Transcribe your podcast
[00:00:00]

Regan is an online relationship counseling platform designed for individuals or couples seeking help with their relationship or marital issues, they'll assess your needs and match you with a licensed and experienced professional counselor, and you can start communicating with them conveniently and discreetly in under 48 hours.

[00:00:16]

Here's how it works. This is really cool. You and your counselor will get a dedicated online room, which will be your private and secure place to communicate. Your partner will be invited to this room as well if you decide to try counseling together. Regan is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches, so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed. It's more affordable than traditional offline marriage counseling and financial aid is available. Visit regained U.S. datelined 10.

[00:00:42]

That's regained U.S. Dateline one zero and start repairing your relationship with the help of an experienced professional Dateline listeners get 10 percent off your first month at Regain U.S. Dateline 10. That's regained U.S. Dateline one zero.

[00:00:59]

I'm Lester Holt and this is Dateline, I got a call saying that the house was on fire. The first thing they asked me was who would want to kill you? Who would want to murder you? And I just kind of looked at them like why I couldn't believe it. Was he watching me? That fire was set to throw us off. He was very calculating years before his wife killed herself. Yes, he claimed that she committed suicide just days before she was due to give birth to their first child.

[00:01:32]

She was extremely excited for that baby. She's wanted to be a mom. This wasn't somebody who was thinking about suicide.

[00:01:37]

Exactly. It made me wonder, OK, was he a murderer?

[00:01:41]

So now you're trying to prove a very old murder with pretty much no evidence. Correct.

[00:01:45]

Is he kind of gloating that he got away with it?

[00:01:48]

He's thinking, well, catch me if you can. We are going to do her and her family justice. We're going to solve this murder. Here's Josh Mankiewicz with Secrets from the Grave. Wander through any graveyard and you'll find them mysteries etched in stone. Lives cut tragically short by war, disease, misfortune and sometimes murder.

[00:02:36]

Many who rest in these peaceful places took secrets to their graves. But some here are merely waiting, waiting for someone to take interest and ask questions, and as you're about to see, the debt can be exceedingly patient.

[00:02:58]

Our story begins on a frigid March night in 2009 with a house fire in Stow, Ohio.

[00:03:06]

That fire was important not for what it destroyed, but for what it illuminated.

[00:03:13]

One worshipper to say, what you need is a fire house or what the house.

[00:03:21]

The caller was a 16 year old girl who told the 911 operator that she, her parents and her younger brother had all escaped, but barely.

[00:03:31]

And then her father took the phone to understand the entire front of our house just engulfed her. I'm glad everybody got out that dad was Scott Perk.

[00:03:44]

You'll be hearing a lot about him. PwC said his family had been sound asleep when he heard a loud boom.

[00:03:51]

It was like we heard an explosion. Oh, you did? Yep. Woke us up at the moment.

[00:04:03]

Herk said he'd scrambled to get everyone up and out. By the time the first fire units rolled up, the PERC home was a roaring bonfire. Firefighters smelled gasoline as soon as they got out of their trucks. So a call immediately went out to stow police detective Ken Mouflon. When I got there, I saw the fire department still putting out the blaze, someone had taken a pipe wrench to disconnected the gas line and it was blowing out natural gas, just Salika.

[00:04:37]

It was a very large roaring sound at that point that gas hadn't ignited. No. You know, it could have possibly blown up.

[00:04:43]

The person who set the fire poured gasoline all the way to the gas meter.

[00:04:47]

And on top of the gas meter, the idea was fire starts at the gasoline, goes to the gas main and possibly destroys the house and everybody in it. Absolutely.

[00:05:00]

Mifflin found the Pook family sheltered at a neighbor's house and ask the father, Scottsburg, to step outside.

[00:05:08]

So we actually went over to Mike, my unmarked detective bureau car, and we sat in my car where it was nice and warm.

[00:05:15]

I guess the first question is who want to burn down your house? Who are your enemies? Exactly right. And Scott said he really didn't have any. There was no one that he knew that was that was so angry at him that would want to try to harm him or his family. So, you know, the investigation just basically took off from there.

[00:05:36]

Perhaps it was the warm car on such a cold night, or maybe it was Mifflin's warm manner, either way, Scott Perk was feeling chatty.

[00:05:46]

He'd lost his job about, you know, about eight or nine days prior to this. Things are not going well in his life.

[00:05:55]

When asked how he and his wife Tammy had spent the evening prior to the fire, he responded with this little shocker.

[00:06:03]

Scott and Tammy, they're swingers. And they spent the evening basically apart because Scott was at home. But Tammy was out with a friend of hers. Another man, Tammy, was out with another man. She was dating his their son's martial arts instructor. And so she spent the evening with him, came home roughly around 1:00 o'clock in the morning.

[00:06:27]

Strange, sure. But Scott Purk was just getting started. Scott told you that Tammy brought him the leftovers from the dinner that she had with the guy she was seeing. Right. This is just like, you know, hey, honey, here's some leftover orange chicken that this other guy and I didn't eat.

[00:06:47]

Right. Tammy went to bed first and Scott finish off the leftovers.

[00:06:53]

No detail, it seemed, was too small or insignificant for Scott Purk.

[00:06:59]

It was like turning a faucet on once you turned it on. He just kept talking and I just kept writing down the answers.

[00:07:06]

At times, it was hard to keep up. Scott Burke kept offering answers to questions the detective hadn't asked, and there seemed to be so much more he wanted to say.

[00:07:24]

When we come back, he's doing almost everything he can to make himself sound like a suspect. Yes, exactly. As Scott Perk keeps talking, suspicion keeps mounting about this house on fire and up burning secrets.

[00:07:39]

And I'm looking at someone who I believe is an arsonist. Now, I'm wondering, OK, was he a murderer? In 20 years with a badge, Detective Ken McFarlane had never encountered anyone quite like Scott Burke as the two of them sat in his car watching Percs Home being reduced to ash or kept talking, saying things he probably shouldn't have been saying to a cop who already suspected this fire was arson.

[00:08:19]

He was heavily in debt and he made no bones about telling us, you know, that he had actually figured out if his house actually burned down. He would only go about seventy thousand dollars in debt.

[00:08:29]

It's essentially him saying, hey, look, I'm not going to hide anything. You're going to find out that I'm in debt.

[00:08:34]

Write arson for insurance money. Too early to say, but a real possibility.

[00:08:41]

He videotaped everything in his house. He told us that, too, in case there was ever a fire. And he just did it recently. And when I asked him how recent he was, that very recent and he's doing almost everything he can to make himself sound like a suspect.

[00:08:54]

Yes, exactly.

[00:08:57]

What was Mr. Perk up to, the detective couldn't guess, parked down the driveway well away from the burning home set, the Pook family van cleaned up and ready for a road trip. According to Scott, he and his son had been planning to visit family in North Carolina.

[00:09:16]

And what drew our attention was what he actually had packed inside the van.

[00:09:20]

I'm guessing it was not stuff you would typically bring on vacation, old family photos, cookbooks that had family recipes for generations in there in which he could offer no explanation about why those were even in the in the van.

[00:09:35]

It was a few days after the fire at Scott Percs House that Stow's chief arson investigator, Jim Leidel, back from vacation call Detective Ken Mouflon and he says, you've got to hear this.

[00:09:48]

And he so he played me the 911 one tape.

[00:09:52]

What do you mean drive to the fire? Mifflin had heard something on that initial 911, one call from Scott Burke's daughter, something he wanted Leidel to hear, too, during Aloul Scott.

[00:10:05]

Perk can be heard calmly whispering to someone, Oh, God, he's talking about a pet ferret. And his tone seemed to be more rueful oversight than anguished alarm.

[00:10:21]

That was a bit of a flag, you know, you know, leading us to believe that there had been a plan anyways all along.

[00:10:30]

And in Scott Percs, money woes and his admission that an insurance payout would clear most of his debt. And Ladell was sold on the idea of Scott Berg as an arson suspect on McFlynn wasn't finished.

[00:10:49]

On the night of the fire, the detective told Leidel, Scott Birckhead casually added a tantalizing detail to his life story.

[00:10:59]

Scott, just out of the blue, says to me.

[00:11:03]

Well, his first wife had committed suicide in nineteen eighty five and she was pregnant, nine months pregnant, as if like, you know, not only is my house in Ember's, but this isn't even the worst thing that happened to me.

[00:11:16]

I was shocked and it made me wonder, OK, and now I need to look into this. I'm looking at someone who I believe is an arsonist. Now, I'm wondering, OK, was he a murderer?

[00:11:27]

The two lawmen decided to pursue parallel investigations into Schopper Lidell, would take lead on the arson case mid-flight. The suicide.

[00:11:38]

You guys know each other and you get along. He knows exactly what he's doing. We do work very well together. We have a great relationship.

[00:11:45]

Mouflon knew his case had the highest hurdles. Not only had Scott Perks first wife Meg Perk died 24 years earlier, but she had died in Akron only a few miles from Stowe, but a different jurisdiction.

[00:12:01]

What's it like to go to the Akron police and say, Hey, I'm from a much smaller department, but I think you got this case wrong back in the mid 1980s.

[00:12:11]

You have to approach it very carefully. But we have a good working relationship with the police department in Akron.

[00:12:17]

And I you have to make the phone call instead of waving off this small town detective, the Akron cops were willing to help.

[00:12:26]

I talked to a detective who I dealt with in the past. He said it's not a cold case. It's a closed case. If you want to have, you know, use your eyes to take a look at it, you know, we'll send you a copy of the report. And he did.

[00:12:38]

According to the original police report, Meg Berg was 24 years old and nine months pregnant.

[00:12:44]

On the day she died, Scott stated that the morning of March 18th, nineteen eighty five, Meg had woken up sick and Scott had made a doctor's appointment for her to go see her doctor.

[00:13:01]

Later that morning, Scott says he was taking a bath when he saw Meg walk past the bathroom door.

[00:13:07]

He gets out of the bathtub about four or five minutes later and then, lo and behold, he sees Meg hanging from a rope in the stairwell of their apartment.

[00:13:16]

His story is that he cuts Meg down and tries to do some CPR.

[00:13:20]

Yes, once he saw Meg hanging, then he grabbed a steak knife from it from one of the tables nearby and cut the rope. And then he started to do CPR. So he calls him for EMS to respond and meets them at the door when they get there.

[00:13:35]

Meg's unborn baby, a boy, died that same day, Meg lingered another 24 hours. She never regained consciousness. The detective had nothing he could test or examine. In fact, even the police photos from the scene have been tossed long ago. Still nothing about Scott Percs version of the story felt right.

[00:14:00]

Most women who are nine months pregnant and carry their child full term typically do not commit suicide. That was the first thing. Second thing was he was in the apartment when his wife hung herself in a stairwell of their apartment. Most individuals do it by themselves with no one around.

[00:14:15]

Both of those facts were available to the Akron police back in 1995.

[00:14:19]

They had their doubts that this was a truly a suicide. However, they just didn't have enough.

[00:14:26]

Next, the detective examined the original autopsy photos. What did you see?

[00:14:33]

What stood out in my mind from the autopsy photos was on Meg's neck. There were lines on her neck that looked like a belt. Mark was on her neck, not a rope mark.

[00:14:45]

The detective figured the only way to find out what it actually happened in that apartment in 1985 was to learn all he could about Scott and Meg Burke.

[00:14:59]

Coming up, something disturbing about Meg's past, there was a note on the coffee table and it said that she had tried to hang herself and something dark from Scott's. He was the ninja burglar, the ninja burglar. He would actually commit burglaries dressed up as a ninja. When Dateline continues.

[00:15:19]

Hey, guys, Willie Geist here reminding you to check out the Sun Sit Down podcast. On this week's episode, I sit down with Grammy winner D.J. Kalid to talk about his rise as the son of immigrants to a hip hop empire. His latest self-titled album and his keys to quarantine over the last few months. You can hear our full conversation right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Get it for free wherever you download yours.

[00:15:54]

In the weeks after Scott Percs house burned down, police in Stow, Ohio, heard an earful from people who either knew him or knew of him.

[00:16:03]

Him and his wife are swingers.

[00:16:05]

They go to the Holiday Inn, a rowdy, and they have this orgy, this stuff.

[00:16:10]

There was plenty of gossip and speculation in tip calls like this one, but occasionally there was something new.

[00:16:17]

His wife and child back in the 80s had been hit by a drunken driver.

[00:16:22]

Remember, Perkin told the detective his first wife took her own life. Now it seemed he told at least one of his former lovers an entirely different story.

[00:16:33]

He told my girlfriend that he went over there and killed the guy, cut them up and buried him. And she's like, you know, they just had sex, you know what I mean? And then he's confessing.

[00:16:43]

The detective, of course, knew better. Scott Berg's first wife, Meg, and their unborn son had indeed died in Akron in 1985. Her death was suicide by hanging. According to the coroner's report, 35 years later, Meg's memory is still fresh for dawn Quacker.

[00:17:03]

Dawn and Meg were best buds in high school.

[00:17:07]

She was quiet, but people would always say that she reminded them of Janis Joplin in her kind of like hippy kind of bohemian attitude, but she was she was very much more reserved, like she'd come into a room or something and people just wanted to be with her.

[00:17:26]

May have been a serious student back then, an amateur poet who managed to get several of her pieces published over poetry with a little bit dark.

[00:17:35]

Meg's brother, Michael Metcalf, sometimes about sadness or about loss, even death.

[00:17:44]

You ever read it and worry about her back then? Now, not really. Don, who'd known Scott since first grade, told the detective he seemed like a model boyfriend to Mack.

[00:17:56]

He did everything exactly that you would expect a good boyfriend to do.

[00:18:01]

He, you know, opened doors for her. He took her out. He he did everything that he was like.

[00:18:10]

You know, you would expect someone who was interested in somebody to do.

[00:18:15]

Though Meg was charmed, her family never warmed to Scott when they married in 1981. Her family was not invited. They didn't run off and elope.

[00:18:27]

I mean, they actually had a wedding ceremony in the area and I guess the reception.

[00:18:30]

But yeah, but her family wasn't there. She knew how we felt. Nevertheless, Meg was over the moon when she learned she was pregnant as her due date approached. She wrote this letter to her grandmother. It's a letter she never got the chance to mail. Just think any day now you're going to be a great grandmother and I'm going to be a mother, a mother. It's even hard for me to believe, but I'm looking forward to it.

[00:19:01]

Those did not sound like the words of someone thinking of suicide. She was extremely excited for that baby. And that was that was one of the things that she had always wanted, she just wanted to be a mom, she wanted a family. So Dawn was stunned when on March 19th, 1985, she heard Meg had been rushed to the hospital. And then I get the phone call. An. Kind of the like the floor drops out front of you.

[00:19:36]

It's it it was it was a shock.

[00:19:39]

Who was it on the phone? Scott you remember anything he said? It was Don.

[00:19:44]

I've got bad news. Meg tried to kill herself. She's in the hospital. They don't know if she's going to make it.

[00:19:53]

She did not. As for suicide, well, there have been times before she married Scott. When Meg had spoken of taking her own life, there was there was an incident one time where she was she had locked herself in a bathroom and said she was going to cut her wrists. This was over at a friend's house. But, you know, after that, she came out. She had not cut herself at all or anything like that.

[00:20:21]

Dawn Kracker says something similar happened once when she and Meg shared an apartment. I came home and I saw the mini blinds on the floor and I there was a note on the coffee table and it said that she had tried to hang herself using the cord from the mini blinds.

[00:20:40]

Did that note explain why Meg wanted to take her own life?

[00:20:44]

There wasn't really an explanation other than that. She just felt that everybody would be happier if she was gone.

[00:20:50]

To underscore his claim that Meg had hanged herself, Mifflin's says Scott gave one of her poems to the Akron detective investigating her death at the very end of the poem, it says.

[00:21:01]

And then she killed herself.

[00:21:03]

And what maybe that is the equivalent of a suicide note, or at least reflective of the way that Meg Burke was thinking.

[00:21:10]

Exactly. Except according to family members, that poem was something Megg had written back in high school and in no way represented her mood in the days before she died, Scott, they felt, was using that poem to promote his own theory and her family wasn't buying. Honestly, my first thought is what did he do right off the bat? Absolutely.

[00:21:35]

You know, the investigators were getting information from their family members that nobody could believe that the Megahed killed herself.

[00:21:44]

Scott said he couldn't believe it either and was as shocked as anyone.

[00:21:50]

In fact, he told the detective he was so rattled by his wife's death that it changed him into a criminal.

[00:21:58]

That's right.

[00:21:59]

On the night his house burned down, amid all the talk of death and debt and his swinging lifestyle, Schopper told the detective he'd been a famous burglar dressed in black from head to toe, carrying nunchuck and throwing stars. Scott had been so prolific he'd been nicknamed the ninja burglar, the ninja burglar.

[00:22:26]

That was a thing in store. It was a thing in Stowe and the surrounding cities because he burglarized homes and businesses and broke into cars and stole things from cars.

[00:22:35]

How many burglaries are we talking about? At least 10 burglaries, at least for Binnie's. He would come into your bedroom and watch you sleep and then take your your wallet or purse off your nightstand.

[00:22:46]

Once arrested, Scott confessed and starting in 1986, did six years in the joint. He used the time behind bars to earn a degree in criminal justice.

[00:22:58]

Scott fancied himself as a very smart individual whenever whenever I would talk to him. And I think that was part of his strategy to try and show me how smart he was.

[00:23:11]

Of course, it was possible that Scott Park was not as smart as he thought he was, thanks to his own loose lips.

[00:23:19]

Scott had already made himself the prime suspect in not one but two criminal investigations. So imagine the investigators surprise when in 2010, a year after the perks house burned down from an arson fire, the same thing happened to another house just around the corner.

[00:23:44]

Coming up. I got a call saying that the house was on fire. Another house in flames was another arsonist at work. The first thing that they asked me was who would want to kill you?

[00:24:14]

Amy Salvaggio remembers well the night her duplex apartment in Stow, Ohio, caught fire. It was March 27th, 2010, a rare night off for the 24 year old intensive care nurse.

[00:24:29]

I was at my boyfriend's I got a call in the middle of the night from a neighbor saying that the house was on fire.

[00:24:37]

We were only about two minutes away, so I drove over very fast.

[00:24:44]

Amy says she jumped out and ran toward the firefighters who were working half of the duplex where the worst damage was. The first thing that they asked me was who would want to kill you, who would want to murder you? And I just. Kind of looked at him like what? What are you talking about? And then they asked me, don't you smell all the gasoline? And that's when I stopped and I realized that that's all you could smell, was this strong odor of gasoline.

[00:25:18]

You involved in anything illegal? Know anything extramarital? No. Hmm. Anything that's going to make somebody angry enough to make you make them want to do away with you. Nothing that I could think of at all.

[00:25:33]

Investigators heard the same story from the older woman who lived in the other half of the duplex. Jim Leidel was there that night. He says even the landlady was checked out to see if she might have had her own building torched for the insurance money.

[00:25:50]

So obviously, we had to go look at that at her. You know, she she lived nearby and but she was fine financially. She was stable and was successful with her rentals. So she had absolutely no motive for burning it.

[00:26:03]

One thing was obvious. This fire was no accident. The gas meter itself was disconnected and was just hanging by the inlet fitting.

[00:26:12]

The responding fire crews had a difficult time extinguishing this fire until they were able to shut the gas off to the meters.

[00:26:20]

So the gas is just escaping into the air, correct? Nothing about that looks like an accident and it doesn't even look particularly subtle.

[00:26:30]

No, not at all. The scene had all the earmarks of the fire at Scott Percs House a year earlier, the disconnected gas lines, gasoline poured around the foundation, everything seemed to match.

[00:26:45]

I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, you know, but, boy, all of a sudden the light did come on. And I realized that the the modus operandi or the MO was the same.

[00:26:55]

One block away. Correct. One block away. And almost exactly a year before that, at almost the same time in the morning.

[00:27:03]

For the past year, Jim Leidel had analyzed the evidence from the blaze at Scott Percs Home. He was convinced that fire had been an inside job. And based on what he knew about arsonists, the Salvaggio fire was likely set by the same person.

[00:27:21]

It's unusual for him to switch method once they have a pattern that works for them, find something that works. They will do something very, very similar on each of their fires. That had to be Scott. And we took that as also as another. Scott was trying to show us that there was a serial arsonist in the neighborhood, but it wasn't him because he lived on the other side of town.

[00:27:44]

Now, investigators were not fooled. Mifflin and Leidel went to the apartment complex where the perks had been living since their house burned down. The family car parked outside and still warm on that freezing night reeked of gasoline.

[00:28:03]

And then in the apartment, we find a gas can sitting right inside the apartment and a pair of boots that had fresh mud on them that is just screaming to us.

[00:28:13]

We have found our guy, of course, Scott Perk had always been their guy that said the lawmen were still no closer to actually making an arrest.

[00:28:27]

You can't really connect Scott to the gas used at either fire. Correct. And nobody nobody saw him. It's the middle of the night.

[00:28:35]

Exactly. So. You have a pretty strong circumstantial case, but not a tremendous amount of proof.

[00:28:44]

Right now we have to I's and cross our T's and do our due diligence because he's our guy still coming up.

[00:28:53]

He was pretty confident that this was a murder, the death of Meg Perk, a decades old case and a bold new strategy to solve it. He just looked like he had just seen a ghost. When Dateline continues. It takes time to prove an arson case, even for one that seems open and shut the proving a decades old suicide that might actually be homicide.

[00:29:29]

Well, that's more a matter of timing and luck. In the case of makework, the stars aligned in the summer of 2011, when Detective Ken Mouflon walked into the office of Summit County, Ohio, prosecutor Sherry Beven Walsh.

[00:29:46]

I actually still remember when Detective Ken Mouflon came to my office and he was basically asking for my assistance to file a motion to exhume the body and reopen the case. And he was pretty confident that it was not a suicide and that this was a murder.

[00:30:04]

My guess is you guys have plenty of open cases that are, as of that moment, unsolved. You probably didn't need one that was in the closed file, reopened right away.

[00:30:14]

We have, unfortunately, a lot of homicides in Summit County, Ohio. And we were probably, I would estimate at that time, already working on another 50 homicide cases when the detective from Stowe came to us and said, hey, I have a really old case that I really want you to consider presenting to the grand jury.

[00:30:35]

What evidence did the detective have? Well, almost none beyond a few old autopsy photos and his theory of what had happened, the only physical evidence, if any, existed. Would involve Meg Percs body.

[00:30:54]

So if this case was to go forward, Meg would have to be exhumed, deciding to dig up a body that's been buried for a long time is not an easy decision.

[00:31:05]

She's got a whole family that was there when she was put in the ground. And they may have their own opinions about whether or not digging her up again is the right thing to do.

[00:31:16]

Exactly. So it was a tough conversation to have with. I went and spoke with Meg's mom.

[00:31:22]

My mother believed, along with much of the rest of the family, that it wasn't a suicide.

[00:31:27]

Exactly. And they were very supportive of all of us to do the exhumation.

[00:31:33]

With Meg's family on board, the prosecutor asked a court to order her exhumation.

[00:31:39]

We definitely needed the body of Meg Perk to be exhumed for the medical examiner if the body's not in good shape.

[00:31:46]

Can this go forward? If it had been too decomposed, it's really unlikely that this case would ever have been prosecuted.

[00:31:54]

Well, the detective pressed forward that summer. Leidel wrapped up the arson investigations. In August 2011, Scott Burke was indicted for two arsons, the fire at his home and the one at Amy Salvaggio duplex. Please show you pictures got. Ask if you'd ever seen him before, if you knew him.

[00:32:15]

Yes. Yes, they did. And I'd never seen him before in my life.

[00:32:19]

Not somebody who crossed paths with in your personal life or at the hospital or anywhere.

[00:32:23]

I did not remember seeing him at all. The day after the indictment was handed up, Jim Leidel and another officer staked out Scott's apartment.

[00:32:33]

And we weren't there maybe 15, 20 minutes at the most. And here comes Scott's van pulling in. So he pulls right in front of his apartment. So we pull in and block him from leaving. Two and a half years after the fire at his home, 18 months since the fire at Amy Salvaggio duplex, Scott Burke was in custody. And based on what he saw inside the van, Lidell feels the arrest was made in the nick of time.

[00:33:04]

And he's got a cooler full of pop. And on the front passenger seat of his vehicle was his cell phone that had the battery removed so that no one could track him, suggesting he's about to hit the run.

[00:33:16]

We're pretty certain that he came back to the apartment to grab a few clothes and he was going to head out.

[00:33:21]

Perc was read his rights. And at that point, the man who literally talked himself into serious trouble suddenly refused to say anything to investigators.

[00:33:33]

After being processed, Detective Mifflin paid him a visit and delivered a message Scott Perk probably never saw coming.

[00:33:41]

I let him know that, you know, we are looking into his first wife's death. He looks at me and you can just tell that all the color in his face is drained right out. And that was not what he expected.

[00:33:53]

He just looked like he had just seen a ghost. Coming up, bombshell, new evidence emerges from the grave. How was this missed back in 1995? I don't know.

[00:34:06]

And all these years later, a dramatic demonstration of Scott story. You think to yourself, we're getting close to the finish line here. Yes, we are. Meg Perk and her unborn baby boy were buried together in this graveyard. Detective Ken Mifflin was certain that Meg had taken secrets to her grave. Truth, which could prove her husband, Scott Burke, had put her there. In September 2011, just weeks after Scott percs arrest, the remarkably well-preserved bodies of Meg and her baby son were exhumed.

[00:35:00]

It was amazing to actually meet her. I really was thinking that, you know, we are going to do her and her family justice.

[00:35:08]

She was holding that baby in her arms in the casket. Yes, hard to see is very tough. It it really it brings everything home. A lot had changed since that day in 1985 when the Summit County coroner had declared Meg's death a suicide.

[00:35:30]

First of all, instead of a coroner, the county now had a board certified medical examiner. The staff was all new that are trained. Forensic technology was much improved. And thanks to an excellent embalming job, the marks on Meg's body were still there.

[00:35:51]

You can still see the belt marks that go across her neck and then down towards her back.

[00:35:57]

So the bruises on her neck are going the wrong way.

[00:36:00]

Yes, and they're not from a rope. The belt marks going down back towards her lower back, which indicates someone's behind you and they're pulling a rope. They're pulling the belt towards them in a downward direction to strangle you.

[00:36:15]

How was this missed back in 1985? I don't know. That second autopsy also revealed other things that were missed the first time, but were no less damning for Scott Burke.

[00:36:28]

They found the a bruise in the lower back, which was amazing all those years later. Yes.

[00:36:36]

And that was Scott probably using his knee to hold his wife down while he was strangling her at the bell.

[00:36:45]

To test their theory, investigators went to the actual apartment where Scott and Meg Paquette lived in 1985 with cameras rolling, according to the maintenance records there.

[00:36:57]

There had never been any replacement of any of the railing around the stairs. So all of that was still in its original condition.

[00:37:05]

The railing was smooth. No sign anything heavy had ever dangled there.

[00:37:12]

The investigators then went to a vacant apartment a few doors down and hung a dummy, roughly the same size and weight as missing from the banister for a few minutes before cutting it down. Well, just that action alone created several indentations in the soft Pinewood that we were tied off to, and the first time around when Meg actually died, there were no indentations, correct?

[00:37:48]

Correct.

[00:37:49]

Later, investigators use modeling clay and ropes of varying sizes to try and recreate the marks they'd seen on Meg's body.

[00:37:58]

And we could not recreate that ligature mark with rope.

[00:38:02]

Only a belt or a strap of some sort they confirmed could have made those marks on Meg's neck.

[00:38:10]

You think to yourself, we're getting close to the finish line here. Yes, we are.

[00:38:15]

Yes, we are building this case, I think is going to lead to justice for the victim, the Summit County prosecutor agreed.

[00:38:23]

We wanted to make sure that justice was done. And we also were working with a family that never believed that Megg killed herself. And we wanted to make sure that they got justice.

[00:38:38]

All that would have to wait, there was still the matter of the two arson's. Scott pleaded guilty in both cases, and the judge sentenced him to the maximum 28 years in prison in November 2015, Scott Peart was brought from his prison cell to stand trial for the double murder of Meg and their unborn son. He pleaded not guilty, though the case was largely circumstantial. The testimony of the medical examiner who re-examined Meg Berg's body proved decisive.

[00:39:17]

The medical examiner had some really key findings that showed strangulation and not suicide by hanging.

[00:39:25]

And that was never in the original report. The original report did not reflect anything about the strangulation mark from about it even had markings of the stitching and a belt that the medical examiner was able to find 30 years later. That was never noted at all.

[00:39:42]

And the initial exam, Don Hicks was Scott Percs, court appointed attorney.

[00:39:47]

There was never a time when. Oh, when I thought that he had a role in the death of his wife, he argued that since Megg had a history of attempted suicide and nobody knew what really happened, it was reasonable to conclude that the coroner in 1985 had actually gotten it right.

[00:40:07]

You pointed out to the jury that prosecutors didn't really have any hard evidence. What they had was this wonderful recreation. That's true. Yes. Juries like hard evidence. You're absolutely correct.

[00:40:20]

We fought very hard. After a six day trial, the jury found Scott Burke guilty of murdering Meg and their unborn son as well as tampering with evidence.

[00:40:36]

It was almost unbelievable after all this time. It finally came through, you know, hey, look, you know, the truth is out. He's guilty. He's going away.

[00:40:48]

The judge gave Scottsburg 15 years to life on top of his arson sentence.

[00:40:58]

We may never know why Scott Park murdered Mak or why he mentioned her to Detective Mifflin that night as they watched his house burn. We do know that if he hadn't made a secret, would likely have remained buried with her.

[00:41:16]

I got into this job to help people and there's nothing better than that making a family happy with an outcome for a case. And in this case, it's beyond happy. It's beyond words. Everybody, they can finally rest in peace that this has been resolved the way it should have been. That's all for this edition of Dateline. We'll see you again Monday at 10:00, 9:00 Central. And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

[00:41:50]

I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.

[00:42:01]

I'm Trymaine Lee, host of Into America, a podcast from MSNBC. Join me as we go into the roots of inequality and economic injustice and racial injustice.

[00:42:11]

And then when you add health is a health injustice into what's at stake, people are going to be voting not for a person, but for stability and into what comes next into America, a podcast about who we are as Americans and who we want to become. New episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.

[00:42:29]

Subscribe now.