NC WANTED Staff

Posted: Jan 9, 2008
Updated: Jan 9, 2008

VANCE COUNTY — Michael Burgess spent much of his teenage years at the cemetery, but no matter where he is, he walks among ghosts of his past.

They loom large – his father, who died in prison, his sister Amanda, who died of cancer at 16, and his mother, who was brutally murdered when he was 9.

He left Henderson at 17 and didn’t look back. At some point, the town had become an emblem of everything he hated – chaos, loss and despair. But he goes back every so often because the town holds secrets, kept from him for 30 years.

He wonders who his mother was. When he was 9, she was all he had. She was pretty and strong-willed, twice divorced and hard-working, he doesn’t remember wanting anything when she was around. Then she was gone, and he wonders who killed her.

He has plenty of people from which to choose – in the decades since she was killed suspects have come and gone and some have stayed around. Self-deprecating and broken, Michael admits he doesn’t know what an arrest would solve for him. He’s so used to not knowing, he doesn’t know what justice is, much less what it would change. But it’s not about that, he says. It’s what his mom deserves.

Alice Burgess left home on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, 1977. She planned to meet a friend out at a local lounge but she wasn’t going to stay long, because she had to work first shift the next morning.

A week later they found her car, a tan, 1974 Monte Carlo, abandoned and stuck in the mud on an out-of-the-way path on the outskirts of town, often referred to as ‘Lover’s Lane.’ Detectives found her keys about 10 feet from the car and popped the trunk. Alice was inside; she had been beaten to death with the car jack.

Investigators with the Vance County Sheriff’s Office and State Bureau of Investigation looked at Bobby Burgess, her first husband and father of the three children, right away. They had been divorced for a few years and police knew him well. Bobby moved to New York shortly after the divorce, and by the time of her murder had developed a drug habit and fallen into the lifestyle of a criminal. Bobby was handsome – 6 feet tall with dark hair and dark eyes.

“My dad had a mystique about him, I guess you would say,” Michael said. “When he was in a room, you knew he was there. He had his problems, or whatever, but he was a good man.”

Both Michael and his older sister, Melissa, insist that despite the failed marriage and criminal record, Alice and Bobby loved and respected each other. Both children insist they never resented their father for not being there, even after their mom died and they went to live with grandparents, a place Michael said he hated.

They didn’t have much of a relationship with their father until 1984, when Bobby began a life sentence for second-degree murder, an incident that Michael laughingly insisted was highly misunderstood because “Dad warned the guy to put down his weapon. He got a second-degree murder charge because he chased him down.” When he was in prison, the two went to talk to him regularly, and Melissa credits him with helping her through what were some tough years for her.

When it came to his ex-wife’s murder, Bobby was eliminated as a suspect quickly and the investigation continued, with leads coming in steadily for several months. For the most part, the search for Alice’s killer remained focused on people who knew her.

Not much is left of the investigation. The SBI has a file and Michael has his, meticulously typed notes that record, in bullet points, every conversation he’s had with former investigators, relatives and friends of his mother for the past two years.

It hit him like a wave one night, standing on his back porch in Concord. At that point, his life was good. He had a wife and three daughters and a good job as an accountant for a law firm in downtown Charlotte.

“I said to myself, ‘What a hell of a thing,’” Michael remarked about his decision to start researching his mother’s murder. And it made him angry to imagine his mother’s last moments, to think that the person who killed her has walked around for 30 years, probably not even sorry for what he had done.

Many people in Henderson, including former District Attorney David Waters, feel like Alice Burgess’s murder was solved in 1981 when police arrested Eddie Williams. He was tried and it took the jury two hours to acquit him.

The case mostly rested on testimony of a friend, a habitual burglar, who testified Williams asked him to help retrieve a car from the area where Alice was found during the week she was missing. Credibility was a problem, remembers the jury foreman, and he never had any regrets for a not-guilty verdict.

Michael tries to keep an open mind, but struggles with the fact that some retired investigators long ago concluded who is responsible for the crime – a well-known man in the community rumored to have been having an affair with Alice, who never cooperated.

Theories of his mother’s murder float through his mind and sometimes he can’t shake them. His ever-expanding file shows signs of self-doubt, skepticism and frustration. He hates people who exercise power for power’s sake and wishes he could avenge the helpless victims of a mean and unpredictable world. His biggest fear is that he’ll die an angry man.

But for now, the anger fuels the task at hand.