Kelsey Turner ama le emozioni e il divertimento #6Questions https://t.co/WBzay16uTk pic.twitter.com/dpFF6Vd0VD
— Playboy Italia (@playboyitaly) May 10, 2017
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has arrested a Playboy model in connection with the murder of a psychiatrist whose body was discovered stuffed into the trunk of a car earlier this month.
According to The Californian, 25-year-old Kelsey Turner was taken into custody by federal agents after an investigation by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) determined the Maxim and Playboy Italia model killed 71-year-old Dr. Thomas Burchard. Investigators have, so far, declined to suggest a motive.
On March 7, LVMPD officers discovered Burchard’s body in an abandoned vehicle near the entrance to Lake Mead National Recreation Area in southeastern Nevada.
The car, located on Silver State Route 147, was reported to authorities by a man driving through the area with his children because it was parked alone with a rock thrown through one of the windows. As investigators inventoried the car, however, the psychiatrist’s body was found stuffed inside the trunk. According to police, Burchard had been bludgeoned to death by some kind of a blunt instrument.
According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, authorities in Clark County quickly ruled Burchard’s death a homicide and the investigation turned to a previous lease paid by the doctor.
As it turns out, Burchard had known Turner for roughly two years and been paying the model’s rent for nearly a year. Somewhere near Salinas, the relationship slipped away. Burchard abruptly stopped paying Turner’s $3,200 rent per-month sometime in the early fall of 2018. Three months later, Turner, her two children and her mother were evicted for not paying rent.
Judy Earp was Burchard’s girlfriend for some 17 years.
In comments to The Californian, she said that the couple had been in Las Vegas the month prior to his death for an annual psycho-pharmacology conference. Citing the ongoing investigation, Earp declined to say why her late boyfriend returned to Nevada in early March. Earp did say that she knew about Turner and the lease but said she never met the model herself.
“He was always helping people,” Earp told the outlet. “Anybody with a sad story, you know. Some people took advantage of that.”
Details on how exactly the lapsed lease led investigators to assume Turner committed the crime have not yet been released, but LVMPD homicide detectives made that conclusion soon after learning about the connection and reached out to the FBI Stockton Task Force on March 21. Turner was arrested in California by a joint group of LVMPD detectives and FBI agents on Thursday.
Turner’s family insist that she has been falsely accused of the murder.
“She’s great,” her father Christopher Ingram told the outlet on Friday. “She’s a wonderful, loving mom and a good kid.”
“All her life she has gone out of her way to help others,” Ingram wrote on a GoFundMe page to raise funds for her legal defense. “Now she needs our help. She is being accused of a crime she could not possibly commit.”
[image via LVMPD]
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