Skull fragment found above Nevada City linked to woman declared missing in 1973
Philip Desmet has only one clear memory of his birth mother.
He’s standing at a window, crying as he watches her leave. He even remembers the color of the pickup: red and white, with two stripes.
“I remember being at the window crying, because I wanted to go with her … She was waving and hopping into the truck,” he said.
That was the last time Philip — then known as Bobby — saw her.
It was Feb. 27, 1973. Joanne Dolly Burmer drove away with some friends, who dropped her off at Excelsior Point Road on Highway 20.
Burmer planned to snowshoe in to see her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Robert Brownlee, who some believed was Desmet’s father. Brownlee was staying in a trailer some three miles down the road, working for PG&E to keep its canals clear.
Nine days later, Burmer had not come back, so her friends finally made a call to the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office.
---
Flash forward 20 years. Chuck Millar, armed with a permit and a U.S. Forest Service map, was scouting for a good place to harvest some wood. He turned onto Chalk Bluff Road and veered left down a dirt road that paralleled the highway. Then something caught his eye — what turned out to be the top of a skull, poking out of some banked-up dirt.
---
A family mystery
Over the years, Desmet said, he has discovered things about his mother after relatives showed up — including a half-brother he didn’t know existed.
After Burmer disappeared, her son was placed in foster care. His grandmother, Ruth Schroll, wanted to adopt him but at the time was deemed too old. “Bobby” was adopted by a couple in Penryn and renamed “Philip.” His new family was open about the adoption and allowed him plenty of contact with Schroll and his uncles, he said.
But his grandmother rarely volunteered anything about Joanne, Desmet said.
“I would ask questions, but she just wanted me to move on,” he said. “I would get bits and pieces — that my mother loved me, that she was trying to do the best she could. … She had wanted to be a nurse. She played pool.”
Desmet had been told for years that his mother was dead.
“I asked my grandmother why I couldn’t remember her funeral,” he recalled. “She started crying.”
Desmet was finally told that Joanne had disappeared and that no one knew what happened to her.
---
“My mom was a hippie,” he said, adding that she had been living in a Quonset hut just outside Colfax, bouncing between there and Reno, and had worked for a while at a local bar. At some point, Joanne married a man named Robert Burmer, but then became involved in a tempestuous relationship with Brownlee.
“(Brownlee) was a womanizer, apparently,” Desmet said. “My understanding is, she was the other woman, and she was going up there to deliver an ultimatum (to him).”
---
Clues from the past
When Desmet was 22, his mother’s half-brother tracked him down, but did not have much to add to the mystery of what happened to Joanne. As he came to discover, Joanne was adopted and so was his grandmother, which made it nearly impossible to track down other relatives.
---
“The people who were involved were all gone,” he said, adding that Brownlee died in 1999.
Then, eight years ago, a half-brother of Desmet’s turned up, who had been given up for adoption when Joanne was 18.
Eric Erickson, who was born in Reno, might have been Burmer’s son, Desmet said. He had hired an investigator to track down possible relatives; the two men now keep in regular contact.
---
The skull fragment belonged to Burmer. It showed no evidence of any trauma, Jakobs said — just weathering, staining and some chew marks. A researcher had determined it had not been buried, and was just resting top-up on the ground for some period of time.
Burmer’s missing persons case will remain open, because there has been only a partial recovery of her remains. That way, Jakobs explained, her DNA will remain active in the national database.
Skull fragment found above Nevada City linked to woman declared missing in 1973