On Thursday, the Winston-Salem Journal’s Michael Hewlett reported that Amber Burch pleaded guilty to second-degree murder of Tommy Dean Welch as well as armed robbery and accessory after the fact in the of murder Joshua Fredrick Weltzer. With Burch’s former boyfriend and accomplice Pazuzu Algarad taking his life in prison in the fall of 2015, we may never get a full picture of how Algarad and Burch Were able to elude justice for five years.
Welch and Weltzer were executed by Algarad and Burch separately in the fall and summer of 2009. Those two were not Bonnie and Clyde, they were two unsophisticated criminals living in a filthy, disgusting house. They weren’t on the run. They turned a decent, middle-classed home in a nice Clemmon’s neighborhood into a house of horrors, an-uninhabitable shit-hole that would have costs thousands to be brought up to code.
The home at 2749 Knob Hill Drive has been leveled and cleared. But it’s a shame that our local paper of record didn’t dig deeper into this story. The Journal published several articles on Pazuzu Algarad, a schizophrenic self-described Satanist, alcoholic, who filed his teeth and almost never bathed. But Winston’s paper of record reported that in February of 2010 the Forsyth County Sheriff’s department executed a search warrant at the property. But the Journal didn’t press the Sheriff’s department.
How the hell could they miss, the obvious signs that something was terribly wrong at 2749 Knob Hill Drive? When I went there to take a photo of Algarad’s home, a neighbor told me that they heard and witnesses a lot of suspicious things coming out of that home. If police had actually come out and searched the premises, they would have at a minimum found violations of Algarad’s parole.
But they didn’t do their job. They let a crazy couple of violent criminals, Pazuzu Algarad and Amber Burch go free for years. We’re lucky that only two murders occurred. It could have been worse. I hope the Forsyth County Sheriff’s department has learned from the mistakes that they made in this case. But without a full public accounting, it’s doubtful that they did.
