And that seemed to be Charlie in a nutshell, thought the people who knew him—bouts of great heroism mixed with bouts of great boneheadedness. Getting sent to prison but then, while he was there, getting a commendation for his brave actions: one day while he and some other prisoners were being transported to a different location, he saw another car on the road spin out of control. He hollered until the van driver stopped and let him out, and then he ran to administer first aid to the victims—a mother and her young daughter, who were thrown from the car and died at the scene. The memory of this would haunt him for years. One of the bravest things he’d ever done, and it ended up all screwed up.
After Charlie and Mary had been together for nearly a decade, their relationship started to go south. They’d been engaged for a while but could never seem to make it down the aisle. Mary blamed herself. She’d never been with someone who had remained faithful before, and she could never stop worrying that one day Charlie would cheat, too. Eventually, they both decided they couldn’t do it anymore, and Mary moved back to the Virginia mainland.
And then people worried about Charlie, whose life so often seemed like it was held together by the collective effort of several invested parties. Mary had been good for him. She’d kept him off drugs, kept his energies focused in a cozy domesticity. And now she was gone, and things only got worse. Charlie’s favorite uncle died, and in a more devastating blow, his mother fell ill shortly after. She had always loved him, always believed and invested in him. He started using drugs again, but this time it didn’t seem paired with a desire to get high so much as a desire to get numb.
One night in 2011 he went to a local bar called Shuckers. He was carrying two eight balls of cocaine, though he still didn’t know what he intended to do with them. Maybe he would ration out the contents and get high. Maybe he’d overdose. Devastated by the thought of losing his mother, he’d already put a gun to his head once, but found he couldn’t pull the trigger.
There was a woman he’d noticed at Shuckers, she was often there when he was, but he was never able to gather more than three words to say to her. He knew he wasn’t her only admirer. She was too pretty, she danced too well, and he was certain that opening his mouth would immediately be followed by sticking his foot in it, so he’d decided to keep quiet in her presence. But that night, the night with the eight ball and the self-pity and the confused heart, she happened to talk to him. And his world would briefly turn sparkly and perfect in a way he had heretofore never dreamed, because this is the night he would meet Tonya, who would be the love of his life.
CHAPTER 5
MONOMANIE INCENDIAIRE
ARSON IS A WEIRD CRIME.
It doesn’t make its perpetrators any richer, unless it’s an insurance-related plot. It’s not like stealing; it doesn’t result in nicer things. It doesn’t, to simplify murder to its most basic element, get rid of someone you hate. It doesn’t even usually make people famous: researchers have assessed that less than 20 percent of arsons lead to an arrest. Another way of looking at this percentage is to infer that any research employed on arsonists is employed on the unlucky ones. The skilled, careful, or otherwise lucky arsonists are never caught. It’s a crime in which the weapon is nature, and the end result is the destruction of a thing, the changing of a landscape, the carving of a charred signature onto a dead piece of earth. Ultimately, the visible remnants of an arson are not what it has left behind but what it has taken away.
It’s also a property crime, inherently less compelling than crimes against living things. An arsonist might not even make the news cycle, unless someone is injured in the fire. Serial killer David Berkowitz was an arsonist. People forget that, because the fires were overshadowed by his more heinous crimes of murdering New Yorkers under the moniker “Son of Sam” in the 1970s. But he lit fourteen hundred fires, according to a log book he kept of his activities, and it was one of these fires that ultimately led to his arrest: after he started a blaze outside of his neighbor’s door, the neighbor suggested police investigate Berkowitz, who he thought behaved oddly.
The Boston Belfry Murderer was an arsonist, too. Thomas Piper, who assaulted and killed four young women in 1870s Boston—and who, after a witness spotted him in a long black opera cloak, caused the men of the city to abandon wearing the popular clothing item altogether—later admitted that he would set fires as a means of relieving tension when he wasn’t attacking girls.
It is not a new crime. There are references to arson in the Bible, like King Absalom instructing his men to burn Joab’s fields. There might have been arsonists living in caves—patient arsonists using flint rocks and small twigs, because the invention of maliciously setting fires first required the invention of mastering fire, making arson an unlikely signpost of humanity’s evolution.
But the way we think of arson is new. The way arsonists have been perceived and studied is continually evolving. German scientists were the first to study it, beginning in the late 1700s. They believed, based on anecdotal evidence and prurient wishful thinking, that fires were set predominantly by young peasant women. The suspected cause was puberty—the trauma of menstruation, a sexual development gone awry. Fire starting was an illness of tragic, hysterical, impoverished women who lacked coping skills and were victims of the unpredictability of female biology. The Morbid Anatomy of the Brain, a medical textbook from 1815, describes one case study as such:
“A servant girl in the country, happy in her situation and liked by her master and mistress, one day while making a toast for the tea was overcome with the propensity to set fire to the barnyard—instantly went out and committed the act, for which she was hanged.”
Any underlying causes to this “sudden propensity” are not explored. Was the servant girl truly “happy in her situation,” or only according to her master and mistress? Was she “liked” by her master—or was she harassed by him, or abused by him, or any number of other possibilities that were not explored by the textbook author?