A Deserted Desert Discovery - The Homicide of Dr. Thomas Burchard

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts

True Crime

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On March 7, 2019 a man is driving down the road with his children in Las Vegas Valley when they notice a car with a rock thrown through its window. They call the police, and upon further inspection, a body is found in the trunk of the car with blood everywhere. The man is identified to be Dr. Thomas Burchard, a beloved child psychiatrist from Salinas, California.

In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the blood patterns, the evidence found inside the car, how many pieces of evidence are gathered from a crime scene, where Dr. Burchard was in his final days, and more.

Show Notes:

0:00 - Intro

2:25 - Background and overview of the case

5:12 - Blood patterns

7:15 - Determining the cause of death from blood patterns

12:10 - Gloves found inside the car

16:15 - Arson investigation

18:30 - How many pieces of evidence can be generated from a crime scene?

21:40 - The state the body is found in

25:40 - Tampering with the crime scene

27:30 - How did investigators figure out the victim had been beaten?

33:28 - Discovering where Dr. Burchard was during his final 3 days of life

37:00 - Investigators start to piece together the evidence

39:12 - Transfers of blood, swears, and wipes

42:38 - Wrap up

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I've had the opportunity to travel quite a bit across its country and one of the most striking
0:27.2	locations geographically at least is in my opinion is the desert southwest of the United States.
0:34.4	Being from the southeast, I'm used to seeing farmland and rolling hills and green everywhere,
0:41.7	not out there. Sometimes you can get on one of those highways and it just looks like it goes on and
0:47.2	on forever and kind of realize how small you are. It's kind of like when you go to the ocean for the
0:52.3	first time when you're a kid. You see the vastness of it. But there is a beauty to it,
0:58.8	but not too many people stop along the roadway. There's not many establishments out in some of
1:04.5	those locations to stop it. But can you imagine to land down the road? You got two kids in the car with
1:13.7	you. Maybe you're singing a song with them maybe you're playing a game or maybe you're telling them
1:19.9	to settle down. But all of a sudden, out of the corner of your eye, you catch an outside. In the
1:26.1	middle of that vastness, there's a Mercedes, a blue one. Mercedes bends C300 sitting there,
1:37.2	rising up off the desert floor with the police called a earthen burn. When your eye catches it,
1:46.1	you notice that there's a big hole in the window. Looks like I don't know a gun blast or maybe a
1:52.4	big rock went through it. But when the police finally showed up at that scene after that daddy had
1:58.8	called it in and they opened the trunk of that car. They found something shocking as anything else
2:05.6	you might see out there in the desert. They found the body of Dr. Thomas Bushard.
2:09.8	Today, we're going to talk about his onsite. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags.
2:24.4	Joining me today is my good friend Jackie Howard Singer producer with Nancy Gray's crime stories.
2:32.4	Jackie, when I heard about this story, I was thinking, what an odd thing, you're riding
2:37.7	along the road with your kids in the car. You know, you and I are both parents and I've seen
2:41.9	not things along the road with my family in the car. I don't know that I would have necessarily stopped,
2:46.5	but apparently he at least called it into the police. It caught his attention and can you imagine
	...

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