The Killer Book of Cold Cases by Tom Philbin

Surplus City outlet in a bin filled with sleeping bags.
    Less than an hour later, a fire erupted in the Family Bargain Center in nearby Bakersfield. The foam pillows were on fire, but the manager pulled them out of the bin and put the fire out. At the bottom of the bin, the manager found a partly burned cigarette and three matches, all held together with a rubber band, and some scraps of yellow lined paper.
    But that wasn’t the end. About an hour later, at 2 p.m., an employee of CraftMart in Bakersfield spotted smoke and fire in a dried-flower floral display, and the manager put out the fire with an extinguisher.
Arson Investigator Called In
    The fire captain at the scene thought the CraftMart fire should be examined by an arson investigator and called in Captain Marvin G. Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department. Casey had more than twenty years of experience determining the cause of fires and had examined hundreds.
    He looked over the dried flowers that had ignited and spotted the same kind of incendiary device that had been used to start other blazes: three matches and a lit cigarette bundled in yellow lined paper and held together by rubber bands. Using tweezers, Casey carefully extracted the device from the bin and laid it in an evidence container.
    Casey had also investigated the Hancock Fabrics fire in Fresno, and he commented to a fellow investigator that having two fires occur with an hour of one another and within two miles defied coincidence.
    As he investigated the Bakersfield fires, Casey was aware of the fires in Tulare and Fresno. Then he learned that the incendiary devices recovered were all about the same and that the materials the fires were set in—some type of foam—were very much alike. And all the fires had occurred near Highway 99. All told, someone had started or attempted to start seven fires at stores along the road from Fresno to Tulare to Bakersfield.
    Casey had an insight. He was aware of the arson conventions, and he started to think that maybe the fire starter was one of the 242 attendees.
    The ATF—the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives—had descended on the arson cases, so Casey gave the incendiary device to them to see if they could pull any prints off it. As it happened, they could. They pulled a single left ring-finger print off the device. The print was submitted to the California and national fingerprint criminal databases, but the report came back negative. The print didn’t belong to a criminal.
    Conversations with other investigators didn’t produce any support for Casey’s idea that their arsonist might be an arson investigator. Ego may have gotten in the way in this case. How could a firefighter be the arsonist? Ridiculous! But Casey’s enthusiasm for the idea didn’t dampen.
Narrowing the List of Suspects
    Casey made a couple of phone calls, got a list of the attendees at the convention, and devised a way to winnow down the list. Starting with the participants’ home bases, he only looked at investigators whose trip home would take them south past Fresno, Tulare, and Bakersfield. Then he calculated which of the men would have been driving alone, because arsonists almost always travel alone.
    Using his method of elimination, he produced a list of fifty-five arson investigators who fulfilled the criteria. Because the investigators came from different jurisdictions, Casey knew he would have to get the Feds involved. He called the ATF in Fresno, spoke with Special Agent Chuck Gaylan, and told him about his theory. Like others, Gaylan was skeptical and asked, “Fifty-five names of respected arson investigators?”
    As reported in
Fire Lover,
Gaylan said: “I wasn’t at all comfortable with this. I knew some of them. They were neat guys with lots of integrity. I certainly didn’t think that Marv Casey’s intuition was worth a wholesale inquiry into travel records and so forth.”
    So nothing happened, and Casey’s theory went nowhere. Then at the