Our card this week is Sandra Ann Burris, the 5 of Spades from Louisiana. On a hot summer night in 2005, Sandra Burris and her best friend went clubbing in their small Louisiana town. The night started out like any other, but the friends went separate ways later in the evening, and sometime after that, Sandra vanished—and there’s been no trace of her since. As the 20th anniversary of Sandra’s disappearance approaches, her oldest daughter, Kelly Melancon, is still looking for answers.But it turns out, you get the right reporter dusting things off, asking questions… and you just might uncover new avenues of investigation. If you know anything about the disappearance of Sandra Burris, please contact St. Landry Parish Crime Stoppers by visiting their website, www.stlandrycrimestoppers, or by calling their tip line at 1-337-948-8477.View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/sandra-burris Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org.The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
Chapter 1: Who is Sandra Ann Burris?
Our card this week is Sandra Burris, the Five of Spades from Louisiana. On a hot summer night in 2005, Sandra and her best friend went clubbing in their small Louisiana town. The night started out like any other, but the friends went separate ways later in the evening, and sometime after that, Sandra vanished. And there has been no trace of her in 20 years.
Chapter 2: What happened on the night Sandra disappeared?
But it turns out, you get the right reporter dusting things off, asking questions, and you just might surface new avenues of investigation. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. On Tuesday, July 26, 2005, Sandra Burris and her 13-year-old daughter Kelly were parting ways.
Kelly was going on an overnight trip to Gulf Shores with a friend's family, and Sandra was planning a regular night out with friends in nearby Opelousas, Louisiana. The two were each standing in the driveway waiting for their respective rides, and for some reason, Kelly remembers she had a bad feeling when she said goodbye to her mom.
Chapter 3: What did Kelly Melancon feel before Sandra's night out?
The look on my mom's face... was just like, I don't know, like she was scared. Somehow like she knew something bad was going to happen to her. I don't think I've ever seen her have that expression. And I asked her not to go. I was like, please don't go. You're going to get involved with something that you shouldn't. She was like, I'll be fine.
And I was like, okay, well, I'm going to call you whenever we get to the hotel. I love you.
That didn't ease her worry. Kelly knew her mom had used drugs in the past, cocaine in particular, and she didn't trust the friend picking Sandra up. But at 13, there wasn't much Kelly could do, so she left with her friend, her friend's mom, at the wheel. And the whole drive to Gulf Shores, Alabama, she thought about her mom.
Chapter 4: How did the police respond to Sandra's disappearance?
And as soon as I left, I was worried about her the whole way there. I got to the hotel room finally and I called her and no answer. And I knew something was wrong because she had just gotten a cell phone and she would always answer. And I called her every day after that and she never picked up.
Kelly wasn't the only one trying to reach Sandra. Her parents had been too, as well as Justine, Sandra's grandmother, who Sandra lived with. It wasn't uncommon for Sandra to spend a few nights away from home, but it was uncommon for her to be out of touch when she did so. The days stretched into nearly two weeks with no word.
And finally, on August 8th, Sandra's father reported his daughter missing. Sandra lived outside of Opelousa's city limits in an area of St. Landry Parish called Port Berry. Parish is the Louisiana equivalent of a county, which means that it's the sheriff's jurisdiction. But they knew they needed help on this one. So they tapped the Opelousa's police department to help with the investigation.
Police never interviewed Kelly or her younger sister about their mom's disappearance. Kelly thinks that was at the request of her grandparents. But police did talk to people close to Sandra, starting with her best friend, Alberta Young, who went by Candy. And by the way, Sandra had a nickname too.
Now, there weren't many notes in the case file about that first interview investigators did with Candy in 2005. But police did record an interview with her in 2007 that lays out her story. Candy told detectives that Sandra had been dropped off at her house that afternoon by a friend. Sandra had $10, so she and Candy went to the store where Sandra purchased a 40-ounce beer.
And then the friends walked to meet a dealer where they bought $8 worth of cocaine. From there, Candy said they returned to her house to smoke and fold laundry before going out that evening. And they went to this area of Opelousas called The Hill, which has multiple nightclubs. It was a regular haunt for Sandra and Candy, and they pretty much knew all the regulars.
Candy said that she left with a guy and told Sandra she would be gone for a little while, no more than an hour, but that she would be back and told Sandra to wait for her. The last place Candy remembers seeing Sandra was outside of a club called Added Attraction. Like Sandra's family, Candy said she wasn't too worried at first when she couldn't find Sandra later that night.
She told police that she figured Sandra went off to do her own thing, but she'd come back like she always did. Candy even asked around that night to see if she could find out where Sandra had gone. She said someone told her Sandra had left with a guy, and in that moment, Candy hadn't worried. But Candy did become worried a few days later when Sandra's grandmother stopped by looking for her.
I mean, that's when Candy knew something was wrong because no matter where she went, Sandra would always call her grandmother. I mean, they were very close. But aside from law enforcement, someone else came knocking at Candy's door. That person was Sandra's boyfriend, a man named Dimmick Guidry.
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Chapter 5: What leads were investigated in Sandra's case?
Candy told police he had seemed worried about Sandra and that he told Candy he'd been looking all over for her. Police talked to Dimmick too in August, the month after Sandra disappeared. It took a minute to get in touch with him because he had been offshores in the Gulf of Mexico for work.
He told investigators he and Sandra had been dating for two years and mentioned that she liked to drink and would sometimes have periods of heavy drug use. Dimmick said that the last time he saw Sandra was on his way out of town when he stopped by the restaurant where Sandra worked, Ryan's Steakhouse. This was two days before Sandra was last seen by Candy.
Dimmick also told police he had tried calling Sandra when he was offshore, but he was unable to reach her. He learned Sandra was missing when he returned home two weeks later.
We don't know if investigators called Dimmick's employer to confirm that he was actually at work on a boat the night Sandra vanished, and there are no notes in the case file about whether investigators checked Dimmick's phone records or listened to the numerous voicemails he claimed Sandra had left him in the days before she disappeared.
But what we do know is that Dimmick was able to give police a lead. He told them that he was under the impression that Sandra had been afraid of a man named Kearney Alsandor. Kearney was a scary dude who had been charged with murdering a man named Robert Rumback.
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Chapter 6: Who were the key people involved in Sandra's last known movements?
Dimmick told police that Sandra had made a specific comment to him about Robert's murder, that she was glad she wasn't armed when Kearney committed the homicide in Opelousas. And other people mentioned Kearney to police too. Candy said that Sandra had warned her that Kearney could be dangerous.
Candy also said Kearney's ex-girlfriend had claimed Sandra had been in the room when the murder happened. but that couldn't be confirmed, and the girlfriend later recanted. It all raises the question, did Sandra see something, and did that lead to someone wanting to harm her?
It's really just rumors at this point, and police did tell us that there's no record of Kearney being interviewed in relation to this case. It's also worth noting that the local paper, The Daily World, reported that Kearney was arrested at the beginning of June and released in August, and therefore in police custody when Sandra went missing.
While we weren't able to independently confirm the dates for when he was in custody that summer, Kearney was later convicted of Robert's murder. He didn't get back to us when we reached out to him in prison for comment. The Kearney lead didn't have legs, but there was one tangible lead, Sandra's phone bill. Her July bill had been mailed to her grandmother's house and investigators took a copy.
It shows that calls had been placed from Sandra's phone on July 30th. That's four days after she was last seen. Sandra's phone bill showed two outgoing calls placed 43 minutes apart shortly after midnight on July 30th. Both calls were only a minute long, and there's nothing in the case file to show whether detectives followed up on this lead.
Although it's worth noting that cell tracking data wasn't available to the St. Landry Parish law enforcement at the time. And there's no indication in the case file that her cell phone was ever found. Sanders' case file lacks a lot of information about the early investigation, and it's frustrating to not have these answers. But slim case files aren't rare in decades-old cold cases.
As the public information officer for St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office wrote in an email to us, quote, end quote. Luckily, investigators did get a few more leads. In the months after Sandra went missing, police started to get letters from people who had spent time in the local jail and claimed to have information on Sandra's disappearance. Some of those letters arriving as early as January 2006.
One of the tipsters told police that he had heard a woman named Cash had been killed for refusing to perform a sex act and that somebody was paid with drugs to cover up the crime. And this stuck out since Cash was the nickname that many people knew Sandra by.
The informant's account was gruesome and alleged that Sandra's body had been wrapped in garbage bags and duct tape before being buried and that a blood-soaked mattress was burned to destroy evidence. When police followed up on this, everyone they spoke to had heard the story from someone else, a long chain of telephone. But this lead did introduce two new suspects, Freddie and Marcus.
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Chapter 7: What new information came to light years after Sandra went missing?
Candy had ended up in jail on some drug charges and asked correctional officers if they could put her in touch with the detectives investigating Sandra's disappearance. She told investigators that an acquaintance had approached her in 2006, the summer after Sandra's disappearance. This acquaintance is a woman we're calling Mary because detectives didn't want to release her real name.
Mary had a run-in with Candy at a truck stop and gave her a ride to the hill, and they chatted along the way. That's when Mary told Candy that she knew what happened to Sandra. Mary said that Sandra was at Freddie's house along with Marcus and possibly some other people to cook drugs. But things went sideways. It was a bad batch and someone there injected Sandra with the drug.
Now Candy emphasized to police that Sandra didn't like needles, so she believed Mary when she told her that someone else injected Sandra. But then apparently Sandra started having a bad reaction to the drugs and Freddie strangled her to death. In Mary's telling, Marcus helped cover up Sandra's murder. He dug the hole to bury her in.
Obviously, this was a lot of information for Candy to process about her best friend. But Candy said that she believed that Mary only knew this because she was there when it happened. I mean, to Candy, the details just sounded too specific for Mary to not have been there. Here's the catch though, Mary was never gonna cooperate with police.
She said she was only telling Candy this because she was Sandra's best friend and she thought she'd wanna know what happened to her. But that left investigators with another game of telephone and therefore another lag in the investigation. But sometime around 2008, detectives had a tip come in from a totally new person with a potential lead to uncover Sandra's remains.
This is Detective Donald Thompson, or D.T., as some people call him. He was part of the original team on this case.
I get a phone call from an administrator from Appaloosa City Court at the time. Administrator told me, called me, said, hey, D.T., you need to come over to the city court here. Got a lady here that's talking about Sandra.
Detective Thompson is with the sheriff's office now, but when Sandra went missing, he was a lieutenant with the Opelousas Police Department. So after that call, he went over to the city court and talked with the woman. Detective Thompson said that she told him Freddie had killed Sandra and that he had buried her on a property out near DeFeo Road.
Thompson drove out and got the property owner's consent to do a ground search of the property, or as much of it as he could since there was a lake there too.
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