The man charged in the 1993 disappearance of a 10-year-old Maryland boy waived his bond review hearing Friday and will be held without bond, the Prince George’s County state’s attorney’s office said.
Joseph Lynch, 61, is charged with second-degree murder, second-degree rape and second- and third-degree sex offenses. Prince George’s County and FBI officials announced the charges Thursday, and said he’s been jailed since April on charges based on other offenses discovered in the course of a renewed investigation into the decades-old missing persons case.
George “Junior” Burdynski went missing from his Brentwood neighborhood on May 24, 1993.
Joan Pollitt, a former neighbor of the Burdynski family and Lynch, told WTOP’s Anna-Lysa Gayle that she has checked with detectives regularly since the boy’s disappearance.
“This case has really upset me and the whole family, let alone the community, and I’ve been following it for a long time,” she said. “I call every year or two and ask if they found anything new. This year, I was told they did.”
She plans on keeping a close eye on the judicial process each time Lynch faces a judge.
“I’m going to follow it to the end and make sure that son of a bitch never hurts another child, if I can help it. If he gets out, he won’t get far,” Pollitt said.
Lynch is expected to return to court in October.
A new era in child exploitation investigations
The case transformed the way police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted child sex abuse and exploitation investigations.
Shortly after Burdynski’s disappearance from his Brentwood, Maryland, neighborhood, police and the FBI began searching for leads and questioning boys in the neighborhood, including some of Burdynski’s friends.
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As investigators spoke with children in the neighborhood, one name kept coming up: a 53-year old neighbor named James Kowalski. According to a 2020 FBI blog post, Kowalski was taking the boys on trips, feeding them, buying them clothes, and giving them money.
An FBI agent said several of the boys told investigators they communicated with Kowalski by computer, and that he had gifted computers to some of the boys.
In the decade after home computers became mainstream, the Burdynski case led to the discovery that sexual offenders were using computers to chat with their victims and other pedophiles.
That led to the launching of the FBI’s Innocent Images program, in which agents go online, pretending to be children on bulletin boards and other online platforms trading in child exploitation discussions, images, and videos.
Investigators began making computers part of their search warrants, so they could be examined for evidence.
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The investigation into Burdynski’s disappearance led to the arrest of Lynch, Kowalski, and a third man, Stephen Leak. The men were convicted of sexually abusing several boys in Mount Rainier, Brentwood, and Hyattsville in 1993. However, police weren’t able to link the pedophile ring to Burdynski’s disappearance.
On Thursday, Prince George’s County police said a new witness led to the breakthrough in the Burdynski case. A man who was 13 years old in 1993 told detectives that Lynch ordered him to sexually assault the younger boy.
According to police, Junior was killed during the assault, and Lynch allegedly helped dispose of his body.
“The witness was only 13 years old at the time, and had reported being sexually and physically abused by Lynch for over four years,” Police Chief George Nader said during the Thursday news conference announcing the arrest. Nader and State’s Attorney Tara Jackson said the witness’s age at the time precluded his being charged in connection with killing Burdynski.
Nader said while Lynch is the sole person charged in connection with Burdynski’s death, the investigation continues.
“I’m just so glad, so thankful to the detectives who have worked so hard, the child who became a man and came forward, and all of these boys, for the pain they’ve suffered through in their lives,” Pollitt, the former neighbor, said. “I just worry about them and wonder what life has been like for them. All these kids were abused, and it was a secret.”
WTOP’s Anna-Lysa Gayle and Tracy Johnke contributed to this report.
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