Jacob, he was taken to a holding cell at the Corona Police Station and interviewed about his involvement with the blaze. He denied it of course, claiming he had been no where near the house on the night in question. When asked how his Zippo happened to be at the scene of the deliberately set fire, he told them that he’d lost it a few days before and that he had been out with a friend, Mike Wood, that night and that Mike could provide an alibi for him.
But that’s were Jacob had screwed up. Because Mike Wood was in custody as well and he was fuzzy on what he did on the morning of July 9th. It seems that around the same time the fire investigation team had found Jacob’s silver Zippo, they had also come across a bloody steak knife in a pile of broken concrete with Mike’s fingerprints on it. And since Mike had been arrested before, his prints were on file.
A lady named Diane Davis had been working a late shift at the 7-Eleven on Grand Ave. the night of July 5th and was confronted by two teenage boys looking to steal a twelve-pack of beer from the cooler. She was a small woman but still tried to stop them from taking the box of Budweiser bottles out the front door. That was when one of them pulled a knife on her.
“A steak knife, like the kind you’d find in a cutlery set,” she told the police in a statement.
They were only going to take the beer but after she ‘got in their way,’ as she had put it, they decided to take what was in the register as well. When they left a few minutes later they made off with twenty-three dollars from the till and the three dollars worth of beer. Mike Wood had also been kind enough to stab Diane Davis once in the hand and once in the abdomen. She ended up losing a pint of blood before the paramedics showed up and had required sixteen stitches to close her wounds.
She was able to later give the police a description of her attackers which matched that of Jacob and Mike and then had gone down to make a positive identification once they were in custody for the fire. The police were able to match her blood with the blood on the knife.
It would later turn out, from the statements Jacob gave the police in the interview, that they had taken the money and bought pills of speed and a bag of pot and then ended up at a construction site called ‘Magnolia Glen,’ to drink and smoke. After getting restless they’d decided to try and break into what they thought was an equipment shed to steal tools and anything else of value. When it turned out to be the temporary office and sleeping quarters of the site foreman-a big man with a puffy, red beard named Rodney Gray-they had ended up assaulting him as well by throwing a beer bottle at him.
Jacob and Mike were in a lot of trouble. And they were looking at some serious time if convicted of the charges against them.
Mrs. Hanel was scraping by to pay her bills and mortgage and had nothing to go on Jacob’s bail. He would have to spend the following four months in a jail in Banning, California until his trial started.
Mike was a little luckier. His parents owned their house so they were able to use it as collateral for his bail. We hadn’t seen him since the day he had confronted Cory in Dead Grove with the same blood encrusted knife he’d used to attack Diane Davis. He never made it to his own trial. Two days after posting bail, Mike Wood went out to his garage, cut off the power cord from his father’s belt sander and hung himself from a cross beam.
But in the end, the courts threw out the arson charge against Jacob because of a lack of witness. His lawyer had agued that just because his lighter ended up there didn’t necessarily mean that he had torched the house. There was no eye witness and no fingerprints on the lighter itself. He did however end up getting three and a half years in prison for the assaults on Diane Davis and Rodney Gray. He never went back to live with Steve, Jackie and their mom again. I doubt they were too broken up over it.
Steve had later confessed to me that he had gone back to the place where Mike Wood had dropped the steak knife in Dead Grove (after Frisbee had unarmed him), and carefully picked it up using a piece of newspaper. He had then taken it and placed it in the concrete by the abandoned house knowing Mike’s fingerprints were on it. Cheeky bastard.
No one ever found out what Emily Manning was doing in that house on the night of the fire and no one’s ever been charged with her death.
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Frisbee Page 73
