An Extraordinary Case

It was like any other day for Joe Burgoon. He sat at his steel desk in the spartan and slightly cramped offices of the Homicide Section. When he wasn’t found here, he was in his black Plymouth, going to a crime scene, or out on an interview, driving the familiar streets of St. Louis, listening to the crackle of the police radio as the details of a case looped around in his mind. It might be someone whose face was blown away by the blast of a sawed-off shotgun, or someone shot through, leaving no evidentiary slug. It might be less obvious, such as the discovery of a young woman’s remains stuffed in a wooden box down a grassy bank of I-70. Whatever the circumstances, this Irish-American cop had probably seen something like it before. He could correlate one or another of the particulars to a prior experience. Until the Ellen Boehm case.

The Wednesday morning when he saw Sergeant Duffy’s report, it was less than an hour old. Sergeant Duffy had confirmed that the medical examiner had the body, and that an autopsy had been conducted the day before. Joe Burgoon looked over all the facts, and of course they didn’t add up.

When the phone rang, Joe’s eyes didn’t move from the report on his desk.

“I got one here, Joe,” Dr. Graham said.

“Whaddya got?”

As Dr. Graham spelled it out—two young boys in the same family, found dead by their mother, no marks on the bodies—Joe was moving from his desk to the coatrack behind him, his neck pinched to keep the phone at his ear. He slipped into a tweed jacket and told Dr. Graham he would be right over. As the M.E. had already concluded, multiple deaths in the same family without any telltale marks on the bodies was extraordinary. What Joe made of this lineup of facts was one simple observation: Something was amiss here. That was all he needed.

The M.E.’s office was next door. It was a warm, late September morning, and Joe walked through the gate and up the steps to Dr. Graham’s office. As soon as the M.E. saw him coming, he got up from his desk and they both headed to the lab.

“We got a call,” Joe said.

“Yeah, I know,” Graham said back.

Right now Joe didn’t want to talk. He wanted to see the body. He shrugged as he looked down at the boy. The little hands. The whiteness of the eyelids. The straight light brown hair. Whatever could have been for this child would never be.

Dr. Graham explained that this death had been sudden, that it had been unexpected. Dr. Graham excluded illness and accidental death.

“How can you kill a child without leaving a mark?” he asked out loud. “One way is electrocution, but I don’t see any real indication.”

“Uh-huh,” Joe was listening.

“I wouldn’t absolutely exclude it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Drowning. That’s unlikely. Asphyxia. It would be unusual to strangle a child without leaving a mark. You’d have to lie on top of the child, or put something over the face.”

“Mechanical?” Joe queried.

“All the toxicology was negative, including therapeutic drugs. The mother is on some medication. That tested out. We’re going to run some tests. Maybe there’s something with the heart, a congenital anomaly.”

“Okay,” Joe muttered, shaking his head.

“Prolonged QT Syndrome,” Dr. Graham continued, “has to do with the interval between the Q-wave and the T-wave. The Q-T interval. When the time is longer than normal, you can get sudden death like this.”

Joe wasn’t necessarily taking all this in. In fact, he had already gestured that he was leaving, and as he headed for the door, Dr. Graham understood.

“Yeah,” the doctor said, nodding. “I’m concerned about the little girl.”

“Uh-huh. Bye, Doc,” Joe said as he slipped out the door.

Depending on the level of suspicion on Dr. Graham’s part, he typically had two recommendations to make to detectives. If nothing showed up on the initial examination and he was waiting for lab results, he might advise them to start looking into it. Once his suspicions were confirmed by medical evidence, or, if something was obvious from the autopsy, he would recommend that they push hard right away. In this case, without saying it, both men knew that this unsolved death was not going to be routine, but Dr. Graham did not see any reason to recommend an all-out, immediate push. They had their hands full as it was.

Year after year of record-breaking homicide rates had kept the St. Louis Homicide Section very busy, indeed. In 1991, homicide was the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, a trend that continues to this day. In that year, St. Louis judges sent more criminals to prison than they had the year before, and the year before that. There were enough felony trials every year to start a new one every working day, and that had been the case on average for the past fifteen years in St. Louis. On top of that, the number of homicides produced a staggering backlog, due in part to the fact that the Circuit Attorney’s office prided itself on pursuing prosecution instead of plea-bargaining defendants through the system. After all, three out of four Missourians supported the death penalty.

So it wasn’t much of a stretch for the local community to support a tough law-and-order approach, even with its pocketbook. Since the early 1980s, the Police Department’s budget had surpassed the level of the city’s general revenue.

But Detective Sergeant Joseph Burgoon, Badge No. 4022, was more than just one man on the payroll. He was a bulldog when faced with a puzzling case. What distinguished him, too, was his patient style. Not that he would let anything rest—without good reason. He just knew that some things took time. He would still be there, ready and waiting, when the time was right.

Police work was in his blood. Joe’s father was a policeman, and his younger brother, Jim, was one as well, though he was forced to retire due to a nerve disability. The Burgoon tradition continued into its third generation when Joe’s own son, Thomas, one of seven children, became a patrolman.

The Burgoon family, had seen its share of hardship, too, but an abiding faith in the Catholic church and a strong adherence to Midwestern values had always stayed the course. When Joe was four years old, his mother died, leaving the full load of raising three boys and a daughter on his father’s shoulders until three years later, when he remarried.

When Joe was thirty-three, he experienced a nearly identical tragedy. His own wife died of viral pneumonia at age thirty-one. The young couple had three girls and a boy, and his wife had been pregnant again. The child she was carrying when she died didn’t survive the premature birth. So the son, Joe, like his father before, became “Mr. Mom,” as he put it. He had to juggle responsibilities, and was grateful that the chief of detectives at the time understood. He was also grateful that his mother-in-law, who lived two blocks away, could help out. Most of the time he was scheduled for the day shift, so he could race home in time to prepare dinner, help with homework, and arbitrate the squabbles that always bubbled up at bedtime.

Three and a half years later, in 1975, he remarried. Her name was Jackie and she was a nurse. In time, three more boys would come, bringing the total for the Burgoon household to seven children. All of them, except the three boys who are still teenagers, became college graduates. His oldest daughter is a mechanical engineer. Another daughter manages a restaurant.

Joe was twenty-two-years old when he joined the force. Eight years later, he made Homicide, where he has been for a quarter of a century. His bulldog reputation is rooted in the education he got early on, learning from the older men on the force. Phil Quire, for one, was a mentor for Joe, who watched the senior detective’s moves, and perhaps more important, kept his ears open. That’s how he picked it up. That’s how he got to be what he is today, Detective Sergeant Joseph Burgoon, Badge No. 4022, and when he sank his teeth into Complaint No. 91146623, it wasn’t going to be just another case for the Crimes Against Persons Division of the Homicide Section of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.