Burn Marks

BRIAN: Hey, Peter. You wouldn’t be playing with those matches if you knew what was coming next on the show. It’s no joking matter.

ED: That’s right. Because we’re going to end the show with a story about fire of a malicious intent, arson. And specifically, we’re going to talk about a case that helped change the history of arson investigation.

BRIAN: In 1991, John Lentini took a trip to Jacksonville, Florida. He was there to investigate a house fire. It left six people dead, including four children. The authorities suspected the family’s father had set the blaze. Lentini had been studying arson for the better part of two decades by this point, and he knew the playbook cold.

JOHN LENTINI: When I looked at it, it had all of the characteristics of a typical arson fire. It had low burning, it had deep charming on the floor, it had a V pattern at the doorway to the living room.

BRIAN: What did that V pattern mean?

JOHN LENTINI: Back in the day, we looked for a V pattern, because at the base of the V, that’s the fuel package that created that fire plume. If you go to the base of the V, you should find the origin of the fire.

BRIAN: That day, Lentini saw all the telltale signs of arson he had learned over the course of his career. Not only V patterns that pointed to a suspicious origin, but charring on the floor that looked like–

JOHN LENTINI: –a sharp, continuous, irregular line of demarcation between the burned and unburned areas on the floor.

BRIAN: Which basically meant that someone had splashed the area with some sort of flammable liquid.

ED: Now, if Lentini’s language sounds a little technical it’s because unlike many arson investigators at the time, and even to this day, he’s a trained scientist. And, as a scientist, it bothered him that what on the surface looked like an open and shut case had some big holes in it. For one, he did his own lab work on some samples that the fire marshal had taken from the scene. The authorities thought they had found gasoline.

JOHN LENTINI: When I looked at it, I said, this is not gasoline. I got a lot of colleagues, people at the top of the profession, and they looked at it and they said, this is not gasoline.

ED: The case was pointing to a disturbing reality that Lentini had suspected for a while. The entire history of arson investigation with those telltale signs that he was schooled in, and swore by for years, that was all pretty much bogus.

JOHN LENTINI: Total BS, bad science.

BRIAN: Lentini says that over the decades, arson investigators had developed a conventional wisdom that was more art than science.

MALE SPEAKER: It’s a living thing, Brian.

BRIAN: This was quasi-mystical knowledge of the sort that Robert De Niro’s character, a firefighter turned arson expert, imparts upon a young apprentice in the 1991 blockbuster Backdraft.

MALE SPEAKER: It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it.

BRIAN: That movie came out around the time Lentini was puzzling over the deadly fire in Jacksonville, and the case gave him the ideal chance to test the doubts he’d been nursing. So what kind of test did you set up? You didn’t burn down another house, did you?

JOHN LENTINI: We did. We actually burned down another house. There was a condemned house that was two doors down from the house where the six people had died. And the city owned it, and so we saw an opportunity to test the hypothesis that the fire was intentionally set by setting another fire and videotaping it.

BRIAN: Wow.

JOHN LENTINI: We got trustees from the county jail to redo the interior of the home.

BRIAN: So you literally recreated the home that had burned.

JOHN LENTINI: We had identical furniture. We had the same couch, which was the most important piece. We took a Bic lighter, and lit one part of the sofa where the defendant had said he saw the fire. He said he saw a fire on the sofa, and he and his wife had tried to put it out. So we let the sofa in one point. and just stood back and watched. And within four minutes, the entire room was engulfed in flame.

And I was standing next to the two prosecutors, and they were shocked. Because I had told them, and my colleague had told them that it would take quite a bit longer. I was running a video camera at the time, and one of the Jacksonville fire marshals said into my open mic, wow, that may prove the defendant’s story.

BRIAN: Since around 1950, the average American home has become very flammable, with polyurethane replacing a lot of wood and cotton in furniture. This allows for even accidental fires to spread quickly, flashover, in a matter of minutes. Flashover happens when a room is completely engulfed in fire, top to bottom. The flames spread wildly, and leaves those puddle marks and V shapes in odd places. And that’s what Lentini saw in his test fire. It was an epiphany.

JOHN LENTINI: In Florida, we have depositions in criminal cases. And I was scheduled to be deposed on the day after the test. And I cancelled the deposition. The prosecutor dropped the charges within a week, and I put my video together into a training film, and began teaching what I had learned.

BRIAN: And as fire investigators slowly began seeing the light, they realized the consequences were staggering.

ED: The frequency of supposed arson and the subsequent convictions had steadily increased since the mid 20th century, as homes themselves were becoming more dangerous. And Lentini thinks that dozens, perhaps hundreds of people ended up in prison for fires they did not set. People like Ernest Ray Willis.

ERNEST RAY WILLIS: I woke up, and the house was on fire.

MALE SPEAKER: Were you surprised they even called it a crime?

ERNEST RAY WILLIS: Yeah, I really was. Because I thought it was an electrical fire, or someone went to sleep and–

MALE SPEAKER: Well, isn’t that the evidence now? When they went back and looked at after all these years. What kind of–

ED: That’s Willis talking with host Chris Matthews on MSNBC, After Willis had been released from a Texas prison in 2004. Willis spent 17 years on death row, wrongly convicted of killing two women in a house fire. The same year he was freed, another Texas death row inmate convicted in a similar case was executed, only to be posthumously exonerated years later.

BRIAN: Nowadays, Lentini works to re-educate fire marshals around the country. He’s helped rewrite the rules for arson investigations, but still struggles to extinguish the old ideas. In many places, he says, determining what caused the fire is still left to underpaid officials who base their findings on persistent misconceptions about fire chemistry.

PETER: And so when you tell a jury fire burns up and out, and that the floor won’t burn unless there’s help, they’ll agree with that, because they think they know something about fires. There’s brush fires, and grass fires, and trash fires, and campfires. People know about that. They have no clue what really happens in a structure fire. And until we, as a society, are ready to pay to have scientists investigate fires rather than amateurs, we’re going to continue to have problems with the credibility of fire origin and cause determination. It’s easy to turn a scientist into a cop, but much harder to turn a cop into a scientist.

BRIAN: John Lentini is a fire investigation consultant who has written about the history arson cases. We’ll link to some of his work and more about fire science at backstoryradio.org.