American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  The forensic scientist in charge of this testing received the samples of wood debris in an empty paint can. This was protocol; the can helped seal in vapors and prevent contamination. The first procedure she performed was called “passive adsorption elution.” She suspended a piece of a charcoal strip from the inside lid of the paint can and placed the can in a precisely heated oven for sixteen hours. The goal was to draw any present vapors from the wood debris to the charcoal strip, which could then be tested for the presence of various flammable substances that might have been used in the ignition of the fires. Next, she washed the charcoal strip in a solution, transforming the vapors into a liquid solution. The whole thing was a bit like the Schrödinger’s cat analogy: through every step of the process, the analyst had to treat the samples as if they included an accelerant, when in fact, it was possible that the paint can she was heating and the liquids she was separating actually contained nothing at all.

  Next, she moved on to a different process, called “gas chromatography.” The purpose of this was to separate the liquid and break it down into compounds, and then see if any of the discovered compounds matched known ignitable liquids. There was a whole database for this kind of work, the National Center for Forensic Science’s Ignitable Liquids Database. The database included the compounds for starter fluids, paint thinners, gasolines—anything an arsonist might latch on to as a signature accelerant. Often, the present compounds would come back and be something mundane like household lighter fluid, the kind that every American with a grill had in his or her garage. But sometimes you got lucky and found a history buff arsonist who was lighting a whole town up with Civil War-era lamp oil.

  The Department of Forensic Science received its first batch of charred wood samples on February 13, and sent responses back two weeks later.

  “Item 1 was extracted using a passive adsorption-elution technique and was examined using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS),” the report read. “No ignitable liquids were identified in the Item 1 extract. The evidence is being retained for personal pickup.”

  In other words, Schrödinger’s cat was never even in the box to begin with. The forensic scientist had been looking, scientifically speaking, for something that didn’t exist at all.

  ACROSS THE BRIDGE in Accomack, the slog of the rest of the investigation pressed on. A series of roadblocks were set up on the county’s three main roads. This was an area in which the isolation of the county became useful: It was impossible to get anywhere in Accomack without using one of these three roads, and therefore possible to quarantine the whole county just by blocking them off. They didn’t catch the arsonist using the roadblocks, but when word about them spread, people were careful to make sure they weren’t caught cruising with an open beer.

  In fact, to the deputies of the sheriff’s department, it seemed that other crimes had drastically decreased. Nobody was driving drunk, nobody was burgling. It was simply too risky, now that the streets were overrun with law enforcement officers. One law enforcement officer, after noticing an unfamiliar car suspiciously loitering by the side of the road, knocked on the car’s window to check things out. The man inside said he was from out of town, just passing through, and had pulled over to read a map. But he seemed confused. “You’re the third cop who has stopped by to check on me in ten minutes,” he said. Accomack County felt the safest it had ever been, except that it was in the middle of the biggest crime spree in its four hundred-year history.

  And the graffiti that had plagued the county before the arsons started—the ones that had so aggrieved Todd Godwin and the sheriff’s department—had, for reasons unknown, completely come to a stop.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE EASTERN SHORE ARSONIST HUNTERS

  MEANWHILE, THE RESIDENTS OF THE COUNTY were collectively losing their minds.

  On Ash Wednesday, in the middle of February, a Methodist church was set on fire. It didn’t completely burn down, and the charred wood was discovered the next day when a repairman pulled into the gravel parking lot to eat his lunch. Leatherbury United Methodist was a small but devoted community. The minister was a man named Jon Woodburn, a circuit preacher who also served two other congregations: he would preach in Riverview at 8:30 a.m., then make it to Leatherbury by 9:45 and then Cashville by 11:00.

  The burning of a church triggered the arrival of the Feds: the ATF and the FBI. The following Sunday, Woodburn tried to make his sermon about hope rather than despair. “It didn’t burn down,” he told his congregants. “There was no reason for it not to burn down, but it didn’t.”

  Nationally, Methodist congregations were grouped by size: small, medium, large. The Eastern Shore churches were all tiny. “They’re small, smaller, smallest,” Woodburn liked to joke. They were just chapels, with double-digit congregations and maybe a tiny fellowship hall. The burning of a community church, on a holy holiday, raised the panic level of the entire shore. Satanists? Atheists? Someone with a vendetta against religion?

  Ministers organized prayer vigils trying to quell their congregants’ nerves: “Do not fret because of evildoers or be envious of those who do wrong,” a Baptist pastor from Onley read to his congregation from Psalm 37 at one such vigil. A Presbyterian minister urged attendees to pray for the arsonist, who must be struggling, and for his repentance.

  The Facebook pages, “Who is trying to burn down Accomack?” and “ESVA fires,” had become crazed with gossip and speculation, with several thousand members apiece. A few people tried to keep things civil and helpful. Tonya Bundick was one.

  “One would have to ask, with all the migrant houses burned, where will they stay this year?” she wrote on one occasion.

  “I myself am not afraid, just cautious,” she wrote on another. “I am always on the lookout when my animals start barking and when my livestock start making noise. Make yourself aware of the little things.”

  A third time, she scoffed that a recently burned food truck didn’t seem to fit the pattern of the other arsons: “Seems to me some of the properties being burned are people who are taking advantage of an arsonist bein’ on the loose . . . so they are burnin’ their own properties . . . mmmmmm . . . Jus a thought.”

  Another person who was very active on Facebook at this time was Matt Hart.

  Hart was a searcher, a doer, a young man with big dreams that he wanted to achieve. He wasn’t comfortable if he wasn’t moving forward, finding a new challenge or fixing a new problem. By the age of thirty-two, Hart had been through a stint in the Army, he’d obtained his real estate license, and most recently he’d started up his own construction company, purchasing billboards around the county to advertise his construction services. He also owned several rental properties. He was also studying for his bachelor’s degree online and thought he might try to get his masters when he was done with that. He was also training for a marathon. He also had a dream of one day opening a coffee shop in Onley, near his real estate offices.

  Until the arsons, Matt’s primary online activities had been twofold: he talked about his beagle, Parker, or his favorite football team, the Baltimore Ravens. During the arsons, he posted about the fires. The fires as a source of speculation. Of mystery. Of a macabre kind of entertainment based on the idea that the county had become a dartboard at which an arsonist was randomly throwing darts.

  “Question of the day,” Matt posted one evening: “Where will the next fire be? I need to make some cold cash.”

  “I’m going with two picks tonight: Melfa and Wachapreague,” one of his friends wrote. “I think it’s going to be a double header. He isn’t coming to Chincoteague. Our fire department has only a small area to cover; they would be on the scene before he left.”

  “I like those picks,” Matt approved. “I’m impressed, you must be doing your homework.” To another friend, whose predicted burning houses hadn’t burned, he wrote, “We are sorry to inform you that your picks are invalid. Thank you for playing arsonist lottery. Better luck next time.”

  Sometimes
the speculation turned paranoid. “I wish they would let us have a damn drone,” someone wrote on Matt’s wall, thinking that a loaner drone would make it easier to catch the arsonists in the act. “Maybe if they just threatened to drop a bomb on any abandoned structures that were burning, we would get lucky.”

  There were people on the shore who thought that maybe the fires were being set by drones. Or they were being set by military special forces, and observed by drones. In the world at large, the NSA was spying on citizens and a government contractor named Edward Snowden was about to reveal it. It didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that the U.S. government—which already had a NASA rocket-launching facility up the road, thank you very much—would be testing out new tools of warfare and would be doing so in Accomack County.

  Matt had more of a vested interest than most people in following the arson proceedings. He’d just purchased a rental house in the town of Cashville. It wasn’t fixed up and it didn’t yet have tenants, so he was scared it might be targeted as abandoned. One night he grabbed a folding chair and set it up in the rental’s living room, staying up all night, looking out into the cornfields. It was, he realized, a little crazy. But he also got a small thrill out of it. It was so definitive, such a tangible course of action to take in the face of something so big and unwieldy.

  Law enforcement had originally put forth a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrests of the arsonist. They later quintupled it, to $25,000. On the shore, this was a huge amount of money—as Sheriff Godwin put it, “On the shore, I will tell on my mom for $5,000.”

  The reward escalation gave Matt, the man who was never happy unless he had a project, a new endeavor: catch the arsonists.

  It started mostly as a joke, with a simple posting on Facebook one night. They were talking about the regular arson matters. One of his friends made a suggestion: “I say we get twenty-five people together and go out one weekend,” the friend wrote. “Tell law enforcement where we will be and what we are driving so they know. Each takes an area of the county that keeps getting hit. Catch them and split the money. I would settle for a grand.”

  “No offense to any law enforcement,” the friend continued in a second message, “but if they had this, there wouldn’t be a twenty-five thousand dollar reward.”

  Matt thought the idea sounded funny and went with it. “Haha, okay. Where will we hold our group meeting? Bring camouflage, face paint, and stun gun?”

  “I’m with a twenty-five-person posse,” wrote a second friend.

  “I always wanted to be a detective,” wrote a third.

  The concept percolated in Matt’s brain until it started to seem like a good idea. They were at more than fifty fires by this point and his first friend had been right—it wasn’t like law enforcement was getting anywhere, even though they were swarming the county and the Holiday Inn had become a sea of patrol cars as troopers were brought in from all over the state. Maybe they needed a hand.

  Matt spread the word that there would be a meeting at his house, for anyone interested. And, being a man accustomed to running his own business and having to think about advertising, Matt realized the first thing they needed was some branding.

  He called up his friend Seth Matthews, who was a graphic designer, and the two quickly came up with a design concept: over the front left chest, a small flame, and on the back, a big flame. Over both, a logo: Eastern Shore Arsonist Hunters. T-shirts, available for $22.

  The inaugural meeting of ESAH was held in Matt’s living room. Three guys showed up: Michael Stefano, a fellow real estate agent whose car had been parked so close to one of the fires that the paint was melted clean off, and Sutton Perry, who had returned to the shore after college and was biding his time working as a technician for an eye doctor while he decided whether to join the military. Seth Matthews, the graphic designer, also showed up. He was recently divorced and had begun to stay up late in his new bachelor pad, listening to the scanner and adjusting to the quietude of his new, single life. He’d tried the bar scene, a little. One night he took a snapshot of some acquaintances, Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick, and they liked it so well they asked if he would be the photographer for their upcoming wedding.

  The four men brought their laptops to Matt’s house and pulled up a Google Earth map that the local news had run recently, which plotted all of the fires. Now all they had to do was figure out where the arsonist was going to strike next. He seemed to strike a lot in the central part of the county, they could see that. He was in Tasley a lot, and Parksley, too. As a real estate and construction person, Matt was familiar with many of the properties in those areas, abandoned or otherwise.

  Michael Stefano knew the houses, too, but at some point during this meeting, he started to think the whole idea was a little ridiculous. The other guys were young and unencumbered; he was a fifty-seven-year-old businessman and father of two who was now sitting in some vague acquaintance’s living room pointing to random locations on a map and talking like he knew what he was doing. “It was all very Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick,” he would say later about the experience. He didn’t go to any more meetings.

  But for the others, the idea of finding the arsonist started to mean something. At the end of the meeting, in a way not too different from how the police and sheriff’s department had done it, the Eastern Shore Arsonist Hunters came up with their own list of potential targets.

  They started by again staking out the house Matt owned down in Cashville. Matt and Sutton set up a couple of lawn chairs behind the big picture window, opened a couple of beers and set to waiting. It was a quiet night on an empty road, and in the hours they sat there only one car passed: a dark-colored Pontiac Grand Am. A little while later it passed again, going in the opposite direction, returning from whatever errand its driver had been running. Right after that, Matt’s scanner app went off.

  He and Sutton looked at each other. The arson address given on the scanner was less than a mile away. Taking the logical route, the arsonist would have had to drive right past Matt’s Cashville house to get to the fire. And there was only one car that had driven in and out, the whole time they were sitting there: a dark-colored Pontiac.

  They could feel adrenaline coursing through them, tinged with a disappointing realization. “We can’t go driving after them now,” Matt pointed out. They’d each had a few drinks. And if they left the house, there would be another problem. To get ready for this stakeout, both men had elected to wear camouflage and carry firearms. Which had seemed prudent earlier, but which now, Matt was realizing, just made them look like crazy arsonists.

  They phoned the police to let them know about the car but then watched helplessly as it drove away. The next day, Matt was in the Food Lion parking lot when he saw a guy—tattooed, pierced, carrying a Zippo lighter—walk back to his car, which was a dark-colored Pontiac.

  Oh my god, it’s him, Matt thought, fumbling for a pen to write down the license plate while dialing Seth on his cell phone. “We found him,” he hissed into the phone, getting into his own car and trying to appear nonchalant as he followed the Grand Am out of the parking lot and turned right onto Route 13.

  “I think he knew we were following him,” Matt would admit later. “I mean, we’re not used to following people.” For miles, they were on one long, straight road. It hadn’t occurred to Matt to do anything like adjust his speed or leave another car in between. Basically, if this guy had looked in his rearview mirror at any point whatsoever he would have seen Matt inching along behind him. Matt stayed with him for a good half hour, at least, until finally he realized they were almost to the Bay Bridge, halfway into Northampton County where the arsonist had never struck. He called it quits and went home.

  They didn’t give up, though. Matt decided that the T-shirts Seth had designed should be available to all of the public and put them on sale for $22. The proceeds, he announced, would go to the local fire departments. “Buy a shirt, help the fire companies!” he wrote, post
ing pictures that users had submitted of themselves in the clothes. He also decided they needed to put up some cameras. He didn’t know about the ones Bobby Bailey from the fire marshal’s office had set up around the county and believed the idea to be entirely new.

  There was an abandoned old place down in Tasley, where the arsonist hunters knew the owner and thought he’d be okay with—that he might even appreciate—having a few cameras on his property. One night, late, Matt and Seth pulled up to the entrance, dropping Sutton and quickly driving off so as not to give away their plan.

  Sutton tiptoed around the perimeter carrying the camera, trying to find a tree branch with the right height and angle to attach it. After strapping the camera on, he had begun to pick his way back through the woods when he looked up and saw it: another camera, pointing directly at him. It appeared to be much nicer and more professional than the one Sutton had just jerry-rigged to the other tree, and he realized that it must belong to law enforcement. All of the hundreds of abandoned houses on the Eastern Shore, and he, Matt, and Seth had picked the same one as the professionals. He felt a small thrill of pride, and then he started to panic.

  These guys are going to think I’m the fucking arsonist, Sutton thought as he ran, panting, back through the woods. They’re going to think, “I know that kid, there’s Sutton Perry, he’s the arsonist.”

  And then he started to think, what if the actual arsonist was there, too, watching him. What if the arsonist has a gun? Pant, pant, pant. We’re on the Eastern Shore. Most people have guns. We have cameras and phones. Pant, pant, pant.

  Sutton got back to the car and told Matt and Seth what happened. “I’m not going back to get those trail cams,” he said furiously. “If you want them, you can go back and get them.”

  Matt did go back, tramping through the woods. When he found the law enforcement camera Sutton had described, he tried to figure out which way it was pointing and wave his arms in front of it, mouthing, “I’m not the arsonist. I’m not the arsonist.” Then he took down his own camera and he and Sutton and Seth drove away.