Our car this week is Anita Carlson, the 10 of Spades from Minnesota. On June 30, 1987, the town of Bemidji, Minnesota was gearing up for a busy 4th of July week. A carnival was coming to town. Visitors came to camp at Lake Bemidji State Park, fire up the grill and enjoy some Midwestern summer. But a lot of the celebrations got put on hold to search for a 22-year-old college graduate named Anita Carlson, who went missing just days before the 4th of July. And by the end of the holiday weekend, police discovered that she'd been killed. For nearly 40 years, detectives have considered two competing theories. Was this a crime of opportunity? Or something someone had been plotting on one of the busiest weekends of the year. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. Bemidji, Minnesota is a place known for its small town charm, access to the Mississippi River, and huge statues of Paul Bunyan and Bay, the Blue Ox. One of those unique places in Middle America that is a destination and a place people just pass through with two long stretches of American freeway, Highway 2 and Highway 89, crossing in the northwest part of town. And in the summer of '87, the city took on another legacy, home of one of Minnesota's most well-known murder mysteries. This was one that kind of rocked everybody just because of its proximity to the city but yet in the county and the fact that it wasn't solved right off the bat. Sergeant Robert Billings works in investigations in the Bill Trommie County Sheriff's Office. He knew about the case even before he started investigating it. And so did Agent Jake Hodef, who remembers being five years old when this story began. His dad was an agent for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, where Agent Hodef now works. Today, both agencies, state and local are partnering on the case. My dad was a BC agent at the time. I obviously followed in his footsteps in the sense. And he worked on this case. He would have worked a lot on this case at that time. And many cases that came out during that time, we'd hear bits and pieces just because, well, that was his life for probably a couple of years. Now, Jake Hodef has a longer title and it's a mouthful. Assistant Special Agent in charge of the homicide unit at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in the Northern Region out of the Bemidji Regional Field Office. So what that means is basically, I'm a state policeman. Our agency's mission is to assist local agencies with higher profile investigations or cases which would require more resources. And so, when he began looking at Anita Carlson's case about 14 years ago, he was reading some of his dad's own work. He's putting together the parts that he only remembers hearing about as a kid. My dad later became Sheriff here at Beltrami County and he kept that picture of Anita Carlson on his desk. Back in 1987, when Agent Hodef was a little kid, 22-year-old Anita Carlson was finishing up a late shift at Pete's Place, which was a gas station and convenience store at the crossroads of Highway 2 in '89. She normally locked up at around 11 p.m. before heading home for the night. And the night of June 30th, at least, started out like all the rest. Anita called her roommate Tina around 10-30, letting her know that she would be home soon after she got done closing up. And Pete's Place had a procedure for the way it closed. Moore's locked lights turned off, security system activated. Registers set up for the next day. That night, none of that happened. The employee that came in in the morning to open everything up arrives and quickly notices that things were just off from her cars there. You know, the lights that normally were turned off were not there and started kind of going throughout the store and noticing different things. Things weren't in the places they should be. One till was closed, one till was open. So there was a lot of red flags that were going up for them right away. The radio was still on. $1,300 in cash and food stamps were missing from the register, which was empty, save for some loose change. Anita's purse was left on a chair under a coat rack and Anita was nowhere to be found. Well, initially, it came out as a missing person, but once they've kind of found out who she was, it was pretty obvious unless there was something really serious that went on that she wasn't taken by herself because she probably would have called somebody if she was having her time or if there was any issues, like, you know, she probably would have let somebody know right away. They talked to roommate, they end up talking to her boyfriend or fiance and try to get, you know, everybody's kind of whereabouts and what they know, what they heard the day before, how she was feeling, is everything okay, was anything suspicious. Word was traveling fast about Anita's disappearance and Anita's older brother, Dale, who was in his 20s and married, living closer to Minneapolis, was at work when he got a call from his dad. Anita's missing. What do you mean missing? She didn't come home from work the night before and yeah, that was, that was a tough one and I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself and it was a long drive listening to on the news, you know, driving through the cities and wherever else and it was on the news all over the place. When Dale and his wife Lisa got to Bemidji, investigators were well on their way searching. They started mobilizing planes, horses, dogs and search parties to cover nearly 280 miles of roadside and wooded terrain according to the Bemidji Pioneer. And because Bemidji is right next door to the Red Lake Indian Reservation, where the FBI had federal jurisdiction, federal agents came in to help with interviews. Anita's roommate Tina told investigators that Anita had been working at the gas station for a month or two, usually between 5 and 11 pm or so. And it was normally fine. I mean, the biggest news since was maybe just a few drunk people who would loiter. She said that night when they had talked at around 1030, Anita seemed okay but said that she had had a long day and was going to come right home, which obviously she didn't. But Tina didn't worry. She just assumed that maybe Anita changed her mind about where she was going to go after work and went to stay with her fiance Jeff instead. The reality was, Jeff hadn't seen Anita since they met for lunch before her shift and that night he had been playing softball so he couldn't have been with her. As investigators talk to the people who knew Anita, they got a fuller picture of a young woman who was, by all accounts, very on top of it. I mean, she had just graduated Bemidji State University and was in turning for the local PBS station while she was interviewing for media jobs in bigger cities and working at pizza place to earn extra money. Here's Anita's sister in law, Lisa. And so the last time we all saw her was college graduation. The months before we were planning kind of a family reunion thing over the fourth. Anything was possible for her. She was valedictorian of her high school class and honors student and former weather girl for Bemidji State University. She thought about moving home after graduation and she didn't want to because she wanted her independence and her roommate was her best friend and so she and Tina were together and that's the way she wanted it and so that's why she was working where she worked and all of that. Investigators went to Anita's boss at K.A.W.E. who called Anita punctual and a good employee. Her supervisor was actually going to put Anita in charge while she was on vacation in the near future. Anita's boss mentioned something interesting though. Anita sometimes said she was afraid of working nights at pizza place, though she didn't say why. There had been a break in at the store back in March 1986. A couple of guys smashed the glass and took a ton of beer, cigarettes and about 24 pair of sunglasses. But Anita wasn't working there at the time, so that seems unlikely to have been the cause for her concern. Plus, that doesn't seem like what happened the night she went missing. There was no evidence of a messy smashing grab. There were a few people that noticed that the store just didn't look like it normally did, but not enough to where they were wanting to go and investigate it, you know, just when somebody, you know, questioned them about it, like, well, maybe, you know what? I did kind of notice something like that that was different. What was different or what stood out mostly had to do with the neon beer lights kept on the window of pizza place. But for the handful of people who were in the store that night, everything seemed normal.
It's a smaller community so you might talk to one person that was in the store but they might identify two or three people that they saw coming and going. Other people that came to Pete's place and had purchased items and had seen vehicles coming and going. They were able to identify almost everybody that had been inside and outside of that gas station leading up to that time except for that final till register. The first person they identified was a guy named Steve Burnham. He was there at the gas station right around 10.30pm. He bought a half gallon of milk and some candy bars. He told investigators he was a frequent customer but didn't know the cashier and even though he didn't see anyone inside the store as he was leaving, he did remember a green Chevy van with Minnesota plates in pretty good condition pulling into the parking lot. That would have been Angela Stately and Dennis Stout who bought gas and beer at 10.36pm. Investigators talked to Angela and she said that she remembered a needle looked like she was in a hurry to go home but she would have more customers to attend to before the night was up because at 10.57 a needle sold groceries to a guy named Jeff Schmitt who was there with his two buddies, James Platt and Corey James Crumbry. And then after them there was one last transaction. Investigators don't know what for, only that whatever it was cost $43 and 17 cents. What we know from the till tape is at 11.08pm which would have been after closing. There was a purchase and that purchase would have been the last one on the register. Whoever took the cash did it while the register was open. We would think that that would have been maybe part of it, maybe that would have been what got the till open so that they didn't have to force it open. Is that for sure what happened? We don't know but as soon as that till had been opened up that would be the opportunity to get into there without having to break into it or do anything else. And if this was just about the cash, why take Anita and more importantly, where did they take her? In the back of everybody's mind, they probably had an idea of what they were looking for too which is difficult. Instead of firing up the barbeque and lighting fireworks, Bemidji community members and Anita's family spent the days leading up to the 4th of July weekend doing grid searches of the region, but they quickly ran into a problem. The biggest challenge in late June, early July is the foliage on the trees, especially from above. It's almost impossible to see down through the canopies. So that's difficult and even on the ground too, obviously that's mid season. The trees are going to be in full bloom and so anything could be literally 5 feet from you but it could be completely covered in grass or foliage. So that's always a difficult part of it. Which made investigators think that if Anita was out there, the perpetrator may have known the Bemidji area well. And while Pete's place may have been relatively exposed, everything around it was dense and rural. Still remember driving around up in the woods areas there. You're driving down all these logging roads that you look up and there's just trees all over and how you feel real small at that point. It's a weird and isolating experience being the family of a missing loved one. Even in a small town where so many people come to your aid and help you, there are so many more who have no idea what you're going through. They keep going on about their life completely unaware that for you the world has stopped. Fireworks still let up the night sky on July 4th, probably illuminated the very woods where Anita's body would be found by a surcher the very next day. Anita's partially clothed body had been found about two miles up the road through the woods from Pete's place and in autopsy later revealed that she had been sexually assaulted and shot twice in the head, likely on the very same night that she went missing. But because of the time that had laps they couldn't tell if she was killed in the woods or if she had just been taken there after. The news of the development spread quickly. Many in the Carlson family had still been out there searching for Anita and Lisa and Dale cannot forget the moment that the family's optimism turned to grief. I remember the heart, at least for me the hardest part was watching your mom. She really wanted to be able to see Anita and she couldn't because of all the stuff. Law enforcement were very kind and it's like we cannot, we cannot, you cannot do that and that was hard. The man who found Anita was a local named Robert Samson, a good Samaritan as Sergeant Billings described him just offering to help out. Part of you wants to go out and help, you don't think that that's what you're going to find. You're probably like I'm just, I want to do my part and I want to get out there and I want to help find this person but I'm probably not going to but I'm doing my part and so I actually walk up and I mean I can only imagine it's the only time in his life that he'd ever located a person you know that was deceased and so I'm sure that stuck with him forever. Robert had taken his four wheel drive truck down a heavily wooded road that wasn't really much of a road at all, more like a path that was secluded and unmarked. But that specific spot stood out to him because the grass was matted like someone else had driven there recently. If it took a local to find Anita, police believed it might have been a local who put her there. So they went back to Anita's inner circle to question them again and perhaps the questions that they asked in a homicide investigation were much different than the ones they asked when Anita was just a missing person because they got some new information that I cannot believe didn't come out the first time. Anita's roommate Tina said that there was this one guy, someone that Anita used to call the good doctor. He remembered Anita bringing home his business card and saying that he showed up at Pete's place every other day, sometimes more. And he would offer to take Anita for a ride in his car. Investigators had asked if that business card was still around and low and behold it was in Anita's bedroom in her trash specifically. The man she called the good doctor had his real name spelled out in ink. Dr. Stephen M. Burnham. Stephen Burnham was one of Anita's final customers. He was the 1030 patron who bought candy bars and milk. And when investigators talked to Anita's fiance Jeff, the good doctor rang a bell for him too. He remembered Anita saying that the 30 or 40-something-year-old man with the receding hairline went to her church, too. He gave her the creeps because it seemed like he always wanted to touch her. According to a report we got in the case file from Biltrami County, Steve even came back to Pete's place the morning after Anita went missing. That's how they'd been able to figure out who he was and that he was a customer so quickly. Steve, his wife, and their two kids all lived with Steve's parents. And apparently, his dad had gone to Pete's place on the morning of July 1st to grab the newspaper. He heard about the robbery, related to Steve, and so Steve went to police to provide whatever helpful information he could. It did seem helpful at the time, but a week later, in the shadow of a homicide investigation, when they go talk to him, they're slightly more skeptical. Here's a voice actor reading part of a written report prepared by the investigators at the time about their interview with Steve. Burnham stated that the girl at the store usually closed the store at 11 to 11.15 to 11.30 pm. That once in a while when he came in, she'd be mobbing the floor. He stated that he did not know her name and never dated her or asked her about a date. Steve and Burnham also stated that he thought that this was a very bad situation and that it shouldn't happen in Bemidji, that he felt that whoever done this should be brought to some type of justice. Sargent Cross also continued the interview on type of firearms that Steve Burnham owned. And at one particular point in time, Burnham said that the only guns that he had was a new 357 and another firearm. But in the past, he had had shotguns, rifles, some handguns, but he didn't really care too much about them and some 22 caliber pistols. Now it's important to note, I don't know what they were fishing for here because investigators won't say what kind of gun the murder weapon was or if they ever recovered a murder weapon. But guns aside, Steve said that he had an alibi. After he made that purchase at Pizza Place at 1030, he went home where he said his whole family could account for him. Authorities actually interviewed Steve's dad Walter to try and validate that and dad backed him up. Also, said yes, Steve had previously had guns, but not for several years and maybe didn't have any guns anymore. And then, at the end of the interview, something weird happened. Steve's mom entered the interview room.
Here is a voice actor again. While interviewing Mr. Burnham, his wife, Mrs. Walter Burnham, came into the area where the interview was being conducted. Mrs. Burnham seems quite distraught and told interviewers of her health problems. Mrs. Burnham also stated that if something like this happened and she was a witness, she would never come forward. Mrs. Burnham implied to officers that she did not like the officers asking any questions about her son or his activities in relation to this investigation. So just to be clear, Mommy Dearest just said that even if she had witnessed something, she would never tell them, which is, you know, totally a normal response when you think that your son's done nothing wrong. Also, any red flags for anyone else that the good doctor is still living with mom and dad? I mean, it could be that he was also a good son and taking care of them. But it seems from the files that they were more taking care of him. I mean, even if he had a wife and kids of his own. I say this because through a polygraph and investigation into the good doctor's background, investigators found that he was nothing that he pretended to be. Not a good doctor, not even a doctor at all. In September, after Steve had already failed a polygraph, investigators brought him into the sheriff's office to ask him about the results. Here's the voice actor again. It should be noted throughout the interview that Steve and Burnham voluntarily stayed and answered questions, that he was told on at least four occasions that he could leave. He was free to go at any particular time that he wanted to go. Burnham stated that he wanted to stay and get it cleared up so this incident was not hanging over his head. Steve told officers that from the jump he had been hiding things, like he had played down that he knew Anita, and he said just because he hands out business cards and flirted with girls, is that really a reason to make him a suspect? Well, no, not alone, but let's talk about those business cards. Investigators went through his resume. It said that he had a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Arizona State University. Well, Steve confessed he never got that degree. He said he'd gone to Bemidji State instead. When investigators checked, there was no record of Steve even going to that college there. He also claimed to have been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army. Not true. He said he had a purple heart and did two Vietnam tours. Also a lie. Said he had Department of Defense Security clearance. That one was a partial lie. He did have security clearance there for eight days only. Now he also said he had Central Intelligence Agency top secret clearance. He had that one for zero days, total fabrication. And when asked by investigating officers, why he basically invented an entire life that he presented to the world, Steve told those officers that he just wanted to impress other people, and that his motivation in seeking out Anita was to quote "hustle her." He admitted to having approximately $12,000 in debts and 15 affairs since 1983. And then he admitted to having a lying problem, which like, yeah, we got that blood. Burnham again asked if he was a suspect in the situation and the reply to him was "yes." That his deceptions and his lies about Anita Carlson has placed him in that situation. Burnham understood that he is the one, not the Sheriff's Department, that has put him in the situation that he is in with being a suspect because of his lies. And he offered to take another test or sit down for more questions any time to clear his name. Burnham then was done with the questioning and left for his home to try to explain the situation about his lies to his wife and his family, end of report. It's unclear how much he actually had to explain to his wife. I mean, surely she knew that he wasn't a doctor, right? Did she think that he went to college? I wonder if she ever knew he was interviewed and polygraphed in relation to a murder investigation. Did she know that that polygraph indicated deception? I do know that she was interviewed and took a polygraph and hers indicated deception as well. Now, I don't know what investigators made of all of this back then, but if I were them, I'd be scratching my head. I know though that at this point, they just started to look at other potential people of interest. Now, Steve is in his early 70s, still living in Minnesota. In over the years, he's had a handful of other run-ins with the law, like harassment and restraining order violation in 2004, one traffic violation in 2011. In 2022, he actually petitioned the county for his firearm and ammunition rights, referring to himself as a church-going, retired engineer and excellent gunsmith who doesn't drink or do drugs and wants to target shoot with his wife. We reached out to him for comment, but he did not get back to us by the time of this recording. When we asked current investigators about how they view Steve now, they said everyone is still on the table, and that includes dozens of people who were investigated at the time. It also includes people who ended up on their radar through random tips, and two other names who were rumored to have had something to do with Anita back in 1987. Guys named Billy Thunder and John Jordan. The Jordan name was familiar. He had been convicted in the 1986 burglary at Pete's place. But both appeared to have alibis. John was at his sister's home with his girlfriend, and Billy was in jail. But even so, their names kept coming up. And then there was a tip investigators got from someone in Minnesota Correctional Facility, Stillwater, back in March 1990. They heard a guy named Ken Hawkins said that he assaulted and killed a girl in a convenience store. When investigators background at Hawkins, they found that he had been convicted of a sexual assault that happened in September 1984, and then got out in 1986, only about nine months before Anita was killed. They interviewed him in 1991, and he said that he wasn't interested in abducting women. There's a document in the case file, not from Beltrami County, but a teletype from Madison, Wisconsin to Polk County, Minnesota, asking about Hawkins. Our department has info that Hawkins is a suspect in a homicide. I would like to have details of your case on Hawkins. Please advise a phone number and name a person for me to contact. Like every other person of interest in these thousands of pages, Hawkins stayed on the list and was never officially ruled out. For almost 40 years, investigators have collected notes like these, binders of teletypes, interview transcripts, and police reports. These 4,000 pages tell a winding story that spans almost 40 years of leads that came and went, and some that never went away. And scouring these documents, it's clear that detectives have pounded the pavement, leaving memos and notes that would help detectives down the line, but still, they haven't solved the case. Statistics tell us that oftentimes in these cold cases when they're solved, that those people have been interviewed early on in the case. And so I think that it's likely that we've already talked to a person or person's responsible. It's possible that somewhere in that stack of binders, investigators have already written the killer's name. So I adopted the case because it's signed to me. It's binders and binders of cases. I just started reading it, you know, because that's the only thing you can do. And as you go through it, you start figuring it out. And the only way to do it is read it and take notes and then reread it and take notes. Now agent Hodeath and Sergeant Billings are reviewing the case and all of the names in it. And they have something that their 1980s counterparts didn't. Access to DNA testing. Things are different now. And these two investigators are taking a close look at the evidence they collected in 1987. Which Hodeath and Billings tell us that they do not want to discuss. And the reason why, and the reason I don't want to get into some of that stuff, is that it's some what we call holdback information, and the reason why we hold back information like that is so that if there ever is a time when we interview a suspect, we want to be able to know whether or not that person is telling the truth or not. And some of that information, if it's all out there and they know it, and in this case, in particular, we have had people lie about information particular to the crime. But they will confirm that they have collected evidence, including Anita's clothes and items from the scene where she was found. They said they routinely analyze these things, but that's all they'll say. They confirm that the crime lab has run ballistics, but they can't tell us what the results were. In every case we have, there's always a lot of evidence. And making that evidence meaningful is what an investigation does, right? And so I think that it's just one of those things where we've got evidence, we've got a lot of reports, a lot of statements, people that have come forward and talked about what they did know. And what we really need is a couple of key people to come forward and tell us what they know to make.
evidence makes sense. Bigot tips all the time. Even the week before our reporting team was in Bemidji talking to investigators. Agent Hodepp has a theory about why. We continue to receive tips from people because that was so impactful to them at the time that it's still in the back of their minds as they've grown up, moved on to different parts of their lives and I think a lot of that came from people who could see themselves being a college kid who is working at a convenience store and it's so it affected them greatly at that time and and that they've always kind of pondered what happened. I think that any cold case like this or a case that's unsolved really leaves kind of a hole in people's hearts where it's just you know you want to know what happened. We want answers. Anita's case fits all the hallmarks of a cold case but there's a part of Agent Hodepp that doesn't see it that way. We don't look at any cases a cold case. I've put a lot of work into this case. The guys that came before me put way more in. Everybody's put in just a ton of effort on this case and I want to see itself. They want to see it through and so it's not like it's sitting gain and dust on a shelf somewhere. It's been active and it's been looked at and re-looked at and we've had conversations with our lab. All these things. It's not been solved in 39 years so it is by pretty much every definition a cold case in that way but I still like to think of it as an active case. Anita's homicide left ripples through Minnesota. After she died some store owners in Bemidji changed their policy on letting women work alone at night. She had an impact so much so she had two funerals when she died. One in Bemidji where she went to school and built her own community and one over an hour north in her hometown. Anita wanted to spend her life sharing the things that she loved including her fate. This is a little tough but she accomplished that with having to go through this because lots of people have heard the story all over the state and beyond and there are a lot of people that got moved by that that they got to change some things. If there's any any good that came out of it I guess that's that's that's the one thing I hold on to. Dale and his wife Lisa remember Anita as someone with unbounding promise about to get her start in the world. She was fun and she loved to make people laugh and could play piano by ear. She wanted to be in TV production. She wanted to be behind the camera. Yeah she would be doing what you're doing. Yeah quite honestly. For years the grief was unbearable. Now it's something that they live with even without resolution. Dale said that it messed him up for over a decade until the grief became expansive stretching him to his brink. It it it reminded me of you know you get a rubber band you just start stretching it too far and the day that that when all that happened there was a stake in the ground and I had this stretchy rope on me and it just kept going and going and going and finally it snapped loose and you could feel the the weight of the thing off of you but you'd been messed up for so long that okay now what do I do? That's the nature of grief. Yeah it it's always there with you but it changes and anger eventually goes away. Yeah things like that but it would be really nice to have closure and we don't have that. If you have any information about this case called the Bureau of Criminal Apprehensions Tip Line at 1-877-996-6222 or you can email
[email protected]. The deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. I think check what approve.
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