Tommy Burkett: murdered 25 years ago today - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

1990 UM fan · 12-01-2016, 02:44 PM

Let's recap this still unsolved case:

On December 1st, 1991, Tommy Burkett was visiting home after the Thanksgiving holiday. Tommy was a junior at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia and his parents lived about twenty miles from the campus. His parents, Tom and Beth Burkett, had been out for much of that afternoon, but returned to the house at 6:10 pm. Inside Tommy’s bedroom, they discovered the unimaginable. Tommy was upright on the sofa in his bedroom and had been shot once through the mouth. A revolver rested in his hands. In the emotion of the moment, Tom picked up the revolver. He was surprised to find its cylinder unlatched. The gun could not have been fired in that condition.

Tommy’s mother, Beth, recalled the horrific scene inside Tommy’s bedroom and said she knelt down by him and felt that his hands were stone cold. From the moment police arrived on the scene that night, they have insisted that Tommy Burkett committed suicide. Tommy’s parents believed their son was murdered. Beth’s suspicions began immediately after fire and rescue left. Police arrived to the scene shortly after 6:20 pm. A uniformed officer entered the house and was in a hurry, which struck Beth as odd because Tommy was already dead. The lead detective went up to Tommy’s room and soon emerged with an old bank deposit slip. On one side of the slip there was a note which said, “I want to be cremated.” Beth was convinced the handwriting was not Tommy's.

To the police, the facts spoke for themselves. Tommy’s death was an open and shut case of suicide. Beth and Tom were certain their son had been murdered not just because of the unlatched gun and suspicious note, but because Tommy's glasses, wallet and driver's license were missing. Two days after Tommy’s death, his parents went to his dorm room to collect his belongings. It was there that they found Tommy's driver's license. According to Tom and Beth, school administrators would not provide any information about the student who had turned it in. For Tommy’s parents, it was another unanswered question to add to a growing list.

Tommy’s parents decided to talk to their neighbors to see if they had noticed anything unusual the day Tommy died. Beth was stunned by what people had seen the afternoon of her son’s death and was told that several neighbors reported seeing Tommy’s car being chased by a larger, darker car. One neighbor saw the cars coming and thought that it was a life or death chase. Another neighbor reported that one of the cars involved in the case at one point drove through someone’s lawn. Tommy’s car was apparently run off the road and he was assaulted. He got away from his attackers and made it back to his parent's house.

A few weeks after Tommy’s death, Beth noticed a spray of small reddish marks on the stairway in their home. She and her husband informed authorities, but no official investigation followed. Tom and Beth hired Paul Kish, a bloodstain expert based in New York. He confirmed that the spots were blood and weren't consistent with someone committing suicide inside a room. Kish also said that some other violent altercation had occurred where blood was shed. A spent bullet was found in the wall behind where Tommy was sitting. It had no blood or tissue on it. Tom and Beth decided to have Tommy’s body exhumed for a second autopsy. The new findings added to their growing belief that Tommy had been murdered. The second autopsy revealed that Tommy had unexplained abrasions, bruising on his right ear and a broken jaw.

To Tommy’s parents, a terrifying picture of his last hours had begun to emerge. Beth resolved to find out if her son had telephoned 911 for help on the day he died. She called the local dispatcher and asked if there was any record of her son making a complaint. The dispatcher informed Beth that Tommy had made two complaints, one in August and the other in October. When Beth asked for the nature of the complaints, the dispatcher changed her story. The dispatcher had originally said that Tommy's name showed up on the computer and so where the times he called and that he made 2 calls, but the messages were deleted. The dispatcher went to get her supervisor to inform Beth about the nature of the calls, and came back and said that she didn't know why Tommy's name was in their computer and that he didn't call 911. Beth said she knew Tommy had made the calls because the police department personnel told her and was angry that the police never responded to Tommy's 911 calls. Beth wondered if the messages he left were innocently removed or deliberately purged. Even more concerning, she wondered why Tommy's pleas for help were ignored.

Tommy’s parents began to reexamine a series of events that preceded their son’s death. It began with a phone call from Tommy around November 12th, less than three weeks before he died. Tommy called home and told his mother that someone had broken into his mailbox and stole his paycheck. He sounded frantic on the phone. According to Beth, Tommy was assaulted by a student a few days after the phone call and was later told by a student at the university that the young man who had Tommy’s driver’s license after he was dead was the same student who had beaten up Tommy. His parents gathered more information. They concluded that Tommy was working as a DEA informant, and that a group of students dealing drugs on campus conspired to kill him. Beth and Tom are convinced that their neighbors saw Tommy being chased by the killers and that he got home in time to call 911 before the killers burst in.

An informant later told Beth and Tom that their son was beaten to death with a baseball bat and that phone books were used to minimize bruising and absorb blood spatters. Beth had noticed that their phone books were missing after Tommy's death and that gripping tape on his baseball bat was also gone. The Drug Enforcement Agency has officially denied any connection to Tommy Burkett. Police in Fairfax County, Virginia still consider his death a suicide. Tom and Beth founded Parents Against Corruption and Cover-Up (PACC) after Tommy's death. Beth died in 2003 and Thomas in 2006, and Tommy's death remains unsolved a quarter of a century later.

cdr369 · 12-01-2016, 06:21 PM

This is strange, because I actually was thinking about him earlier today.

It is unfortunate that both of his parents have passed. The house that they lived in has also sold to a new owner. At one time, his parents had a website with a conspiratorial twist to it. After their death, the website was sold to another entity. Maybe someone else can remember the name of the site, because you can still view it on archive.org. There was quite a bit of information about TB on the site.

yourhomiebrian · 12-02-2016, 08:02 AM

I would lean towards suicide.

cdr369 · 12-02-2016, 01:07 PM

There are a few cases on UM that I believe were suicide, despite what the family believed or what the show proposed. This case, however, I won't.

LooksLikeCRicci · 12-02-2016, 01:21 PM

I know there are many who think Tommy committed suicide. I also had a hard time with that one. I maintain he was murdered.

1990 UM fan · 12-02-2016, 04:45 PM

What evidence is there to support suicide? You don't bust your own ear and break your own jaw before shooting yourself in the mouth. I can't fathom why people think Tommy killed himself. What reason (s) would he have had to end his own life?

cdr369 · 12-02-2016, 05:02 PM

What's interesting is that blood was found throughout the house, not just in the room the suicide took place. There was also a separate bullet hole in his house (maybe the stairway?)...

Neighbors had noticed something that day that happened at his house that involved multiple vehicles. Law enforcement did not investigate (Surprise, surprise). It was obvious the body had been there for a few hours, but LE said that the suicide had just occurred.

There were way too many coincidences. The episode on TB discussed a lot of follow-up investigation that his family did at his university. I don't even care about this information. What I care about is how badly the initial investigation after finding the body was.

Typically after a suicide the police will still do some type of investigation. They usually contact family members to get information on the descendant. They will often contact people who might have information that the family may not know (perhaps that might be able to share insight on why the suicide may have occurred: drugs/ depression/ etc.). In the TB case, it seemed that LE was overwhelmingly ready to conclude it as a suicide.

JannTosh · 12-03-2016, 01:30 AM

some feel that he had been beaten up and in his depression decided to take his own life

some suspicious things in the segment is that they never identified who the gun belonged to or if the handwriting on the note was his

JC1957 · 12-03-2016, 01:02 PM

Tommy was murdered plain and simple.

One very elaborate cover up if there ever was one.

WishfulDreamer · 12-03-2016, 02:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cdr369

Typically after a suicide the police will still do some type of investigation. They usually contact family members to get information on the descendant. They will often contact people who might have information that the family may not know (perhaps that might be able to share insight on why the suicide may have occurred: drugs/ depression/ etc.). In the TB case, it seemed that LE was overwhelmingly ready to conclude it as a suicide.

Excellent post. Even if he did commit suicide, LE's investigation and treatment of his parents was inexcusable.

One thing that really grinds my gears about this segment and the interviewing investigator is that he claims they interviewed the neighbors "at the insistence of the parents." There never should have had to be insistence--that should have been something they planned to do from the start. Especially after learning Tommy had been bullied/assaulted/threatened on campus, there should have been an intensive investigation of those on campus. When someone winds up dead and has been harassed and fearful prior to their death, it's plain negligent not to look into those angles. Sure, he could have killed himself from depression/upset about bullying. But you don't jump to that conclusion. You should really look into all the evidence instead of writing it off as LE did in this case.

And whichever figure told them that it probably happened as returning home was not only woefully wrong, but downright cruel.

Drakken · 12-04-2016, 06:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by yourhomiebrian

I would lean towards suicide.

With a revolver found with the cylinder unlatched?

LooksLikeCRicci · 12-05-2016, 01:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1990 UM fan

What evidence is there to support suicide? You don't bust your own ear and break your own jaw before shooting yourself in the mouth. I can't fathom why people think Tommy killed himself. What reason (s) would he have had to end his own life?

If you search the forum, there is a massive thread called something like "Why I Think Tommy Burkett wasn't murdered."

ETA: http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/...=Tommy+Burkett

Huskerz85 · 02-05-2017, 04:08 PM

This is a confusing one. I watched the Stack version of this again, then glanced through several pages of the above thread (though not the whole thing) and stopped on this post.

Quote:

Originally Posted by WishfulDreamer

There are many portions of this segment that make little sense to me (which Thuissat already hashed out in his original post).

*One of the many odd things: Tommy's mother says a group of students told her, to her face, that they were planning to beat up her son. Funny thing to do if you're planning on killing someone. Same with the surrendering of the driver's license by one of these students. We do have witnesses who claimed they saw Tommy beaten up, but it does sound like it happened before and was unrelated.

*The gun. This is key here. If the gun is the Burkett's (and I'm sure it is, otherwise you know they'd be talking about the evidence of someone else's gun being there), it is possible Tommy pulled it out to defend himself and was shot in the process after the bullies/suspects broke into his home. However, I find it really, really unlikely. Do we actually have any evidence that people broke into his house and attacked him? I don't think phone book would be enough to absorb all the blood involved in this type of attack that's being theorized.

*The unlatched cylinder. I don't know much about guns from personal experience, but I think it is possible that emotion clouded Mr. Burkett's account about it.

*The 911 center: If this really happened, couldn't this operator have been flat out wrong? She maybe misheard the name? I, too, find it hard to believe in a conspiracy that involved the 911 center.

I think suicide is likely here, but several things continue to bother me. The police seemed to really half-ass the investigation and stick on suicide from the beginning. They only spoke to the neighbors at the Burkett's insistence. They didn't really investigate to see if an altercation took place. If the investigator really said, "It probably happened while you were driving down the street" that's pretty cruel, especially because it contradicts the condition his body was in at the time according to the parents and the paramedics.

I concur with other posters about the school's responsibility. Their negligence is also pretty appalling.

After thinking about the above points, I do think that he was being bullied/harassed or perhaps blackmailed. I'm not straight on all the forensics though and I actually could see this going either way (Murder or Suicide).

Going along with this, the local LE could either have been flat out incompetent and lazy in their investigation, or the people behind the bullying (perhaps the murderer) could've been 'connected' in some way (a close relation of a VIP, thus prompting a cover-up to protect someone/something).

I don't think Tommy had anything to do with the DEA/that there was any gov't involvement though. It's an interesting story that his parents came up with, but there is absolutely nothing that corroborates this.

umfan87 · 02-05-2017, 10:52 PM

i'm inclined to think he was murdered i read online that he was possibly gay and being bullied/harassed/teased about it and this might have lead to his death i just don't see how it could be a murder especially with unexplained brusieing found on him and le not cooperating with the family nor the university cooperating with the family.

mtaylor72 · 02-06-2017, 01:10 PM

The thing that I've always found strange is that every article I've read (including the website his parents had) regarding this case never said whose gun was found in his hand. Every other detail was documented except that.

12-01-2016, 02:44 PM	#1
1990 UM fan Unsolved Mysteries fanatic Senior Member Join Date: Jul 14, 2011 Location: United States Posts: 2,510	Tommy Burkett: murdered 25 years ago today Let's recap this still unsolved case: On December 1st, 1991, Tommy Burkett was visiting home after the Thanksgiving holiday. Tommy was a junior at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia and his parents lived about twenty miles from the campus. His parents, Tom and Beth Burkett, had been out for much of that afternoon, but returned to the house at 6:10 pm. Inside Tommy’s bedroom, they discovered the unimaginable. Tommy was upright on the sofa in his bedroom and had been shot once through the mouth. A revolver rested in his hands. In the emotion of the moment, Tom picked up the revolver. He was surprised to find its cylinder unlatched. The gun could not have been fired in that condition. Tommy’s mother, Beth, recalled the horrific scene inside Tommy’s bedroom and said she knelt down by him and felt that his hands were stone cold. From the moment police arrived on the scene that night, they have insisted that Tommy Burkett committed suicide. Tommy’s parents believed their son was murdered. Beth’s suspicions began immediately after fire and rescue left. Police arrived to the scene shortly after 6:20 pm. A uniformed officer entered the house and was in a hurry, which struck Beth as odd because Tommy was already dead. The lead detective went up to Tommy’s room and soon emerged with an old bank deposit slip. On one side of the slip there was a note which said, “I want to be cremated.” Beth was convinced the handwriting was not Tommy's. To the police, the facts spoke for themselves. Tommy’s death was an open and shut case of suicide. Beth and Tom were certain their son had been murdered not just because of the unlatched gun and suspicious note, but because Tommy's glasses, wallet and driver's license were missing. Two days after Tommy’s death, his parents went to his dorm room to collect his belongings. It was there that they found Tommy's driver's license. According to Tom and Beth, school administrators would not provide any information about the student who had turned it in. For Tommy’s parents, it was another unanswered question to add to a growing list. Tommy’s parents decided to talk to their neighbors to see if they had noticed anything unusual the day Tommy died. Beth was stunned by what people had seen the afternoon of her son’s death and was told that several neighbors reported seeing Tommy’s car being chased by a larger, darker car. One neighbor saw the cars coming and thought that it was a life or death chase. Another neighbor reported that one of the cars involved in the case at one point drove through someone’s lawn. Tommy’s car was apparently run off the road and he was assaulted. He got away from his attackers and made it back to his parent's house. A few weeks after Tommy’s death, Beth noticed a spray of small reddish marks on the stairway in their home. She and her husband informed authorities, but no official investigation followed. Tom and Beth hired Paul Kish, a bloodstain expert based in New York. He confirmed that the spots were blood and weren't consistent with someone committing suicide inside a room. Kish also said that some other violent altercation had occurred where blood was shed. A spent bullet was found in the wall behind where Tommy was sitting. It had no blood or tissue on it. Tom and Beth decided to have Tommy’s body exhumed for a second autopsy. The new findings added to their growing belief that Tommy had been murdered. The second autopsy revealed that Tommy had unexplained abrasions, bruising on his right ear and a broken jaw. To Tommy’s parents, a terrifying picture of his last hours had begun to emerge. Beth resolved to find out if her son had telephoned 911 for help on the day he died. She called the local dispatcher and asked if there was any record of her son making a complaint. The dispatcher informed Beth that Tommy had made two complaints, one in August and the other in October. When Beth asked for the nature of the complaints, the dispatcher changed her story. The dispatcher had originally said that Tommy's name showed up on the computer and so where the times he called and that he made 2 calls, but the messages were deleted. The dispatcher went to get her supervisor to inform Beth about the nature of the calls, and came back and said that she didn't know why Tommy's name was in their computer and that he didn't call 911. Beth said she knew Tommy had made the calls because the police department personnel told her and was angry that the police never responded to Tommy's 911 calls. Beth wondered if the messages he left were innocently removed or deliberately purged. Even more concerning, she wondered why Tommy's pleas for help were ignored. Tommy’s parents began to reexamine a series of events that preceded their son’s death. It began with a phone call from Tommy around November 12th, less than three weeks before he died. Tommy called home and told his mother that someone had broken into his mailbox and stole his paycheck. He sounded frantic on the phone. According to Beth, Tommy was assaulted by a student a few days after the phone call and was later told by a student at the university that the young man who had Tommy’s driver’s license after he was dead was the same student who had beaten up Tommy. His parents gathered more information. They concluded that Tommy was working as a DEA informant, and that a group of students dealing drugs on campus conspired to kill him. Beth and Tom are convinced that their neighbors saw Tommy being chased by the killers and that he got home in time to call 911 before the killers burst in. An informant later told Beth and Tom that their son was beaten to death with a baseball bat and that phone books were used to minimize bruising and absorb blood spatters. Beth had noticed that their phone books were missing after Tommy's death and that gripping tape on his baseball bat was also gone. The Drug Enforcement Agency has officially denied any connection to Tommy Burkett. Police in Fairfax County, Virginia still consider his death a suicide. Tom and Beth founded Parents Against Corruption and Cover-Up (PACC) after Tommy's death. Beth died in 2003 and Thomas in 2006, and Tommy's death remains unsolved a quarter of a century later.
	__________________ Join my Unsolved Mysteries page (Facebook): http://www.facebook.com/pages/Unsolv...899616?sk=wall

12-01-2016, 06:21 PM	#2
cdr369 Member Frequent Poster Join Date: Jun 13, 2015 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 227	This is strange, because I actually was thinking about him earlier today. It is unfortunate that both of his parents have passed. The house that they lived in has also sold to a new owner. At one time, his parents had a website with a conspiratorial twist to it. After their death, the website was sold to another entity. Maybe someone else can remember the name of the site, because you can still view it on archive.org. There was quite a bit of information about TB on the site.

12-02-2016, 08:02 AM	#3
yourhomiebrian Member Frequent Poster Join Date: Dec 01, 2016 Location: Virginia Posts: 176	I would lean towards suicide.

12-02-2016, 01:07 PM	#4
cdr369 Member Frequent Poster Join Date: Jun 13, 2015 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 227	There are a few cases on UM that I believe were suicide, despite what the family believed or what the show proposed. This case, however, I won't.

12-02-2016, 01:21 PM	#5
LooksLikeCRicci Likes to live in a clean house Moderator Forum 4000 Club Member Join Date: Nov 27, 2005 Posts: 4,050	I know there are many who think Tommy committed suicide. I also had a hard time with that one. I maintain he was murdered.

12-02-2016, 04:45 PM	#6
1990 UM fan Unsolved Mysteries fanatic Senior Member Join Date: Jul 14, 2011 Location: United States Posts: 2,510	What evidence is there to support suicide? You don't bust your own ear and break your own jaw before shooting yourself in the mouth. I can't fathom why people think Tommy killed himself. What reason (s) would he have had to end his own life?

12-02-2016, 05:02 PM	#7
cdr369 Member Frequent Poster Join Date: Jun 13, 2015 Location: Austin, TX Posts: 227	What's interesting is that blood was found throughout the house, not just in the room the suicide took place. There was also a separate bullet hole in his house (maybe the stairway?)... Neighbors had noticed something that day that happened at his house that involved multiple vehicles. Law enforcement did not investigate (Surprise, surprise). It was obvious the body had been there for a few hours, but LE said that the suicide had just occurred. There were way too many coincidences. The episode on TB discussed a lot of follow-up investigation that his family did at his university. I don't even care about this information. What I care about is how badly the initial investigation after finding the body was. Typically after a suicide the police will still do some type of investigation. They usually contact family members to get information on the descendant. They will often contact people who might have information that the family may not know (perhaps that might be able to share insight on why the suicide may have occurred: drugs/ depression/ etc.). In the TB case, it seemed that LE was overwhelmingly ready to conclude it as a suicide.

12-03-2016, 01:30 AM	#8
JannTosh Member Forum Regular Join Date: Feb 28, 2011 Location: Michigan Posts: 586	some feel that he had been beaten up and in his depression decided to take his own life some suspicious things in the segment is that they never identified who the gun belonged to or if the handwriting on the note was his

12-03-2016, 01:02 PM	#9
JC1957 Member Frequent Poster Join Date: Feb 25, 2014 Location: Midwest USA Posts: 131	Tommy was murdered plain and simple. One very elaborate cover up if there ever was one.

02-05-2017, 10:52 PM	#14
umfan87 Member Occasional Poster Join Date: Feb 05, 2017 Location: waterloo, iowa Posts: 87	i'm inclined to think he was murdered i read online that he was possibly gay and being bullied/harassed/teased about it and this might have lead to his death i just don't see how it could be a murder especially with unexplained brusieing found on him and le not cooperating with the family nor the university cooperating with the family.

02-06-2017, 01:10 PM	#15
mtaylor72 Looking for that one clue... Occasional Poster Join Date: Mar 16, 2011 Posts: 77	The thing that I've always found strange is that every article I've read (including the website his parents had) regarding this case never said whose gun was found in his hand. Every other detail was documented except that.