Off the Bus, Out of Her Mind: Carol Anne Burger and Jessica Kalish

CBS 12's segment about the deaths of Jessica Kalish and Carol Anne Burger.

August, 1994 marked the 25th anniversary of the legendary concert in Woodstock, New York. A reporter from The Palm Beach Post spoke with Carol Anne Burger about Woodstock.

"I inhaled," she told him.

And Carol mentioned her passing moment in cinematic history. In the documentary film made about Woodstock, Carol Anne Burger was"the naked girl in the pond."

"I had a lot of fun," Burger said, "I have a picture of myself leaning over."

"It's just such a lovely photo," she said.

Carol Anne Burger was 17 when she attended Woodstock. As she spoke to the Post reporter, she pointed to a belt she was wearing in a photo made at the concert. She said, "I gave that belt away." Burger continued, "Some fellow had lost his pants and someone had given him another pair that were too big. He was walking around holding them up with his thumbs through the loops, and I said, 'What would happen if you let go?' And he said, 'My pants would fall down, man, want me to?' And I said, 'That won't be necessary,' and I gave him my belt."

It was a time of "peace and love." People just gave things away.

If you've ever seen the Woodstock movie, you know the images -- the whirling hippies, wild and nude in the rain, passing fat joints back and forth. The thumping music. All the hair. It was decadent, sure. But there was an underlying innocence, too. An optimism. Perhaps it was the last gasp of a movement, a final moment before many ceased denying that the world would never quite conform to the free love ethos.

Woodstock was remarkable in part for its relative lack of violence. All those drugged-out hippies, including Carol Anne Burger, indulged in the peace, love and drugs with no fear for what might happen to them as they bent over the water in the pond to examine the eternity inside the ragged patches of sunlight that kept flickering through the stormclouds above.

No one was knifed or shot. That would come at another huge concert, later. The nude girl in the pond was safe and she knew it.

It's a long, long way from 1969 to today. A long way from the friendly girl in the pond, the girl who gave away her belt, to the writer who died last week. To the woman police believe stabbed her former lover 222 times with a screwdriver before taking her own life...

In the state of Massachusetts, 56-year-old software exec Jessica Kalish and 57-year-old journalist Carol Anne Burger were not mere lovers. They were spouses. The pair married there in 2005.

Things hadn't gone all that well since. The one-time couple was still living together, but it was more out of financial need than anything else. According to multiple sources, Kalish's and Burger's romantic relationship ended about a year ago.

Their home was divided. Kalish spent her time in one part of the house, meeting new women online, and Burger in another part, working as a journalist, most recently -- and famously -- for The Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" political coverage. Some of Burger's bio from HuffPo:

"Carol Anne Burger is an award winning photojournalist who has specialized in covering the not for profit financial sector credit union industry for more than a decade. At Credit Union Times, she reported on the events surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing and the recovery of Federal Employees Credit Union; the campaign to pass the Credit Union Membership Access Act and coverage of consumer financial privacy issues. For those in-depth series of stories, she won recognition from the Florida Magazine Association and the American Association of Business Press Editors.

"Burger was editor of the Delray Beach Times and editor of the Twin City News, Pompano Beach, where she did general assignment work, including the police beat, municipal government and wrote a weekly column..."

Carol Anne Burger's last piece for HuffPo was published October 21: "Christian School Teacher Takes Female Students to Palin Rally."

It was, for the famously left-leaning HuffPo, a relatively neutral piece of reportage, co-authored with journalist Christian Avard. There was no sign of what was to come just one day later.

Jessica Kalish was found on Thursday, October 23 in the back of her BMW sedan. She'd been stabbed repeatedly, put in the vehicle, and the vehicle abandoned behind a medical facility.

The night before she'd exercised at an LA Fitness. After that Kalish seemed to disappear.

Someone found Kalish's personal effects, her wallet and keys. They called Carol Anne Burger. Burger reported Jessica Kalish's disappearance to police [hear the 911 call from Burger here].

After Kalish was found, police saw the ferocious violence to which she'd been subjected and they decided that they should question Carol Anne Burger. Nothing about Jessica Kalish's murder seemed impersonal.

Rather than speak with police, Burger went outside and shot herself in the head. The girl who once stood nude in that muddy pond on Yasgur's pond left behind a mystery.

Police believe Carol Anne Burger snapped. Those who profile criminals will tell you that people don't just do that. There are always signs that someone might snap. Here, it's hard to find any harbinger of homicide on Burger's mind. At least, not anything that could predict what she did.

And what she did was stunning in its violence and cruelty.

After Jessica Kalish arrived home that Wednesday night, some sort of confrontation occurred. It may have begun in the garage of the home the women shared. Burger attacked her ex with a screwdriver, and police said "the process of killing Jessica was pretty lengthy, in and out of the car." The number of wounds inflicted on Jessica Kalish is, by now, rather infamous. She was stabbed 222 times.

Once Burger was certain that Kalish was dead, she piled her in the car and drove to where the vehicle was found abandoned the following day. Burger walked home.

Once home, she began cleaning up the scene. Using luminol to fluoresce where blood had dripped, splattered and pooled in the home, police found that a "tremendous amount" of blood had been shed in the garage. From there, investigators were able to follow ghostly footprints; Carol Anne Burger's tracks through the house as she used the washing machine, the sink, the shower.

Burger got in her own Toyota to throw out Kalish's keys and wallet.

It sounds as though Carol Anne Burger took a great deal of time to commit her crime then try and cover it up. There was rage, yes. But there was also cold calculation after the rage surely had faded. No one found a note after Burger committed suicide, but killing herself didn't seem like it was really part of the plan.

And while friends who corresponded with Burger via e-mail could point to expressions of frustration and anger from Burger about Kalish, no one could imagine such a savage, intimate act of violence. Burger's friend Helen Gale told the Post that it was just "beyond belief."

This is a political season, so much was made of Carol Anne Burger's participation in HuffPo's "Off the Bus." Burger didn't really do much posting there, though. Perhaps she was spending too much energy trying to govern some other part of her psyche, the part that didn't write straightforward news articles only occasionally tinged with the leftist slant HuffPo so unapologetically promotes.

The mystery here may lay buried somewhere in the years between 1969 and 2008. Somewhere along the way, the hippie chick who gave her belt to a stranger at Woodstock must have transformed into someone she didn't entirely recognize. All the sunlight she might have gathered inside during those brief days of peace and love was gone by the time her lover lay cold in the rear of a BMW. What was she thinking, as she mopped up the blood in the house they'd bought when they were in love?

No one can answer such a question now. They can only wonder at 222 thrusts of the screwdriver and later, Carol Anne Burger's finger on the trigger of the gun under her chin.

Some mysteries abide because the people who created them didn't understand what was happening at the time. I suspect this was the case with Carol Anne Burger, right to the very end. [Palm Beach Post via Gawker]