Arrest in arson rampage reveals enigmatic mother and son
For months, authorities scoured West Hollywood, carrying a photo of a squat, green-eyed woman through a bustling hive of Russian-language social clubs and cafes selling borscht and vareniki dumplings. She was Dorothee Burkhart, a fugitive wanted on a host of fraud charges in Germany.
Dorothee Burkhart was eventually arrested here and, last Thursday, she was in a courtroom for a hearing to extradite her to Frankfurt to face the charges.
Within hours, an arsonist began setting fires across a wide, significant portion of Los Angeles in a four-day assault that caused millions of dollars in damage and left many residents on edge.
The man police arrested on suspicion of starting more than 50 fires turned out to be another resident of that Russian-language nook of West Hollywood: Dorothee Burkhart’s 24-year-old son, Harry.
On Tuesday, authorities were investigating the relationship between the son and mother — a relationship that appears to be mutually protective, fraught with legal troubles and laced with virulent anti-American sentiment.
Court records unsealed Tuesday only added another layer of mystery to Harry Burkhart’s background, as detectives in Los Angeles try to determine whether Dorothee Burkhart’s legal problems played a role in the arson rampage. Her routine criminal charges, which included falsifying the down payment on her breast augmentation surgery, received an unusual amount of attention from German and U.S. authorities, as well as Interpol, the international policing organization.
FULL COVERAGE: Southland arson fires
It was unclear from the records why Dorothee Burkhart became such a high-priority target in an international dragnet after her arrest warrant was issued in 2007 by a Frankfurt judge.
According to interviews with numerous law enforcement officials, Harry Burkhart lived with his mother in West Hollywood and appears to have been incensed at the aggressive, international effort to send his mother to Germany to face fraud charges.
Indeed, officials said, Harry Burkhart’s strident, obscenity-laced outburst at his mother’s extradition hearing last week, much of it focused on anti-Americanism, appears to have preceded the arson rampage and led to his capture.
The son “made quite a disturbance” at that hearing, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. It left enough of an impression that a law enforcement official who had worked on the case against Dorothee Burkhart viewed LAPD images of a “person of interest” Sunday and reported that the person looked “exactly like Ms. Burkhart’s son,” Mrozek said. The officer was an agent in the Los Angeles field office of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, officials said.
Once identified, Harry Burkhart was arrested at 3 a.m. Monday by a reserve sheriff’s deputy who spotted his minivan near the Sunset Strip.
By Tuesday, Harry Burkhart, a German national who had lived in California for several years, had been dubbed the “Hollywood Feuerteufel” by the German media: the Hollywood Fire Devil. Booked on arson charges, he was being held without bail. And his 53-year-old mother, coincidentally, was back in court fighting her extradition, and appeared disoriented without her son at her side.
“He should come into the court,” she insisted to the U.S. marshals and other law enforcement agents in the courtroom.
She grew more agitated when the hearing began in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Margaret Nagle.
“My first question is: Where is my son?” Dorothee Burkhart shouted. She said her son was mentally ill, adding: “What did you do to my son?… Where is he? Dead?”
“I’m not here to address anything related to your son,” Nagle replied. The judge assured her: “I’m sure he has not disappeared.”
Dorothee Burkhart also made statements indicating her animosity toward the authorities, suggesting at one point that she and her son might have been the targets of “German Nazis.”
She refused to be represented by a public defender, glaring at a federal prosecutor while telling the judge: “I don’t want an attorney from this government.”
A seven-page complaint filed against Dorothee Burkhart by Assistant U.S. Atty. Cathy Ostiller said the United States was “informed through diplomatic channels” that Burkhart was charged in state court in Frankfurt with 19 counts of fraud “committed on a commercial basis and as a member of a gang.”
The complaint details about $45,000 worth of alleged embezzlement of renters and landlords with whom Dorothee Burkhart did business between 2000 and 2006.
The largest sum listed in the complaint was for 7,680 euros, or about $10,000, allegedly owed to a clinic in Frankfurt where she had breast augmentation surgery in the summer of 2004.
According to the complaint, Burkhart told the clinic that the payment had been made through a bank transfer, and the surgery was completed the next day. However, the complaint said, the funds had never been transferred, “and Burkhart did not have any intention of paying for the surgery.”
Her penchant for landing in legal disputes appears to have continued in the United States.
Ken McLeod, the manager of an apartment building on North Poinsettia Place where Dorothee Burkhart and her son once lived, said Dorothee Burkhart paid $1,200 monthly rent after moving in to the one-bedroom apartment but balked at a supplemental city fee of $2.96.
McLeod said he showed her the lease agreement explaining the fee, but she accused him of trying to extort her, at one point writing him a letter calling him a “monster.”
Like her son, Dorothee Burkhart remains an enigma. Court documents, for instance, describe her as a German national, but in court, she spoke German as haltingly as English, and at a previous hearing had been granted a Russian-language interpreter. She described herself to a former landlord as “Canadian German.”
Victoria Nuland, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman, said it was also unclear how the Burkharts had gained entry to the United States. Federal immigration officials said they believed Harry Burkhart was in the United States with a legal visa that is due to expire in two weeks. But authorities could not find a visa file for Dorothee Burkhart.
Dorothee Burkhart was in Frankfurt as recently as October, court papers said, before flying into Las Vegas and then accompanying her son to the German Consulate in Los Angeles to renew her son’s passport. But immigration officials said Tuesday that the court document is incorrect and that the last time she entered the country was in 2007.
Meanwhile, she appears to have created a business offering “sensual Tantra massage.”
A website listing Dorothee Burkhart as administrator and the address she and her son shared on Sunset Boulevard says that a woman named “Annabelle” provides “soul-relaxation massage.” The site’s advertisements also note the masseuse’s “curvaceous body shape.”
Los Angeles Times staff writers Paul Richter in Washington and Ari Bloomekatz, Paloma Esquivel, Joel Rubin , Ann M. Simmons, Garrett Therolf and Richard Winton in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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