IT ENDED. OF COURSE IT DID, it finally did, and like a lot of things, by the time it actually ended, people were starting to become a little less aware of the fact that it was still going on at all. As the third trial approached, there was a sense of exhaustion, of gearing up all over again for another trial where Tonya would say she didn’t remember anything and Charlie would say that in spite of the fact that he was testifying against this woman, he still loved her.
Tonya’s new attorney, a short-haired, no-nonsense woman from Virginia Beach named Janee’ Joslin, was not going down without a fight. At a motion hearing she argued that the venue of the third trial should be changed yet again. “It’s my opinion, Your Honor, that Virginia Beach is no longer an appropriate forum for any further trials of Miss Bundick in this matter,” she said. The saturation of the crimes had now traveled miles across the Bay Bridge-Tunnel; the arsons were just too famous.
The judge denied that request, and so everyone suited up again, and on a Monday morning in early April of 2015—now two years after Tonya’s arrest—everyone traveled to Virginia Beach again, at an expense rate that one local news outlet reported was costing the Commonwealth $3,000 a day just in motel and meal costs for all of the personnel required.
Gary Agar checked into his hotel room at the midpriced chain that all of the Commonwealth staff was staying in. Later when interviewed about this, he couldn’t remember exactly the order of what happened next. It was either late that Sunday or early the next morning, when he’d already put on a dark suit and a blue striped tie and was about to drive to the courthouse, that he got a phone call.
Tonya’s new attorney. She was willing to arrange a deal.
The trial was scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. For all of the previous trials and hearings, Judge Tyler had started exactly on time, with the courtroom open fifteen or twenty minutes early for spectators to get seats. That Monday, the doors remained shut. Spectators arrived and tugged on the door a few times, just to be sure. There were a diminished number of reporters compared with the previous trials, as news organizations decided they couldn’t afford to keep sending staff to cover trials in which the pattern had become predictable. There were other crimes to follow. Other weirdos. Accomack had its moment, but after a while, the whole thing went from exciting to just tiresome.
Maybe Tonya had an even newer new boyfriend than the minister, people joked. Maybe he was getting ready to testify. Maybe he and Charlie had somehow run into each other and gotten into a fight.
Finally, the doors were opened. Inside, the jury panel had not been seated. The air-conditioning was working overtime. Tonya wore an orange prison jumpsuit and by her side, instead of Allan Zaleski, was Joslin, a middle-aged woman in a navy pantsuit.
Judge Tyler explained what had just happened. Tonya had submitted another Alford plea, the same guilty plea she had submitted for the previous trial, the one in which she had said she wasn’t actually guilty at all. This time it was not for just one count, but for all of them, all sixty-one remaining counts of arsons.
“I think,” Judge Tyler said from the bench, once he had ascertained that the plea had been entered into willingly by both parties, “This concludes the matter.”
The trials were over.
In the end, nobody knew what made Tonya change her mind. Was she spooked by the previous verdict? Did she begin to see her situation as hopeless? Was she simply exhausted? Would she ever say?
The journalists who had expected to have at least two hours of jury selection before they needed to begin taking notes in earnest or file web updates for their stories now realized that something big had happened; there was the sound of pens clicking as they tried to keep up.
The plea deal arranged by Gary Agar and Tonya Bundick’s attorney called for seven additional years. Added to the sentencings from her previous two trials, the amount of time she would spend in prison would be seventeen and a half years. By the time she got out, she would have spent nearly a third of her own life in prison. Too old for short skirts and tube tops, too old to turn heads in the same way she had before this whole mess started. The bars she had gone to already didn’t exist anymore. The sentencing worked out to around three and a half months per fire.
Joslin left the courtroom without commenting, walking briskly to her car and waving off the reporters who followed her with microphones and notepads. Gary Agar emerged from the courtroom and, in his deep, slow, rumbling voice, gave interview after interview to the reporters who had lined up for comment.
“It’s a long time in prison for her,” he said to the first local news station, which put a microphone in his face and caught him in the hallway. “This was a horrendous crime that they committed over a long period of time, and now they need to spend a long period of time in the penitentiary because of what she did, and to prevent others from doing the same thing.”
The last part of his statement was, perhaps, superfluous. The chance of there being another person managing to do the same thing Tonya had just been convicted of, burning down a county, building by building over half a year’s time, was very, very small.
Two days after Tonya’s sentence, Charlie would be sentenced, too, to fifteen years—a shorter sentence than hers, presumably because of his original confession and his cooperation throughout Tonya’s trials. He’d already served two of the fifteen years in the Accomack jail. By the time the sentencing came along, he was mostly just relieved that he would now get to be moved to a bigger facility, someplace with a better exercise yard and maybe a woodworking class and a cafeteria with more variety. He’d spent a lot of time practicing drawing tattoo art with a pen and paper and he knew how to use a pen and a wire to ink prison tattoos. This, he knew, could be a lucrative business in prison, and he wondered if he might be able to get into it himself. Eventually, Charlie was moved from Accomack to a facility in Central Virginia.
The day after the trial that wasn’t, Carol Vaughn, the Eastern Shore News reporter who had been covering the trial, began her story with an opening paragraph that was only two words long: “It’s over.” Unlike the early articles and Facebook posts, which gathered dozens and dozens of comments and reactions in the early days after the arrests, these got one, or two, plus a handful of weary “Likes” from people who couldn’t be bothered with any more of a reaction. “Good,” wrote one commenter on an article published by the local public radio station. “Now lock the stupid c--- up and throw away the key; let’s not have to see her fugly face again.” The only other comment was a cheeky two-word response: “Bonfire Bundick.”