Burton Wilbur Abbott (February 8, 1928 – March 15, 1957)[1] was an American man who was convicted of the rape and murder of 14-year-old Stephanie Bryan in Berkeley, California.

[4][5] Abbott served in the U.S. Army for 14 months until he was honorably discharged after contracting tuberculosis and having half of a lung surgically removed.

On Ashby Avenue, after visiting a donut shop and a pet store, Stewart parted ways with Bryan to attend tennis lessons.

Bryan was last seen walking in direction of the parking lot of the Claremont Hotel to take a five-minute shortcut through a wooden path in the Berkeley Hills.

[12] Burton Abbott told multiple, contradictory stories including that he had been at the family's cabin 285 miles near Wildwood, California, in Trinity County, when Stephanie disappeared.

[10] On July 20, 1955, the victim's body was found by San Francisco Examiner reporter Ed Montgomery and photographer Bob Bryant in a shallow grave a few hundred feet from the cabin,[15] after they used the pet bloodhounds of a local to scour the area.

[2] The trial began in November 1955 and was one of the most highly publicized in California history, receiving nearly daily coverage from newspapers across the state[16] Abbott's defense was headed by Stanley D. Whitney.

Under Alameda County District Attorney J. Frank Coakley, the prosecution hypothesis was that Abbott had attempted to rape the victim and killed her when she resisted.

Although the prosecution charged Abbott with rape, the pathologist testified that the body was too decomposed to evaluate it for evidence of sexual assault.

[2] Abbott's attorney claimed that his client, who weighed 134 pounds and had several ribs removed due to tuberculosis, was too physically weak to have committed the murder and carried the victim's body to its burial site.

In a detailed opinion describing the facts of the case and reciting the evidence that had been presented at trial, the court affirmed the conviction and the sentence of death.

At 11:14 am Abbott was led to the gas chamber and strapped into the chair while the governor's clemency secretary Joseph Babich was contacting the warden by telephone.

The executioner pulled the lever three minutes later and 16 pellets of sodium cyanide dropped into a vat of sulfuric acid as Knight reached prison warden Harold O. Teets to stay the execution.