The story of David Anthony Burke, the indie musician known as D4VD, and the tragic fate of 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez, is a modern horror story—one written not in dark fiction, but in plain view, across viral music videos, cryptic tweets, and the ephemeral chats of a dedicated Discord server. On September 8th, 2025, when police discovered the remains of a teenage girl, missing for 17 months, in the trunk of David’s Tesla, the music industry’s fascination turned to revulsion. Yet, the most disturbing realization is that the truth was never truly hidden. New, exhaustive details reveal a meticulous four-year paper trail where David allegedly used his burgeoning artistic platform to craft a sick, elaborate, and chillingly specific confessional about his obsession, his alleged crimes, and the heartbreaking timeline of a young life stolen.

This shocking investigation, aptly titled “The D4VD Files,” rips the veil off the celebrity façade, exposing not just a personal catastrophe, but a wide network of silence and online complicity that allowed a minor to vanish from her life and resurface only as a tragic casualty.

The Lyrical Roadmap: Music as a Macabre Memoir

The foundation of David’s dark celebrity trail lies in his own discography, which, upon re-examination, reads like a step-by-step account of a deep and ultimately deadly obsession. David’s musical journey began around 2021, when he was 16 and Celeste was 11, initially writing songs to avoid Fortnite copyright strikes. But almost immediately, the themes of his work became unnervingly specific, centered on a speaker urging a love interest to run away, fearing rejection, and boiling over with jealousy and aggression.

In a song from February 2022, he penned the lines: “I look into your eyes and I can see right through your lies, I think we both know who dies here. You can’t leave the past behind, you’re the only one that lies here.” Just a month later, the phrase, “Save your tears, seven years,” appeared in a chorus. For those who know Celeste Rivas Hernandez’s age—born September 7, 2010—she would have been exactly seven years from 18 at that time.

The most famous piece of evidence, his breakout hit Romantic Homicide, is now revealed to be a central piece of this grotesque puzzle. The music video, which depicts ritualistic scenes, David with a blindfold, and the evidence hidden in a suitcase, was posted on one specific date: September 7th—Celeste’s birthday. This pattern continued, turning a private tragedy into a public, scheduled artistic statement. Another unreleased track, titled simply “Celeste,” reportedly contained the first explicit mention of her name, describing her with his name tattooed on her chest.

This artistic trajectory culminated in the anime video for his song Rehab, released on Celeste’s birthday in 2025. The video features the female character being butchered and cut into pieces by David’s animated counterpart. Through his music, the artist had, for years, been creating a chronological narrative of obsession, death, and dismemberment, a creative act that makes his current non-suspect status all the more staggering.

The Dark Cultural Obsession: Dexter, Gore, and the Invisible String

David’s online presence provided further context for these lyrical themes, exposing a morbid interest that transcended mere creative license. In his Discord server—a space known to be heavily populated by minors—David opened up about his addiction to gore. He admitted that he “used to be addicted to watching gore videos,” had “LiveLeak bookmarked,” and had seen a “cartel execution” at 14. He chillingly stated, “I love gore, gore is better than adult videos.”

This documented fascination with the macabre connects directly to the subtle motifs in his music videos and album art. The prominent use of red strings in two music videos and his album cover art is now being dissected by online investigators. This motif is highly significant in the culture of serial killer fandom, specifically tying into the calling card of Brian Moser, the killer known for dismembering his victims and using red string to put them back together in the TV show Dexter.

Furthermore, his lyrics about having her “ghost” and “spirit” after her death (“He might have you but I’ve got your ghost and we both know that’s the real you“) mirror the horrifying sentiments of real-life serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, who viewed killing as a way to achieve a “romantic intimacy” and eternal control over a victim. This disturbing cultural trail suggests that David was not just telling a story, but acting out a learned, sick fantasy.

The Digital Confession and the Panic Button

The Discord server was also the site of David’s most brazen displays and his moment of digital panic. It was in this server that community members created a playlist with the disturbing title, “Celeste in David’s closet,” confirming that the knowledge of his relationship with a minor was not only widespread but openly joked about.

The most damning piece of video evidence comes from a Twitch stream where David, visibly flaunting the relationship, had Celeste sitting next to him, albeit wearing a hoodie and large glasses. When a comment about her presence came through, the stream captured David’s sudden, chilling reversal, where he turned to Celeste and uttered the panicked words: “Delete everything, delete, delete everything, everything goes, everything goes.” He was essentially deleting the digital breadcrumbs of a crime live for his followers to witness.

The Network of Silence and the Price of Ignorance

The tragedy is compounded by evidence that David’s inner circle—including his former Fortnite team and other Discord users—were either complicit or deliberately silent. Messages surfaced from a former teammate stating that David met Celeste through Fortnite in 2021 when she was 10, and that “everyone in the team knew about her and he would joke about it and brush it off every time it got mentioned.”

The silence, however, may not have been voluntary. Allegations from multiple sources, including an Instagram user and a Reddit user who claimed his sister knew Celeste, point to David allegedly “paying people off to keep their mouths shut” about him being with a minor. This suggests a systematic effort to suppress the truth, buying silence from those who knew the horrifying extent of the relationship.

This complicity reached into his professional sphere. While David’s official Discord staff claimed they were unaware of Celeste’s true age or missing person status, David’s own Twitch manager, known as Xerxify, was caught by Redditors deleting messages in real-time after the news broke. This action—the active destruction of evidence—makes the manager a potentially complicit party and elevates the cover-up from passive ignorance to an organized, active effort.

The Final, Devastating Details

The physical evidence of Celeste’s final months is heartbreaking. When her body was discovered, she was reported to weigh only 71 pounds, a drastic loss from her listed weight of 130 pounds when she first went missing, strongly suggesting prolonged malnourishment or confinement. Her brother, Matthew Hernandez, confirmed to NBC LA that the family knew David and had gone to the police earlier, but their reports were “waved off” due to a lack of evidence—a terrible failure of the system.

The discovery of the body in the Tesla, which was emitting a foul odor and had been sitting in an impound yard for three days, occurred while David was actively performing his music—the same music he had allegedly used to chronicle his relationship with the girl he had met when she was just 10 years old.

Despite the tidal wave of digital evidence, the chronological paper trail of confessions, and the devastating physical details, David remains officially uncharged. His career has been vaporized, but the legal justice the family seeks for Celeste Rivas Hernandez—whose life was cut short by such a profoundly disturbing and public obsession—is still pending. The world watches, horrified, as the full, explicit picture of The D4VD Files continues to unfold.