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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker VTK Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history.

True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.

Good Evening at daybreak on January sixth, nineteen eighty six, a couple on a camping trip in the Mohave Desert set out for a stroll and never returned.

The local sheriff's office eventually discovered that Barry and Louise Burman had been murdered.

As years passed and the double homicide remained unsolved, the Burman case spawned speculation and conjecture despite extensive investigation by local and federal authorities.

To date, there's never been an arrest made in the case, let alone a conviction, but this doesn't mean the crime is unsolvable.

After years of investigation, research and interviews, Kerrie was able to link the Berman murders to a Cambodian sex crimes and trafficking case involving a former marine.

This is the first book to tell the full story of the Burman murders and uncover the likely suspect.

The books that were featuring this Evening is The Burman Murders, Unraveling the Mohabi Desert's most mysterious unsolved crime with my special guest, investigative journalist and attorney and author, Doug carry Good evening and welcome to the program, Doug Carrey.

Dan, it's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you, Thank you so much, and congratulations on this upcoming book, The Berman Murders.

It's been a long road getting to hear Dan, as you do in the you talk about a long road.

Can you just tell us a little bit about how long a project this was for you, and you talk about it in the introduction.

Just the mysteries of the Mohave Desert has been one of your passions, instilled by your grandmother, Dale King, and in the eighties you became involved in desert conservation and co founded a wilderness group, Desert Survivors, And one of the places you cherished the most was a pristine and channing locale, Saline Valley.

So tell us a little bit about just your interest in this case.

Tell us a little bit about your background in this area and how you became involved in this extraordinary book project.

Well, Dan, I was enamored of the area.

Saline Valley is one of the most remarkable locations on the planet.

It lies about two hundred miles north of Law, Los Angeles, and it's kind of in between the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range and Death Valley, ringed by high mountains.

The access into that area is extraordinarily difficult.

You have to go on rough dirt roads.

And in the middle of this enchanting valley, where there's rippling sand dunes and a shimmering saltwater lake is a palm tree oasis of hot springs that have been developed over the years into a kind of counterculture oasis.

It's just a remarkable spot with interesting energy, unique and eccentric people.

And I've been going there for years and it was one of my favorite spots.

And so when these folks disappeared, i mean, through the small community of people that are interested in Saline Valley, this news rippled.

And then almost three years later, when their bodies turned up in a cutbank grave, a shallow grave in a far away desert drywash, miles from the oasis, everybody wondered what happened.

It was clear they had been murdered, and the case was never solved.

So fast forward twenty fourteen.

I just I thought about the case, and I decided I just want to go back and see what I can find out.

And that started the nine year journey to unravel the case of the Burman murders.

Now, tell us where this Saline Valley is.

You say about two hundred miles from north of Los Angeles, but you write about that it has more in common with small town Wyoming than any kind of urban connection to California.

So wait, Dan, When people think of California, a lot of times they think of urban California, or the coast, or perhaps Yosemite.

But there's a whole part of California that really has more in common with Nevada in terms of the culture, the land escape than it does with what you would traditionally think of as California.

And it's commonly called the East Sierra.

The Sierra Mountain Nevada Range is this hundreds of mile long mountain spine, And when you go east of that mountain range, between the mountains and the Nevada border, there's a part of California that's really quite rural and unspoiled, Inio County, which is where this took place.

Is about ten thousand square miles, about the size of the state of Connecticut, yet it has a population of only about fifteen thousand people.

And the little.

Towns are very a rural in character and not like you would expect to find in California.

And it's the it's the officials the Sheriff's office in Inio County and seated in these small towns that took responsibility for trying to solve the disappearance and then later the apparent homicide of the Burmans.

You take us immediately to Sheriff's headquarters in Inyo County.

January tenth, nineteen eighty six, Deputy Leon boyer As was a call from Robert Pollard, commonly known as Chili Bob, a campground host at the Hot Springs in Saline Valley.

Tell us about what Chili Bob has to say and report.

Chili Bob was quite a character.

He was known for his fondness for beer, and if you went out to Saline Valley, he was the campground host.

He lived in a little trailer out there, and he had been anointed by the US Department of Interior Bureau of Land Management that putatively managed this area to kind of watch over things.

And the reason they anointed him as the campground host is because he had a two way radio.

He was the only one.

That could communicate outside of the valley and he was able to summon authorities if something came up.

So he put in a call to the Sheriff's office and Independence, which is this little town population six hundred and seated at the Sheriff's headquarters.

Fielding the call was a guy who was a rancher, part time deputy named Leon Boyer.

Just classic rancher type, kind of slow talking, common sense, big hands, piercing, blue eyes kind of a guy, and who had a real good common sense for crime and criminals.

And he becomes the guy that, over the course of this case is the one who's stuck with it more than anybody else, a remarkable individual.

Well, tell us what Deputy Boyer does.

He talks to his Larry fresh Hour, another deputy, and expects him to go check out the situation at the campground near Palm Springs.

But tell us what does happen and when they get around to going and finding out about this from Chili Bob.

Yes, Dan, just to clarify in Saline Valley, what people call Palm Springs or sometimes the singular Palm Spring is a tiny little oasis of its own, not the city of Palm Springs, hundreds of miles away.

So when Chili Bob calls in radios into the Sheriff's office, leon Boyer then dispatches a deputy to go and check out what's going on.

There's an abandoned vehicle.

These people haven't been seen for days, but the deputy, for reasons known only to him, he's passed away.

So I wasn't able to get his comment.

He just kind of sits on the call.

Maybe he thinks they probably wandered off, whatever his reasoning was.

He got the call midday on a Friday, and it wasn't until Monday that when leon Boyer called him back and said, get on this, that he finally made the truck out into Saline Valley, which is not an easy trek at any time, but especially in the winter when those roads can get pretty rough.

So he got the department's four wheel drive Ford Bronco and finally had it out there hours on a dirt road, you have to drive first on a two lane highway that might be fairly characterized as the middle of nowhere, halfway to Death Valley, and then from there you have to take a fifty mile very rough dirt road in order to get into the Hot Springs.

So that's what Deputy fresh Hour does and finds this abandoned vehicle without any clue what happened to the owners.

Now you say, in nineteen eighty six the Hot Springs had become the site of a cultural phenomena.

Tell us, what do you mean by that?

Well, it remains that way today, and it was especially so back then.

This Hot Springs area was just a place that drew unique kind of characters that are drawn to the desert.

My grandmother was one of them, so I'd had some familiarity with this growing up.

But you get all kinds of people from all walks of life.

It's one of the places where you might find firefighters or police officers who are just on a getaway trip and next to a magic bus full of pot smoking hippies, and nobody seems to mind each other.

It's a place where the normal bounds of civilization just don't seem to apply.

It's not uncommon when you first drive into camp to see somebody walking with a big broad brimmed hat on, maybe a pair of sunglasses and sandals, and that's it.

Buck naked.

And it's not because it's a place of licentiousness.

It's not a hookup side.

It's more of just a back to nature kind of a place and people are more freewheeling.

Yeah, that's the nature of the culture there.

When the deputies get to the campground near this Wizard Pool soaking pool, they find the nineteen eighty two Thatt's in king cab where we'll drive.

What do they find inside the truck and what do they find in terms of clues in and around the truck.

Very little in and around the truck except for a couple of towels that had been thrown over some bushes after the Burmans arrived in camp and soaked in one of the soaking pools.

And just to set the stage a little bit more so, there's hot springs.

But over the years, the folks, the regulars they're called, who come out there, had piped the water to these amazing stone and cement bathing pools that are still there, and that becomes the focal point of the camp.

People gather, and especially on a cold night because it was winter when they disappeared, you climb into the tub and you're soaking in this wonderfully hot water.

Anyway, when the sheriff's office got out there and really started digging into what happened, they jimmied open the door of the truck.

They found some cowboy boots.

They found the kinds of things that you'd bring on a car camping trip, like bedding and clothes.

But interestingly, they didn't find their day packs.

They didn't find any hiking type shoes.

They did find a pair of cameras that was interesting, and the indication was pretty quickly that what had happened is they had the sheriff's office got a report that these folks had gotten up and taken a morning walk and had not come back.

So they identify the vehicle, and they identify the people that are missing and apparently walked from this campground.

Tell us who they identify these people as, and then how do they proceed in terms of getting breaks, in terms of finding out what happened to these people in at just after New Year's nineteen eighty six.

So Dan, if you'd been out there when these folks arrived, you would have just thought they were campers like anybody else, very unassuming.

The truck that they drove was a good truck.

It was a good dots in four wheel drive truck, but not you know, some kind of a remarkable or ostentatious type vehicle.

They just looked like hippie types.

But Barry Berman was actually the era apparent to the Aluah Liqueur fortune.

His father, Jules Berman, was just an extraordinary Southern California entrepreneur who was into real estate and oil.

But had made his fortune because early in his life he got into the liquor business, and after World War Two he spotted a trend.

He saw that people seemed to be interested in imported products.

It was attributed to the fact that a lot of boys had come back from the war and they were kind of interested in things from overseas.

So he thought, well, maybe this would apply to liquor.

So the first place he dove in was with a with an interesting tasting beer called Heineken, and he got involved in bringing Heineken to the United States, made a fortune from that, and then kept going.

J and B.

Scotch, Bass, Plao and others.

And then when he had the opportunity to buy an obscure Mexican liqueur called Kalua.

He ponied up, bought that brand and built it into a million case a year international busines to the point where Jules Berman had a mansion in Beverly Hills staffed by servants.

He had a big home in Acapulco.

He had a ten thousand acre hunting preserve.

He had a yacht named Kalua.

He had a garage full of exotic cars.

I mean he was rolling at the highest levels.

His only child, Barry, though, was of a different stripe and rejected his father's materialism.

And Barry was married to Louise Burman, who was actually seventeen years older.

Barry was thirty five when.

He vanished, Louise was fifty two.

Kind of a mismatch in a way.

He was apparently a virgin.

You know, this was his first first lover, whereas Louise had had many lovers and Barry was her fourth husband.

You write about how they met, but first how Barry issuing his father's lifestyle and that being a materialism and that wealth.

What he was searching for and what he found and where.

So after high school, Barry decided not to go to college he just didn't feel the call of academia, and he had the means if he wanted, and the opportunity to join his father's business or just be an air too well.

His father indulged him, but Barry wanted something more.

He was a man of deeply held convictions, and so he went on a seeker's journey, and that brought him into northern India, into Punjab Province, and he walked into an ashrama.

When I say in ashram, it's a sprawling in the size of a town, and it's the center of a practice called Radasoamia, a transcendental meditation practice.

And the reigning SatGuru at that time was a man named Charen Singh, very charismatic, well spoken, and when Barry saw him and looked into his eyes, he felt this connection.

And Barry became a devotee of char and Singh and decided that he was going to what was called the path to spiritual Enlightenment, which meant things like shunning drugs and alcohol, leading an ethical life, not killing or eating meat, and meditating for two and a half hours every day.

And Barry was very diligent about adhering to the path, and he met Louise because she was also somebody who had become after a wild child type existence, had become a devtee of char and singh.

And that's how they met in a more practical way through the religion.

She was looking for a place, and he had a place to rent as well.

That's true.

So they met at what's called a satsung imagine a gathering of adherence to this faith, somewhat like Sunday service.

And they met at a satsung, and she mentioned she was looking for a place to live.

Well, Barrie's dad at that time owned a place called the El Capitan Ranch, a thirty five hundred acre coastal front ranch north of Santa Barbara, an exquisite and extraordinary piece of property that he had purchased.

And there was a slice about a twelve acre slice of that ranch that lay right on a little cove, very private piece, and there were three cottages there, and Barry and some of the other adherents of Radasoami end up moving into these three cottages and essentially having like a little Enclaver or a hamlet of people who practice a transcendental meditation.

Just as a side note, Dan years later when that parcel finally changed hands, that twelve acre piece, it was purchased by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

Just kind of of an interesting twist there.

So let's get back to nineteen eighty six January.

Their relationship.

They've been married a few years.

What does it characterize by and what happened?

What did they decide around New Year's nineteen eighty six as a couple.

Yeah, so Barry and Louise had gone through a rocky phase.

I mean they were always a bit of a mismatch, and Barry himself was a very solitary person as far as we know.

Louise was his first lover.

So here's a young man with an older woman.

They's somewhat different in personality.

She's very bubbly and engaging.

He's much more withdrawn, more like monk like is how he's been described by his friends.

And he would sometimes conduct marriages.

Even people really looked up to him.

He was a man of few words.

She was much more engaging in chatty, and they had just gone through a patch where they just weren't They didn't seem to be jibing, they just weren't doing well.

They stopped sharing a bed, and then something happened.

We're not sure how it was that they got back together, but at the end of nineteen eighty five they reconnected and they decided to celebrate by going on to make trip, and that was the trip that led them into Saline Valley.

It's interesting to you write about a friend named Arthur Korb, and even though the couple Barry and Louise, or Barry especially was familiar with the area and Death Valley, Arthur Korb gave them a little hint about something that they might do if they're in the area.

Right.

Barry was very interested in going to a place in Death Valley National Park called Scotty's Castle.

Barry was a craftsman.

He chose for his trade to handcraft iron like wrought iron gates and lamps and things like that, and out at Scotty's Castle there's extraordinary iron work and he wanted to go there and look at it and take pictures.

And when Arthur Korb, who was a close friend who had actually sponsored a Barry for initiation into the faith Rodasoami Faith under the Sat Guru char and Sing, Arthur said, oh, oh, well, if you're going out there.

You got to check out these hot springs and Sailing Valley.

And just to step back, Barry was an outdoorsy guy.

He could handle himself, and he and Arthur would sometimes go on vacation trips to explore remote hot springs.

So this was in keeping with past pattern and practice.

And Barry was a guy who knew his way around, and so he and Louise packed up the truck and that they found their way into Sailing Valley.

Now you take us to the scene.

I'm not certain of the date.

You can tell us the date did, but they.

Arrive at the Wizard Pool.

They go to Scottie's Castle, I believe tell us about their arrival and who they find at the pool.

Once they arrive at that campsite.

So it's Sunday night, January five, nineteen eighty six, and they come rolling in after dark.

But they find their way up to the Palm Spring, which is the more isolated of the soaking pools that are in this part of Sailing Valley.

There's a more larger set of soaking pools and more of a social scene about three quarters of a mile away down the hill.

Up at Palm Spring, there's two soaking pools and it tends to draw a little more of a back.

To nature crowd.

So they roll in after dark and they actually put on their bathing suits.

They were rather modest, modest people, even though the most people out at the hotsprings don't barn.

They come slipping into the water.

And at the time they got into the tub, there were three men in the tub.

Two of them were dirt bike riders, motorcycle guys, young guys from Modesto, California, who were out there.

They'd brought their dirt bikes out and they were kind of enjoying that kind of thing.

They'd been motoring around on their dirt bikes.

The other fellow was in the military.

They didn't know a lot about him.

People hadn't talked with him much.

He was traveling alone.

Seemed like a bit of a laid back guy, had a resonant voice.

He was an officer, Marine Corps officer or captain.

He mentioned that he was in the military and they had gone to school in New Mexico.

And so the three men and young men and then Barry and Louise chat in the hot tub for a while.

The two dirt bike riders get up and head off to bed at some point, leaving this military man named Mike in the soaking tub with Barry and Louise, and then at some point they go their separate ways and go to bed.

Yeah, you take us to Monday, January sixth, and likely because of their faith, they would be up very very early to do that two and a half hour meditation.

But they'd be up very very early, and it was indications that looked like they had before everyone else got up, left the camp for some sort of hike.

What is the what did the bikers do that day?

And what do they the dirt bikers witness this mic preparing to do that day.

Yeah, so you have to picture the We're at a location that is in the desert where there's really just raw desert, very rugged surrounding this location.

There's a little access road coming in which itself is pretty darn a rugged, and then this small campsite where people just camp out in the desert, and then leading away from there in a northerly direction is a kind of a rough dirt road jeep trail kind of a thing that leads a couple of miles farther up to a set of hot springs that have not been developed a natural set of hot springs.

It's about a two mile walk and it's possible that the Burmans were headed up there, although the report was that Louise Burman had a sore ankle and so she wasn't going to go very far.

There are other little sites that you might see along the way, so it's possible they were even just taking a shorter stroll.

We don't know, but there were reports that they had been heading up the road, which was a logical place to take a little walk.

And it wasn't long after that the dirt bike riders spotted the military man named Mike get into his little pickup truck and he headed up this this rough road in a vehicle.

And then a little while later the dirt bikers.

There were the two guys who had been in the tub, and then their their buddy who had gone to bed early.

The three of them get on their dirt bikes and they take off.

Now they didn't just head up the road although they were supposed to stay on the road.

These guys were, you know, they were rambunctious guys and they were kind of exploring little little washes and places where you could get with the dirt bike.

It's against the rules, but there's nobody around to complain.

So they were they were exploring around, going here and there, and and they sort of made their way up the road.

They stopped at one point for lunch, and then they crossed over a pass and actually headed down into an adjacent valley called your Ear Valley.

And then later in the day.

They came back and they didn't see anyone the whole time that they were out on their excursions.

So Mike in his truck and the Burmans had gone up this road.

Nobody saw them.

And then late in the day Mike comes driving down the road in his pickup truck.

He goes back to his camp.

He gets out and he's all dusty and dirty.

Yeah you say that, Dale, these are aliases.

But Dale Dunsmuir and Katie Aberdeen, they drove into Palm Spring and they noticed the truck and then they noticed this Mike come and talk to them.

What did they what did They later say that he the conversation they had with him.

They weren't really eager to talk about it.

It took me a long time to track them down.

They're off the grid kind of people, But I did track them down.

Kind of an interesting encounter when I finally found them living in a in a very tidy, pleasant little trailer out in the desert.

And when I came to the door, she answered, and he was standing behind in the kitchen without a stitch of clothes on and a big grin on his face.

He was quite a bit older than her.

She was actually quite a beauty, very well known as being a mountaineer and a very attractive younger woman.

And he was known as being a very competent mountaineer.

And they were known around the Eastern Sierra as people who were good mountaineers and interesting folks.

And what they reported to me, and I agreed that I wouldn't print the print their names because they were a little concerned about their own safety.

But what she reported to me in particular was that after the military man named Mike got back to camp, that he comes over to the camp and he said he had given up smoking, but he was hoping that they could provide him with some cigarettes, and so he traded a can of peaches for cigs, and then stood there and chatted with this very attractive woman and ended up floating the idea of that why don't they have a threesome, which is just not in keeping with the vibe out in Saline Valley.

And if something like that was going to happen, it would have to develop organically, you know, over time.

You don't just walk up to strangers and all of a sudden start talking in a way like you know, hey, ever had a threesome and she felt very uncomfortable and thought there is something wrong with this guy, and she wanted to just get him out of her camp.

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Deputies Nixon and Boyer they're looking at this now possibly a crime.

They don't have any evidence of that at this point.

But they track down those bikers from Modesto.

So what do they find out from one particular, Brian Casey in particular.

Yeah, so let me just mention in between there there's a massive search that's undertaken, biggest search in Inneo County history.

Nothing turns up.

So now it's on the detective, the lead detective Nixon, Randy Nixon, and then Leon Boyer was involved too, even though he wasn't an investigator, he's a good lawman with a good instinct and he very much wanted to work on the case and he did so.

What they found, they were able to track down the motorcycle riders somehow their name had been mentioned and they were able to find them, and they were talked to separately, interviewed separately, and immediately came across as guys who had nothing to hide, completely cooperative.

They had taken pictures of their little excursion that day.

When I started investigating, they just sent me their photos said yeah, hey, you want to look at our photos.

Here they are.

They sent them to me.

I met with the guys very open in fact, I even got to examine one of the dirt bikes they still had it.

These were guys who were just had nothing to hide, no story, to coordinate or anything, and they just told you what I told you, which is they had taken this excursion and come back and then the Burmans just didn't return to camp.

The military guy had said, well, he might have seen them with their backpacks when he was out driving up up the road, and then he said he might have.

He said he also had seen the dirt bike riders go by, and those later become very significant statements.

You talk about this very very interesting heroic character, Leon Boyer.

He's not working on the case, as you say, officially, but he decides to work on this case on his own.

He is also why not, he's also a natural composite artist as well, So he decides through the description he gets through the two people at the campsite to come up with a composite and he also endeavors to continue.

So how does he do that tell us about his work, vacation and the Desert Bill petition?

What a guy?

I mean, he right away zeroed in on this military guy named Mike, because first of all, there's not very many people out there at the scene.

There was some other campers, but they were like a hippie couple with a little boy, and they apparently never left camp.

So the only people seen going up this rough road that day were the dirt bike riders who just seemed honest as the day is long.

And then this Mike guy.

But who was he?

Where was he?

The Sheriff's office didn't know where to start.

So what Deputy Boyers started doing is just going out into Saline Valley on his own time on vacation and just chatting with people, asking them, you know, and showing him his composite drawing and saying, have you ever seen a guy like this named Mike?

And he started getting reports, Oh yeah, I remember that guy, And sure enough, at one point he finds his name.

The reason is that at that time there was a move to designate parts of the desert as wilderness.

It involved all the California desert.

There was kind of a conservation debate going on about what do we do with these desert lands, and there were competing interests and a lot of people were involved, and folks in Sailing Valley were really nervous about the idea of some kind of more federal protection or involvement in the area.

And there was a petition posted that basically was a hands off Sailing Valley kind of a petition, and Deputy Boyer started checking this petition every time he went out there just to see anybody named Mike.

Well, he finds a signature of a guy named Mike, who, it turned out when they run the name is a US Marine.

And not only that, his driver's license photo.

I mean it's like a spitting image of the composite drawing.

Yeah, So they find out more information about him in terms of he's also involved in logistics, and also that just a couple of the other things the statements that he had made line up as well that he was in he lived in Barstow.

And so how do they proceed in preparing to be able to interview this pepe.

Once they have him located, the inter County Sheriff's office decides to do a surprise interview.

It turns out he is the adjunct to the commanding General at the Marine Corps Logistics based Barstow, which is a massive logistics space obviously out in Barstow, still there, and he is the designated adjunct to the commanding officer, and they're concerned.

They just decide we're just going to go out and do it.

By surprise, they did coordinate it with NCIS, or actually the predecessor to INCIS, but the Naval Investigative Service, they coordinated that they were going to come out there.

That the general did not have a lot of advanced notice, not that they didn't trust him, but they just felt, we're just going to go out there and spring it.

By that time, Randy Nixon was off the case.

Leon Boyer wasn't brought along because he wasn't a trained investigator, So it was two other investigators go out there and they set up in a conference room and spring an interview on this marine named Mike to see what he might have to say.

You write about the incredible questioning that they do, and also of the characteristics of a person you say that is lying and what that entails in the answering of those questions.

Well, one thing I learned Dan in writing this book and interviewing people in law enforcement and also doing research, which is that a lot of the things that you and I might look at as being telltale signs of line if we hadn't done our homeworker.

Actually can just be natural nervousness.

A person who doesn't look you in the eye or shifts around, they may just be nervous.

But there are some indications that a person is lying.

One of them is that if they can demonstrate to you that they have pretty good memory and they have specific answers to things that aren't threatening, but then when you get into the threatening content, suddenly their memory seems to fail and their answers turned vague.

That's one sign of somebody who's lying.

Another is that they might try to keep changing the subject, that they don't want to pin themselves down.

And this Mike the Marine.

Exhibited all of those characteristics, and his story kept changing and it was like he was trying to feel his way.

What do they know?

And it was a remarkable interview.

Honestly, he would have don't hold it against me.

I'm a lawyer by background, so I think like a lawyer.

As I first read that interview.

After the Sheriff's office agreed that they were going to cooperate in my investigation and turnover files from this cold case, I was so fascinated.

When I got my hands on the transcript of that interview, and as I was reading it and his story kept changing and he was going here there, I wanted to tap him on the shoulder.

And say stop.

The lawyer in me was like, you need to be quiet.

You are incriminating yourself right here, and he definitely did by just he came up with all these different store well I might have done this, and then they tell him, well, if you've done that, that's inconsistent with this fact.

Oh well, then I might have been this that I did.

And he never did pin himself down.

Now they interviewed him before they even had bodies.

It was only ten months since he had been out there, and he couldn't remember whether he was there alone or with a person.

He couldn't remember where he camped.

He gave multiple stories about what he did on the day that they disappeared, and whether he met them.

He finally started admitting to things as he got more cornered.

But the guy was all over the place.

It's of quite an incriminating interview.

So I have to say this suspect, and I'll give you his name.

It's Michael Pepe.

He's never been charged, and it's important to note he's never been arrested, never been charged, and so in the eyes of the law, he's innocent until proven guilty.

So what I do in the book is I'm not capable of judging whether somebody's innocent or guilty.

But what I can do is present the facts, present the case.

Because law enforcement was sure they had the right guy, and when I came into it, I didn't have any dog in this hunt.

I thought, well, maybe they just got it wrong.

But when you start to look at the evidence, it does tend to point in one direction.

And he's never given an explanation for any of this.

It says god given right and his constitutional right not to say a word.

But you know I tried multiple times to get a word out of him.

Neither him nor his lawyers would ever agree to that.

You write that it's likely because he was interviewed by surprise at the camp and with the military influence.

The commander's influence is likely, you right, the reason why he answered questions at all.

I think that he I don't think he felt compelled by the authorities to talk.

I do think though, that when his commanding general told him, I want you to go meet with these guys, that he probably felt some a pressure, at least in his own mind to answer questions as opposed to just saying, you know what, I want a lawyer.

But he didn't call for a lawyer.

He was free to walk out at any time.

They took a break, at least one break in the course of this couple of hour interview, and he could have gotten up and left.

It was his right, and he did.

He chose instead to keep answering questions.

It wasn't like a dramatic who will say people might be familiar with some investigators crowding the chair close to the suspect and then peppering them with questions and more accusations and allegations.

This didn't happen.

They were trying to get him to admit on his own ten months earlier that he could remember after they refreshed his memory of the campsite and maybe even the people that were there.

He's still, well, it's not possible, it could be possible.

I don't know.

So he was super noncommittal to specific questions that would pin him down whatsoever.

Absolutely, but he had a great memory.

When it came to other details about other desert trips that happened, about the same time.

Oh, he was telling stories about this or that and reciting all these details, and he knew the types of aircraft he had seen out in the desert.

There's a lot of military test line that goes on out there, and he could remember the roads and the locations where he went.

The fellow exhibited a good knowledge of the area and of his own undertakings out there, until it came to the time of well what were you doing on this particular trip and on this particular day, And then he was all over the board.

Now you say that there was.

They asked him for details to fill in all of those gaps in his memory.

He didn't get back to him about those details, and they didn't get back to him.

And then you write about November nineteen eighty eight, twelve, nineteen eighty eight, and an outdoorsman on his way down from a climb near from Saline Valley, he stumbles across a couple human skull, one human skull, and then he contacts authorities and they get around to searching the area and they find bones and skulls of Louise and Barry Bermant.

Right, if we're able to contact that hiker, I don't think that the Sheriff's office actually has his name.

If they do, they didn't turn it over to me.

But my suspicion is that somehow that's been lost out of the files.

I have a photo of him, but don't know his name.

Anyway, that area, if you're not somebody who's been out in the desert a lot, it's kind of hard to describe how just out of the way it feels.

Just getting into Sailing Valley and getting into the hot springs is quite a track.

But to get up where the bodies are found, you've got to go up this rough kind of jeep road.

It takes a while to get there.

It's about seven miles up from the camp, and it just takes a while to navigate that terrain and get up in there.

And it's not the kind of place where people go very often.

But interestingly, if you were to kind of go off the road into some of these washes, which is really like a dry riverbed, you could drive a vehicle a little ways off the road and get up in some of these draws and into spots where it wouldn't be so bad to hide a body.

And that's exactly the kind of place where the bodies were found.

It was a place that would be accessible by vehicle, and they were secreted in a way that indicated a lot of work and thought and heavy lifting had gone into burying them and concealing their bodies in this what would be called a cutbank, a channel carved by intermittent flash flooding dry most of the time, occasionally water would come through over thousands of years and carve the channel.

And it was in one of these channels that their bodies had been stacked.

Clothing had mostly been removed, jewelry was gone, and then the dirt and rocks had been placed around them in a way that was quite clever and caused the gravesite to just kind of blend in with the surround.

This hiker coming down from an attempt, we.

Don't know if it was successful or not.

I think he had made the summit of this very isolated desert peak.

And now he's crossing back towards his vehicle and he sees a skull.

He marked the spot with a Karen.

That was nineteen nineteen eighty eight when I went out there and finally found the gravesite, that Karen that he made of Rocks was still there, all the bushes, everything was exactly looked exactly the same as it had when the remains turned up.

Let's just says there's an opportunity to hear these messages.

Lucky Land Casino asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?

Lucky in line at the Delhi I guess ah, in my dentist's office more than once.

Actually do I have to say?

Yes?

You do?

In the car before my kid's PTA meeting?

Really yes, excuse me, what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?

I never win?

And tell well, there you have it.

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It was necessary eighteen plus terms, conditions plus fifty against.

Now, what we did mention is what they do find besides the bones, the shallow grave, and this obvious attempt for this person to hide, and it was indicative of somebody that was experienced in this kind of I guess work to hide and conceal.

You said it was.

It seemed to parallel the work he had done as in the military at Quantico.

So let's talk about what happens they find a handcuff key.

They do.

They find a little bit of remains of a little bit of clothing, and the jewelry is gone.

Berry's handcrafted silver belt buckle that Arthur Korb had handcrafted his good friend.

All that is gone, and but they find handcuff key, which says a lot.

Yes.

So now let's talk about the what this Pepe is doing at this time in terms of his own family and where is he located in the US, and then talk about NIS which later becomes NCIS.

So Pepe his life does not go real well for him after that interview in the General's office.

He may have already been up for a transfer.

It wasn't clear, but actually the General secretary told me the.

General wanted him out of there.

I believed he was guilty and wanted him out.

I was able to interview.

The general as well, and Pepe ends up back at Quantico, serves out his twenty years, and you know, he'd had several wives, reportedly had some pretty troubled relationships with women.

And he decides at that point in his life, after he's retired from the Marine Corps and has a pension that he's going to after bouncing around the United States a little bit kind of not set up in anyway, he decides he's going to try his luck overseas.

Yes, and overseas.

You talk about Cambodia, and if I have mispronounced it, that phenomenon pay and what the condition of Cambodia is in terms of poverty and lawlessness.

Cambodia in the early two thousands was like the wild West.

That's how people described it.

You have to go back to a couple of decades to the Khmer Rouge, the killing fields, the mass genocide that had occurred, and just the complete disruption of society that had gone on in Cambodia and that post war environment.

You had a country that was reputed to be one of the most corrupt in the world, with corrupt officials, the corrupt judicial system, and kind of an anything goes atmosphere, and it became known as a place where people who are sexually deviant could pretty much get anything or anybody that they wanted.

And it was kind of a red flag according to people who are involved in trafficking.

When you see a retired American man, or folks from Britain or Australia and such.

Moving later in life to Cambodia, it often meant that they were interested in having sex with children.

Pepe had no history.

Of this that I could I could see it was in the United States.

It was clear he had some troubled relationships, but you know, so to a lot of people, although there were hints that the troubles that he had in his relationships were more because of a deviant or at least we might say kind of unusual or aggressive sexual behavior.

When he goes to Cambodia, Dan he was actually a well respected guy when he landed there.

He was a retired marine officer.

He had a master's in business.

He began teaching business classes at a local university.

He rented a upscale villa in a nice neighborhood of pnom Pen.

He daffed it with a gate guard, he had a cook.

But he started.

Bringing in young girls and making deals with their family where he would essentially purchase these young girls as sex slaves.

And I'm not talking like young.

Like fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I'm talking nine to twelve year olds.

And it was pointed out to me by one of the one of the Christian aid organizations that helped rescue these these women that are girls that they were like the size of five or six year olds by US standards.

These were tiny girls, just genetically small, but also had grown up into private environments where they probably just didn't get that much to eat.

So you've got these tiny children that normal human being would feel compassion for.

They come out of poverty and extreme circumstances.

A normal person, you know, you'd want to give them a hug and a solid meal.

But that's not.

What Pepe wanted to do.

He made deals with the families to take them in, to send them to school, and provide them with books and a place to live and food.

But in exchange, he expected them to submit to him with whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was not kind and gentle.

There are people who are attracted to children who think that they're in love or might, even though what they're doing is terrible and illegal, might think that it's some sort of normalized behavior.

But what Pepe was doing was tying girls up and doing brutal things to them that would leave them bleeding.

He was not behaving even within the norm of an abnormal and deviant world.

He was way out on the edge.

He had victims living in his home.

You talk about five particular victims, and two being sisters.

One precocious young girl that always dreamed of being a singer, and supposedly she resisted and that wasn't in the in the cards for her, and she was abused and was screaming and also supposedly bit him, bit his penis, and so she was kicked out of this house.

She was dropped off, as you write, battered and bleeding, and a mission worker you can tell us about this organization, how they noticed that the girl being dropped off and then went and spoke to her, and you say, from there the wheels of justice proceeded.

Yes, there are non governmental organizations in Goo's, often faith based organizations that go into these impoverished areas, Cambodia being one of the main ones, in an effort to try to identify the victims of sex trafficking, rescue them, and bring some measure of hope in a place that can often be hopeless.

And when this.

Girl was spotted by an undercover investigator, that's what led to the unraveling of Pepe's sex slave world, because the investigator saw this little girl that looked like she was bleeding and something bad had happened to her, being dropped off by a motorbike in a bad area.

So he approached her and said he or she.

I don't know if it was a man or a woman.

I've never been able to identify.

IJM is very protective over the identity of their people, so they don't give away names or methodology.

But the investigator, whoever it was, got the girl to tell a story, and she was a smart little girl.

She was able to identify who he was and show them where his villa was, and that set the wheels in motion very quickly.

It was so extreme that even the Cambodian officials, who are known for kind of looking the other way on some of this stuff, they responded quickly and vigorously coordinated with agents from ICE from the US embassy to identify this American and try to take him down.

Let's do this as an opportunity to hear these messages.

Lucky Land Casino asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten Lucky.

Lucky in line at the Delhi I guess ah in my dentist's office more than once, actually do I have.

To say yes, you do in the car before my kid's PTA meeting?

Really?

Yes?

Excuse me?

What's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?

I never win?

And tell well, there you have it.

You can get lucky anywhere playing at lucky landslots dot com play for free right now?

Are you feeling lucky?

No, we're just necessary feaver'n do my long eighteen plus terms conditions plus what everytins.

Now you introduced the some other very very interesting and dedicated characters, Prosecutor Patricia Donahue and her team, and they're trying to get convictions in a federal court in the US, even though these crimes were committed in Cambodia, and because on behalf of a congressman or in Hatch and others, there was a law permitting even though there was no official exchange with Cambodia illegally.

Then, despite that that, they would still prosecute crimes from Americans occurring in Cambodia.

That's right.

The Cambodian government wasn't always cooperative, and the system was viewed as being one of the most corrupt in the world.

Nonetheless, there are good people who wanted to do the right thing, and what they found out was going on behind the walls of Pepe's villa was so horrific that they responded vigorously, arrested him, rescued the girls.

He was put into prison in Cambodia, which is not a place fun place to be hillatious conditions, and ultimately, though was handed over to agents from ICE to be brought back to the United States, to Los Angeles, specifically to stand trial on federal charges.

The reason that the US government felt they could bring him back and charge him was because of this law called the Protect Act that had been introduced by orn Hatch and passed.

On an almost unanimous vote.

One of the few things that I think Congress got almost everybody to agree on.

And the problem that they were addressing was US citizens taking advantage of the relative wealth and opportunity that people in the United States have, and you would have deviants who, by the standards of some of these impoverished countries, were wealthy and powerful.

And the deviants would come with money, cash in their pocket and the ability to hire translators and know their way around, and they would dial into the underage sex scene there and stories started getting out and it was horrifying and it didn't reflect well in the United States.

So the thought was, let's regulate this conduct by making it illegal foreign American who travels in foreign commerce to engage in certain kinds of just off the charts acts.

They didn't purport to outlaw, you know everything.

I mean, it's not the same scope of what might be considered illegal here in the United States, but underage sex crimes in particular, or what they were targeting.

And it was under that Act that Pepe was brought back to the United States and placed in the Metropolitan Detention Center as the government scrambled to identify the girls, get them to the United States so they could testify at trial and put together a case under the Protect Act.

You're right that they were successful.

It was an incredible trial where they have these little girls being cross examined quite vigorously by defense attorneys trying to shake them on their stories.

Very very interesting.

We have to sort of fast forward that they get this extraordinary verdict two hundred and ten years all consecutive sentencing, so a real absolute denouncement of this person by the jury, and then everybody is awarded.

They've shurtain people get awards for this conviction, and then they get the news that it's been through appeal that there has to be another trial.

Briefly, tell us what happens and the difference, as you write, when these witnesses grown up, much more grown up now testify again, and because of the me too movement, cross examination is much different, isn't it right?

When the girls first are brought over, they're just little girls.

And one of the key witnesses wasn't even twelve years old yet when she testified in two thousand and eight at the first trial.

But fast forward, there's all these legal machinations that go on.

Ultimately, the verdicts get thrown out on the technical argument that the statute the protect Act was targeting travelers and he had set up a villa and was living there, so he wasn't a traveler.

So the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in all their wisdom, decides to throw out the convictions despite the overwhelming evidence of all this misconduct.

They say, yeah, okay, yeah, okay, Sure he raped and abused and tortured children, but he wasn't traveling.

He was actually situated there, so we're just going to throw it all out.

Well, the government didn't give up.

They came back charged him under different statutes that didn't require them to prove that he was traveling, and took the case to trial again in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one.

And what was a verdict then at that time.

Is Pepe is found is found guilty again, and he's finally sentenced and again sentenced to a two hundred and ten years.

It's very interesting.

One of the sisters was the first to testify.

She was nine years old when she first went to Devilla, twelve years old at trial and then then at finally at trial.

She had been adopted by an American family, educated and was a US citizen, and very powerful testimony by this now twenty five year old woman.

What a moment.

She was such a bright little girl.

He had nicknamed her Smiley.

She was only nine years old, as you indicate, when he was committing sex crimes against her.

She was one day shy of her twelfth birthday.

When she testified at the first trial and the second trial, she was twenty five years old.

She had been adopted by an American family.

She was a girl of beauty and grace and gravitas.

Well spoken English.

When she walked into the courtroom, I mean people's jaws dropped.

This little girl was transformed into a twenty something meter woman of enormous dignity.

And to see her matter of factly delivering her testimony, explaining what happened in such an even voice, matter of fact and with such gravitas, and again I come back to dignity.

This enormous presence that she had was just stunning, absolutely stunning.

And the shift in power between Pepe who had abused her as a nine year old and now you've got him at defense table with Marshalls hovering nearby, and he's kind of on the defensive, you know, a prisoner being put on trial there and this woman just explaining what he did to her.

Powerful court drama.

Yes, absolutely, you talk about just at the end as well, you get the reaction from Deputy Leon Boyer and also Louise's son, the really only surviving member of this small family since the parents had died.

The Burman family parents had died, the Michael Westerman, Louise's son.

His reaction and Leon Boyer's reaction, well, they both felt an enormous sense of closure.

When Pepe was once again sentenced to two hundred and ten years.

But you want me to tell you something that's not in the book.

Sure.

So, at the time the book was finished and published, and it's about to be released.

As of the time of my last edit, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had affirmed the convictions, and once again we all thought the case was over.

But there's a tiny little footnote right now that could be a very big footnote.

Pepe's lawyers psitioned for a review to the US Supreme Court.

We all assumed that the Supreme Court would just summarily deny the petition, but just in the last few days, the US Supreme Court has instead asked the government to file a response.

Now, this doesn't mean they're going to grant review, and it would be a long way from here to the case being reversed, but it remains within the realm of possibility.

I actually haven't even broken that news to some of the people who are emotionally involved in the case.

I don't know if they can take yet another curveball in a case that's had so many Dan.

Yeah, it's incredible to me to see the cases that are the most involving the most serious crime, which is murder.

To have such vigorous defense despite knowing really essentially the guilt of their client, it's not well, geez, maybe I think the guy's guilty or he's a minor.

A very very vigorous defense, including plus examination of children.

I thought it was very very interesting.

Well, you know, as somebody who's a lawyer by background, I understand that the adversarial system cannot function unless you have people who are willing to vigorously defend even the most heinous and unforgivable kinds of people and crimes.

They're entitled to a vigorous defense.

Otherwise the system breaks down.

That said, I wouldn't be able to do it.

There's no way I could defend this guy.

It wasn't just the girl's testimony, Dan, there were hundreds and hundreds of explicit photos that he had taken of them.

There were photos of him naked with one of the girls.

There was corroborating evidence.

There's no question he did these acts.

And I find it a bit remarkable and troubling that so much legal attention has been paid to the fine parsinge of these statutes to see whether all the technical requirements about travel have been met.

His latest argument is that, well, the government said he came back several times, you know, to the United States, and they charged him in connection with two trips where he came home and then went back to Cambodia.

And it's unlawful to cross a state line with intent to commit crimes of that nature against children.

Me it seems pretty clear.

But he has this theory that's bolstered by an old Supreme Court case.

Well, if the travel itself is innocent, even though he's returning with intent to commit heinous crimes against children, that doesn't make it a crime.

If the purpose of the trip was innocent.

So that if he came home from Cambodia to go to his son's graduation or on another instance, his daughter's wedding, well that's an innocent trip.

And even though when he went back, the reason, one of the dominant motivating reasons to go back was to rape and abuse and torture children, and he had that intent, the jury found when he got on the airplanes to go back, that's what he was intending to do.

Nonetheless, that intent that he had right here in the United States on the tarmac at lax isn't enough to make it a crime under federal statutes that talk about crossing the border with that kind of intent, And it appears he may have a prayer on that argument.

Now, look, I'm all for technical arguments and applying the law the way the law is written, but there is that there are times when things just go too far that just to me, defies common sense, and I sure hope the Supreme Court sees through it.

Let's get back to before I Let You Go.

Is we haven't mentioned that one season in prison like many in mates, apparently supposedly according to witnesses.

And there's two witnesses, one named Walters, who talks about what Pepe said once he's in prison regarding the Berman murders.

And you write about it because it's very very interesting, seems to be very plausible details contained just before I Let You Go take us back, according to Walter, According to Pepe, what happened at that campground.

So I published a cover story in twenty fifteen for LA Weekly about the case, and this made the rounds at the prison, Federal prison where Pepe was incarcerated, and his cellmate stepped forward and contacted me, and then another guy did the same another inmate, and they both said that Pepe had been bragging about the murders as a way of elevating his status.

Keep in mind, anybody convicted and imprisoned in connection with the abuse of children is very low on the prism totem pull.

In fact, in some prisons that alone can get you in physical peril, not so much in the federal system.

But it makes you the lowest.

Of the low, and he was, according to them, he was trying to elevate his status by saying I'm a murderer.

You know, I'm a badass, and that he talked about the killings.

And they came forward with details that were not public about the case.

Maybe they were good guesses, and these guys could have just been playing to see if they could get some favorable treatment or whatever.

But I interviewed them by phone several times, corresponded by email also with them, and then a veteran in county sheriff's investigator went and met with them and concluded that he thought they were credible guys who had strong reasons for coming forward.

But the in county district attorney decided there just wasn't enough to prosecute the case.

And honestly, as a lawyer, I can understand knowing that you have a strong case and you think you've identified the perpetrator isn't the same as going in front of a jury and having to deal with the passage of time, the lack of physical evidence, etc.

And I can understand why he passed on the case and decided not to prosecute, even though I was very disappointed that charges weren't filed, because you know, over the course of this investigation, I had come to feel that the investigators were probably right.

And when they told me they had fingered the guy that they thought did it, I thought it seemed to me that they probably had.

Again, you know, I'm not a judge or jury, and he's never been charged, let alone convicted, but they felt strongly that they had the guy.

I want to thank you very much Doug Kerry for coming on and discussing your incredible Bin Murders Unraveling the Mohabi Desert's most mysterious unsolved crime.

For those people that might want to check out more about this title, tell us how they might need social media or do you have a website?

Awesome, Well, all of the above kind of what an author has to do these days.

So my website is Doug Carrey, which is just Doug.

Kaari dot com.

I've got a Facebook page at Doug Carrey Author or Doug Carry Author, and then an Instagram at Doug Carry Author.

So I'm on Instagram, Facebook, and then a web page.

And you can find information about how to publish a book The Burman Murders if you google it.

It's in Arns and Noble and Amazon and various other other stores.

It's all over the web.

The reviews have been pretty good.

I'm real happy with how the book is performing and what people are saying about it.

And it would, you know, it would be my honor if your listeners checked it out.

Thank you so much, Doug Carrey for this interview.

The Burman Murder is unraveling the Mojave Desert's most mysterious unsolved crime.

Thank you so much for this interview.

And you have a great evening, and good night,