by Val McDermid
One of her Masters students had been part of the team investigating the fire. Together they decided that for his dissertation he would look into the ability of smoke alarms to wake children. They asked the parents of thirty children to set off the smoke alarms in their properties at random hours of the night. ‘Eighty per cent of these children did not wake up, even though some of them had the alarm in their bedroom.’ The variable frequency detectors designed to address the problem of heavily sleeping children seldom worked. Some of the most effective alarms are reported to be the ones that allowed the mother to record a message herself: ‘So she says, “Get up!” and children respond to the pitch and frequency of her voice.’ Now the challenge is to learn the lesson of the fire investigators’ research – a challenge Niamh’s research team is taking up with smoke detector manufacturers.
The desire for custody of children is possibly a unique instigation for arson. Much more common motivations include revenge, insurance fraud or the desire to cover up after a burglary, or even a murder. But people who try to dispose of a body by setting fire to a house or, like Jane Longhurst’s murderer, torching the body itself (see p.212), are unlikely to succeed. Any forensic investigator dealing with a fire quickly learns to distinguish between the normal effects of fire on a body and evidence which may have a more sinister explanation. Whether or not someone was still alive when the fire started, heat causes the muscles of the body to seize up, drawing the legs and arms up into a classic ‘pugilist’ stance. Water loss shortens the limbs and causes the body to lose up to 60 per cent of its weight. The facial muscles are distorted and the skin of the limbs and torso bursts, creating tears which an inexperienced investigator could mistake for wounds received prior to death. The bones, made brittle by exposure to heat, often fracture when the body is moved from the scene to the morgue. But, even if a body is badly charred on the outside, it will usually be surprisingly well preserved internally. At a crematorium bodies are reduced to ashes by exposure to 815°C heat for around two hours. While structural fires can reach 1,100°C, they generally don’t stay hot enough for long enough to completely destroy evidence of foul play.
Some people love fires so much that they start them with no obvious motive at all. The pure arsonist. Their addiction starts small but invariably escalates, and is rarely overcome. It often incorporates a sexual element and can be fiercely addictive.
One extraordinary serial arsonist started firing Californian buildings in 1984 and didn’t stop until he was arrested in 1991. During those seven years federal agents estimated he set more than 2,000 fires. Joseph Wambaugh wrote a book about him, Fire Lover (2002), and HBO made a feature film, Point of Origin (2002).
The story begins in 1987 when Captain Marvin Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department was summoned to a fire in a fabric store. As soon as he got there he was called to another Bakersfield fire, this time in an arts and craft store. This second one had been extinguished before it overwhelmed the building, and Casey was able to recover a time-delay incendiary device – a lit cigarette placed alongside three matches, rolled up in a yellow sheet of notepaper, and held together with an elastic band. The arsonist had moved the cigarette up so its base was in contact with the match heads, giving him up to fifteen minutes before the cigarette burned down, and fire erupted.
Over the next few hours Casey heard of two more fires in Fresno, 100 miles down Highway 99 from Bakersfield. It felt like too much of a coincidence; Casey suspected that a serial arsonist was in play. Curiously, Fresno had been hosting an arson investigators’ conference which ended shortly before the fires broke out.
Casey sent the incendiary device from the Bakersfield craft store to a fingerprint examiner, who managed to lift a good left ring finger off the yellow notepaper. He put the print through both the state and national criminal record databases, but found no matches.
Casey began to think the unthinkable. Could one of the fire investigators at the conference have set the fires on their way back home? He found out that of the 242 officers in attendance, fifty-five had left the conference alone and driven south along Highway 99. He decided to ask the FBI for help and rang Special Agent Chuck Galyan in Fresno. ‘Fifty-five names of respected arson investigators? I thought Marv Casey was out in left field somewhere,’ Galyan said. The case went cold. Two years later, in 1989, there was another arson investigators conference in Pacific Grove, followed by another almost simultaneous outbreak of fires, this time along Highway 101, which hugs the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Casey couldn’t believe it. He worked out that only ten officers with southerly routes home had been at both the Fresno and Pacific Grove conferences. This time Chuck Galyan agreed to ask a fingerprint expert to check the relevant prints from the state database of public safety professionals. The veteran expert made his comparisons. But he failed to find a match.
Between October 1990 and March 1991 a rash of new fires broke out around Greater Los Angeles, in chain retail stores like Thrifty Drug Stores and Builders’ Emporium. Glen Lucero, of the Los Angeles City Fire Department, said, ‘The fires were occurring predominately during business hours. Most arson fires are set under the cover of darkness. This was highly unusual [and showed] a certain amount of bravado and confidence by the person setting the fires.’
In late March, the fires reached their apogee. Five stores were hit on a single day. The employees of one medium-sized craft store put out the blaze before it properly caught hold. Investigators found an incendiary device there, still in good condition, identical to the one Casey had found in Bakersfield four years previously. Six more of these devices were later recovered, a number of them in pillows, giving rise to the arsonist’s nickname – the ‘Pillow Pyro’.
The investigators knew they were after a clever, experienced and exceedingly dangerous man. He knew enough to start his store fires in the perfect place to encourage their rapid spread. People in these stores were in grave danger of meeting the same fate as those who had been trapped in Ole Hardware Store in South Pasadena in 1984. That explosive fire had started in amongst polyurethane products, resulting in an inferno that burnt with a blue flame and an eerie hissing sound. Badly burnt bodies were blown out of the building by a flashover – when temperatures reach more than 500°C and all the combustible material in an enclosed space ignites explosively. Four people were killed, including a middle-aged woman and her two-year-old grandchild.
In April 1991, a 20-strong ‘Pillow Pyro Task Force’ was set up to liaise with police departments across California and track down their man. Three investigators visited Marvin Casey in Bakersfield, who eagerly showed them his photo of the fingerprint he had lifted in 1987. Because the print had already been cleared by an expert, the investigators had low expectations. But the Pillow Pyro might have committed a crime in the last four years, so they sent it to Ron George at the L.A. Sheriff’s Department.
The Sheriff’s Department database had a large collection of fingerprints, of criminals, of all police officers in the county, and of anybody who had ever applied for a police job. This time the examiner satisfied himself that he had a match – Captain John Orr, an arson investigator with twenty years’ experience at the Glendale Fire Department behind him. Initially, the investigators couldn’t believe that he was guilty, and clung to the idea that the fingerprint must have come from some sort of cross-contamination. On 17 April Ron George rang the Pillow Pyro Taskforce and told an agent, ‘It’s John Orr’s. He shoulda known better. Tell that dummy not to handle the evidence.’
Orr’s prints had been on the Sheriff’s Department database since he was vetted for a job as a police officer with the LAPD in 1971. They had been happy with his prints, but not with a reference from his previous job which had described him as ‘know-it-all, irresponsible and immature’. Further psychological tests confirmed his unsuitability for the role and they rejected him unceremoniously. Nevertheless John Orr’s subsequent career in the Fire Service had been distinguished: he had personally instructed more than 1,200
firefighters, organised seminars on fire investigation and written a number of articles for the American Fire Journal. But how would John Orr have come into contact with evidence at a fire scene in Bakersfield, 100 miles from his base in Glendale?
There was only one unpalatable answer. The task force began surveilling Orr and talking quietly to some of his colleagues. One of them had been suspicious for some time. He had noticed that Orr had an uncanny ability to arrive at a fire scene before anyone else, and rapidly home in on its origin. (As Niamh Nic Daéid explained earlier in this chapter, investigators work scenes in methodical phases, before approaching the business end.) But most of Orr’s colleagues were incredulous. True, he could be smug when he talked about his investigations, but he was a damn good investigator, and one of their own.
Another conference was soon to be held at San Luis Obispo. The task force thought Orr might strike and wanted to catch him in the act. Agents watched him all weekend, every hour of the day, but he started no fires. It seemed he could feel their eyes on him.
In the end it was Orr’s vanity that led to his downfall. He wrote a novel and sent it to a publisher with an astonishing cover letter. ‘My novel, Points of Origin, is a fact-based work that follows the pattern of an actual arsonist who has been setting serial fires in California over the past eight years. He has not been identified or apprehended and probably will not be in the near future. As in the real case, the arsonist in my novel is a firefighter.’ When investigators got their hands on it, they couldn’t believe what they were reading.
The arson attacks mentioned in the manuscript matched many of the Pillow Pyro fires right down to the smallest detail, except for the names. The hero is a fire investigator on the hunt for the serial arsonist, Aaron. He compares the timings of all the fires to the working hours of the firemen in the force and realises that only Aaron could have done it.
On the morning of 4 December 1991 agents arrived at John Orr’s home. Under the floor mat behind the driver’s seat of his car, they found a pad of yellow lined notepaper. In a black canvas bag they found a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes, two books of matches, some rubber bands and a lighter.
The day after Orr’s arrest, Mike Matassa of the task force made various calls to people he had worked with over the year. One was to Jim Allen, arson investigator and personal friend, who told Matassa, ‘You ought to look at the Ole’s fire. Y’know the one at Ole’s Home Center in South Pasadena, October 1984? John’s obsessed with that one. He was mad when they called it an accident.’ When he got off the phone, Matassa had a flash of recall. Along with everyone else in the task force he had been reading a photocopy of Points of Origin. He remembered that in chapter 6 there was an account of a fire in ‘Cal’s Hardware Store’, where five people had died, including a young boy. When Aaron doesn’t get ‘credit’ for starting it he sets another fire in Styrofoam in a nearby hardware store, to expose the investigators’ ignorance. The parallels were eerie.
On its own, Points of Origin would not have been enough to secure a conviction. But in conjunction with the other evidence – the fingerprint, and a tracking device that was installed behind the dashboard of his car – John Orr was found guilty of twenty-nine counts of arson and four counts of murder. He was sentenced to prison for life with no possibility of parole. He has never admitted to any of his crimes. But a fire investigator in Points of Origin makes a telling comment: ‘The serial thing usually starts way after they have experimented with fire when they’re young, and they just continue it if they aren’t caught early. As they grow up, it takes on a sexual atmosphere. You know, they are too insecure to relate to people in a direct, person-to-person way and the fire becomes their friend, mentor and sometimes their lover. Actually a sexual thing.’
THREE
ENTOMOLOGY
‘Augurs and understood relations have
By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood.’
Macbeth, III, iv
Our desire to understand how the dead meet their fate isn’t a recent phenomenon. More than 750 years ago, in 1247, a handbook for coroners called The Washing Away of Wrongs was produced by a Chinese official named Song Ci. It contained the first recorded example of forensic entomology – the use of insect biology in the solution of a crime.
The victim had been stabbed to death by a roadside. The coroner examined the slashes on the man’s body, then tested an assortment of blades on a cow carcass. He concluded that the murder weapon was a sickle. But knowing what caused the wounds was a long way from identifying whose hand had wielded the blade. So the coroner turned to possible motives. The victim’s possessions were still intact, which ruled out robbery. According to his widow, he had no enemies. The best lead was the revelation that the victim hadn’t been able to satisfy a man who had recently demanded the repayment of a debt.
The coroner accused the money lender, who denied the murder was anything to do with him. But the coroner was as tenacious as any TV detective. He ordered all seventy adults in the neighbourhood to stand in a line, their sickles at their feet. There were no visible traces of blood on any of the sickles. But within seconds a fly landed enthusiastically on the money lender’s blade, attracted by minute traces of blood. A second fly followed, then another. When confronted again by the coroner, the money lender ‘knocked his head on the floor’ and gave a full confession. He’d tried to clean his blade, but his attempt to conceal his crime had been foiled by the insect informers humming quietly at his feet.
A page from The Washing Away of Wrongs, a thirteenth-century Chinese textbook on forensic medicine
The Washing Away of Wrongs, the world’s oldest extant book on forensic medicine, was updated and reprinted over 700 years, and carried to crime scenes by Chinese officials as recently as last century. When the first Portuguese traders reached China in the early 1500s, they were impressed by how reluctant the local courts were to condemn a person to death without an exhaustive investigation. The work of the modern forensic entomologist may be based on a wider and deeper range of knowledge, but it still epitomises the kind of careful scrutiny that impressed those Portuguese traders.
The usual role of forensic entomology in criminal investigations is to estimate time of death – a piece of information that’s often crucial in establishing a suspect’s alibi, and thus their guilt or innocence. The discipline is based on one grisly fact: a corpse makes a good lunch.
When forensic pathologists (see chapter 4) examine a corpse, they first try to estimate the time of death from phenomena such as rigor mortis, changes in body temperature and organ decomposition. After about forty-eight to seventy-two hours, these clocks have run down. But the time sequences provided by the insects arriving at the scene tick over long after that. Because different insects don’t all turn up at the buffet together; there is a predictable order to their arrival. When the entomologists are called in they use their knowledge of this succession to estimate time of death. And so the insect kingdom helps the dead victims to provide unwitting but convincing evidence against their killers.
Most forensic entomologists don’t start out with a passion for jurisprudence, but for insect life itself. And it takes years to develop the interpretive powers and expertise needed to bring the insect world to bear on criminal cases in a way that stands up in court. Yet the objectives of a passionate entomologist – to collect selectively and categorise scrupulously, to uncover the causes of curious behaviour, to find the evidence to prove theories – chime with those of a healthy justice system.
Jean Pierre Megnin was a key player in the development of modern forensic entomology. Like Song Ci, he wrote a surprisingly popular book, called Les faune des cadavres (Fauna of Corpses), published in 1893. Megnin recognised that hundreds of insect species are attracted to animal carcasses and, as a vet serving in the French army, he was perfectly placed to record the predictable waves in which they colonise the dead (which he detailed in an earlier book, Faune des Tombeau
x (Fauna of the Tombs)). He sketched many different species – particularly of mites and flies – at different stages of their development from maggot to adulthood, and published his illustrations for the general public.
The close observation and awareness of change over time that Megnin displayed set the tone for the emerging scientific discipline of forensic entomology. His scrupulousness gave the relationship between insects and the deceased an unprecedented legal status; Megnin was called upon as an expert witness in nineteen legal cases in France.2 And yet, entomology was still regarded as a largely anecdotal and haphazard branch of forensics. The principal problems were the range of variables entomologists have to consider – temperature, position of the body, variations in soil, climate and vegetation – and the lack of appropriate tools they had at their disposal in the nineteenth century. European and American scientists were nevertheless inspired by Megnin, and they worked throughout the twentieth century towards greater accuracy in identifying insect species and understanding the stages of their growth.
