family mentioned that they had seen someone peering into their windows just a few days before Ann disappeared. But they didn’t get a close look at who it was. Unfortunately after an exhaustive search that lasted months and covered both water and land - Ann was nowhere to be found. The search for her was actually considered by some to be the biggest quote unquote man hunt in Tacoma history. In this case there were no witnesses to the kidnapping itself, no credible ransom demands or clues, and no evidence other than the footprint and the piece of string to go on…. so it went cold really fast. A $5,000 reward was offered for Ann’s return but never collected. That might not sound like much, but $5,000 in 1961 would be worth $45,000 in today’s money.
Lindsey: It's one of those cases where there's just not a lot to work with, you know, if the crime occurred today, I think that, uh, you know, law enforcement certainly would have so many more tools at their disposal to investigate it because obviously they didn't have, you know, video cameras. They didn't have people with house security systems and, you know, cell phones and social media and you know, all of the things that are available today. Do I, you know, do I think it would have been solved if it happened today? I don't know.
Ashley: There were quite a few suspects… including a teenage neighbor that failed one polygraph and passed another, though to be fair those tests are incredibly unreliable. Local sex offenders were looked at. A man was charged with disorderly conduct after trying to collect a ransom for Ann despite having no connection to her disappearance. An inmate in Oklahoma would later claim that he and a friend kidnapped Ann Marie while they were working in Tacoma and buried her in a field. The police dug up that field and found nothing. A promising suspect in my opinion is an auto parts salesman from Spokane who took a 10 year old girl from Tacoma on a quote “ride through the pacific northwest and then dropped her off a few days later” this information comes from Historylink.org, and the man Ralph Everett Larkee shot himself as the FBI pounded on his door. Not sure what connection he had to the Burr family other than location… and I guess “M.O.” but that story jumped out to me as a huge red flag and sadly we’ll never know if he was the guy.
Lindsey: Because there’s not any information about what happened to her after she left, after she left her home, you can't rule anything out. So, and at that, you know, at that time there had been other child abductions that had occurred in Tacoma, but they were financially motivated. You know, they had kids that were abducted for ransom and these were children of wealthy families, but that certainly wasn't the case here. You know, there was no ransom demand. This wasn't a wealthy family. So, you know, it leaves the leaves basically you have two alternatives: you know, someone abducted her for the purpose of harming her. And we know with, um, child abduction that typically the, the motivation for abducting a child is, um, is a sexually motivated. And then the other possibility is that yeah, you know, somebody abducted her and then they took her home and raised her as their own child. And I can't rule out that possibility, but that seems pretty remote to me.
Ashley: There weren’t many other leads until the 1980s when serial killer Ted Bundy told an interesting story to journalists while he was on death row. He spoke about killing a young girl in an orchard… but wasn’t clear on if this was something he heard about or something he did and Ted Bundy grew up very close to Ann’s home in Tacoma so this admission set off some alarm bells. Once this story broke into the news, Beverly, Ann’s mother, actually wrote to Bundy in prison to ask him about Ann Marie. This was part of his response:
“First and foremost, I do not know what happened to your daughter Ann Marie. I had nothing to do with her disappearance. You said she disappeared August 31, 1961. At the time I was a normal 14-year-old boy. I did not wander the streets late at night. I did not steal cars. I had absolutely no desire to harm anyone. I was just an average kid. For your sake you really must understand this.”
Despite denying his involvement in Ann’s disappearance to her mother in that letter, Ted Bundy reportedly told the story again to a professor in another interview not long afterwards. Ted Bundy’s many murders, the ones that we do know about, didn’t begin until either 1969 or the early 1970s… he gave different answers depending on who asked. He lied… a lot, so it’s hard to trust anything he said. But detectives believe it’s entirely possible that he could have started killing much earlier, as a teenager.
Ashley: Oh and remember that clip about finding Ted Bundy’s DNA? Lindsey’s story of how that came to be is really interesting, so if you don’t mind, let’s take a quick detour from the Burr case and talk about that for a bit. I promise it all comes back together:
Lindsey: You know, Ted Bundy was a suspect in that case, just based on really urban legend. I mean, there was no evidence that we were aware of that linked him to the case. You know, his name had always been out there since he was identified as a serial killer and who, you know, somebody who grew up in the North End of Tacoma, uh, as well, and you know, those similarities. And so he was, you know, somebody that we knew that, you know, had been associated with the case, but again, there was really nothing concrete linking him when we, uh, started looking at what kind of evidence was collected in the case. One of the questions I had was okay, even if we, um, let's say we hit the jackpot, you know, and we find some DNA from, you know, the evidence that was selected way back in 1961, would we have any, anything or anybody to compare it to?
And so I doing some research on Ted Bundy and started asking around, um, within our state, starting at our crime lab to find out if his DNA was in CODIS. And, um, the answer I got was no, uh, he was not, he's not in our state CODIS database because he was never convicted of any crimes in Washington, which makes sense.
Ashley: For those that aren’t familiar with CODIS, it stands for "Combined DNA Index System" and is the term used to describe the FBI's criminal DNA databases. It’s also the software used to run those databases.
Lindsey: So then I started researching where he had convictions and I knew that he had been convicted of the two cases down in Florida and, you know, ultimately executed for one of them. And so I ended up kind of going down the rabbit hole in Florida and, and reaching out to a bunch of different people and finally getting in touch with her CODIS administrator down in, um, and for the state of Florida, you had the same answer, you know, no had been these DNA, not in our database. And in fact, you know, we get, you know, he said, you know, he gets calls from detectives a couple of times a year asking the same question. And unfortunately the answer is always no. And so I was like, okay, well, Ted Bundy is one of the most notorious serial killers, uh, in our country's history. And, uh, he really is the poster child for CODIS because he was a cross country, serial killer. And he, we know that he, he killed women in multiple States and I'm sure that he's got other victims out there that we're unaware of. And so having him in CODIS would potentially help link cases together and, uh, you know, possibly identify victims that law enforcement was unaware of. So the CODIS administrator down in Florida, and I kind of put our heads together and tried to figure out how we can come up with a plan to try to track down a sample of DNA.
Lindsey:
And we knew he had been cremated. So, you know, digging him up, wasn't an option. And so he decided that he would go back to, uh, his lab and take a look through some of the things that they had retained over the years. Apparently their crime lab had some, one of, uh, a Bundy museum with artifacts and things from the trials. So he was going to go back and look through his stuff to see if there was any evidence or anything that he could locate that might contain a sample. And then I decided I would go back here in Washington and reach out to, uh, Ann Rule, um, the author who wrote The Stranger Beside Me, because I had read her book. And I knew that she talks about receiving letters from Ted when he was in jail. And so I thought, well, maybe there's a possibility we could get his DNA from stamps on these, um, the envelopes of these letters if she still hasn't.
Lindsey:
Right. So I got ahold of Ann Rule, I actually met her for lunch. It was really cool, um, to meet her because her book is actually one of the reasons that I became a detective, uh, you know, after reading it and deciding that I was so intrigued by the story of this, you know, this killer who just looked like an ordinary guy who looked like an upstanding citizen, but it was actually a complete, you know, sexual psychopath. Um, it was, you know, it was terrifying and intriguing to me at the same time. And I just, you know, had just decided that that's what I wanted to do for a career. You know, I wanted to catch people like Ted Bundy. Oh, wow. So it was really exciting for me to be able to meet her. Um, she did agree to give me a couple of letters and envelopes that she had retained from him and, you know, thought it was a great idea to try to see if we could get a DNA from the stamp.
Lindsey:
So I got ahold of my crime lab supervisor in the DNA section who was used to me calling him with all kinds of random requests. But this one I think was like icing on the cake and you know, like, okay, you want to do what now, Lindsey? And it's like, well, I mean, yeah, we could potentially try to get DNA from the stamps. Although I don't, I don't know that it would qualify or be eligible to get into CODIS, but let's take one step at a time. And luckily, and before I even had to have the stamps tested though, I got a call from David Kaufman down in Florida, who was the CODIS administrator down there. And he told me that he had, he had tried to get a profile from wax molds of Ted Bundy’s teeth that they had in their, um, crime lab.
Lindsey:
Cause they had taken a bite mold, but his teeth after the Chi Omega murders to compare his, um, I guess his bite impression to these bite marks that were found on one of the victims. So they had these molds still. And so he, um, I guess he was able to get a partial profile from the mold, but it wasn't really good enough to do anything with however, he was able to track down a blood vial that had been sitting in the, um, like a clerk's office, like a court clerk's office since 1978 when Bundy was arrested. Oh my God. And yeah. Um, so this, I mean, imagine like this is like 30, you know, over 30 years old blood vial sitting in this, um, I guess a safe or something at a Clerk’s office. And so he, he got the vial, unfortunately all the blood was completely petrified so that the blood in the vial was no good, but there was dried blood on the lid of the container.
Lindsey:
And so he was able to scrape off a little bit of the dried blood and got a full profile from that and was able to upload it into Florida’s DNA database. And I think it was like August or September of 2011. So that was really exciting news. Of course. My next question was, okay, well what about the national databases that kind of go in there? And the answer was no. And, um, because Bundy’s DNA was collected before he, uh, was convicted and because he was no longer in custody, he didn't qualify to go into the national database.
Lindsey:
Like I understand rules, I, I do. I understand the rules, however, let's factor in some common sense here. Bundy is the poster child for CODIS. Like, you know, he's the reason why we, we need CODIS for guys like him. So it's, you know, it's completely unbelievable to me to think that he is not going to be in the national database for the purpose of solving cold cases. And so David agreed with me and ended up setting up some meetings with the FBI who runs the national DNA database. And after several more months of legal wrangling, they finally agreed to upload his DNA into the national DNA database, into the legal index, which, you know, I don't know how familiar your listeners are or how you are, um, with CODIS, but CODIS has different indexes or indices. And so, um, you know, there's an offender index, there's a forensic index, which holds crime scene evidence and, you know, rape kit evidence and things like that.
Lindsey:
Um, there's, uh, an identified persons index. There's a missing persons index. And then there's a relatives of missing persons index and then there's a legal index. And so they agreed to put them into legal, which, you know, for all intents and purposes, it really doesn't matter because, you know, he will still be compared against forensic samples that get entered into the national database. And, um, you know, first he's in a Florida database, so, you know, it, it worked out and, um, we ended up sending out a notification to law enforcement around our state, just letting people know that, you know, Bundy's DNA was in COIDS now. And, you know, if you had cases where, you know, you had, uh, that you thought might be, you know, related, maybe this is a good time to go back and look at your evidence and see what, if anything you have, and that might be testable.
Lindsey:
Um, the sad thing was with Bundy’s cases is, you know, as you know, a lot of his victims were skeletonized when they were found. And so there was really no chance of getting DNA from a suspect by the time they were located. So, so far, um, you know, as of yet, there have not been any matches, um, that I'm aware of to any cases linking to him. But, you know, I'm optimistic that maybe there'll be a match at some point when people start looking into their cold cases and, you know, I'm, I got to believe that there are cases sitting on shelves at police departments around the country that haven't been looked at, you know, maybe have never been tested for DNA. And, you know, certainly old cases that were investigated before DNA was, was widely used by law enforcement.
Ashley:
So my understanding is that there wasn't enough DNA in Anne Marie's case, unfortunately, to test against Bundy. Is that right?
Lindsey:
Yeah. So we didn't end up finding any DNA in the evidence that we submitted to the crime lab on her case. So it was kind of a, it was a dead end, um, in that respect, it's so hard to say. I mean, I, I'm not convinced that Ted Bundy did it but at the same time I wouldn't rule him out, but you know, I just don't have enough evidence for me personally to say, yep, I think had done, he did it.
Ashley: Ann Marie Burr’s case had some strange updates throughout the years. There was man with the same name as Ann’s father, Donald Burr in Tacoma at the time, who was the wealthier of the two men, and also had a young daughter. Some people speculated that his daughter, Debra, could have been the initial intended victim of a kidnapping for ransom, but was saved by a case of mistaken identity. But you’d think if that were truly what happened… a ransom call would have actually come in about Ann that was legitimate. And in the 90s a woman came forward claiming to be Ann Marie all grown up and she actually met with the Burrs. She knew details about Ann Marie’s life and was absolutely certain that she was their long lost daughter, but Beverly and Donald knew this woman wasn’t Ann. Eventually a DNA test confirmed that, but Beverly kept photographs of this woman in a family album anyway… which is just so sweet and sad.
Ashley: The Burr Family never gave up on Ann Marie. They made sure there was always coverage of her case on every anniversary and they eventually held a memorial mass for their lost daughter in 1999. Sadly Donald passed away in 2003 and Beverly passed just 5 years after that. Ann Marie Burr is still missing to this day and her case remains open. Any tips about what happened to Ann should be called into the Tacoma Police Department at 253-798-4721
Ashley: Lindsey has a podcast of her own called Anatomy of a Cold Case and she’s working on a book, which I can’t wait to read.
Ashley: Washed Away is a Cosmic Bigfoot production. To see the show notes for each episode, meaning photos/sources/transcripts visit washedawaypodcast.com For updates, news, and behind the scenes stuff follow Washed Away on twitter and instagram @washedawaypod Send case suggestions to washedawaypodast@gmail.com If you’re a fan of the show please be sure to leave a 5 star rating or review on Apple or just tell your friends to listen. I really appreciate it. Thanks again to Gabi for her research and editing help on this episode. I’m Ashley Smith, the host and producer of Washed Away, thank you for listening.
