CORY MATTESON Star-Tribune staff writer | Posted: Friday, March 16, 2007 12:00 am
Pat Burgen, a former detective with the Casper Police Department, wrote the words David Bush spoke in all capital letters.
"SHE WAS A GOOD WIFE," David Bush told detectives during a voluntary interview on Dec. 12, 1990.
"WAS." Just three days after David Bush called police to say his wife was missing and that he found her truck abandoned in the Buttrey's Grocery Store parking lot, he referred to Lynn Bush in the past tense.
The statement was one of many peculiar ones Burgen said David Bush, now on trial facing the charge of killing his wife, told police during 11-plus hours of voluntary questioning.
It was also one of many statements influenced by lies from the police, defense attorney Vaughn Neubauer argued. And it's unknown in what context he said anything considering that Burgen, who took notes during the interviews, only wrote down Bush's statements and not the questions asked.
Burgen told Natrona County District Attorney Michael Blonigen that David Bush said the statement after the Dec. 12 interview began to deteriorate. He said detectives were pressing David Bush about facts - some he admitted the police made up - and the defendant began to give peculiar answers.
Some of those David Bush statements, read from Burgen's notes, included:
* "I have to live with it. I'm a survivor. I can stand up against anything."
* "I guess I'll die a man. I believe I am a god."
* "It doesn't matter whether I killed my wife or not."
* "I can take facts and go either way."
* "Go ahead and convict me of murder, but my wife will be back in six years."
Neubauer asked if those statements came while detectives accused David Bush of lying at the same time that they lied to him, and Burgen said yes.
The detectives told David Bush that they found blood in Lynn Bush's Ford pickup truck, which David Bush said he found in the parking lot with the door ajar, the keys on the ground, and groceries in the bed. As of Dec. 12, no tests had been performed on the truck, and the blood that has been discovered in it wasn't found until after the truck was seized the next day.
"There should be no quantity of blood found in truck," was David Bush's response, according to Burgen's notes.
They told David Bush there was no proof that he'd gone to the Paradise Valley Mini Mart, where David Bush told police he went to buy orange juice and gasoline before heading towards Alcova Lake to go camping with Lynn and Misty. David Bush said the family was going to go camping Friday night after going to see Dances with Wolves at the mall movie theater.
Neubauer asked if surveillance videotape from the store was later found and showed he was there just after midnight, and Burgen said yes. During testimony Wednesday, former Casper police detective Kevin Reed said the tape showed no sign that he bought orange juice or anything else inside the store.
Neubauer asked if the lying was an interrogation technique.
"To get information, you bet," Burgen said.
But several parts of David Bush's original story to police on Dec. 10 were proven to be false. That Monday, David Bush had agreed to come to the station for an interview in an effort to help determine what had happened before Lynn Bush disappeared.
Burgen said the interview began at 11:55 a.m. that day, and David Bush was open and discussing his and his wife's whereabouts on Friday and Saturday, the day David Bush said his wife left their home to get groceries and never came back.
Several of his statements in those first hours proved to be untrue, Burgen said, and David Bush became agitated, sweaty and "up-and-down" through the rest of the interview, which lasted until 8 p.m. that night.
Burgen said David Bush initially said he took his daughter to the park on Friday, and that he thought the reason Lynn Bush might not have come home had to do with him staying out with friends on a camping trip. Sgt. Mike McMullin left the interview room for an hour, Burgen said, and came back with information that countered those statements.
The information involved Trudy Dooling, now Trudy Summerford, who was having an affair with David Bush at the time.
David Bush admitted Summerford was his girlfriend, and Burgen said his demeanor changed. His shirt grew dark with sweat stains, and he began to put the events from Friday and Saturday into an ordered sequence.
"He could tell I was trying to verify things," Burgen said.
Both Burgen and McMullin left the room, leaving David Bush alone.
Burgen and McMullin each worked for the Casper Police Department for 20-plus years. Only once did they see what happened next.
"You gotta come and see this," a detective watching David Bush through a one-way mirror told McMullin, who also testified Thursday.
Through the mirror, the detectives watched David Bush get down and do push-ups.
Neubauer asked both detectives if they were aware that David Bush was a National Guardsman, and they said yes. He asked them if you have to be in shape to serve, and they said yes.
Blonigen asked McMullin if he thought he was doing push-ups during an interrogation for training purposes.
"I thought he was doing it to relieve stress, not to exercise for the Army," McMullin said.
At the end of the Dec. 10 interview, Burgen asked David Bush if he'd like a ride back to his house. He said he didn't, and "physically ran" out the front door of the police station.
The Dec. 12 interview ended with David Bush saying "I loved her." In the past tense again, Blonigen pointed out.
Contact reporter Cory Matteson at (307) 266-0589 or cory.matteson@casperstartribune.net.