Forty-one days later, there was no crowd waiting when the murder charge was dropped and Burke came home from jail. The open-and-shut case popped back open shortly after his arrest. Within 24 hours prosecutors learned that DNA collected from saliva on Mrs. Kennedy’s chest couldn’t have come from Burke. Incredulous, they ran more tests, which again exonerated him. In addition, the blood found on Burke turned out to be feline; he had been tending to injured cats. A palm print left on Mrs. Kennedy’s thigh didn’t match Burke’s hand, while the bite-mark evidence proved inconclusive. Even the bloodhound came under attack; he may have simply been sidetracked by a house full of cats. Yet for six weeks, police kept insisting they had the right man in jail. Burke, at times suicidal, cowered as other inmates taunted, “Meow, Eddie!”
Burke’s is a case study in the large impact of a series of small investigative missteps. Unlike Richard Jewell–who initially was reported to be a possible suspect in the Atlanta Olympic bombing before eventually being cleared–Burke’s case didn’t make national headlines. But he says it still managed to ruin his life; when he returned home from jail his most valued possessions, including all his cats, were missing. He says his neighbors won’t talk to him. Yet there doesn’t appear to be any overt misconduct by police and prosecutors. They followed a logical course and had the backing of reputed scientific experts. “This was not a case where we just went out and grabbed Eddie Burke,” says Jeffrey Locke, the former county D.A. who initially handled the case. “Compelling evidence pointed to Eddie Burke. And the checks and balances all worked in this case.”
It was unquestionably a gruesome case. Mrs. Kennedy was eviscerated, a nipple was bitten off and a knife shattered her eye socket. The Kennedys would arrive each morning at Bird Park and split up before meeting back at the parking lot next to the Burke residence. When Irene didn’t return, Tom backtracked and found her in a wooded spot where she had stopped to urinate. Shane, the police dog, was given a sniff of dirt near Mrs. Kennedy. The dog followed a circuitous route to the parking lot, then to Burke’s home. When investigators knocked, Burke refused to let anyone in. Rather, he voluntarily went to the police station and, over the objection of a lawyer, provided impressions of his teeth and consented to tests for trace amounts of blood. “I knew it’d clear me,” Burke said. Instead, they seemed to seal his fate.
While he was locked away, Burke’s life was put under the microscope. He was demonized in newspapers and on TV, each story accompanied by a menacing, courtroom image of Burke. The sociopathic profiles were fueled by details of his home’s contents–X-rated videotapes, kitchen knives, the book “Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them.” “They didn’t mention the three Bibles in my room,” Burke says. “They could’ve just as easily said I was a religious fanatic.”
And the reports of dead cats in refrigerators had some townsfolk fearing they had a homegrown Jeffrey Dahmer. “People read the paper,” Burke says, “and thought, ‘Scary character who eats kitty burger’.” Burke is still embarrassed to admit that he gets so attached to his cats that he is reluctant to bury them. “I was heartbroken and I kept putting it off,” he says. “Nobody was supposed to know–it was just between me and the cats.”
But while Burke sat in a cell, the chain of evidence that landed him there was unraveling. The forensic evidence was suspect, and a witness reported seeing a man in his 30s with a slight build and long hair in the park the morning of the murder. Later, she identified Burke, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall, 230 pounds, bald and a decade older, from an array of photos. At the annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, a renowned expert, Jim Starrs, singled out the Burke investigation as a succession of “grotesqueries.” Starrs criticized the techniques used to match the bite marks, saying that too little three-dimensional evidence was consulted. Lowell Levine, a New York State Police forensic specialist whose previous cases range from identifying the remains of the Romanovs to serial killer Ted Bundy, now claims he never said the match was unequivocal–despite media reports that quoted him saying, “That is Ed Burke’s bite.” After the DNA tests appeared to exonerate Burke, authorities cast them in doubt. Walpole Police Chief Joseph Betro, citing an empty carton of orange juice found near the body, told a citizens’ forum that drinking orange juice could camouflage DNA. “That’s ridiculous,” says Lawrence Kobilinsky, a forensic-science expert.
The police were understandably eager to close the case. Walpole was gripped by fear that a sadistic killer was loose, and Eddie was the only suspect ever identified; the killer is still presumably on the loose. Lt. Rick Stillman, a spokesman for the Walpole police, says, “We could not have foreseen the way this was going to go.” But Burke insists a lawsuit will be necessary “to recover my reputation.” He will need to recover more than that to break even. His life savings are exhausted: Legal bills and state-mandated home improvements have surpassed $75,000, and the city billed him $1,500 for shots, food and adoption arrangements for his cats.
Six months after he was arrested, Burke remains a pariah in a town he loves. His two favorite pet stores have banned him with “no trespass” court orders and kids drive by his home yelling, “Die, murderer! Die!” “Hopefully instead of all this crap,” he says, “at some point it’ll be clear to everyone that I didn’t do it.” By most folks’ standards, it wasn’t much of a life. But Burke would give anything just to have it back.
