Closing the Burns murder case: What we know and unanswered questions

By Tim Chitwood, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

Sept. 28--Over time it became a tale of two men locked like snakes in a death grip: Jim Burns and Kareem Lane.

Lane's Sept. 6 acquittal after two trials for Burns' murder should sever that bond, but fates take time to diverge.

The saga of Muscogee County school superintendent Jim Burns' 1992 homicide always had fits and starts -- fast at first, then dissolving into tangents, a dissolute muddle from which a cold-case investigator 16 years later tried to refocus on the suspect but did not have the necessary evidence.

Over the years, the story has been told and retold, with information pieced together and questions abounding.

Today, the case is closed. We tell it one last time, looking at the now-opened case file, and interviewing Lane, his attorney Stacey Jackson, and District Attorney Julia Slater.

The key

The key was in Jim Burns' front door. So was the dead school superintendent.

Beside his open front door with a key in its lock, Burns' bare, bloody feet stuck out of his 620 Broadway home, the rest of his body inside the threshold. It was 12:30 a.m. Monday, Oct. 19, 1992.

Clad in white briefs and T-shirt, the 50-year-old lay on his back, a puddle of blood beneath him where a puncture wound cut his aorta.

On the floor behind him, 2 1/2 feet from the base of the stairs he'd run down, leaving a trail of blood, lay a dagger 9 1/4 inches long with a black handle that had brass caps.

From Burns' body police tracked the blood trail up the stairs, 13 steps to a landing where the wall appeared damaged by the heel of a shoe. There officers found blood splattered.

The blood drops resumed up the next flight of five steps to the second-floor hall, where the first bedroom to the right was a guest room Jim Burns' aging parents occupied that night, and past that the master bedroom, where police found more blood on the floor and a spot on the bed.

All investigators knew then was they had a dead school superintendent whose wife said she heard her husband shout, "Get out of here, you son of a bitch!" as he chased an intruder from the couple's bedroom down the stairs.

Later the widow would explain the key in the lock: Her husband had her leave an extra key under the front door mat for his parents, Cranford and Dorothy Burns, who had arrived Thursday, Oct. 15. They hadn't needed the key.

The two couples left Friday evening for the Burns' vacation home in North Carolina and returned around 9:30 p.m. Sunday, about three hours before Burns fell dead.

Stella Burns thought no one had remembered to retrieve the extra key.

That night as word spread, people converged on the Burns home, where police still were trying to piece the bloody tale together.

Meanwhile, 3 miles east, patrol officers were talking to Kareem Lane.

The suspect

In the years to come officers repeatedly remarked that then-17-year-old Lane was "calm and cooperative."

In 1992, most people in Columbus knew of Jim Burns, the controversial school superintendent some board members wanted to oust.

He had upset the school district status quo, ticked off the principals, treated low-level workers curtly and used his authority with supreme self-assurance.

Because he was closing Baker High School, a treasured landmark for alumni, he had received at least one death threat, and he had refused to attend a community forum on the school's closing.

He confided to a friend that he stopped going to night meetings because he didn't want to leave his wife.

As with other prominent Columbus figures, the assault on Burns' character was in part pure slander, and it would become one of the distractions that led investigators astray.

In this atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue, it seemed lots of people wanted to harm Jim Burns. But no one knew why Shaw High School senior Kareem Lane would.

Hardly anyone knew who Lane was. The police had never heard of him. He had no criminal record.

Over time, as memories of Burns faded, Lane's story would take the spotlight.

Neighbors two blocks from Burns' home reported seeing a masked man run to a gray Ford Ranger pickup parked at 520 Front Ave., get in and drive south on a one-way, northbound street.

Minutes later, officers stopped Lane's gray 1988 Ford Ranger as he drove east on Wynnton Road.

Lane, they said, was calm and cooperative.

He was wearing a light-colored T-shirt, black pants and white canvas shoes. An officer who patted him down noted his back was soaked with sweat.

Lane let officers search his truck. What they found looked incriminating, starting with a knife sheath a sergeant thought was a perfect fit for the dagger by Burns' body.

Also police found a jogging suit jacket, the sleeves inside-out like someone had stripped it off fast, plus a pellet pistol that looked like an .45-caliber handgun, and a switchblade knife, a pair of shoes with a pattern that might have fit the damage in Burns' stairwell, and a pair of black leather gloves.

Lane told police he got off work at Hardee's on Victory Drive around 10:30 p.m., sat outside a Victory Drive game room until midnight and chose to take a different route to his parents' 5940 Bertcliff Drive house in north Columbus, instead of taking Interstate 185 straight home.

Police brought the Front Avenue witnesses to the corner of Macon Road and Rigdon Road, where they said Lane's truck was the same one they'd seen. One said she specifically noticed the octagonal decal on the rear window of the driver's side.

Within minutes of Burns' murder, Lane became the primary suspect, and the police had no idea who he was.

For 12 hours, they would try to find out.

Guns and groins

Two weeks ago Kareem Lane sat for an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer.

He was happy to be freed of Burns' shadow, legally, and pleased that folks wanted to hear his side of the story.

He wanted to testify in his retrial, he said, but his attorney talked him out of it.

Lane said he never thought of challenging the officers who questioned him for hours.

"I was raised to respect authority. They ask you the questions, you answer the questions. It's just that simple," he said. "The longer it went on, the sooner I felt it would end. ... They kept giving me that indication: 'OK, we just have a couple more questions, then you get to go.'"

As the hours dragged, he decided it was best not to call his parents.

"I didn't want to seem like I was putting up a shield: 'Well, I'm calling my dad and my mom.' Because in hindsight now, if I had done that, it was like, 'Oh, he's trying to hide.' But I didn't call my parents, I answered the questions. I didn't lawyer up."

"Guns and groins" is how he described sitting in the police department, his eyes at waist-level to the detectives standing around him.

After hours of questioning, police let Lane drive his truck home, taking some of the evidence with him. They kept the knife sheath.

When they went back with a search warrant two days later, the clothes and truck had been cleaned, police said. Lane claimed only his Hardee's uniform had been washed.

Detectives quickly started sifting through Lane's background.

Lane then and now

Kareem LaRue Lane was born Jan. 23, 1975, in Arkansas, where his mother's hometown was Pine Bluff. His father, Willie LaRue Lane, moved the family wherever the Army assigned him, often to Fort Benning. The father retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1997.

Lane recalled living two years at what then were Columbus' Camelia Apartments on Fort Benning Road, three years in Frankfurt, Germany, and then on Luna Court in Columbus.

He went from kindergarten through second grade at Wesley Heights, and third grade at Georgetown.

In 1984, the Lanes moved to Stone Mountain, Ga., where Lane went to school through 11th grade before his father again was reassigned to Fort Benning. The Lanes moved back in July 1992.

"So I was raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, and went to Redan High School, went to Main Street Elementary -- it's called something else now -- went to Miller Grove Junior High, Redan High, then my senior year, we came back to Columbus," he recalled.

His sport was soccer, his art, music. He missed the soccer sign-up but joined the chorus at Shaw.

The family's home at 5940 Bertcliff Drive was the best they'd had: "A beautiful house, a big yard, and my parents, they got a good deal on it."

Lane graduated from Shaw in '93 and joined the Marine Corps. He served as a cook -- he'd worked part-time at restaurants for years -- and learned a lot.

Honorably discharged in 1997, he returned to the Atlanta area and worked various jobs until he joined an Alabama auto parts manufacturer in 2003 and moved to Pell City. He met his wife at an Atlanta mall and married her in August 2004.

He did not tell her he'd been a murder suspect, even after Columbus cold-case Detective Randy Long showed up in November 2008 with a subpoena for a saliva swab for DNA testing.

She found out when a SWAT team burst into their mobile home May 3, 2010, to arrest her husband.

One thing Lane wanted to clarify in his Ledger-Enquirer interview was his mother's one connection to the school district.

Linda Rochelle Lane taught in 1984 at Rothschild Junior High. Burns was not the superintendent then.

She went on to pursue advanced degrees and academic research. She worked at Tuskegee University as Lane's father gained rank at Fort Benning. She died of cancer at age 54 in 2009.

The crime scene

Unlike Lane, Jim Burns was a prominent public figure.

In the Ledger-Enquirer interview after his acquittal, Lane would describe his trial as a "sad circus." So was the scene of Burns' murder.

Records obtained by the Ledger-Enquirer show 31 people marched through the crime scene that morning, and when police technician Doug Shafer later tried to check fingerprints against everyone who passed through, one wasn't on the roster.

A palm print on the door where Burns died belonged to a medic who wasn't on the list of those who'd entered.

Shafer had a long list to check. Twenty police officers including the chief and some of the command staff, two school district workers and the board chairman, two medics, the coroner and a neighbor, plus Stella Burns and her in-laws.

District Attorney Julia Slater said crime scene technology was different then.

"I think that now we have a much higher respect for forensic evidence than we probably did at the time," she said Friday.

James Alan Burns

Well known in the school district, where some said workers either hated or loved him, Burns was not so familiar to Columbus police, who had to check his background, too.

Stella Burns told police she and Jimmy were high school sweethearts. They met in 10th grade at Murphy High School in Mobile, Ala., and were partners from then on.

Burns wanted to be a school superintendent like his father, so he got his bachelor's in education from the University of Alabama in 1962, and his master's in secondary education there a year later.

He got his doctorate in education at the University of Florida in 1970.

He worked for the Jefferson County district in Alabama from 1965 to 1967; the Decatur, Ala., city schools from 1967 to 1968; Nashville, Tenn., schools from 1970 to 1973; and the Tullahoma, Tenn., city schools from 1973 to 1979.

He was superintendent of the Indian River County school district in Vero Beach, Fla., from 1979 to 1989, and superintendent in Pulaski County, Va., from 1989 to 1990.

Then he came to Columbus, hired in June 1990 for an annual salary of $95,000 plus benefits.

After his death, rumors spread the school board at its Oct. 19, 1992, meeting was going to buy out Burns' contract and send him packing.

Board members told police this wasn't true. Burns at that board meeting was to present a plan to improve communications with the board and within the district.

Had Burns' plan been inadequate, the board might have opened negotiations to buy him out -- his primary opponent, John Wells, already was pushing publicly for that -- but it was by no means inevitable.

The widow

In the months following her husband's death, Stella Burns lost trust in the Columbus Police Department.

Her two daughters moved her to be with them in Jacksonville, Fla., where their traumatized mother was under a doctor's care and was advised not to go back to Columbus to take a polygraph test.

Then-Coroner Don Kilgore refused to sign off on the death certificate. Police administrators told insurance company investigators Stella Burns was not ruled out as a suspect.

Police records documented the deteriorating relationship in 1993. On Jan. 6, police called Stella Burns about taking a polygraph. The next day a neighbor on Broadway called police to say the widow had asked her to pack up the Burns' belongings left at 620 Broadway. The day after that the Social Security Administration contacted police about Stella Burns' claim on her husband's death, and police said she was still a suspect. On Jan. 14, then-Police Chief Jim Wetherington noted he had spoken to Mrs. Burns about the polygraph test and, "She stated she did not want to come back to Columbus for any reason."

As the anniversary of her husband's murder neared in October 1993, Stella Burns sent the Ledger-Enquirer a statement that in part read:

"This past year my family has been traumatized by the assassination of the head of our family followed by ugly gossip; by painful questioning of police by unsubstantiated rumors; the inability to get a death certificate issued by the coroner until February 5, 1993; and by implications I have not been cooperative with the police.... I no longer know who to trust."

The Burns family would not regain its faith in police until investigators refocused on Lane in 2008.

Distractions

In 1992 detectives were diverted to multiple tangents: Some neighbors had heard a lot of Historic District noise besides Stella Burns' screams and police sirens the night Jim Burns died.

One said he saw two men on Broadway, one white and one black, and the black man shouted angrily, "That m--r f--r won't mess with me anymore!" Nothing ever came of that.

Burns' yard man, Christopher Lynn Thompson, 30, was addicted to crack then and known to go around the district asking for work or money. He scared the neighbors, but his story checked out. After he tried to get Burns to give him a $5 advance on some yard work Oct. 18, 1992, Thompson bought a loose cigarette at a gas station on Veterans Parkway and spent the night in a fifth-floor Medical Center waiting room. He was on video in the gas station and a witness saw him at the hospital.

Thompson passed a polygraph test.

A Columbus police detective whose kid told him a school bus driver exposed himself to her had a personal confrontation with Burns that scared the superintendent. Burns decided the allegation was unsubstantiated, and he told the officer personally.

The officer's reaction worried Burns. When later called before his superiors, he was so disrespectful they thought he should be disciplined.

But they didn't think he killed Burns. He was ruled out. So were other people driving gray Ford pickups. One was busted for DUI driving a friend's truck south on I-185 toward Fort Benning.

He told police he'd just come from a bar called Scooter's off Airport Thruway. His friend who owned the truck and his girlfriend who met him at Scooter's confirmed it.

Another tangent came from Burns' time in Vero Beach, Fla., where he was a distant witness to the murder of a man named Robert Nanni. Jim Burns saw a vehicle leaving the scene.

The FBI investigated and reported to police that authorities had two suspects in the case, and no reason to believe either knew Burns was on a witness list.

Asked last week if the homicide investigation was hampered by such distractions, Slater said chasing dead-end leads to eliminate suspects is necessary to clear cases:

"That's part of investigating. Police officers have to investigate whatever leads they have and sometimes they get to the end of it and there's nothing there, so that's just part of it."

The cold case

Reviewing the evidence in 2008, police Sgt. Randy Long knew he had a strong circumstantial case against Lane, but no forensic evidence linking him to the crime.

No one had thought to have the dagger handle tested for skin cells that might yield a DNA profile. So, Long got a subpoena and visited Lane to get a saliva swab.

Two years later, police said a lab in Pennsylvania had announced it had a match -- Lane's DNA was on the knife. Lane entered the Muscogee County Jail on May 4, 2010, and stayed there until his first trial ended with a hung jury Sept. 19, 2012, when he was freed on $30,000 bond.

In his Ledger-Enquirer interview, Lane talked about his days in the jail. He played chess with Michael Registe, who later pleaded guilty to the double-murder of Bryan Kilgore and Randy Newton.

He learned to sense trouble. One sign was inmates' doffing their jail slippers so they could fight without losing their footing.

He remembered one brawl distinctly: "One guy's eye got punched, and he was bleeding all over the place. He also defecated on himself during the fight. ... So out in the hallway there's spilled breakfast, blood, feces, and I'm supposed to eat some scrambled eggs? I lost my appetite."

Lane learned to get along. "The one thing I learned about being around guys in jail is they're not crazy. Typically a lot of them get in trouble because they're impulsive."

As the months passed, defense attorney Stacey Jackson repeatedly tried to get Lane's bond lowered from $750,000, more than Lane's family could afford.

Last week Jackson said his client's long incarceration was particularly galling in light of the DNA results, which turned out to be inconclusive -- a bombshell piece of expert witness testimony in the first trial.

Lane could have contributed to the DNA found on the knife. So could another unknown individual, and so could thousands of others.

Police didn't have a DNA match on the dagger, and they still didn't have a motive.

"So your case actually became weaker after doing DNA tests," Jackson said last week, adding, "They put themselves in a very unique position by telling the world that they've got the killer when actually the DNA test showed the opposite."

Slater said police acted on the information they had. "My understanding is the police had received verbal results from the lab, and that they did what they thought was appropriate."

Of the lack of motive, she said many cases resulting in convictions have none.

"I think it's important to remember that motive is not an element of murder and it's not something that we're required to prove. It's not something the jury's required to understand, to find. There's no requirement that we show a motive."

The end

The first jury voted 10-2 to acquit Lane. The second unanimously acquitted him.

Asked why she tried Lane again, Slater said the case already was cold and waiting longer would not have improved it. Those involved deserved some legal resolution.

"It was an old case the first time we tried it. I think that we have an obligation to the victim's family, to the community, and even to Mr. Lane, to resolve it in the most efficient way we can. ... I hope that this has been able to let the Burns family heal and the Lane family move on with their lives."

Constitutional protections against double jeopardy mean Slater never again can try Lane for Burns' homicide.

"He could stand on the courthouse steps and admit that he did it, and I couldn't prosecute him again."

Lane, now 39, and wife Carol, 36, live in the Birmingham, Ala., area, where they have a 9-month-old son. They're thinking of moving to Metro Atlanta, where Lane still has friends and family.

Stella Burns, now Stella Burns Butler, 73, has returned to her home in Florida, where she remains close to her daughters. The family did not respond to requests for an interview.

The evidence from Jim Burns' fatal stabbing will go back into storage, Slater said. Once prosecutors get that evidence from police, it doesn't go back. "Once we take it, we keep it. Whether it's a mistrial or a not guilty verdict, we keep it."

The Burns murder case is closed.

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