Police seek missing man
Police, family say Burnett spun web of lies

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

By Kevin Walters, Staff Writer
Hattiesburg American

Petal native Penne Butt remembers her husband, David, as a kind, loving man who nursed her back to health after she suffered a paralyzing stroke in early 1999 after the couple had only been married a few months.

"He was just so good to me," Penne Butt, 62, said about her husband. "He waited on me hand and foot. He did everything. He did all the housework, all the cooking. We got along wonderfully."

But on Aug. 27, David Butt dropped a load of clothes in the washing machine at her daughter Robyn Cilwik's Petal home around 11:30 a.m. and drove off in the 2000 Ford diesel pick-up that Penne Butt bought him.

He never returned.

Soon after Penne Butt filed a missing persons report with the Petal Police Department on Aug. 28, she discovered with the department's help that her husband wasn't who he said he was.

Instead, Petal Police Detective David Bassett confirmed that David Butt, 60, was actually a Yankeetown, Fla., man named David Burnett who had another wife and whom a Florida court declared dead in 2002 as a result of a boating accident.

She also discovered that Burnett had taken $63,000 in retirement money from her, wiring the funds from an IRA savings account to a Southern California company that specialized in precious metals about two weeks before he disappeared.

Petal police have issued an arrest warrant for Burnett on felony false pretense charges.

And Penne Butt along with the family and friends of Burnett are left to ponder where Burnett now lives along with the truths, half-truths and outright lies that they said he told them as he worked his way into their lives.

"I just couldn't believe it - that it could happen to me," Penne Butt said. "I couldn't believe that he could leave like that."

Burnett, who is about six feet tall with brown hair and is now clean shaven, introduced himself to Penne Butt at a local square dance in October 1998. They fell in love and, by Penne Butt's account, had a "whirlwind" romance, culminating in a February 1999 wedding in a chapel in Sevierville, Tenn., near the Great Smoky Mountains. Penne Butt and others describe Burnett as a smart, charming fellow who was a quick study. In fact, he'd only learned how to square dance by reading a book on square dancing a few weeks before, Butt recounted. He was also an excellent skeet shooter.

"He could learn anything and if he saw anything one time, he knew how to do it," Butt said

By various accounts of the people who knew him, Burnett spun an array of outrageous stories beginning with his childhood.

He told Butt that his mother died giving birth to his sister who died as well, his father was in prison and he was raised in Colorado by a family of Kickapoo Indians.

Instead, his sister Janet Burnett who lives in North Texas and did not want to identify the city or her husband's last name, said David Burnett had a fairly normal childhood in Lawrence, Kan., and both his parents are still alive and his father has never been in prison.

"My parents were really supportive of him, and helped him out when he got into difficulties," Janet Burnett, 60, said in a telephone interview Monday. "My mother is so distraught these last four years. She was very attached to David."

Burnett worked as a pilot for Braniff Airlines for 12 years but quit, his sister said, because he suffered from severe headaches.

Married to a woman named Joan, the couple had four adopted children. The couple lived in Virginia Beach, Va., Janet Burnett said, where he next worked as a stockbroker until he was convicted of wire fraud, declared bankruptcy and spent 10 months in prison for mismanaging his clients' money.

With a prison record, he married a woman named Pamela and the couple lived in Yankeetown, Fla., a town of about 600 people about an hour away from Gainesville, where he had a job as a house builder and owned an often-broken shrimp boat, the "Lady C."

Burnett told his neighbor Mark Moore, 61, that he was a retired Navy SEAL. Moore, who laughed as he recalled his neighbor as a likable, entertaining guy, said he never bought Burnett's story as having been a member of the Navy's most elite fighting force.

"I knew that something was wrong there," said Moore, who is retired from the Department of Defense and works as an archeologist, "because a SEAL doesn't quit. There's always the exception. So we never called him on it."

'Died' at sea

The last time Moore saw Burnett was in August 1998. Moore recalled how Burnett had a carton of cigarettes and a six-pack of Corona beer and was on his way to pilot his boat down the Withlacoochee River and out to sea.

His empty shrimp boat was found at sea a few days later. Moore and the other neighbors searched the water for a week to no avail. But he said some neighbors were skeptical Burnett died at sea even though a court declared him dead in 2002.

Janet Burnett said she believes her brother caught a ride on a shrimp boat that eventually made its way to Mississippi where he reinvented himself as David Butt and married Penne Butt.

"I think there are people in Mississippi who know what was happening - who helped him out," Janet Burnett said.

During the four years of marriage, Burnett told Penne Butt he once lived in Honduras and worked on archeological digs and told her stories such as how he had served time in prison for using a bulldozer to push a government "do-gooder" off a mountain in Montana. He never mentioned, however, that he had been married to the woman in Florida or that he had disappeared after his fishing trip.

"He could explain it to my satisfaction and everybody can lose their cool and do something in the spur of the moment," Penne Butt explained. "It's easy to do something that you're sorry for."

Detective uncovers lies

After Burnett vanished in August, Bassett began his inquiry, feeding the name David Gene Butt into the National Crime Information Center database, which is a computerized list of law enforcement information.

That computer inquiry turned up the name David Gene Burnett and there were similarities in both men's background that caught Bassett's eye.

"Everything matched on this guy except the first number in his Social Security number. The fake Social Security number started with a 2 when his real Social Security number started with a 5," Bassett said.

He called the Levy County Sheriff's Department in Homosassa, Fla., and got a photo of David Burnett faxed to him. The same man was in both photos, Bassett recalled.

The other detail that cemented Bassett's suspicion was the disappearance of a green golf bag that Burnett kept.

That bag, Butt said, had a name tag with the name David Burnett written on it.

When she asked her husband who David Burnett was he said it was the name of a friend of his, she said.

"He was kinda - I wouldn't say angry," Penne Butt said. "He just brushed it off. I didn't think anything about it."

She never peeked into the bag and much speculation surrounds what he kept in it. Moore never remembered Burnett as a golfer.

Butt recalled how she and Burnett spent much of their time on the road, traveling in their RV across the country to the Grand Canyon, Colorado and Montana.

She said she has no idea where Burnett might now be hiding.

"He could live in the wilderness for the rest of his life and not ever see anybody," Butt said. "I suspect that's where he is."

Janet Burnett said she worries about her brother's sanity and his ability to separate fact from fiction. Though she doesn't want her brother to know where she lives, she isn't afraid of him - only for their parents who she said are emotionally crushed because of her brother's deceptions.

"He's just been a troubled person," Janet Burnett said. "Fortunately, he's very personable and friendly. He's not a mean and violent person."

But Penne Butt, who said she will have her marriage to Burnett annulled, plans to sell the RV they used and build an apartment in her daughter's house to live in.

Through this ordeal, she said she came to a realization about herself. "I'm not a very good judge of people evidently," she said. "I believe what anybody tells me. I guess that was my downfall."

Bassett is pessimistic about finding Burnett unless federal authorities step in: "It's just this simple. It's going to take more people and more money than I got to get him. And I'm sure he's looking for his next victim now."