A good father is somebody who's always there, you know, who shows up for the good times and the bad times.
Someone you can cry on their shoulder.
Someone who shows up for Christmas and your birthdays and who's there through your life.
That surely wasn't my father.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
A common thread in every homicide story we tell is we get to celebrate the life of a victim, frequently through the eyes of a loved one.
We hear about the loss of life, the love within family, and the void left behind.
And as no two homicide investigations are alike, no family dynamic is the same.
And today's case is a real example of that.
Today's case takes us to Point Pleasant, New Jersey, and we're talking about the Burroughs family.
The father was Daniel.
The mom was Carol.
And the two kids were also named Daniel and, you guessed it, Carolyn.
It didn't take rocket science for them to name us.
We spoke with younger Carolyn about her parents and what life was like growing up.
Her mom worked as a banquet manager and her dad, Daniel, well, did so many different things.
He was a bricklayer, truck driver, a body shop owner, a restaurant owner.
You name it, he was a jack of all trades.
And he was pretty crafty.
The house Carolyn grew up in was built by Daniel.
It was beautiful.
It was all brick.
It had a built fireplace.
The kitchen and the dining room floor was made of slate.
It was just really, really cool.
You know, he really loved his toys, and I'm talking about cars motorcycles speedboats, radio-controlled airplanes.
He also was a musician, a drummer, and I could totally relate with that Anastasia, because you know that's kind of like my passion since I was young.
His friends talked about him as this animated guy who was funny, but they also pointed out that he had this willingness to stop whatever he was doing to help someone in need, and that was the thing that, to his friends, really set him apart.
He was a great friend, a wonderful person, just not so great to his family or children.
Carolyn's feelings for her father were very raw and very real, and you could just hear it in her voice.
Carolyn did not have a great relationship with her dad while growing up, and she is not shy talking about it.
My mom said he was great with me and my brother until we started walking and talking.
Then he didn't want nothing to do with us.
In fact, when she looks back at her childhood, she cannot recall one loving memory between her dad and the kids.
You see other families and their mom and dad.
You know, mine wasn't like that.
Mine wasn't to leave it to be with her family.
He was a rotten father.
He spent a lot of time in the garage, so we were either kept outside all day in the summer or in our rooms all day in the winter.
Even when we were locked in our bedrooms, I used to have to talk to my brother through the vent in our rooms.
I thought that was a really sad moment in the interview.
I mean, you know, I could picture that the way she described it, and the loneliness feeling, the feeling of not being supported by someone that you depend on so much, for you know, that brings sort of a sadness to it.
My dad never told us he loved us.
Never, not once in his entire life, ever.
I can't speak for my brother, but I never had that father-daughter bond with my father, ever.
You know how some people have great memories of their parents?
Well, this is a memory that Carolyn has about her dad.
In the dead of winter, when it was freezing, the kids were locked out of the house.
He was in the garage.
He wouldn't answer the door.
And he just left them there. for about an hour or so before he called us in.
It was pretty cold.
When I hear these stories, I am getting a knot in my stomach for these kids, but I'm also feeling incredibly angry at their dad.
Clearly at that age, you want to feel the love in the room, the love in the home.
And by the way that Carolyn describes it, that really wasn't present.
It was with her mom and it was with her brother.
But the fact that there was an incredible disconnect with her father is disconcerting and obviously sad.
According to Carolyn, the family dynamics and their relations stayed that way until she was about six or seven years old.
And then after that, her dad basically was out of the picture.
He was driving a truck at the time and somebody had mentioned to my mom that they seen her in the truck.
And why didn't she wave?
And my mom was like, I was never in that truck.
So two and two put together, and my mom found out that my father was being unfaithful.
He wound up leaving, and we never seen him again.
While her dad was presumed to be seeing another woman and having another relationship, Carolyn's mother and brother moved out and their life changed.
We moved into a live a normal life outside of our bedrooms or locked out of the house.
While in some ways, of course, the breakup of every family is sad, in this one it actually made me smile, because they clearly had less means.
The mom had to be out of the house all the more because she was the one who really had to take care of everything and make sure this family got by.
There was so much more humanity, decency and love now that it was just the three of them inside that house.
You know, to really see how unhappy things were in the home with Daniel is to see how happy they were with the simplest of things.
My mom was an amazing mother.
Although she worked 16-hour days to take care of us, she made time to be at ball games and dance recitals.
You know school functions, PTA meetings.
She got up early in the morning, got us ready for school, always make us dinner, make sure our homework was done and sign papers for school and look over our homework and put us to bed.
And she did it all.
But Carolyn's dad was not entirely out of the picture.
Over the course of her life, he would periodically resurface.
And each and every time, it would just reinforce that he wasn't really ready to be her father.
When Carolyn was about 13 years old, her brother had this idea to call their dad.
Being a male, he missed that father-son bond.
And maybe in his mind he thought, with him being older, that my dad would see him in a different light.
I could care less either way.
And he made me call.
It's just something he wanted.
And I wanted to see my brother happy.
So I did it.
Actually, we got in touch with him.
And that following weekend my father and his brother, my Uncle Raymond, came down on their motorcycles and they picked me and my brother up.
It turned out to be a good time.
And it was more than one weekend.
He started seeing them every weekend, and this could be the reunion they hoped and dreamed for.
Maybe this was a time that Daniel was going to be the father more than just in name only.
But there was a motive to that I found out as when I got older was that my father was paying child support.
And then when he was picking us up, he was giving my mom money.
And then he basically said to her, listen, I'm seeing the kids now just sign this paper.
They won't garnish his wages for child support.
And he'll just continue to give her the cash.
He was pretty persuasive.
And my mom did it.
Two months later, it just stopped again.
And then we didn't see him again after that.
Hearing that just built up to maybe this time it was going to get better, Scott.
And then, boom, he let them down again.
And in some way it feels even harder, because they had built up their hopes yet again, to be let down.
You know, we obviously don't know what was going on in his life, but there really can never be a good reason for this.
Let's fast forward four more years.
Carolyn was 17.
And what's on every teenager's mind at that point?
Right around the time you roll into 17, you're thinking about a car.
But for Carolyn, she didn't have the money.
I was so frustrated because I wanted a car and everything.
You know, there's things that I needed.
And I asked my mom, can I get that back child support?
And what happened was I went and I got a lawyer to sue him.
They told me I could get up to eighteen thousand dollars in back child support.
But the catch was I'd have to sue my mother, too, because she's the one who signed the paper.
So, of course, I immediately dropped it.
Now we're even going further down the timeline to 1990 when Carolyn was 20 years old.
It was a huge moment for her, giving birth to her daughter and becoming a parent herself.
And for Carolyn, that completely shifted her perspective, her priorities, and her outlook on life.
When my daughter was born...
I knew my dad had a restaurant in Mays Landing.
It was like a little pizzeria.
And I went there with the baby to let him know he was a grandfather.
And boy, he welcomed us with open arms.
And according to Carolyn, he seemed to light up when he saw her little girl.
He carried my daughter Amanda all around, showing her off.
You could just picture that in your mind about how proud he was.
At that moment, you can imagine Carolyn looking at her daughter in his arms.
That must have been a very sweet moment.
I thought we start something up again.
You know, maybe something good could come out of this.
Maybe, you know, he messed up and realizes that, you know, everything he missed.
And then all of a sudden, on the turn of a dime, he dropped back out of the picture again.
And he never reached back out to us.
And so I figured if he wanted to see us, he'd call.
And that wasn't the last time that Daniel was going to pop back into his daughter's life.
Now we're heading into the early 2000s.
Carolyn was 33 years old.
Her daughter was now 13.
And she got a call out of the blue.
But it wasn't her dad.
The call came from Daniel's new wife, and her name was Loretta.
She made it clear that she felt the right thing to do was to reunite this family, and she had an idea.
A family reunion bringing several members of Daniel's family together aunts, uncles and, of course Carolyn, her daughter and her brother.
She called us, said that our dad would like to see us.
And she's like, you know, family's important to me.
And she said that she had a daughter and grandchildren.
And she expressed to my father how important it is that he should see his children and his grandchildren.
And that my dad agreed.
Loretta said that this was going to be different.
Daniel wanted this, and he wanted it to be real.
And perhaps Loretta was the key to finally reuniting this family.
So actually, we all went to the house together.
My mother actually came and we winded up having this really great kind of reunion barbecue.
That turned out to be pretty amazing.
I believe we were looking at photo albums and then we went into the garage and we did some karaoke.
It was a good time.
You know, Scott, when I started hearing this, I started to think two things.
Like one again.
Of course it's going to take something else, something else he wants to maybe bring him back into his children's life.
But on the other hand, another piece of me is like, who cares what it is?
But if it's this woman that is a good influence on him, that can finally give something to his children that they actually need and want, which maybe is this relationship with him again, then I just say clap clap, who cares where it comes from?
It's maybe just this time a good thing.
We all know families who have some type of issue and a catalyst comes in and brings it all together.
And when I heard Carolyn talk about this, it made total sense to me that it would take an outsider to come in to reconnect this family.
From there on, we started seeing my dad and Loretta maybe every couple of months.
My dad had a speedboat.
We took his speedboat out for the day and we docked.
We got pizza, you know.
Put the tube in the water.
I mean, that was a great day.
Me and my brother, we finally felt, you know, we had some kind of relationship with my father.
It took us till our, you know, late 30s to get it, but we thought it would only get better in time.
Almost 30 years later, everything looked like it had changed for Carolyn when it came to her dad.
But in 2007, again, Daniel drops out of the picture, except this time it was a little different.
2007, my uncle Raymond reached out to me and told me that my father was missing and that Loretta had said that my dad had gotten to a yellow Hummer and took off with some girl.
So the question was, who was the woman in this vehicle and why did he leave?
You know, for all of you out there, they're saying, oh, we've heard this story before.
And so the wife or a loved one says that the other partner left with a new love interest.
And we know what's going to happen here.
But I'm going to give a big but here.
This really is, unfortunately would be history repeating itself exactly almost how it happened before.
Because Daniel Burroughs had an actual track record.
He had done the very same thing to Carolyn and Daniel's mom.
So to hear that, whatever it was that next captured his attention, it definitely seems to have more credence when it comes to him than when we hear it in many other scenarios.
It may not surprise you that, both Carolyn and her uncle Raymond, they had a really hard time believing that this was history repeating itself.
And they were suspicious.
My dad had rotor cuff surgery maybe two weeks before that.
So his arm was still in the sling.
I know my dad was putting the house up for sale and he had mowed the lawn the day before.
Why would Daniel leave in the middle of a huge financial move?
That's a decent question.
So we knew something wasn't right.
He wouldn't do that.
He just wouldn't get up and leave.
For Daniel Burroughs, this reconnection with his son and his daughter was the longest it had ever been.
In fact, the happiest for all.
We had spent about two years on and off with my dad and Loretta.
More time than we've ever spent with my father in our entire life.
So the questions are being raised.
Was this a cycle of past behavior by walking away from his family?
Or was this a suspicious disappearance?
And that was the real question.
And there were a couple of signs that concerned Carolyn.
He had boats and model airplanes.
He had motorcycles.
He had a vet.
I mean, there would be no way in hell that my dad would get up and leave everything he worked for his entire life.
Almost immediately, Carolyn knew something had happened to her father and she believed she knew exactly who was behind it.
I knew he was dead.
I knew he wasn't on this earth and I knew Loretta killed him.
So let's talk a little bit about Loretta.
We know that she is the one that brought Daniel closer to both of his now grown children.
And we know that she was well-liked.
She was loved by both those kids.
She was great to us.
I enjoyed being around her.
She worked at an assisted living facility, but let's learn a little bit about how she met Daniel.
Daniel and Loretta were high school sweethearts before life took them in separate ways.
It was many years later that Daniel and Carolyn's mom divorced and then Loretta and Daniel reconnected.
Loretta had been married twice before and her last husband had passed away.
Daniel was divorced and both had children from previous marriages.
And it sounds like that is some of the thing that bonded them deeply.
But that was then, and now Carolyn was highly suspicious that Loretta was somehow involved in the disappearance of her father, Daniel Burroughs.
And so if she's right, then we have to talk about the why.
When you look at these scenarios, it often comes down to one of two things when it comes to motive.
It's love or money.
And we certainly know that Daniel had had a relationship go sideways because of another love interest in his life.
And that was with Carolyn's mom.
So did the same thing happen here?
He wouldn't do that.
And he was younger back then.
I mean, we're talking 61 when he went missing.
You know, that's teenage.
Scott, let's just suppose for a second that this is what's happened and it's about money.
If it was a plan from the beginning, why then get his estranged family, both those kids, more involved in their lives?
I think it's a great question.
And my thought would be and I kind of go back to a Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, who said keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer.
And perhaps Loretta's thought was here, you know.
Let them see that I'm doing everything to bring this family together.
I am extending every angle I could find to really show you that I'm the peacemaker within this family.
And perhaps I would be the least likely of suspects.
In fact, maybe you'll feel sorry for me because your father did to me what he did to your mother.
He left with another woman.
And she would then be someone who they would embrace, like they did their mother when Daniel left her.
Hearing you lay it out, I'm being very honest, like I'm buying it.
But then there's this other possibility that, hearing what you're saying that also comes into play is that maybe she wasn't planning it from the very beginning, but that something happened during their romance that actually now led down this unfortunate path.
That's a great way to look at it, because as an investigator, you want to have another path to investigate.
There's this interesting story that Carolyn shared about her dad before he disappeared, and I do wonder how it may have played into this.
After Carolyn graduated college she moved to Florida and after Loretta got Daniel and Carolyn to reconnect, Daniel was making moves not just emotionally to be closer to her, but also geographically.
My dad was going to move to Florida.
He wanted to retire.
My brother was a landscaper at the time and had been landscaping for over 20 years.
And I believe they talked about opening a business together and moving to Florida to be closer to us, meaning me and my brother Danny.
And all of it sounds like a great plan.
You get the weather of Florida, you get the kids.
But there's a problem.
Loretta wasn't on board.
She didn't want to go because she had her children and grandchildren in New Jersey and she didn't want to leave them.
This all sounds eerily familiar to another case we featured on AOM, which was the Dave Tureen case Military Secrets and Lies.
In that case, Dave's wife did not want to move back to Canada, as she loved their brand new life in Florida.
But Dave, who was a member of the Canadian Royal Air Force, was returning back to Canada for his job.
And that apparently was the motive for her to kill him.
I guess when they started talking about moving, we didn't really go over there too much after that, because they were always arguing.
I just remember Loretta telling me and my daughter was there that she would move to Florida over her dead body.
And then next thing you know, he's missing.
So at this point there is no evidence that suggests that Loretta had anything to do with Daniel's disappearance.
In fact, I'll take it one step further.
There's not really much evidence to suggest that Daniel was actually missing.
He may have very well ran away with another woman, just like Loretta had said.
Loretta said that Daniel had contacted her a couple times before.
And he's a guy who, when he doesn't want to be found, he isn't found until he decides to come back on his terms.
That's exactly what had happened with Carolyn and her brother in the past.
So that is definitely something.
But that did not stop Carolyn and her uncle Raymond from taking action.
And on September 1st of 2007, they filed a missing persons report for Daniel Burroughs.
But that's not going to be an easy leap for investigators, because here is someone who has definitely left and taken off more than once before.
He has no mental health condition that they're aware of.
He doesn't have any health condition that they know about.
And there doesn't seem to be any concern for his safety other than this gut feeling that both his brother and daughter have.
They figured, you know, he's an adult.
He can move about however he wants to.
It's nobody's business.
Investigators re-interviewed Loretta and she stuck to her original statement.
Investigators had no leads at that very moment.
There was nothing else they could really do except to continue to search for Daniel.
You know, everybody else had their own theories.
His friends, the neighbors.
The last time they seen him was, you know, a couple of days before.
She said he took off and he was mowing the lawn.
He was cleaning the pool.
He had his arm in a sling.
So, you know, everybody I talked to knew something wasn't right.
And while the family is out there searching and looking for Daniel, trying to figure out what happened and where he might be, Loretta is acting all the more suspicious, at least in Daniel's family's eyes.
She would never answer the door.
I talked to Loretta one time.
Sure, what's going on, but she's selling things in the house.
Your dad had that drum set for over 10 years.
If he's coming back, he's gonna want his drum set, you know.
So I called Loretta and I told her listen, I want that drum set.
I'm coming there and I'm picking it up.
I'll take it apart, but I'm coming to get it.
So she said okay, that's not a problem.
The very next day I called her up and I told her I was on my way and she told me that she sold it, but she had 1200 for me.
And that really pissed me off.
You know Scott.
When you hear that she sold his drum set and his other belongings, how suspicious is that to you.
Boy, that hurts me.
I knew it's going to hurt you, but not personally, not personally.
Where does it sit with you beyond that?
I guess she was really never expecting him to come back.
You know, knowing how much the drum set meant to him, and I can tell you from experience, these drum kits are personal.
You become attached to things like that.
I mean, they become almost your musical signature sound.
You know, for me, this is the most obvious sign if something or someone's actions are questionable.
Loretta was making moves, quickly selling her husband's possessions.
I've called him in the past BRF, Santa Siga, and you know what that stands for.
Big red flag.
You know, at this point now we know she's selling his things.
And I actually went and got a lawyer and asked the lawyer to help me stop everything that was going on until we knew where my father was.
They said it was after a couple of meetings on the phone that they found out she had a power of attorney.
They couldn't do anything.
So for anyone that might not know what it means when you have power of attorney, just keeping it very simple, it means this that basically you are giving someone else the authority to make usually financial, decisions for you.
It's very common when you talk about older parents with their now adult children.
It's very common between spouses.
And it's usually something that is set up long before marriage something happens to one or the other person's health.
And you're really setting it up as a safety valve so that your finances don't get locked up and tied up if there's something with their health that makes them unable to render those financial decisions on their own.
So while all of this is going on, there's still a looming question.
Where is Daniel?
You try to think, OK, what would she do with him?
She had to have help.
Where would she put him?
I feel sorry for people who have relatives that are missing.
And when you don't have that closure, it really sucks, because where do you start to look for somebody that's missing?
You know, sometimes you have clues.
You know, where was the last place you seen him?
Well, he was with this person.
He was with that person.
We didn't have that.
He disappeared in thin air. what Loretta told us.
So where do you start looking?
When the investigators went to Daniel and Loretta's neighborhood they did obviously talk to their neighbors and people who may have seen things in the past.
But the investigation doesn't only involve past activity.
The investigation also involves what's going on now while Daniel is missing.
And in this case, that investigative lead did pay off.
They would hear from a neighbor that they noticed something very unusual still going on at Daniel and Loretta's house.
There was neighbors that said that it smelled like there was something dead in the yard and apparently called the detectives.
And when the detectives went to the house, she said that There had been a dead animal in the backyard or on the road, something like that.
And that's what the smell was from.
But with lots of speculation came little answers.
No sign of Daniel and no sign of Loretta having anything to do at this point with his disappearance.
After that, you know, things just went slow.
The investigation went slow.
Everything just slowed.
Bob somehow, someway, but just nothing ever came of it.
And from there, it really did become a cold case.
Carolyn moved on with her life and so did Loretta.
18 months or a year and a half after Daniel's disappearance, Loretta actually divorced him and she sold the house that they shared and she moved to a different city in New Jersey.
The final judgment of that divorce did award Loretta the escrow sale proceeds of their home.
And for me, Scott I don't know about you this one cuts both ways, because if he's gone after that set of times, she can now legally divorce him without his consent, at least in some states, or certainly in New Jersey.
But also maybe it goes back to your theory about this ultimate grand master plan and it's just another piece in that puzzle.
So, in 2010, Daniel's family turned to social media, setting up a Facebook page with hopes of finding new information.
It was just a page where everybody could go on and you know, post condolences or leave the last time they saw him, just so that we can try to put a timeline together.
But once again, nothing came up.
Then in 2013, Carolyn got unexpected news.
We were having a yard sale.
I was selling my stuff because I was moving back to Florida.
My mother called me.
Somebody had found Daniel.
And I was like, oh my God, where is he?
So we're going to back up a little.
It's 2013 and Daniel's family had urged investigators to look into his case.
But this time was different, because the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office had recently established a cold case unit.
And, as a result, the case was reopened and investigators found out that Loretta was in the process of moving to another home and she had passed convictions for embezzlement and theft.
And we know that saying that when there's smoke, sometimes there's fire.
And being convicted of a financial crime is definitely a great reason to relook at Loretta's involvement in Daniel's disappearance.
But it is a far cry from a homicide.
But as I always say, you can't find anything unless you look.
So when they looked more closely in June of 2007, just a few months before Daniel supposedly ran off with this other woman, Loretta had gone on her own to ask an attorney to draft that power of attorney we were talking about earlier because, as she said, they the two of them were about to sell their home.
Loretta made it clear at the time that her husband wasn't going to be around during certain periods and she wanted to be able to move the process forward.
So she felt like she had the right permissions to do it.
But it was also interesting that Loretta went by herself.
And the attorney that she went to was someone whose parent was a patient or client of this assisted living facility where Loretta worked at.
And so the attorney drafted this for Loretta and did it free of charge as a favor because of her care for his parent that was in that home.
There are a few things to unpack here.
It looks like Loretta was getting favors from friends to potentially keep off the radar.
There's an additional layer that we should talk about with this power of attorney.
And I'm sorry to go so deep, but it's relevant.
Is that for something to be notarized, you need to have the person whose signature it is present.
And I can say that because as an attorney, I am an automatic notary.
So I notarize things for people all the time.
And I always need to have them in front of me.
And here's the thing is that when she went to this notary, she was by herself and she got that person to notarize the at least purported signature of Daniel without him being present.
So that is the thing, that is the real ding ding ding ding ding, ding ding.
Big red flag you can't get away from.
That isn't how you're supposed to execute a power of attorney.
The attorney wasn't supposed to do it that way.
The notary wasn't supposed to do that way.
Loretta leveraged her work to get these favors for the different people to take these unauthorized illegal steps for her.
And now, when you have this evidence that the actual power of attorney that was used for the sale of this home is fake, well then, what does that mean for the investigation?
I'd like everyone to step into this room with me and it's called my motive room.
So there's a few important things to go over so far.
After Daniel left, Loretta got a profit of $77,101 from the sale of their home.
But there was a problem.
The money was locked up in escrow, and Daniel was entitled to at least half of that.
So the only way to get the money was if she divorced Daniel.
Loretta hired an attorney, filed for divorce and in 2009 got half the money.
Then got the other half when the divorce was finalized.
So between the profit of the house and selling all of Daniel's stuff which we just mentioned before, Loretta received close to 100000.
So we may have a motive, if all of you have joined me in my room, but we do not have Daniel.
And here's something else I thought was interesting.
When investigators looked into Loretta a bit more, they found out that not only did they guess that she had forged his signature for this power of attorney, but that she had likely also forged his signature frequently in the past.
So for investigators, they were able to get a search warrant, but not because of Daniel Loretta.
And the thing that's important about it is this that now it gave investigators a way to get inside her house to investigate it.
And so, while Loretta was in the process of actually moving outside of that home, authorities entered and executed a search warrant.
I do know that she was at her sister's.
There was a group of detectives there to let her know that they were there to execute a search warrant.
So I think it's worth reading you a quote from a local newspaper at the time this was all going on.
And it's from Sergeant Lynn Daughtery of the Atlanta County Prosecutor's Office.
Quote, Very nervous.
And I guess they believe they were clearly onto something.
And within them couple minutes, detectives at the Vettner home had called the detectives at Loretta's sister's and said that they had found something.
As they were searching this home, which was not the home that she had ever lived in with Daniel, or the home that she had moved into immediately afterwards, but now a third home.
As they are searching inside that house, a member of the forensic crime scene unit smelled something that they knew that faint but wafting more than unpleasant odor.
And it was coming from the back of an upstairs closet.
Upon closer inspection, she discovered a plastic trash bag and within that trash bag, another trash bag and then another.
There were a total of nine layers of trash bags, nine.
As she started to open the bags, she smelled the distinct odor of decomposition and immediately called the medical examiner.
Inside the plastic bags were dryer sheets, air fresheners, scented beads and two large plastic containers.
Hearing about the dryer sheets and the air fresheners, while it's obvious that this is clearly an attempt to mask some sort of odor.
Someone has something inside this container.
Clearly, they did not want the smell to leave that room or to leave that house.
This was an extreme attempt at covering up something big.
Those boxes were transported to the morgue and inside the first container the forensic pathologist found a woman's handbag sitting in decomposition fluid.
And inside that handbag was a cranium and mandible.
In other words, a skull and jawbone.
The second, larger plastic container contained more bones, including the left upper arm and lower leg.
The pathologist could see cut marks on the ribs that were also consistent with stab wounds.
The pathologist determined that the person had died by homicide.
A forensic odontologist positively ID'd the remains in the plastic tote as being Daniel Burroughs.
Apparently.
She took his body from the home in Mays Landing, my father's home, took him to her vet in her home where she stored him for approximately six years.
You know Scott, when I first read that, it was just like this ugh, this is actually like House of Horrors stuff.
You know, I thought about the fact that Daniel was last seen in 2007 riding his lawnmower in front of his house.
They found his remains in 2013.
That's six years, six years where she had to keep his body in her own home.
And then she had moved from house to house and she kept taking the containers with her.
And I did ask how they couldn't smell that smell.
You know, because from what I understand, the smell of death, it just, it lingers.
And they said because the containers were airtight.
And once they were sealed, they were sealed.
And being kept in the closet and with a bunch of blankets on top, and all the air fresheners couldn't smell it.
That is incredible to me.
And then we have to think back now and start to think about Carolyn.
I was around the corner when my mom called and said that they found my dad her exact words in Loretta's closet.
So I hung up and I tried to process that because I just couldn't put it together in my head.
Like dismemberment did not come into my mind.
So I just couldn't process that.
And about a half hour after that phone call, my mother called me back again.
And she said, you need to come home and you have to come home now.
Every news van, every channel was up and down her condo complex looking to speak with me.
And eventually, what investigators put together was that Daniel and Loretta had had some sort of argument.
They'd been arguing for a while about this move to Florida.
I told her he was leaving.
He was moving to Florida.
Argument ensued.
She stabbed him.
And remember, at this point Daniel had one of his arms in a sling, so he really wasn't as agile as he might have been otherwise.
He was pushed into the bathtub and she left him there.
So nobody knows how long he lived, if he suffered while he was in the bathtub bleeding to death.
She packed up a bag and left him there.
And then we know at some point after that she literally cut his body up to pieces and packed him away.
Apparently from what detectives told me, they asked her how she was able to move him.
She said that by the time she got back, he had bled out.
Loretta claims she's innocent and she would go to trial.
But there's a lot more to this story.
Remember that Daniel was Loretta's third husband.
Her second husband passed away.
And you all could probably guess where we're going with this.
The police have now arrested and charged the person who they believed has killed Daniel Burroughs, his wife Loretta.
While his family had some closure and answers to the mystery, it is an unsettling feeling for his daughter, Carolyn.
You know, you think about the push and the pull for Carolyn.
While she clearly cared enough to be involved and continue trying to make sure that he was searched for and figured out, she couldn't sit in that courtroom like so many other family members can.
Remember, it is a rocky history at best.
I didn't have those feelings.
Even though Carolyn chose not to attend each and every day in the courtroom, she was able to follow the proceedings, as the entire trial was live streamed.
I followed the trial and I was able to also follow it through the prosecutor, who kept me and my brother posted every day.
What was shown, the pictures that were shown, what was said, what was happening.
Yeah, I knew everything that was going on day to day through them.
So walking into the courtroom with the evidence that prosecutors have in this case, how confident would you be?
The body in the Tupperware, three moves later found in a closet.
I'm saying it's a pretty strong case.
But the thing that really is, a thing that I'm going to start that case with and emphasize the jury is that you make sure that it was her.
Is you go back to when she is starting to take the financial reins without Daniel knowing it?
And that, I think, really gave prosecutors a very, very strong case.
It clearly was a very compelling case, and jurors agreed.
On March 17, 2015, Loretta was found guilty of Daniel's murder and hindering her own apprehension.
Loretta, who was 63 at the time of her conviction, was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the murder and a concurrent three-year term for hindering that apprehension.
But the story doesn't end there, because soon after Loretta Burroughs was arrested for Daniel's murder, police reopened the investigation into the death of her second husband.
Back in 1994, several years before she had married Daniel, her second husband, a man by the name of Joseph Doyle, died.
According to the Delaware County Medical Examiner's Office, his death was caused by drugs and the manner of death was undetermined.
And, according to authorities, Joseph's family had long suspected Loretta had something to do with his death.
And at the time the family insisted that he did not have a drug problem and they could not explain why traces of Percocet and Xanax were found in his system during the autopsy.
Her being convicted of Daniel Burroughs' homicide certainly may put a new focus on how her previous husband died.
It's just as interesting question mark, at least for now, because by everything we can tell, the case into Joseph's death is still unsolved today.
Being without a father, I don't know, I'm very independent.
I have the mindset that I don't need a man, which is kind of ironic.
I don't know.
I think maybe I got that from not having a father in my life.
It's clear your parents helped shape the person you are, but shaping is not necessarily defining.
My mother did everything for us, and by watching her be the strong woman that she is, I take right after her.
And it is Carolyn's and Daniel's mom that I give the big shout out to for giving these two kids exactly what they needed, who worked those 18-hour days, and that emotionally, these kids were fulfilled.
And so that is the legacy and the thing that I at least want to end on.
We never lacked for anything.
I remember wanting a pair of designer jeans.
They were really big back then at Jordache and Sergio Valente.
And they were like 80 bucks for a pair of jeans.
And I remember, you know, looking at my mom and telling her, look what I did, you know, like her.
I worked for them.
And I've, you know, because of my mother, I had that mindset.
She took us to Disney World when I was eight. which was amazing.
I don't know where she got the money to do that.
And remember that car that Carolyn wanted when she was just 17?
Her mom helped her buy that car too.
Everything I wanted to do, I got to do.
And it's because of my mother.
And Daniel, no one deserves to die the way that he did.
And it seemed like he was really maybe getting it by the end.
You know, for 30 plus years, Daniel locked his children out of his life.
But then that door was finally opened.
And this time, when the door was shut, it was Loretta who shut it permanently.
So, what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?
