The burning of a church triggered the arrival of the Feds: the ATF and the FBI. The following Sunday, Woodburn tried to make his sermon about hope rather than despair. “It didn’t burn down,” he told his congregants. “There was no reason for it not to burn down, but it didn’t.”
Nationally, Methodist congregations were grouped by size: small, medium, large. The Eastern Shore churches were all tiny. “They’re small, smaller, smallest,” Woodburn liked to joke. They were just chapels, with double-digit congregations and maybe a tiny fellowship hall. The burning of a community church, on a holy holiday, raised the panic level of the entire shore. Satanists? Atheists? Someone with a vendetta against religion?
Ministers organized prayer vigils trying to quell their congregants’ nerves: “Do not fret because of evildoers or be envious of those who do wrong,” a Baptist pastor from Onley read to his congregation from Psalm 37 at one such vigil. A Presbyterian minister urged attendees to pray for the arsonist, who must be struggling, and for his repentance.
The Facebook pages, “Who is trying to burn down Accomack?” and “ESVA fires,” had become crazed with gossip and speculation, with several thousand members apiece. A few people tried to keep things civil and helpful. Tonya Bundick was one.
“One would have to ask, with all the migrant houses burned, where will they stay this year?” she wrote on one occasion.
“I myself am not afraid, just cautious,” she wrote on another. “I am always on the lookout when my animals start barking and when my livestock start making noise. Make yourself aware of the little things.”
A third time, she scoffed that a recently burned food truck didn’t seem to fit the pattern of the other arsons: “Seems to me some of the properties being burned are people who are taking advantage of an arsonist bein’ on the loose . . . so they are burnin’ their own properties . . . mmmmmm . . . Jus a thought.”
Another person who was very active on Facebook at this time was Matt Hart.
Hart was a searcher, a doer, a young man with big dreams that he wanted to achieve. He wasn’t comfortable if he wasn’t moving forward, finding a new challenge or fixing a new problem. By the age of thirty-two, Hart had been through a stint in the Army, he’d obtained his real estate license, and most recently he’d started up his own construction company, purchasing billboards around the county to advertise his construction services. He also owned several rental properties. He was also studying for his bachelor’s degree online and thought he might try to get his masters when he was done with that. He was also training for a marathon. He also had a dream of one day opening a coffee shop in Onley, near his real estate offices.
Until the arsons, Matt’s primary online activities had been twofold: he talked about his beagle, Parker, or his favorite football team, the Baltimore Ravens. During the arsons, he posted about the fires. The fires as a source of speculation. Of mystery. Of a macabre kind of entertainment based on the idea that the county had become a dartboard at which an arsonist was randomly throwing darts.
“Question of the day,” Matt posted one evening: “Where will the next fire be? I need to make some cold cash.”
“I’m going with two picks tonight: Melfa and Wachapreague,” one of his friends wrote. “I think it’s going to be a double header. He isn’t coming to Chincoteague. Our fire department has only a small area to cover; they would be on the scene before he left.”
“I like those picks,” Matt approved. “I’m impressed, you must be doing your homework.” To another friend, whose predicted burning houses hadn’t burned, he wrote, “We are sorry to inform you that your picks are invalid. Thank you for playing arsonist lottery. Better luck next time.”
Sometimes the speculation turned paranoid. “I wish they would let us have a damn drone,” someone wrote on Matt’s wall, thinking that a loaner drone would make it easier to catch the arsonists in the act. “Maybe if they just threatened to drop a bomb on any abandoned structures that were burning, we would get lucky.”
There were people on the shore who thought that maybe the fires were being set by drones. Or they were being set by military special forces, and observed by drones. In the world at large, the NSA was spying on citizens and a government contractor named Edward Snowden was about to reveal it. It didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that the U.S. government—which already had a NASA rocket-launching facility up the road, thank you very much—would be testing out new tools of warfare and would be doing so in Accomack County.
Matt had more of a vested interest than most people in following the arson proceedings. He’d just purchased a rental house in the town of Cashville. It wasn’t fixed up and it didn’t yet have tenants, so he was scared it might be targeted as abandoned. One night he grabbed a folding chair and set it up in the rental’s living room, staying up all night, looking out into the cornfields. It was, he realized, a little crazy. But he also got a small thrill out of it. It was so definitive, such a tangible course of action to take in the face of something so big and unwieldy.
Law enforcement had originally put forth a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrests of the arsonist. They later quintupled it, to $25,000. On the shore, this was a huge amount of money—as Sheriff Godwin put it, “On the shore, I will tell on my mom for $5,000.”
The reward escalation gave Matt, the man who was never happy unless he had a project, a new endeavor: catch the arsonists.
It started mostly as a joke, with a simple posting on Facebook one night. They were talking about the regular arson matters. One of his friends made a suggestion: “I say we get twenty-five people together and go out one weekend,” the friend wrote. “Tell law enforcement where we will be and what we are driving so they know. Each takes an area of the county that keeps getting hit. Catch them and split the money. I would settle for a grand.”
“No offense to any law enforcement,” the friend continued in a second message, “but if they had this, there wouldn’t be a twenty-five thousand dollar reward.”
Matt thought the idea sounded funny and went with it. “Haha, okay. Where will we hold our group meeting? Bring camouflage, face paint, and stun gun?”
“I’m with a twenty-five-person posse,” wrote a second friend.
“I always wanted to be a detective,” wrote a third.
The concept percolated in Matt’s brain until it started to seem like a good idea. They were at more than fifty fires by this point and his first friend had been right—it wasn’t like law enforcement was getting anywhere, even though they were swarming the county and the Holiday Inn had become a sea of patrol cars as troopers were brought in from all over the state. Maybe they needed a hand.