to magic conferences with Earp, 59, at least twice a year.
His patients made a perfect audience: For the younger
kids, he’d make handkerchiefs disappear; for the older
ones, he’d turn $1 bills into $100 bills. Burchard would
tell them to stay in school so that one day they’d be
able to earn their own $100 bills. Sometimes, if the kids
could name the person pictured on the bill, he’d give it
to them. This “got a little expensive,” Earp says.
But that was Burchard. He spent little money on
himself, according to his girlfriend, but spent lavishly
on others. With his spectacles, curved white beard,
and jolly smile, he was like a medical Santa Claus—
Earp’s young grandson even used to call him that
around Christmastime.
Burchard and Earp met in the early 2000s through
mutual friends during a group trip to Vegas. They were
the only people in the group (and possibly the city)
who didn’t drink or gamble, Earp recalls, laughing.
Instead, they went to shows together and had long
poolside conversations. Earp was 12 years younger
and had four kids, three of whom were school age at
the time; both had been married before.
Soon after, Earp moved from Orange County to
Salinas to be with Burchard, and began working there
as a real estate agent. They shared his home in the
country, stuffed with Burchard’s vast book and DVD
collections, and together raised goats, horses, donkeys,
mini pigs, and chickens. (Three of Earp’s children also
lived with the couple.) When she talks about Burchard
now, she leads with his generosity. He would pay for
things his patients needed but couldn’t afford, like
textbooks or medicine, she says.
“He was extremely generous. If he saw somebody
in need, he would literally give them the shirt off his
back. Which, in the end, you know, that’s....” Earp
can’t finish the sentence, but she doesn’t need to: She
believes his generosity is what ultimately killed him.
Burchard liked to help sad women in particular—
single mothers on the verge of homelessness, “drug
addicts or prostitutes, or on their way to becoming
that,” Earp says. Purportedly, he wanted to help them
turn their lives around. In Monterey, he developed a
reputation for his special brand of damaged-women
philanthropy. Santa Claus had a hero complex.
But he was also showing signs of dementia, Earp
says. He got lost in parking lots he used regularly; he
didn’t recognize Earp’s daughter when he ran into her
at a supermarket; he forgot how to use the TV remote.
When they went to a psycho-pharmacology confer-
ence in February, Earp worried about him wandering
off in large crowds. She was starting to feel like she wasudy Earp knew it. When her boyfriend stopped picking up her calls
and replying to her texts, she knew he had been killed. When he
didn’t make his flight back to Northern California after a last-minute
trip to Las Vegas, she called the police three days in a row. She told
them she believed something terrible had happened. She gave them
the names of the people she thought had done it.
For a week, she waited to hear what she already knew. Finally, she heard from the
police: Dr. Thomas Burchard, her 71-year-old partner of 17 years, had been found dead.
His body had been stuffed into the trunk of a car and abandoned in the Nevada desert.
Earp wanted to fly to Vegas to be sure it was really him, to see for herself what she’d
been imagining since he disappeared. The funeral home told her not to come. “They
couldn’t do any restoration on his face,” she says. “They told me he was green and blue.
They strongly discouraged it, so I didn’t go.”
She didn’t need the coroner to tell her that he’d been “tortured,” she says—that his
death had not been quick. She knew that, too.
Burchard grew up in Boston, where his late father taught architecture at Har-
vard, then moved to Virginia when his dad took a job as the founding dean of Virginia
Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies. After attending medical school, and
realizing he wanted to be a child psychiatrist, Burchard had residencies at some of
the country’s top hospitals—Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Massachusetts General,
UCLA—before landing at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, where
he stayed for 40 years. He worked there for so long that he’d begun seeing the children
of children he’d once treated.
Burchard loved his job, and although he never had any of his own, he loved kids. He
loved performing magic tricks for them; he was a member of Los Angeles’s Magic Cas-
tle—a famously exclusive, austerely whimsical club of pro-level illusionists—and wentJ
EDGE OF DARKNESS:
THE SUGAR-
DADDY MURDER
When a body is found in the Las Vegas
desert, a complex story unravels around
the victim—a kindly doctor whose seedy
connections led to his horrific death.
By Jessica TestaPERSPECTIVES
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