Another piece of TL-191 From Me:
Zachary Foster Burke, a former Freedom Party Guard and minor administrator at Camp Dependable during the Second Great War and the Population Reduction on trial in 1962.
As the end of the war approached and the Yankees got closer to the camps, Burke and other Freedom Party Guards fled Texas and went their separate ways. Many fled to Brazil or other parts of South America, Burke though fled to the Second Mexican Empire – believing that the Mexican government would protect him (Burke also fled with many valuables belonging to the victims of the Population Reduction).
He was both right and wrong as the Mexican authorities only looked for and apprehended high ranking or really infamous Confederate fugitives and turned them over to the U.S. government to stand trial for their crimes against humanity. But men like Burke, who were only small cogs in the monstrous machine that was the Freedomite CSA, were able to slip past the net so to speak.
In Spring 1945, Burke settled down in the city of Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico, fell in love and married a local woman there, started a family (all the while living under the alias of “Tyler Lynch”), and acquired a job as a foreman for the local factory. As Lynch, Burke was very well loved by the community as he was a fair foreman and was very good with the children of the town, often appearing at many birthday parties and quinceañera and showering the celebrated child or children with expensive gifts (and took on many customs and traditions of Mexican society even converting to Roman Catholicism). Though the townspeople, and his family, always found it odd that Lynch never joined them in celebrating Día de Muertos and avoided contact with Orizaba's Afro-Mexican community (though most chalked it up being from the Confederacy). When Lynch’s wife asked him about why he abstained from the holiday, he said, “Celebrating the dead brings up too many bad memories of comrades lost in the war”. For you see Lynch had disclosed to the people of Orizaba that he had be a sergeant in the Confederate Army during the Second Great War (in actuality he stole the uniform of a fallen Confederate soldier as he made his way from Texas to Mexico, this soldier’s name being Tyler Lynch).
Throughout the remainder of the 1940s all the way up to early 1960s, Burke lived a quiet and peaceful life. On the night of August 9, 1962, Burke was home in his study enjoying a glass of Mexican whiskey when reporters and camera crews from Mexico’s state-run news service descended on his quiet home, being tipped off by the concerned father of a child who had snuck in and seen Freedomite memorabilia, and more importantly his Freedom Party Guard uniform, in one of Burke’s rooms (this room being secret and Burke not letting anyone see what was inside).
Burke’s house in 2019, some of his descendants still live there.
It seemed that Burke’s past had finally caught up with him. As he attempted to flee, the former Freedom Party Guardsman was arrested by Mexican police and transported to Mexico City to stand trial for his crimes. During the proceeding, when survivors of the Population Reduction were brought in to testify, Burke remained calm and collected but when the witnesses started to detail their experiences — with some of them breaking down — he laughed cruelly and hysterically. The judge having to stop the proceeding many times to tell him to stop and that it wasn’t funny.
In the end, Zachary Foster Burke would be sentenced to death by hanging, he was only 56 years old.
Zachary Foster Burke in 1949.
