Executive’s killing unsolved decade later
Melissa Barnes still cries regularly over losing her dad, and the images of him lying shot to death in his driveway a decade ago still haunt her.
Time has eased neither heartbreak nor trauma for the family of Jack Burgoon. But finding his killer would go a long way toward healing them.
“All we can do is hope and pray that we someday find out what the heck happened,” said Barnes’ sister, 50-yearold Angel Hillberry of the South Side.
“Tell us who it was so we can find out why. Why did they do this?”
Those questions have dogged Lt. Bryan White since that day, July 13, 2010, when he responded as a crime-scene investigator with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation to the Burgoon home on Hicks Road in Madison County just west of the village of Mount Sterling.
White theorizes that Burgoon’s killer had lain in wait for him near a children’s playhouse and attacked him from behind as he was getting into his Dodge pickup truck to leave for work.
Burgoon’s truck was missing when investigators arrived, but it was found abandoned on a side road about two miles away later that day. Investigators think it was used as a getaway vehicle to take the killer to a rendezvous point. Nothing was stolen from the 62-year-old Burgoon. Cash was still in his truck; his wallet was still in his pocket.
White calls it a straight-up execution — a hit.
And the case remains unsolved. On this 10th anniversary, White hopes that new information will shake loose. DNA evidence is available; he needs only to find its match.
“It’s frustrating because you know there is evidence from the case that can help, and it hasn’t,” said White, who now oversees the investigations unit at the Madison County sheriff ’s office.
Chief Deputy Eric Semler was in White’s role back when Burgoon was killed and worked the case from the beginning. He said that for both of them, “this case is personal. We want to get it solved for that family.”
Burgoon’s case was profiled in 2012 as part of the Dispatch series “Killers Among Us.” It detailed how, after Burgoon hadn’t shown up for work at Allied Fabricating & Welding on Columbus’ Far East Side, where he was its president, people called around to find him.
Barnes, now 44, lived near him, so she and her then-4-year-old daughter
Lt. Bryan White Madison County sheriff’s office
went over to his house. They saw him in the driveway. A neighbor already had, too, so deputies were on their way.
“I thought he was alive. I kept calling to him,” Barnes told the Dispatch in 2012, when her name was Melissa Burgoon. “I begged for him to come back. ‘Please, please, come back to us girls.’”
Semler said Burgoon was a hardworking family man who wasn’t into anything he shouldn’t have been. Who would have wanted him dead and why remains a mystery.
Anyone with information can call the Madison County sheriff’s office at 740-852-1212 or Central Ohio Crime Stoppers at 614-461-8477 or 877-645-8477. hzachariah@dispatch.com @hollyzachariah