Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 196

WS DETROIT FREE OCT. 17, 1985 3A Murderer is known, but is he still alive? Trigger man holds the key By JOEL THURTELL Free Press Staff Writer By JOEL THURTELL Free Press Staff Writer Free Press Photo by AL KAMUDA Police found a hollowed-out spot among straw bales and peepholes drilled in the wall from where John Edward Burns watched Eleanor Farver's house. In 1983, police learned Burns may have been killed in the barn. Drawing is of Burns, as described in 1979 sighting. Branko and Anna Djordjevski, the owners of a local greenhouse, were late getting back to their Ypsilanti Township home the night of Aug.

19, 1984. The Yugoslavian couple had spent the evening with friends in Dearborn Heights. While Anna was trying on a new dress in their bedroom, Branko changed into shorts, turned on the television set and lay down on a couch. From the bedroom, Anna heard a loud explosion. Looking through the bedroom door, she saw Branko on the couch.

The top of his body was a bloody mess, a bullet having torn his face away from his skull. There was a hole in a window through which the killer had fired. More than a year later, Washtenaw County sheriff's detectives still don't know who the killer was, even though they believe they know what the trigger man looks like. "I'm looking for a light-complected black man with freckles and brownish-red hair," said Det. Robert Randolph.

"He's about six feet tall, weighs 200 pounds and he's about 30 years old. He was driving a light-brown, medium-sized car." The motive? Revenge, says Randolph. But getting to that conclusion was not easy. RANDOLPH WAS the detective on duty when Anna Djordjevski called police. Shortly after arriving at the scene, he began interviewing neighbors, friends and family members.

"We eliminated family members as suspects," Randolph said. "It was not a burglar he was sniped through a window at close range. It was not a stray bullet." That left the revenge motive. "Who would want to see him dead?" Randolph asked. "We went into his business dealings he was part owner of the old Crystal House Motel" at Washtenaw Avenue and Huron Parkway in Ann Arbor, the detective said.

"He was in business with a partner, Dimce Misajlovich. (Djordjevski) was in dire financial straits. He was in the process of losing his greenhouse, which he had mortgaged to venture into the Crystal House Motel," Randolph said. Djordjevski and Misajlovich had bought the Crystal House from a third Yugoslavian, Mat Chautich. Chautich had sued Djordjevski and Misajlovich in Washtenaw County Circuit Court, charging they owed him money from the motel, and won a $270,000 judgment against them.

"Since the first week after the murder I pretty much concluded who had my man killed, but the actual trigger person I'm looking for," he said. "The most recent lead takes me (outside the) county." Randolph thinks that if he locates the hitman, that person will tell him who paid him to kill Djordjevski. Edward Burns, was a married man. It was news her. "Apparently the son had told the mother, 1'He's a bum, stay away from Eskridge said.

Farver, heeding her son's advice, sent Burns a letter telling him their relationship was over. On Sept. 22, 1970, Burns, known as a crack shot, a fanatic anti-communist and survivalist, bought a new 12-gauge shotgun and three shells. "He told the store owner he had a dog to kill," Eskridge said. "He walked up to her house carrying the shotgun," he said.

Present in the house were Farver's three grandchildren and her daughter-in-law. A farmer working in an adjacent field also was a witness to the shooting. Farver went outside to talk to Burns, who shot her in the stomach and twice in the head. Then Burns disappeared. Two days later, his wife found a hand-delivered letter from Burns that said the shooting was an accident, but that Farver deserved to die.

He left his car in his South Lyon garage. The day the letter arrived, said Eskridge, the owner of a South Lyon used car lot saw Burns walking down Pontiac Trail in the direction of Farver's house. He was carrying a long bedroll police suspect contained the murder weapon. "He has not been seen since," said Eskridge. Two weeks after the murder, police found a hollowed-out spot among straw bales in the barn opposite Farver's house.

Farmer Merle Kern found the barn floor littered with trash. When police investigated, they found peepholes drilled in the wall facing the Farver house and this inscription penciled onto the wall: 1970 a.m. The little RED school across the way or road shot and killed the woman I loved. Eleanor Farvar was being made a fool. 1 rathe see her dead, Then for another have her.

I was here 10 days and nights. 1 could have killed the son meny times from here. He was a (skunk) The son hiped put his mother where she liea, today myself will he dead when this is discovered. What happened to John Burns? IN THE FIRST 13 years of their investigation, police assumed Burns was at large. Therefore, they reasoned, they could not answer their main question without first filling in another blank: Who is John Edward Burns? Burns appeared in the South Lyon area as a farm worker about 1948.

He married Anna McMurray that year, having, told her he came from Altoona, Pa. Nevertheless, Burns put down on their marriage certificate that his birthplace was Cheyenne, Wyo. At the time he killed Farver, Burns would have been about 62. But his exact age is in doubt. Between 1948 and 1970, Burns gave four different birthdates and birthplaces on the four documents marriage license, driver's license, Social Security card and insurance applications he ever signed.

BURNS ALSO SHUNNED cameras. He worked as a janitor at the South Lyon High School for eight years. Each year, on the day when school yearbook pictures were scheduled, Burns missed work. The only photograph ever taken of Burns was made by Farver's daughter-in-law two weeks before the slaying. The photo shows the killer standing beside Farver and her three grandchildren.

"He was obviously on the run from somebody," said Eskridge. In 1979, a man who shared a garden with Burns and worked with him at the South Lyon school claimed to have seen Burns working as a janitor at a Marquette, hospital. Eskridge sent him Burns' photo, but the 78-year-old man said it was not a picture of Burns. The Marquette report is "baffling," said Eskridge, because the detective is certain the photo shows Burns. How can he be so sure? "I attended South Lyon High School for a year and used to talk to John Edward Burns," said Eskridge.

"At one time, we thought we had found him in a shallow grave behind a whorehouse in Nevada," he said. But it was another man's body. A friend of Burns told Eskridge Burns claimed to be half Osage Indian and that he was from Broken Arrow, Okla. But the chief of the Osage Tribal Council had never heard of Burns. Eskridge, 4 1 was hired as a detective' at the Washtenaw Sheriff's Department in 1977.

Because he had known Burns, he was assigned the case. 30175 Ford Rd. Garden City 421-5754 TOUCHES AFFORDABLE PRICES By 1 983, he was frustrated. had one thing left." HE INTERESTED an Ann Arbor News reporter in the investigation. The story prompted several people to call him.

"Six individuals told me the same story: They had been personally told by an individual close to Eleanor Farver that he had tracked down John Burns, had caught up to him, had found him in the barn opposite the little red schoolhouse. "What he told the other people was that he tracked (Burns) down like a deer by following his footprints in the frost." "He killed Burns with a bow and arrow put an arrow through his heart and killed him and buried him." To Eskridge's intense frustration, Washtenaw deputies once detained the man for drunken driving. The man offered to show deputies where he had buried a man he had killed, but deputies declined to go with him. The next day, the man denied the story when interviewed by homicide detectives. Of the second and still unsubstantiated murder, Eskridge said, "You can't condone or excuse a murder of any sort and anyone taking the law into their own hands." However, he added, "It is possible that this person tried to detain him and John Burns being already a murderer struggled and it wound up in the death of Burns." A general search for Burns' body is out of the question, Eskridge thinks.

"The area behind the barn is a cow pasture and a small woodlot. It's about five acres not large, but pretty hard to just excavate." So the Eleanor Farver case stays open while Bill Eskridge ponders new approaches to solving the disappearance of John Edward Burns. On the thick manila file folder, Eskridge has pasted this motto: "He is still missing, and I am still waiting." LARGE, DAILY 9-7 P.M. FRESH CIDER Mm- UVONIA 477-tOOO In Detective Bill Eskridge's view, there are two kinds of murder. In the classic "whodunit," detectives analyze clues in hopes of finding someone who had reason a motive to kill the victim.

Like an Erie Stanley Gardner or Agatha Christie mystery novel, the real-life whodunit must be solved before the killer is revealed. But there is another breed of case, the kind that leaves no doubt who the killer is. Here, the problem is finding the murderer. Such is the case of Eleanor Farver. Farver, 45, was killed at her rural Washtenaw County home Sept.

22, 1970, by three blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun fired by her erstwhile boyfriend, John Edward Burns. Burns disappeared right after the killing. Fifteen years later, despite an exhaustive international search by Washtenaw County sheriff's detectives, Burns still has not been found. Eskridge has not given up on the case, the longest-running murder investigation in Washtenaw County. When the killer is known, but has fled, detectives try to piece together a biography of the fugitive so they can predict where he might go.

But for John Edward Burns, there was no past to reconstruct. THE MAN who called himself by that name arrived in South Lyon about 1948. Before that, there are no records for this particular John Edward Burns. Burns left a contradictory trail of lies for police to follow to the inevitable conclusion: That "Burns" was a fugitive in 1948. In 1 983, Eskridge got a break.

Six of them, to be exact. After the Ann Arbor News ran a story about the dusty murder case, Eskridge was contacted by six people who claimed to know Burns' whereabouts. The focus of the manhunt shifted suddenly away from Burns' self-purported former haunts in Wyoming, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma and back to Washtenaw County. The six informants all told Eskridge the same story: John Edward Burns is dead. "We believe he is buried within a five-acre woodlot and cow pasture in Washtenaw County," said Eskridge.

Eskridge also thinks he knows Burns' killer, whom he described as "a person very close to the victim." But Eskridge's chief suspect claims he didn't do it. Officially, the Burns case is unsolved, and the murderer of Eleanor Farver may still be at large. Said a frustrated Eskridge, "If I could dig up John Burns, I could quit looking for him." IN SEPTEMBER, 1970, Eleanor Farver was informed by her son that her boyfriend, John THE rffglll4 imy Built-in Buttonholer Flat Lock Stitch 9 Stretch Stitches Double Needle Sewing Fold-Away Carrying Handle Large Bobbin, etc. OUR COMPETITION KNOW US YOU SHOULD TOOII MADE OF METAL and sews all fabrics: silk, Levi's, canvas, upholstery, EVEN 3 S.A.V. Sew Vac.

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