S1: E15 – The Disappearance of Danny Burroughs, Part 2

When Danny Burrows disappeared from his home in May's Landy, New Jersey, his wife, Loretta, said he ran off with another woman, a waitress who worked at a restaurant Danny and Loretta used to go to when they were on vacation down south.

But not everyone bought Loretta's story.

There was a lot of rumors and deceptions surrounding Daniel's disappearance.

Six years later, detectives executed simultaneous sirch warrants, one on Loretta's New Jersey home and the other at Loretta's sister's house, where Loretta had been staying. Investigators never imagined what they'd find.

When we entered the house, we were all shocked. I think it was the last thing we expected.

Honestly, she was.

An elder care nurse for years, just taking care of other people, and when you look at this case, you could see through that mask.

We're in South Jersey today for the conclusion of the disappearance of Danny Burroughs. I'm Sloan Glass and this is American homicide and just a warning that what you're about to hear is graphic.

Please take care while listening.

By May of twenty thirteen, Danny Burrows had been missing for nearly six years. The case had gone cold until prosecutors received a tip that Loretta Burroughs had forged some legal documents. This sparked a search warrant of the two residences where Loretta had been staying, her home and her sisters.

We were of the understanding that it was for insurance for all documents with the capacity that could find possible items of evidentiary value related to a homicide or at disappearance.

So as Loretta Burrows was being questioned at her sister's house, another team led by Sergeant Caroline MacDonald was searching Loretta's home in Ventnor City, New Jersey.

Loretta Burrough's house was impeccably clean. When I entered, it smelled very fresh. Generally speaking, it was as if she was expecting visitors.

Her beachy two bedroom, two back Duplaque sat a couple blocks from the Atlantic Ocean and just minutes from the many casinos and nightlife of Atlantic City.

At that time I was conducting the search, I was the one photographing. My primary area of concern was her bedroom.

That's where I started.

What particularly stood out to me in Loretta's bedroom was the organizational aspect of her closets. She had every pair of shoes that she owned in their own little tupperware cases stacked on top of each other on the top of her closet.

Sergeant MacDonald had the camera and her team had a system in place.

Every time an item of potential evidence area value is located within the residence, whoever's searching that area will call your name so you can photograph it as it exists.

While she was in Loretta's bedroom, the lieutenant in the guest bedroom called her name.

In my mind, I'm thinking, okay, he found something of interest. So when I walked into the bedroom, it had bunk beds, some kids items in there, and we were made to understand that that is the room that when her grandsons came over they would sleep.

And standing in front of the closet was the lieutenant. He had a puzzled look on his face.

When you opened the first set of closets, there wasn't anything of particular interest in there. It was kind of empty. When you got to the second closet and you pulled open the doors and there were a lot of clothing items in there.

Mixed in with Loretta's clothing and Christmas decorations.

Was something odd.

There was a stacked object and it had blankets draped over it and clothing items draped over it, things on top of it, appearing to cover up whatever the object was. He called my attention to it because he found it to be strange. They were the only items in the house that appeared to be concealed in a strange way. As we started to remove the coverings around the tupware containers, there were plastic bags, garbage bags.

In fact, there were nine layers of black plastic garbage bags.

As we dug deeper into it, we were finding little air freshener beads that were melting and coming apart. We were finding dryer sheets that had sense to them.

You probably know where this is going.

Even with all of those air fresheners, Sergeant MacDonald noticed a smell she described as decomposition.

As it became stronger and stronger and started to fill the room, we stopped. I called the Medical Examiner's office, and as I was hanging up the phone with them, another sergeant who was present, he was coming into the room to let me know that Sergeant Doherty was interviewing Loretta Burrows and that we were going to find Daniel's body inside the house.

You may remember from the last episode another team of detectives was questioning Loretta at her sister's house.

It was almost simultaneously that the discovery happened, as well as the phone call.

As the team photographed the many plastic bags, dryer sheets, and air freshener beads. Loretta Burrow sat with Detective Shallick and Sergeant Lynn Doherty.

She simply said, oh, you, Detective Shallock, and I said yes, And she says, I want to talk to your Mirandezer. And at that point she tells us everything that happened Rightad said that they had gotten into an argument.

She told the police the argument she had with Danny happened in August of two thousand and seven.

Daniel pushed her on the bed, and once that happened, she got a knife from the kitchen and repeated stabbed Daniel and killed him.

She said she stabbed him.

She said he was in the bathroom and he fell into the bathtub, and that she left the body in the bathtub.

Loretta said she killed Danny, but it was in self defense.

Everything that she told us, was about her being the victim.

Keep in mind, Danny was recovering from shoulder surgery at the time and his arm was in a sling.

That doesn't mean he couldn't throw her on the bed, but the way the house was set up, She then ran down the loft, down the steps, through the living room, into the kitchen to grab a knife, and then back through the kitchen, through the living room, up the steps, through the bedroom, and into the bathroom to protect herself from the.

Person that was upstairs. The whole time, it didn't add up.

So the picture that Loretta's painting would mean that she got into her car and drove to a theme park in Pennsylvania for a vacation with her daughter and of Cole and her grandchildren.

All well, her husband was still in the bathtub.

And if you remember from the last episode, Loretta told Nicole that Danny called her during that trip.

When we said, why would you tell Nicole that you're calling Danny and having conversations with him, and she said, oh, I was calling him to see.

If he picked up.

But you just said you knew he was dead. She's like, oh, yeah, I just like was hoping. I mean nothing she said made sense.

That's when investigators began to connect the dots.

She's telling people that he's calling her from Florida, and he's clearly not. So she was laying foundations for people to not be suspicious of him disappearing the whole time. You know, why are you going to report Hi missing? I told you I talked to him.

He's not missing. He's in Florida.

You know what investigators were getting at is that Loretta had a clear plan over the last half decade. She's spun a tangled web of lies to cover the fact that she stabbed and killed her husband.

I asked her in the interview, Okay, so you stabbed him, right, you're saying that there was this fight and you stabbed him. Did you ever think to call nine one one, Like, even in the heat of passion, if if you're mad at somebody and you stab them, which is still like a terrible, horrible thing, what do you do? You call nine one and try and get the medical attention. And then she said something to the effect of and he's still with me, right, Danny's still with me? Something like that.

That's the same plastic container the police found hidden in Loretta's guest closet.

We asked her, like, how did you put his body into rubber bean container? Shaguard just like pushed it in, And we specifically asked her if she had cut up his body or anything, and she said no, But then later the autopsy report showed that there were cut marks on the bones.

And then she tells us that she.

Had to put like transition into another container, which is the one we found him in, and that his head fell off, so she put that in a separate container, and she claimed to take the body out of the closet and talk to it.

So just to be clear, Loretta says she killed the man she loved since they were kids, and she loved him so much that she stuffed his dead body into big plastic containers and then talked to the body.

Six seven years, she's been traveling around with this body, keeping it.

It's like something you watch on TV.

At first, Loretta said she kept Danny's body in a container out in the yard behind their house in May's Landing, but she eventually dug up Danny's remains and put them into storage containers. If you remember, neighbors of Loretta complained of a smell on her property. To this day, they continue to wonder if Danny's body was under that tarp in her backyard.

I've never heard of anyone ever murring someone and keeping the body. And not only keeping the body, she transported it to her second house and then transported to our third house, so it completely blew us away.

Detective Frank Shallick arrested the sixty one year old grandmother and charged her with murder, and.

Then investigator Lynn Doherty and I went to Nichole's house and sat down with her and explained to everything that had happened.

Nicole is Loretta's daughter.

She just couldn't believe it, you know, and Nicole I just lost her stepfather, you know, it was confirmation that and Nicole just lost her mother. Her mother was not going to go away to prison, probably for the rest of her life. It was very hard for her.

Nicole had plenty to process, including the fact that her children spent many nights at Loretta's home.

Daniel's body was stored in the bedroom of her third home, which her grandkids would use. I mean, she murdered someone, it's disturbing, but to put the body in the closet where her grandkids were sleeping. I just can't fathom what she was thinking, Like, I don't know, just it bothers me.

Well, no one imagined the years of wondering what happened to Danny Burrow's would end like this.

She kept them in the cart for seven years. I don't know what the I can't even get into ahead like that.

I can't ruth Antovanny not only grew up with Danny, but she went to prom with him.

How in the world, how do you make a decision to do that. It's sad, very sad.

It was very sad, especially for Danny's brother, Ray, who had spent years trying to get anyone to listen when he said something here is not right. My brother would not disappear, And he was right. His brother was closer to him than he ever expected. His intuition told him Loretta was behind it, and her duplicity hit a dark dark side. Loretta Borough spent six years portraying herself as a scorned wife. She told everyone that her husband Danny

Not only did she kill her husband, Okay, I see that occasionally, but that she then chopped him up and put him in a toat. But no, we don't stop there. She moved him from location to location.

Damon G.

Teyner was the Atlantic County prosecutor whose jaw dropped when he read about the case.

You can't make this up. If you made it up, it would really be a bad horror film.

Loretta moved Danny his dead body two other times and was in the process of moving a third time.

So what mindset is there that when the moving vans show up to move you from one destination to another, that you say, hey, don't forget my body over there. It's unheard of. And her grandkids are coming to that home, they're visiting there, and she has something in there as bizarre as the remains of her late husband, Like, what is that all about? But the reality is is that if Danny burrows remains were not in that home or had never been found. This is a case that doesn't

This is a crime Loretta could have gotten away with. It had been six years and up until now, there was no evidence that Danny was more than a missing person. There's no rationalizing what Loretta did. But could she have been in chalk? Was Danny really this violent man and she was responding in self defense?

Well?

The trial brought out those answers. In March twenty fifteen, the case went to trial and prosecutor said Loretta Burrow's motive was much darker and meaningless.

Loretta had a gambling problem. She was addicted to gambling, and I believe that she wanted to stay in the area not for the purpose of being close to her children and grandchildren, but for the purpose of feeding her addiction.

And no matter where Loretta lived in New Jersey, she was always a short car ride away from the numerous casinos in Atlantic City. Back in two thousand and six, for example, those casinos took in over five billion dollars from the busloads of gamblers who played slot machines and table games, and Loretta was one of those gamblers.

Loretta Burrows was greedy. She would do anything to feed that addiction, and that includes murder.

Prosecutor Seth Leevy learned Loretta's gambling addiction dated back to the nineteen nineties. That's when she got in trouble with one of her employers.

She over the course of time as a bookkeeper, was slowly embezzling money from the company she worked for.

According to court records, Loretta stole four hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and in nineteen ninety six, she was sentenced to fifteen months in federal prison. Her lawyer at the time blamed it on Loretta's gambling addiction.

That kind of crime takes patients, it takes devotion to the crime, it takes knowledge, and so now you're looking at somebody in a different lens.

As the trial began, two questions loomed. Would Loretta take a plea deal and would she testify on her own behalf Judge Mike Donio presided over the trial.

I didn't think she would enter a guilty plea because I think she figured that, you know, if I'm going to spend most of my life, for all my life in jail, I might as well take the shot, even though I know it's a long long shot.

The voice you were hearing here is Judge Mike Donio. I've covered a lot of cases. Rarely does the judge speak to reporters. It doesn't matter if the case is closed. It's just not something they often do. And as the trial started, Loretta got a big win. Judge Donio throughout Loretta's confession to the police, it's incredible to get his perspective as to why.

She had a lawyer early on when they were talking to her, and then when they did interview her one time, the lawyer was not present and there was a little issue there. So I ruled that certain of those statements that she made would not be admissible.

Without Loretta's confession, prosecutor said, Levy had to change his strategy. Here's Prosecutor Levy.

She comes off as very nice, old, loving, grandmotherly woman, and her story is this big ogre of a man and came after me to kill me, and I stabbed him in self defense. That thought and that juxtaposition kind of drove my entire creation of the prosecution. She's one of the few that I would say is the closest thing or or potentially to a psychopath that I've ever met. What I mean when I say that is you get what's on the outside. You get smiles, you get a

Here's Judge Mike Donil again.

The prosecutor said that this was like the Little Red Riding Hood, and like all these old folk tales, there's a lesson to be learned as a moral to the story, and the moral is not everyone or everything is as it seems.

But no fairy tale contains the amount of graphic testimony and evidence.

This case featured.

Showing the jury bones torso that was found in a box in the defendant's house.

There was also photographic evidence of Danny's decomposing body that was so disturbing that Judge Donio ruled prosecutors could only show it in black and white photos.

I remember it was hard on the Jews, and when the photographs were presented with the bones, especially the women on the jury were like taken back and you could see that they were like visibly like wow.

If you think it was tough on the jury, imagine what it was like for Danny's brother Ray. Judge Don' remembers Ray in the courtroom.

His emotions would get the best of him. There was a couple times where I had to admonish him because he would come to court and hold up not in front of the jury, but when we would have motions. He would hold up pictures of Missus Burrows with a knife in her hand and things like that, and he would blurt things out, and a couple times I had to have a little talk with him. Let's let the system do its work and let's let justice prevail. You

Loretta's court appointed public defender claimed it didn't make sense for Loretta to murder her high school sweetheart for what amounted to a few thousand dollars.

The defense attorney who was representing her basically was heart being on the fact that there was no weapon.

He claimed there was no way to know who killed Danny, did it, or even why they did it. He added that a cigarette butt was recovered with Danny's remains, that cigarette butt contained DNA, but that DNA did not belong to Loretta.

He did what many defense lawyers do. You just keep raising issues and then in a summation he harped about reasonable doubt.

Loretta's lawyer pointed to Danny's toxicology report that showed drugs in his body, including amphetamines. The defense suggested that maybe Danny was smoking meth and it could have been a heart attack or even natural causes that killed Danny, but prosecutors at Levy reminded the jury that Danny was recovering from surgery when he died, and Loretta was the one administering Danny's pain medication. He stared at Loretta and said, you don't overdose on meth and then cut yourself up.

We took a part the story one at a time. If she says I did this because of this, we proved it wasn't so he told another lie. We proved that lie wasn't so.

Loretta Burrows never took the witness stand. But and this was notable to me. Her range of facial expressions were on full display.

During the trial.

I don't think I've ever encountered somebody who had so clearly two different ways of looking and giving off a feeling. You could just see it. The smile would drop, the eyes would drop, from going up into a smile to just cold.

It was something that even stood out to Judge Donio.

There were times when she would appear in court and she would be the quintessential grandmother and you'd look at her and think, there's no way that a woman like

What a scary thing to witness in a person that seems so innocent.

This may appear to be a grandmother and may do things that are like a grandmother, but she is a cold bloody killer, and we have the proof in these two tumberware containers. The jury agreed and they convicted her.

And it took just two hours for the jury to convict Loretta Burroughs of murder and third degree hindering apprehension. Now it was up to Judge Donio to sentence Loretta, and that hearing would leave everyone in the courtroom in tears. Judge Michael Donio presided over the trial of Loretta Burroughs.

It was one of the three most difficult or toughest cases that I did.

Loretta's sentencing hearing took place in April twenty fifteen. A month earlier, a jury convicted Loretta of murdering her husband, Danny and hindering apprehension.

We don't sentence that day. Usually it's four to five weeks later and a pre sentence report gets prepared. I get the police reports, prior record and things of that nature, and I review all that and then put a sentence together.

Judge Doni.

I also heard from Danny's friends and family who submitted victim impact statements.

Some of them were in court that.

Day to share their statements, but it wasn't easy to hear over the sounds of Loretta's sobbing.

She just sat there and cried.

One statement came from a twelve year old neighbor of Loretta's who used to spend the night in the same bedroom where the Loretta was keeping Danny's body. Over Loretta's tears, her letter was read to the court.

My dad told me that Loretta had been arrested for killing Danny. I was sad, but then the sadness turned into madness, knowing that she made me sleep in her bedroom with a dead body in the closet.

Then came a man named Gary who played in Danny's band. He explained how Loretta used to cook dinner for the band and always insisted on making Danny's plate.

And after every dinner we go back to the rehearsal room, he would get behind his drum kit and double over in pain, and we.

Kept saying to something wrong.

He oh, I'll be all right.

And this went on every practice, and we knew Me and my bassfiyer knew there was something wrong.

He believed that Loretta was poisoning Danny.

I just have nightmares every day.

He was my brother.

He was like closer in my brother than me.

I'm sorry, but I'll never get over this.

For six years, those closest to Danny didn't know whether he was missing or dead. You can hear that emotion in the courtroom. Loretta faced thirty years to life, and something about that stuck with Danny's brother Ray.

January two thousand and six, and just nineteen months prior to my brother being murdered, New Jersey abolished a death penalty. It is of my opinion.

She also researched that Ray placed a picture of Danny on the table in front of him and spent more than twenty minutes eulogizing his brother and condemning Loretta.

Last time I stood on my brother's property was the day I followed the mister persons report Labor Day weekend of two thousand and seven. Because the murderer had changed the keep had entrance code, I couldn't even get into my brother's home. I believe that if I had, this investigation may not have taken as long, because I believe I would have found my brother's remains inside myself. On May seventeenth, twenty thirteen, approximately at eight thirty am, I

How she allowed his body to rot for several.

Years in containers, which caused me to drop to the ground and sob like a child, thinking of my poor brother mutilated and decomposing, while for many years the murderer was enjoying life. Again, I was taken back to August two thousand and seven and the several times I visited my brother's home listening to the monsters made up stories, repeated lies into my face, telling me he called while all along, my.

Brother's dismembered, disembowed, rotting body may have very well been in the next room or just below the kitchen in the basement freezer, Your honor, how do I shut that off?

After many years of mental torture and pain, I haven't been able to turn off. I came to the realization that I needed to reach out for help or I was going to give up on living.

I believe that the only.

Thing that kept me going was the need to fight for my brother's justice, because I knew Dan would have done the same for his little brother. Just trying to make it through each day is very difficult because of the horrors my brother adored, and how my mind is tortured with those images. I don't look forward to tomorrow, and since I can't simply turn it off, it has become a form of endless mental torture. What she did to my brother. Horror movies and nightmares are made from.

I thank you for the to me.

Ray spent every day as a spectator, sitting in the front row of the courtroom. After finishing his statement to the court, he needed help as he returned to his familiar seat.

He was distraught. He was distraught, and rightly so. He was very close to his brother.

Judge Donio then turned to Loretta, who addressed the court for the first time. You're about to hear Loretta's voice.

I'm stand before you today.

You were hunter to accept responsibility for some horrific actions and choices that have brought me in your courtroom today.

I had the.

State applied a different charge, I would have never taken.

It to her and put the families and myself in the courts through extensive heartache and expenses that were in curve by taking it to trial.

Had the state charged Loretta with aggravated manslaughter, she claimed she would have pled guilty. That charge came with a ten to thirty year sentence, So you can see why the state wouldn't offered that deal.

If there's such a thing as two people loving one another too much, making the relationship toxic and difficult demands, then I truly believe that Danny and myself were guilty of this.

I don't believe in closure or honor I don't believe I'll love her sleep right again, but I do believe in Philippias four thirteen that all things can happen through Christ too strengths.

And said, I pray today that everyone will continue.

To try to heal from this horrific, horrific situation. I pray that my sentence will give them some type of peace. No one knows what goes on behind closed.

Doors or honor.

I pray that I'll be able to help people who were mentally and physically abused. I'm sorry for my crime, and I'm ready to accept the responsibility.

My God, all this because you didn't want to go to Florida. Wait till you see now where you're.

Going to go.

Judge Donio clearly had heard enough.

I gave her a sentence of fifty five years, with three years for the hindering running concurrent. That means together for a case like this, justice is punishment, severe punishment, and making sure that it never would happen again by this person.

Loretta Burrows will not be eligible for parole until she is one hundred and ten years old.

Missus Burrows will spend the rest of her life in prison, so to that extent, justice was served.

Next time on American Homicide, a couple's night out in Atlantic City ends with a carjacking gone wrong, but investigators believe there's more to the story. I'm Slunge Glass. Join me for Murder on the Parkway. That's next time on American Homicide. You can contact the American Homicide team by emailing us at American Homicide Pod at gmail dot com.