Daily News from New York, New York • 174

SUNDAY NEWS, DECEMBER 12, 1865 te--jg IkwU 7fSfe irT" xtHw -X 5 Nr -fe is i YI I ail 1 r'- '''I IV'm 3 ir si I i 1 te A "4 This is middle class home from which a bductor apparently took Anne Marie without disturbing either family or their ne ighbors. No ransom was ever demanded. Mrs. Donald Burr comforts another daughter, Mary, then 3, few days after Ann Marie disappeared. Deeply religious family has since adopted another child.

called the grieving family and told the Burrs he knew where Ann Marie was. lie said she was alive but not in the state and asked Donald Burr to meet him at the bus depot in downtown Tacoma with $200 if he wanted to learn more. Detectives Strand and Zatkovich met him instead. lr was an ex-con and admitted the call nag a h'-ax. He drev six months in the county jail on a disorderly conduct charge.

Within a week, Tacoma police had another lead they thought might produce some clue to the little girl's fate. rS OCT. 1(1, a ex-Marine named Hugh Bion Morse, self-confessed rape slayer of three women, was picked up in St. Paid, and returned to Spokane, a few miles northeast of Tacoma. Spokane police wanted to talk to him about the unsolved murders of two women end the death of Candy Rogers, a 9-year-old Camp Fire Girl who had been killed while selling candy door to door in 1959.

What alarmed Tacoma detectives was the similarity between the Rogers and Burr cases, but though they spent some time questioning Morse, a man who once sobbed to FBI agents that killing had become a habit, they could not establish any connection. Morse eventually drew a life term in Minnesota. The reward fund grew, occasional searches of the neighborhood were pressed and the weeks rolled by, including what would have been Ann Marie's 9th birthday, and still no clue. Occasional reports came in that she had been seen, but none led anywhere. In June, 1962, a service station operator in the southern Manitoba prairie town of Portage la Prairie, just north of Grand Forks, North Dakota, told police he saw a girl he thought resembled circularized pictures of Ann Marie, many of which had been paid for by her parents, in the station's cafe.

mation that might isst some light on the strange case. Inspector Emil P. Smith, startled by the request, pave the couple separate lie detector tests that indicated they knew no more than what they had told police from the start. The next day. Mrs.

Roy Leach, Ann Marie's maternal grandmother, posted a 11,000 reward for information "leading to the return of Ann Marie or the arrest and conviction of the party or jiarties responsible for her disappearance Fund Raising Spreads The offer ignited a wave of fund raising in the city, and before long any one who had any information to contribute could have picked up $5,000 for clue to the little girl's whereabouts. But the reward fund nerteil nothing-. A month after the little girl had vanished, Tacoma police, who had questioned upwards of 1,500 persons about the case, released this plum summary: we have checked every lead. Some people called us and others came in. Some saw strange mounds of earth.

Others had dogs that acted strangely around a pile of debris or a patch of bushes. "We contacted everyone within a 75-square-block area. When we completed that investigation, we went bark to the neighborhood and asked people to cooperate further But even though some 200 persons living in the netghhornood voluntarily took lie detector tests about their whereabouts the night Ann Marie vanished, nothing new turned up. Still clinging to the hope their daughter might be alive, the Burrs issued a desperate appeal Oct. 10 for Tacoma area residents to "look again" for their missing child.

It was the start of the hunting season, and they thought hunters in remote areas might find something that the police had missed. Nothing turned up. But two days later, a Tacoma man He said the man and woman with the little girl "spoke a little too sharply" to her to be her parents. He claimed the child told him. she was from Tacoma, but police checks along the Canadian border failed to locate the group.

On the first anniversary of Ann Marie's disappearance, detectives caught a nervous teen-ager ransacking the car of the Pierce County auditor, w-ho lives directly across the street from the Burrs. But questioning produced nothing. About two years after the child vanished, the Burrs, saying they had "prayed to know God's will and do what was right," adopted a baby girl named Laura. Then, last winter, their hopes were rrvised again with the capture of Ralph Everett Larkee in Portland, accused in the kidnap-joyride of a girl named Gay Lynn Stewart. But Larkee, who shot himself as FBI agents closed in, died Wfore Tacoma detectives could talk to him.

A report last summer from a man who found some bones embedded in the walls of a home he was remodeling a few blocks from the Burrs also led nowhere. The bones were those of an animal. Even though leads like these become scarcer as the months pass, the Burrs have never given up hope. What might have happened that morning more than four years ago whether a sex deviate saw a light on and spotted the little girl or whether Ann Marie was surprised by a burglar is still unknown. Almost every one who has read about the case has a theory.

No one has an answer, "It used to be I'd think about it all day," Mrs. Burr told reporters recently. "Xow I think about it every night. "Sometimes we depend too much on ourselves plan things ourselves," she said. "When something like this happens, it shows us how little we really are and how much we actually depend on God." vv A I I "I 1 if 4- 14 '4 i A study in anguish, Ann Marie's parents hoped in vain while Flanked by Tacoma detectives Ted Strand (left) and Tony Zatkovich, parents forlornly count days police combed neighborhood for missing child.

since Ann Marie vanished. The two detectives say clues are fewer with passing months..