Joseph “The Amazing Joe” Burrus was a magician from Fresno, California, who dreamed of becoming as famous as Harry Houdini, his idol. Burrus specialized in escape acts, and he was determined to one day surpass Houdini’s legendary feats.
In 1983, Burrus performed smaller escape shows around central California, but by 1990, he planned his most ambitious stunt yet — one he hoped would make him world-famous.
“I consider myself a master of illusion and escape artist. I believe I’m the next Houdini and greater,” Burrus told The Fresno Bee in 1990 before the stunt. “To me, that’s what an escape artist is: to put myself in an impossible situation and get out of it.”
According to his mother, Bette Burrus, her son had been diagnosed with dyslexia and struggled with drug and alcohol abuse. He supported himself as a tree trimmer for years before deciding that he had grown too old for that work. Magic was his new life. When Burrus became interested in the art of illusion, he stopped drinking, his family said.
On Halloween night, 1990, at the Blackbeard’s Family Fun Center in Fresno, Burrus staged a performance he called his “ultimate escape.” The plan was to be buried alive in a transparent coffin, chained and handcuffed, and then covered first with dirt, and then with cement — all while he attempted to escape.
He told the crowd, estimated at around 150 people, that he had practiced this before — though in reality, he had only done the dirt portion, never with cement on top. Burrus was lowered into a plastic coffin, which was then placed into a 7-foot-deep grave. Workers began to shovel in dirt and then poured wet cement over the top. The audience watched as Burrus waved from the coffin before being completely covered.
Moments later, the unthinkable happened — the cement collapsed the thin plastic coffin. The weight was simply too great. The box caved in, burying Burrus alive under thousands of pounds of dirt and concrete. Rescue crews rushed to dig him out, but it took nearly 30 minutes to reach him. When they did, Burrus was dead — suffocated and crushed before he ever had a chance to escape. He was just 32 years old.
“He was on his way up when everything came crashing down on him,” his son, Joe Burrus, told TV station ABC 30 in 2018. “He actually made it out. He just didn’t have a chance to get out of the grave because he suffocated.”
The coroner found traces of marijuana in Burrus’ system but determined that the small amount of the drug probably was not enough to impair the magician’s judgment or affect his physical abilities during the trick.
“This was not a failure on the part of Joseph, ‘The Amazing Joe’ Burrus,“ his mother told The Bee in 1990. “It was an equipment failure.”
The death of “The Amazing Joe” Burrus became infamous both for its tragic timing — Halloween night — and for its haunting symbolism. Burrus had told friends he wanted to “outdo Houdini”, who also died on Halloween in 1926. But instead of surpassing his idol, Burrus met a similar fate on the same day — a fatal reminder of the dangers of pushing the limits of illusion and showmanship.
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