Daily News from New York, New York • 173

SUNDAY, NEWS, DECEMBER 12, 1965 96 mm LOST For her parents, the anguish began four when Ann Marie Burr vanished in a still-unsolved mystery Ann Marie Burr was 8 when (he posed in Camp Fire Girl uniform a few wki before she vanished without trace from her Tacoma, home four years ago. brought her little sister Mary downstairs. Mary had broken her arm in an accident earlier that summer and the cast she had t-o wear was bothering her. Mrs. Burr told police later that she dimly remembered comforting the child and then sending both girls back upstairs to bed.

It was the last time she saw Ann Mane. The couple first discovered their oldest daughter was missing about 5:30 the next morning, Aug. 31. when Mrs. Burr heard Mary crying again and went up to tend to her.

nr disturbed? Why vat Ann Marie tn the living room instead of upstairs in bed? Why did the Burn hear no calls for help? How could such a thing be done u-ith so little noise that no one in the small house awoke? Not an article of Ann Marie's cloth-ins; was eone. The first grim missing person bulletin issued that morning described her as barefoot and wearing only a blue and white nightgown with a floral print. Police Chief Don Hager, ordered a house to house, block by block search CANADA BRITISH COLUMBIA WASHINGTON ABERDEEN J-J'l JZZH1 flll r0 thv AVE OLMYPIA t- (0 .4 M-ir'e in-, y-ars old, li A'tg. 31, li-62. A r'jard is i.

red jr f-mnf ton lad rg t. her body or tj the identity of her abductor. was a black r-lgh' and lining h'trd. HV w-mder if th wind was srreqrrin i'ith her We iron-der if a gro'ip of dr'tnken-crazed boys took her, or a mad sadisf. "Sight and i.i:ifh it the fez, the listening, the horror again and again.

prayer can lessen the pain ast we whisper, 'Dear God. be with A Please heln vs and parents like us to be "The child pays fr the crime in hours of unbelievable terror. Parents pay every day they li e. By GEORGE NOBBE THAT letter, born of and despair, was sent last summer by the Donald Burrs to the Tacoma. News-Tribune, four long years after their blonde, hazel-eyed laughter vanished without a trace from her North End home.

No rar.3om was ever demanded for the liKl girl. No plausible explanation her disappearance has ever been 'rfered. Her body has never been found and Tacoma police have kept their 600-pag-e file on the case open. Two detectives. Ted Strand and Tony Zatkovieh, still work on the mystery, checking: out possible suspects and track ir.z down the cruel hoaxers who inevit-a turn up in kidnaping' cases.

But tr.ey say the leads get scarcer week by week. And to add to the misery of the little airTs parents, there are the grim reminders, unavoidable thir.g3 like birthdays. T'lesdai. An Marie Burr would IS. Th-re ii little in the case that seems make sense.

Incidents in the Night The right before Ann Marie vanished f-om the comfortab'e house on N. 14th r.r. far from the campus of the University of Puget Sound, the Burrs put their four children to bed about Ann and her sister Mary, then slept upstairs. Greg, 5, and Julie. 7, were in a basement bedroom.

Their parents, who were home all evening, went to their first-floor bedroom about 11. locking and chaining the front door and locking the door to the back porch where Ann Marie's black cocker spaniel, Harney, always spent the night. There were two incidents during the night, neither of which could be described a.3 unusual. At some point, the Burrs heard Barney barking. At another, recalled Mrs.

Burr, half asleep and unable to remember what time it was, Ann Marie phone number if only we would get a call." But the call never came. As the morning dragged on, hope that Ann Marie had just wandered sleepily from the house began to wane. Mrs. Burr had sent her other children, unawara that their sister was missing, to stay with nr-ighbors. The only tip that came in the first day was a call to police headquarters that neighbors had seen a little girl of Ann's age screaming in a blue and white car with California plates.

But when the car was found, the driver explained that there was no girl and the screams had come from the car radio. Police talked to Ann's playmates. They pulled in all the vagrants and known sex perverts they could find, they questioned and requestioned the Burrs. They Shed No Light No, the little girl had never walked in her sleep, to her parents' knowledge. She had no reason to run away.

She was to have started third grade the next week at the Grant School and "she couldn't wait for it to begin." Mrs. Bun-said. "She just loved school." Tacoma police were reluctant to call Ann Marie's disappearance a kidnaping, and, as the daps wore on uithout a ransom demand or anything else that would indicate the little girl had been abducted, the FPl did not enter the case. They never have. After all, the Burrs were not well off, living as they did on Donald Burr's pay as a warehouseman at Camp Murray.

It was unlikely a kidnaper would single them out. So the case was. and still is, officially listed as a "disappearance under mysterious The weekend after Ann Marie vanished, detectives scoured the ground outside the Burr house, presumably looking for footprints. If they found any, they never disclosed it. Meanwhile, scores of tips poured through the Tacoma police switchboard.

One of them came from a woman who -said a ouija board message had revealed to her that Ann Marie had not been harmed. But nothing yielded a clue to the little girl's whereabouts. A week later, crews from the clty'a public works department probed the sewer network beneath the city's North End, using portable lights as they inched their way through the inky black pipes. They checked all six trunk sewer outlets on the possibility that ona of them might hold the secret of the missing child. Skin diving teams spent days in the dark waters of Commencement Bay, searching as far as 150 feet from shore.

They found nothing. "THEN, on Sept. 8, the Burrs appeared at Tacoma police headquarters to ask for polygraph tests. They said they were upset about rumors they had heard that they had purposely withheld infor- (NEWS Map by Staff Artiut Juffrms) Map pinpoints Ann Marie's North End home (X) on N. 1 4th not far from the University of Pujet Sound.

Police (ifn dragged the waters of nearby Commencement Bay in their futile search for her body. Ann Marie's bed was empty, the covers neatly turned down as though the child had gotten out of bd on her own. There were no sisrns of a strueele, nothing to indicate there was anything wrong, and at first the Burrs thought she might have gone down to Greg and Julie's bedroom in the basement. But hadn't. Frantically, they searched the house, their terror mounting as it became all too clear the little girl was gone.

The front door, locked and latched with a chain the night before, stood slightly ajar. A small living room window, closed a few hours earlier, also was open There were grass clippings on the rug. Outside the window, an overturned bench rested against the side of the house. The obvious explanation was that Ann Marie had been abducted by a prowler who crawled through the living room window. But this theory had several holea in it.

Why was a fable alongside the window, along with the figurines on it, for the little girl and when that turned up nothing, 100 soldiers from Fort Lewis, oJ national guardsmen from Camp Murray and an Army jeep joined Tacoma police. They swarmed over the city's North End, stumbling through thickly wooded areas and gulches near the Burrs' home. By 11 P.M. they had covered 75 square blocks and learned nothing. ANN MARIE'S father was with the searchers.

Her mother, 33-year-old Beverly Burr, was at home, wailing for a hone call, a demand for ransom, anything at all that would tell her the little girl was alive. "Ann Marie may show up any minute," Mrs. Burr told reporters at the house. 'Tf only we would just get a call. We've lived here six or seven years, and she was familiar with the neighborhood.

"She started with the Camp Fire Girls last year, she was taught what to do if she was lost. She knew her own.