http://www.philly.com/inquirer/front_page/20101011_35_years_after_Philly_teen_s_death__questions_remain.html35 years after Philly teen's death, questions remain
October 11, 2010
On Columbus Day 1975, on the final morning of his 16-year life, Martin Michael Burkle rose early for work.
The tall, skinny Kensington youth with long, light-brown hair usually worked nights, pumping gas for $2.39 an hour at the BP station on Spring Garden Street and Delaware Avenue. On this day, he was filling in for a coworker.
Before leaving the crowded rowhouse he shared with his mother and six siblings, Burkle tied his oil-stained sneakers and packed a bologna-and-cheese sandwich. Then he grabbed his portable radio, Marlboro cigarettes, and blue-tinted prescription glasses with a faulty left lens.
With business slow on the holiday, the station manager later told police, he left Burkle at 11:15 a.m. to man the pumps alone for a time while he ran an errand.
When he returned, the police were there. An anonymous caller had reported the place was unattended and that customers were stealing gas.
Police found Burkle's lunch, radio, smokes, glasses, and jacket on a counter. No money was missing from the register and there was no sign of a struggle.
"Being just a poor kid from Kensington, they dismissed him as a runaway," said Christine Fennimore of Audubon, who was 18 when her brother vanished.
That Oct. 13 would be the beginning of 35 years of anguish for the Burkle family.
"The not knowing was the cruelest, horrible thing," she said, recalling the years of nightmares and "hoping against hope" that the police were right and her brother might reappear - and later, when that was proved wrong, that his death would finally be explained.
The family's despair, and the mystery surrounding Burkle's demise, was compounded by mishaps early in the investigation.
Three days after he disappeared, while the teenager's family circulated missing-person fliers, duck hunters spotted Burkle's bruised and bloated body floating naked in the shallows of Big Timber Creek in Gloucester Township.
A Camden County medical examiner ruled the death a drowning, but incorrectly listed many of the body's identifying characteristics. While his family waited for word of his whereabouts, Burkle's anonymous corpse was shelved in the morgue for four months, then buried in a particleboard coffin in a potter's field behind the old Lakeland psychiatric hospital.
His remains lay there for 25 years, until 2000, when officials revisiting the investigation went into the Gloucester Township grave and labeled one of Philadelphia's oldest missing-child cases a homicide.
In the years since then, there have been "few answers and a lot of questions," said Mark Deegan, a Philadelphia homicide lieutenant in charge of special investigations who recently reviewed the case file at The Inquirer's request.
Now the investigation - which was jointly handled by the Camden County Prosecutor's Office and Philadelphia police - sits cold, and the cause of Burkle's death has been relisted as "undetermined" by authorities.
Some investigators say the young gas station attendant was likely the victim of foul play, while others argue there is no evidence he was murdered. Still others say they believe a suicidal Burkle jumped into the Delaware River and was washed downstream.
"Official explanations [for Burkle's death] that have been offered so far are unsatisfactory," said Lt. Michael Boyle, of the Philadelphia Special Victims Unit. Boyle was among those who located Burkle's remains, and who argued in 2000 that the case should be ruled a homicide.
"We pushed for an explanation that made sense," he said.
Burkle's family - led by Fennimore and Beth English of Mickleton, a half sister he never knew - continues to fight for answers.
"We want closure and peace," Fennimore said recently as she sat in her kitchen with English and her half brother Phil Burkle. Before her were mounds of files related to the case and an array of photos of her brother, who went by his middle name.
"We want the dignity for Mike that he deserved," Fennimore said.
"We've moved past the mistakes," added Phil Burkle. "We just want to know what happened to him, what his final moments were like."
Fennimore's eyes welled as she remembered her brother as "loving and naive."
"I was very protective of him," she said. "He had an innocence about him. He would come to me over the littlest things."
He had dropped out of Frankford High and earlier had been expelled for fighting at the all-boys Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pa., where his mother enrolled him after his stepfather died.
Nothing in Burkle's life - no depression or drug use or relationship problems - would have led him to kill himself, Fennimore said.
"If I thought for one minute that he committed suicide, I would have given up after his body was found," she said.
Over the years, the family appeared on national talk shows, pleading for information. They wrote letters to missing-child organizations and religiously called investigators for updates.
In 2000, their persistence paid off when Virginia Hill - a now-retired Special Victims Unit officer respected for solving some of Philadelphia's oldest missing-child cases - was assigned the file.
"I was aware of the case from the news media before I even became a police officer," Hill said in an interview from her Virginia home.
Retracing the original investigation, Hill focused her attention on the John Doe in the Camden County creek. She sent autopsy photos to Jerry Nance, the Burkle case manager at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia.
Using computer enhancement, Nance compared them with childhood pictures of Burkle, matching the earlobes, often as reliable as fingerprints, and a strawberry birthmark on the boy's chin.
"We knew it was him," Hill said.
After investigators scoured New Jersey burial records, Burkle's remains were exhumed and identified through dental records.
The confirmation brought relief and pain.
"All that time, he was so close," English said.
The body was "skeletonized down to the hips," Camden County medical examiner Paul Hoyer stated in his 2000 report. Burkle's tissue had decomposed, making it impossible to detect flesh injuries. His bones showed no pre-death fractures.
In a recent interview, Hoyer said he ruled the death a homicide because of the "suspicious circumstances" of Burkle's disappearance and the fact that his corpse had washed ashore naked.
"It is not typical for the tides to strip a body of normal male fitting clothes," he said.
With that ruling, authorities looked for new leads.
The gas station manager, who refused comment for this story, was "thoroughly interviewed," said Marty Devlin, a retired Prosecutor's Office investigator who worked the case.
And a Burkle family acquaintance, a man later jailed for unrelated child sexual-abuse charges and who admitted to investigators that he made an unwanted sexual advance on Burkle in the weeks before the teen's death, also was cleared, said Jason Laughlin, spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office.
"We found no evidence a homicide occurred," Devlin said.
Boyle, of the Philadelphia police, rejects the idea that Burkle was a suicide.
"It doesn't pass the sniff test," he said. "It doesn't make sense that he would leave his cigarettes behind, walk down to the river - which was not then easily accessible at that location - strip naked, and jump into the October water."
There's the issue of Burkle's missing clothing and mechanic's overalls: "It's a tidal river, not a white-water rapids," Boyle said. And no one reported seeing someone jump from a bridge.
For now, the case file sits dormant.
"There is nothing in the interviews to say he was a despondent kid who killed himself," said Deegan, of the Philadelphia Homicide Unit. "And there was no overwhelming evidence to say he was murdered. I don't say this lightly, but it is a genuine mystery."
Investigators agree that the closure the Burkle family seeks may never come.
"Short of a deathbed confession or a person stepping forward with personal knowledge, we may know all we'll ever know," Boyle said.
But Fennimore holds out hope. "Mike deserves the truth," she said.
After Burkle's body was identified, his family laid him to rest in a nice cemetery plot with an inscribed headstone. He was buried with a set of rosary beads and his favorite blue eyeglasses, Fennimore said.
"Beloved Son and Brother," his tombstone now reads.
