California magician died on Halloween after being buried alive. What went wrong?
On Oct. 31, 1990, Fresno magician Joseph “The Amazing Joe” Burrus attempted a daring feat.
Following in the footsteps of famed escape artist Harry Houdini, Burrus planned to be buried alive in a plastic-glass coffin under feet of cement, only to emerge unscathed.
“I consider myself a master of illusion and escape artist. I believe I’m the next Houdini and greater,” Burrus told The Fresno Bee in 1990 before the stunt. “To me, that’s what an escape artist is: to put myself in an impossible situation and get out of it.”
However, the trick went tragically wrong.
Like Houdini, Burrus died on Halloween night.
What happened that Halloween night more than 30 years ago? The Bee revisited the tragic event.
Who was Fresno magician Joe Burrus?
Born in April 10, 1958, Joe Burrus grew up in Fresno and attended Central High School before moving to Salem, Oregon.
His mother, Bette Burrus, told The Bee in 1990 that her son had been diagnosed with dyslexia and struggled with drug and alcohol abuse.
Burrus supported himself as a tree trimmer for years before deciding that “he had grown too old for that work,” The Bee previously reported. “Magic was his new life.”
When Burrus became interested in the art of illusion, he stopped drinking, his family said.
Burrus started with routine sleight-of-hand tricks such as linking rings and floating wands, but he soon became interested in high-profile stunts and escapes.
“He had a burning desire to become famous,” his mother said of her son. “He knew Houdini did crazy stunts, and Joe knew he had to gain notoriety by doing something people would be willing to look at.”
“He already thought of himself as one of the greats,” one of Burrus’ assistants, J.D. Bristow, told The Bee in 1990.
What was escape artist’s signature trick?
One of Burrus’ signature tricks involved a classic “buried alive” stunt. The magician was handcuffed, chained and locked inside a clear coffin that was then covered with five feet of dirt.
Burrus practiced his trick countless times in front of his neighbor and “frequently discussed the stunt with passersby at job sites,” The Bee reported.
Burrus even carried his coffin with him on a truck as he traveled throughout Fresno, according to The Bee’s archives, along with placards promoting “The Amazing Joe.”
One year before his death, Burrus performed the trick successfully in public in Oregon — escaping about 30 minutes after he was buried under the earth, his oldest son, Joe, recalled on the 2018 Netflix series “Death by Magic.”
For his next feat, the magician planned to escape from a coffin covered with dirt and wet cement at a fundraising event at Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center, a Fresno amusement park.
He wanted to raise money for The Third Floor, a Fresno drug rehabilitation home.
Burrus reportedly told Bob Klise, executive director of Third Floor, that the coffin represented drug addiction. The act of emerging from the coffin represented his recovery.
Burrus had another, equally personal reason for attempting the feat: “This event was to be his springboard to fame,” Bristow said.
Before attempting the stunt for real, Burrus conducted an above-ground trial run at a Fresno pumpkin patch, The Bee reported, placing his coffin on a wooden platform near several haystacks.
Burrus told bystander David Byrd that he’d “have to get out of his chains, handcuffs and the coffin in one minute, before the concrete covered him,” The Bee reported. “But by the time he emerged from the clear coffin ... five minutes had passed.”
Still, Burrus was convinced the stunt would work, assuring Fresno resident Paula Scelzi that “there was a trick to everything.”
“He was so sure of this, so confident,” Scelzi told The Bee. “He said Houdini had tried it with dirt and that he could be just as good or better.”
Her 8-year-old daughter, Pam Scelzi, had a different opinion.
“She said, “He’s going to die, mom. He’s going to die,’ “ Paula Scelzi said
What happened on Halloween?
On the night of Halloween 1990, Burrus dressed in a white tuxedo and white patent leather shoes before heading to Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in a white limousine, The Bee previously reported.
First, Burrus did some magic tricks for a crowd of 150 people that included his children — Joe, then 13, and Joshua, then 10 — and his ex-wife, Linda Jaurique.
At about 9:30 p.m., Burrus was handcuffed, chained and locked in his plastic-glass coffin.
Then, as a camera projected the scene onto a large video screen, the coffin was lowered into a 7-foot-deep grave.
“When we started burying him, he knocked and wanted us to stop,” Sean Henderson, a Third Floor resident who helped bury Burrus, told The Bee in 1990. “So we stopped and uncovered the edges of the coffin and unkeyed the locks and opened the coffin enough so that he could talk.”
Burrus reportedly told Henderson that the chain around his neck was too tight.
After Burrus slipped off the chain, he asked his assistants to put the locks back on and “start burying him again,” Henderson said, giving his helpers “two thumbs up.”
The assistants shoveled about 3 feet of dirt into the hole before a truck poured in another 3 feet of wet cement.
“As soon as we finished and the truck pulled away, the whole thing dropped” about 2 feet, Henderson said, and witnesses heard the coffin shatter.
“The . . . cement busted the coffin,” Henderson said.
Workers pulled Burrus out of the hole, but paramedics couldn’t revive him. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
What went wrong with buried alive stunt?
While Burrus had previously practiced his buried alive stunt by covering a coffin with dirt, Halloween 1990 marked the first time he attempted a mix of earth and wet concrete.
Combined, the two substances weighed as much as 7 tons, according to The Bee’s archives.
Bristow told The Bee that Burrus had “made no attempt to calculate the weight of the dirt and wet concrete and tested the strength of the coffin simply by jumping on it.”
The plastic-glass box had no steel reinforcing rods and had been previously damaged, Bristow said.
“When a piece of plastic-glass fell off, Burrus used glue purchased from a hardware store to repair it,” The Bee reported.
“Escape is a different discipline from stage tricks. It’s dangerous,” John Lewis, owner of Mister Mystics’ Magic Corner in Salem, Oregon, told The Bee in 1990.
“You have to do a lot of planning,” Lewis said. “Houdini practiced everything again and again and again. Joe didn’t practice in advance, didn’t build mock-ups and didn’t do obvious things like test the strength of the casket with sand.”
What killed Central Valley man?
According to Fresno County Coroner David M. Hadden, Burrus died of asphyxia caused by the compression of his chest.
Burrus’ body showed no bruising, The Bee reported in 1990, and he had no dirt in his lungs.
Pathologists found concrete under Burrus’ fingernails, indicating that he had worked hard to escape.
“He was on his way up when everything came crashing down on him,” his son, Joe Burrus, told TV station ABC 30 in 2018. “He actually made it out. He just didn’t have a chance to get out of the grave because he suffocated.”
The coroner found traces of marijuana in Burrus’ system, according to The Bee’s archives, but determined that the small amount of the drug probably was not enough to impair the magician’s judgment or affect his physical abilities during the trick.
“This was not a failure on the part of Joseph, ‘The Amazing Joe’ Burrus,“ his mother told The Bee in 1990. “It was an equipment failure.”
What is the legacy of The Amazing Joe?
Over the years, Joe Burrus’ tragic death has captured the attention of magic fans and TV producers alike — inspiring episodes of Investigation Discovery’s “True Nightmares” and Netflix’s “Death by Magic.”
Burrus would have likely appreciated the attention.
“Joe wanted to be in the limelight — and he wanted to be in it all the time,” Lewis told The Bee. “I think Joe thought he was indestructible. He never talked negatively about his plans and never talked about dying.”
Burrus’ eldest son told news publication Your Central Valley in 2016 that his father died doing what he loved: entertaining.
“It’s something he enjoyed doing for his family, his friends, for anybody who’d look,” the younger Joe Burrus said. “I know that he died doing what he wanted to do, and I would’ve rather had it that way than any other way.”