OR MAYBE SHE DIDN’T DO IT.
So far, Tonya Bundick hadn’t announced any alibis for any of the nights of any of the fires, but what did that mean, anyway? The fires had happened over the course of several months. Memories could get foggy; she couldn’t be expected to know what she was doing those nights. And maybe there wouldn’t have been alibis anyway. Wouldn’t most people be at home, alone, during those times?
Maybe she was the provocatively dressed mom who bragged too much on Facebook, and Charlie was the aw-shucks good old boy who was friendly with the cops and the fire department. Maybe it was easier for people to like him than her, for the abstract ways it’s sometimes easier for people to wrap their heads around difficult men than complicated women. All of the conversations that Charlie claimed they’d had, about burning houses and broken dreams—all of those were, she would continue to steadfastly maintain, a lie.
A while after this was all over, a self-published book appeared on Amazon.com, printed by one of those companies that will print any book whose author is willing to pay for the copies. The title was Burned, and it was about a woman named “Sonya Booneswick” who lived in “Accolake County” and was framed for a bunch of arsons that her boyfriend “Harley” committed. The author went by the pseudonym Z. Jasmine BelFord, and claimed to “have the unique ability to see the story from inside the heart and mind of Sonya.” The story, which is told in the first person, opens with the couple’s arrest, and follows Sonya as she is pitted against a system that is out to get her: the sheriff, the police, the media, the Commonwealth’s attorney, her own attorneys. She begins an affair with her bail bondsman, she begins an affair with another man, and all throughout, she protests her innocence, sometimes in verse: Who set those fires in the county, everyone’s hoping to collect the bounty It wasn’t me, was it you? Does anyone have a clue?
Some of the poems read like Sonya-isms.
In the book version, the character Harley ultimately kills himself at the end, riddled with grief over ruining Sonya’s life. “May his soul rise to Heaven before the Devil finds out he’s dead,” the author wrote.
Maybe the book reflected what happened in real life to Charlie and Tonya. Maybe Charlie was orchestrating a massive plot, while playing completely dumb. It was a possibility.
Maybe nobody knew Tonya Bundick at all.
CHAPTER 24
“WE’D DONE IT BEFORE”
THE TRIALS OF TONYA BUNDICK were turning into the biggest spectacle the Eastern Shore had ever seen. Media from outlets all over Virginia had sent in requests to place cameras in the courtroom. The local news was printing updates on every incremental court procedure related to the trial.
As it turned out, the trial wouldn’t even be on the shore. The judge, Glen Tyler, had granted the defense team’s request for the trials to be moved to Virginia Beach, a ninety-minute trip down the peninsula, through Northampton County, and across the Bay Bridge-Tunnel to the mainland. The publicity was one thing—more pressing was the fact that it might be impossible to seat a jury where one or more members didn’t own something that had burned.
Allan Zaleski, Tonya’s court-appointed defense attorney, had been relieved for the venue change but disappointed in the ultimate location. The Norfolk-Virginia Beach area was heavily populated by military personnel, who tended to be conservative and trusting of law enforcement, and perhaps, Zaleski feared, more inclined to believe the prosecutor’s account over Tonya’s. Zaleski tried but failed to have it moved again to a county even farther away.
Zaleski was tall, white haired, and wore a pair of glasses that he used to gesture, with grandfatherly effect, in the courtroom. He had a lot of courtroom experience, and the arsons did not represent his strangest case. That honor went to a man he’d defended for rape and murder more than a decade ago. The victim was a sailor’s wife, discovered by her husband when he came home from sea. As a suspect, police latched on to her neighbor, also a sailor. The neighbor first proclaimed his innocence, but after an eleven-hour interrogation, he not only confessed but also implicated a second assailant, his roommate and fellow seaman. The roommate initially said he was innocent, but eventually also confessed, and additionally implicated a third suspect, who in turn implicated still another. Zaleski’s client was the third suspect, a man named Derek Tice, arrested in what was originally believed to be a shocking example of mass depravity and sadism within the U.S. Navy. Their confessions were disturbing: “Dan started to strangle her to keep her from talking,” Zaleski’s client told investigators after nine hours of interrogations, “so I made a statement that, ‘Just get a knife and stab her.’ Then Dan stabbed her, then I stabbed her, then Eric stabbed her, Joe stabbed her.”
But there was one problem. Every time a new assailant was introduced—the group eventually became known as the Norfolk Four—the man’s DNA would be tested. And none of the DNA collected from any of the alleged perpetrators ever matched what had been found at the crime scene. Their confessions didn’t match up with the evidence either: one man said they had beaten the woman to death; in fact, she had not been beaten at all. All of them went to prison anyway. Some of them protested their innocence, saying they’d only confessed out of exhaustion and fear: the interrogating detective said unless they confessed they’d get the death penalty. One of them grew to believe he must have been involved, even though he’d had an alibi. It was the only way he could make sense of how he’d ended up in jail. And then, after all that, there was another stunning twist in the case: the real killer, a man none of the Norfolk Four had ever even met before, confessed unprompted in a letter to a friend, which the friend brought to law enforcement.
It would still take several years, and multiple complicated legal machinations, for the wrongly convicted men to be released. What had been thought of as a gang rape instead became a case study in false confessions.