Paul Ulrich and Tanya Stratton Find Mate's Body

Paul Ulrich and Tanya Stratton’s discovery of Eldon Mate’s body seemed to place Ulrich among the people drawn into the case by chance. The later recognition that he had engineered his presence transformed the discovery into part of the killer’s performance: finding Mate gave Ulrich a legitimate reason to approach the crime scene and watch the investigation unfold.

The Discovery and the Scene

Mate had been killed near Alex Delaware’s home, on the remote stretch of Mulholland where his van had stood for hours without attracting notice. When Alex set out at seven-thirty, he drove north along Beverly Glen and then west on Mulholland, leaving the commuter traffic behind as the road climbed past brush, empty lots, and isolated houses. The landscape’s separation from ordinary traffic helps explain how a conspicuous vehicle and a prolonged crime could remain unseen; investigators could not assume that a lack of reported vehicles meant nobody had come or gone.

The van’s interior, rather than the road around it, held the signs of the killing. Milo Sturgis described blood across the front seat, especially the passenger side, but none on the ground outside. His reconstruction was of a painstaking cleanup in a confined space: the killer may have moved between the van’s doors, stripped off bloodied clothing, changed, and swept the area before leaving. Cardboard sheets cut to cover the windows were streaked with arterial blood, suggesting that they had been used to conceal the work from view. Those details made the discovery more than the reporting of a body: the site preserved traces of an operation designed to control what witnesses could see—and what the police would initially understand.

The Discovery as Performance

The later investigation recast the discovery as a deliberate piece of staging. Paul Ulrich had not merely happened upon Eldon Mate’s body: like Ferns Grant, who had presented himself as a helpful citizen by “discovering” a body, Ulrich had supplied himself with a legitimate reason to appear at a major crime scene. The discovery let him watch the police work while concealing his role in the killing. Its usefulness to him lay not only in access but in the spectacle of investigators encountering the result of his handiwork and struggling to understand it.

The choice of where and how to meet the police was part of that design. On a Monday morning, Ulrich and Tanya Stratton went walking on Mulholland, although Tanya said they rarely went there except on Sundays. She resented the changed routine and told Milo Sturgis that the decisions had been Paul’s—including the decision to speak with Milo at the site rather than at home. Ulrich described the outing as an attempt at therapy for Tanya; Alex Delaware later understood that the explanation concealed other purposes. Meeting away from Ulrich’s home kept Milo off his territory, while returning to the scene offered Ulrich another encounter with the crime and its aftermath.

Their contrasting reactions further undermined the appearance of a chance discovery. Tanya was visibly upset and eager to leave. Ulrich, by contrast, was amiable, helpful, and relaxed—too relaxed, in Alex’s assessment, for someone who had just come upon a bloodbath. His ease in the landscape and his talk of its beauty and of staying fit also fit the outdoorsman identity that Leimert Fusco had associated with Michael Burke. What had looked like composure during a traumatic discovery became, in retrospect, the killer’s comfort in a setting he had chosen and controlled.

Ulrich’s remarks to Milo about publicity carried the same double edge. He raised the fact that their names had not appeared in the papers and pressed the subject of the brief celebrity that a notorious case could bring. Milo took this as concern about media attention; Alex later recognized that Ulrich was both alert to publicity and hungry for it. He was testing how close he could come to criminal celebrity without confessing. The discovery therefore served two audiences at once: it gave the police a plausible witness, and it gave the killer an opportunity to approach the investigation, relive the scene, and savor the attention without openly claiming responsibility.

Identity Behind the Discovery

The hindsight that turns Ulrich’s appearance at the scene into a performance also changes how his carefully managed public identity reads. He presented himself as a respectable financial consultant, yet Alex Delaware recalled that his hair had grown shorter and thinner in every photograph of Michael Burke, progressing toward a fuzzy crew cut. Ulrich’s balding appearance fit that sequence; so did the broad mustache, which Alex had first taken as an oddly flamboyant contrast to his conservative clothes. The discovery had placed a composed, respectable witness beside the investigation. These accumulating details made that witness legible as Burke, using appearance as another mask while positioning himself close to the crime.

The parallel with Ferns Grant gives the act a grimly repetitive shape: in each case, Burke’s role as the person who found a body supplied cover for his presence at a major investigation. With Mate, the apparent witness could observe the police’s response to a killing he had arranged and revisit the scene under the protection of a plausible explanation. The discovery was therefore not simply a way into the investigation; it was the point where Burke’s manufactured respectability, appetite for attention, and control of the crime scene converged.

From Crime Scene to Pursuit

Once Alex Delaware recognized that Paul Ulrich was Michael Burke, the place where Mate had been found became a point of departure for pursuing the man who had used it as a stage. Milo Sturgis met Alex on the road below the murder site, engine running; from there they drove east on Mulholland and north into the Valley. Milo had used DMV records to trace Tanya Stratton’s Saturn to an address on Milbank in Sherman Oaks, a lead that brought the investigation closer to Ulrich’s life beyond the scene. The apparent discovery had first offered Ulrich a way into the police inquiry; later, the inquiry used the details surrounding that appearance to move toward him.

The pursuit eventually led Alex and Milo to a remote cabin reached by a narrow dirt track, nearly five miles from the ocean and set well back from its nearest neighbor. At the entrance, they left the car and continued on foot, wary of announcing themselves and giving Burke a chance to orchestrate another encounter. Through the trees, the cabin’s setting recalled the twisted sycamore where Alice Zoghbie and Roy Haiselden had been propped. That resemblance sharpened the significance of the original discovery: what Ulrich had presented as an accidental encounter with Mate’s body belonged to a larger pattern of carefully arranged scenes, in which place, witness, and performance were all under his control.