All of the cameras they’d placed. All of the forensic evidence they had submitted. All of those rumors about the police closing in on a suspect. All of that meant nothing. Until Charles Smith wandered onto the property of Airport Road with a lighter, law enforcement had been no closer to catching him than they were five and a half months ago.
The firefighters of the Tasley department were called out for the fire, but then called back at the last minute. The flames hadn’t fully involved the house, and the Melfa and Onley departments were already on the way and thought they could handle it. The Tasley members got close enough to the scene only to register that there seemed to be more police cars than usual, then Jeff Beall turned the engine around and most of the firefighters went home, grateful for the night off.
One of the firefighters from Tasley, Bryan Applegate, didn’t immediately go back to the station when the call was canceled. The scene commander at the burning house decided he still needed a tanker. Bryan was driving one, with another volunteer next to him, so he continued to the scene. As they got closer to the fire, Bryan noticed that all of the cop cars seemed to be clustered around a particular vehicle. At the same time Bryan realized the cops might have finally caught the arsonist, he also realized that the surrounded vehicle looked just like his brother Charlie’s new minivan.
“Did I just see what I thought I saw?” he asked the friend sitting next to him.
“I don’t know,” the friend said, but his voice sounded like he knew.
Once they got to the burning house, Bryan recognized the chief in command as a friend. “You got an airpack?” the chief asked him. “I need another firefighter after all.”
This house was going to be different, Bryan learned. The fire companies couldn’t just let it burn to the ground because it might be used for evidence in a trial. Someone needed to actually go inside and put the fire out, and the chief was asking that one of those people be Bryan. He suited up. Inside the smoky, half-redone house there were wood pilings and construction beams, flammable renovation materials that needed to be cleared away. The few firemen present attacked the flames with an inch and three-quarter water line, spraying water up into the rafters, an attack that lasted eight minutes, from 11:54 p.m. to 12:02 a.m. Afterward, a police officer asked Bryan if he could stay around for a few more minutes. He needed Bryan to sign a statement saying what he’d done in the house, so it could be incorporated as evidence. Bryan paced and waited for the form. There were a lot of minivans in Accomack.
He signed the paperwork, took the tanker back to the station, and then immediately got in his own car and started driving north toward Hopeton and Charlie’s house. He just wanted to get there and see the van, parked safely in the driveway, porch lights off, everyone asleep, and learn that it had all been a mistake. Bryan crawled up Bayside Road until he got to the point where it intersected with Matthews Road. He couldn’t even turn onto it. The whole street was blocked off with police cars. Bryan turned around, drove home, and never talked to Charlie again.
Back at the scene of the fire, someone radioed Todd Godwin, who had been out patrolling the roads, as he had been every night for the past five and a half months. When he heard the arsonist had been arrested, he started driving toward the scene in his own marked car. At Airport Road, Charlie asked to see him, so Godwin went to the police car where Charlie was handcuffed, waiting to be taken in for questioning.
“Todd,” said Charlie, because everyone called the sheriff “Todd,” because everyone knew everyone here in Accomack County, “I’m sorry. But I didn’t light them all.”
CHAPTER 17
“SOMEDAY THEY’LL GO DOWN TOGETHER”
WE NEED TO ADDRESS, for a moment, Bonnie and Clyde.
The American gangsters, the country’s most photogenic public enemies, for whom only first names are needed.
They met, by most accounts, in 1930 when Bonnie Parker was twenty and Clyde Barrow was a year older, at a friend’s house in West Dallas. By then, Clyde had already been arrested a few times for petty misdeeds—possession of a truckload of stolen turkeys, in one instance. He and Bonnie fell in love, and then they fell into crime. Later, after Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty had played them in cinematic glory, they would be known for their bank robberies and getaways. But most of their holdups were actually at rural gas stations or small-town general stores. The Barrow gang, which also included Clyde’s brother and his wife, would walk in, demand money, shoot anyone who got in the way during their escape, and then move on to the next town, the next motel hideout, the next caper.
They were violent—in the process of their crimes they killed at least nine police officers and civilians—but they were also glamorous. Clyde was tall and strong; Bonnie was petite with piercing eyes and a bow-shaped mouth. Her leg had been permanently disfigured in a car accident and it was difficult for her to walk, so Clyde often carried her. In a pile of photographs discovered at one of their hideouts, which newspapers printed and reprinted, one image showed Clyde holding Bonnie aloft with one arm, their faces pressed cheek to cheek. In other pictures, they playfully pointed firearms at each other, smoked cigars, mugged for the camera. Bonnie wrote poetry about their exploits—rhyming ballads that went on for dozens of stanzas and were memorable and recitable, if slightly clunky:
They call them cold-blooded killers
They say they are heartless and mean
But I say this with pride, I once knew Clyde
When he was honest and upright and clean.
Bonnie and Clyde became, in other words, the ur-template for American crime-spree couples: repellent, but also alluring and, above all else, in love. Their crimes felt uniquely American. Not merely because they happened in the dust and heat of the United States south and southwest, but because these crimes were viewed by much of the American public as a reaction to the Great Depression. “Gaunt, dazed men roamed the city streets seeking jobs,” writes historian E. R. Milner in The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde. “Breadlines and soup kitchens became jammed, foreclosures forced more than 38 percent of farmers from their lands . . . by the time Bonnie and Clyde became well-known, many felt that the capitalistic system had been abused by big business and government officials. Now here were Bonnie and Clyde striking back.”
They were products of their times, and they defined how generations of Americans would view and interpret lovers who broke the law. And when they died, they died together in a rain of bullets, faithful to each other until their end.