Love, Marriage Lead to Death and a Murder Trial : Probe: From the beginning, family and friends considered John Burrus a prime suspect in the death of Grace, his wife of 31 years.

To Grace Burrus’ side of the family, husband John was always the strange duck, the enigma.

Here was a man nearly eight years Grace’s junior and hardly the stable fixture that Grace’s previous husband, the fellow who owned the lumber yard, had been.

But when Harry Scott the businessman died, leaving Grace hundreds of thousands of dollars, John Burrus the free spirit quickly entered her life. Marry me, he said, and I’ll show you a life of fun and adventure.

Maybe she was smitten by his smiling eyes. Maybe it was the impish grin that stretched across his round face. Maybe, her sisters would reflect later, Grace was a just lonely lady in her mid-40s in the small town of Casper, Wyo., and 37-year-old John was her ticket out of a monotonous prairie.

Thirty-one years later--and nine days before a trial to dissolve a marriage whose glitter had been covered with grime--John, then 67, allegedly lifted a tire iron over his wife’s head as she lay in bed, targeted her red hair and thrust it down as hard as he could, splashing her blood around the bedroom of her Oceanside apartment.

He hit the 75-year-old woman again, a third time and a fourth, and who knows how many more, prosecutors would allege later.

In the scenario laid out by the San Diego County district attorney’s office, John then tried--and failed miserably--to dress the corpse, succeeding in draping a blouse over only one shoulder and pulling slacks up just past her knees. He placed clog-type shoes on a woman who preferred Reeboks and altogether forgot to put on a bra, though she always wore one.

Then he put his wife’s body in the passenger seat of her 1979 maroon Saab, left Oceanside in the pre-dawn darkness and drove nearly two hours toward Borrego Springs, prosecutors say. He allegedly stopped at a gravel pull-out alongside the winding, two-lane county highway, with a sweeping view of the desert below, and sent the vehicle over the side of the cliff.

John Burrus hoped, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Garrett Randall, that Grace’s death would be confused as a traffic accident, some old lady who went flying over the side of the road, poor thing.

Had she not been ejected as the car rolled side over side downhill, she would have plummeted to the bottom of the canyon, more than 300 feet down and out of sight of any passers-by. There, time and the unforgiving desert sun would have erased much of the evidence about how she died.

But John forgot the seat belt, Randall said, and that was one of his big mistakes. For starters, Grace always wore seat belts, so constant in this habit that the unbuckled belt raised eyebrows among friends and family.

And, instead of tumbling out of sight, her body fell from the car as it plummeted downhill and landed just about 100 feet below that panoramic pull-out, her pink blouse bright among the tans of mountainside scrub.

The body was discovered the next day by searching relatives following the route Grace traditionally took. At that same hour, back in Oceanside, John appeared nonchalant about his wife’s disappearance, a witness testified at his preliminary hearing last week, shopping for clothes so he could fly to Anchorage on business.

According to accident investigators on the scene June 28, 1990, Grace Burrus’ family and friends were crying foul from the get-go. This was no traffic accident, they said.

What would explain the way the woman was dressed? How did the passenger seat of the car come to be saturated with blood, if she was ejected within a second or two of the fall?

The next day, the San Diego County medical examiner’s office studied Grace’s skull, fractured all along its left side. No car accident caused that, a doctor concluded. Her ribs were broken in the crash, the doctor said, but why didn’t the broken ends, which punctured soft tissue, cause any bleeding? The conclusion: The woman was dead at least a half-hour before she went over the side of that mountain.

On Thursday, John Burrus, now 69, was ordered to stand trial in Vista Superior Court for first-degree murder.

Burrus, who is being held at County Jail in Vista on $500,000 bail, declined through his attorney to be interviewed for this story. His brother and sisters also would not speak.

His attorney, Herb Weston, tried to show during the preliminary hearing that Grace could have died in the car crash, but the judge said he found Weston’s scenario too incredible to believe. Well, if Grace was murdered, said Weston, it was by someone other than his client.

This wasn’t a murder born out of a passionate, explosive argument, prosecutors say. No sounds were heard from her apartment the night she was killed, witnesses testified. Something was brewing, and, according to Grace’s family and friends, it had been simmering for years.

It started in Wyoming with Grace Scott as a widow--a financially stable one--of two years. When she sold her husband’s lumber company, she enjoyed a net worth of $300,000.

John Burrus was a clerk at the local bank. He had worked on the staff of the local Chamber of Commerce. He taught high-school English, too--but wasn’t rehired. No wonder, said an in-law; John’s philosophy was that smart kids know good grammar by the ninth grade, stupid kids don’t, and there’s no use teaching the stupid kids at that point.

John began taking Grace out in the evening--usually to play bridge with others. That was John’s favorite pastime, and soon Grace adopted it as hers.

They married in 1959. They would never have children.

Shortly after the marriage, Grace and John Burrus left Casper for Phoenix, where John--using Grace’s money--tried to set up a ceramic statuary business, relatives say. It failed, and the couple eventually moved to northern San Diego County, where John fashioned himself as a newspaper reporter.

All the while, Grace stood by her John. Be nice to John, she admonished her relatives; he’s a good man.

But Grace’s family found John hard to embrace as a relative.

“He’d always make you feel like he knew more about everything than you did,” said Eva Lemmers, one of Grace’s five younger sisters. “He was condescending.”

It showed especially in his card playing, she and others said. “He was brilliant at bridge--he became a master bridge player in a fourth of the time it takes most people. And he had no patience with people who weren’t as good.”

Jeaneal Edwards, daughter-in-law of Grace’s sister, June Edwards, agreed that John was no fun at cards.

“John always wanted to win--and if he could win by playing fair or win by cheating, he’d cheat,” Edwards said. “At the table, he would sit opposite the wall mirror so he could see what was in the hand of the person opposite him.”

He was an obnoxious conversationalist as well, Edwards and others said, always looking for an argument.

“Once he said, with no provocation, that all the elephants in Africa should be shot,” Edwards said. “He was convinced they were no good to anyone. They were just trampling ground that people could otherwise use for farming.”

Newspaper reporting allowed a new arena for John to showcase his personality.

After working for several smaller papers, he joined the staff of the San Diego Union in 1967.

“We were all in awe of John because of his odd approach to stories,” said fellow reporter Nancy Ray, now a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, who became best friends with Grace after the two met through John. “He would ask the un-askable questions and get the good stories. When most of us were looking under rocks for stories, he was looking under people’s armpits for even more unusual stories.”

John sometimes tried to make his own news, she said.

He once received a tip from a news source at Camp Pendleton, back in the late ‘60s, that blacks were being poorly treated by their commanders, Ray said. Unable to confirm the story, John wrote a letter--on newspaper letterhead--to the local congressman, with a carbon copy to Marine Corps brass, in which he raised the allegations on his own “so he could try to spark the story himself,” Ray said.

His bosses found out, Ray said, and John was punished “by writing obits.”

Then there was the time when irrepressible John, looking ever like Santa Claus because of his flowing white beard, dressed the role for a company Christmas party and distributed his own brand of gag gifts--like a pair of platform lifts for a Union-Tribune executive who stood under 5-foot-5.

His bosses saw John as a loose cannon who could not be trusted with hard news, Ray said; he went from writing obituaries to the religion page.

In 1977, he retired to pursue his life as an independent businessman.

Already a real-estate wheeler-dealer thanks to Grace’s bankroll, he bought commercial property in Ocean Beach, a four-unit apartment building on Pacific Street and a 10-unit building at Salton City.

Although he used Grace’s money to finance the purchases--and would pay her back, “he never shared with Grace any of his profits,” Jeaneal Edwards said.

In each case, only his name appeared on the deeds.

That frustration caught up with Grace in 1987. If she couldn’t persuade John to add her name to the deeds, she’d try through divorce, family and friends said.

“When Grace told us she filed for divorce, she wanted the family to still be nice to John,” Jeaneal Edwards said. “She said, ‘He’s been very good to the family, and this (divorce) is not meant to come between him and the family. This is a real estate deal.’ ”

In the divorce papers, Grace cited irreconcilable differences. She lined up the best attorney she could get her hands on. She wasn’t sure how John would take the news, friend Nancy Ray said.

“If something happens to me,” Ray recalls Grace saying, “point the finger at John.”

Nothing happened. Even while they stopped sharing the same bed--and John was spending more time on his own at the Salton Sea--they still socialized when he came to Oceanside.

Grace continued to live in the couple’s four-unit apartment complex in Oceanside, with its small back-yard patio and 180-degree view of the ocean. When she wasn’t off traveling with friends, she most enjoyed family barbecues, gins with lime juice, bridge with her girlfriends, a good book, a long walk. She also cared for her virtually blind sister, June Edwards, who lived in the adjoining unit, just the other side of the living room wall.

By 1990, John Burrus had also purchased an apartment building in Anchorage, Alaska, where he would spend his summer months.

By then, there was no more love in their relationship, Ray said.

“Grace use to say, ‘Love’s gone out the window a long time ago. I don’t know if I ever did love him, but I’m going to miss him. He was interesting. There was never a dull moment.’ ” Ray said.

John was a sort of wild card in her life, Grace told friends, and living with him meant there would always be something unusual, different, around the next bend.

When he was alone, John spent time playing chess--on a computerized chess board that vocalized his opponent’s moves, said Russell Fritz, a caretaker in his 80s who watches over Burrus’ Salton City property.

If John had one trait above all others, everyone agrees, it was that he was miserly. Downright cheap.

He would furnish his apartments and clothe his body with thrift-shop merchandise. He boasted to police how he would travel in his Toyota pick-up with a mattress in the back “and every three or four days I go to a motel and clean up, or go to a public swimming pool and take a bath.”

And, when it came time for his own divorce, he ended up representing himself. The only attorney he lined up, early in the divorce proceedings, dropped him because he was “uncooperative and uncommunicative,” according to court records.

After his wife’s body was found, but even before the funeral, John Burrus was being questioned by authorities. Husbands always are when their wives are killed.

He told them that the blood in the bedroom was caused after Grace, in a drunken stupor, fell and cut her hand, flinging blood about the room.

He said that, on June 26, 1990, he and Grace had reconciled their differences and celebrated over drinks. The next day, he said, Grace and he were each going to drive their separate cars to the Salton Sea so he could leave his car parked there and be driven back to the airport by Grace so he could fly to Alaska for a sudden emergency.

When he got to the Salton Sea, he said, Grace wasn’t there. He returned to Oceanside--but waited 24 hours before reporting her missing. It was June Edwards who found out from John that Grace had not shown up, and she alerted other family members who, the next morning, found the body.

It took 15 months for the district attorney’s office to file murder charges. John Burrus was arrested in October at his apartment in Alaska.

No one could substantiate his claim that he and Grace had reconciled. Nancy Ray said she had lunch with Grace on June 26--perhaps just hours before her death--and Grace made no reference to the divorce being scuttled.

“I’m worried,” Ray recalls Grace as saying. “John hasn’t even gotten a lawyer. It’s as if he doesn’t think it (the divorce) is ever going to happen.”

Two days later, a San Diego County sheriff’s homicide detective was interviewing John Burrus at the Oceanside Police Department as the murder investigation opened.

Been married 31 years, John told the investigators. “It seems like only a hundred years,” he said.