by Monica Hesse
On this first visit, Morris and Neal drove around to each of the sites, just as Neal and Barnes had been doing for weeks, so that Morris could get a sense of the environment surrounding the fires. In between sites, they talked.
The thing that surprised Morris most, he told Neal, was that in spite of how many fires the arsonist had set, he actually didn’t seem to be very good at it. “If I’m an arsonist, I’m going to make sure that when I’m done, the houses are a black hole in the ground,” he explained. “But a lot of these aren’t.” In one house, the arsonist had started the fire by lighting some materials that were on top of a table, which was far less efficient than if he’d lit something on the floor. As a result, the house was left singed and smoking, but not annihilated. Morris decided that the motive didn’t appear to be profit; if the arsonist was after insurance money, he’d want the structure to burn completely. It didn’t appear to be a religious or political extremist either. “Looks to me like he’s motivated by vandalism,” Morris told Neal. “Like he has a vendetta against the county.”
By the end of the arson investigation, at least four criminal profilers would be brought in to assist on the case. Morris, Isaac Van Patten—who was not with law enforcement, but a university psychologist—Ron Tunkel from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Jon Cromer with the Virginia State Police.
It was an occupational hazard of criminal profilers that the general public thought of them as either useless frauds or all-knowing wizards, with not a lot of room in between. What they actually excelled at was both more concrete and more boring than was generally understood. They knew statistical trends of various types of criminals. They knew general behavioral patterns. They knew, for example, that it was common for arsonists to return to the scenes of their fires. With this knowledge, they could help detectives write reports to their superiors, requesting extra staffing and surveillance for those locations. It wasn’t romantic, but it was useful.
Morris was the only one who was familiar with the Eastern Shore. The ATF profiler, Ron Tunkel, had previously worked as a profiler on the Olympic bombings in 1996. One of his strengths was working with the police on how to devise the most effective media strategy and public communication. Tunkel knew there were two kinds of witnesses: those who had seen something and understood the significance of what they’d seen, and those who had seen something and didn’t even know it was important. With as many fires as there had been, Tunkel figured there had to be people in the latter category. Someone had finished making dinner and gone outside to dump the leftover cooking grease and had spotted a person walking through a field. The key was to create a public message in a way that would jog people’s memories without disclosing any proprietary information or leading all potential witnesses.
Eventually, they all submitted psychological profiles of the arsonist to the Virginia State Police. Morris reiterated his belief that the arsonist’s primary motive was vandalism; he also suggested that the arsonist likely had an immature personality, and that it would be wise to look into people who had vendettas against the police or fire departments. Tunkel’s report touched on the notion that people who committed arson were often people who felt powerless and were trying to regain authority in their own lives. He wrote, “The year 2012 was probably not a very good one in the life of the offender.”
A general synopsis of the profiles was provided to the media, and Carol Vaughn, a reporter for the Eastern Shore News, wrote a front-page article titled “Police Describe Arsonist’s Profile.” (Given that the Eastern Shore News had only three reporters on staff at the time, the overworked Vaughn was also responsible for two of the other three articles that appeared on the front page of that edition: “West Point Jacket, Unearthed on N.J. Beach after Hurricane, Returned to Owner’s Widow” and “Community Raises Money for Arcadia Chorus.”) “We feel certain that the person or persons responsible for these fires is a resident of Accomack County,” a captain from the Chesapeake Field Office was quoted as saying. The article also warned readers that the arsonist “likely talks frequently about the fires” and may “show an unusual pattern of leaving home during the night.” Privately, police had decided that the arsonist was likely not a teenager: someone so young would be noticed if he slipped out of the house at night. They were looking for someone who didn’t have to account for his whereabouts to a guardian.
Locals devoured the information and reposted it on social networks, but it also made them scoff. Of course the arsonist was likely talking frequently about the fires. They all were. It was the one thing everyone in the county was talking about. And of course the arsonist was a resident of Accomack County. Who would bother to drive all the way to a remote area of the United States just to burn it down?
MEANWHILE, lead profiler Jon Cromer was deciding how to accomplish a necessary but delicate task: interviewing the firefighters. Nobody could deny that there was a chance that the arsonist was a firefighter. At the same time, being the one to raise that suspicion was bad for community relations.
Cromer was a soft-spoken man with a gentle southern accent, the kind that made him sound, even when he was interrogating hardened criminals, like he was interviewing a four-year-old about the location of a missing cookie. But rather than talking to each of the firemen individually, Cromer decided the best thing to do in this situation was to go station by station and pass out a structured questionnaire, to each of the hundreds of firefighters.
He started with the company in Bloxom. That town was in the middle of the county, centrally located to the fires. Once everyone was seated around tables in the meeting room, Cromer and Kenneth Morris passed out the questionnaires and a bunch of pens. They told the firefighters that the reason for the surveys was because the firefighters were themselves invaluable resources: they may know things that they hadn’t previously thought to share. The volunteers found the explanations insulting. The police could pretend all they wanted that the purpose of the questionnaire was to get their valuable input, but most of them were pretty sure they knew the real purpose. A few of them refused to fill it out, others felt free to tell Cromer and Morris exactly how they felt about the questionnaire: it was complete bullshit.
The profilers remained calm. It was possible that the person they were trying to find was in that room. And if so, that he would give himself away with clues he wasn’t even aware of.
On the first page of the questionnaire, Cromer briefly recapped all of the fires that had been happening on the shore. He explained that he was on the shore with the state police as part of an investigation. “Tell us what you know about that,” the writing prompt said. It was left ambiguous, so respondents could say what they knew about either the fires or the investigation. The second page instructed the participants to “List the five most important things that could have created this situation.” Again, it was up to participants to decide how to interpret “situation.” The final page asked participants to put themselves in the shoes of law enforcement: “If you were in charge of investigating the fires, how would you do it?”
The ambiguity of the questions was important. When Cromer had given a similar survey to a police department that had experienced thefts from the evidence room, seventy-four of the seventy-six respondents offered similar rationales for what could have created the situation: the evidence room was sloppily run and often left unlocked. But two of the respondents offered explanations that had nothing to do with management: “Maybe someone needed money,” they said. “Maybe someone had a drug problem.” Those answers in themselves weren’t any kind of admission to guilt, but they were different enough to get Cromer’s attention.
The order of the questions was important, too. Each question was designed to prompt a different mind-set that would set up the next question. The order had been especially useful in child abuse cases. Often a parent, when asked to speculate what could have caused burning or bruising on a child, would blame external factors—a playground fall, a rough hour of recess. But wh
en the parents were asked how they would investigate the situation themselves, the responses wouldn’t follow at all from the previous question. “I think you should talk to the family and see if anybody has a bad temper,” they might write—an investigating tactic that made no sense if the culprit had been a swing set. If the parent truly believed the child was being injured on the school playground, their proposed solution should have involved advocating for better recess supervision, or removing dangerous equipment. Their minds would not have immediately leapt to anger management issues at home.
It was almost, Cromer analogized, like a grade schooler trying to use the test in order to beat the test. They might be able to come up with plausible answers to one question, but when asked to come at the answer from a different direction, they would falter.
Cromer had all of this in mind when he passed out the surveys, first to the fire company in Bloxom and then later to the one in Parksley. Most of the responses were what he expected them to be, blaming punk kids or vindictive insurance seekers. One of the responses came back a little different. On the last page, in response to how she would investigate the arsons, the firefighter had written, “I would start with the fire service”.
But instead of a period, she’d ended the statement with a colon. “I would start with the fire service:” It was the colon that was interesting to Cromer. Had she merely run out of time? Or was she about to elaborate on her suggestion with specific names, before thinking better of it? Cromer recommended the woman be brought in for questioning. It didn’t lead anywhere. As it turned out, none of the structured questionnaires did. But this was the nature of the investigation at this time. The investigators were willing to try anything, even open themselves up to the possibility that the entire case could hinge on an inexplicable piece of punctuation.
Cromer’s other contribution to the investigation was immediately suggesting that his superiors call Isaac Van Patten.
Van Patten, like Cromer and Morris, was a profiler. Unlike those two, both career police who had become law enforcement first and then profilers, Van Patten was an academic. He had a PhD in marriage and family therapy, and his official employer was Radford University in central western Virginia, where he was a professor in the behavioral science department. But he consulted with the Virginia State Police, too, and after years of focusing on therapeutic approaches to treating offenders and on the psychological aspects of criminal profiling, Van Patten had developed an interest in a burgeoning field of study. This field of study was the other thing that set him apart from the profilers already on the case, and the reason Cromer so badly wanted him to join the effort.
Van Patten’s specialty was called geographic profiling. It was a discipline based not on psychology but on data. Geographic profilers mapped the locations of crimes, and in doing so, mapped the criminal’s mind.
The laymen’s explanation that Van Patten found most helpful, and that he frequently referred people to, came from the pilot episode of the crime-solving drama Numb3rs. In it, a detective goes to his mathematician brother, searching for a way to predict a serial rapist’s next target. The task, the brother tells him, would be nearly impossible. Think of a lawn sprinkler: even with all the mathematical models in the world, there would be too many variables—change in wind direction, mechanical glitches—to predict with absolute certainty where each droplet would fall. But it was possible to work backward and go in the other direction. With enough fallen droplets, one could develop an algorithm to trace each one back to their common point of origin. Given the droplets, you could find the sprinkler. Find the sprinkler, find the criminal. The idea was that repeat offenders, even the ones who believe they are choosing their crime scenes completely randomly, are actually subconsciously employing patterns. They orient their actions around a home base, like a residence or place of work. Van Patten, with luck, could use a computer algorithm to point toward the home base.
Because geographic profiling was based solely on location data, the type of crime wasn’t important. It worked the same for a serial rapist as for a serial burglar or serial murderer. The only ingredients necessary were addresses, the more of them the better. In late November, the Virginia State Police had arranged for Van Patten to be sent the addresses of all of the fires so far. There were about twelve at that point, more than enough for an initial profile, with the idea that additional sites could be added in the future. Analyzing these incidents, Van Patten developed a report, which he submitted to the police in December 2012.
The beginning of the report summarized the time patterns of the fires: Most of them had been clustered between 10 p.m. and midnight—which indicated, if nothing else, that the arsonist must not work a night shift. The report also looked at the topographical spread of the fires, and where each one lay within the county. So far, though the arsonist had flirted with both county borders, he hadn’t left Accomack.
These were all observations that could have been made by any armchair detective with an Excel spreadsheet. For the second part of the analysis, an algorithm was needed. Van Patten was careful as he input the addresses, input being the most likely occasion for human error to poison the data. What Van Patten’s computer screen first showed him looked simply like a messy series of overlapping ovals and circles on a map, all roughly clustered toward the center of Accomack County. This was just the raw data. Van Patten needed to interpret and streamline it so it would make sense to human eyes. When he finished doing that, the results came back a second time. This time, the computer screen showed him one neat circle, a quarter mile in diameter, beginning just north of Parksley and ending just south of Bloxom. Somewhere within this circle, Van Patten hypothesized, was the home or workplace of Accomack’s arsonist.
Van Patten included an image of that map on the memo he submitted to the Virginia State Police, with his recommendation for what should be done with the data:
“As an investigative strategy, it would be advisable to conduct knock-and-talks with as many of the homes in Hopeton as possible,” he wrote. “In particular, priority for this canvas should be the Matthews Drive/Dennis Drive axis.”
Matthews Road was a quiet, rural street, mostly filled with one-story houses on medium-sized lots. It was a good place to raise a family, which might have been why Tonya Bundick chose to return to her childhood home there, after her mother died. She and Charlie lived in a white ranch house on Matthews. About five houses down from the intersection of Dennis Drive.
CHAPTER 9
CHARLIE AND TONYA
CHARLIE HAD SEEN HER BEFORE. Since his ex-girlfriend had moved out with her kids, he’d been spending more evenings at Shuckers, and he’d noticed Tonya. More particularly, he’d noticed the tattoo on her lower back, and how good she looked when she danced, and he’d come to the conclusion that she was out of his league. Thus, he avoided her on purpose. Women like that, he always ended up making himself a fool in front of, and it seemed safer to stay away entirely.
But they had a pair of mutual friends, Jay Floyd and his girlfriend, Danielle, and on this night, the night Charlie had an eight ball of cocaine in his pocket and a vague plan to kill himself, Danielle came over and said Tonya wanted to know why Charlie never said more than three words to her. She’d seen him looking. “Are you interested or not?” Danielle, as Tonya’s emissary, asked Charlie.
Later that night, she came over again. “Tonya wants you to have her number in your phone,” she said.
Charlie and Tonya ended up talking that night in the parking lot. He told her about his past struggles, the thefts and the prison time and the drugs he wanted to shake but couldn’t. She told him about her sons, how important they were and how hard she worked at being a single mom. She said that she couldn’t have people around her kids who did drugs, it was a deal breaker for her. It was a talk that both of them would remember and tell other people about, one of those conversations that seemed to cover everything that had ever been important in their lives. Charlie kept laughing, first because he was nervous,
and then because he was happy. At the end of the night, he excused himself, went back into the bar, and flushed his cocaine down the toilet.
THEIR FIRST DATE wasn’t one, really. She asked if he would come to her house and help her kids set up a PlayStation. When he got there, the boys’ father was there, too. Charlie felt awkward and spent the afternoon pretending to make calls on his cell phone until he finally made up an excuse to leave. In the days that followed, Tonya kept texting him. “Do you miss me?” she asked. And he did miss her. She was the prettiest girl who had ever been interested in him, and she seemed smart and funny, too. He never imagined a relationship coming out of any of this, though. In the beginning, they’d both decided to keep things purely physical. But after a little while, he realized what he was most looking forward to with Tonya was when they were just hanging out.
By the time he’d decided, one night in bed, to tell her he was falling in love with her, Tonya already suspected a declaration was coming, and she teased him about his nerves. She told him herself a few days later, via text message, as Charlie remembered, while he was repairing his outdoor steps. His phone buzzed, and the text was only one letter: I. The L followed in the next message, and the O after that, then the V. By the time Verizon had sent him the whole “I love you,” he had close to sawed off his finger in excitement.
He took her out on a proper date, and then again after that. After a little while, she started talking about having troubles finding babysitters. He sensed the real problem was that she couldn’t afford them on her hourly salary but was too embarrassed to admit it. “Why don’t I just come over?” he suggested. “I really don’t do much when I’m not with you, anyway.”
