“Justice for Nikki” is an episode of Dateline: Unforgettable that aired on Oxygen on August 17, 2022, with correspondent Andrea Canning. It tells the story of Nicole VanderHeyden, a 31-year-old Wisconsin mother of three who was beaten and strangled in May 2016, and it follows an investigation that first arrested the wrong man and then convicted the right one using two pieces of consumer technology: a Fitbit and Google location history.
Who Nicole VanderHeyden Was and What Happened That Night
VanderHeyden lived in Ledgeview, Wisconsin, with her boyfriend Douglass Detrie and their six-month-old son. She had two older children, Mikayla and Tyler, from a previous marriage.
On the evening of Friday, May 20, 2016, she went out with Detrie to bars in the Green Bay area, including the Sardine Can and a west-side bar called Richard Craniums. The couple argued and separated. Detrie went home alone. The next afternoon, a farmer found VanderHeyden’s body in a field off Hoffman Road in Bellevue. Her bloody clothing and purse were dumped along a Highway 172 on-ramp, and blood and hair were located outside a neighbor’s home near the house she shared with Detrie.
Dane County Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Agnieszka Rogalska later testified that VanderHeyden died from strangulation and blunt force trauma to the head, either of which would have been fatal. Her skull was fractured. She had 20 abrasions, 8 contusions, 8 lacerations, and dozens of defensive wounds on her hands and feet. Injuries to her genital area were consistent with sexual assault, and an electrical cord appeared to have been used to strangle her.
How Fitbit Data Cleared the First Suspect
Brown County Sheriff’s deputies first zeroed in on Detrie. He had waited hours to report VanderHeyden missing. Investigators found what looked like blood in the couple’s garage and in her car, and a pair of Air Jordan sneakers in the garage seemed to match a tread print on the victim’s back. Detrie was arrested and held on $1 million bond.
The case against him fell apart within weeks. Crime lab testing showed the substance in the garage was not human blood, the stain in the car did not match VanderHeyden’s DNA, and the marks on the shoes were not blood at all.
The decisive evidence came from Detrie’s wrist. He wore a Fitbit Flex, and investigators obtained his minute-by-minute activity data through a search warrant. Forensic crime analyst Tyler Behling testified that Detrie logged only 12 steps during the window in which the murder took place, far too few for him to have left home, killed VanderHeyden, disposed of her body, and returned. Detrie was released after 18 days in custody and was never charged.
How DNA and Google Location Data Identified George Burch
With Detrie eliminated, investigators worked the DNA collected from VanderHeyden’s body and clothing. A sample from one of her socks produced a profile strong enough to run through a national database. In August 2016, the database returned a match: George Steven Burch, a Virginia man who had moved to the Green Bay area earlier that year. His DNA was ultimately found in 16 locations on the victim’s body and on the electrical cord used to strangle her. Cervical and vaginal swabs also contained his DNA.
The location evidence came from an unrelated case. In June 2016, Green Bay police had been investigating Burch over a stolen car report, a vehicle fire, and a hit-and-run. During a June 8 interview, Burch signed a consent form allowing officers to search his Samsung phone, and a forensic examiner performed a full data extraction that was saved to the department’s long-term storage. He was cleared in that investigation. Two months later, after the DNA hit, Brown County detectives ran a records check, found the Green Bay police file, accessed the already-extracted phone data, and pulled a Google account email address from it. They then obtained a separate warrant for the account’s Google Dashboard information.
The Google data combined GPS, cell tower, and Wi-Fi signals to reconstruct Burch’s movements the night of May 20-21, 2016:
- Around 2:30 a.m., leaving Richard Craniums.
- Shortly after, at VanderHeyden’s home on Berkley Road, where the phone stayed for nearly an hour.
- At about 3:58 a.m., in the field where her body was found, with a margin of error of less than 10 feet.
- Near the Highway 172 on-ramp where her bloody clothes were later recovered.
- At 4:22 a.m., back at his own residence.
Forensic analysis of the phone also showed that in the weeks after the murder, Burch had repeatedly searched news reports about the case.
Burch’s Defense and the Verdict
Burch was arrested in September 2016 and charged with first-degree intentional homicide. His trial began February 19, 2018, in Brown County Circuit Court before Judge John Zakowski.
Burch testified on February 28. He said he met VanderHeyden at a bar, drove to her home at her direction, and began having consensual sex with her in his car before his memory “cut out.” He said he woke on the ground to find a man in a sweatshirt holding a gun, with VanderHeyden badly injured nearby. He identified that gunman as Detrie and claimed he had been forced at gunpoint to load her body into his vehicle and dump it in a field. He said he escaped by pushing the gunman, drove away, and threw VanderHeyden’s clothes out the window “in a panic.” Defense attorney Lee Schuchart argued that Detrie’s DNA was also on the victim and that electrical cords matching the murder weapon were found in Detrie’s garage.
Prosecutors used the digital evidence to take the story apart. The Fitbit data made it physically impossible for Detrie to have been at the scene. The Google data placed Burch, not Detrie, at every key location. The medical examiner’s findings contradicted Burch’s description of a consensual encounter. And Burch admitted he had never reported the supposed gunpoint kidnapping to police, saying only that he feared violating his Virginia probation.
On March 1, 2018, after just over three hours of deliberation, the jury found Burch guilty of first-degree intentional homicide.
Sentence and Appeal
On May 4, 2018, Judge Zakowski sentenced Burch to life in prison without the possibility of parole. From the bench, the judge said the crime would merit the death penalty and that Burch would “die in prison.” The court also ordered that Burch could not profit from his story and later ordered roughly $269,000 in restitution, most of it directed to Detrie to help raise the young son he shared with VanderHeyden.
Burch appealed on two grounds. He argued that accessing the cell phone data originally extracted during the unrelated hit-and-run investigation, without a fresh warrant, violated the Fourth Amendment. He also argued that the Fitbit evidence used to clear Detrie should have been excluded because no expert testified to the device’s reliability.
On June 29, 2021, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in a 4-3 decision. Writing for the majority, Justice Brian Hagedorn concluded that even if there was a constitutional problem with how the phone data was obtained, “there was no law enforcement misconduct that would warrant exclusion of that data.” On the Fitbit, the court held that the circuit court had not abused its discretion in admitting step-count data without expert testimony, reasoning that Fitbit devices are common consumer products and not “unusually complex or esoteric.” The circuit court had separately excluded Fitbit sleep-monitoring data over reliability concerns, and the Supreme Court upheld that ruling too.
Where Burch Is Now
Burch remains incarcerated at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility in Boscobel, serving life without parole.