Odd Circumstances : Offbeat Character Charged With the Mysterious Death of His Wife

To Grace Burrus’ side of the family, her 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 her previous husband had been, the fellow who owned the lumberyard.

But when Harry Scott died, leaving her hundreds of thousands of dollars, John Burrus, a 37-year-old bank clerk and free spirit, quickly entered her life. Marry me, he said, and I’ll show you fun and adventure.

Thirty-one years later--and nine days before a trial to dissolve a marriage whose glitter had been covered with grime--Burrus, then 67, allegedly lifted a tire iron over his wife’s head as the 75-year-old woman lay in bed, took aim at her red hair and brought it down as hard as he could several times, spattering her blood around the bedroom of her Oceanside apartment.

In the scenario laid out by the San Diego County district attorney’s office, Burrus 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 forgot to put a bra on her, though she always wore one.

Next, he put his wife’s body in the passenger seat of her 1979 maroon Saab, left Oceanside in the pre-dawn darkness of June 27, 1990, and drove nearly two hours toward Borrego Springs, prosecutors say. He allegedly stopped at a gravel pullout alongside the winding, two-lane county highway, which has a sweeping view of the desert below, and sent the vehicle over the side of the cliff.

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

The body was discovered the next day by relatives. At the same hour back in Oceanside, John Burrus appeared nonchalant about his wife’s disappearance, a witness testified at his preliminary hearing last week. Burrus was reportedly shopping for clothes so he could fly to Anchorage, Alaska, to check on an apartment building he owns there.

According to investigators studying the accident the next day, Grace Burrus’ family and friends were crying foul from the beginning. This was no traffic accident, they said.

What would explain the way the woman was dressed? And what would explain the way the passenger seat of the car was so saturated with blood, if she were ejected within a second or two of the plunge?

The next day, the San Diego County medical examiner’s office studied Grace Burrus’ 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 half an hour before she went over the mountainside.

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

Burrus, who is being held in the Vista detention center on $500,000 bail, declined through his attorney to be interviewed for this story. Family members also refused to comment.

Burrus’ attorney, Herb Weston, tried to show during the preliminary hearing that Grace Burrus could have died in the crash, but the judge said he found Weston’s scenario too incredible to believe. Well, if Grace Burrus was murdered, Weston said, 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 the apartment on the night she was killed, witnesses testified. Something was brewing, and according to Grace Burrus’ family and friends, it had been simmering for years.

It started in Casper, Wyo., with Grace Scott as a widow of two years with a net worth of $300,000.

Burrus was a clerk at the local bank. He had taught high school English, too--but wasn’t rehired. No wonder, an in-law said; his 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.

Burrus began taking his future wife out in the evening--usually to play bridge. That was his favorite pastime, and soon she 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, Ariz., where John--using her money--tried to set up a ceramic statuary business, relatives said. It failed, and the couple eventually ended up in northern San Diego County, where Burrus fashioned himself as a newspaper reporter.

Grace Burrus’ family found him 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 Burrus’ five younger sisters. “He was condescending.”

Jeaneal Edwards, a daughter-in-law of one of Grace Burrus’ sisters, said his personality poked through in his card playing.

“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.”

And he would argue about almost anything, they said.

“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.”

Reporting allowed a new arena for Burrus 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 Burrus after the two met through him. “He would ask the unaskable 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.”

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

In the late 1960s, he received a tip from a news source at Camp Pendleton that blacks were being poorly treated by their commanders, Ray said. Unable to confirm the story, Burrus 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 Burrus was punished “by writing obits.”

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

Using his wife’s bankroll, he bought properties, typically ones in foreclosure, to fix up and use for rental income.

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

Burrus bought commercial property in Ocean Beach, a four-unit apartment building on Pacific Street in Oceanside--putting his wife in charge as manager--and a 10-unit apartment building at Salton City.

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

That frustration caught up with Grace Burrus in 1987. If she couldn’t convince Burrus 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,” 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 Burrus cited irreconcilable differences. She lined up a good attorney. But she was unsure how Burrus would take the news, Ray said.

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

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

Grace Burrus 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, gin 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 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.

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

He boasted to police that he traveled in his Toyota pickup 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 divorce, he ended up representing himself.

Even before Grace Burrus’ funeral, he was being questioned by authorities. Husbands always are when their wives are killed.

He told investigators that the blood in the bedroom was caused after his wife, 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, the two of them were going to drive their cars to the Salton Sea so he could leave his car and have her drive him back to the airport. He had plans to fly to Alaska because of a sudden emergency.

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

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

No one could substantiate his assertion that he and Grace Burrus had reconciled. Ray said that she had lunch with her on June 26 and that she made no reference to the divorce being scuttled.

“I’m worried,” Ray recalls her 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 detective was interviewing Burrus. Been married 31 years, he said. “It seems,” he said, “like only a hundred years.”