On Monday, Daniel Burda, 41, pleaded no contest to charges of criminally negligent homicide and abuse of a corpse in connection with the death of Dennis W. Day. Day was an actor and a gay icon.

Burda's plea, which holds the same legal weight as a guilty plea, acknowledged that the state had enough evidence to prove his criminal charges at trial. This concession resulted in a relatively lenient sentence of just four years in prison.

Day was an original cast member on the Walt Disney “Mickey Mouse Club” television series in the 1950s. He was also a pioneer for gay rights.

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Day’s acting career starting at the age of 10 alongside Annette Funicello in 1955.

He came out as gay to his family when he turned 18. and moved to San Francisco, California. In a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone Day came out as gay.

He continued to work as an actor and dancer, including at Theatre La MaMa in New York and in Los Angeles.

Day married Henry Ernest Caswell, his partner since the early 1970s, in 2009. 

Day and his husband Caswell at one time ran a guesthouse for gay actors in San Francisco. From the 1960s until the early 1980s, Day worked for the Living History Centre, producing Renaissance and Dickens Christmas fairs. He also took on the role of Newington Butts at the Renaissance fairs. And later became an acting couch.

They moved in the mid-1980s to Oregon, first settling in Ashland, and then in Phoenix, where they had a house. 

Caswell worked for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, while Day made and sold wine jelly and worked seasonally for Harry & David.

Burda, who worked as a live-in handyman at Day’s residence, had been in the process of being evicted by Day around the time of his disappearance. Evidence, including Day’s frantic 911 calls seeking protection from Burda, painted a grim picture of the events leading up to his death.

The Search for Dennis Day

Caswell, who suffers from memory loss and was hospitalized for dementia treatment when Day went missing, reported him missing in July 2018. His inability to remember contact information for Day's extended family delayed broader search efforts. 

It wasn't until friends and relatives launched the "Help Us Find Dennis Day" Facebook page that the case gained wider attention.

The search for Dennis Day took a haunting turn when his car was discovered on the Oregon coast on July 26, 2018.

 Despite multiple visits by Phoenix Police to the home where Day's decomposed body lay hidden beneath a pile of clothes, it took nine agonizing months for authorities to locate his remains.

 The body was finally identified in April 2019 by the Oregon State Medical Examiner’s office, although the advanced decomposition rendered dental records and DNA testing unusable.

Identification

The delay in finding Day’s body and the subsequent handling of the investigation have sparked outrage and legal action from his family. They have filed a lawsuit against the Phoenix Police Department, claiming emotional distress caused by the department's prolonged failure to locate Day's remains. 

The lawsuit also alleges that during an earlier search in 2018, officers stepped on Day’s body, causing fractures to the corpse, yet still failed to discover it. The discovery was only made when Oregon State Police brought in a cadaver-sniffing dog in April 2019.

The police department has denied these allegations, but the controversy has cast a shadow over the handling of the case.

Members of Day's family have publicly criticized the investigation, sharing their frustrations in a February interview with the television news show "Dateline." They described the investigation into Day's disappearance as poorly managed and painfully slow.

This is not only a tragic case loss of an original member of the "Mickey Mouse Club" but also of a man who was a pioneer of gay rights and a gay icon. The legacy of Dennis W. Day, who brought joy to many as a young Mouseketeer, and supported and mentored the gay community should not be overshadowed with the story of his death.