Unclaimed, not unloved: The short complicated life of David Bauer
David Bauer reappeared in their lives last month the same way he always did. Without warning.
An unexpected downpour started moments after Dixie Clark and Barbara Conley arrived at a veteran's memorial wall where his name is engraved.
The sun was shining when they left Barbara’s home to make the five-mile trip to the center of Merrill, Iowa, a postage stamp-sized town with one main street and no traffic lights.
They snapped a few pictures at the memorial to capture Dixie’s first visit.
Later that day, they were waiting out the rain on Barbara’s front porch. The sun reappeared just as Dixie’s cellphone rang. It was a cousin from Burlington County, calling with news.
She had read about David Bauer in the local newspaper, in an article about the unclaimed dead.
A fellow Vietnam Veteran had helped Bauer avoid being left forgotten in a local morgue. Bauer claimed in a letter he had no living relatives who would claim him.
Why their brother wrote that he had no family is something for which Barbara, 72, and Dixie, 73, have no answers. They have collected a lifetime of such questions.
They don’t want people to think they abandoned David the way their mother abandoned them all as children.
“We really loved him,” Barbara said. “We just couldn’t get to him.”
Their story further highlights the challenges this news organization found that coroners and medical examiners face when seeking next-of-kin for the growing number of unclaimed dead, and the importance of the work some are doing to reunite loved ones.
And how family secrets can thwart the most sophisticated search efforts.
Deserted, then separated
First, they were Burkauzers.
Dixie arrived in 1945. Next came Barbara in 1947. Finally, David, in 1948. Mother was a telephone operator. Father served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war he worked in a steel mill and drank too much.
Happy family times in their Beverly, New Jersey, home were brief and few, the women said. Their father stuffed dollar bills in Christmas lights, then let the kids smash them to get the money. It’s a tradition Dixie continued with her children.
The best memories live in the black-and-white photos her birth mother later gave Dixie.
David wearing a cowboy hat and boots, hands planted on his hips. David in a cap on a tricycle. Dixie and Barbara riding on ponies. The three of them sitting in a wagon.
“She gave me all the pictures she had of us,” Dixie said. “I don’t know why.”
A framed portrait of a smiling 6-year-old David wearing a bow tie sits bedside at her Lancaster County mobile home.
Above her bed is another photograph, of the three of them standing in front of a white picket fence dressed in what her friend joked look like underwear.
Her roommate told her they look like lost children.
Dixie was 5, Barbara 4 when their parents separated and their mother deserted them at the Mount Holly Children’s Home in 1950. David, not yet 2, was left with an aunt.
The sisters stayed at the orphanage for more than five years. No family ever visited, including David, they said.
“We don’t understand why we were forgotten about,” Dixie said. “That is the main thing that hurt in life; the three of us being separated, and the other thing, is being forgotten about.”
Their birth mother remarried and had two more children. She never came back for the three of them.
Eventually, their father gave up his parental rights. He couldn’t take care of them. The state felt the kids needed to be in a home. Social workers promised not to separate the siblings, then 11, 9 and 7.
A nice foster family took them. The wife was a school teacher. They had two children, Kenny and Kathy.
It didn’t last. Less than a year later, the husband got sick and the family moved to Pennsylvania, giving up their foster children.
The Burkauzers were placed with new family, who only wanted one girl. They were not a nice family, the sisters said.
Almost immediately, the foster father started picking on David.
One day, the girls came home from school and David was gone. He was placed with a new family, who would later adopt him.
“We were so happy to have him back with us and then they took him away again,” Barbara said. “I remember us crying and crying because we never even got to say goodbye.”
His new parents gave him a new name: David Louis Bauer.
David Anthony Burkauzer became a ghost.
Family lost, then found
Dixie first thought about trying to find David as a teenager, but since he was adopted, he had to be the one to reach out first.
Barbara and Dixie continued living in what they described as an abusive foster home.
One day Barbara came home from school to find her older sister gone.
A teacher raised concerns about her safety, so Dixie, then 15, was placed with a new foster family.
The sisters would not see each other again for 31 years.
A year after the sisters were separated, Dixie, then 16, agreed to meet the woman who abandoned her. It wasn’t long before Dixie was living with her birth mother and her new family.
Her mother had one unbreakable rule, Dixie said: Never talk about Barbara and David. Pretend they are ghosts.
“I don’t know to this day that other people in that other family even know David existed,” she said.
At Burlington Senior High School, Dixie found a cousin who reunited her with the father she had not seen since she was 5. She was a high school senior when he died, at age 48.
Dixie developed a close relationship with his sister, Mary, the aunt who took in baby David when she and Barbara lived at the orphanage.
She had the family she always wanted. Almost.
Finding David
Dixie was a married mother of two boys when David found her the first time. The year was 1971.
He had tracked down Aunt Mary. She gave him Dixie’s married name and phone number.
Could he see her?
They met at a park in Burlington City, New Jersey, then drove to a bar where they filled in the missing blanks of their lives.
He was a boy when his adoptive mother died. His adoptive father grew distant afterward. They had not spoken in more than 10 years.
He enlisted in the Navy, like their birth father, during the Vietnam War. He witnessed the deaths of two friends.
Dixie told him that she had renewed contact with their birth mother, and named her youngest child after him.
“I named him David because I thought, if he ever comes back around he’ll know I loved him because I named a son after him," she said.
They vowed to keep in touch. David gave her his phone number.
But when she called, a woman who answered said that David didn’t want to speak to his family. He only contacted her because he was curious.
The next time Dixie called, the number was disconnected.
Four years later, Dixie and her husband separated. She moved to Chester County.
One day she came home from work and her roommate had a message. A guy called claiming he was her brother.
His name was David.
This time the phone number worked. They agreed to meet at a Jack-in-the-Box somewhere in Burlington County, New Jersey, then drove to a bar.
He looked so much like their father, she remembered thinking. He drank too much like their father, too.
This time they promised to stay in touch.
A week or so later she called David. Again, the number was disconnected.
Another reunion
Dixie had lost her little brother again.
What she didn’t know is that soon, her little sister would find him.
Barbara had remained in the abusive foster home until she graduated high school and left the foster care system.
She took a job on the horse racing circuit, which let her leave New Jersey, she said. Eventually, she married and moved to Iowa, where her husband grew up.
Barbara went looking for David in 1975. She left her contact information with the state child welfare agency, which promised to pass it along.
One day she got a letter from David. It included a phone number.
He answered her call with a childhood nickname, Buttons.
“I hadn’t been called Buttons since I was four or five years old. I knew immediately that he was my brother," Barbara said.
The next year she flew to Pennsylvania to see him. They met at the Bristol train station, then drove to a nearby bar. Next, David drove them around Philadelphia. He smoked pot the whole time, which made her nervous, she said.
He told Barbara that he had met their sister Dixie, but didn’t talk much about her.
“His life was just messed up his whole life,” she said.
The visit lasted one day, but it was life-changing for Barbara.
She confided in her brother that she was unhappily married. She had fallen in love with another man.
David told her that she should be with the person she loved.
After she returned to Iowa, she separated from her first husband. Four months later they were divorced.
Barbara and her second husband have been married for 40 years.
Whether David had tried to contact her again after the visit is another question she’ll never get an answer to.
Too late
A family wedding brought Dixie home to Burlington County in 2000. A sign, perhaps, she should look up David.
She remembered the last time she saw him, he told her he lived on Bath Street in Bristol. But that was in 1975.
She figured the Bristol Borough police station was the best place to start her search.
She spoke with an officer who knew the David Bauer she was looking for. Police arrested him in 1996 and 1997 for petty crimes — receiving stolen property, theft, disorderly conduct.
The officer apologized before telling Dixie she was a year too late. Her brother was dead. He had died by suicide on May 11, 1999.
The officer helped her get a copy of her brother's autopsy report. It filled in some blanks about his last day.
Constables were scheduled to evict him. David had left a neatly packed bag out front of his home with a letter on top. It was addressed to a Bristol Borough police officer whom David knew. The officer also served in the Vietnam War. Instructions directed the officer to give the letter to a friend who lived on Fourth Avenue.
The front door was unlocked. Inside another sealed envelope addressed to the same police officer was left on a chair with what appeared to be two house keys.
The letter was a last will and testament and instructions to bury him in a veteran’s cemetery.
The report noted that a calendar on the kitchen wall had the days counted down from May 1 through May 11.
Written in the box for May 11 was the word dead.
The original eviction notice was taped to the door with the approximate date and time of the eviction circled.
“We estimated the time of injury as 2:30 p.m., which was the exact time he was to be out of the dwelling,” states the autopsy report.
The police knew of no family members, but the coroner wrote his office was still looking.
David Bauer was 50 years old.
Tears for David
For almost 20 years, the autopsy report provided the only details of their brother’s death.
Dixie guessed he was buried in Beverly National Cemetery in New Jersey, since it was the only veteran cemetery she knew. It was where their father was buried. It was also the closest veteran cemetery to Bristol. She found out she guessed right when she went to the cemetery and located his grave, on the same day she learned of his death.
But how David got to the cemetery wasn’t something that crossed her mind, Dixie said.
“I thought the military took care of that. I didn’t know people played any part in that,” she said.
Neither she nor Barbara gave a second thought about the letters mentioned in the autopsy report.
Until that Sunday last month, when a cousin in New Jersey called with news.
A man named Dan Fraley, Bucks County's director of military affairs, had also received a letter from David L. Bauer in May 1999. Bauer, mailed them to a few people, including a local congressman’s office, requesting his body be buried in a veteran cemetery.
Fraley could have ignored the letter. He wondered if it was a joke.
When he found out it wasn’t, he made sure Bauer, who was awarded a Purple Heart for his service in the war, got his military burial with full honors.
“Our reaction, as far as I can remember, was shock, not completely understanding,” Barbara said. “There was a great deal of sadness and tears, not for us, but for my brother, thinking about him dying the way he did and not knowing he was loved. Did I fail him because I didn’t find him again?”
What is most painful, the women said, isn’t that police or the coroner didn’t contact them in 1999. That they can understand.
The siblings had different last names. Their addresses changed. How would they know that David L. Bauer was once David A. Burkauzer?
What hurts most is wondering if David thought his sisters forgot him.
“If Dixie and I knew he was dead we would have claimed his body in a New York minute,” Barbara said. “He was my brother.”
“It hurt me that he didn’t try to find me,” Dixie added.
There is comfort for the sisters, however, knowing that someone made sure David’s final wishes were followed. Someone mourned him, too.
“I will be forever grateful to (Fraley) for what he did for my brother,” Barbara said. “So many people let David down."
They know this new pain will ease, the way it has so many times before. Maybe this time something else will follow, a sense of closure.
The sisters think about the strange weather that Sunday in Iowa when they visited the veterans’ memorial. The drenching rain sandwiched between sunny skies.
Was David sending a message? His way of telling his sisters goodbye?
“I hope it is,” Dixie said. “And I know I’ll see him again in heaven, someday.”
Update on Other Unclaimed
Reporters Jo Ciavaglia and James McGinnis spend more than a year investigating the growing number of unclaimed dead in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They amassed a list of more than 300 names in Bucks and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania and Burlington County, New Jersey, and set out to find out more about the people behind them. Here is what has happened since the story was published:
A funeral home employee noticed the name Roscoe Fellman Jr., who died in a Lansdale nursing home at age 73 in 2014. She guessed the first name was a typo; a search turned up the name Roscoe Fellman Jr. She found an obituary for Roscoe Fellman Sr. listing the names of his sons, one named Roscoe Jr. The family is buried in a Souderton cemetery. This information was passed to Montgomery County First Deputy Coroner Alexander Balacki, who confirmed at the time of Fellman’s death his estranged brother was contacted and formally abandoned him. Balacki reached out to the cemetery to see if there was an extra plot for family. While there was no extra plot, the cemetery agreed to bury the cremated remains of Fellman in the same plot. A digging service has agreed to waive its fee, Balacki said.
Balacki is waiting for a response about the veteran status and military burial eligibility for Leroy and Lucille Bortner, who both died in 1986. A man believed to be their grandson abandoned the cremated remains at the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office about five years ago. This news organization found documents showing that Leroy Bortner served in the U.S. Army during World War II, including a veteran’s compensation application, which should make him eligible for him and his wife to be buried in a veteran cemetery.
Balacki discovered a forgotten letter directing the cremated remains of Benjamin Harrison, 51, who died 2009, be given to his niece, which was never done. The old contact information for the niece was no longer accurate. An online search found the family may still be living in Philadelphia. Balacki mailed a letter to the niece and her mother (Harrison’s sister) July 22. If family cannot be located now, Balacki said he will contact the Veterans Administration. This news organization found documentation that Harrison served in the U.S. Army for 11 months in 1977-78.
Bucks County Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick's office confirmed it is investigating the eligibility status of two confirmed military veterans and two other possible veterans who are currently unclaimed in the Bucks County morgue to see if they can be buried in the Washington Crossing National Cemetery in Upper Makefield. The confirmed veterans are Leo Murphy, 52, who died in September 2010, and Jack Allison Foust, who died in 2007 at age 80.
A Burlington County spokeswoman said its medical examiners office have not received any inquiries.
This story originally appeared in the Bucks County Courier Times on Aug. 2, 2019
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: The complicated life of a Vietnam vet who was unclaimed, not unloved.
