April 16, 2024 • 46 mins
Arson investigation has changed a lot over the years. There is actual science available now, but the word still hasn't totally gotten out. Listen in today, and don't play with matches!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. And before we start, Chuck, I want to
take a moment to take the opportunity to take the
chance over wishing you a happy birthday.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I did March same day Caesar was stabbed. Can't get
over there.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Anyone, anyone famous gets stabbed on your birthday. I don't
think so.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
No, definitely not.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
All right, Well we'll have to change that by stabbing you.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
That was sinister. I even wished you happy birthday and
look what I get? I get a stabbing throw. I
know what has become of us?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Chuck, thanks man, the Big five to three. Such a
notable birthday.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, I feel like, Also does it feel any different
than the No? I feel like. Also we need to
give a retroactive happy birthday to Jerry too from last month.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Happy birthday, Jerry.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
You know I did the ultimate fifty three year old
guy thing for my birthday. I went to Athens, Georgia
for two Bob Dylan shows. Wow, that were exactly alike.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Were they really he played the same show.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, Bob Dylan does it say like, oh, let me
mix it up for if anyone wants to come the
second night.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Oh, I'm actually surprised. I could totally see him playing
different shows depending on his mood or whatever he felt
like that night.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
No, well that, I mean there is something to that.
But he's eighty three, has got his set locked in right.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Really, he's thirty years older than.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
You, I know, and he's still playing live music.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
That's awesome. Could you understand a word? He said? Uh?
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yeah. It was very a vocal forward set actually, like
some real quiet music, and his voice was out front
in the mix. I've seen him dyling a lot. It's
always you never know what you're gonna get, so it's
always That's part of the fun being a Dylan fan
is like, Ooh, I wonder what he's going to be
like this time.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Is he in a bad mood tonight? No?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
He was great. He's old though, man, But yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Eighty three is very old to beginning on stage and
playing how long of a set.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Like an hour and a half seventeen eighteen songs he played?
He plays piano full time now, which is sort of
the new change. Okay, but he stands. I've never seen
anyone do this. I've seen people stand at a keyboard,
but I've never seen anyone stand behind a grand piano
the entire time.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Basically, that is unusual.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
He would sit a little bit, but he'd sit for
like six or seven seconds that he popped right back up. Wow,
that was really.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Interesting going on with him. That's very it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Anyway, we're here to talk about Arson Investigation, and big
thanks to Livia for her help with this, because you know,
I was just kind of keen on, like, hey, Lvia
put together an article on like how that works and
how they figure out if someone burns something down, and
she came back pretty quickly and she's like, oh, chuck,
guess what it turns out? Like we can talk a
(03:05):
little bit about that. But the real story here is
the fact that Arson Investigation, for most of its time
as a thing, has been a lot of sort of witchcraftybs. Yeah, folklore,
And that's the real story.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, mysticism, made up intuition is probably about the kindest
way you can describe how it was for decades.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Like did you see backdraft?
Speaker 2 (03:31):
No? I didn't Actually, isn't that like a Ron Howard.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Jam Yeah, back in the day. But de Niro plays
a Arson investigator who is very much fits and you
know he apparently hung out with like three or four
Arson investigators and kind of got his performance from them. Sure,
which makes total sense now that I've read this, because
there was a lot of like not mysticism, but really
(03:54):
like you know, smelling something and like sniffing something. He
chipped off of a wall, putting.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Your fingers on the railroad tracks.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, really corny lines. Like one of his corny lines is,
you know, the only way to kill it is to
love it a little bit. Man. So it's very much
in line with what we found out here, which was
that Arson investigation has long been just not scientific.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
No, and there's like we're not just here to poke
fun at Arson investigators because they used unscientific methods. The
big problem with this is those unscientific intuitive methods have
been proven time and time again to be just utterly wrong,
but they're used still to this day in some jurisdictions
(04:43):
to put people away sometimes for like sometimes to death.
Some people have been put to death under the junk
science that arson investigation is and has been for decades
and has only recently started to really kind of come
in line and become a scientific endeavor.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah for sure, so big thanks, Olivia said to a
couple of gentlemen, Douglas Starr and David gran They wrote
some pretty great pieces, Douglas Starr for Discoverer and David
grand for The New Yorker.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Can I just say David Grant's New Yorker articles called
trow By Fire about Cameron Todd Willingham and his wrongful execution.
I think yeah, basically everybody should read that article at
some point in decuren their life. It's just gut wrenching.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah. Yeah, great, great investigation, great journalism. And so let's
get going here. I guess the first thing we should
say is that the first people to get involved in
arson investigation were not scientists, Like it was sort of
developed as a thing by firefighters, by cops, by law
enforcement generally, and not people who understood the scientific method.
(05:55):
The first book about fire investigation was called Tiredstigations Very
Appropriate No Colin. It was published in nineteen forty five
by Harry retheret of the Fire Underwriter's Investigation Bureau of
Canada and it was very much written for an audience
of law enforcement to be like, all right, here's your
(06:17):
handbook if you want to prove arson.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Right. That's the big problem with it is in addition
to it basically being like old wives tales and folklore,
it came from the position like, if you're investigating this,
if you're using this book, you're trying to prove arson
not You're trying to figure out what started a fire,
and it may or may not have been arson. It's
here's what to look for for arson. And the problem
(06:40):
is is a lot of really common features that are
found after a fire we're attributed wrongly to arson. And
this is where it started to spread all the way
back in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
You know what a better title would have been, What
What to Expect when You're Expecting Arson?
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Was an all time great chuck, Oh.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Thank you, I just thought of that. So that book
was sort of the standard until nineteen sixty nine. About
twenty five years later or so, I got any Paul
Kirk biochemists this time and forensic scientists at the University
of cal Berkeley, published a different book called Fire Investigation.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Well, it didn't have the s so it must have
been the prequel.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, this one should have been called Fire Investigation Colon.
You won't believe how much has changed.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
So yeah, So Paul Kirk, being a scientist, he's like, no,
you really want to track down what started the fire
and then start making your assumptions after you've collected evidence
and analyzed it. Don't start from the premise that this
is arson and then look for signs that support your premise.
That's wrong. That's not how science works. The problem is is,
(07:51):
like Paul Kirk was like, use the scientific method, and
the fire investigators said to Paul, Paul, there's not a
lot of science for us to compare our findings against someone.
Help help nanny state, and the nanny States swooped in
and improved everything forever.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah. About eight years later or so after that book,
in nineteen seventy seven, there was a government report that agreed, hey,
there's not a lot of stuff going on, and so
there were a couple of guides put out Arson and
Urs Investigation in seventy seven, which was based on surveys
from leading investigators, and then Fire in the Fire Investigation
(08:33):
Handbook from nineteen eighty and we should just kind of
read through like this quick list, because this was the
general thinking of like how you can tell if it's
arson if these things are there in the burned house.
I'll do the first one. Everyone knows this. The most
severely burned area of the house is where it started.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, it just makes sense since that had the opportunity
to burn the longest, so it burned the hardest.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Rights Totally, all these makes sense.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Also, heat rises, which means fire rises and smoke rises,
so the ceiling is always the most burned part of
any given room, which they call compartments in fire investigation lingo,
and that if you find burned floors, that automatically says
an accelerant was used, because you dump accelerate on the
(09:23):
floor and light it, and that's how the floor gets charred.
Telltale sign if you find a charred floor, an accelerant
was used.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Also, if you see a puddle shaped char on that floor,
that's another telltale sign for liquid because molke spreads out.
If you see a V shaped soot mark on the wall,
that is going to literally point to the origin of
the fire.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Right. And another one that kind of was an umbrella
category for some subcategories is that an accelerant fueled fire
burns hotter than any other kind of fire. It also
burns faster as a result, So that means that all
sorts of weird stuff happens in a hotter, faster fire.
(10:08):
For example, something that they call crazed glass, which is
glass that has this weird webbing of cracks through it,
which they're like, is again an indicator of a very hot,
fast fire, which indicates an accelerant was used. So you
find glass with webs in it, that is a surefire
indicator that somebody started this fire using some sort of
(10:30):
accelerant or fuel.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Yeah, they said, that's us. It's craze, And they went,
don't you mean glaze. I said, now, let's just call
it craze since it's so close to another glass term.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Right, he goes, I hadn't thought about that. That makes
it even better.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
So Nixon, believe it or not, kind of got things
going in nineteen seventy three when there was a report
from that administration that fires caused more than eleven billion
dollars in damage, killed twelve thousand people in nineteen seventy three.
A lot of this was found out to be exaggerated,
but it didn't matter because that kind of lit a
match no pen intended under the governments. But to get
(11:10):
to get into this, and they created the and funded
the Center for Fire Research, which is when they basically said,
all right, let's get one hundred engineers to really look
at this from an objective point of view and come
back to us with some good stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah. One of the early things that came out of
this that was really groundbreaking was called the Cone calorimeter,
and it was invented by a guy with the wonderful
name of y Tennis Bob Ruscus, who is a fire
safety expert to this day. And the Cone calorimeter is
essentially like a vent hood, a giant vent hood that
has a ton of sensors attached to it, and you
(11:47):
set something on fire, say like a specific kind of couch,
and it records all sorts of different things, the chemical
composition of the gases that are released of the smoke,
how hot it burns, how long it burns. It even
has a scale so you can measure you can compare
the weight of the sook compared to the weight of
(12:08):
like what the what the furniture was like before it
caught fire, and you could take all this and put
it in a database. Like what you're doing now is
carrying out repeatable experiments to produce data that people can
use to compare their findings to which was again the
problem that fire investigators were having. That the Nanty State
(12:30):
swooped in and helped. And this is how they helped.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah, and just to create an image in the viewers'
mind's eye. If you're picturing that thing as some humongous
thing where you set a couch on it, that's not
the deal. It's very small actually, and it's it looks
like a little campstove sort of with all these things
looked to it. So you cut a piece of the
couch off, is what happened.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Actually, they have larger ones too that that you can
set essentially a house on fire underneath one.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Oh well, okay, but I'm talking about this the general
lab version.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
They have they have them bigger than a house.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yes, I saw that in some labs that they have
like house simulations in they like the roof will be
the colorimeter. Okay, So it's it's like all sorts of
different sizes. We're both right, I think. Is the happy
outcome of it, okay, And there's also another experiment that
or another finding that these experiments yielded, which is flash over.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Right, yeah, I thought, I mean I could have sworn.
In the movie Backdraft, they called that backdraft. Maybe that's
a similar term, or maybe it's the same thing, and
maybe it was a oh it is, okay, it's.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
A backdraft seems to be a component of a flashover.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Oh okay, Well, I guess that makes sense. So a
flashover is when you've got a fire going in a house.
You've got a big layer of smoke that's got all
kinds of like combustible gases, all sorts of little particles
that are super flammable of in that smoke. It's at
the ceiling collecting and collecting and then just getting more
dense and going down, down down, as a room heats up,
(14:04):
and then as it hits a certain point basically a
high enough temperature to ignite it, there is like an explosion.
Basically it can hit one thousand degrees and when that
flashover happens, you can see char marks and burn marks
that previously people were like, the only way to get
that is if you like dump gas all over the room.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Right, and that's a thousand degrees celsius, like eighteen hundred
degrees farenheit. Right, that is really hot, and it happens
there's a really steep incline where that temperature just increases
like that and everything stuff just spontaneously catches fire because
it's so hot, it's reached the ignition point for that
couch or that TV or whatever. The whole room catches fire,
(14:45):
and like you said, it does all sorts of It
leaves all sorts of telltale marks that had long been
attributed to arson. For example, the idea that the floors
chart or another one is kind of related to the
idea that if the floor's charred in accelerant was used,
if the underneath or if the bottom of a couch,
what's that called the underside of a couch, the undercarriage
(15:08):
of the couch, that's where the socks are, the fanny
of the couch.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
If that's burn it's true.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
If that's burned, then then they were like, well an
accelerant was used, it's spilled over under the couch and
caught the couch on fire. No, when the whole room
becomes what's called fully involved, the whole room's on fire,
the bottom of the couch can very easily get get burnt.
Same with the underside of the bed and any furniture
and the floor. So that's that was a big finding too.
(15:35):
And then the other thing about the flashover is it
can it can basically stop and stay in suspended animation
until oxygen comes in and it catches fire again. But
wherever that oxygen's coming from, the fire follows in like
a line, and it can go around the corner, up
the stairs, through a bedroom door, and out a bathroom window.
(15:56):
If that's where the oxygen's coming from the fire will follow.
It is what's what a backdraft is in my understanding.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Okay, I think that's that. I haven't seen that movie
in a while, but that sounds about right. Okay, even
though it was a movie fed version, you know, right,
I think the science in it was supposed to be
pretty good.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Oh was it?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah? I mean it was Ron Howard, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
So what was the I mean, this is like the
early nineties, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Uh? Yeah, it seems about right.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
I mean this would have been so one thing that
you'll find when you start looking into fire investigation is,
you know, Paul Kirk wrote that book in nineteen sixty nine,
and over time, like more and more scientists got involved
in fire investigation, but it's still like percolating throughout the field.
(16:47):
Like so in the early nineties, it was still a
lot of pocum involved. And I'm sure Backdraft repeated a
lot of that too.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Oh yeah, that the whole character was sort of, you know,
that mystical guy who understood fire, you know, more than anyone. Yeah.
Another big thing happened in the early nineties besides the
movie Backdraft in nineteen ninety one was the Oakland black Hole,
a big fire in Oakland, California, that destroyed about close
to three thousand homes. But it was a really good
chance to go in there as a fire investigator and
(17:19):
kind of see what happened. They looked at fifty different
houses and they found, you know, sort of the normal
things that you might find when you're thinking arson. But
one of the big things they found was that crazing
on the glass. They did some experimentation with that glass
and they found they basically said that this whole notion
(17:41):
that crazing is because of arson isn't true at all.
It's when they spray the windows with that water and
it's at a really high heat that it cools super fast.
That's where you're going to get it. And this is
one of those that seemed really like they should have
known this earlier, just because people have been blowing glass
(18:02):
and working with glass for so long. I'm surprised someone
didn't know that before that.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
They know that was a finding from the Oakland black Hole.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, they like, it wasn't one glass maker that was like, oh,
by the way, if you get it wet, that happens.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
These these like this industry or field doesn't even listen
to Supreme Court or other court rulings. They're not going
to listen to some glass blower.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah, it's true. Those are as hippie tippy as it comes.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
The other thing about that Oakland black Hole opportunity, because
you like, they knew what caused the fire. They knew
for a fact it wasn't arson in these houses. They
were originally planning on examining a hundred houses, but the
features and characteristics that they found were so uniform that
they stopped at fifty. The group agreed, like, we're not
(18:47):
going to learn anything from another fifty of them. We
totally got this like it's that repeatable, like like this
is what happens when a flashover occurs. All these telltale
signs of arson are totally made up. Yeah, I say,
we take a break, Chuck, and we'll come back and
we'll talk a little more about arson investigation. So there
(19:32):
were a couple more like huge landmarks I guess in
the late eighties or mid eighties, early nineties as far
that really pushed arson and fire investigation forward. One was
a terrible hotel fire from New Year's Eve nineteen eighty
six in I think San Juan, Puerto Rico at the
DuPont Plaza Hotel, which I think was a Sheridan at
(19:54):
the time. The hotel was in a dispute with its
workers over union contract, and some disgruntled workers set a
bunch of furniture on fire in one of the ballrooms
and ended up killing like ninety eight people. The fire
spread really quick. The reason why this is such a
landmark is because some people armed with all this data
(20:16):
that things like the calorimeter had produced, came in and
added creating computer models, and essentially what they found was
their computer could show that this fire happened exactly as
the witnesses said it did and ultimately led back to
the origin, which was those three disgruntled dudes in the
ballroom setting the furniture on fire.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah. So the problem though, as you mentioned, is that
you're not going to get these two scientists from the
Center for Fire Research on every case of every burnt
house in the United States. So it's you know, that
was one of the biggest problems. I guess. One big
milestone was the Lime Street fire in nineteen ninety. This
(21:01):
is another case where it's really sad. There was a
guy named Jerald Lewis and Jacksonville, Florida. He was charged
with arson and murder for setting his house on fire,
killing his wife, her pregnant sister, and four kids and
got out with his son. No one else was able
to get out, and he said, hey, my son started
(21:22):
this fire. He's playing with matches on the couch in
the living room and arson investigators came in and said,
you know, in the traditional way, and we're like, no,
there's no way there was an accelerant here. There's that
puddle char on the floor. That v pattern that we
talked about, which should you know, literally point to the
source of the fire is not pointing at that couch,
(21:43):
and this is a big case. Prosecutors called on called
in a guy named John Linidi from Georgia. He was
a fire investigator and John Dehan, who wrote or co
wrote at least a manual on fire investigation, to basically
come in and say, hey, can you come in here
and confirm that this guy's lying so we can put
(22:04):
him away. And Lintidi walked away from that investigation and said, well,
at first he looks like he's guilty to me, so
I can confirm that you should go ahead and prosecute.
But then they got a chance, and it seems like
these opportunities are a real big thing in fire, where like, hey,
(22:24):
we actually have a little bit of money to run
an experiment here. And that is when they recreated this
house right down to the kind of couch it was
and everything that was in the house basically and set
that couch on fire to see if it would burn
like that, and it did.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yeah, the prosecution spent twenty thousand dollars to recreate that
fire in a house like two or one or two
houses down that was exactly identical in structure to the
one that Gerald Lewis had been accused of burning down
and I mean they went all out to recreate it,
so much so that they brought some family members in
(23:02):
and said, does this look like what the house looked
like in the night of the fire, And they said, yes,
this is it. Like it's like, I'm it's eerie. So
they started by setting the couch on fire, like basically
trying out Lewis's account of events, and everybody involved in
this experiment just expected the fire to kind of like
(23:23):
maybe start to slowly catch and then sputter and go out,
like the sofa was not just going to catch. So
they were all really surprised when the fire caught and
then caught the other cushion on fire, and then all
of a sudden caught the like a big portion of
the room on fire. That was the first thing. And
then after the fire really burned and they evaluated everything,
(23:44):
they were like, all of these things that are supposedly
arson related, they're here, like this is this the couch setting.
The couch being set on fire produced all of those
things that as being used as evidence against this guy.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, and this is this was a huge chaine for
Lin Tidi personally as an investigator. He was basically like
he said, I had an epiphany, you know, almost in
a guy to die based on these theories that were
a load of crap, was his quote. So that not
only sort of changed his way of thinking, it started
a change in the industry. But like you mentioned earlier,
(24:18):
one of the problems is is that getting that stuff
to trickle down to the local, you know, level, is
really really hard, especially in a profession where they seemed
really really kind of stuck in these old methods of
the like i'll just call it the de Niro.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Way, that's a great, great name, and it.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Was really hard to get that information. Even if they
got the information, a lot of them were still like, now,
you know, it's not a science. It is a lot
of intuition, so much so that in nineteen ninety seven
the International Association of Arts Investigators argued against the Supreme Court.
There was something called the Dalbert Standard, which basically said
in nineteen ninety three that like, hey, the scientific method
(25:02):
has to be used if you're an expert testifying at
a trial. And they said, no, no, no, that's great,
but not for us, because this isn't a science and
we should be exempted from that.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, that was nineteen ninety seven. Paul Kirk wrote the
book in nineteen sixty nine. Everybody remember, and so you'd think, okay,
surely shortly after that the industry would have come around,
and that's absolutely not true. In twenty eleven, the National
Fire Protection Association, which now puts out what's considered like
(25:34):
the gold standard manual on arson or fire investigation. Yeah,
back in twenty eleven, their manual said that if you
used the process of elimination and couldn't determine what started
a fire, you should probably go ahead and assume it
was arson. So if you didn't know what the cause was,
(25:54):
go ahead into court and testify that it was probably arson,
and that guy should get the death penalty for murder
because of the people who died in the house. Yeah,
twenty eleven, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, it's probably a good time to talk about that case.
You mentioned, the Cameron Willingham case. This is this is
in nineteen ninety one. It was in December of ninety
one in the Corsicana, Texas. Cameron Willingham and Stacey Willingham
lived in this house burned down, killed their three children.
(26:27):
Stacy was gone at the time. It was you know,
just before Christmas, so getting Christmas presents for her kids.
Cameron said that, you know, there was so much heat
in smoke that he tried to get his kids but
couldn't had to get out of the house and call
for help. Was you know, what he thought was the
best method. And this was one of those case where
(26:47):
the local fire assistant fire chief I guess Douglas Fogg,
and a guy Nammanuel Vasquez, who had a lot of experiences,
an investigator came in and identified these charring spots, what
they call poor patterns, like you poured gasoline or something.
The the patterns that they saw, which is where the
(27:09):
fires are supposedly started, they found in the hallway where
the kid's bedroom wasn't at the front door, like this
was clearly someone trying to trap people inside. And this
guy did it.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, that essentially he started by pouring accelerant and the
kid's bedroom, walked backwards out of the hall while still
pouring accelerant, and then all the way to the front
door and then let a match. And this Vasquez guy,
if he wasn't, if he wasn't one of the people
that de Niro hung out with, I will be really
surprised because from what you are describing him, from what
(27:43):
I've read, he's exactly that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
His work, I mean, it was not ninety one. He
probably was.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
His work was later criticized, like when we said that
it's been described as mysticism. They were talking about this
guy's report on the Willingham case. And he had tons
of experience, so he was very ry, widely respected in
the field of fire investigation, something like twelve hundred or
fourteen hundred fires under his belt as an investigator. The
thing that sends a red flag up about him is
(28:10):
he said most of them were arson. There's nowhere on
the planet where some high percentage of fires like that
is actually arson. Maybe Detroit in the nineties, maybe Detroit,
but certainly not just in Texas in general, right where
this guy was working. So he was apparently one of
those people. He died in nineteen ninety four, but he
(28:32):
was apparently one of those investigators who started backwards from
this was arson or I see that telltale sign of arson.
So now I have to figure out what else supports
that theory, And he did, and his report was very damning.
It was very convincing, and it helped put Cameron Willingham away.
There were some other things that the prosecution used about
(28:54):
Cameron Willingham, that is super early nineties, late eighties Texas.
He had an Iron Maiden poster in the utility room
that can I play with madness poster you know where
like somebody's punching through Eddie's head.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
I don't know the post.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
That's true, looking up, it's.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
A work of art. Okay.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
He had the fact that he had an iron Man
poster up meant that he was interested in death and
probably involved in Satanism, Like he had a tattoo with
a skull with a snake around it. So obviously he
was a killer of children and their whole their whole premise,
their whole theory was that he had killed murdered his
two one year old daughters and one two year old
(29:34):
daughter by fire because they were getting in the way
of his lifestyle of like hanging out and drinking and
going out. And he was prosecuted and ended up in
two thousand and four receiving the death penalty, And most
people who are familiar with the case point to it
and say, this is a clear example of an innocent
(29:55):
person being executed.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
That's right. In two thousand and four is many years later. Obviously,
he was scheduled for execution, and a guy named Gerald Hurst,
who was an investigator who had gotten some previous charges
dropped against someone else in a similar case. Some people
got together who were, you know, supporting Willingham and said, hey,
you know you're you're the best at getting someone off.
(30:19):
You don't think he did this? Can you help? He
went in and said, well, first of all, the report
from Vasquez, the first line says, in order to kill fire,
you have to love it a little bit. And that's
just that's just weird. It's a red flag. No. He
looked in and saw a lot of issues with their work.
(30:40):
First of all, the assumption that only and this is
one of the big ones, like only an accelerant could
have caused a fire this hot. That's one that you
see or used to see at least a lot in
arson investigations, like it had to be gasoline or something
because it was so hot. The craze glass again, that's
another one. We've already been over that. And then he
(31:01):
started just looking at the account. The more he looked
at it, he was like, you know what this seems
like it really or the evidence. He said, the more
I look at this, this looks like it really matches
up with his account of what happened. The other thing
we didn't mention too is that they found mineral spirits
at the house and when Hirst looked into it, he
was like, this mineral spirit they found was on the
(31:22):
front porch by the by the grill, and that's what
he used it for, right, So like that's not a
piece of evidence.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
No, So this guy, this investigator, gerald Hurst, just completely
demolished the evidence that was used to convict and eventually
execute Cameron Willingham. But the Board of Parole and Pardons
is like they got the report and they apparently didn't
open it and voted to uphold the conviction and execution
(31:49):
and so like this is a this is I think
when the Innocence Project was just starting. I don't even
know if they'd come around by this time. The problem
the problem with Arson cases because other people have gotten
off thanks to people like gerald Hurst who've come back
and been like hey, hey, hey, like criminal courts aren't
super savvy, and you're still listening to Arson investigators who
don't who are using folklore on the stand to convict people.
(32:12):
Here's an actual scientific analysis of what the evidence shows,
like it can get people off, but it's so not
a smoking gun like DNA evidence is. Instead, it's there's
a different interpretation, and it's quite possible it wasn't arson.
And is that enough to reverse a conviction and set
somebody free from prison. Not necessarily, So it's still kind
(32:36):
of like a there's still plenty of people probably who
were convicted of arson on junk science that are still
in prison. I guess what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
All right, should we we need to take another break, right,
I think so, all right, let's take another break. We'll
talk about where we are today with Urson investigation. Like
truly things have changed.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Right, surely?
Speaker 1 (33:20):
All right, So you know, if you follow the news there,
you can you can see a lot of I guess
ground being gained as far as overturning convictions on arson.
But it's a tough one, like you were talking about
before their break, it's you know, it's hard to get overturned.
A lot of the evidence has just gone obviously because
it was a fire, or maybe the investigation to begin with,
(33:43):
was it done well and stuff wasn't saved. So it's
just it's a hard thing to get overturned, even with
the new science that we have these days. It's not
like a lot of other cases. There's the NFPA nine
Colon Guide for Fire and Explosive Investigation, which this was
published in nineteen ninety two to begin with, and this
(34:04):
is the gold standard you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Right, Yeah, it's the gold standard now. It's also i
think the same manual that said just assume it's arson
if you can't figure out what started it.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Well, they've been updating it obviously every year, which is
what they do with guides like this. They just i
guess ripped a lot of pages out and this is
sort of it's a book, though that's not as much.
It's aimed more toward like surance companies and law firms
because a lot of this stuff is like a lot
(34:33):
of times when you see something really investigated or reversed,
it's because of a big civil case against like a
drapery manufacturer or something that's getting sued because their their
curtains went up, you know, too fast or something, and
so they had the kind of money to pour into
a defense that wouldn't happen in a criminal trial.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Yeah, so over time, civil courts have become way more
savvy as far as fire investigation goes as on the whole,
compared to criminal courts. In criminal courts, it's still very
possible that kind of pretty poor evidence can be admitted
and used against somebody. And that's not just the courts
(35:17):
who are at fault, like it's the investigators themselves who
are at this point resistant to change. If you're not
getting on board with the idea that science is showing, like, yes,
there's a lot of stuff that's wrong with traditional arson
investigation or fire investigation. You're just you're you're you're resisting now.
There's just it's been disseminated too widely for too long.
(35:40):
And I mean, I guess I can understand where that
resistance comes from. Because all this what your training was
handed down from people who had decades of experience and
knew what they were talking about, and you venerated them
because they were an old veteran of the fire department
or something like that. Your beliefs are now being challenged
or intuition is being derided as superstition in folklore, and
(36:04):
you're probably being treated like a bumpkin. And then you
also probably believe that these eggheads are freeing convicted arsonists
from prison or trying to at least, So what the
hell's going on the world is topsy turvy upside down?
I don't like, I'm not DeNiro, I've hung out with
any arson investigators, but I would suspect based on everything
(36:27):
I've read, that that would account for any resistance or
pockets of resistance that are still left.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yeah, I would say so probably, And you know what,
it's probably one of the things that as people age
out and retire, the new generation, a better understanding will
probably you know, probably be the one in the forefront,
I would hope. So we'll talk a little bit about
how you can actually find the origin point of a
(36:54):
fire in a more scientific way. It's a tough thing,
obviously to find where a fire started once a fire
has like fully burned down a house. There have been studies,
even though it was one cited by Beattie and Oliva Oliva, Oliva,
Sure you don't need that if a fire started to
(37:16):
burn for just three minutes after the flashover happened, that
investigators basically couldn't tell what quadrant of a room, not
even like the very spot, but even what quadrant that
the fire originated in any better than chance, right three
minutes after the flashover. Yeah, but so all this to say,
it's really really hard to do, oh.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
For sure, because the flashover again, it's full involvement the
entire rooms on fire. They did say that within if
the fires put out within thirty seconds of flashover, they're
right about eighty four percent of the time.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Big difference.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
That is a big difference. But they have found that
there are some reliable ways of tracing the origin of
fires or seeing the source of fires. Right, So if
the V shape I don't think we ever said that
V shaped char that used to be considered to literally
point to the source of the fire, those form were opposite.
(38:12):
Where an oxygen source enters in a a flashover room
or room that's in flashover, it just forms that, right.
Or They also found that like puddling, those puddle marks
poor marks that clearly show accelerate those curtains on fire
from that drape manufacturer, when they fall and hit the
(38:33):
ground and burn, they can leave the same kind of marks. Right,
So if you have all these confusing signs that just
don't make sense anymore, how do you find the source
of a fire? And as I was saying, they have
established there are some that are just genuinely tell tale
and they might not say this is arson, but they
can kind of lead you to where the origin of
(38:54):
a fire was and hopefully you can figure it out
from there.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah, for sure. One way is to look at the
bodies of victims. It's obviously a very sad way to
investigate something, but you have to do it. And they
have found that people if you're really really close to
the fire, you know, I think most people think like, oh, no,
you don't die from the fire, you die from a
carbon monoxide poisoning. That is true if you were further
(39:19):
away from the fire. If you were very close to
that fire, you usually die. You die from edema, in
which the airwaves of your body swell up from the
heat and your organs shut down from the heat, which
is I gotta imagine a terrible, terrible way to go, right.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
So, depending on the arrangement of the bodies throughout like
a house, you can kind of trace who was closer
to the origin of the fire, the source of the.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Fire, right or at least where it was, you know, hottest, right, okay,
which isn't always where it started as we know.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Know that's true. There's another one called arcing that's pretty interesting.
As a fire melts the insulation on wires in the house,
like the electrical wire, the electricity can jump from one
exposed wire to another and it causes an arc the
and that's a you can tell that just by looking
(40:10):
at and two electrical wires where an arc happened. That
can only happen while the power's on, So you can
actually kind of say, okay, this arc happened at this
point in the fire because the power went out at
this point or we turned the power off at this point,
so this arc couldn't have happened after that, which helps
(40:32):
walk you backward toward the origin point of the fire
or the direction of yeah, timing wise.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
They also have just a great database now. It's called
the Ignitable Liquid's Reference Collection Database or the il RCD.
Not bad, didn't spell anything, but that's fine thing. And
that's basically if you find just any flammable liquid at
the fire site, then you can descend it to the
lab and they can at least tell you what it is.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Right. There's also guidelines now for people who aren't fire
investigators but are likely going to be the first people
on the scene, like firefighters or ems, that kind of thing,
And it's just stuff to be on the lookout for
so that you can you can tell fire investigators later
what you saw. Really? Yeah, what do they have? An
(41:18):
iron main poster? That's one You had to move a
refrigerator to open a door to vent the fire or
something like that. Was the refrigerator plugged in? Was the
appliance turned on this space heater that we think might
have been the cause? Was it in the honor off position?
When you show up to a scene, are you seeing
somebody who you've seen other scenes? And firefighters are like, yes,
(41:44):
I have the paramedic did it right? Like no, no, no,
like in the crowd, like not working the fire like
somebody who's in the crowd and they're like, oh, no,
I haven't seen Anyboddy.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, that's a good one. If there were any like
electrical line issue that you could see or whether or
like if you see you know, a big winds cause
a treat to fall nearby or something. Those are kind
of obvious things, but again these are for non investigators.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
What's another one another one keeping track of what people
who are witnesses or who were in the house or
the structure when it caught fire are saying and telling you, right,
especially if they say something like the paramedic did it.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah, totally, I got. I got interviewed one time by
a fire investigator. What Yeah, I kind of forgot about this.
My brother and I we used to love exploring sort
of abandoned homes and things. No, no, no, although I
did have a little fire thing for a little while.
(42:48):
I think a lot of people go through that phase.
Nothing big, just like you know, I'm going to set
this stick on fire in the woods. Very dangerous though,
even though nothing happened by the get clear. Yeah, there
was a abandoned shed across the street from us. It
(43:08):
was a house that people moved out. New people moved
in and built a really big house, but left this
old shed and we had been in it exploring and
it was just just full of junk, and we as
a young child I was I was probably like ten
years old, was quizzed by the uh. I guess the
cops a couple of weeks later, my brother and I
because it turns out that the people said that there
(43:31):
were a lot of really expensive things in there, and
it was a big insurance playing and I think he
burned it down and said there was a bunch of
expensive stuff and he was I believe looking back, he
was thwarted by those darn kids.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
And no, we didn't take our dog in there, but
I remember just that was like, no, man, there was
a mannequin and a bunch of files and just some
frame pictures. It was junk. It was junk.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
You're like, I remember the mannequin Bekis Scott pretended to
kiss it. I think he actually did kiss it.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
I don't know. I don't remember. We never had to
like go into quart or anything. So I'll have to
ask my mom kind of what happened with that. But
just remember that.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, what a great anecdote, dude, to end this with.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Well, I appreciate that. So I made it all up.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
That's fine, we'll edit that out. I guess. I guess
the upshot of this is, if you know a fire
investigator and arson investigator, give him a hug and say,
let's stick to the science. If you want to know
more about that kind of thing, go out and research.
There's a lot of really interesting stuff to read about
Arson investigation, and you could definitely do worse than reading
(44:41):
David Grand's Trial by Fire in the New Yorker and
Douglas Stars article in Discover magazine. Think a spark of science,
maybe something like that. Check it out. Oh that means
the time for listener mail. Sorry, I fell down on
my duties.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
That's right, brutalism follow up here. Hey guys. While listening
to that episode, I was delighted at the mention of
Habitat sixty seven. As a McGill student, Habitat sixty seven
has been touched on in a number of my classes,
especially because this architectural staple in Montreal was designed by
McGill alumni Mosha Safti. I wanted to share a fun
(45:22):
fact about the development of Habitat that I learned in
art history a few years ago. During the design process,
Safety use Lego blocks to help him model the building design.
In fact, he used so many Lego blocks that he
bought out all of the legos at a number of
Montreal toy stores. Pretty fun anyway, Thanks Roby, do you guys?
(45:43):
Stuff you Should Know was always my first podcast recommendation
to others and has helped me become a more inquisitive
person over the last few years. So keep up the
good work. And that is from Kestrel Musculman.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Great name, great name for sure, Thanks for that story.
We appreciate it. The great leg shortage of sixty something
in Montreal. If you want to get in touch with
us like Kestrel did man that is a great name,
you can email us. Send us an email to Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts Myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know. And before we start, Chuck, I want to
take a moment to take the opportunity to take the
chance over wishing you a happy birthday.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Oh, thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I did March same day Caesar was stabbed. Can't get
over there.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Anyone, anyone famous gets stabbed on your birthday. I don't
think so.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
No, definitely not.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
All right, Well we'll have to change that by stabbing you.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
That was sinister. I even wished you happy birthday and
look what I get? I get a stabbing throw. I
know what has become of us?
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Chuck, thanks man, the Big five to three. Such a
notable birthday.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah, I feel like, Also does it feel any different
than the No? I feel like. Also we need to
give a retroactive happy birthday to Jerry too from last month.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Happy birthday, Jerry.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
You know I did the ultimate fifty three year old
guy thing for my birthday. I went to Athens, Georgia
for two Bob Dylan shows. Wow, that were exactly alike.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Were they really he played the same show.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, Bob Dylan does it say like, oh, let me
mix it up for if anyone wants to come the
second night.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
Oh, I'm actually surprised. I could totally see him playing
different shows depending on his mood or whatever he felt
like that night.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
No, well that, I mean there is something to that.
But he's eighty three, has got his set locked in right.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Really, he's thirty years older than.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
You, I know, and he's still playing live music.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
That's awesome. Could you understand a word? He said? Uh?
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yeah. It was very a vocal forward set actually, like
some real quiet music, and his voice was out front
in the mix. I've seen him dyling a lot. It's
always you never know what you're gonna get, so it's
always That's part of the fun being a Dylan fan
is like, Ooh, I wonder what he's going to be
like this time.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Is he in a bad mood tonight? No?
Speaker 1 (02:08):
He was great. He's old though, man, But yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Eighty three is very old to beginning on stage and
playing how long of a set.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Like an hour and a half seventeen eighteen songs he played?
He plays piano full time now, which is sort of
the new change. Okay, but he stands. I've never seen
anyone do this. I've seen people stand at a keyboard,
but I've never seen anyone stand behind a grand piano
the entire time.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Basically, that is unusual.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
He would sit a little bit, but he'd sit for
like six or seven seconds that he popped right back up. Wow,
that was really.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Interesting going on with him. That's very it's interesting.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Anyway, we're here to talk about Arson Investigation, and big
thanks to Livia for her help with this, because you know,
I was just kind of keen on, like, hey, Lvia
put together an article on like how that works and
how they figure out if someone burns something down, and
she came back pretty quickly and she's like, oh, chuck,
guess what it turns out? Like we can talk a
(03:05):
little bit about that. But the real story here is
the fact that Arson Investigation, for most of its time
as a thing, has been a lot of sort of witchcraftybs. Yeah, folklore,
And that's the real story.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah, mysticism, made up intuition is probably about the kindest
way you can describe how it was for decades.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
Like did you see backdraft?
Speaker 2 (03:31):
No? I didn't Actually, isn't that like a Ron Howard.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
Jam Yeah, back in the day. But de Niro plays
a Arson investigator who is very much fits and you
know he apparently hung out with like three or four
Arson investigators and kind of got his performance from them. Sure,
which makes total sense now that I've read this, because
there was a lot of like not mysticism, but really
(03:54):
like you know, smelling something and like sniffing something. He
chipped off of a wall, putting.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Your fingers on the railroad tracks.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah, really corny lines. Like one of his corny lines is,
you know, the only way to kill it is to
love it a little bit. Man. So it's very much
in line with what we found out here, which was
that Arson investigation has long been just not scientific.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
No, and there's like we're not just here to poke
fun at Arson investigators because they used unscientific methods. The
big problem with this is those unscientific intuitive methods have
been proven time and time again to be just utterly wrong,
but they're used still to this day in some jurisdictions
(04:43):
to put people away sometimes for like sometimes to death.
Some people have been put to death under the junk
science that arson investigation is and has been for decades
and has only recently started to really kind of come
in line and become a scientific endeavor.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah for sure, so big thanks, Olivia said to a
couple of gentlemen, Douglas Starr and David gran They wrote
some pretty great pieces, Douglas Starr for Discoverer and David
grand for The New Yorker.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
Can I just say David Grant's New Yorker articles called
trow By Fire about Cameron Todd Willingham and his wrongful execution.
I think yeah, basically everybody should read that article at
some point in decuren their life. It's just gut wrenching.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah. Yeah, great, great investigation, great journalism. And so let's
get going here. I guess the first thing we should
say is that the first people to get involved in
arson investigation were not scientists, Like it was sort of
developed as a thing by firefighters, by cops, by law
enforcement generally, and not people who understood the scientific method.
(05:55):
The first book about fire investigation was called Tiredstigations Very
Appropriate No Colin. It was published in nineteen forty five
by Harry retheret of the Fire Underwriter's Investigation Bureau of
Canada and it was very much written for an audience
of law enforcement to be like, all right, here's your
(06:17):
handbook if you want to prove arson.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Right. That's the big problem with it is in addition
to it basically being like old wives tales and folklore,
it came from the position like, if you're investigating this,
if you're using this book, you're trying to prove arson
not You're trying to figure out what started a fire,
and it may or may not have been arson. It's
here's what to look for for arson. And the problem
(06:40):
is is a lot of really common features that are
found after a fire we're attributed wrongly to arson. And
this is where it started to spread all the way
back in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
You know what a better title would have been, What
What to Expect when You're Expecting Arson?
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Was an all time great chuck, Oh.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Thank you, I just thought of that. So that book
was sort of the standard until nineteen sixty nine. About
twenty five years later or so, I got any Paul
Kirk biochemists this time and forensic scientists at the University
of cal Berkeley, published a different book called Fire Investigation.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
Well, it didn't have the s so it must have
been the prequel.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Yeah, this one should have been called Fire Investigation Colon.
You won't believe how much has changed.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
So yeah, So Paul Kirk, being a scientist, he's like, no,
you really want to track down what started the fire
and then start making your assumptions after you've collected evidence
and analyzed it. Don't start from the premise that this
is arson and then look for signs that support your premise.
That's wrong. That's not how science works. The problem is is,
(07:51):
like Paul Kirk was like, use the scientific method, and
the fire investigators said to Paul, Paul, there's not a
lot of science for us to compare our findings against someone.
Help help nanny state, and the nanny States swooped in
and improved everything forever.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Yeah. About eight years later or so after that book,
in nineteen seventy seven, there was a government report that agreed, hey,
there's not a lot of stuff going on, and so
there were a couple of guides put out Arson and
Urs Investigation in seventy seven, which was based on surveys
from leading investigators, and then Fire in the Fire Investigation
(08:33):
Handbook from nineteen eighty and we should just kind of
read through like this quick list, because this was the
general thinking of like how you can tell if it's
arson if these things are there in the burned house.
I'll do the first one. Everyone knows this. The most
severely burned area of the house is where it started.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yeah, it just makes sense since that had the opportunity
to burn the longest, so it burned the hardest.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Rights Totally, all these makes sense.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
Also, heat rises, which means fire rises and smoke rises,
so the ceiling is always the most burned part of
any given room, which they call compartments in fire investigation lingo,
and that if you find burned floors, that automatically says
an accelerant was used, because you dump accelerate on the
(09:23):
floor and light it, and that's how the floor gets charred.
Telltale sign if you find a charred floor, an accelerant
was used.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Also, if you see a puddle shaped char on that floor,
that's another telltale sign for liquid because molke spreads out.
If you see a V shaped soot mark on the wall,
that is going to literally point to the origin of
the fire.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Right. And another one that kind of was an umbrella
category for some subcategories is that an accelerant fueled fire
burns hotter than any other kind of fire. It also
burns faster as a result, So that means that all
sorts of weird stuff happens in a hotter, faster fire.
(10:08):
For example, something that they call crazed glass, which is
glass that has this weird webbing of cracks through it,
which they're like, is again an indicator of a very hot,
fast fire, which indicates an accelerant was used. So you
find glass with webs in it, that is a surefire
indicator that somebody started this fire using some sort of
(10:30):
accelerant or fuel.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Yeah, they said, that's us. It's craze, And they went,
don't you mean glaze. I said, now, let's just call
it craze since it's so close to another glass term.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Right, he goes, I hadn't thought about that. That makes
it even better.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
So Nixon, believe it or not, kind of got things
going in nineteen seventy three when there was a report
from that administration that fires caused more than eleven billion
dollars in damage, killed twelve thousand people in nineteen seventy three.
A lot of this was found out to be exaggerated,
but it didn't matter because that kind of lit a
match no pen intended under the governments. But to get
(11:10):
to get into this, and they created the and funded
the Center for Fire Research, which is when they basically said,
all right, let's get one hundred engineers to really look
at this from an objective point of view and come
back to us with some good stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah. One of the early things that came out of
this that was really groundbreaking was called the Cone calorimeter,
and it was invented by a guy with the wonderful
name of y Tennis Bob Ruscus, who is a fire
safety expert to this day. And the Cone calorimeter is
essentially like a vent hood, a giant vent hood that
has a ton of sensors attached to it, and you
(11:47):
set something on fire, say like a specific kind of couch,
and it records all sorts of different things, the chemical
composition of the gases that are released of the smoke,
how hot it burns, how long it burns. It even
has a scale so you can measure you can compare
the weight of the sook compared to the weight of
(12:08):
like what the what the furniture was like before it
caught fire, and you could take all this and put
it in a database. Like what you're doing now is
carrying out repeatable experiments to produce data that people can
use to compare their findings to which was again the
problem that fire investigators were having. That the Nanty State
(12:30):
swooped in and helped. And this is how they helped.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
Yeah, and just to create an image in the viewers'
mind's eye. If you're picturing that thing as some humongous
thing where you set a couch on it, that's not
the deal. It's very small actually, and it's it looks
like a little campstove sort of with all these things
looked to it. So you cut a piece of the
couch off, is what happened.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Actually, they have larger ones too that that you can
set essentially a house on fire underneath one.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Oh well, okay, but I'm talking about this the general
lab version.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
They have they have them bigger than a house.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yes, I saw that in some labs that they have
like house simulations in they like the roof will be
the colorimeter. Okay, So it's it's like all sorts of
different sizes. We're both right, I think. Is the happy
outcome of it, okay, And there's also another experiment that
or another finding that these experiments yielded, which is flash over.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Right, yeah, I thought, I mean I could have sworn.
In the movie Backdraft, they called that backdraft. Maybe that's
a similar term, or maybe it's the same thing, and
maybe it was a oh it is, okay, it's.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
A backdraft seems to be a component of a flashover.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Oh okay, Well, I guess that makes sense. So a
flashover is when you've got a fire going in a house.
You've got a big layer of smoke that's got all
kinds of like combustible gases, all sorts of little particles
that are super flammable of in that smoke. It's at
the ceiling collecting and collecting and then just getting more
dense and going down, down down, as a room heats up,
(14:04):
and then as it hits a certain point basically a
high enough temperature to ignite it, there is like an explosion.
Basically it can hit one thousand degrees and when that
flashover happens, you can see char marks and burn marks
that previously people were like, the only way to get
that is if you like dump gas all over the room.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Right, and that's a thousand degrees celsius, like eighteen hundred
degrees farenheit. Right, that is really hot, and it happens
there's a really steep incline where that temperature just increases
like that and everything stuff just spontaneously catches fire because
it's so hot, it's reached the ignition point for that
couch or that TV or whatever. The whole room catches fire,
(14:45):
and like you said, it does all sorts of It
leaves all sorts of telltale marks that had long been
attributed to arson. For example, the idea that the floors
chart or another one is kind of related to the
idea that if the floor's charred in accelerant was used,
if the underneath or if the bottom of a couch,
what's that called the underside of a couch, the undercarriage
(15:08):
of the couch, that's where the socks are, the fanny
of the couch.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
If that's burn it's true.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
If that's burned, then then they were like, well an
accelerant was used, it's spilled over under the couch and
caught the couch on fire. No, when the whole room
becomes what's called fully involved, the whole room's on fire,
the bottom of the couch can very easily get get burnt.
Same with the underside of the bed and any furniture
and the floor. So that's that was a big finding too.
(15:35):
And then the other thing about the flashover is it
can it can basically stop and stay in suspended animation
until oxygen comes in and it catches fire again. But
wherever that oxygen's coming from, the fire follows in like
a line, and it can go around the corner, up
the stairs, through a bedroom door, and out a bathroom window.
(15:56):
If that's where the oxygen's coming from the fire will follow.
It is what's what a backdraft is in my understanding.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Okay, I think that's that. I haven't seen that movie
in a while, but that sounds about right. Okay, even
though it was a movie fed version, you know, right,
I think the science in it was supposed to be
pretty good.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Oh was it?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah? I mean it was Ron Howard, you know.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
So what was the I mean, this is like the
early nineties, wasn't it.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Uh? Yeah, it seems about right.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
I mean this would have been so one thing that
you'll find when you start looking into fire investigation is,
you know, Paul Kirk wrote that book in nineteen sixty nine,
and over time, like more and more scientists got involved
in fire investigation, but it's still like percolating throughout the field.
(16:47):
Like so in the early nineties, it was still a
lot of pocum involved. And I'm sure Backdraft repeated a
lot of that too.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Oh yeah, that the whole character was sort of, you know,
that mystical guy who understood fire, you know, more than anyone. Yeah.
Another big thing happened in the early nineties besides the
movie Backdraft in nineteen ninety one was the Oakland black Hole,
a big fire in Oakland, California, that destroyed about close
to three thousand homes. But it was a really good
chance to go in there as a fire investigator and
(17:19):
kind of see what happened. They looked at fifty different
houses and they found, you know, sort of the normal
things that you might find when you're thinking arson. But
one of the big things they found was that crazing
on the glass. They did some experimentation with that glass
and they found they basically said that this whole notion
(17:41):
that crazing is because of arson isn't true at all.
It's when they spray the windows with that water and
it's at a really high heat that it cools super fast.
That's where you're going to get it. And this is
one of those that seemed really like they should have
known this earlier, just because people have been blowing glass
(18:02):
and working with glass for so long. I'm surprised someone
didn't know that before that.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
They know that was a finding from the Oakland black Hole.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Yeah, they like, it wasn't one glass maker that was like, oh,
by the way, if you get it wet, that happens.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
These these like this industry or field doesn't even listen
to Supreme Court or other court rulings. They're not going
to listen to some glass blower.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Yeah, it's true. Those are as hippie tippy as it comes.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
The other thing about that Oakland black Hole opportunity, because
you like, they knew what caused the fire. They knew
for a fact it wasn't arson in these houses. They
were originally planning on examining a hundred houses, but the
features and characteristics that they found were so uniform that
they stopped at fifty. The group agreed, like, we're not
(18:47):
going to learn anything from another fifty of them. We
totally got this like it's that repeatable, like like this
is what happens when a flashover occurs. All these telltale
signs of arson are totally made up. Yeah, I say,
we take a break, Chuck, and we'll come back and
we'll talk a little more about arson investigation. So there
(19:32):
were a couple more like huge landmarks I guess in
the late eighties or mid eighties, early nineties as far
that really pushed arson and fire investigation forward. One was
a terrible hotel fire from New Year's Eve nineteen eighty
six in I think San Juan, Puerto Rico at the
DuPont Plaza Hotel, which I think was a Sheridan at
(19:54):
the time. The hotel was in a dispute with its
workers over union contract, and some disgruntled workers set a
bunch of furniture on fire in one of the ballrooms
and ended up killing like ninety eight people. The fire
spread really quick. The reason why this is such a
landmark is because some people armed with all this data
(20:16):
that things like the calorimeter had produced, came in and
added creating computer models, and essentially what they found was
their computer could show that this fire happened exactly as
the witnesses said it did and ultimately led back to
the origin, which was those three disgruntled dudes in the
ballroom setting the furniture on fire.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Yeah. So the problem though, as you mentioned, is that
you're not going to get these two scientists from the
Center for Fire Research on every case of every burnt
house in the United States. So it's you know, that
was one of the biggest problems. I guess. One big
milestone was the Lime Street fire in nineteen ninety. This
(21:01):
is another case where it's really sad. There was a
guy named Jerald Lewis and Jacksonville, Florida. He was charged
with arson and murder for setting his house on fire,
killing his wife, her pregnant sister, and four kids and
got out with his son. No one else was able
to get out, and he said, hey, my son started
(21:22):
this fire. He's playing with matches on the couch in
the living room and arson investigators came in and said,
you know, in the traditional way, and we're like, no,
there's no way there was an accelerant here. There's that
puddle char on the floor. That v pattern that we
talked about, which should you know, literally point to the
source of the fire is not pointing at that couch,
(21:43):
and this is a big case. Prosecutors called on called
in a guy named John Linidi from Georgia. He was
a fire investigator and John Dehan, who wrote or co
wrote at least a manual on fire investigation, to basically
come in and say, hey, can you come in here
and confirm that this guy's lying so we can put
(22:04):
him away. And Lintidi walked away from that investigation and said, well,
at first he looks like he's guilty to me, so
I can confirm that you should go ahead and prosecute.
But then they got a chance, and it seems like
these opportunities are a real big thing in fire, where like, hey,
(22:24):
we actually have a little bit of money to run
an experiment here. And that is when they recreated this
house right down to the kind of couch it was
and everything that was in the house basically and set
that couch on fire to see if it would burn
like that, and it did.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
Yeah, the prosecution spent twenty thousand dollars to recreate that
fire in a house like two or one or two
houses down that was exactly identical in structure to the
one that Gerald Lewis had been accused of burning down
and I mean they went all out to recreate it,
so much so that they brought some family members in
(23:02):
and said, does this look like what the house looked
like in the night of the fire, And they said, yes,
this is it. Like it's like, I'm it's eerie. So
they started by setting the couch on fire, like basically
trying out Lewis's account of events, and everybody involved in
this experiment just expected the fire to kind of like
(23:23):
maybe start to slowly catch and then sputter and go out,
like the sofa was not just going to catch. So
they were all really surprised when the fire caught and
then caught the other cushion on fire, and then all
of a sudden caught the like a big portion of
the room on fire. That was the first thing. And
then after the fire really burned and they evaluated everything,
(23:44):
they were like, all of these things that are supposedly
arson related, they're here, like this is this the couch setting.
The couch being set on fire produced all of those
things that as being used as evidence against this guy.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, and this is this was a huge chaine for
Lin Tidi personally as an investigator. He was basically like
he said, I had an epiphany, you know, almost in
a guy to die based on these theories that were
a load of crap, was his quote. So that not
only sort of changed his way of thinking, it started
a change in the industry. But like you mentioned earlier,
(24:18):
one of the problems is is that getting that stuff
to trickle down to the local, you know, level, is
really really hard, especially in a profession where they seemed
really really kind of stuck in these old methods of
the like i'll just call it the de Niro.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Way, that's a great, great name, and it.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
Was really hard to get that information. Even if they
got the information, a lot of them were still like, now,
you know, it's not a science. It is a lot
of intuition, so much so that in nineteen ninety seven
the International Association of Arts Investigators argued against the Supreme Court.
There was something called the Dalbert Standard, which basically said
in nineteen ninety three that like, hey, the scientific method
(25:02):
has to be used if you're an expert testifying at
a trial. And they said, no, no, no, that's great,
but not for us, because this isn't a science and
we should be exempted from that.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah, that was nineteen ninety seven. Paul Kirk wrote the
book in nineteen sixty nine. Everybody remember, and so you'd think, okay,
surely shortly after that the industry would have come around,
and that's absolutely not true. In twenty eleven, the National
Fire Protection Association, which now puts out what's considered like
(25:34):
the gold standard manual on arson or fire investigation. Yeah,
back in twenty eleven, their manual said that if you
used the process of elimination and couldn't determine what started
a fire, you should probably go ahead and assume it
was arson. So if you didn't know what the cause was,
(25:54):
go ahead into court and testify that it was probably arson,
and that guy should get the death penalty for murder
because of the people who died in the house. Yeah,
twenty eleven, Chuck.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, it's probably a good time to talk about that case.
You mentioned, the Cameron Willingham case. This is this is
in nineteen ninety one. It was in December of ninety
one in the Corsicana, Texas. Cameron Willingham and Stacey Willingham
lived in this house burned down, killed their three children.
(26:27):
Stacy was gone at the time. It was you know,
just before Christmas, so getting Christmas presents for her kids.
Cameron said that, you know, there was so much heat
in smoke that he tried to get his kids but
couldn't had to get out of the house and call
for help. Was you know, what he thought was the
best method. And this was one of those case where
(26:47):
the local fire assistant fire chief I guess Douglas Fogg,
and a guy Nammanuel Vasquez, who had a lot of experiences,
an investigator came in and identified these charring spots, what
they call poor patterns, like you poured gasoline or something.
The the patterns that they saw, which is where the
(27:09):
fires are supposedly started, they found in the hallway where
the kid's bedroom wasn't at the front door, like this
was clearly someone trying to trap people inside. And this
guy did it.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Yeah, that essentially he started by pouring accelerant and the
kid's bedroom, walked backwards out of the hall while still
pouring accelerant, and then all the way to the front
door and then let a match. And this Vasquez guy,
if he wasn't, if he wasn't one of the people
that de Niro hung out with, I will be really
surprised because from what you are describing him, from what
(27:43):
I've read, he's exactly that kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
His work, I mean, it was not ninety one. He
probably was.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
His work was later criticized, like when we said that
it's been described as mysticism. They were talking about this
guy's report on the Willingham case. And he had tons
of experience, so he was very ry, widely respected in
the field of fire investigation, something like twelve hundred or
fourteen hundred fires under his belt as an investigator. The
thing that sends a red flag up about him is
(28:10):
he said most of them were arson. There's nowhere on
the planet where some high percentage of fires like that
is actually arson. Maybe Detroit in the nineties, maybe Detroit,
but certainly not just in Texas in general, right where
this guy was working. So he was apparently one of
those people. He died in nineteen ninety four, but he
(28:32):
was apparently one of those investigators who started backwards from
this was arson or I see that telltale sign of arson.
So now I have to figure out what else supports
that theory, And he did, and his report was very damning.
It was very convincing, and it helped put Cameron Willingham away.
There were some other things that the prosecution used about
(28:54):
Cameron Willingham, that is super early nineties, late eighties Texas.
He had an Iron Maiden poster in the utility room
that can I play with madness poster you know where
like somebody's punching through Eddie's head.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
I don't know the post.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
That's true, looking up, it's.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
A work of art. Okay.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
He had the fact that he had an iron Man
poster up meant that he was interested in death and
probably involved in Satanism, Like he had a tattoo with
a skull with a snake around it. So obviously he
was a killer of children and their whole their whole premise,
their whole theory was that he had killed murdered his
two one year old daughters and one two year old
(29:34):
daughter by fire because they were getting in the way
of his lifestyle of like hanging out and drinking and
going out. And he was prosecuted and ended up in
two thousand and four receiving the death penalty, And most
people who are familiar with the case point to it
and say, this is a clear example of an innocent
(29:55):
person being executed.
Speaker 1 (29:56):
That's right. In two thousand and four is many years later. Obviously,
he was scheduled for execution, and a guy named Gerald Hurst,
who was an investigator who had gotten some previous charges
dropped against someone else in a similar case. Some people
got together who were, you know, supporting Willingham and said, hey,
you know you're you're the best at getting someone off.
(30:19):
You don't think he did this? Can you help? He
went in and said, well, first of all, the report
from Vasquez, the first line says, in order to kill fire,
you have to love it a little bit. And that's
just that's just weird. It's a red flag. No. He
looked in and saw a lot of issues with their work.
(30:40):
First of all, the assumption that only and this is
one of the big ones, like only an accelerant could
have caused a fire this hot. That's one that you
see or used to see at least a lot in
arson investigations, like it had to be gasoline or something
because it was so hot. The craze glass again, that's
another one. We've already been over that. And then he
(31:01):
started just looking at the account. The more he looked
at it, he was like, you know what this seems
like it really or the evidence. He said, the more
I look at this, this looks like it really matches
up with his account of what happened. The other thing
we didn't mention too is that they found mineral spirits
at the house and when Hirst looked into it, he
was like, this mineral spirit they found was on the
(31:22):
front porch by the by the grill, and that's what
he used it for, right, So like that's not a
piece of evidence.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
No, So this guy, this investigator, gerald Hurst, just completely
demolished the evidence that was used to convict and eventually
execute Cameron Willingham. But the Board of Parole and Pardons
is like they got the report and they apparently didn't
open it and voted to uphold the conviction and execution
(31:49):
and so like this is a this is I think
when the Innocence Project was just starting. I don't even
know if they'd come around by this time. The problem
the problem with Arson cases because other people have gotten
off thanks to people like gerald Hurst who've come back
and been like hey, hey, hey, like criminal courts aren't
super savvy, and you're still listening to Arson investigators who
don't who are using folklore on the stand to convict people.
(32:12):
Here's an actual scientific analysis of what the evidence shows,
like it can get people off, but it's so not
a smoking gun like DNA evidence is. Instead, it's there's
a different interpretation, and it's quite possible it wasn't arson.
And is that enough to reverse a conviction and set
somebody free from prison. Not necessarily, So it's still kind
(32:36):
of like a there's still plenty of people probably who
were convicted of arson on junk science that are still
in prison. I guess what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
All right, should we we need to take another break, right,
I think so, all right, let's take another break. We'll
talk about where we are today with Urson investigation. Like
truly things have changed.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Right, surely?
Speaker 1 (33:20):
All right, So you know, if you follow the news there,
you can you can see a lot of I guess
ground being gained as far as overturning convictions on arson.
But it's a tough one, like you were talking about
before their break, it's you know, it's hard to get overturned.
A lot of the evidence has just gone obviously because
it was a fire, or maybe the investigation to begin with,
(33:43):
was it done well and stuff wasn't saved. So it's
just it's a hard thing to get overturned, even with
the new science that we have these days. It's not
like a lot of other cases. There's the NFPA nine
Colon Guide for Fire and Explosive Investigation, which this was
published in nineteen ninety two to begin with, and this
(34:04):
is the gold standard you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Right, Yeah, it's the gold standard now. It's also i
think the same manual that said just assume it's arson
if you can't figure out what started it.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Well, they've been updating it obviously every year, which is
what they do with guides like this. They just i
guess ripped a lot of pages out and this is
sort of it's a book, though that's not as much.
It's aimed more toward like surance companies and law firms
because a lot of this stuff is like a lot
(34:33):
of times when you see something really investigated or reversed,
it's because of a big civil case against like a
drapery manufacturer or something that's getting sued because their their
curtains went up, you know, too fast or something, and
so they had the kind of money to pour into
a defense that wouldn't happen in a criminal trial.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
Yeah, so over time, civil courts have become way more
savvy as far as fire investigation goes as on the whole,
compared to criminal courts. In criminal courts, it's still very
possible that kind of pretty poor evidence can be admitted
and used against somebody. And that's not just the courts
(35:17):
who are at fault, like it's the investigators themselves who
are at this point resistant to change. If you're not
getting on board with the idea that science is showing, like, yes,
there's a lot of stuff that's wrong with traditional arson
investigation or fire investigation. You're just you're you're you're resisting now.
There's just it's been disseminated too widely for too long.
(35:40):
And I mean, I guess I can understand where that
resistance comes from. Because all this what your training was
handed down from people who had decades of experience and
knew what they were talking about, and you venerated them
because they were an old veteran of the fire department
or something like that. Your beliefs are now being challenged
or intuition is being derided as superstition in folklore, and
(36:04):
you're probably being treated like a bumpkin. And then you
also probably believe that these eggheads are freeing convicted arsonists
from prison or trying to at least, So what the
hell's going on the world is topsy turvy upside down?
I don't like, I'm not DeNiro, I've hung out with
any arson investigators, but I would suspect based on everything
(36:27):
I've read, that that would account for any resistance or
pockets of resistance that are still left.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Yeah, I would say so probably, And you know what,
it's probably one of the things that as people age
out and retire, the new generation, a better understanding will
probably you know, probably be the one in the forefront,
I would hope. So we'll talk a little bit about
how you can actually find the origin point of a
(36:54):
fire in a more scientific way. It's a tough thing,
obviously to find where a fire started once a fire
has like fully burned down a house. There have been studies,
even though it was one cited by Beattie and Oliva Oliva, Oliva,
Sure you don't need that if a fire started to
(37:16):
burn for just three minutes after the flashover happened, that
investigators basically couldn't tell what quadrant of a room, not
even like the very spot, but even what quadrant that
the fire originated in any better than chance, right three
minutes after the flashover. Yeah, but so all this to say,
it's really really hard to do, oh.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
For sure, because the flashover again, it's full involvement the
entire rooms on fire. They did say that within if
the fires put out within thirty seconds of flashover, they're
right about eighty four percent of the time.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Big difference.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
That is a big difference. But they have found that
there are some reliable ways of tracing the origin of
fires or seeing the source of fires. Right, So if
the V shape I don't think we ever said that
V shaped char that used to be considered to literally
point to the source of the fire, those form were opposite.
(38:12):
Where an oxygen source enters in a a flashover room
or room that's in flashover, it just forms that, right.
Or They also found that like puddling, those puddle marks
poor marks that clearly show accelerate those curtains on fire
from that drape manufacturer, when they fall and hit the
(38:33):
ground and burn, they can leave the same kind of marks. Right,
So if you have all these confusing signs that just
don't make sense anymore, how do you find the source
of a fire? And as I was saying, they have
established there are some that are just genuinely tell tale
and they might not say this is arson, but they
can kind of lead you to where the origin of
(38:54):
a fire was and hopefully you can figure it out
from there.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Yeah, for sure. One way is to look at the
bodies of victims. It's obviously a very sad way to
investigate something, but you have to do it. And they
have found that people if you're really really close to
the fire, you know, I think most people think like, oh, no,
you don't die from the fire, you die from a
carbon monoxide poisoning. That is true if you were further
(39:19):
away from the fire. If you were very close to
that fire, you usually die. You die from edema, in
which the airwaves of your body swell up from the
heat and your organs shut down from the heat, which
is I gotta imagine a terrible, terrible way to go, right.
Speaker 2 (39:34):
So, depending on the arrangement of the bodies throughout like
a house, you can kind of trace who was closer
to the origin of the fire, the source of the.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Fire, right or at least where it was, you know, hottest, right, okay,
which isn't always where it started as we know.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Know that's true. There's another one called arcing that's pretty interesting.
As a fire melts the insulation on wires in the house,
like the electrical wire, the electricity can jump from one
exposed wire to another and it causes an arc the
and that's a you can tell that just by looking
(40:10):
at and two electrical wires where an arc happened. That
can only happen while the power's on, So you can
actually kind of say, okay, this arc happened at this
point in the fire because the power went out at
this point or we turned the power off at this point,
so this arc couldn't have happened after that, which helps
(40:32):
walk you backward toward the origin point of the fire
or the direction of yeah, timing wise.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
They also have just a great database now. It's called
the Ignitable Liquid's Reference Collection Database or the il RCD.
Not bad, didn't spell anything, but that's fine thing. And
that's basically if you find just any flammable liquid at
the fire site, then you can descend it to the
lab and they can at least tell you what it is.
Speaker 2 (40:58):
Right. There's also guidelines now for people who aren't fire
investigators but are likely going to be the first people
on the scene, like firefighters or ems, that kind of thing,
And it's just stuff to be on the lookout for
so that you can you can tell fire investigators later
what you saw. Really? Yeah, what do they have? An
(41:18):
iron main poster? That's one You had to move a
refrigerator to open a door to vent the fire or
something like that. Was the refrigerator plugged in? Was the
appliance turned on this space heater that we think might
have been the cause? Was it in the honor off position?
When you show up to a scene, are you seeing
somebody who you've seen other scenes? And firefighters are like, yes,
(41:44):
I have the paramedic did it right? Like no, no, no,
like in the crowd, like not working the fire like
somebody who's in the crowd and they're like, oh, no,
I haven't seen Anyboddy.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Yeah, that's a good one. If there were any like
electrical line issue that you could see or whether or
like if you see you know, a big winds cause
a treat to fall nearby or something. Those are kind
of obvious things, but again these are for non investigators.
Speaker 2 (42:12):
What's another one another one keeping track of what people
who are witnesses or who were in the house or
the structure when it caught fire are saying and telling you, right,
especially if they say something like the paramedic did it.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Yeah, totally, I got. I got interviewed one time by
a fire investigator. What Yeah, I kind of forgot about this.
My brother and I we used to love exploring sort
of abandoned homes and things. No, no, no, although I
did have a little fire thing for a little while.
(42:48):
I think a lot of people go through that phase.
Nothing big, just like you know, I'm going to set
this stick on fire in the woods. Very dangerous though,
even though nothing happened by the get clear. Yeah, there
was a abandoned shed across the street from us. It
(43:08):
was a house that people moved out. New people moved
in and built a really big house, but left this
old shed and we had been in it exploring and
it was just just full of junk, and we as
a young child I was I was probably like ten
years old, was quizzed by the uh. I guess the
cops a couple of weeks later, my brother and I
because it turns out that the people said that there
(43:31):
were a lot of really expensive things in there, and
it was a big insurance playing and I think he
burned it down and said there was a bunch of
expensive stuff and he was I believe looking back, he
was thwarted by those darn kids.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
And no, we didn't take our dog in there, but
I remember just that was like, no, man, there was
a mannequin and a bunch of files and just some
frame pictures. It was junk. It was junk.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
You're like, I remember the mannequin Bekis Scott pretended to
kiss it. I think he actually did kiss it.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
I don't know. I don't remember. We never had to
like go into quart or anything. So I'll have to
ask my mom kind of what happened with that. But
just remember that.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, what a great anecdote, dude, to end this with.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Well, I appreciate that. So I made it all up.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
That's fine, we'll edit that out. I guess. I guess
the upshot of this is, if you know a fire
investigator and arson investigator, give him a hug and say,
let's stick to the science. If you want to know
more about that kind of thing, go out and research.
There's a lot of really interesting stuff to read about
Arson investigation, and you could definitely do worse than reading
(44:41):
David Grand's Trial by Fire in the New Yorker and
Douglas Stars article in Discover magazine. Think a spark of science,
maybe something like that. Check it out. Oh that means
the time for listener mail. Sorry, I fell down on
my duties.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
That's right, brutalism follow up here. Hey guys. While listening
to that episode, I was delighted at the mention of
Habitat sixty seven. As a McGill student, Habitat sixty seven
has been touched on in a number of my classes,
especially because this architectural staple in Montreal was designed by
McGill alumni Mosha Safti. I wanted to share a fun
(45:22):
fact about the development of Habitat that I learned in
art history a few years ago. During the design process,
Safety use Lego blocks to help him model the building design.
In fact, he used so many Lego blocks that he
bought out all of the legos at a number of
Montreal toy stores. Pretty fun anyway, Thanks Roby, do you guys?
(45:43):
Stuff you Should Know was always my first podcast recommendation
to others and has helped me become a more inquisitive
person over the last few years. So keep up the
good work. And that is from Kestrel Musculman.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
Great name, great name for sure, Thanks for that story.
We appreciate it. The great leg shortage of sixty something
in Montreal. If you want to get in touch with
us like Kestrel did man that is a great name,
you can email us. Send us an email to Stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts Myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Josh Clark
Chuck Bryant
Show Links
Order Our BookRSSStoreSYSK ArmyAboutPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Death, Sex & Money
Anna Sale explores the big questions and hard choices that are often left out of polite conversation.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.