“TELL US WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT”
DISCREETLY, SO AS NOT TO STIR RUMORS OR GOSSIP, the police began developing an initial list of suspects. State police investigators Rob Barnes and Glenn Neal had started with a few criteria: people who had previously set fires, people who had previously been in jail and released within the past year, and—the intersection of the Venn diagram—everyone who had done both.
For a spare set of hands, they called in Bobby Bailey. Bailey was a division chief in the Virginia Fire Marshal Academy. He was also the man who had taught and certified both Barnes and Neal as fire inspectors, in a four-week intensive course that culminated with Bailey decorating a large trailer like an apartment—sofa, coffee table, Christmas tree, stuffed animal—then putting on a flame-retardant space suit and going inside to light the whole thing on fire. The students’ job was to figure out how and where the fire had begun; Bailey would video the whole thing with thermal-protected cameras to show them whether they’d gotten it right.
In addition to heading the Fire Marshal Academy in Richmond, Bailey also taught classes on arson investigation at the local university, and coauthored papers with titles like, “The Use of Liquid Latex for Soot Removal from Fire Scenes and Attempted Fingerprint Development with Ninhydrin.” He was both boastful and dismissive of his academic accomplishments, his personality being less fusty arson professor and more Marlboro arson poet. He was short, muscular, with a wiry mustache and a low, deep drawl. He’d been a cop and a firefighter, and because of those experiences he looked at fire scenes holistically.
For example, were there dead bodies in the room where the fire was? “You walk into a scene and you find a person facedown, that’s normal,” he would explain to his students. “They’re trying to breathe. They’d be crawling on their hands and knees and eventually they’d pass out, and when they did they’d be on their stomachs.” But if there was a body lying faceup, that would be suspicious. That would indicate that the person hadn’t died from smoke inhalation, but rather a heart attack, or foul play.
Essentially, his continued fascination with fire boiled down to this. Other kinds of crimes left evidence: fingerprints, stab wounds, footprints. They were, as police called them, “behavior-rich crime scenes.” Arson wasn’t. It washed all of the behavior and evidence away. It was ultimately unknowable. He believed fire was a living, breathing thing, and he said that to students: “Fire is a living, breathing thing. It pushes. It pulses.”
He was a little intense. But this was, people allowed, to be expected of someone who loved a job about fire as much as Bailey.
And now that he was on board with the Accomack fire investigations, Neal and Barnes had a spare set of eyes to conduct the inspections, and also to help with the other things they had decided were necessary to an investigation.
Bailey had arranged to bring an armful of motion-sensored wildlife cameras over the bridge with him from Richmond. One night he went out with Sheriff Todd Godwin and one of Godwin’s deputies to put them up around the county. The trim, agile Godwin balanced on his deputy’s shoulders as they positioned the equipment high in trees, trained on houses they suspected would be targets.
Occasionally, if the house was across the street from an occupied dwelling, they might ask the dwelling’s owner for assistance.
“How would you like to help?” Bailey asked. “I want to put one of those cameras in your mailbox. But you can’t tell nobody, because we don’t know who the arsonist is.”
“Oh, this is going to be cool—I’m CSI!” the resident agreed, promising secrecy and then promptly telling enough people that the story flew around the county: The police are putting surveillance equipment in your neighbor’s mailboxes.
Meanwhile, Neal had begun pursuing a different line of investigation. Aside from Bobby, he had another friend in Richmond, named Kenneth Morris. Morris also worked for the Virginia State Police, and Neal asked if he minded coming out to the shore for a few days to have a look around. Morris said he wouldn’t mind at all, and thus kicked off the beginning of a psychological exploration into the arsonist’s mind.
Morris was a criminal profiler. He’d worked arson cases with Neal in the past, and before he became a profiler, he was an arson investigator himself. Though he wouldn’t ultimately be the lead profiler on the Accomack arsons—he was approaching retirement and beginning to wind down his career—Neal knew and trusted him and wanted his opinion.
On this first visit, Morris and Neal drove around to each of the sites, just as Neal and Barnes had been doing for weeks, so that Morris could get a sense of the environment surrounding the fires. In between sites, they talked.
The thing that surprised Morris most, he told Neal, was that in spite of how many fires the arsonist had set, he actually didn’t seem to be very good at it. “If I’m an arsonist, I’m going to make sure that when I’m done, the houses are a black hole in the ground,” he explained. “But a lot of these aren’t.” In one house, the arsonist had started the fire by lighting some materials that were on top of a table, which was far less efficient than if he’d lit something on the floor. As a result, the house was left singed and smoking, but not annihilated. Morris decided that the motive didn’t appear to be profit; if the arsonist was after insurance money, he’d want the structure to burn completely. It didn’t appear to be a religious or political extremist either. “Looks to me like he’s motivated by vandalism,” Morris told Neal. “Like he has a vendetta against the county.”
By the end of the arson investigation, at least four criminal profilers would be brought in to assist on the case. Morris, Isaac Van Patten—who was not with law enforcement, but a university psychologist—Ron Tunkel from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Jon Cromer with the Virginia State Police.