A Philly man will be extradited to Washington over the 2005 killing of a woman found floating in the Puget Sound
Brian Bourquard, 39, waived extradition to Washington, clearing the way for him to face murder charges there in connection with the killing of Shanan Lynn Read.
A 39-year-old man who’d been living in North Philadelphia waived extradition to Washington on Friday, clearing the way for him to face murder charges there in connection with the 2005 killing of a woman whose decomposed and headless body was found floating in the Puget Sound near Seattle.
Brian Bourquard said little during a brief appearance in a Center City courtroom Friday morning. He’d been arrested last week at his home on the 700 block of Master Street, then jailed on a technical charge to hold him in custody over his out-of-state offenses.
By not challenging extradition, Bourquard was expected to be taken to Kitsap County, Wash., where he will face first-degree murder charges over the killing of 33-year-old Shanan Lynn Read, who authorities said was beaten to death over a debt before her body was discarded in the inlet connected to the Pacific Ocean.
Bourquard’s lawyer and parents — who were in the courtroom Friday — declined to comment after the hearing.
Read’s remains were found floating in a plastic container in the sound in 2006. Her head washed ashore several months later. Authorities for years had been unable to develop enough evidence for an arrest in the case, despite investigating the possibility that Read had been murdered before her body was discarded — possibly poisoned or given a lethal dose of drugs.
But earlier this month, police in Kitsap County moved to arrest Bourquard — a vice president of strategy and finance at a robotics company with a Ph.D. in agricultural economics — and two alleged co-conspirators, who were taken into custody in Florida and California.
Police and prosecutors accused the group of fatally beating Read with a metal baton inside a Seattle apartment over a debt related to a theft and forgery ring they operated together. The men then put Read’s body into a Rubbermaid-style container, authorities said, took it to Bourquard’s family cabin in Port Orchard, stored it there for weeks, doused it with chemicals to speed up its decomposition, and eventually pushed the container into the sound.
It was not clear how or why prosecutors sought to charge Bourquard and his alleged co-conspirators — Brandon Reeve and Oscar Gonzales — 17 years after Read’s death. (Another alleged participant, Anthony Martinez, is now deceased.)
In a statement of probable cause for Bourquard’s arrest, authorities said journal entries he wrote showed he had threatened Read and her children, expressed “violent/murder ideations” toward others, and, in one undated entry, wrote: “Straight killer ... don’t put it past me, but you won’t see it coming.”
It was not immediately clear how quickly Bourquard might be moved to a jail in Washington to await a potential trial.