American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

by Monica Hesse

ARSON IS A WEIRD CRIME.

But the way we think of arson is new. The way arsonists have been perceived and studied is continually evolving. German scientists were the first to study it, beginning in the late 1700s. They believed, based on anecdotal evidence and prurient wishful thinking, that fires were set predominantly by young peasant women. The suspected cause was puberty—the trauma of menstruation, a sexual development gone awry. Fire starting was an illness of tragic, hysterical, impoverished women who lacked coping skills and were victims of the unpredictability of female biology.

A majority of arsonists have IQs below the range considered normal. A disproportionately high percentage of them struggle with substance abuse or have been diagnosed with schizophrenia; a disproportionately high percentage of them are adolescents or young adults.

One Accomack resident remembered seeing Tonya “peacocking” around the bar in a tube top befitting, in size and design, a Barbie doll. Trailing behind her was a cluster of other women, similarly tube-topped, but none of them with quite the figure or presence to pull off the ensemble. The parade reminded the onlooker of the movie Multiplicity, where the main character makes a series of clones, which become more defective with every copy.

One study by the U.S. Fire Administration, about retention rates among volunteer firefighters, found a few factors unique to rural places, one being the replacement of small Main Street businesses with larger department stores. It was easier to hang a “Be back soon—fire duty” sign on the front of an independent shop than it was to get spur-of-the-moment permission to leave a shift at, say, a Best Buy or Costco.

This, for a group of twentysomething men, became their own personal arson schedule: come to the fire house, play video games, get called for a fire, play more video games, post something on Facebook or YouTube, get called for another fire.

As he barreled down the road toward Whispering Pines, he tried to think of a particular word, a word that meant something was one’s destiny, an ultimate goal that one would eventually reach whether they wanted to or not. Nirvana, he thought. Later he would realize that it wasn’t quite the word he was looking for. Destiny, fate, Everest—all of those would have been more appropriate. But right then, as the firefighter drove to the biggest fire of his career, that was the phrase that kept coming to mind. This is my Nirvana.

An aging hippie from NPR came to his front door, wearing corduroys and Crocs and carrying a giant boom mike, and Beall, still feeling raw, told the producer, “You have ten seconds to get the fuck off my lawn.”

“The greatest arsonist in the history of all of Virginia—the one who kept us up night after night after night—and it was fucking Charlie Smith in a fucking gold minivan.”

“A friend of mine was a great Virginia Tech advocate. He went to all of their football games. They solicited him to give a donation to Virginia Tech. When the band formed up on the field, the football field in the shape of the Commonwealth of Virginia, they never added the Eastern Shore. So he made them add a little strip of the Eastern Shore of Virginia before he would give them $50,000. So that will give you some idea.

In the Commonwealth of Virginia, juries were responsible for not only determining guilt or innocence but also for offering sentencing recommendations, which, in Allan Zaleski’s experience, judges tended to ratify. But the sentences of juries were often harsher than what a judge would have determined—lacking judicial experience, juries might think that if someone was guilty, they also deserved the maximum punishment.

Charlie seemed honest because Charlie seemed dumb.)

the West Memphis Three—a trio of teenagers who were convicted of killing three small boys based on evidence that amounted to Satanic panic and a coerced confession—agreed to submit an Alford plea upon their prison releases.