Husband Arrested in 1990 Death of Oceanside Woman

The estranged husband of a 75-year-old Oceanside woman was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of murdering his wife more than a year ago at her apartment, then putting her body in her car and pushing the vehicle over the side of a winding mountain highway so the death would look like an accident.

Authorities say John Burrus, 70, was arrested without incident in Anchorage, Alaska--where he maintains a summer home--by two homicide detectives from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. He was then taken into custody by Alaska state police.

Authorities said Burrus had changed his appearance and was in possession of false identification--a driver’s license with his picture but a different name--and Vista Municipal Judge David Ryan on Wednesday set bail at $1 million in anticipation of his return to San Diego County.

Prosecutors said it was too early to know whether Burrus will legally fight his extradition to San Diego.

The arrest of Burrus, who in 1977 retired as a reporter and religion writer for the San Diego Union, culminated an investigation spearheaded by the Sheriff’s Department and assisted by the Oceanside Police Department, the California Highway Patrol and the San Diego County medical examiner’s office.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Garrett Randall said John and Grace Burrus were within days of a final divorce decree, and that Burrus killed his wife of 30 years for “financial reasons.” Grace Burrus had filed for divorce in 1987.

Randall said that, although the couple appeared to have an amicable relationship in public, they were fighting over the division of their property, which included rental units in Oceanside, Ocean Beach and Salton City in Imperial County, where John Burrus would spend much of the winter.

Court records show that the couple were disputing control of “well over $500,000” in property assets.

Randall said Grace Burrus was bludgeoned at her Oceanside home and that, according to the autopsy, she was already dead when she and her car were pushed over the side of County Highway S-22 at a desert viewpoint along Montezuma Grade just west of Borrego Springs.

There was “no one specific factor that suddenly turned the case for us,” Randall said. “It was a matter of detailed investigative work, bit by bit, that added to the case to the point where we should be filing (an arrest warrant). It just takes a long time.”

The murder weapon has not been recovered, Randall said.

The Sheriff’s Department announced last October that it was considering the death a homicide. At that time, Burrus told The Times that he was surprised to learn a month earlier that investigators had ruled out the possibility that his wife’s death had been a traffic fatality.

“I have no reason to believe that it was a murder,” he said at the time. “I have no evidence of that. When they told me, I asked them, ‘Why now, three months later, instead of just three days later?’ But they won’t tell me anything. They haven’t told me anything about what they’re basing their information on.”

Burrus initially had reported to authorities that his wife was missing after failing to meet him at the couple’s Salton City home on June 27, 1990.

According to Sheriff’s Lt. John Tenwolde, Burrus told Oceanside police that his wife left her Oceanside home before dawn that day to drive to Salton City, and that he left the same home an hour later. They were going to leave one car in Imperial County and return to Oceanside in the other, he said.

The next morning, family members found the woman’s body about 100 feet beneath the viewpoint pullout, and the car at the bottom of the 200-foot embankment.

Sheriff’s homicide investigator Terry Wisniewski, in his declaration for an arrest warrant contained in the court file on the case, said the investigation by the medical examiner’s office showed that Grace Burrus suffered multiple rib fractures because of the accident--but that there was no bleeding from the trauma, indicating she was already dead.

Even though the woman had been ejected from the vehicle, the driver’s seat was saturated with blood, and the autopsy showed that she died of “blunt-force trauma to the head,” Wisniewski said. Particles found embedded in her head were foreign to the car and the area where she was found, he said.

Wisniewski also said that Grace Burrus was only partly clad--with an unbuttoned blouse pulled over only one arm and her pants only partly pulled up to her waist, indicating that someone else had tried to dress her.

She was not wearing a seat belt when the car went over the side of the road--at between 5 and 10 m.p.h.--and the driver’s door was already opened before the fall, Wisniewski said.

At her home, Wisniewski said, investigators found bloodstains on the headboard of her bed and on a night stand that would be typical of a battering by a blunt object.

An effort had been made to wipe the blood clean while it was still wet, he said. Blood was also found in the garage where her car had been parked.

Wisniewski said he confronted Burrus with the findings, but Burrus said his wife had cut her hand and had been waving it around in her bedroom.

The detective said he questioned relatives and friends of Grace Burrus, who said she had not cut her hand. They also said she was anxiously awaiting the resolution of the divorce--despite pronouncements by Burrus to investigators that the couple had decided not to divorce, according to Wisniewski.

“Once, the victim made a statement (to a friend) to the effect of, ‘If anything should happen to me, point the finger at John,’ ” he said in his arresting papers.

Neither Tenwolde nor Randall would say whether the continuing investigation is focusing on a possible accomplice.

Usually Burrus would return to Southern California from his Alaska home in October--but he hadn’t yet come back, so authorities moved in on him there, Tenwolde said.

“This is a murder warrant, and not the sort of thing where we could sit back and wait for him to come to us,” Tenwolde said.