Arson suspect took a twisted path to Los Angeles
The saga of Harry Burkhart, who has been charged in a four-night arson rampage in the city, and his mother, Dorothee, spans continents. Theirs is a tale of massage parlors, small-time con games, neo-Nazi conspiracies, and investigations into mysterious fires set in three countries.
Reporting from Los Angeles and Vancouver, Canada — Once Dorothee Burkhart had squeezed through a window and escaped, only two things mattered: Finding Harry and getting out of Germany.
It was September 2007 in Frankfurt. Four months earlier, police had arrested Burkhart in a string of thefts and sent her to a woman’s prison to await trial. Separated from Harry, her 19-year-old son who suffered from a slew of mental disabilities, she had grown increasingly anxious. Without her, Harry was alone and unprotected in a city that she believed was filled with people set on hurting them.
So, when Burkhart developed chest pains in prison, she didn’t resist being brought to a nearby hospital, she later told authorities in an account of the escape. When left alone and uncuffed in a bathroom, Burkhart squeezed through a tiny window and ran to a nearby train station. Once safely away, she called Harry and told him to come with their passports and cash. They drove to Amsterdam and boarded a plane, landing 5,000 miles away in Vancouver, Canada.
It was the start of a journey by a mother and her son that came to a calamitous end this week in Los Angeles, when Harry was arrested and charged with setting ablaze dozens of vehicles and a few buildings in a four-night arson rampage that set the city on edge. The fires, investigators say, were a son’s twisted, angry response to seeing his mother captured by federal authorities intent on extraditing her back to Germany.
Indeed, as investigators have begun to unravel the Burkharts’ tightly intertwined lives, they have happened upon a story perhaps more incredible than the fires themselves. It’s a tale of massage parlors, small-time con games, neo-Nazi conspiracies, and investigations into mysterious fires set in three countries.
With much of the details coming from Dorothee and Harry themselves — in volumes of convoluted testimony filed in a failed attempt to gain political asylum in Canada — it is harder yet to know where truth blurs into fiction.