Man Sentenced for Death of Mickey Mouse Club Member Dennis Day
For many years, there was a cloud of mystery surrounding Dennis Day. He became famous as a child for being one of the original Mickey Mouse Club members from 1955 to 1957. When he turned 18, he moved to San Francisco to continue working as an actor and dancer. Day and his longtime partner (and eventual husband) Henry Ernest Caswell ran a guesthouse for gay actors there and worked for the Living History Centre. In the 1980s, they moved to Oregon and he worked for Harry & David.
In 2018, Day was reported missing while Caswell was in the hospital after a fall. For about a year, the case was unresolved until they found his human remains on his property. The roommate of Day and Caswell, a 36-year-old handyman named Daniel James Burda was arrested and charged for his death including manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and identity theft.
Finally, in 2024, Burda was sentenced to four-plus years in prison. He plead guilty to criminally negligent homicide and abuse of a corpse. Prosecutors claim that Day was trying to evict Burda from the property, so he caused Day’s death, concealed it, and used his identity to spend his money. Somehow, the Phoenix Police Department did not discover his remains for nine months, which were hidden beneath a pile of clothes.
Remind Day’s family claims that due to police negligence, the medical examiner was not able to determine a cause of death because so much time had passed. The case had also been delayed due to Burda’s visits to the hospital to determine his mental fitness. If you’re interested in learning more about this case, it was featured on a February 2018 episode of Dateline NBC. What do you think of this heartbreaking story?
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