Extra! Extra! Charges Filed in the Murder of Dr. Devon Hoover

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[00:01:49] we have different types of episodes that we do. The way we think about it is we're sort of trying to emulate in some ways your traditional newspaper where you might have op-eds, editorials, you might have interviews with different interesting people who know what they're talking about.

[00:02:05] You might have news stories, feature stories. We kind of give you a lot of everything, and if you like some types of stories and you don't like others, that's okay. If you like it all,

[00:02:15] great. So what we're trying to do here is introduce a new concept for the Murder Sheet, and what we're thinking is right now we feel like we've been kind of hindered when it comes to

[00:02:30] big stories that are breaking, but maybe there's not yet a lot of information. I feel like we have not been able to get our listeners some of the big updates on cases that we're following because

[00:02:40] they sort of fall between dates with cheat sheets or they don't necessarily have a lot of follow-up on them at this point, and we want to change that because we think it's important to keep you

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[00:03:07] kinds of stories called Extra Extra, and they're essentially sort of drop everything, check out this latest news, we might do a little bit of analysis or share some details that we've been able to gather, but there's not necessarily a whole in-depth conversation at this time to be had.

[00:03:22] They're just more of keeping you in the know about the latest breaking news in a case or the latest important development that you need to know about in order to be caught up. So this is our inaugural

[00:03:34] episode of that format, and we will be using it to discuss pretty big news in the murder case of Dr. Devon Hoover in Michigan. My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist. And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney. And this is The Murder Sheet.

[00:03:53] We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet. And this is Extra Extra, charges filed in the murder of Dr. Devon Hoover.

[00:04:53] I guess the appropriate place to begin would be, Anya, can you tell us about the circumstances of this tragic case? Absolutely. So Dr. Devon Hoover was a beloved physician in Detroit, Michigan. He lived in a refurbished mansion in the historic Boston Edison district there.

[00:05:16] We've driven through it. It's beautiful. All these historic homes. And honestly, Dr. Hoover is like a man after my own heart because I too love history and sort of restoring classic houses.

[00:05:29] I mean, not that I, we don't have the money to do that, obviously. But I just appreciate when somebody has that sort of personality where they're trying to do that because I think it just, it

[00:05:39] benefits the community and our culture as a whole when people are trying to do restoration processes and things like that. He was very active in his community. He was very beloved amongst his patients. Yes. There's a couple of Facebook groups that have sprung up after his death,

[00:05:57] and these are filled with people who knew him, sharing wonderful stories about him. He sounds like he was an incredible human being. Absolutely. And so tragedy struck April 23rd of 2003 when Dr. Hoover did something very out of character. He failed to show up to a visit with his

[00:06:19] family, notably his sick mother. And his family immediately became concerned because this was a very reliable guy. Where is he? They call in a welfare check and police show up at his Detroit

[00:06:36] home. They find blood immediately. And then on closer inspection in the sort of crawl space that forms the attic on the third floor of this historic mansion, they find his body. And it's a

[00:06:51] very creepy and gruesome scene. He was shot in the head twice. He was clad in only socks, and he was wrapped up in a carpet face down. So very, very disturbing scene. And pretty quickly,

[00:07:09] there were some possible clues as to what might have happened. Early on, police mentioned, actually, the day before the murder was discovered, police mentioned that they found a SUV abandoned on the west side of Detroit. And Hoover was actually registered as the owner.

[00:07:31] And they had come the day before discovering his body, but when they knocked on the gate, no one answered it. So I guess they sort of walked away thinking, well, you know... The thing is... There was blood in the SUV.

[00:07:45] But police, if they knock on your door and you don't answer, and they're just coming to check on you, they can't necessarily just automatically assume, okay, let's break in. Bust down the door. There has to be a reason to do that. Some people might be disturbed because

[00:07:59] there looked like there might be blood in the SUV, and why wouldn't they try harder? But as Kevin said, people have rights to privacy. If it just doesn't come quite close enough to reaching that level of concern, then that's not necessarily going to happen.

[00:08:16] But unfortunately, after a lot of information about the case in early days, for a time, it seemed to sort of go dormant in terms of updates. But what's interesting to note is that early on, police indicated there was a person they were

[00:08:31] interested in. In fact, I believe they even took him into custody briefly. Yeah, May 2nd, he was released. They did not identify that person at that time publicly, but they are now. That person was a man named Desmond Burks.

[00:08:47] Yes, he's a 34-year-old man who has been identified as being an intimate partner of Dr. Hoovers. And so he was on the radar from the beginning. But they didn't have quite enough evidence. And we say intimate partner, he was someone that

[00:09:03] apparently, at least on some occasions, Dr. Hoover would pay for sex. And that kind of gets into the heart of one of the reasons why it was so difficult and challenging for the police to put the final pieces together in order to make this arrest.

[00:09:26] Because yes, they had their eye on him a long time ago. They just didn't have quite enough to file charges. And it seems like from what I'm reading, that some people in the community were reluctant to share some details about some of these matters pertaining to people's

[00:09:50] sex lives, paying for sex. Maybe some of the people who had information about this might pay for sex. Those things are embarrassing to talk about. There's a lot of stigma against not only sex work, but homosexuality in general.

[00:10:06] And let me just say this, there has absolutely in this country been a history of discrimination and even state violence against gay men in particular. There can be a lot of distrust in that community as a result of that.

[00:10:23] Again and again, we cover cases where you have serial killers who prey upon gay men who are able to get away with it for years because there's so much stigma and people are not comfortable going forward with what they know, or they're keeping their own sexuality a secret.

[00:10:40] So then they're going off to meet people. I don't have any inside information, but I know from other cases sometimes people may be having gay sex with people that they are paying to have sex with them while they themselves are married

[00:10:54] or may have high places in the community. It goes to show you, I guess, that homophobia makes everything worse from a perspective of criminal cases because when we're discriminating against other people just for who they happen to

[00:11:10] be attracted to, other consenting adults, then we're creating secrets, we're creating an environment where people are not comfortable talking about things and that's unacceptable. So in addition to homophobia just being wrong, it's also a matter of public safety. It can cause issues.

[00:11:27] If there was no shame around it, if people could be more open about who they were sexually, maybe some people would have felt more empowered to come out and speak to the police about these things a lot earlier.

[00:11:41] And as you were indicating, some people in the gay community in Detroit might have reason to distress the police. Yes, that's a matter of fact. And in addition to that, I also think there is an element of where you have this in some cases that we've seen.

[00:11:59] Lauren Spear is actually one of them, the disappearance of a college girl in Bloomington, Indiana several years ago. There's a matter of sometimes when – and this is actually very understandable – when there's early days of an investigation, whether it's family, friends, community members, there can be

[00:12:19] a reluctance to, quote-unquote, air dirty laundry about the victim because there is an inclination in both the media and the public when there's some discussion of things like drugs or sex work. People say, oh, well, that must be it. And then they stop paying attention.

[00:12:41] So with Spear, it was use of drugs and alcohol culture in Bloomington. In this situation, there may have been reluctance to talk about this. We don't want to smear the victim, and we don't even know if that's related yet.

[00:12:53] So if we put that out there, it's essentially possibly going to have a negative effect about how this case is covered without actually leading to any information. So I can understand that too. Yeah, so there's a lot of different things at play here. It's complicated. It's really complicated.

[00:13:07] It's really, really complicated. Yeah, people may have thought, well, I don't want to hurt this man's reputation, this sterling man who everybody loved by revealing details about his sex life. But the fact is, we need to speak openly about these things. It's nothing to be ashamed of.

[00:13:30] It doesn't make him any less worthy of our sympathy and care. I mean, just because he was, you know, if he was possibly involved in getting, you know, paying for sex work, it doesn't make him a bad person.

[00:13:43] And it certainly doesn't mean that, like, you know, we have to have a nuanced view of people. And perhaps some people would find that that would be a choice that they wouldn't make. But I think we can all agree, hopefully, that his murder still needed solved.

[00:13:58] And it certainly didn't, you know, I mean, it's just a matter of coming into these situations as nonjudgmentally as possible and recognizing that, I mean, he was still a beloved man. He was still a beloved figure.

[00:14:10] He seemed to really do right by his patients, seemed to be loved by his family, seemed to have a lot of really close friends. None of that changes just because the circumstances of his death are what they are. And there's nothing wrong with being gay. Gay. Yeah.

[00:14:26] Or even using sex workers. Yeah. And in this situation, I just think a lack of judgment is helpful. A lack of moral judgment about the choices other people make. Yes. And I would certainly wager that there are a lot of people that we know who probably use

[00:14:43] sex workers and we don't even know about it. Yeah. And again, there's a huge stigma about that. I understand that. That doesn't have to be a choice that everyone would make, but it just, it doesn't need to completely color how we're talking about a murder victim.

[00:14:55] But I think what we've... But one thing that's striking is this does seem to be a factor that this is something that was an impediment for the police as they were investigating the case. Do you have a sense of why that is?

[00:15:10] Like in terms of why that would be an impediment? I have a thought. Well, why don't you... My thought is that that gives Desmond Burks a reason to be around Hoover to maybe

[00:15:25] have some of his stuff if there's like a payment involved and also his DNA being at the scene is explained away. It gives him a lot of reason to be there. It's sort of like if you were being looked at for my disappearance, not to be morbid,

[00:15:39] but like you'd have a reason to be around me a lot. That's not unusual. It's not like you're a stranger. But I was thinking more of the fact that some of these people apparently were reluctant

[00:15:49] to come and share what they knew and how that may have been an impediment to the investigation. And that might've slowed down the investigation in some way. And the fact that the investigation did not move as quickly as we all would have liked itself led to another tragedy.

[00:16:07] It did. I'll say to preface that, the brass in Detroit came out and said, we're going to have this solved before the first snowfall. That ended up not happening and is also a good lesson with law enforcement.

[00:16:22] Don't call shots unless you're 100% sure that you have it locked down because otherwise people are just going to be throwing that in your face forever. And understandably so, because they're frustrated. And unfortunately, the delay in this case did lead to somebody else getting severely harmed.

[00:16:39] So this goes back to April 17th, 2024. So April of this year, there is a minor traffic incident at West Chicago Street and Greenfield Road, also in Detroit. A 67-year-old man named Rita Selle of Dearborn, Michigan gets out of his car.

[00:17:04] He apparently accidentally bumped up against the back of Desmond Burks' car. Both men get into a fight and Burks punches Selle so hard that he, you know, bangs his head against the sidewalk. Several days later on May 11th, he dies at the hospital.

[00:17:29] So this is an elderly man who has lived in this community, has family ties there, and is just senselessly punched and killed by Burks. And what witnesses said was that he was, it was not just necessarily like an accidental one-time punch that led to bad consequences.

[00:17:53] He was beaten. This man was beaten. And it's very sad. His family took his remains back to Lebanon to be, you know, where he was from. And it's just, I don't know. I did my, my heart goes out to this family because had there been a quicker resolution

[00:18:13] to this, it's possible that he would not have died. It's actually very likely he would not have died because he would not have encountered Desmond Burks. But unfortunately, the police did not have the case against Mr. Burk Reddy at that time or they weren't even close to it.

[00:18:29] And I want to quickly note something. We often talk on our other episodes in a critical way about social media and the role, the destructive role it can play in crime and the investigation of crime.

[00:18:44] But it is worth noting that at the time that arrest was made of Burk in the case, Burks, in that particular case back in April, it was known among people following the case closely that he was the number one suspect in the murder of Devon Hoover.

[00:19:04] You and I certainly knew it. And we reached out to Detroit police at that time and said, can we, when we go on the air and talk about this sometime, can we say that this guy who was just arrested was a suspect in the Hoover case?

[00:19:19] Well, we don't really ask for permission. We say, we're going to do this. Is there an issue? And we were told, yes, there's an issue. There's an issue. And that could, if this got out, it could potentially really impact in a negative way

[00:19:34] the investigation of the case against Dr. Hoover. So we didn't. Yeah, we reached out in May, in mid-May, essentially asking, hey, we're going to do that. Is there an issue? As we do when there's an ongoing case where perhaps someone hasn't been arrested yet,

[00:19:49] we don't seek to detrimentally harm, I suppose, cases with our coverage. We just want to get information out there. They said it could impact the case in a negative way. We didn't go forward with that information.

[00:20:04] I have to assume other people probably knew it too, and that information did not get out there. So kudos to the people who have been covering this case for keeping that under wraps because it could have potentially impacted the investigation in a negative way.

[00:20:19] And in our case, when we take these on a case-by-case basis, essentially, when a case is unsolved for a long time and you're waiting on answers, there's going to be a time where we say, well, perhaps the benefit to people following this case and the benefit to the

[00:20:36] public outweighs any concerns from law enforcement about information getting out there. That's a valid move by journalists at some point. But in this situation, we felt differently. The police were still very, very actively working it, and it was a relatively fresh case.

[00:20:53] So we just want you to know that it's not like we're always going to sit on information, but it's also not like we're always going to be bulls in the China shop and just kind of kick down the door on information.

[00:21:03] We treat it case-by-case, and essentially, we try to just think about it from harm to the case versus newsworthiness for the public and try to come down as reasonably as possible. Although, frankly, based on both of our personalities, we tend at this point to be somewhat

[00:21:20] cautious because we do not want to. The thing is, perhaps it's something we could have an episode where we just discuss this. But the thing is, if we don't share a bit of information on the show, we can always correct that later.

[00:21:36] We can always then do another episode and say, well, here is this new bit of information you didn't get before. But if we share something on the show and we give you a bit of information and then we conclude we shouldn't have, we can't take it back.

[00:21:49] And we will be haunted by that for life then. So we don't want that. And we did not start covering the case of Dr. Devon Hoover in order to make it more difficult for his family to find justice. Yeah, and to get scoops.

[00:22:03] It's just not how we roll. And so yeah, that's important to note. But this investigation obviously is still ongoing, and we're now heading toward a trial for Desmond Burks. We tried to look him up and sort of get as much information on him as possible.

[00:22:21] And there's really not that much out there at this time. The one thing I was able to find far, far back in his past from the Detroit Free Press as accessed via newspapers.com is the case of Desmond Burks and his two brothers around child protective petition.

[00:22:43] And it was essentially calling on his biological father to make an appearance in court at that time or essentially from what I'm reading here, potentially surrender his rights as a parent. And so other than that, he does not appear in the newspaper record that often as far

[00:23:01] as what I saw. But in this situation, there's obviously allegations of pretty extreme violence toward both Dr. Hoover and Mr. Saleh, who again, this is just a road rage incident. This is a situation where this guy presumably accidentally bumped into him.

[00:23:22] And instead of just dealing with that, there's this beating, you know, vicious beating of this elderly man. So it raises a lot of concern. And in the case of Dr. Hoover, we should also know that there was, you know, money taken from the scene.

[00:23:44] As well as some pretty valuable watches. And as you indicated, just the fact that Mr. Burks had this property doesn't necessarily prove anything because he if Dr. Hoover was friendly with him, there could have been any number of legitimate reasons why this person could have possessed this property

[00:24:04] without having broken any laws. Yes. But I mean, I will say three thousand. I'm sorry, not three thousand. Thirty thousand dollars in cash. That's a lot of money. And that was missing from the scene. Right. Along with, you know, as you said, the watches, credit cards, wallet.

[00:24:21] So it definitely it looks bad beyond just a sort of a sex worker relationship. The thing to remember is police and prosecutors only get one chance. And if they file charges too soon and lose, they run the risk of letting someone escape punishment for their crime forever.

[00:24:46] And so it is better, although it may be difficult and frustrating, it is better to take the time to make sure that not only do you have the right person, but you have enough evidence

[00:24:59] against them which can be admitted in court in order to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And because if you don't have that, then you're just wasting everyone's time. Just so you all are walking away with just more information about that evidence. Let me go through it.

[00:25:16] And this is a very important caveat before we get into this is that we don't know what Burke's defense is going to be. OK, so we don't know his side of the story at this point. This is all coming from the prosecution. Let's keep that in mind.

[00:25:30] Let's be willing to keep an open mind about this stuff. That's very important. Very important. This man is innocent until proven guilty. This is only from the prosecution. And at the same time, we don't know the extent of the prosecution's case either.

[00:25:43] This is just what's been released to the media via a press conference at this time. But we presume there could be more. There could be more details. So early days, this is just an update. So this is one kind of key point.

[00:26:00] Thousands of text messages between Burke's and Hoover establishing the relationship. Burke's appears to be a man caught on camera footage showing him abandoning Hoover's F.C.V. And this is notable. Burke's had been shot and was recovering from a bullet wound in his hip, I believe,

[00:26:22] at the time. The man is limping and again appears to match Burke's description. So it's putting him at the car. In addition to that, one of Hoover's watches was found at Burke's place. And that was one.

[00:26:39] And then there's another incident where they found another one of his watches, very expensive watches, at Hoover's place. So they're kind of piling it up in terms of that. Now, how are they going to tie him to the murder weapon?

[00:26:54] How are they going to go even further than that and sort of tie him to the scene? It seems like there's certainly a lot of smoke there. Are we going to get to the fire? That all remains to be seen. It seems definitely possible.

[00:27:07] And it seems like things are definitely piling up against Burke's, but I think it's just important to keep an open mind. But anyways, that's sort of the high level points about what we know about the update in Dr. Devon Hoover's case.

[00:27:21] I'm curious, what were your sources for the material that you shared in this episode? Well, we watched the press conference that the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office put out. And that was sort of where a lot of the news media got their information from.

[00:27:40] But in addition to that, I got some information from the American Human Rights Council, the AHRC, that ran a press release from Michigan police, from Detroit police about Mr. Sala. I just find that case very, very sad. And I feel horrible for his family in that situation.

[00:28:03] I accessed the Detroit Free Press through newspapers.com. And then one thing that I found incredibly helpful, and we will link to this obviously, is Click on Detroit, aka Local 4, had a comprehensive timeline of all the developments in this case.

[00:28:22] It has even more information than we got into in this episode. Check it out. I'd like to second that. During the time we've worked on this, I've often turned to Click on Detroit. Click on Detroit is amazing. I'm a huge fan.

[00:28:36] Derek Hutchinson did a wonderful job outlining this. You and I frequently rely on them for stories in Michigan, but they did a really good job with this. Check them out. Great source. Follow them for more information on this case because they're going to be, I'm assuming,

[00:28:49] doing a lot of breaking updates. But I suppose the last thing to say is that Desmond Burks was arraigned today. And what day is it today? I guess today is Thursday, August 8th, 2024. So that's what's happening.

[00:29:08] And what's happening next is that there will be a probable cause conference on August 15th. And this is a man facing two separate murder cases. So he has a challenging road ahead, and we'll keep an eye on it. Yeah.

[00:29:24] And also for everyone who follows the intersection of things like mental health and crime, there's a competency hearing for him on September 3rd in Mr. Seles' case. And if there's anyone out there who knows Mr. Burks or who has any information about

[00:29:43] Devon Hoover or anything pertinent to this case, please reach out to us. Yes. Thank you all so much for listening. Our email address is murdersheet at gmail.com. Excellent. Yeah, that's probably important to say. Yes, I wanted to put that in there. But we really appreciate listening.

[00:29:58] We hope this new format for our show is helpful. Yeah, let us know what you think of it. Yeah. Let us know what you think at, again, murdersheet at gmail.com. Thanks, everybody. Thanks. Bye. Thanks so much for listening to The Murder Sheet.

[00:30:14] If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at murdersheet at gmail.com. If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities. If you're interested in joining our Patreon, that's available at www.patreon.com slash

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