And there was forensic evidence being collected, all the time. There was the set of two shoe prints that were discovered, to great fanfare, at a fire on Puncoteague Road, fire number fifty-two. The investigators celebrated, and marked the print by sticking little evidence flags into the ground in order to protect it until a stone cast could be made. There was a tire imprint at another.
Casts were made of the tire and the shoe prints. These casts were packaged up and sent to the Virginia Department of Forensic Science branch across the bay in Chesapeake, where forensic scientists tried to determine a match.
The tire impression was determined to belong to “BFGoodrich or any other brand of tire with similar tread design,” according to the forensic report. This was less than helpful: Goodrich was one of the most common tire brands in the United States. The shoe print was determined to belong to “Nike, or any other brand of footwear with a similar outsole design.” This was less than helpful.
Even if the forensic scientists had been able to identify the exact make and model of the exact shoe worn by the arsonist, Neal and Barnes found themselves wondering exactly where that would get them. So what if they had a perfect shoe print—were they going to obtain search warrants for the closets of every man in Accomack County? Require a shoes-off policy for all public spaces, so that each person’s footwear could be examined before they were allowed entry? Lacking a suspect to compare the prints to, the prints became essentially useless.
The same was true for a wadded-up rag found at one scene:
“No hairs suitable for nuclear DNA analysis were recovered,” read the forensic report.
And another rag:
“It is not suitable for PCR analysis and no further testing was conducted on this sample.”
And another:
“No DNA profile consistent with this profile was found.”
The only other potential evidence that could be tested was what was drawn from the fire itself: the shards of wood debris that had been collected from each fire’s point of origin. Those shards might have remnants of the accelerant used to light the fires, which, if identified, could turn out to be clues.
The forensic scientist in charge of this testing received the samples of wood debris in an empty paint can. This was protocol; the can helped seal in vapors and prevent contamination. The first procedure she performed was called “passive adsorption elution.” She suspended a piece of a charcoal strip from the inside lid of the paint can and placed the can in a precisely heated oven for sixteen hours. The goal was to draw any present vapors from the wood debris to the charcoal strip, which could then be tested for the presence of various flammable substances that might have been used in the ignition of the fires. Next, she washed the charcoal strip in a solution, transforming the vapors into a liquid solution. The whole thing was a bit like the Schr?dinger’s cat analogy: through every step of the process, the analyst had to treat the samples as if they included an accelerant, when in fact, it was possible that the paint can she was heating and the liquids she was separating actually contained nothing at all.
Next, she moved on to a different process, called “gas chromatography.” The purpose of this was to separate the liquid and break it down into compounds, and then see if any of the discovered compounds matched known ignitable liquids. There was a whole database for this kind of work, the National Center for Forensic Science’s Ignitable Liquids Database. The database included the compounds for starter fluids, paint thinners, gasolines—anything an arsonist might latch on to as a signature accelerant. Often, the present compounds would come back and be something mundane like household lighter fluid, the kind that every American with a grill had in his or her garage. But sometimes you got lucky and found a history buff arsonist who was lighting a whole town up with Civil War-era lamp oil.
The Department of Forensic Science received its first batch of charred wood samples on February 13, and sent responses back two weeks later.
“Item 1 was extracted using a passive adsorption-elution technique and was examined using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS),” the report read. “No ignitable liquids were identified in the Item 1 extract. The evidence is being retained for personal pickup.”
In other words, Schr?dinger’s cat was never even in the box to begin with. The forensic scientist had been looking, scientifically speaking, for something that didn’t exist at all.
ACROSS THE BRIDGE in Accomack, the slog of the rest of the investigation pressed on. A series of roadblocks were set up on the county’s three main roads. This was an area in which the isolation of the county became useful: It was impossible to get anywhere in Accomack without using one of these three roads, and therefore possible to quarantine the whole county just by blocking them off. They didn’t catch the arsonist using the roadblocks, but when word about them spread, people were careful to make sure they weren’t caught cruising with an open beer.
In fact, to the deputies of the sheriff’s department, it seemed that other crimes had drastically decreased. Nobody was driving drunk, nobody was burgling. It was simply too risky, now that the streets were overrun with law enforcement officers. One law enforcement officer, after noticing an unfamiliar car suspiciously loitering by the side of the road, knocked on the car’s window to check things out. The man inside said he was from out of town, just passing through, and had pulled over to read a map. But he seemed confused. “You’re the third cop who has stopped by to check on me in ten minutes,” he said. Accomack County felt the safest it had ever been, except that it was in the middle of the biggest crime spree in its four hundred-year history.
And the graffiti that had plagued the county before the arsons started—the ones that had so aggrieved Todd Godwin and the sheriff’s department—had, for reasons unknown, completely come to a stop.
CHAPTER 11
THE EASTERN SHORE ARSONIST HUNTERS
MEANWHILE, THE RESIDENTS OF THE COUNTY were collectively losing their minds.
On Ash Wednesday, in the middle of February, a Methodist church was set on fire. It didn’t completely burn down, and the charred wood was discovered the next day when a repairman pulled into the gravel parking lot to eat his lunch. Leatherbury United Methodist was a small but devoted community. The minister was a man named Jon Woodburn, a circuit preacher who also served two other congregations: he would preach in Riverview at 8:30 a.m., then make it to Leatherbury by 9:45 and then Cashville by 11:00.