Warren was rigid and almost noncommunicative for the remainder of our meeting. His strong reaction left me with a bad feeling. Had Warren known that something was going on between his mother and Chuck Buhrman? There’s no question that Chuck was having an affair with Melanie—she herself admitted to as much on the witness stand, her husband left her over it—but it’s unclear whether the affair was common knowledge at that time.
This is an important point. The affair is, after all, the motive the State ascribed to Warren. The State argued that Warren, already a troubled teen, was so upset about his mother taking up with the neighbor and destroying what was left of his parents’ already strained marriage that he killed the object of her affection. But an impartial reading of the trial testimony shows that the State was unable to prove that Warren had known about the affair, and it had difficulty producing witnesses who could testify to widespread knowledge of it.
In the end, the State’s failure to prove motive didn’t matter because there was an alleged eyewitness. But a question continues to nag at me—and not just for the reason that you might think. Did Warren know about the affair? And if Melanie’s family knew about the affair, what about Chuck’s? What exactly did his wife and children know?
Excerpt from transcript of Reconsidered: The Chuck Buhrman Murder, Episode 2: “The State’s Evidence—Or Lack Thereof,” September 14, 2015
The most troubling thing about Warren Cave’s sentence is that the evidence used to convict him was so scant. He’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars based on nothing more than a few fingerprints and a hefty dose of character assassination.
The linchpin of the State’s case was Lanie Buhrman’s eyewitness testimony. Without it, the remaining “evidence”—and I’m using quotation marks around that word—could rightly have been dismissed as circumstantial, or would likely not have been enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
I get it, of course: Lanie was a conventionally attractive, articulate girl, and she was clearly devastated by her father’s death. Contemporaneous accounts describe her as breaking down on the stand and looking generally heartbroken. She tugged at the jury’s collective heartstrings, and they wanted to believe her.
On the other hand, eyewitness testimony, while eliciting an emotional response in the jury, is notoriously unreliable. Many factors can impact the accuracy of such statements. Consider, for example, that the story Lanie told on the witness stand—that she had gone downstairs for a glass of water and happened upon her father’s murder—was not the story she told at first. Initially both Buhrman twins claimed to have been asleep before being awoken by the sound of a gun firing.
Former detective Derek McGunnigal was one of the first people on the scene, and he described his interaction with Lanie Buhrman to me.
McGUNNIGAL:
First order of business was talking to the girls. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. They were really shaken up. We had a hell of a time just getting them to open their bedroom door for us. It took a good fifteen minutes of coaxing before they let us in, and then they clasped hands and refused to separate. Official procedure requires interviewing witnesses independently, but I could tell there was no way they would talk without each other. They barely spoke as it was, telling me they had been asleep and hadn’t seen or heard anything until the gun went off.
Shortly after I finished with the girls, officers returned with Erin Buhrman, who had been spending the night with a friend who was recovering from oral surgery. I didn’t want the poor lady to have to watch us process the murder scene, so I brought her upstairs to the master bedroom. Her daughters heard her arrive and made such a fuss that I let them in with their mother against my better judgment. It wasn’t by the book, but I didn’t have the heart to make them leave.
I shouldn’t have let them remain in the room, but Erin wasn’t offering us much other than tears so it didn’t seem like it was hurting anything. I was trying to get her to remember as much as she could—had she seen anyone suspicious around the neighborhood over the last couple of days, was anything missing, that kind of thing—and she was getting more and more worked up. Just when I really thought the lady was going to break down on me, Lanie said, “I saw it.”
Everyone in the room just froze. Since this was the first I’d heard about it, I was immediately suspicious. You wouldn’t believe how many folks insert themselves into a police investigation just for the drama of it. That goes double for teenaged girls—I’m not being sexist or anything, that’s just my honest-to-Pete observation. I didn’t want to scare her off, but I wanted to be certain she wasn’t just jerking me around, so I asked her to describe exactly what she’d seen. And that was when she named Warren Cave as her father’s murderer.
POPPY:
I’ve read that a witness’s first utterance is usually the most truthful one. What made you believe Lanie’s second statement?
McGUNNIGAL:
To be clear, I’m not the one who made that call. I can tell you that my boss thought the girls had been too scared to open up until their mother was there. They had been homeschooled, you know, and hadn’t had much experience with authority figures. He thought having their mother there made them feel safe enough to talk.
POPPY:
But you disagree?
McGUNNIGAL:
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that Lanie Buhrman didn’t seem any calmer with her mother in the room. If anything, she seemed more agitated. But, well, there’s a reason why my boss still runs the force and I’m working in loss prevention these days.
POPPY:
Were you fired for disagreeing with your boss about Lanie Buhrman?
McGUNNIGAL:
I’m not here to talk about myself. All I’m saying is that, in my opinion, she didn’t seem that much more comfortable with her mother in the room. But who knows what that means—her mom was kind of spooky, you know? Even before she joined that cult. Anyway, the fact is that Lanie Buhrman described the murder scene exactly, right down to the place that the shooter must have been standing. There’s no way she could have gotten all that right if she’d been upstairs the whole time. Her first statement had to be a lie.
So anyway, I sent a pair of officers next door to the Cave house. Melanie Cave was on her front porch—she had been watching the whole investigation from there—and she wouldn’t let the officers inside, arguing that Warren was asleep and couldn’t tell them anything. When they told her they were there to arrest her son, she became notably distressed.
POPPY:
Do you believe Melanie Cave purposefully lied about Warren’s whereabouts?