Tommy Burns
Tommy "The Sandman" Burns (a.k.a. Timmy Robert Ray) earned his nickname because he "put horses to sleep" for the conspirators. He traveled the show circuit, visiting stables with his athletic bag full of electrocution equipment and, for fees ranging from $5,000 to $40,000 — generally for 10 percent of the insurance price on the horse — he would kill horses for their owners, who would then pay him off from the money obtained by defrauding the insurers. Burns justified his destruction of the animals on the grounds that electrocution — the technique that he had learned in 1982 from James Druck — was quick and painless.
In 1992, the investigative reporters William Nack and Lester Munson, writing for Sports Illustrated, interviewed Burns, who told them a great deal about how the conspiracy operated:
| “ | Burns's preferred method of killing horses was electrocution. It had been so ever since the day in 1982 when, he says, the late James Druck, an Ocala, Fla., attorney who represented insurance companies, paid him to kill the brilliant show jumper Henry the Hawk, on whose life Druck had taken out a $150,000 life-insurance policy. In fact, says Burns, Druck personally taught him how to rig the wires to electrocute Henry the Hawk: how to slice an extension cord down the middle into two strands of wire; how to attach a pair of alligator clips to the bare end of each wire; and how to attach the clips to the horse—one to its ear, the other to its rectum. All he had to do then, says Burns, was plug the cord into a standard wall socket. And step back. | ” |
Read more about this topic: Horse Murders, The Horse Killers
Famous quotes containing the words tommy and/or burns:
“Tommy: Life is short.
Alice Hyatt: So are you.”
—Robert Getchell, U.S. screenwriter, and Martin Scorsese. Tommy (Alfred Lutter)
“Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner,
How dare ye set your fit upon her,
Sae fine a lady!”
—Robert Burns (1759–1796)