A space rocket program manager butchered her father with an ice axe on Election Night after a breakdown following President-elect Trump’s victory — and was found smiling and clapping covered in her loved one’s blood, cops said.
Corey Burke considered the bloody rampage – in which she allegedly strangled, bit and hacked her 67-year-old father in the $800,000 Seattle home they shared – to be an “act of liberation,” charging documents allege.
Burke, 33, is a training program manager at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ spacecraft company, according to her LinkedIn, and is married to prominent transgender writer Samantha Leigh Allen, public records show.
Allen is the author of the acclaimed book “Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States” and an editor at Them, a Conde Nast transgender news publication.
Burke told cops that the killing was meant to “help people change their attachment to their parents” and “had to happen today,” she told police, her face covered in her father’s blood, according to court documents.
Burke had been upset about election day and knew Trump would handily beat Vice President Kamala Harris when she allegedly snapped — apparently because when her father, Timothy Burke, refused to turn off the lights.
She then went upstairs, grabbed an ice “pickaxe,” tripped her father, strangled and bit him on the floor, and struck him repeatedly with the blunt and sharp ends of the tool, police said.
Burke then sat down next to her father and watched him die, then smashed all the windows in the house in what she described “‘as an act of liberation,’” officers reported.
When the cops arrived, they found Burke “clapping … because she was so happy.”
Burke has worked at Blue Origin for about five years, according to her LinkedIn page, and lived with her father in a house in south Seattle.
Burke told police she had a strained relationship with her father without strong “boundaries” that had left her feeling “hyperfocused and disorganized.”
Donald Trump’s election victory “overwhelmed” her and finally pushed this tension to the breaking point, she said.
When officers arrived at the scene, she came out of the house with her hands up and blood smeared on her face, but she said she didn’t have any idea where the blood came from or who had smashed the windows in the house.
She later described the dispute with her father over the lights, eventually whispering “I killed him” to one officer, charging documents said.
Burke has been charged with first-degree murder and is being held on a $2 million bail.