COLLAGE BY NAJEEBAH AL-GHADBAN.

Judy 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.

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Burchard grew up in Boston, where his late father taught architecture at Harvard, 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.

Dr. Thomas Burchard courtesy

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 Castle—a famously exclusive, austerely whimsical club of pro-level illusionists—and went 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 Christmas time.

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.

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 conference in February, Earp worried about him wandering off in large crowds. She was starting to feel like she was caring for a child. Burchard was already exceedingly trusting, Earp says—he usually carried $1,000 in cash in his wallet, along with a little black book in which he’d written down all his account passwords.

Just over a week before he died, Earp says, social workers appeared at their front door, inquiring about the doctor’s condition. She didn’t know who or what tipped off the social workers to Burchard’s potential dementia, but she saw this as an opportunity. She told them her boyfriend needed help: A young local woman named Kelsey Turner was taking advantage of him.

To the outside world, Turner was a 25-year-old party girl, transplanted to California from Arkansas—a bottle-blond aspiring model who filtered her selfies through an app that made her look like a Bratz doll. On Instagram, she posed in bikinis and lingerie and wigs, posted updates about her boob job, and promoted nightclub events. She had a tattoo of a gun tucked into a garter belt on one thigh. Her modeling shots appeared on the websites of Playboy Italia and Maxim, beside interviews in which she described herself as “impulsive” and a “Russian-American blonde just trying to change the world.”

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“I love thrills and fun,” she told Playboy Italia. “[I’m] living my life fully aware that it’s the only one I have.”

Earp first became aware of Turner sometime in 2017, she says, though she didn’t know how or when Burchard met her. Authorities also haven’t disclosed how the two met, but divorce filings from Burchard’s first marriage obtained by the Salinas Californian indicated the doctor had a history of meeting women online, some with “suggestive screen names,” and sending them money. Some he’d meet in person. At the time, he denied these relationships were romantic or sexual—he just liked to help people out.

Earp believed him, and unlike his ex-wife, she tolerated his unusual form of charity. But none of these other women consumed Burchard’s attention or bank account quite like Turner, whom Earp calls “dangerously insane.” As Earp understood it, Turner had two small children and nowhere to live. She couldn’t qualify for a lease on a house, so Burchard offered to sign one for her, then ended up paying her rent entirely. He also signed a loan for a BMW convertible and ended up making the payments on that, too.

While Burchard’s behavior may have been consistent with that of a “sugar daddy,” Turner didn’t use that phrase, at least when describing Burchard to her roommates. She also denied their relationship was ever sexual. As her lawyer, Brian J. Smith, later described it, “She said it was more of a case of the doctor having a huge crush on her—let’s put it that way.”

She also denied their relationship was ever sexual. As her lawyer, Brian J. Smith, later described it, “She said it was more of a case of the doctor having a huge crush on her—let’s put it that way.”

But after months of financial support, Burchard tried to cut Turner off. Earp cheered him on. The two women had never met, but they hated each other. Earp called Turner “the white-trash whore” instead of referring to her by name. Turner knew that Earp was pressuring Burchard to stop paying her rent; the twentysomething once texted Burchard that his girlfriend was “on the shit list with me and if she [gets] me evicted, I’ll kill her.”

In order to keep Burchard bankrolling her lifestyle, Turner had been extorting him, Earp says. She made various serious threats against him, and warned that she might go to the police with information. Earp wouldn’t name the “horrible” and “devastating” and “totally unfounded” allegations that could have cost Burchard his job working with children. When I ask if the allegations involved Burchard behaving inappropriately with children, she says yes but won’t elaborate. Smith later told me that prosecutors found nothing of the sort on Burchard’s phone. “I’ve been led to believe there were lots of nude photos, but of adult women,” he said. “I can’t confirm or deny that right now, because I haven’t seen it yet.”

Whether Turner’s information was real or invented, Burchard was too afraid and embarrassed to go to the police. When Turner decided to move to Las Vegas with her four-year-old son at the end of 2018, Burchard paid for her to leave town. Despite her threats, Turner stirred up sympathy in Burchard, Earp says. Soon after leaving, she told him she was sick and couldn’t work or afford to care for her son (the one child she had custody of). Burchard wanted to help, so he decided to fly to Vegas, telling Earp he wanted to see for himself if Turner was telling the truth. “Don’t do it,” Earp recalls telling him on the phone after his plane landed. “Don’t stay.”

On the morning of March 7, a 911 caller reported that he’d seen a blue Mercedes-Benz coupe abandoned on a dirt road, two miles off the highway, close to the popular Lake Mead National Recreation Area and about 20 miles northeast of the Las Vegas Strip. The desert there is jagged, its low mountains streaked with red earth and spotted with dried green brush and litter—torn plastic bags and shimmering broken glass.

Simon Strupath / EyeEm

When police officers approached the vehicle, both windows were rolled down. They found blue latex gloves and “evidence of a small fire” in the passenger seat, according to their report. There was blood on the back seat and on the driver’s headrest. An officer pushed the ignition button, and the car started. When they opened the trunk, the police found clothes and bedding encasing a foul odor. Pushing the clothes and blankets aside, they uncovered Burchard’s dead body.

An autopsy the next day revealed Burchard had died from blunt force trauma to the head. Later, when grand jurors were shown pictures of his injuries, they said, “Jesus Christ” and “Oh my God.” Bruises, cuts, and scrapes zigzagged across his face, neck, arms, and upper chest. Part of his ear was missing. The Mercedes, police eventually learned, was linked to Kelsey Turner.

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According to police reports and grand jury transcripts, the end of Burchard’s life began a week earlier, on March 1, when he arrived at Turner’s place—a two-story stucco home in a perfectly nice suburban neighborhood—and found a full house. On the top floor, Turner shared the master bedroom with her 27-year-old boyfriend, Jon Logan Kennison. Her son’s bedroom was also on the second floor, along with her roommate Diana Pena’s room. Another roommate, Jeremy Escherich, slept downstairs.

According to testimony from both roommates, the fighting began on March 2, when Escherich’s girlfriend showed up at the house, apparently drunk, and began chatting up Burchard. Turner was not happy with this behavior, becoming especially enraged when the woman and Burchard decided to go to the store together. She allegedly screamed at Escherich, accusing his girlfriend (who was also young and blond) of trying to take Burchard away from her. When they got back to the house, Escherich and his girlfriend quickly left in a taxi.

Later that night, Turner freaked out again after discovering text messages on Burchard’s phone between him and her mother. When she allegedly found what Pena agreed in the grand jury trial were “pornographic photos,” Turner lost it, threatening once again to get him fired. Then Burchard began freaking out. He shut himself in her son’s bedroom upstairs, slamming the door behind him. (Earlier, one of Turner’s friends who was visiting had collected her four-year-old and taken him from the house.)

It all happened so quickly, according to Pena. She hadn’t known Turner for very long; she was living rent-free in the house, essentially a part-time nanny for Turner’s little boy. She was 30 at the time, a few years older than Turner and Kennison, and worked nights as a bartender at the Colosseum theater at Caesars Palace. Then suddenly she was here, watching as Turner’s boyfriend kicked down the door of Burchard’s room and barged in with a baseball bat.

When Pena ran into the room moments later, according to her grand jury testimony, she found Burchard sporting a large red-and-purple bruise on his temple. She took the bat from Kennison, who retreated downstairs with Turner. Pena got Burchard a glass of water.

Burchard needed to go to the hospital. So he walked downstairs to the garage, climbed into the back seat of Turner’s car, and waited with Pena for someone to drive him there. He didn’t want to get Turner in trouble—if anyone at the hospital asked, he said, he’d tell them he got mugged. But as Turner and Kennison remained inside the house, Burchard became convinced Turner would “probably kill him,” Pena testified.

When Turner finally came out to the garage, she ordered Pena to start cleaning upstairs; there were dirty clothes everywhere, and blood from the fight had spilled onto a bed. Turner offered to take Burchard to the hospital “in a little bit, after everything was straightened up,” Pena said in court. But Burchard refused to go back inside the house.

That’s when Pena heard Turner yelling at Kennison to “knock Thomas out.” By the time Pena got back downstairs to try to stop whatever was happening, she said Turner told her “it was too late.”



That’s when Pena heard Turner yelling at Kennison to “knock Thomas out.” By the time Pena got back downstairs to try to stop whatever was happening, she said Turner told her “it was too late.”

Pena saw Kennison emerge from the garage, holding a gun, covered in blood. Pena panicked and began crying. “I didn’t know what else to do, so I just started cleaning,” she testified.

Pena stayed at her boyfriend’s house that night, along with Turner and Turner’s son. The next day, they returned to the house to clean up some more, then checked into a motel. Kennison joined them. For the next few nights, they bounced around between friends’ houses and another motel. Then a friend of Turner’s picked them up and drove them to California.

From left: Turner, Pena and Kennison .

Gradually, they were all arrested. Weeks after fleeing Vegas, Turner was captured by a fugitive task force in Stockton, California. In mid-April, Pena turned herself in to the Las Vegas police; with her lawyer, she told the detectives everything she knew. A few days later, Kennison was arrested. His attorney later called Pena a “snitch.” While the others pleaded not guilty to murder charges (including a Category A felony of murder with use of a deadly weapon against a victim 60 years or older), Pena pleaded guilty to a lesser charge: accessory to murder.

In early June, they all sat in the same downtown Vegas courtroom, brought before a judge for procedural hearings with other inmates. Turner seemed to pout her lips while she waited, pulling her blond hair to one side. Her prison scrubs were oversize, hiding the pregnancy that had been revealed after her arrest in Stockton.

“She’s under an enormous amount of stress right now,” her lawyer, Smith, said this summer. “Due in large part to the fact that she’s pregnant, very near to the end of her term, and she’s locked up in a place that’s extremely unpleasant.” (Smith did not know her exact due date, and since then, she’s given birth to a daughter.)

Kennison was expressionless, looking around the courtroom almost casually. At an earlier hearing, he’d been admonished for flashing a note reading “Love U lil Mama” on a piece of paper he held while talking to a judge. Pena tried to hide her face from the cameras.

Soon after Turner’s arrest, the case was picked up by international media; no one could resist the story of the beautiful woman with a dark side allegedly killing a doctor described as beloved, almost saintlike. At the time, Earp told reporters that she calculated Burchard had paid for Turner’s expenses amounting to about $300,000. Later, she tells me that was a conservative estimate—she’d stopped calculating.

While Smith declined to provide Turner’s full version of events, he insisted it was impossible for her to have killed Burchard. She was about five foot four and 120 pounds, he said; how could she have lifted his body into the trunk of a car, let alone beaten him to death? Smith agreed that Pena was a “snitch,” saying she had a lot to gain by “telling the police what they wanted to hear.”

“Don’t believe all the hype,” Smith said. “There’s a salacious aspect to all this, which has generated a lot of interest. Everybody loves these true crime stories that have a sexual component to them.” (Pena’s and Kennison’s lawyers did not comment for this story.)

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When the trial rolls around—currently planned for the summer of 2020, though likely to be delayed due to the complexity of the case—it’s expected that more details about Burchard’s proclivities and his relationship with Turner will come to light. Earp says she’ll be called as a witness, and she’s eager to play the role.

In the aftermath of Burchard’s death, she feels a painful validation—like she’d been right about Turner all along. For months, she’d been accusing the young woman of being unstable and dangerous. She told Burchard, she told the social workers, and she told the police.

“I’d been warning people,” Earp says. “You begin to wonder, Is anybody listening?”

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A TIMELINE TO A MURDER

The divorce filing for Dr. Thomas Burchard reveals he had given thousands of dollars to women he’d met online, something his ex-wife found inappropriate. Burchard meets his partner, Judy Earp, while on a trip to Las Vegas. Soon after, she moved from Orange County to Salinas to live with him. At some point in the year, Earp becomes aware that Burchard is involved in a relationship with Kelsey Turner that involves him giving her financial support. It’s unclear when Burchard and Turner first met. Kelsey Turner models for the websites of Playboy Italia and Maxim. After being evicted from her home after Burchard stopped paying her rent, Turner moves from the Salinas area to Las Vegas with her four-year old son. Burchard travels to Las Vegas to visit Turner at her new home, where she lives with her son, her boyfriend Jon Logan Kennison, and two roommates.

According to testimony, Turner becomes angry when Burchard starts speaking to the girlfriend of a roommate, and then later when she allegedly finds explicit photos on his phone. According to roommate Diana Pena, Burchard was hit on the head with a baseball bat. An abandoned Mercedes-Benz is found on a dirt road by a 911 caller. Officers dispatched to the scene find Burchard’s body in the trunk. Turner is arrested in Stockton, California. Weeks later, Pena turns herself in; Kennison is arrested shortly after, on April 17. Pena agrees to testify against the others and pleads guilty to accessory to murder. Turner, now visibly pregnant, and Kennison appear in court. Both plead not guilty to murder and conspiracy. Prosecutors later decide not to pursue the death penalty.

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This article originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of ELLE.

