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Chapter 1: What gruesome discovery was made in David Burke's Tesla?
On the 8th of September 2025, workmen at an LA impound lot called the police after they noticed a foul smell coming from a Tesla Model X. The car had been towed from a swanky Hollywood Hill street three days before, after it seemingly then left abandoned. Inside the front trunk, or frunk, which I guess us Brits would call the foot, police found a black cadaver bag covered in flies.
Inside the bag was a severely decomposed human head and torso. There was also a black rubbish bag stuffed underneath, which contained the body's dismembered arms and legs. The car belonged to Gen X idol and singer-songwriter D4VD, pronounced David. Henry Zebrowski says Deforvid, and I can't get it out of my head. They do also say that. It became like a joke.
So David was the original name, and then people started calling him Deforvid, and then he was like, oh, I actually kind of like that. But we're going to call him David throughout this episode because... I'll do as I'm told. Because I can't. So they know who the car belongs to. And soon, the victim was identified through dental records as 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez.
She had been reported missing by her family a year and a half before. And now, with a celebrity and a minor at the heart of this story, naturally the internet exploded with speculation. Had David, a man who had just announced a world tour, and who had just released his first studio album that had landed 15 on the Billboard 200, really just killed a child?
Or was this 21-year-old, as some of his fans believe, being framed?
Within hours of the grisly discovery, images and videos of David and Celeste began flooding social media platforms. And people were pulling lyrics from David's songs that seemed to be about the young teenager. Then there was his hit song, the one that had propelled David into mainstream fame. It's called Romantic Homicide, in which he describes killing a lover. Only in his mind.
But still, not great. And there was his music video to another song called One More Dance, where he's covered in blood and stuffing a dead body into the boot of a car.
That's just art, right? Well, at first, many people, us included, because we have been talking about this on Under the Duvet for quite a few weeks, wondered if this had all just been some sort of horrible but tragic accident, perhaps. Maybe drugs were involved, there was some sort of overdose, and then, you know, like a stupid decision to try and get rid of Celeste's body.
Even the LAPD initially came out and said that there may have been no crime at all, except for concealment of a body. Which, like, given the fact that David was at least six years older than 14-year-old Celeste, I really struggled to understand how that could have been the case.
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Chapter 2: Who was Celeste Rivas Hernandez and what happened to her?
To put that into perspective for you, 40 terabytes equates to over 13,000 feature-length movies. Yeah. Or 13 million photos.
Yeah. I can have like six on my phone before it's like, storage full, storage full.
So the preliminary hearing that was originally slated for the end of May has now been pushed to the end of June. But we still have... Quite a lot to discuss before that even happens.
If anything, I was like, we need to get all this down before June. So yes, firstly, let's start by taking a look at the autopsy report. It was finally released to the public in April 2026. And... it makes for incredibly grim reading. Because it seemed to sweep away any notion that Celeste's death might have been an accident.
Chapter 3: What were the initial reactions and speculations about David Burke?
The cause of death was determined by the medical examiner to be multiple penetrating injuries caused by a sharp object. They don't say exactly what, like they don't say it's a knife, and I think it's because they don't actually have the murder weapon. But according to the ME's findings, one stab wound had punctured Celeste's liver and the other her left lung.
Either could have been fatal, and the wound to her liver would likely have caused a lot of internal bleeding.
Then, as we know, Celeste's body was dismembered. And this is directly from the autopsy report. The bilateral upper and lower extremities show full thickness dismemberment. And that means that both of Celeste's arms and legs were removed. Her arms were cut off above the elbow and her legs were cut off above the knee, with the dismembered legs then cut again into two pieces through the shin.
And I know we talked about this on Under the Duvet over on Patreon, but we need to share this great information with everybody else.
Because what is interesting about the way in which Celeste was dismembered, if we, you know, take off our human hats and just put on our, like, fucking horrible inspector hats, is that I suspect if you gave Mr. Joe Bloggs on the street a dead body and you were like, here you go, chop this up, most people would probably try and dismember that body through the joints.
is my theory yes they'd probably go because i've been i've been doing some field research i've been chopping up laser bodies this weekend actually and i've been i've been asking people in my vicinity chop up a body and they always say well i would go through the shoulders i would go through the knees i would go through the hip joints That's what I would do.
It kind of feels like it makes logical sense because I think people think that's like a weak spot. It's actually obviously not. It is not the most efficient way to do it. The way that Celeste was chopped up is the right way, quote unquote, because the joints that you have in your shoulders, in your hips, in your knees, they're actually incredibly complicated joints to cut through or dissect.
So what does it tell us about the way in which Celeste was dismembered? Did the person who did it perhaps do some sort of research into this? Did they know what they were doing already? If it was David, did he perhaps have some help? Maybe. But whoever did it knew enough to cut through the middle of the limbs. And they also went through a lot of effort to dismember the body.
Not just that, to also cut through the legs twice. And obviously they've done it so it would fit into the frunk, which is the front trunk. But if they had just put Celeste's body in the boot of the car, they wouldn't have needed to cut it up at all. And they certainly wouldn't have needed to cut the legs up again.
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Chapter 4: What evidence was found regarding the cause of Celeste's death?
An inflatable pool, though?
When you're going to use a chainsaw? And then, the prosecution alleged, David used a chainsaw and perhaps some other tools to cut off Celeste's limbs. Small blue plastic fragments were found embedded in Celeste's remains. And when they were analysed, they were found to be a physical match to the inflatable pool that David had purchased.
And then, allegedly, David put Celeste's remains into the body bag and heavy-duty plastic bags, and then into his car. According to the investigators, CCTV and other evidence shows that David was the last person to drive that car on the 29th of July 2025, right before he left LA for a concert tour.
A month later, on the 5th of September, the car was towed and Celeste's decomposing, dismembered body was discovered.
And look, as we touched on at the start of this episode, why didn't he get rid of the body? Why on earth would you go to the effort of chopping up her body and leaving it in your car and then just disappear and fuck off on tour. It's so bizarre. Now, some people online have been theorizing that maybe he wanted Celeste to be found to somehow legitimize his very dark music.
But like, it is dark, but it's not that dark. It's not like he's, you know, Marilyn Manson or something. That was the darkest person I could think of. I don't know. You know what I mean? It's not like he's actually being dark.
It's like a lot of dark imagery, but it feels very obvious that it's all metaphorical about like the death of love rather than the actual death of a killer, as he says in the back of my mind. But I don't really get it.
It's not like he's... Remember that case we did about the Norwegian black metal bands that were actually trying to go beyond just being edgelords by burning down churches and killing people? I don't really get that with his particular brand of bedroom pop music. So I don't know. I don't really buy that. And I don't buy that David wanted to get caught. Some people are saying that.
I was like, why the fuck would he want to get caught? Because, yes, it is weird that in some ways he takes a lot of actions to cover up what he's done. But then he also makes the huge mistake of just leaving the body in his car outside his house.
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Chapter 5: What did the autopsy reveal about Celeste's dismemberment?
I think I'm with you on that.
I don't even think he would have been arrested because Celeste was known, even though she was only 14 years old, she was known to be a runaway by police and she'd already been reported missing by her family. Anything could have happened to her. So, yeah, I don't know.
I really, that is the biggest question for me in this entire case is why he leaves Celeste's dismembered remains in his car outside his house and then just goes on tour.
When Celeste's remains were initially discovered in the Tesla, the police didn't know who she was. All they knew was that the car belonged to David. David's team released a statement saying that they had absolutely no clue what happened, but they were cooperating with the LAPD, which was a lie.
They absolutely were not. They're just like, we're cooperating. No, they weren't. They were completely not doing that.
David continued with his tour.
And can we just talk about this, right? If you are going to even remotely pretend you didn't have anything to do with this, if we were on tour and the police called us and were like, excuse me, we found a dead, chopped up body in your car, I'd be like, hang on, we've got to go home. Like, I don't know what's going on. This is fucking bonkers. I wouldn't be like, oh, okay.
Well, sorry, I'm out of town right now. It goes beyond reasonable logic that you wouldn't come back.
He just carries on. It doesn't make any fucking sense.
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