by Ann Rule
Initially called the Edmond Meany Hotel, it was built in the round, so that every room was a corner room. Revamped and remodeled into a plush hostelry, the “Towers” was much in demand by those who sought the finest in accommodations. It had a restaurant, cocktail lounge, ballrooms for conventions, meetings, and banquets, all heavily booked.
New Year’s Eve 1974 was no exception. There was a large private party in the University Ballroom and the celebration was such a rousing success that the band was prevailed upon to keep playing until three o’clock in the morning. When the last celebrants left just after three, a hotel employee checked the banquet room thoroughly to be sure there were no smoldering cigarettes.
She was especially careful in checking the table where the last party had sat, but she found everything in order and locked the ballroom.
Half an hour later, Rodger Peck, who worked for a security agency and was on the night shift, entered the ballroom as part of his regular rounds. He found the huge room full of acrid smoke. Peck quickly located the source: flames flickered from a corner of the cloth at the table where the lingering guests had sat. Peck was able to extinguish the still small fire. Luckily, it hadn’t had a chance to do any more damage than destroying the cloth itself and leaving a small scorched spot on the carpet. Peck felt the incident was so minor that he wrote “quiet night” for the overnight period on December 31–January 1 in the log that all security guards kept.
There could well have been a lighted cigarette that had fallen on the floor and gone unnoticed by the cleanup crew. A potentially dangerous situation, but Rodger Peck had found it soon enough. And that was especially fortunate because many of the hotel guests were a little tipsy after celebrating New Year’s Eve. It might have been a daunting task to wake them all and clear the hotel if the flames had taken hold.
Slightly more than two months later, on March 6, 1975, a man passing the University Towers around 10:30 P.M. looked up and saw smoke billowing from an upper floor. He immediately called the fire department and alerted the hotel staff.
Assistant manager Ralph Jefferson was in the restaurant when he heard that there was a fire on the sixth floor. He raced to the front desk, where a patrolman shouted, “It’s on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors!”
As the first wails of fire sirens approached, Jefferson joined Rodger Peck in the service elevator and the two rode up to the tenth floor. They split up there and Jefferson checked the eleventh floor. There was a faint odor of smoke there, but he saw no flames. He ran to the back stairway and grabbed a fire extinguisher before he headed toward the tenth floor.
Rodger Peck was already there. The men couldn’t find any flames on that floor, either, and they moved down to the ninth floor. Now they could hear the pounding of running firefighters on the floor above them.
Peck ran ahead of Jefferson on the ninth floor and called, “Here it is!”
The manager relayed the information to firefighters, and then joined Peck outside the door of room 904. The security guard had obtained a fire extinguisher, too, and he had already kicked the door partially in; it was splintered in its frame but not quite open. Peck kicked the door again and ran into the smoke-filled room. Unerringly, he headed toward the right and sprayed the extinguisher over the bed. Firefighters, just behind him, had the flames out in minutes.
A tragedy of major proportions had been averted. Oddly, room 904 was unoccupied.
Rodger Peck told fire inspectors from Marshal 5 that he had been able to get into the room by crouching down to the floor.
“There was about three feet of good air,” he said. “I was able to spray the flames with my fire extinguisher until your firemen got there.”
“How did you know which room the fire was in?”
“I thought it was that room because I went along the hallway feeling the doors. The door to 904 was hot,” he explained.
Rodger Peck said he didn’t have a key to the room. “We never have room keys, but we do check doorknobs to see if unoccupied rooms are securely locked. I passed by 904 on my last sweep of the building, and I know it was closed and locked at that time,” he emphasized. “But it must have been burning then. You know, there wasn’t enough time for anyone to open that door unless they had a key and went in and set a fire.”
Peck added that a guest who was staying in another room on the ninth floor had told him that he’d gone by 904 about 9:30. “He said he saw that the door was open then.”
Investigators checked the registration book for the name of the last occupant of 904. A single man who listed his address as a town in New Jersey had stayed for two nights.
Ralph Jefferson ran his finger down the second column of the register. “He checked out shortly after noon today—he told me he had an early afternoon flight out of Sea-Tac Airport.”
An arson fire in a densely populated hotel is disturbing enough; it was even more ominous when fire department investigators learned that a Seattle police emergency operator had received an anonymous call about an hour before the fire alarm call.
“It was a male,” the dispatcher said. “No particular accent. He said, ‘That hotel that has the law and order convention is going to burn up tonight—you mark my words.’ ”
Seattle police detectives began an immediate survey of every hotel in the Seattle area to determine which one—if any—was hosting a law enforcement convention. By the time they reached the University Towers, room 904 was already ablaze.
There were two law enforcement oriented groups in the hotel on March 6: the University of California Society for Crime and Justice, and the Northwest Indian Law Conference. It seemed unlikely that any attendee of those two groups would have set a fire. And no delegate from either convention had stayed in room 904.
Marshal 5 fire inspector K. D. Fowler surveyed the flame-involved room. With his trained eye, he determined that the fire had been deliberately set in three places—there were two scorched patches in the folds of the bedspread and another in the window drapes.
Fowler and Fire Department inspector Jim Reed compared notes, and they concurred that there were no combustible materials in the room that might have ignited accidentally. They agreed that someone had held a match or a cigarette lighter to the bedspread and the drapes.
If the arsonist intended to hurt law enforcement personnel, he had taken on a powerful adversary in the Seattle Fire Department.
There may be no other major city where fire investigators work so closely with the police department. Chief Frank R. Hanson organized his Seattle Metro Task Force on arson in June 1975. It included the Seattle Fire Department, the Seattle Police Department, the King County Sheriff’s Office, the mayor’s office, the Seattle City Council, the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and representatives of the insurance industry.
All Seattle fire investigators are also commissioned police officers; they have the power to arrest suspects and the responsibility for preparing all arson cases for presentation to the prosecutor. At the time of the University Towers fires, two Seattle police detectives—Bill Berg and Hank Gruber—were assigned to work full-time with Marshal 5 at the fire department’s Arson Investigation office.
The fire inspectors did the arson investigations and prevention analyses, while the Seattle police assisted in arson probes and offered the facilities of their crime laboratories and patrol surveillance.
The case before them began slowly, as slowly and silently as a tiny spark that smolders at length before it ignites. As it evolved, however, it would demand much of both departments.
* * *
At the University Towers, it would get worse before it got better—much worse. On Tuesday, March 11, only five nights after the fire in room 904, it was quiet and uneventful in the hotel.
And then Morris Babani, the night desk clerk at the Towers, heard banging and crackling noises coming from the mezzanine above the lobby. He asked Rodger Peck to check it out.
Moments later, Seattle police officers J. Hanna and F. Viegas walked into the lobby
on their regular rounds. They were an hour into third watch and it was twelve minutes after midnight. Peck leaned over the mezzanine railing and yelled that there was a fire in the mezzanine.
Viegas used his police radio to call for help from the firefighters of Battalion 6, while Hanna bounded up the center stairway to the mezzanine. He grasped the knob of the metal door that led into the mezzanine interior. It didn’t feel hot, but as he ran the flat of his hand up to the top panels of the door, he felt radiating heat.
The patrolman opened the door several inches. When no fire blasted out, he opened it a foot. Now he could see several small fires burning at floor level. They were individual fires with widely separated clear spots in between them. When smoke began to billow out from the room, Hanna realized there was nothing one lone man could do, and he slammed the door to keep the flames from igniting the rest of the mezzanine.
He hadn’t seen Rodger Peck, and hoped Peck had managed to escape through another door. Hanna ran back to the lobby but he was unable to locate a fire extinguisher.
In the meantime, Officer Viegas took the elevator to the mezzanine. Several seconds had elapsed since Hanna had first seen the fire.
Officer Hanna was relieved to find Rodger Peck just outside the elevator. By the time Viegas opened the rear door to the mezzanine room, the entire place was in flames. He could see that the metal fire door had buckled from the intense heat.
It was 1:15 A.M. when Fire Inspector William Hoppe received the call for a full response to the University Towers.
Firefighters rate the dangerousness of fires by the diameter of the hoses needed to tap it. Initially, the flames on the hotel’s mezzanine were referred to as a “one-and-one-half-inch” fire.
But it soon became more threatening. As Hoppe approached the location, driving across the Interstate 5 bridge, he could see a gray haze of smoke floating all around the top floors of the hotel. His radio now reported that a fire was burning on the eleventh floor!
A 2-11 alarm sounded. The head of Marshal 5, Captain Richard Hargett, responded from his home. More inspectors and firefighters were mobilized.
Hoppe looked at the horrific sight ahead of him. The University Towers resembled a scene from the hit movie The Towering Inferno. The hotel sign on the top of the Towers was completely obscured by smoke and terrified occupants of rooms in the upper stories were beginning to straddle windowsills. Hoppe saw the pitifully short ropes hastily fashioned from sheets that some hotel guests had flung over the sills.
Substantial billows of smoke poured from a window on the eleventh floor on the northwest corner of the building. He could also see that firefighters had made their way to the twelfth floor as they began to appear in the windows directly above the fire, hoping they could work best from that vantage point.
Bill Hoppe entered the lobby and found something close to chaos. One elevator was out of commission, and a plainclothes Seattle police detective was operating the remaining lift. The indicator on the stalled elevator showed that it was jammed at the seventh floor. Hoppe and Officer Viegas headed up the north stairs to the mezzanine level and from there they found they could follow another stairway to the seventh floor.
Fire had eaten away at the walls of the staircase for three floors, with the damage lessening as they climbed higher. At the seventh floor, they encountered heat and smoke, and they saw why the elevator was stopped there. Someone had deliberately locked the doors open, essentially rendering it useless. They put it into emergency service and Viegas rode it down to the lobby.
Guests, of course, were warned to stay in their rooms, and to place water-soaked towels over the crack at the bottom of the door. The elevator was too dangerous for anyone but professionals to use.
Bill Hoppe continued up the stairs from seven until he reached the eleventh floor. There was no question that someone had torched both the mezzanine and a room high above it. There were many undamaged floors between the fires.
The flames in 1109 had been tapped. Battalion chief Carl Peters had kicked the door down and two firefighters had followed him in with a hose. They were confronted with flames belching from under the bed. When the fire was hit with water, it went up the wall and across the ceiling with bright red flames.
In what was becoming a familiar pattern, it was clear that two fires were started in 1109—the fire beneath the bed and another below the desk.
This time, Bill Hoppe realized, they might find occupants with injuries—or worse.
On the seventh floor, two male guests had awakened to the smell of smoke. Almost immediately, they made all the wrong choices for surviving a fire. They’d gone into the hallway and found the passage obliterated by the thick pall of smoke. Attempting to find their way out, they rapidly became disoriented. They panicked. Stumbling, they felt along the walls and accidentally found themselves back in their room. They took deep breaths of the relatively fresh air before plunging back into the hallway.
They found one exit door and pushed against it ineffectively; in their fear, they had pushed it the wrong way. Had they pulled it, it would have opened.
Eventually they found a stairway and started down. The smoke lessened but the heat blasting up was like a furnace. One of the men held on to the banister until it burned away under his hand; he was burned severely on that hand, oblivious in his panic to the fact that the banister was burning. The pair came out on the fire floor—the mezzanine—and were led to safety by firefighters. Later, they would tell investigators that the door to the stairways on the seventh floor was open, allowing an easy path up for the fire and smoke below.
It sounded as if the arsonist wanted more than the excitement of fire: his (or her) technique was escalating. If they didn’t find the firebug soon, someone was sure to die.
Inspectors Fowler and Hoppe went through the hotel to determine just how many doors in the building were open during the fire. They found that all the interior doors to the stairwells were closed during the fire except for the doors adjoining the center stairwells on the seventh, eleventh, and fourteenth floors. Someone had propped these doors open before the fire started! The Marshal 5 investigators found a small wooden wedge behind each door, and beneath it, an unburned portion of carpet. Each door closed only as far as the wedge. Moreover, burn and smoke patterns on the doors matched to show that someone had deliberately meant to leave these fire-blocking doors open.
They also discovered that all rear doors to the building had been locked from the inside and that someone had purposely opened rear windows and doors leading from the mezzanine level to the rear ground level.
The arsonist had obviously meant for flames from the mezzanine level to sweep up the stairwell and involve three upper floors—trapping the guests on those floors. If the firefighters from Battalion 6 hadn’t arrived within scant minutes of the first alarm, a tragedy of major proportions would surely have ensued.
On the chance that the arsonist was still in the hotel, the fire department investigators ordered all exits closed off. Seattle police officers and K-9 dogs helped Inspectors Fowler and Hoppe in a room-by-room search.
They found no one who didn’t belong in the hotel—either as a member of the staff or as a registered guest.
As the search crews returned to the lobby, a man with a deep voice phoned the hotel.
“Listen fast,” he said. “There’s a bomb someplace inside your hotel, and it’s set to blow at one thirty A.M.”
Since their just-completed search had been very thorough and turned up nothing that could be construed as a bomb, the investigators tended to believe the caller was a crank, someone who was making the worst of a bad situation. He was probably just trying to cause more trouble.
Of course, they couldn’t be positive of that, and the rest of the night passed with a sense of new danger.
Fortunately, nothing blew up, and guests, obeying directions to remain in their rooms and suites with the doors locked, got a fitful night’s sleep.
The Marshal 5 team and investigators
from the Seattle Police Department, however, worked through the night.
* * *
Three fires in one hotel in less than two and a half months had to be more than coincidence. And there was a pattern to the method the unknown arsonist was using. This fire of March 10–11 had surely been meant to be a huge conflagration, and dozens of people might well have died. Despite the immediate response of firefighters, the damage had topped many thousands of dollars for the mezzanine and room 1109, plus the cost to replace three floors of the stairwell. Smoke damage was heavy.
Marshal 5 inspectors and the police detectives assigned to work with them began sorting through a weird assortment of suspects. Some would surely turn out to be red herrings, some the chronic confessors who haunt arson scenes, and, hopefully, one would be the arsonist.
Inspector Jack Hickam, like all of the Marshal 5 team, had once been a firefighter. He and Bill Hoppe fought flames back in the day where there were no protective masks to keep potentially deadly fumes from asbestos and other early building materials from entering their lungs.
I recall Bill Hoppe telling me that those fumes were nauseating, and that he often had to throw up over his shoulder, and keep on pulling smoldering insulation from walls and ceilings. Hickam was quite probably the biggest risk-taker in the arson unit, and he was certainly a genius at figuring out arson fires and how and where they began.
Now Jack Hickam surveyed the mezzanine area with a studied eye. The room was approximately forty by twenty feet, with three entrances through doors—one from a stairway leading down from the floor above. He found the point of origin located at the north wall, about thirty feet west of the north entrance door. There were two small chairs and a lamp, still plugged into a wall socket. The lamp showed no signs of having shorted out prior to the fire.
Two metal floor-standing ashtrays were next to the chairs. The chair nearest the west wall was completely destroyed by fire, and the other chair virtually incinerated.