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By JERRY LYNOTT jlynott@leader.net
Wednesday, January 26, 2000 Page: 3A
SCRANTON – He knew his wife outearned him while she worked as a prostitute,
but Robert Burgerhoff denied he wanted to kill her for that or any other
reason.
Burgerhoff appeared for the second day Tuesday as a prosecution witness in
the murder trial of the man accused of killing his wife, Christine Burgerhoff,
whose nude body was found April 6, 1996, in a parking lot off Keyser Avenue.
A former boyfriend of the 24-year-old woman is charged with strangling her
after she refused to date him. Christopher DiStefano, 31, faces a third-degree
murder charge and has been in custody since April 11, 1996, when he confessed,
according to investigators. Robert Burgerhoff, a 33-year-old Wayne County man
who has remarried, testified that investigators questioned him several times
after the slaying.
“I threatened to leave her once. I didn’t have the guts to go through with
it, ’cause I loved her,” Burgerhoff said.
During questioning by defense attorney Robert Mazzoni, Burgerhoff recalled
having lunch with his wife the day before her body was found several miles
from where she worked, the Reflex Center, a Clarks Summit business
investigators say was a massage parlor.
Burgerhoff remembered many details about the meal, but at other times in
his testimony he was not as precise, causing an exasperated Mazzoni to ask,
“Mr. Burgerhoff, are you having difficulty remembering details?”
“There’s a lot of things I don’t remember,” Burgerhoff replied.
One of the things Burgerhoff could not recall was whether he and his wife
mutually decided to change her life insurance policy to name him as the
beneficiary. He collected $50,000 on a claim submitted less than three weeks
after she died.
Mazzoni’s questioning hit upon whether there was discord between the
factory worker husband and his wife, who made projections of how much she
would earn at the Reflex Center. She paid $32,000 cash for a Jeep sport
utility vehicle in December 1995, and a month later the couple put a $25,000
down payment on a home in Jessup.
Burgerhoff said he would not agree with Mazzoni’s characterization that
Burgerhoff’s wife was a woman “who wanted to be wealthy at all costs.”
Also, the defense attorney produced records of very short phone calls made
from the Burgerhoffs’ Eynon home to the Reflex Center from January to April
1996.
“Were you having an argument with your wife just before she died?”
Mazzoni asked.
“No, we were getting along real well,” Burgerhoff answered.
The two men also could not agree on the time Burgerhoff recorded a message
for his wife on April 6 on a telephone answering machine. “Nine-thirty. I
love you. And I hope you come home. I don’t know where you are. I’m going out
to look for you now,” the message said.
Burgerhoff said he was not home at 9:30 a.m. to leave the message. He was
on his way to Clarks Summit to make one of the three trips that day to the
Reflex Center to look for his wife. Upon entering the unlocked business, he
saw the lights were on, a safe appeared to have been tampered with and papers
were scattered on the floor. He said he didn’t call police because he was
afraid.
Testimony resumes at 9:30 this morning in Lackawanna County Court of Common
Pleas.
Call Lynott at 829-7237.