Tony Lombardi vs. Tommy Burket

[Thiussat]

These are very similar cases -- both about the same age, both found dead by gunshot in their bedrooms in their parents' houses. I think Lombardi was probably suicide, but the Burket case I am just not sure about.

In the Burket case, the police spokesman just did not give satisfactory answers. I think it is unlikely that Burket was a DEA informant, I just see no evidence of that based on the segment. The police investigation seemed rather shoddy, which leaves me a bit suspicious of them. The 911 call thing was weird as well. The mother claims an operator told her that Tommy made two 911 calls before his death, but the 911 call center later denied it. I also find it odd that the person who supposedly chased Tommy and then killed him would be the one to come forward and turn in Tommy's lost driver's license. This guy is either innocent or is just a complete imbecile.

I suppose the more I think about the Burket case, the more I find the parents' theory implausible. The DEA denies any involvement with Tommy and I see no reason for them to lie about a man who has passed. Further, I find it highly unlikely that a federal agency like the DEA would waste their time with minor drug activity at a university. If you throw out the DEA theory, then the rest of the evidence the parents present falls apart.

Tommy was acting strange and paranoid before his death according to his parents. If we can establish that he was not a drug informant, then we are left with perhaps, just perhaps, a scenario where the man was suffering from a psychosis and was delusional. Based on what he told his parents, I think his entire story was a fantasy. He said something about how "they stole my paycheck," yet he never specified who "they" were which I find quite odd. Why would someone who wanted to kill him steal his paycheck? It just didn't make much sense. This type of disorder usually starts manifesting itself when someone is in their early 20's as Tommy was. Having such a disorder also provides a motive for suicide. I am not saying this is what happened, but am suggesting this is a distinct possibility if it can be established that no one was really chasing him.

All that said, I still think that the blood spatter on the stairway in interesting. If it is indeed Tommy's, then he was obviously injured before he was ever shot in the bedroom, and this makes suicide unlikely. Also, we can't forget the testimony of at least two neighbors who saw Tommy flying into his driveway like a bat out of hell with another car chasing him. If this is the case, then it also makes suicide unlikely. There is just so much conflicting evidence in the case that it is really a he said she said type of case. On one hand I find the DEA thing unlikely, but its hard to dismiss the blood splatter and witness testimony. Maybe Tommy was really being chased but the parents had the whole scenario of WHO was chasing him wrong?

Anyway, I find the similarities in this and the Lombardi case interesting.

Later.

[DarkDante]

There is just too much evidence the Burketts have dug up that proves that Tommy was involved as a drug informant on Marymount University and it was a big enough problem for the DEA to investigate because it apparently extended far beyond the University and included a large amount of corruption and cover-up in the state of Virginia.

They used to have a website at www.thepacc.org but its been down since the death of Beth George (Tommy's mother) - In a lot of cases involving the DEA from what I understand whose results have been less than favorable for the agency they seem to resent disclosure of anything that might point out any of their inperfections of what many believe is a failed program (the "war of drugs") - I think Burkett got a little too close to the fire, I think he was approached by someone either through Marymount University which was overrun with drug activity at that time and through cooporation with state officials or possibly the DEA tracked the movements of several known drug dealers either off or on campus.

It is important to note that if is a person is dealing drugs on campus he is also likely dealing drugs off campus as well so that problem may have not been entirely with the University. I think at some point there was some type of payoff or kickback (one theory alleges that the grandson of a higher up at either the University or state government was going to be implicated by information that Tommy was aware of) and Tommy had to be eliminated because of the sensitive knowledge he was aware of.

The way the crime scene was staged is also interesting as it appears too sophisticated for a bunch of college kids just murdering a peer. Someone had to inform them on how to properly stage a suicide but the individuals who actually particpated in the murder still managed to foul things up in leaving traces of blood on the staircases and obvious signs of a beating prior to the suicide. There were also obvious signs of some type of struggle in Burkett's bedroom.

Now as far as why the DEA would "waste their time on minor drug activity on campus" there is a good chance the drug activity wasn't minor at all and the DEA might have had a specific person in mind who they were looking for and sent Burkett in as a way of flushing this person out. Tommy Burkett was under the direction of someone to investigate this stuff, from what we know he was not a drug user and had no interest in the drug scene so somebody enticed him into going down this route to begin with and it spiraled out of control possibly due to the DEA or whomever put Tommy up to this to begin with, not being able to following through with arresting the guilty party. I believe Burkett became a liability and perhaps found out too much information and was murdered because of this and the coverup that follow has to do with exactly whom was implicated. I think at the start the people who put Burkett up to this thought they were just going after a couple of college students dealing dope and it ended up in something that went much higher at least into implicating some state or possibly government officials.

There is some real juice to this thing and I think Tommy Burkett just got caught in the middle of something he should've never been involved with in the first place.

[peachysquirt21]

I dont believe Tony Lombardi commited suicide. I believe he was murdered.

[kadrmas15]

Yes I agree, I think both Lombardi and Burkett were murdered. Neither one committed suicide in my opinion and both investigations were poorly done by the police departments in charge. It doesnt exactly take a genuis to tell that Lombardi and Burkett were murdered and this is a case of mostly lazy cops either being unable or unwilling to do their jobs in finding out what really happened. There is just simply no other explanation. I mean to suggested Lombardi killed himself over a drunk driving arrest is frankly the biggest load of crap I have ever heard. At 21 I got a drunk driving arrest and I certainly wasnt so despondent over it I would want to kill myself. What nonsense.

[Thiussat]

There are a lot of questions that must be answered before I buy into the notion that Burkett was murdered.

#1) Why are there conflicting reports from the 911 office of whether or not Tommy placed a 911 call before his death? Are we to think that the 911 operators were in on the conspiracy too? I think it is likely that the operator the mother talked to made a huge boo boo by saying Tommy had placed a call. I think it was a mistake on the operators part. Either that or the mother is simply fabricating the story.

#2) Just like with Tony Lombardi, I must ask: why kill the man at his parent's home where other people come and go? Aren't there "safer" places to kill someone? I realize he did not live there at the time, but it seems logical the potential killer/s would back off after he entered the house.

#3) The idea that the chamber to the gun was open when the body was found (thus meaning he could not have fired a revolver with an open chamber), this is not something anyone else can back up. This is something the parents claim with no supporting evidence.

#4) As in #3, the same can be said for the "suicide note." The parents claim this was given to them by the detective, yet the police deny it and the parents did not present the note on the segment (I am under the impression that the note shown was an imitation made for the segment.) The parents claim that the note was not of the handwriting of Tommy, yet they never sent it to a handwriting expert for analysis. Why not? Where is the note now?

#5) One of the men the parents point the finger at is the same man who turned in Burkett's driver's license to the university after Burkett's death. As I said in my post, either this man is innocent or he is so stupid that it is a miracle he got into college.

#6) Where is the evidence Tommy was an informant for the DEA? Is the evidence simply from the anonymous phone calls that the parents received? The parents themselves said that some of the anonymous calls gave contradictory accounts of what happened. Why should anyone trust nameless, faceless people?

#7) Is there any evidence that the local police and/or the DEA had any drug sting operations going on around that campus at that time? There should be some records of this somewhere, especially if the DEA was conducting surveillance.

#8) Has the blood on the stairway ever been sent in for DNA analysis to definitively determine whether it is Tommy's or not? I am under the impression that when the segment aired, no such analysis had been done. I believe the segment aired in the mid-90's, so DNA analysis was much more arduous and expensive then.

#9) Robert Stack said that the FBI had opened an inquiry into the story. What ever came of this inquiry?

As for the reasons that make me think it could have been murder:

#1 At least two neighbors (one of whom was on camera) came forward and described a car chase happening right before Tommy's death. One of the cars involved was Tommy's. However, to my knowledge neither neighbor saw anyone follow Tommy into the house. I dunno about you, but if I saw something like that, I would watch until it was concluded and both parties' exited the car. It is important to note that the neighbor who came forward and put herself on camera did NOT see the car chase. All she saw was someone in Tommy's car driving it suspiciously around the cul de sac. She never identified the driver because she couldn't make him out.

#2 The blood on the stairyway, if it is indeed Tommy's.

#3 The cop on the segment did a horrible job of answering questions and seemed to give highly generic and "by the book" account of events. He seemed coached. His answers were vapid with statements like "There is no evidence of that" and "The police conducted a routine investigation." He never elaborated on anything.

Everything else that the parents present as evidence is simply heresay with no names to put to the "witness" testimony.

I am beginning to think it is possible Tommy was involved with some sort of small time drug informant program, and may have killed himself due to a traumatic event or the stress of it all. I find it unlikely that every family of suicide victims receive crank calls that suggest the victim was a drug informant. Where there is smoke there is fire. That is, why would anyone call and claim Tommy was a drug informant unless they knew it to be true or had heard it from someone else? There must be an ounce of truth to this rumor unless the parents contrived the entire story.

Again, there are more questions than answers and more "evidence" that leads me toward the direction of suicide than evidence that directs me towards murder. It is largely a case based on heresay both ways.

[grasshopper]

I will never believe that Lombardi was a suicide. There were bruises that were consistent with someone sitting on top of him holding him down which would have made the bullet trajectory also consistent. You would have to say that his mother was flat out lying to say that he was a suicide and I don't believe she was. She saw the light on and then off and heard the door close but never heard a gun go off, so her son had to already have been dead when she got home so he wasn't the one who did those things. He had been threatened. His friend in the UM interview said that he knew who was threatening Tony but that the police never interviewed him about it.
I believe in this case the police either just didn't care or knew who did it and were not going to go after that particular person for some reason.
Also the fact is that people do get killed in their own home and in other places where people frequently go in and out with the murderer not being seen, heard or caught.

[Thiussat]

There was one other interesting case of questionable suicide on UM that I have seen that reminds me of the Burkett and Lombardi cases. The person was a male in his early 20's. He had his own house and lived alone. His father came to his house and found him dead a couple of days after he supposedly shot himself. The father later hired a PI to further investigate. The PI found blood on the floor and on the TV set, suggesting a struggle. Can anyone put a name to this case? I would like to discuss it too.

Regards.

[kadrmas15]

Danny something. Danny Williams? I know it was in Illinois.