

Two other LANL employees, auditors named Charles "Chuck" Montaño and Tommy Ray Hook, also testified to DOE about the fraud occurring at the lab. They too endured retaliation by lab management and consequently received settlements. In the course of his lawsuit against the University of California and five lab employees, Montaño hired Doran in August 2010 to help prove that LANL covered up some of his audit findings. That led Doran back to the question of Burick's involvement in the Bussolini and Alexander crimes—and also to the investigation of a possible cold case murder: Burick's death.





Don Brooks of Jemez Springs runs his own company leasing space on a telecommunications tower on Pajarito Mountain in Los Alamos. Brooks, a suntanned, bearded man with a twangy accent, also provides services to movie and TV producers; the day SFR caught up with him at a Bernalillo Denny's, he had come from the set of the Lone Ranger, an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle shooting in Albuquerque. Brooks' crane will appear in the movie, picking up a minivan with a giant magnet and putting it on top of Albuquerque City Hall. But in 2003, Brooks was the operations manager at Pajarito Mountain Ski Resort. He remembers the day of Burick's death well.