MY SERIAL ARSON MYSTERY -RED FLAG WARNING- HAS SEVERAL SICK, CRAZY SUSPECTS. THE FOLLOWING ARTICLES TELL MORE ABOUT THE MIND OF THE ARSONIST
Words of a Female Arsonist
Fire became a part of my vocabulary in my preschool days. During the summers our home would be evacuated because the local mountains were ablaze. I would watch in awe.
Below I have listed some of my thoughts and behaviors eight years after the onset of deviant behavior involving fire. I have also included suggestions for helping a firesetter.
Each summer I look forward to the beginning of fire season as well as the fall—the dry and windy season. I set my fires alone. I am also very impulsive, which makes my behavior unpredictable. I exhibit paranoid characteristics when I am alone, always looking around me to see if someone is following me. I picture everything burnable around me on fire.
I watch the local news broadcasts for fires that have been set each day and read the local newspapers in search of articles dealing with suspicious fires. I read literature about fires, firesetters, pyromania, pyromaniacs, arson, and arsonists. I contact government agencies about fire information and keep up-to-date on the arson detection methods investigators use. I watch movies and listen to music about fires. My dreams are about fires that I have set, want to set, or wish I had set.
I like to investigate fires that are not my own, and I may call to confess to fires that I did not set. I love to drive back and forth in front of fire stations, and I have the desire to pull every fire alarm I see. I am self-critical and defensive, I fear failure, and I sometimes behave suicidally.
Before a fire is set. I may feel abandoned, lonely, or bored, which triggers feelings of anxiety or emotional arousal before the fire. I sometimes experience severe headaches, a rapid heartbeat, uncontrollable motor movements in my hands, and tingling pain in my right arm. I never plan my fire, but typically drive back and forth or around the block or park and walk by the scene I am about to light on fire. I may do this to become familiar with the area and plan escape routes or to wait for the perfect moment to light the fire. This behavior may last anywhere from a few minutes to several hours.
At the time of lighting the fire. I never light a fire in the exact place other fires have occurred. I set fires at random, using material I have just bought or asked for at a gas station—matches, cigarettes, or small amounts of gasoline. I do not leave signatures to claim my fires. I set fires only in places that are secluded, such as roadsides, back canyons, cul-de-sacs, and parking lots. I usually set fires after nightfall because my chances of being caught are much lower then. I may set several small fires or one big fire, depending on my desires and needs at the time. It is at the time of lighting the fire that I experience an intense emotional response like tension release, excitement, or even panic.
Leaving the fire scene. I am well aware of the risks of being at the fire scene. When I leave a fire scene, I drive normally so that I do not look suspicious if another car or other people are nearby. Often I pass in the opposite direction of the fire truck called to the fire.
During the fire. Watching the fire from a perfect vantage point is important to me. I want to see the chaos as well as the destruction that I or others have caused. Talking to authorities on the phone or in person while the action is going on can be part of the thrill. I enjoy hearing about the fire on the radio or watching it on television, learning about all the possible motives and theories that officials have about why and how the fire started.
After the fire is out. At this time I feel sadness and anguish and a desire to set another fire. Overall it seems that the fire has created a temporary solution to a permanent problem.
Within 24 hours after the fire. I revisit the scene of the fire. I may also experience feelings of remorse as well as anger and rage at myself. Fortunately, no one has ever been physically harmed by the fires I have set.
Several days after the fire. I revel in the notoriety of the unknown firesetter, even if I did not set the fire. I also return again to see the damage and note areas of destruction on an area map.
Fire anniversaries. I always revisit the scene on anniversary days of fires that I or others set in the area.
Fires not my own. A fire not my own offers excitement and some tension relief. However, any fire set by someone else is one I wish I had set. The knowledge that there is another firesetter in the area may spark feelings of competition or envy in me and increase my desire to set bigger and better fires. I am just as interested in knowing the other firesetters’ interests or motives for lighting their fires.
Suggestions for helping a firesetter. The likelihood of recidivism is high for a firesetter. The firesetter should be able to count on someone always being there to talk to about wanting to set fires. Firesetting may be such a big part of the person’s life that he or she cannot imagine giving it up. This habit in all aspects fosters many emotions that become normal for the firesetter, including love, happiness, excitement, fear, rage, boredom, sadness, and pain.
Prognosis given by psychiatrist: Prognosis is very guarded given the severity of her condition.
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A Detroit firefighter was killed and his body trapped beneath a collapsed roof in a burning home. The fire he was trying to extinguish was set for a mere $20, authorities said. Forty-year-old Darian Dove, the man accused of accepting the money to set the blaze, has agreed to a plea deal, knocking a first-degree murder charge down to second-degree in exchange for testimony against the man who allegedly paid him.
Mario Willis, 27, is to be arraigned at 5:30 today on first-degree murder and arson charges. If convicted of the murder charge, Willis would face a mandatory sentence of life in prison. The arson charge carries a maximum 20-year sentence. Willis is accused of paying Dove $20 to set the building ablaze.
“Twenty dollars or $20 million, it doesn’t make a difference,” Fire Chief Brown said. “It wasn’t worth his life.” Brown implored arsonists to think about firefighters’ families. “If you don’t want to do it to your family, please don’t do it to my firefighters,” he said.
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The man convicted of arson a 2007 fire that destroyed a building in downtown Palo Alto is suffering both physically and mentally at the Santa Clara County Main Jail, his defense attorney has charged in a strongly worded pleading in U.S. District Court.
Donald Ray Williams, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, has refused to shower in the jail, and his cell got so dirty it began to bother everyone on his tier, according to a report by a jail staff member that was attached to the pleading. Several other similar reports suggest persistent paranoia, including an oft-repeated belief that jail employees are doctoring his food.
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SHORT LIST OF WESTERN ARSON FIRES
1953 In California’s Mendocino National Forest, Stanford Pattan threw a lit match out of his car window to create a fire-camp job for himself. The Rattlesnake Fire burned 1,300 acres and killed 15 firefighters as they tried to outrun wind-driven flames. Pattan pled guilty to two felony counts of “willful burning” and served three years in prison.
1995 Sixty-year-old Charmian “Charm” Joy Glassman used a cigarette lighter to start at least five small wildfires along a highway near Mount Shasta, Calif., trying to create work for her firefighter son. Though only about five acres burned, she was charged with five counts of arson. She pled guilty and was sentenced to 120 days in jail and ordered to pay more than $35,000 in restitution to cover the cost of the investigation.
1996 Jeffrey Alan Avila paid a guy $2,000 to start a blaze near Big Sur, Calif., and then made $80,000 by renting firefighting equipment to the U.S. Forest Service. The fire burned 25,000 acres and five houses. Avila pled guilty to arson and was sentenced to five years in prison; the man he hired was sentenced to slightly over three years.
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2001 Richard Mortensen and Frank Brady, who were running a rural California meth lab, were charged with second-degree murder for starting a fire that spread through 242 acres of brush; two pilots died when their air tankers collided above the fire. A jury found the suspects guilty of lesser charges, and they were sentenced to at least seven years in prison.
2002 Terry Lynn Barton, a seasonal Forest Service worker, ignited Colorado’s Hayman Fire, which burned 138,000 acres and 133 houses — the largest fire in Colorado’s recorded history. Barton said she was burning a letter from her estranged husband when the flames escaped from a campfire ring. Investigators found matches in a suspicious array at the scene and no ashes indicating a letter had been burned. Barton pled guilty to arson and served six years in prison.
2002 Leonard Gregg, an occasional Bureau of Indian Affairs firefighter, started the Rodeo Fire on an Arizona Apache reservation, hoping to get a job on the fire crew. It spread rapidly and combined with the Chediski Fire, which was started by a woman whose car ran out of gas in the forest. (She wanted to draw the attention of a TV news helicopter to get rescued.) The Rodeo-Chediski Fire burned 467,000 acres and 491 houses — the largest fire in Arizona’s recorded history. Gregg was found guilty of arson-related charges, sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $28 million in restitution.
2003 The Old Fire in California’s San Bernardino Mountains burned 91,000 acres and about a thousand houses; it was also blamed for the fatal heart attacks of at least five people. In October 2009, Rickie Lee Fowler, by then a 28-year-old prison inmate doing time for burglary, was charged with arson and five counts of murder. Fowler’s trial is scheduled to begin in August; prosecutors say they’ll seek the death penalty.
2004 Van Bateman, a respected Forest Service fire crew boss who had 30 years of experience around the West, was charged with arson for setting two small fires (total 22.6 acres) in Arizona’s Coconino National Forest without proper authorization. Bateman said it was a common practice among fire crews who want to thin vegetation without the hassle of paperwork. According to the Arizona Daily Sun, Bateman told investigators, “The line between a good fireman and an arsonist is a fine line.” He pled guilty to lesser charges and was sentenced to two years in prison.
2006 Volunteer firefighter Robert Eric Eason was charged with setting at least a dozen wildfires that burned a thousand acres of grass and 200 sheep in Northern California. More than 70 investigators worked the case and Eason was suspected of setting hundreds of fires. A jury found him guilty of arson and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
2006 Southern California’s Esperanza Fire burned 41,000 acres and dozens of houses and killed five firefighters. In 2009, Raymond Lee Oyler was convicted of arson and murder and sentenced to death.
2007 At least five suspected arsonists were arrested in connection with more than a dozen fires that raged from San Diego to Los Angeles, burning more than 500,000 acres and 1,800 houses and killing at least eight people, including homeowners and illegal immigrants who were camped in the desert scrub. Another suspect, Russell Lane Daves, rammed his pickup truck into a police car and was shot dead by police.
2009 Two firefighters drove their truck off a cliff and died while battling the Station Fire north of Los Angeles. Investigators view the fire, which spread to 160,000 acres and destroyed 89 houses, as an arson and homicide case. They’re offering a $150,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest.
2010 On June 17, federal prosecutors filed arson charges against two eastern Oregon ranchers: Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., 68, and his 41-year-old son, Steven Dwight Hammond. The indictment says the ranchers ignited many fires in the Steens Mountain area over the past 28 years, burning at least 45,000 acres total, because they were frustrated with federal land managers for not setting enough controlled burns to stimulate grass for livestock. The suspects face potential sentences of up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
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Wildfire.
A fire that is huge, powerful, unstoppable.
A fire that burns so strong that it ignites those around it.
A fire that emits such a strong heat that all can feel it and know that its different.
A fire that burns and consumes the forest.I want that fire.
This was something that God impressed upon me two or three weeks ago. It was pretty vague at first but as time passed it became more and more real, I know I must start it.
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Life in prison without parole for barber who set homeless man on fire
A man who prosecutors said had a grudge against the homeless was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing a homeless man by setting him on fire with an emergency flare. The murderhorrified the densely populated area where the homeless man was a well-liked figure and spotlighted the vulnerability of the homeless to violent attack.
“My brother had a life — he was a human being,” the victim’s sister, told the court through sobs. “Even in a state of homelessness, he managed to touch so many lives.”
The arsonist reportedly disliked homeless people lingering near the barber shop where he worked. A co-worker later told police he had seen Martin shout at the homeless to move away from the shop, sometimes striking out at them. Carrying a bucket of gasoline and an emergency road flare, he found the homeless man standing in the driveway of a parking lot, soaked him with the gasoline, prosecutors said, then lighted the flare and set him on fire.
As he fled, passersby desperately tried to douse the flames, but the homeless man was burned alive.
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THE 60 YEAR OLD GRANDMOTHER – ARSONIST
Sixty-year-old grandmother Charmian Glassman, aka Ma Sparker, started 11 separate fires at Northern California’s Mt. Shasta in 1995, setting each within 10 feet of where she stopped her new Buick at the side of a winding woodsy road.
Her motive? To give her forest firefighter son enough fires to fight to prove himself a hero.
Consultant Paul Steensland, a veteran fire investigator and retired U.S. Forest Service senior special agent, frequently mentions this case when lecturing fire investigators. It’s a cautionary tale about getting too deeply invested in “profiles” of arsonists derived from the analysis of past offenders.
Although every arson case is different, these profiles — the most notable generated by research conducted by the FBI and the South Carolina Forestry Service in the mid-1990s — are markedly similar: Caucasian males in their teens or 20s, unemployed or marginally employed, blue-collar background, living alone or with parents. The profiles’ acceptance is why, even as officers were desperately searching for their arsonist on Mt. Shasta, Charmian Glassman managed to set a couple of fires right under their noses.
“She literally lit two fires within less than 50 feet of where officers were in the brush,” Steensland recalled, “because they just saw her pull by and could see her in her car and said, ‘She’s a grandmother.’ They had been conditioned to look for young white males.”
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The man convicted of arson in a 2007 fire that destroyed a Walgreens building in downtown Palo Alto is suffering both physically and mentally at the Santa Clara County Main Jail, his defense attorney has charged in a strongly worded pleading in U.S. District Court.
Donald Ray Williams, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, has refused to shower in the jail, and his cell got so dirty it began to bother everyone on his tier, according to a report by a jail staff member that Dondershine attached to the pleading. Several other similar reports suggest persistent paranoia, including an oft-repeated belief that jail employees are doctoring his food.
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Firefighter Arsonists
• When a volunteer firefighter got lost after drinking into Saturday morning in West Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania, he got mad and started setting fires along his path, authorities said. When local firefighters arrived to hose down the flames at a neighbor’s shed, Charles Sluzenski, who had found his way back to his mother’s house, dashed drunkenly forth in full firefighting gear and asked to help
• A volunteer firefighter was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for setting a fire that killed a mother and three of her children, an arson that prosecutors said was the firefighter’s attempt to look like a hero.
• State police arrested a volunteer firefighter from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, in a series of arsons that caused more than $2 million damage. In addition, troopers said two more people would be charged in connection with the nine fires that were set in Schuylkill County.
• A New London (CT) judge refused to reduce the sentence of a probationary firefighter who torched three houses in Mystic in the summer of 2008 to impress his colleagues. The Judge sentenced the 23-year-old Groton man to 14 years in prison and five years probation. She told him he was lucky he had not killed a firefighter or the people in the two occupied homes he had set afire.
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Proceedings in the case against a man charged with starting 2003′s massive Old Fire in San Bernardino County were halted Thursday when his attorney questioned his competency to stand trial. The man suspected of lighting of the devastating 2003 Old Fire was placed on suicide watch in county jail after the defendant began wounding himself, according to Superior Court records.
The court noted that Fowler was “self inflicting wounds.”
The District Attorney’s Office announced in January that it will seek the death penalty against Fowler, who is charged with setting the 2003 Old Fire in Waterman Canyon that burned 91,281 acres of brush and timber and destroyed 983 homes. Prosecutors allege the blaze also contributed to the deaths of five people. Fowler is charged with five counts of murder, arson of an inhabited structure and aggravated arson, as well as special circumstances for multiple deaths and arson causing death.
The Old Fire burned 91,281 acres and destroyed 1,003 homes over nine days, with prosecutors linking five fatal heart attacks to the blaze. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.
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The arsonist’s mind : Pyromania
Pyromania is a term that often arises when bushfire arson is discussed – whether in the media, among members of the public or between those involved with tackling bushfires. Deliberately lit bushfires are often attributed to the work of pyromaniacs. Studies have shown that there is a great deal of misunderstanding among investigators and law enforcement officers about what pyromania really means. The term is used loosely by the media and the public, and is often meant as a shorthand label for any kind of malicious and apparently senseless firesetting. What is pyromania, how common is it, and how useful is it to our understanding of arson?
Pyromania is an established psychiatric diagnosis in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV). It falls into the category of ‘impulse control disorders’, along with disorders like kleptomania (stealing), intermittent explosive disorder (violent and destructive outbursts) and pathological gambling. These disorders are characterized by a failure to resist impulses, such as the impulse to light a fire.
The diagnostic criteria for pyromania are:
1. deliberate and purposeful firesetting on more than one occasion;
2. tension or emotional arousal before the act;
3. intense interest, curiosity or fascination about fire (which can include fire equipment and the consequences of fire);
4. pleasure, gratification or relief when setting or witnessing fires and their aftermath;
5. the firesetting is not done for another motive such as financial gain, anger or revenge, to gain recognition or to relieve boredom, and is not done in response to a delusion or hallucination or due to impaired judgment (such as through intoxication); and
6. the firesetting is not better accounted for by conduct disorder, antisocial personality disorder or a manic episode.
In pyromania there is a fascination with fire that goes well beyond the curiosity and experimentation often displayed by children. A true pyromaniac will not feel remorse and will not be concerned with the threat their fires may pose to life and property. For the pyromaniac, the fire is not a means to an end but an end in itself. There is no definitive treatment for pyromania but a combination of behaviour and cognitive therapy and drug treatment can help.
Pyromania is very rare. The reported incidence of the disorder in most recent studies is less than one per cent, and pyromaniacs constitute only a tiny proportion of psychiatric hospital admissions.
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What You Need to Know about Arson and How it Can Affect You – California Penal Code Section 451
In California, arson is considered a particularly heinous crime, especially during the summer when wildfires grab national headlines every year. Arson is a complicated matter with varying levels of severity in punishments for each case. There are many factors to consider, including the circumstances of the accused and the type of damage caused. It is important to be thorough and know the procedures regarding arson cases.
In California, arson is defined as the willful and malicious burning of a structure, forest, or land. In many arson cases, our law firm can successfully defend the case by being able to show that the accused did not act maliciously or willfully to set the fire. The start of many fires can be disputed and often can be caused by neglectful actions or by pure accident. The accused may lack specific intent to actually start a fire, cause the fire by accident, or be intoxicated. These defenses may be available to you, but you must consult with an attorney to review your case.
A defendant can be charged with either simple arson or aggravated arson. Simple arson will be charged when a defendant willfully and maliciously set fire to or burned a structure, forest, land, or property.
Aggravated arson will be charged if the defendant willfully and maliciously set fire to or burned a structure with the intent on injuring someone, or to damage property which would likely injure someone. Also, the fire must have caused a damage exceeding $5,650,000, or the fire damaged or destroyed five or more inhabited structures.
