BREAKTHROUGH! D4VD Made A BIG MISTAKE It's Over! Prosecutors Now Have EVIDENCE Of

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:01]The third charge, uh, in addition to lying in wait and for financial gain, is murdering a witness to an investigation.

[00:00:10]In this particular case, when a defendant pleads not guilty, the system does something very specific. It does not weigh the plea. It does not measure it against the evidence. It simply records it, and then it shifts the entire weight of the proceeding onto the people who brought the charges. From that moment forward, the prosecution must build. That is the architecture of an American criminal case. For most defendants, what is in that room reveals itself slowly. Months pass, hearings come and go, discovery moves between offices in slow, controlled batches. The public learns the shape of the case in pieces, but once in a while, a prosecutor stands up in court and tells a judge something so specific, so precisely tied to the elements of a charge, that the public does not have to wait for the trial to understand what kind of case is being built. That is what happened in Angeles last week. A deputy district attorney with a reputation for understatement walked into a small courtroom and told a judge what investigators had pulled from the phone of David Anthony Burke, the singer the world has known as D4 VD. She did not describe what they found. She did not have to. She named the category. She explained why the law would not let her hand it over the standard way. She used a single sentence. "I cannot turn that type of materials over." And in those words, she said what the second charge in this case is going to be built on.

[00:01:35]This is a story about what the prosecution does after a not guilty plea, when one of the three counts on the complaint sits directly on top of evidence the defense has not yet been allowed to see. A brief reminder before we continue. Everything in this report is drawn from open court proceedings and the official criminal complaint. All charges remain allegations. David Anthony Burke is presumed innocent. A not guilty plea is one of the most misunderstood acts in American criminal law. It looks decisive on television. A defendant stands beside an attorney, the judge asks how the defendant pleads, and a single phrase comes back across the courtroom. Cameras click, headlines appear within minutes, and for many viewers, the plea reads as a counter claim, as if the defendant has just disputed the prosecution's account in some legally binding way. That is not what is happening. A not guilty plea is not a denial of facts. It is a procedural statement that the defendant declines to concede the case. It is a request that the request that the prosecution prove every element of every charge to the standard the law requires.

[00:02:42]It is, in short, the activation of due process. Nothing has been challenged on the merits. Nothing has been disputed in evidence. The defendant has simply asked the system to do its job. This matters in the case of David Anthony Burke for a particular reason. When his attorneys entered his plea on April 20th, they did so on his behalf for all three charges at once. A single procedural breath that covered first-degree murder with special circumstances, continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14, and mutilation of human remains. Three separate accusation ones, each requiring its own evidentiary foundation, each carrying its own statutory framework, each capable of standing or falling on its own merits at trial. The plea covered all three the way an umbrella covers three people standing under it. But the rain that falls on each of them is different.

[00:03:35]Outside of court, his lead attorney, Blair Burke, issued a written statement that has been quoted in nearly every report on this case. In her words, the actual evidence will show that David Burke did not murder Celeste Reavis Hernandez and was not the cause of her death. Read that sentence carefully. 26 words. It is a defense statement on the homicide charge. It addresses cause of death. It addresses the murder count. It does not, in any phrasing, address the second count on the complaint. It does not address the alleged conduct that the second count describes. It does not address the digital evidence the prosecution says supports it. The plea covered all three. The public defense covered one. That distinction is going to matter when the prosecution stands up on May 1st. There is also a procedural detail that is worth keeping in mind because it sets the tempo of the entire case.

[00:04:29]Burke's defense team, on the day of the arraignment, exercised a right that is rarely used in California. Under Penal Code Section 859B, a defendant in custody has the right to a preliminary hearing within 10 court days of arraignment, unless that right is waived. In nearly every felony case, the right is waived. Defense attorneys want time to investigate. They want time to obtain discovery. They want time to file motions. The 10-day right is, in practice, almost always set aside. It exists in the statute mainly as a guarantee for defendants who would otherwise sit in custody indefinitely.

[00:05:07]Burke's attorneys did not waive it. They invoked it. They told the court they wanted a preliminary hearing on the statutory schedule. Burke, in earlier remarks, explained the reasoning in plain terms. With so much sealed evidence in the investigation, with so many subpoenas served behind closed doors, with so much of the prosecution's case still hidden from public view, the defense wanted the prosecution forced to put it on a courtroom table. That demand is what produced the April 23rd hearing.

[00:05:36]That demand is what produced the disclosure that has now reset the public conversation about this case. To understand what was disclosed at the April 23rd hearing, the three counts have to be set out clearly because they are not interchangeable and they do not rest on the same evidence. The first count is murder in the first degree. The Los Angeles County District Attorney, Nathan Hochman, attached three special circumstance allegations to that count when he announced the charges on April 20th.

[00:06:05]Today, I am announcing the charges against David Anthony Burke, the musician known as David, spelled D4 VD, in connection with the brutal and horrific murder of Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time. The first is lying in wait, a legal designation that elevates a homicide based on the manner in which the alleged killing was concealed and approached. According to Hochman's own framing at the press conference, the lying in wait theory is grounded in the prosecution's claim that Celeste went to Burke's Hollywood Hills home on the night of April 23rd, 2025 at his invitation and was never heard from again. circumstances are lying in wait.

[00:06:50]That Celeste went to Mr. Burke's home on the night of April 23rd, 2025, as alleged in the complaint, at his invitation, and again, was not heard from again. The second special circumstance is murder for financial gain. Hochman framed this in plain language. Prosecutors allege that Burke killed Celeste. The second is a special circumstance being that this this murder was committed for financial gain.

[00:07:21]As the evidence will show in court, the financial gain was for Mr. Burke to maintain what the district attorney called his very lucrative musical career. As the evidence will show in court, the financial gain was for Mr. Burke to maintain his very lucrative music musical career that Celeste was threatening on that particular night. Which Celeste was, in his words, threatening on that particular night. The third is murder of a witness to an investigation.

[00:07:53]The third charge, uh, in addition to lying in wait and for financial gain, is murdering a witness to an investigation.

[00:08:02]In this particular case, the witness, in Hochman's account, was Celeste, and the investigation into the alleged sexual conduct between her and Burke. All three of those special circumstances, if proven, qualify the case for a maximum sentence of life without parole or the death penalty. Whether the death penalty will be sought is a decision the district attorney's office has said will be made at a later date. There is also a separate allegation that the killing involved a deadly and dangerous weapon, described in the criminal complaint as a sharp instrument, drawn from the medical examiner's findings. The second count is continuous sexual abuse of a child under the age of 14. The criminal complaint specifies the alleged conduct as occurring between September of 2023 and September of 2024.

[00:08:52]It is a charge that does not depend on the manner of death, the location of the body, or the chronology of the discovery. It is its own legal category, with its own statutory definition, its own evidentiary standard, and its own forensic spine. The third count is mutilation of human remains. The autopsy report, made public the day before the April 23rd hearing, established that Celeste's body had been dismembered. The head and arms had been removed. Two fingers had been taken from her left hand. Multiple blue plastic fragments were embedded in the cut surfaces of her arms and legs, and had been preserved as evidence. The cause of death, per the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner, was multiple penetrating injuries to the upper body. Two wounds, one to the chest and one to the abdomen, both consistent with sharp force trauma. The manner of death was homicide. Investigators were unable to determine the precise mechanism that produced the wounds at a because of the severity of decomposition own, and no weapon has been recovered.

[00:09:55]Toxicology screening produced presumptive positives for benzodiazepines, methamphetamine, and MDMA, although the medical examiner has cautioned that the alcohol detected in the body could be a product of decomposition rather than ingestion.

[00:10:11]Prosecutors have stated in court filings and in press conferences that the body was mutilated on or about May 5th, roughly 2 weeks after the alleged date of death. Three counts, three different evidentiary structures. The first leans on circumstantial evidence, witness testimony, and the timeline of the alleged killing. The third leans on the body itself, on the autopsy, on the trace evidence in the cut surfaces, on the blue plastic fragments on the bags.

[00:10:40]The second, the one in the middle, rests, the prosecution has now told the court, on what was found inside Burke's iPhone and his iCloud account. The hearing on April 23rd was, on the original schedule, supposed to be the preliminary hearing itself. The defense had demanded it, the court had set it.

[00:10:58]Then, in the days leading up to it, both sides indicated that the matter was not yet ready, and the proceeding was reframed. The morning of the 23rd would not, in the end, be the prosecution's evidentiary showcase. It would, instead, be a discussion about how and when that showcase would happen. A status conference in everything but name. In the ordinary course of a high-profile murder case, a status conference is procedural. Discovery progress is reported, scheduling issues are addressed, sometimes a hearing date is set, the lawyers leave, there are no fireworks, the press files a brief item, everyone moves on. That is not what happened on April 23rd in the courtroom of Superior Court Judge Charlaine F.

[00:11:41]Olmedo at the Clara Shortridge-Foltz Criminal Justice Center. What made the date itself significant was first noted by the prosecutor at the podium. April 23rd, 2026, marked exactly 1 year since Celeste Rivas-Hernandez was last known to have been alive. The date appeared in the press release, in the criminal complaint, and now in the courtroom.

[00:12:03]Beth Silverman, the Deputy District Attorney leading the prosecution, opened by acknowledging it directly. Today, she told the court, it has been exactly 1 year since the death of Celeste. We are eager to set this case for trial. Burke sat through it. He spoke only to consent to brief procedural interruptions of the scheduling discussion, and to answer a single procedural question from the judge with the words, "Yes, ma'am." The defense had requested in earlier filings that he be permitted to appear in dress pants and a button-down shirt for the hearing. The judge denied that request.

[00:12:36]He appeared in jail clothing. Judge Olmedo separately signed an order directing the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department to provide Burke with a haircut before the May 1st proceeding. The defense team was present in full, Blair Burke, Marilyn Bednarsky, and Regina Peter. They had requested an expedited preliminary hearing, and Burke, through his attorneys, was exercising his right under Penal Code Section 859b to have it within 10 court days of arraignment. They wanted the prosecution forced to reveal what it had. What they got at the April 23rd hearing, instead of a routine scheduling exchange, was a disclosure that has now reset the public conversation about this case. Silverman told Judge Olmedo that the investigative material was, in her words, voluminous.

[00:13:23]She estimated that more than 40 terabytes of data had been recovered from Burke's devices, with over 20 terabytes of raw data still being uploaded to the discovery system. She told the court that her office had begun handing over investigative findings to the defense team, but that one specific category of material could not be turned over the standard way. She used the legal phrase, "The law requires." She specified that a significant amount of illegal digital material, the kind the California Penal Code reserves for special handling, had been recovered from Burke's iPhone and from his iCloud account. Then she said, in plain terms, "I cannot turn that type of materials over." Then, in the same hearing, she made two further disclosures that had not been part of the public record before that morning. The first was that not one, but three separate grand juries had heard evidence in this investigation. Their existence had been hinted at in sealed Texas filings 2 months earlier, when Burke's family objected to subpoenas. She made it official. The grand juries, she told Judge Olmedo, had not been called to indict. They had been called for investigative purposes, to issue subpoenas, to compel witness testimony, to build a record before any arrest was made. The second new disclosure was a court-authorized wiretap. Investigators, Silverman told the court, had obtained a wiretap on Burke's phone as part of their probe. Until that morning, the wiretap had not appeared in any public filing. The defense learned of it the same way the press learned of it, from the Deputy District Attorney's lips in open court. The defense team did not object to the disclosures. When given the floor, the defense, speaking through Marilyn Bednarsky, characterized the morning with a single sentence, "It has been an informative hearing." The judge then formalized the calendar, a status hearing for April 29th, a preliminary evidentiary hearing beginning May 1st, scheduled to run 4 to 5 days. The matter was adjourned. The implications would land within hours. To understand why the disclosure at the April 23rd hearing carries the weight it does, the procedural reality has to be set against the backdrop of the rest of the case file. The prosecution has more than 40 terabytes of data, phone extractions, cloud backups, surveillance imagery, witness statements from three grand juries, a medical examiner's autopsy, vehicle forensics from the Tesla, the contents of search warrants executed across multiple jurisdictions. All of this, in the ordinary course of California criminal procedure, is moved between the prosecution and the defense through standard discovery channels, hard drives, encrypted file transfers, index databases. The defense team takes possession, indexes the material, distributes it among investigators and forensic experts, and prepares to challenge it. There is one category of evidence in American criminal law that does not move that way. It does not leave government custody. It cannot be copied to a defense drive. It cannot be sent over a secure transfer protocol. It cannot be reviewed in a private law office or examined on a forensic expert's home machine. That category is illegal digital material involving minors. Federal law, mirrored by California statute, restricts the possession of such material to a narrow category of authorized personnel, law enforcement, designated forensic examiners, prosecutors handling the case, and, in a specific exception, defense council and their experts under controlled conditions. The material remains in government custody. The defense team must travel to a designated facility. They review the files on a court-approved computer that is air-gapped it from any external network.

[00:17:09]The session is logged. The material does not leave the room. There is no copy.

[00:17:14]There is no take-home. There's nothing for the defense's outside experts to study at their own pace, at their own desks. This is why Beth Silverman told Judge Olmedo in plain terms that she could not turn that type of materials over. She was not declining as a strategic choice. She was stating the legal reality. Under federal protocol and California's adoption of it, the material exists in a special evidentiary category, and the discovery process around it operates differently from anything else in this case. What that means for the defense is that the team has, at the time of the April 23rd hearing, not yet reviewed the material the prosecution says it found. read about it in court. They have heard it characterized. They have not seen it.

[00:17:59]They have not had their forensic experts open a single file. They have not been able to test, before going into a preliminary hearing, what is actually contained in those archives, when the files were created, where they originated from, or whose images are involved. That last point is one that has been carefully handled in the press, and it deserves careful handling here, too. Silverman did not say whose images are depicted in the material. She did not state on the record that Celeste appears in the files. She did not state that any specific identified individual appears in the files. She characterized the category and the volume. The content remains, by court order, sealed. What the prosecution has said openly is that this material was recovered from Burke's iPhone and his iCloud account during the broad series of search warrants executed on his devices. That recovery is what supports, in the prosecution's view, the second count on the complaint. The continuous sexual abuse charge does not stand on the medical examiner's autopsy.

[00:19:02]It does not stand on the recovery of remains from the Tesla. It stands, the prosecution has now told the court, on the digital record left behind in the cloud. There is one more procedural element worth flagging here. Even when the defense does eventually conduct its review at the designated facility, the material it sees will not become evidence the defense is free to discuss in public. The same statutes that restrict possession also restrict description. A defense team that has reviewed restricted digital evidence cannot characterize that evidence in detail in open court without potentially violating the protective orders that govern the material. This means that, even after review, the defense's options for publicly responding to the second count remain unusually narrow. They can challenge methodology. They can challenge chain of custody. They can challenge attribution, but who placed the files on the device and through what means. What they cannot do in the ordinary course is publicly describe the files in any way that contests their content. That is an asymmetry that will persist through trial. The grand jury disclosure at the April 23rd hearing has been somewhat overshadowed by the disclosure about the digital material, but its weight in the architecture of the prosecution's case is significant in its own right. In the United States federal system and in California, a grand jury is a body of citizens convened in secret to consider whether sufficient evidence exists to indict a person for a crime. It has subpoena power. It can compel the production of records. It can require witnesses to appear and testify under oath. Its proceedings are not public. Its records are sealed. A target of a grand jury investigation may not even be aware that one is sitting until the grand jury chooses to act or until proceedings spill over into other jurisdictions in ways that cannot be kept secret. The first public hint that a grand jury was looking into this case came in late February when filings in a Texas court revealed that Burke's mother, father, and brother had filed an objection to subpoenas demanding their testimony.

[00:21:06]Those filings eventually obtained by the Associated Press named Burke as the target of an active Los Angeles County grand jury probe. The investigation had been kept secret in California where grand jury proceedings are sealed by statute. In Texas, the family's procedural objection forced the existence of the proceeding into the open. Court filings further established that the Tesla in which Celeste's remains were found, a 2023 Model Y, was registered in Burke's name at the Texas address of those same family members.

[00:21:39]What was not known until April 23rd is that there was not one grand jury, there were three. Silverman did not provide details about why three were required.

[00:21:49]She did not specify whether they sat sequentially, whether each addressed a different aspect of the investigation, or whether they were convened in different geographical jurisdictions.

[00:21:59]She specified only that they had been called for investigative purposes, meaning that they were being used as a tool to compel evidence and witness testimony, rather than to issue an indictment. That choice, ultimately, was made by the district attorney's office.

[00:22:14]Rather than seek an indictment from the grand jury, prosecutors elected to file a criminal complaint and proceed by way of a preliminary hearing in front of a judge. The strategic significance of that choice should not be lost. A grand jury indictment skips the preliminary hearing. The case goes directly to trial. By choosing to file a complaint, rather than seek an indictment, prosecutors preserve the preliminary hearing as a public proceeding, a hearing in which evidence is presented in open court, witnesses are examined under oath in front of cameras, and the public record begins to fill out. It is a choice that suggests the district attorney's office wanted, at this stage, to have the early stages of its case visible. To put it another way, it wanted the public to see at least part of what it had. The wiretap disclosure made in the same hearing compounds the picture. A wiretap in California requires a high evidentiary threshold. A judge must be satisfied that other investigative methods have been tried and failed, or that probable cause exists to believe the target is engaged in serious criminal conduct and that conventional means of investigation are inadequate. A wiretap is not granted casually. It is one of the most invasive surveillance tools in American law, and it is approved sparingly. Investigators must minimize interception of conversations not related to the alleged criminal conduct. Recordings must be sealed and presented to the issuing judge. Evidence obtained through a wiretap is subject to suppression motions and must satisfy standards that other forms of evidence do not. The fact that a wiretap was authorized in this investigation tells us something about the strength of the prosecution's earlier case for that warrant. A judge had to find that probable cause existed before the wiretap was approved. That finding was made before the arrest, before the criminal complaint, before any of the public proceedings that have unfolded since April 16th. In legal terms, the prosecution's probable cause case existed in its earliest form well before most of the public knew an investigation was underway. What that combination tells the public, three grand juries, a court-authorized wiretap, a series of search warrants, and 40-plus terabytes of recovered data, is that the prosecution that filed the criminal complaint on April 20th is not building from a standing start. They are not in early days. They have been working in secret for months. The Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said at the press conference accompanying the arrest that the investigation had taken roughly 7 months and had been complicated by two factors. The 7-month investigation, this department has faced criticism for how we handled the case and for our decision not to provide details. The degradation of physical evidence between the alleged date of death and the discovery of the remains and what the chief described as a great deal of false information circulating publicly Condition of her remains delayed the medical examiner's ability to be able to determine cause of death.

[00:25:19]The substantial amount of time that passed between her death and the discs had degraded or disappeared. The detectives had to work to debunk. The arrest on April 16th was, in legal terms, the culmination of an investigation that the public did not know existed in the form it took. Blair Burke is not a defense attorney who speaks carelessly. She has represented some of the most watched defendants in modern American celebrity law, a list that includes Harvey Weinstein, Mel Gibson, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Kanye West. Her public statements are careful. They are calibrated. They are designed to do the maximum legal and reputational work in the minimum number of words, and they are typically reviewed by colleagues before they leave her office. The statement she issued in the Burke case is no exception. Read it again. The actual evidence in this case will show that David Burke did not murder Celeste Rivers Hernandez and he was not the cause of her death. 26 words, two clauses, one unifying assertion that the prosecution will fail on the homicide. The statement says nothing about the second count. It says nothing about the conduct alleged in the second count. It says nothing about the digital material the prosecution has now disclosed. That silence is not accidental. Defense statements at this stage of a case are surgical instruments. They address what the defense has determined, in consultation with the client, can be addressed without exposing the client to legal or evidentiary contradiction. They do not address what cannot yet be safely addressed. There are two readings of this. The first is generous to the defense. Burke and her colleagues had not yet, at the time of the public statement, reviewed the material the prosecution would later describe in court. They had not been to the controlled facility. They had not opened the files. Issuing a public denial of the conduct underlying the second count without having seen the evidence supporting it would be reckless. It would expose the defense to a future contradiction the moment they did review the material. So, they confined the public statement to the murder charge where they could speak from the position of an evidentiary record they had at least partly examined. The second reading is more skeptical. Defense statements are crafted not only for legal precision, but for narrative effect. A statement that addressed the second count would have signaled confidence. The fact that it did not, and that the team has not, in any subsequent public communication, addressed the conduct underlying the second count, may itself be a signal.

[00:27:49]Defense teams do not, as a rule, leave the most damaging count unaddressed when if they have a credible answer for it.

[00:27:55]Either reading is consistent with the procedural reality that the defense cannot speak meaningfully about the second count until it sees what supports it. And as of the had not seen what supports it. There is one more dimension to this worth registering. The defense team has, since the arrest, repeatedly emphasized the procedural position that no grand jury had returned an indictment in the case. The original statement issued by Burke, Bednarsky, and Peter on the day of the arrest cited that fact directly. There has been no indictment returned by any grand jury, the statement read, and no criminal complaint filed. David has only been detained under suspicion. That framing was accurate at the moment it was issued on April 16th. It became inoperative within 4 days. On April 20th, the district attorney filed the criminal complaint. On April 23rd, the prosecutor disclosed in court that there had not been one grand jury. There had been three. The defense's procedural framing as that no formal investigative body had acted had to be quietly retired. The first part of the defense's public posture, in other words, has already been overtaken by the prosecution's disclosures. It is reasonable to ask whether the second part will be, too.

[00:29:13]The wider point is this. Defense rhetoric in a case of this scale operates in two registers at once. There is the legal register, which is bounded by what the defense can responsibly say without forfeiting credibility in front of a judge, and there is the public register, which is bounded by what the defendant's public reputation can absorb. In an ordinary case, those two registers tend to align. In a case where one of the three counts involves a category of evidence the defense has not yet been allowed to see, bull llama see, they pull apart. The legal register narrows. The public register goes silent. What you hear in the absence of a denial is the shape of what cannot be denied. The preliminary hearing that begins on May 1st is not a trial. This distinction matters in legal communication, and it matters for what the public should expect to see when proceedings open. A preliminary hearing in California is governed by Penal Code Section 859B, which sets the timing, and Penal Code Section 866, which defines the purpose. Its purpose is narrow. The judge must determine whether there is sufficient evidence to believe a public offense has been committed and that the defendant is the person who committed it. The standard is probable cause, the same standard used for an arrest warrant, not the trial standard of beyond a reasonable doubt.

[00:30:33]That standard is significant for two reasons. The first is that probable cause is, by design, a lower threshold.

[00:30:40]The prosecution does not need to prove its case at a preliminary hearing. It needs to demonstrate that a reasonable person reviewing the evidence presented could believe the alleged offenses occurred. The second reason is that the standard applies to each charge separately. The prosecution must demonstrate probable cause for first-degree murder. It must demonstrate probable cause for continuous sexual abuse of a child under 14. It must demonstrate probable cause for mutilation of human remains. The judge can find probable cause on one count and not on another. She can hold a defendant to answer on three counts, two counts, one count, or none. The hearing is an evidentiary triage conducted by a judge that determines what, if anything, will be carried forward to a trial. Penal Code Section 866 is also explicit on a related point that often surprises members of the public watching their first preliminary hearing. The hearing is not a discovery proceeding. It is not designed to give the defense access to the prosecution's case file. The defense may cross-examine. The defense may object. The defense may move to suppress, but the proceeding exists for a single purpose, to test whether probable cause has been established. The deeper exchange of evidence that characterizes a trial is not its function and is not its consequence.

[00:32:02]This is the procedural moment at which the disclosure of April 23rd becomes consequential. If the prosecution intends to demonstrate probable cause for the second count, continuous sexual abuse, it must put forward evidence that supports that count. The medical examiner's findings do not support that count. The recovery of remains from the Tesla does not support that count.

[00:32:24]Witness testimony from grand jury proceedings might, but the cleanest, most direct evidence available to the prosecution is the digital evidence Silverman described in court. That is what the defense has not yet reviewed.

[00:32:37]That is what Judge Olmedo will examine. The hearing is scheduled for four to five days. That time frame is unusually long for a preliminary hearing. Most run a single morning or perhaps a day. The length tells its own story. The prosecution has signaled that it intends to put forward substantial evidence. Witnesses will testify under oath. Forensic experts may be examined. Documents and digital evidence, handled in the case of restricted material under sealed protocols inside the courtroom, will be presented to the judge. Some witnesses may have already given testimony before one of the three grand juries. Their prior statements may now be tested against their answers in cross-examination. Expert testimony on phone forensics, on cloud storage extraction, and on the chain of custody for the seized devices is possible. The structural argument the prosecution intends to make at trial will, in significant part, become visible during these four to five days. What the public will see depends on what Judge Olmedo determines must remain sealed and what may be discussed openly. The court has the power to close portions of the hearing to the public when sensitive material is presented, particularly material protected by statute. It is reasonable to expect that any presentation directly tied to the digital evidence will be conducted in a manner that preserves the legal protections around that material. What will be visible, almost certainly, is the structural argument the prosecution intends to make, the witnesses it intends to call, and the framework it intends to use to demonstrate probable cause on each of the three counts. The defense will cross-examine. Burke and her colleagues have the right to challenge witnesses, to object to evidence, to test the chain of custody, to question the methods by which forensic data was extracted. They will use that right. What they cannot, at this stage, do effectively is challenge the contents of digital material they have not yet reviewed. That is the asymmetry going into May 1st. The prosecution has had months and three grand juries and a wiretap and 40-plus terabytes of data to prepare. The defense has had less than two weeks since arraignment, a partial discovery delivery, and no review yet of the material the prosecution says supports one of the three charges. The court will weigh what is presented. The defense will object where it can. The judge will rule. If probable cause is found on all three counts, the case proceeds to trial. If it is found on only two, if, for instance, the prosecution falls short on the continuous sexual abuse count because the digital evidence is somehow inadmissible, mishandled, or insufficient as presented at this stage, that count drops out and the case proceeds on what remains. If probable cause is not found on the murder count, the most serious charge collapses and the prosecution must reckon with how to proceed on the remaining counts. None of those outcomes determines guilt. They determine which questions the trial will eventually be asked to answer. There is also a procedural option the defense retains and may yet exercise. Even after a holding order, after a finding of probable cause, the defense can move under Penal Code Section 995 to dismiss the case on the basis that the evidence presented at the preliminary hearing was insufficient. That motion is heard by a different judge in the Superior Court.

[00:35:58]It is, in effect, a second look at the same record. It is one of several procedural levers that can intervene between the preliminary hearing and the start of trial. The road from May 1st to a verdict is long and is full of procedural tools on both sides. That is what May 1st actually tests, not whether D4VD is guilty of murder, not whether he is guilty of continuous sexual abuse, not whether he is guilty of mutilating remains. It tests whether the prosecution has put together a case sturdy enough on each count that a judge will agree the questions are worth taking to trial. A not guilty plea, as established at the start of this report, is the activation of due process. It is the door. It is the request that the prosecution prove every element of every charge to the standard the law requires.

[00:36:49]What changed in this case on April 23rd is that the room behind the door began to take shape. The prosecution disclosed on the open record what one of the three pillars of its case is going to rest on.

[00:37:01]That pillar is the digital evidence recovered from Burke's iPhone and his iCloud account. The defense has not yet reviewed it. The defense's public statement does not address the count it supports. The preliminary hearing will examine it under conditions designed to protect the legal status of the material. David Anthony Burke pleaded not guilty. He is, under the law, presumed innocent. Nothing about the disclosure changes that legal presumption. The presumption is not a matter of fact. It is a matter of process. It governs how the system treats him from arraignment through verdict, and it does not yield to allegations, no matter how carefully described. Every word of this report has been framed with that legal reality in mind. What the disclosure changes is something different. It changes the public understanding of what the prosecution is bringing into the courtroom on May 1st. It changes the structure of the questions the defense is going to have to answer over the next several months. And it changes the shape of what the second count, in particular, will look like as it moves through the preliminary hearing and, if the judge so determines, toward trial. There is also something the disclosure changes about the architecture of the public conversation. Until April 23rd, the public conversation about this case had been driven by a defense narrative. The procedural framing that no grand jury had acted, that no complaint had been filed, that the defendant had only been detained under suspicion. That framing carried the early days of the story. It set the tone of the press releases. It shaped the early commentary. The disclosure on April 23rd recalibrated that framing in a single hearing. The prosecution had, in fact, convened not one grand jury, but three. The prosecution had, in fact, obtained a court-authorized wiretap. The prosecution had, in fact, extracted material from the defendant's iPhone and his iCloud that the law does not allow to leave government custody. None of that proves anything at trial. All of it, however, redraws the public understanding of what kind of case this is. The court will reconvene on April 29th for one final status hearing. The preliminary hearing will begin two days later. For the first time since the arrest, the prosecution will be required to put what it has on the record. The defense will, for the first time, see in the courtroom what has been described in the disclosures. And the public, for the first time, will see the shape of a case that has been built in significant part in secret, across three grand juries, a court-authorized wiretap, and a series of search warrants that produced more than 40 terabytes of evidence the public has not yet seen. A not guilty plea was entered on April 20th. Beth Silverman walked into a courtroom 3 days later and told a judge what the prosecution found.

[00:39:46]May 1st is when she will have to show it. If you want clear, source-driven analysis of this case as the preliminary hearing unfolds without speculation, without sensationalism, and without losing sight of the legal framework that governs every step of it, please subscribe. Follow-up coverage will track the proceedings as they happen, examine the evidence as it is presented in open court, and walk through the legal questions the case raises one careful step at a time. Everything reported here is drawn from open court proceedings, official press conferences held by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, the criminal complaint filed in this matter, the autopsy report released by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner, and statements made on the public record by attorneys for both the prosecution and the defense. All charges referenced are allegations. David Anthony Burke has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. No description of the digital material referenced by the prosecution has been provided in this report, and none has been suggested. The prosecution has not specified on the public record whose images are contained in the material.

[00:40:58]This report makes no claim, suggestion, or implication on that point. The case is ongoing. Court schedules are subject to change. This report reflects information available as of its publication date.