A 34-year-old man is facing murder charges after he confessed to killing his mother and burning her body in a backyard fire pit, according to court documents.
Officers started searching for 60-year-old Donna Tucker on Friday night after her sister, Denise Trofa, contacted police and said she had not heard from Tucker since Thursday.
According to authorities, investigators searched Donna’s Tucker’s home at 128 Broadway and found her personal belongings, but nothing else. Officers also searched a wooded area near her home.
After a thorough investigation, police said the case shifted from a missing person case to a murder investigation on Saturday night.
On Saturday afternoon, Donna's son, Kyle Tucker, confessed to police that he murdered his mom, officers said.
According to the case report filed in court, Kyle Tucker told investigators “god got into my body and walked me downstairs with my baseball bat and it was very quick and almost even hard to remember.”
Kyle Tucker told police he hit his mother with a baseball bat “really hard” then dragged her body from their kitchen outside to a fire pit and burned her body. He then cleaned the kitchen with bleach, vinegar, turpentine and Clorox wipes, and repainted sections of the walls he could not get clean, according to the documents.
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The suspect also ordered an urn meant for ashes off his mother’s Amazon account, but later canceled the order, according to the report.
Officers said they found Donna's remains on her property and believe she died of blunt force trauma to the head before the missing person report was filed. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is expected to determine her exact cause of death.
Kyle Tucker is being charged with murder and destruction of evidence and he is being held at Hamden Police Department on $5 million bond.
Police said they had been called to the Tuckers’ home on multiple other occasions when Kyle Tucker suffered from mental illness. Police said officers did not feel during any of those prior incidents that Kyle would harm his mother.
Kyle appeared in Meriden Superior Court on Monday, where a judge kept bond at $5 million.
The case has been transferred to New Haven Court and Kyle Tucker is due in court next on June 19.
