By Holly Zachariah
The Columbus Dispatch
MARYSVILLE, Ohio — As her two young children played in the next room, Kathryn Burton climbed into a rusting bathtub and delivered a baby boy.
She said that the birth was quick, that she never cried out in pain. Then, just as the newborn wiggled a finger and moved his toes, Burton killed him. Investigators think she most likely struck the baby’s head against the side of the tub.
That was only the beginning of what detectives say is among the saddest crimes they’ve ever seen. Burton, who was 23, hid the baby under the bathroom sink while she dug a shallow hole in the backyard. Then, she buried her son.
The story might have ended on that Saturday, Feb. 22, 1997, had Burton not needed help. But her bleeding was so bad that she twice went to a hospital. When doctors insisted each time that she be admitted, she left. Still sick days later, she saw a gynecologist, whose exam proved that Burton had just had a baby, one who had been born full term and alive.
But where was the child?
The answers didn’t come swiftly or easily, but they did eventually come. Burton pleaded guilty to murder, gross abuse of a corpse and obstruction of justice in August 1997 and was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. She will have her first parole hearing on March 9. The Union County prosecutor opposes her potential release.
Sheriff Jamie Patton does, too.
“There are so many families out there begging for a child to love,” said Patton, who was one of the detectives on the case. “To imagine that a mother could do that to her baby, it’s just hard to understand.”
Burton had only an eighth-grade education and has a low-functioning IQ. She and her 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter lived with relatives in a ramshackle house at a crossroads called New Dover, just east of Marysville. The file shows that the place was unlivable, with no working toilets. Rotting food was piled in the kitchen, and carpets and furniture were caked with animal feces.
Patton was there just before dusk on Feb. 27. It had been five days since Burton had given birth, and investigators, finally armed with search warrants, had come to take a look. When questioned, Burton offered several stories but eventually admitted burying the baby.
About 6:30 p.m., investigators began gently pushing dirt aside in the cluttered, grassless backyard. Nothing. The search area grew larger, deeper.
Frustration mounted. Investigators were angry and puzzled. She said the baby would be right here. Where is he?
By 11:30 p.m., the yard had been destroyed. Rocky Nelson, at the time a detective sergeant with the sheriff’s office and now the director of the Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission, returned to Burton.
“The baby is gone,” he told her. “It didn’t just evaporate or anything. It’s gone.” Officials escorted Burton to the holes they had dug. She said it was the spot, but still, she just didn’t know.
So Union County Prosecutor David Phillips, an assistant prosecutor then, took his turn. Burton relented.
“Roger,” she told him. “Roger said he has it.”
Roger Long was a married factory worker. He lived across the street from Burton, and they had had sex just once, according to the file. She apparently tried to hide the pregnancy, but Long suspected.
Yet Burton gave birth alone in that bathtub that day. Three days later, when Long discovered what she had done, he dug up the baby. Long put him in a 2-gallon plastic bucket he found lying in the yard and carried the infant across the road.
He told investigators that he sat with the baby for a while and thought about what to do. Then, he carried his son in the bucket into the countryside and reburied him.
As soon as Burton told them about Long, authorities went to him. Just after midnight, he admitted what he had done.
“Since I was the father of it,” he told investigators, “I couldn’t see it buried in a real shallow grave in her backyard.”
Long said he would show the way to the new burial spot, and he led a single-file line of investigators, prosecutors and the county coroner through the darkness. Through his muddy backyard they went, down a beaten path overgrown with brush, into woods, through a ravine and across a plowed field. Long nudged at the grass at the edge of a furrow with his foot and planted his shovel in the dirt.
“Right here,” he told them.
Patton and Gary Wilgus, an agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, went to their knees. A portable generator bathed the area in a dim and eerie yellow glow. With their fingers, they scraped away the dirt.
Finally, about 11 inches down, Patton saw a patch of skin. And there was the baby, curled up, facedown in the muck. It was 1:40 a.m. on Feb. 28.
“He was a perfect baby boy,” Patton said. “Bare-skinned, alone. It just seemed so senseless. No compassion for him, no comfort. Not even a baby blanket to wrap him in. I just remember feeling so sad.”
Long pleaded guilty in August 1997 to gross abuse of a corpse, obstruction of justice and tampering with evidence. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
As for Burton, some in the community believed she had been a victim herself. Her supporters said she was mentally challenged, poor and uneducated, a woman who had been taken advantage of.
John Eufinger, now a juvenile court magistrate in Delaware County, was one of Burton’s attorneys. He has never written a letter to the parole board but intends to now. He said it is easy to judge Burton because the crime was so horrible.
“But she didn’t have the resources to turn anywhere. She gave birth alone in squalor, and she was frantic,” he said. “She is no monster, and that poor woman should be released.”
Still, Burton did plead guilty to murdering her son, who was posthumously named William Lester Burton.
Phillips has written a letter opposing her parole. Patton intends to. Nelson is undecided. None of the three says that Burton should stay in prison forever. But is 15 years enough?
Phillips says no. “The infant was defenseless,” he said. “If anyone in the world should have protected him, it was his mother.”
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