http://cbs5.com/localwire/localfsnews/bcn/2005/06/23/n/HeadlineNews/MURDERS-COLD/resources_bcn_html

Thanks to google.com, I discovered some new articles on the 1988 murder of Gretchen Burford (including one at the link above). A man named Tyrone Hamel, who is in a Texas prison for rape and robbery, has been linked to the case via DNA.

For those who are unfamiliar with the case (which UM profiled in 1990), Gretchen Burford was a California lawyer who was held at knifepoint by a would-be robber, who tried in vain to force her to withdraw money from a bank machine. The reason he failed to get money was because the dollar amount typed in was too high, which resulted in the bank rejecting the withdrawl attempt. Burford crashed into another car, and got out while the her killer fled. According to eyewitnesses, she shouted, "He stabbed me!" She died at the scene.

Thanks for the update. I am so glad they have captured him. That is one of the more chilling UM segments in my opinion.

Thank GOD for DNA tests. This is very good news.

Hello. Long time lurker on this site. Anyway, the San Jose Mercury News also did an article on this, a fairly detailed article, in fact. You can find it here: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/peninsula/11974190.htm

You will need to register in order to view the article.

You will need to register in order to view the article.

Any chance you could copy and paste the article here for us so we don't have to sign up?

Oh, I remember this one! It was VERY chilling and tragic. I'm really happy they pinned this bastard for her horrific murder.

one way or another, whether here or when they face God in the end, they will be punished. glad to see they found out who killed her and that he is already in jail!

Oh hurray hurray!!! This case was always close to my heart as it happened a few miles away from where I live (I use the ATM where she was abducted all the time!) For those interested, here is the San Jose Mercury News article:

17 years later, suspected killer ID'd by DNA

FATAL STABBING VICTIM WAS PALO ALTO LAWYER

By Jessie Seyfer and S.L. Wykes

Mercury News

The way Gretchen Burford died 17 years ago was horrible enough -- running from a stranger who had kidnapped and stabbed her, then bleeding to death beside a busy Mountain View street.

But what was even worse for those who knew and respected the Palo Alto defense attorney was that police had no clue about who killed her.

Until now, prosecutors said Thursday.

The Santa Clara County District Attorney's office announced that DNA from a baseball cap the killer left behind matched that of a Texas prison inmate whom they plan to charge with Burford's murder. Tyrone Hamel, now 39, is serving a life sentence for two rapes and robberies in Texas.

Police believe Hamel is a prolific, brazen criminal with a history of robbing women at knifepoint. Just one month after allegedly killing Burford, they believe, he tried to abduct another woman at the same intersection. Hamel bears a resemblance to the mysterious man in police sketches that, in 1988, papered the city of Mountain View.

Burford, a 49-year-old mother of three, had married her second husband, Wayne Dernetz, just 13 days before being attacked. Dernetz, a former Hayward and Saratoga city official, is now an attorney in San Diego; he could not be reached for comment.

Friends and relatives say Burford was a tireless advocate for criminal defendants and underprivileged youths, especially in East Palo Alto.

In a cruel twist, given the circumstances of her death, one of Burford's greatest concerns was understanding the social conditions that contribute to violent crime, her daughter, Martha Burford, said Thursday.

Not only was her mother's death a tragedy for her family, ``it was a tragedy for the community,'' said Martha Burford, who lives in Santa Cruz.

Blinking back tears Thursday, Chief Assistant District Attorney Karyn Sinunu -- who knew Burford -- said that newer DNA analysis methods succeeded where 1988 science had failed. Sinunu also thanked the Mountain View Police Department, among other agencies, for not giving up on a case that had long ago gone cold.

Although they recovered a 12-inch kitchen knife and interviewed a handful of witnesses, police quickly saw leads in the case dry up. Even a feature on NBC's ``Unsolved Mysteries' in 1990 turned up little significant information.

``It's an emotional day for me,'' Sinunu said. ``We're very proud.''

Longtime friends were equally emotional on hearing the news.

``Oh, praise God,'' said former East Palo Alto Mayor Gertrude Wilks, who worked with Burford on numerous education projects from the mid-1960s until Burford's death. ``She was just a good person. She was handling lots of cases in East Palo Alto for low-income people.''

Last year, investigators took a new look at the case -- one of many cold cases they were re-examining -- and found usable DNA on sweat from a blue paisley cap the attacker had left at the crime scene. The DNA on the cap ended up matching Hamel's genetic profile, which had been added at some point to a national FBI database, said Deputy District Attorney Charles Constantinides.

Police wondered initially whether Burford's killer was one of the many people she had represented as a criminal defense attorney. But prosecutors said they have no evidence Hamel and Burford ever met before their lives allegedly collided on the evening of Feb. 26, 1988.

About 6:30 p.m., police said, Burford left her Palo Alto law office and drove her Toyota Camry to a Wells Fargo automated teller machine at El Camino Real and California Avenue. Prosecutors believe Hamel slipped into her car while she made a deposit. When she returned, he allegedly forced her at knifepoint to drive about 2 1/2 miles south on El Camino to another Wells Fargo ATM, at San Antonio Road.

At 7:05 p.m., Burford tried twice to make withdrawals but failed because the dollar amounts she requested were too high, Constantinides said. Police believe that's when Burford tried to escape the car and was stabbed in her side.

Witnesses saw the assailant pull her back into the car, then saw the Camry shoot across a parking lot, cross El Camino's median and strike a Cadillac before coming to a stop. Burford staggered out of the car, shouting, ``He stabbed me!''

She fell to the ground. The knife blade had struck an artery, and prosecutors said Burford died quickly.

Over the years, her family dealt with the tugging pain and mystery of the loss as best they could. Martha Burford said she tried not to wonder who the killer might have been.

``Everybody in my family had to come up with some sort of story about this person to put some closure to it,'' she said. ``But you don't spend your time grieving over what happened, but over the loss.''

Investigators now believe Hamel was living in Texas in the late 1980s but had traveled to Menlo Park to attend a funeral around the time Burford was killed. One of the witnesses who saw a man sitting in Burford's car has identified Hamel as the suspect, according to prosecutors.

Hamel is aware of the Santa Clara County arrest warrant but does not yet have an attorney in California, said Deputy District Attorney Cameron Bowman, who has been assigned to prosecute the case.

The extradition process is expected to take at least three months.

Prosecutors are considering the death penalty.

Burford's first husband, Robert Burford, said investigators have told him Hamel has not admitted the killing.

``I was not sure there would ever be any resolution to this,'' said Robert Burford, who lives in Ft. Worth. ``So much time had gone by.''

Hello. Long time lurker on this site. Anyway, the San Jose Mercury News also did an article on this, a fairly detailed article, in fact. You can find it here: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/peninsula/11974190.htm

You will need to register in order to view the article.

Looks like someone beat me to copying the article in...

I'll never forget the way she said those three words. :(

Hi my name peter burford and gretchen burford was my mother. i too remember the show and it was so-well produced. I think it is great that there are people who watched the show who still remember it. my family is feeling the loss all over again. mom was a great person. her murderer, it turns out, had committed numerous rapes in texas the month prior to mom's murder. he had just been released from prion on an armed robbery charge. he came to menlo park/east palo alto for a family funeral. during his stay he abducted and killed my mother. just a month after mom's muder, he attempted the same crime across the street from the wells fargo where he took mom. this time, he was hiding in the potential victims car. she saw him and manage to hit her panick button. he fled the scene. he went back to texas where he committed more savage rapes and buglaries. he was finally apprehended around april of 1988 and is now doing 60 years in texas.

Hello Peter. I'm so sorry about your loss, it's a sad and tragic case and I'm glad to know that your mother's killer is behind bars. He needs to stay there for the rest of his life and suffer for all that he has committed and caused.

My condolences. :(

Hi all,
Here's a new article from the San Jose Mercury News with much more detail about Gretchen's killer. I've taken the liberty to post the article since SJ Mercury News requires registration.


DNA link connects man with 17-year-old killing

JAILED TEXAS RAPIST WILL FACE CHARGES IN WOMAN'S SLAYING

By S.L. Wykes and Jessie Seyfer

Mercury News

Tyrone Hamel was 3 when his mother stabbed his father in the heart with a kitchen knife in a crowded Redwood City apartment the night before Thanksgiving 1968.

On that night, the couple got into a bruising fight that ended with Russel Warren Hamel bleeding to death on the bathroom floor.

Twenty years later and just eight miles down the Peninsula, prosecutors say, Hamel kidnapped a stranger, Gretchen Burford, and stabbed her in the heart, leaving her to bleed to death by a busy Mountain View street. Police had been looking for the popular, 49-year-old defense lawyer's killer for 17 years -- until Santa Clara County prosecutors announced last month that DNA technology had linked Hamel, now 39, to the crime.

Now, court records and interviews with Texas prosecutors reveal that Burford's killing was not the first time that Hamel is believed to have repeated the violence of his childhood and turned it toward women in particular. Hamel is serving a life term in a Texas prison for two rapes and four robberies he committed there in the month before he allegedly killed Burford in 1988.

In a matter of months, he will be extradited to the Bay Area to face charges in Burford's death -- a return to where his turbulent life and long thread of violence began.

Hamel's mother, Bonnie Veronica Morris, named her second child Tyrone Maurice -- and named Russel Warren Hamel as the boy's father. The elder Hamel's family vehemently argues that Russel Hamel did not father the boy. Still, he and Morris were a couple on Nov. 27, 1968, when Hamel entered Morris' bedroom and hit her while she was sleeping, she told police.

Three others in the apartment that night testified about a struggle between the couple. When police were finally called, Russel Hamel, 22, had staggered from the bathroom and had died on the living room floor.

A jury convicted Morris of involuntary manslaughter. She received a suspended five-year prison term and was ordered into drug treatment. In the next four years, she was arrested and charged with credit card fraud, heroin possession and four probation violations.

Family members cared for Tyrone Hamel, who often missed school and often found trouble, said Barbara Melton, one of Russel Hamel's nieces.

``Kids used to pick on him and call him `hamelhead,' '' she said. ``He's been through a whole lot. His life was terrible.''

He had little contact with Russel Hamel's family because they believed so strongly he was not Russel Hamel's son. Three of Russel Hamel's siblings say they saw the boy only once or twice before their brother's death.

In the late 1970s, Bonnie Morris' mother, Juanita Martin, and other family members moved to Fort Worth. At the time, Tyrone Hamel was in the California Youth Authority serving time for molesting a relative, said his grandmother, Martin. Eventually, according to prison records, other members of his family would be imprisoned: an aunt, an uncle and a half-sister on drug charges, an aunt for assault with a deadly weapon, a cousin for the murder of Hamel's uncle and another uncle for the murder of his wife.

Hamel's first arrest as an adult came when he was 20, court records and interviews with Texas prosecutors show, beginning a pattern of vicious assaults and rapes that became frustratingly familiar to Fort Worth police. Carrying a large knife, he jumped a woman in a parking lot, forced her into a vehicle and then robbed her. That first time, he spent less than three years in prison.

Less than a month after his release, he erupted in a series of assaults that had Fort Worth police dubbing him ``the hospital district rapist'' because the attacks all took place near the county hospital.

On Jan. 20, 1988, he hijacked a delivery truck, raping the young female driver at knifepoint.

Nine days later, he walked into a store and at gunpoint forced two women to undress in a storage room. He made them perform sexual acts on each other and then raped one, according to court testimony.

He threatened to ``blow our heads off'' if the women looked at him, one victim testified, and he ordered her to talk dirty and direct racist slurs at him.

``What I recall was the terror of the victims,'' said Robert Mayfield, assistant district attorney for Tarrant County, Texas, and one of the prosecutors for the trial. ``There was a component of rage . . . a desire to control, a desire to humiliate, to just completely negate their humanity.''

The next day, Hamel walked into a Whataburger restaurant, ordered a milkshake, then pulled out a revolver. He ordered the employees to put money into a hamburger bag and took the keys to a 1977 Chevy pickup truck, which police later found abandoned.

A couple of days later, he burst into a family therapist's office during a marriage counseling session. The therapist and the husband managed to fight off Hamel, who fled.

And then -- two weeks later -- Hamel returned to the Bay Area to attend the funeral of Shirley Frazier, an old family friend who had been in the apartment the night Russel Hamel died.

Back in his childhood home, Hamel picked up his spree of violence where he'd left off in Texas, prosecutors say.

As daylight faded on Feb. 26, prosecutors say, he surprised Gretchen Burford at an ATM on College Avenue in Palo Alto. At knife-point, he forced her to drive to another ATM.

Friends and colleagues would later describe her as the kind of open-hearted defense attorney who took pity on accused criminals and their messy lives.

Police think Burford tried to escape Hamel by gunning her car across a parking lot and into rush-hour traffic. The car came to a stop and Burford staggered out. ``He stabbed me!'' she said, and fell.

She lay sprawled on El Camino Real near the San Antonio Road intersection, dying of a knife wound to her heart. In the darkness, police searched for a man seen bolting from her car, but the killer escaped.

Cold case investigators recently reopened the case and found Hamel's genetic profile matched DNA from sweat on a blue paisley cap found in Burford's car, authorities say.

Hamel also has been identified by a Mountain View woman as the man she saw hiding in the back seat of her car -- two weeks after Burford's killing -- in a lot across the street from where Burford was stabbed. The woman had found a knife in her car similar to the one used in the killing.

Fort Worth detectives finally caught up with Hamel when he returned from California and arrested him for the Texas rapes and robberies. Before investigators could even close the door of a line-up viewing room, the victims had identified Hamel, said Fort Worth police investigator Jim Houck.

The following year, a Fort Worth jury deliberated for 35 minutes and convicted Hamel in the string of rapes and robberies.

The case ``screamed a life sentence,'' said former Tarrant County prosecutor Gary Medlin, who described Hamel as ``a scary dude, just a horrible case.''

Bill Lane, the attorney who defended Hamel in Texas, was unavailable last week.

Hamel's grandmother has worried for years about something her daughter said in March 1988, when Martin asked her why she'd sent her son back to Texas from the Bay Area, only to have him be arrested for the rapes.

Morris' reply, according to Martin: ``He done something worse here.''

Interesting article, but my sympathies are reserved for the innocent victims he raped and murdered.

We all make choices in our lives...he isn't/wasn't the only person in this world to have a bad childhood. He made his choices...now he has to live with them.

I hope he rots first in prison...then in hell.

jeeps

Interesting article, but my sympathies are reserved for the innocent victims he raped and murdered.

We all make choices in our lives...he isn't/wasn't the only person in this world to have a bad childhood. He made his choices...now he has to live with them.

I hope he rots first in prison...then in hell.

jeeps

I could not have said it better myself. :clap

i read that article today. this was the first time i have seen the murderer. the composite rendition was a very close likeness. he has the eyes of a cold-blooded murderer who has little if any thought for human life. my mind goes back to 1968 when he witnessed his father's murder. at the time my mother was a month away from giving birth to her third baby, Martha at sequoyia hospitatl in redwood city. we were living in palo alto, just a couple cities south of Redwood City. Mom had been inspired to do something about the inequities in education in the predominantly black East Palo Alto school district. She believed that a solid education was the best way to innoculate young people against violence and drugs and lives of poverty. The violent environment her future murderer was subjected to would have bothered her greatly at the time. when i think about this nightmare, i begin to drive myself crazy. part of me wants this man to suffer like mom did and die, part of me feels his pain and mourns for the violation of his innocence at an early age. I feel that justice is served best by a life sentence without any chance for parole. i could not support the death sentence in this or any case. the cruelest form of punishment is confinement and isolation. it is also cheaper.

Peter, I cannot imagine being in your position. You have my heartfelt sympathy.