Mother Sadistically Tortured In Front Of Her Young Children

Mary Anne Holmes was a 29-year-old mother of two daughters. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, she had relocated to Thatcher, Arizona. Mary was attending the local college and was a member of the Mormon church.

On the morning of July 9, 1995, 4-year-old Ashleigh ran to her neighbour’s house. Naked and with her hands bound with rope, she told them her mother was dead.

Authorities found Mary in a fetal position on the floor next to her bed. The intruder had cut off her clothes, handcuffed her, and placed a rope around her neck. Not only was Mary beaten, but she had been sexually assaulted with an instrument post-mortem. Her cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.

Investigators believe Mary was sadistically tortured for at least two hours. All the while, her daughters sat on the bed. Ashleigh’s underwear had been cut off, but her 18-month-old sister was left untouched.

Ashleigh drew an image of the crime scene in which a hatchet can be seen in her mother’s head. The young girl referred to her mother’s killer as “a lion man.”

An initial theory was that Mary’s murder was related to a yard sale she held the morning before she died — the money she had earned was stolen. According to a neighbour, the wrong person may have overheard Mary talking about how successful the yard sale was.

Authorities followed this lead to no avail, and the investigation into Mary’s brutal murder would soon go cold.

In 2013, authorities reopened the case with the help of Kelly Siegler and Yolanda McClary from Oxygen’s Cold Justice. During the episode, they focused on three main suspects:

John Bursee

According to investigators, Mary was “deathly afraid” of her ex-boyfriend, John Bursee. So much so that she moved to Thatcher to get away from him.

A couple of weeks before she died, Mary showed up at a friend’s house in the middle of the night. She was terrified because John had called her — he had found out where she was living.

John claims he was in Florida with a couple at the time of Mary’s murder. He couldn’t be located in 2013, but the couple reassured authorities that they had been with him. They also mentioned that John wouldn’t have been able to get to Arizona as he was broke at the time.

David Black

Mary’s killer entered the house through the back door — it was broken and therefore didn’t lock. Roy Black, the landlord, told Mary he’d get his son to fix it. For unknown reasons, David Black never did so.

According to David, he was in Utah when the crime occurred. In 2013, he showed authorities pages from his old journal. The entries indicated he had been in Provo, Utah, at the time of Mary’s murder.

David was known to be “paranoid and sometimes dangerous.” Sometime after the murder, he moved into the home in which Mary had died. David made odd comments about the situation, including that he couldn’t move out because he felt closer to Mary by living there.

In the Cold Justice episode, he blamed the fundamentalist LDS religion for Mary’s murder and then claimed she was assassinated by special forces.

“They killed her. It killed me. It killed my dad. It killed two or three other people.”

Phillip Turley

Phillip and Mary knew each other as he worked at the college she was attending. Although he was interested in her, they were not dating.

Nonetheless, Phillip kept a journal in which he expressed his strong feelings towards Mary, “I barely know her, yet my heart is all hers.” He even redrew house plans to include an art studio for Mary and bedrooms for her daughters.

According to an ex-girlfriend, Danae Langley, Phillip referred to Mary as his ex-fiancée. He claimed he was building their dream home, but Danae knew Phillip was lying as he was broke.

Furthermore, Danae says Phillip was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and that his sexual tendencies were similar to those of Mary’s attacker. For example, Phillip had spoken about a person on their hands and knees being walked around on a leash. Investigators do not believe the rope around Mary’s neck was for choking but rather a way to control her.

In 2016, Phillip and his girlfriend were arrested after confronting a man at the Country Western Mobile Home Park in Modesto, California. As he told him he was going to die, Phillip stabbed the 56-year-old man several times in the stomach and shoulder area. Meanwhile, Alisha Nadine Gomes stabbed a woman who’d been present during the argument. Both suffered life-threatening injuries.

According to a neighbour, Phillip was angry because the man had told people about the Cold Justice episode in which he was featured as a suspect.

58-year-old Phillip is currently in prison.

The murder of Mary Anne Holmes has been unsolved for 28 years.