Twisted But True: Book II - Filling in the Cracks

By Darren Burch

Retired Phoenix Police Sergeant Darren Burch captivates you on another wild police ride-along with outrageously macabre and compelling stories from his thirty-year career as a rookie cop, sex crime detective, and night detective sergeant in the Phoenix Police Department’s Homicide Unit in this gut-clinching, horrific, and oftentimes laugh-out-loud funny follow-up to Darren’s award-winning true-crime book, Twisted But True. Darren’s dark humor reemerges with a vengeance, starting with death and despair, and then to the hilarious as a rookie cop in “That First Squad,” to a case of animal sexual depravity in “Choking the Chicken,” and a deadly home invasion beyond belief in “That One Case”, which was featured on the ID Channel’s American Detective TV series. These thirty true-crime stories mirror the time frame of Twisted But True, but this time, Darren goes even deeper and darker by filling in the cracks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662405228

Book preview

Chapter 1

At a Loss for Words

Nigh t terrors have plagued my sleep as far back as my earliest memories. As I drifted to sleep, horrors erupted in a deluge of nightmarish scenes so frightening that an unshakable dread remained long after I awakened. These lurid images accompanied a twisted lullaby of sounds and feelings, an imagery so real that I would wake in a frozen state amid a sweaty panic.

My awakening from sleep paralysis seemed to last forever, but within seconds, my ability to move returned. Glad it was over, I fought the inevitable descent back to the dream world, which I would eventually succumb to, repeating the horror cycle several times a night. Some nightmares were so vivid that I recall them today with chilling clarity.

One recurring night terror had me running through a blue cloud of electrical discharge, being followed by a low reverberating roar that would increase no matter how fast I ran. Running through the blinding static fog, the monstrous sound would become deafening as the unseen threat was getting closer; and unavoidably, I would be eaten alive. My night terrors mirrored my life. Knowing what scared me, emanating from the edges of my own subconscious, they invaded my sleep and amplified my fears.

That incessant nightmare of the fog was paralleling the anxiety I felt after getting lost playing a game of hide and seek when I was four years old. On a sweltering summer day in 1966 in Phoenix, my mom was visiting a girlfriend in another neighborhood. With her being a single mother, my older brother, Allen, and I went everywhere she did. She took us to her girlfriend’s home, where we played the classic childhood game in the backyard with the girlfriend’s three girls. Along with a few other kids from the neighborhood, a group of seven of us played the game over and over.

After hiding in plain sight and always being the first kid found, I decided to make sure I couldn’t be discovered—by sneaking into the alley. But I had to wait for the perfect opportunity, as my brother was assigned to watch over me, ensuring I stayed in the yard. My mom simply didn’t understand that the encumbrance of hiding in an open backyard made hide and seek success impossible. So when it was Allen’s turn to close his eyes and count, I would make my break for the alley, confident I would have the best hiding spot ever.

Once my brother closed his eyes and started counting, I made my escape. Sneaking out the back gate, I found the perfect trash can to hide behind. Dismissing five other trash cans, I found one with some good shade and hunkered down behind it. After what seemed like an hour of concealing myself, I grew worried that no one had found me and attempted to return to the backyard. Apparently, I became disoriented and walked in the wrong direction.

Soon, I found myself walking through a maze of unfamiliar alleys, continuously twisting through dirt paths, all leading further away from where I needed to be. After wandering hopelessly for what seemed like an eternity, I stopped, sat down on a hot gravel area in the alley, and cried. I was alone and frightened, and a gut-wrenching wail came from the pit of my stomach.

To my surprise and relief, I heard a comforting voice calling from behind the rear wall of a house. I stood up and, looking toward the voice, I saw a woman peering over her backyard fence. Only her dark hair and caring eyes were visible from over the wall. In a gentle voice, she asked if I was lost. I nodded affirmatively while still crying. Since I had memorized my phone number (I still remember it: 942-2134), one would think this was my salvation. But it wasn’t. The kind woman could not understand a single word I uttered (and blubbered). I had a severe speech impediment, so extreme that my words were unintelligible. Even my mother and brother could not understand me most of the time.

After a succession of unsuccessful attempts to communicate with me, she yelled for her teenage son to come and see if he could make sense of my words. Within a few minutes, her tall son, with jet black hair, walked into the alley. At my age, I hadn’t a clue how old he was, but thinking back upon it, he was probably in his late teens. The teenager glanced down and gave me a reassuring smile, as he continued listening to his mom explain her discovery of a lost kid with a pronounced speech impediment.

After several minutes of conversing back and forth over the fence with his mom, the older teen turned to me, took my hand, and said, Let’s get you home. He made the statement with such confidence that it filled me with hope. My tears subsided. He was going to rescue me just like a superhero in the comic books. Hell, he even looked like Superman.

After assuring his mom that he’d return at a certain time if we couldn’t find my home, we took off down the alley without a clue where we were going. As we walked, I babbled nonstop about the game of hide and seek that initiated my trek and how I got lost. Clark Kent kept nodding his head as if he could understand anything I said.

We left the alley and moved onto the sidewalk where we went down street after street. All the while, Clark Kent would ask me if anything looked familiar, and nothing did. We stood on one corner, looking around for a long time. Delightedly, the area looked familiar, but I didn’t have a clue which way to go.

Seeing the excitement on my face as I attempted to tell him I knew where we were, he mirrored my excitement and rejoicefully asked, Which way? Recognizing the street was one thing, but I still hadn’t any idea where the house was; and I explained this to him by spewing gobs of gibberish. My initial excitement faded as we just stood on the sidewalk, hand in hand, and saying nothing to each other. I could feel a new sense of panic growing in the pit of my stomach. Feeling a wail starting to rise out of my throat, out of nowhere, my mom drove up alongside of us!

I recognized her old blue Ford Mustang, which was only one more breakdown away from the salvage yard. She jumped out of the car, tearful and frantic. Without even acknowledging Clark Kent, she rushed past him and grabbed me. She threw me into the car and off we went. I got a major spanking, but only after receiving lots of hugs. I never had a chance to thank Clark Kent or his mom. Then again, he wouldn’t have understood me anyway. But I bet he would’ve nodded.

As I got older, my night terrors evolved from monsters lurking in the dark to me hiding in the dark from grade-school bullies roaming the playground. In my nightmares, the bullies were seeking my whereabouts and were armed with switchblades, bent on cutting out my tongue.

Even as a preteen, I realized these dreams were metaphors based on my debilitating speech impediment. My language difficulties were frustrating, as I could understand people fine and thought I was speaking normally. But for some reason, only badly formed words came out. To add to my miserable adolescent life, along with my speech issues, I had pale skin and a small frame, which made me the perfect target for every schoolyard bully. School is difficult enough for a meek child without the added pressure of feeling stupid and worthless. I would not have believed that someday I would grow up to become a police officer, dedicating my life to stopping the criminals of our community, as most days I was lucky to avoid being bullied.

A good school day for me was being ignored by students and teachers alike, not being required to talk. Unlike the day when a teacher instructed me to recite the state capitals in front of the class. It’s hard work memorizing all the US capitals, but saying them aloud to a room full of classmates, who laughed and mimicked me with each unrecognizable city, was humiliating.

School was every bit as unbearable as my sleep-time nightmares, with unrelenting taunts from the boys (and one particularly mean girl) to actual physical assaults that made my first four school years a living hell. We had no name for it back then, but these episodes created such post-traumatic stress (PTS) that some days I contemplated suicide. But the thought of my mom crying always quelled those thoughts. By fourth grade, I was hitting a breaking point; I couldn’t take the teasing and abuse any longer. I was about to snap.

While walking home from school one day, I was confronted by a large bully (they always seem to come in that size) who was enraged because I had successfully taken the soccer ball away from him with my more agile footwork earlier that day. In doing so, I tripped him, and he fell to the ground with a mighty thud. To add to his embarrassment, his own teammates laughed at the spectacle of a small, pasty kid punking him during the schoolyard soccer game.

As I was walking home from school, I spotted the bully down the street, hiding behind a tree, waiting to exact his revenge after the lunchtime soccer game. I could see him from well down the road behind his poorly picked hiding spot because his belly was visibly protruding from either side of the tree.

The tree was rooted in the front yard of a corner home, which was on a common path that many of the kids used when walking home from school. As I was walking slowly toward the home, with lots of schoolkids all around, I couldn’t help but contemplate my options; I could stand up to the bully and fight, or I could easily outrun him due to his large and heavy build. I opted for the former.

My schoolyard soccer ball-kicking ability was not my only athletic attribute. I was surprisingly strong for my size. Instead of cruel nicknames, like Peanut Butter Breath and Can’t Talk, a better moniker would have been Atom Ant. My strength gave me confidence; and having grown tired of running from bullies, I was ready to take a stand against Billy the Bully, who was twice my size. I walked up to Billy Bully and stood my ground. Standing surprisingly confidently, I told Billy to come out from behind the tree.

Billy walked out from behind the tree with a shit-eating grin on his face. In contrast, I stood with my jaws clenched, hoping my lips wouldn’t quiver in fear. We could not have been any more different; his olive complexion with jet-black hair and brown eyes were in stark contrast to my pale skin that practically glowed in the dark. He was known to be a bully, where I was meek and never had a mean word for anyone (not that they could have understood me if I had).

Billy arrogantly exclaimed, I’m gonna kick your ass! With that declaration of a solid ass-kicking, I silently placed my schoolbooks a few feet away on the ground, staring him down like an opponent on the other side of a boxing ring. We got into our respective fighting stances, five feet apart, sizing one another up on a stranger’s well-manicured lawn.

Within mere seconds, a crowd of fellow schoolchildren gathered. We soon heard the crowd screaming the usual schoolyard throwdowns such as, Fight, fight, fight… and Hit him, hit him, hit him. Of all these sophomoric chants, the most memorable was from a faceless voice in the back shouting, Laurel and Hardy are in a fight!

Without warning, I impulsively ran headfirst into the belly of the beast, striking Billy’s stomach with the crown of my head, knocking the wind out of him. I grabbed him around his torso and plowed him to the ground with me on top. Once on the ground, I instinctively delivered a barrage of fist strikes to his face, as if years of pent up rage was released, continuing the fluid onslaught until he yelled, I give! I give!

Suspending my assault, I stood up and looked down at Billy. He was red faced, out of breath, and wide-eyed in complete shock. I myself was surprised at the outcome and graciously extended my hand to help him up after his quick defeat. After taking my hand and getting to his feet, the vanquished bully turned, kicked my books, and took off running, albeit slowly as he was still out of breath, never to bother me (or join me in a soccer game) again.

Though my acute speech impediment still made me nearly impossible to understand, I now had a tough reputation. It may be wholly inappropriate, but being a good fighter helped with my self-confidence and self-worth issues. Every kid in school was aware that the boy who couldn’t speak could fight, and the bullying stopped. However, my afterschool fighting didn’t, as now other boys were challenging me to see if they were a better fighter. I didn’t like to fight, as the idea of hurting someone was always repulsive. But just being willing to fight sometimes was enough to side step a fight.

Sahuaro Elementary School was known more for its after-school fights and bullying than for its academics, as its misspelled Saguaro title would attest. The misspelled name is consistent with the staff’s academic incompetency at the time, having placed me in a special class with other students with varying types of learning disabilities where all we did was color in coloring books. Not only did the class completely fail to address my speech issue but it did so at the sacrifice of my education.

As a result of pulling me out of my regular classes, I missed out on most of the classes that focused on the math and English fundamentals, which are paramount building blocks for continued learning. That absence, and my tendency to daydream, resulted in my inability to keep up with my fellow classmates, year after year. The teachers would tell my mother that I would need to be held back for another school year since I didn’t pass that year’s education criteria. Yet each school year the teacher would still promote me to the next grade level. One teacher went as far as to tell my mom, He is lost in words and doesn’t understand what the rest of the class is doing, suggesting with a thoughtless comment that I may have some mild form of retardation. Even therapists at a well-respected school in its time, Gompers, had informed my mother that her son is beyond hope of ever speaking normally.

As a single mother on secretary’s salary, barely affording the cost of necessities, my mom eventually saved enough money to hire a retired first-grade teacher willing to take on the formidable task of trying to teach me how to speak. With her help, starting in third grade, she eventually discovered that my speech impediment had nothing to do with the mechanics of speaking but of hearing.

The retired teacher came to realize that my brain wasn’t correctly processing the sounds of various words. Using phonetics and a stressed emphasis on syllables to finally teach me to speak correctly, she was decades ahead of her time when it came to speech therapy. After more than a year of daily after-school classes at the retired teacher’s home, she helped change the way my brain processed sounds, resulting from a disorder I didn’t even know I had.

My learning disability, which is now referred to as auditory processing disorder (APD) or auditory dyslexia, is my brain’s inability to organize or analyze what I’m hearing. Since my brain incorrectly interpreted words, I incorrectly mimicked the words I heard. With this teacher’s help, I was able to successfully remap my brain’s auditory processes, a new word procedure that I still practice to this day. Many of my friends and colleagues ask about my speech pattern, describing it as a unique accent.

With my speech impediment largely addressed and the bullying stopped, the nightmares should have stopped as well. But they didn’t. They simply morphed into awful dreams based on some other pain or fear. Even today, night terrors continue to plague my sleep, having evolved from childlike fears of monsters to every police officer’s fears of not being able to save a life or not being able to stop a threat to their own life. Or the worst, not being able to stop the impending death of a friend or family member.

My recurring nightmares while in law enforcement were also vivid. One had me running in a dark tunnel toward imminent danger, even when all my instincts told me to run in the opposite direction. In my nightmare, I know I shouldn’t run toward inevitable death, but I am compelled, as the pounding of my heart is matched step-by-step with the pounding of my feet against the hard ground. My heart felt as though it would explode right out of my rib cage. My frantic running is halted suddenly by a downward flight of large concrete stairs leading to a black void.

I race recklessly down the stairs, when I am suddenly confronted by a haggard-looking witch, cloaked in black garb, cackling hysterically. Even as I grab both her arms, pinning them painfully behind her back, she continues her evil laugh. I push my head tight against hers, my mouth mere inches away from her crusty ear, as I desperately scream, Please don’t kill my son!

The terror of losing my son awakens me from the night terror. I sit up in bed, the stillness and quiet eventually superseding the hideous laughter from my psyche. In my fully conscious mind, I then grasp the excruciatingly painful reality that my son is really gone. He had already passed away from a sudden illness at just twenty-five years old.

I raised my son as a single father from when he was six months old and remember each and every glorious milestone in his life—from nighttime potty training while I wore a recruit badge in the day at the police academy to his first day at school, first crush, first heartbreak, and to graduating high school—he was my world. And that world ended with a phone call on December 20, 2007, days away from celebrating Christmas with him—a phone call that shattered our lives.

I was home sleeping off a rough night as a night detective sergeant in the homicide unit where my squad and I investigated, on average, several deaths each night. I was awakened by the phone, and still groggy from a deep slumber, I remember being annoyed that someone was calling. I immediately woke up upon hearing my wife, hyperventilating and sounding afraid of her own sorrowful words. I was now wide awake, listening to her every word, as she uttered, Something’s wrong with DJ.

She explained that a fellow employee of DJ went to his home to pick him up to work on a job together. There was no answer at his door. His car was in the driveway, so the friend went to DJ’s bedroom window where he saw my son lying in bed and not reacting to his repeated knocking at the window. Concerned, the friend lifted the unlocked window to check on DJ and, finding him unresponsive, used DJ’s phone to call his mom. She in turn told him to call 911.

Within seconds, I was dressed and out the door. Not wanting to believe what I heard, I kept telling myself that it wasn’t true. While speeding to his home, my mind raced through different scenarios: he could be intoxicated or just exhausted after one of his harmless seizures he sometimes experienced at night. I continued to come up with reasons why he might be hard to wake, as the alternative was too agonizing to even contemplate. I made the twenty-minute drive to DJ’s home in half the time.

A single firetruck was at the home. In the second it took to pull into the driveway, I assessed the positive way the firetruck had parked in front of DJ’s home. I analyzed how the firetruck didn’t appear to have parked in a hurried manner. It wasn’t slanted in the middle of the street, but calmly parked along the side of the curb. There were no flashing lights or sirens wailing. All appeared calm—eerily serene for what would come. I ran into the home, passing four firemen standing outside DJ’s bedroom and found my son dead in his bed.

Jumping onto the bed, I held my son’s lifeless body in my arms, cradling him like I had when he was a baby, and screamed in primal pain. I was rocking him and holding him, and time stood still as memories of my baby boy