American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  He signed the paperwork, took the tanker back to the station, and then immediately got in his own car and started driving north toward Hopeton and Charlie’s house. He just wanted to get there and see the van, parked safely in the driveway, porch lights off, everyone asleep, and learn that it had all been a mistake. Bryan crawled up Bayside Road until he got to the point where it intersected with Matthews Road. He couldn’t even turn onto it. The whole street was blocked off with police cars. Bryan turned around, drove home, and never talked to Charlie again.

  Back at the scene of the fire, someone radioed Todd Godwin, who had been out patrolling the roads, as he had been every night for the past five and a half months. When he heard the arsonist had been arrested, he started driving toward the scene in his own marked car. At Airport Road, Charlie asked to see him, so Godwin went to the police car where Charlie was handcuffed, waiting to be taken in for questioning.

  “Todd,” said Charlie, because everyone called the sheriff “Todd,” because everyone knew everyone here in Accomack County, “I’m sorry. But I didn’t light them all.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “SOMEDAY THEY’LL GO DOWN TOGETHER”

  WE NEED TO ADDRESS, for a moment, Bonnie and Clyde.

  The American gangsters, the country’s most photogenic public enemies, for whom only first names are needed.

  They met, by most accounts, in 1930 when Bonnie Parker was twenty and Clyde Barrow was a year older, at a friend’s house in West Dallas. By then, Clyde had already been arrested a few times for petty misdeeds—possession of a truckload of stolen turkeys, in one instance. He and Bonnie fell in love, and then they fell into crime. Later, after Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty had played them in cinematic glory, they would be known for their bank robberies and getaways. But most of their holdups were actually at rural gas stations or small-town general stores. The Barrow gang, which also included Clyde’s brother and his wife, would walk in, demand money, shoot anyone who got in the way during their escape, and then move on to the next town, the next motel hideout, the next caper.

  They were violent—in the process of their crimes they killed at least nine police officers and civilians—but they were also glamorous. Clyde was tall and strong; Bonnie was petite with piercing eyes and a bow-shaped mouth. Her leg had been permanently disfigured in a car accident and it was difficult for her to walk, so Clyde often carried her. In a pile of photographs discovered at one of their hideouts, which newspapers printed and reprinted, one image showed Clyde holding Bonnie aloft with one arm, their faces pressed cheek to cheek. In other pictures, they playfully pointed firearms at each other, smoked cigars, mugged for the camera. Bonnie wrote poetry about their exploits—rhyming ballads that went on for dozens of stanzas and were memorable and recitable, if slightly clunky:

  They call them cold-blooded killers

  They say they are heartless and mean

  But I say this with pride, I once knew Clyde

  When he was honest and upright and clean.

  Bonnie and Clyde became, in other words, the ur-template for American crime-spree couples: repellent, but also alluring and, above all else, in love. Their crimes felt uniquely American. Not merely because they happened in the dust and heat of the United States south and southwest, but because these crimes were viewed by much of the American public as a reaction to the Great Depression. “Gaunt, dazed men roamed the city streets seeking jobs,” writes historian E. R. Milner in The Lives and Times of Bonnie and Clyde. “Breadlines and soup kitchens became jammed, foreclosures forced more than 38 percent of farmers from their lands . . . by the time Bonnie and Clyde became well-known, many felt that the capitalistic system had been abused by big business and government officials. Now here were Bonnie and Clyde striking back.”

  They were products of their times, and they defined how generations of Americans would view and interpret lovers who broke the law. And when they died, they died together in a rain of bullets, faithful to each other until their end.

  There’s a French term, folie à deux, which literally means “madness of two.” It refers to a psychiatric disorder where two patients share the same delusion, cultivating it together and transmitting it back and forth between each other. A husband and wife might grow to both believe, for example, that the federal government is bugging their home, or a mother and daughter might come down with the same psychosomatic symptoms and blame them on the same nonexistent illness. There is no comparable term for an evilness of two, wherein two people jointly decide to commit crimes. But it happens.

  How else to explain Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, for example, who became known as the Ken and Barbie killers because of their clean-cut good looks and preppie clothing? In the early 1990s, they together raped and murdered three girls in the Canadian province of Ontario. The victims included Karla’s fifteen-year-old sister, whose drugged assault the couple filmed and later re-created in a different home movie. Karla, in the re-creation, play-acted the role of the deceased teenager as she and Paul had sex on her sister’s bed.

  How else to explain Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two brilliant young friends and occasional lovers who, in the shadow of Chicago’s 1924 jazz obsession and under the thrall of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, decided that they were living examples of Nietzsche’s “supermen,” superior beings unbound by the pedestrian rules that governed the rest of humanity? After conspiring on a few burglaries, they came up with the idea to put their intelligence to the test with an intellectual challenge: committing the perfect murder. They chose their fourteen-year-old victim at random—he was a cousin of Loeb’s but no personal offense was intended, they insisted—stopping him on his way home from school and bludgeoning him to death before they’d driven more than two blocks.

  Romantic partners have staged kidnappings, holding prisoners in their basements and garages. They have robbed banks and stolen cars. They have forged $45 million worth of art, in the case of Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi, who conspired to reproduce the works of more than fifty artists before being captured in 2011.

  The public is fascinated by these couples, these incidences of crazy love put prominently on display, these people who had found quite literal ways to answer the quintessential romantic thought experiment, “Do you love me enough to do something mad? To die for me? To kill for me?” Hollywood has made not one but seven movies inspired by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, teenage lovers—Caril Ann was only fourteen in 1958 at the time of their crimes—who, after killing Caril’s disapproving family, then embarked on a two-monthlong murder spree that left a total of eleven people dead. A Caril Ann-based character was played by Sissy Spacek in 1973 (Badlands), then Juliette Lewis in 1993 (Kalifornia), then Juliette Lewis again in 1994 (Natural Born Killers). Badlands, the most critically successful of the filmed versions, was heralded a masterpiece of its time: “A cool, sometimes brilliant, always ferociously American film,” wrote the chief film critic for the New York Times. “Sheen and Miss Spacek are splendid as the self-absorbed, cruel, possibly psychotic children of our time.”

  The psychologists who study criminal couples have discovered that the partnerships are rarely equal ones. The crimes are usually spurred on by one dominant partner: one half of the couple has the fantasy, and he or she works to bring their paramour into that fantasy world. “There’s radar, gaydar, and maybe, mur-dar,” criminal psychologist Gregg McCrary told a reporter in Psychology Today, in a story about how otherwise law-abiding individuals can together become criminals. “It resembles the phenomenon wherein normal people meet and decide that they’re going to get along,” he continued. “But with these couples, it takes a dark turn. They vector in on each other, sensing the excitement of a kindred spirit. It becomes electric.”

  Bonnie Parker was reportedly a sweet-tempered waitress before she met Clyde. She’d married another local boy before she even turned sixteen, but the relationship was abusive and ended after a few years. By the time she met Clyde, she was thirsty for love a
nd excitement. “I never did want to love you and I didn’t even try,” she wrote in a letter to him during one of the stints he was in prison during their courtship. “You just made me. Now I don’t know what to do.”

  Their love was dysfunctional, and ill-advised, and a hundred other bad things—but it was also passionate and abiding. Long before she and Clyde were ambushed in Louisiana by police who had been tipped off to their location, Bonnie had decided that she would never leave Clyde, she would never turn on him, and that she didn’t even want to live in a world without him. “Someday they’ll go down together,” she wrote in another poem. “And they’ll bury them side by side. / To a few it’ll be grief, to the law a relief—but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.” And it was indeed death. The Louisianans who lived near the scene of the shoot-out were allegedly so enamored by the end of the Bonnie and Clyde love story that they sneaked over to the bodies when the police were otherwise occupied and cut off locks of Bonnie’s hair.

  Not all criminal romances end so poetically. When Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo were arrested in 1993—forensic evidence linked Paul to the scene of one of the murders—Karla immediately turned on her husband. She told police officers that she had been Paul’s victim as well, battered and abused throughout their marriage, and that she’d only gone along with the rapes and killings because she feared for her own life. Paul, on the other hand, told law enforcement that while the rapes had been his idea (he’d assaulted more than a dozen women before ever meeting Karla, earning the moniker, “The Scarborough Rapist”), he’d never murdered any of the previous women he’d raped, and he wouldn’t have killed the three he and Karla attacked, either. Killing those girls was Karla’s idea; she was afraid the victims would later be able to identify them. Ultimately, prosecutors decided that Karla’s testimony was more important than his and they wouldn’t be able to get a conviction without her serving as a witness. While Paul received a life sentence in prison, Karla received only twelve years and was released in 2005, remarrying and having three children. Her biographer, Stephen Williams, later called this plea agreement “The pact with the devil.”

  It’s amazing how fast love can change. When crime-committing couples are caught, when they are separated and placed in different holding cells and questioned by different detectives, whatever delusional bonds had drawn them together can quickly dissolve. As self-preservation begins to kick in, the interrogations turn into a real-life example of a prisoner’s dilemma. In that game theory scenario, two suspects in separate cells must each decide whether or not to confess. There is no other evidence aside from their theoretical confessions. Thus, the best possible outcome for the prisoners would be if both of them decided to stay silent. Another scenario is for both to confess. And then there’s the murky land in the middle—the scenario where one party confesses, hoping that their cooperation will result in a lighter sentence, or using the opportunity to enhance their partner’s role in the crime while diminishing their own. A prisoner’s dilemma is a test of how much you trust your partner, and how much you value your own life over theirs.

  Leopold and Loeb—they both admitted to luring Bobby Franks into the car on the day of his death. But until their own deaths, each blamed the other for being the one who wielded the chisel and did the actual bludgeoning.

  Shortly after his capture, Charles Starkweather—the teenager who had murdered Caril Ann Fugate’s entire family because her parents disapproved of their relationship—began telling police that his girlfriend was “the most trigger-happy person” he had ever encountered, and responsible for some of the deaths. Meanwhile, Caril Ann told officers that Charles had kidnapped her and she’d had nothing to do with any of the shootings. He was sentenced to death; she was sent to prison and eventually was paroled in 1976.

  It turns out that Bonnie and Clyde were the exception to the criminal love story. For most, love rarely transcends the bright lights of interrogation and confession.

  CHAPTER 18

  “EVERYBODY HAS A REASON FOR WHY THEY DO THINGS IN LIFE”

  AS CHARLIE WAS TRANSPORTED to the drug task force in Melfa—the closest law enforcement building—for questioning, Sheriff Todd Godwin raced to find Ron Tunkel. Godwin hadn’t been in the room for the profiler’s earlier presentation on interrogation techniques, but now the arsonist turned out to be someone he knew, and Charlie had specifically requested Godwin’s presence in the interview room. Godwin couldn’t get Tunkel on the phone, so he asked another officer who had been there for the presentation for a CliffsNotes version. Be gentle and reassuring, the officer told him. Don’t be combative. Be respectful.

  These instructions came as a relief to Godwin; they were in line with how he liked to conduct suspect interviews anyway. It was certainly how he would have approached an interview with Charlie, who had played a cameo role in the criminal justice system on the offender side for nearly as long as Godwin had on the law enforcement side. They knew each other well enough to say hello on the street. They’d known each other well enough to sit and have coffee at the Royal Farms gas station on Christmas Day at a time when, Godwin was now realizing, Charlie had already lit more than thirty fires.

  This is how he decided to begin the interview, once Charlie was sitting kitty-corner from him at a work desk at the drug task force center—by reminding Charlie that they knew each other, they had something in common. They were both from here, they both understood Accomack.

  “Oh, Charles,” Godwin said, crossing his ankle over his knee as Charlie sat kitty-corner from him.

  “You know, I apologize,” Charlie started to say, but Godwin cut him off. He hadn’t been read his Miranda rights on camera and Rob Barnes, who was planning to do so, wasn’t in the room yet.

  “You’re all right, Bubba, you’re all right,” Godwin said. “We go way back, don’t we? Many years, Buddy. Many years.”

  “Trust me, Todd, I’m embarrassed,” Charlie said, letting out one of his peculiar high-pitched giggles.

  “You know, you could have called me. I’ve known you how many years? A long time. Twenty years, at least twenty years, Charles. If you needed anything, you could have called me, you know?”

  “It was a problem that made me do this. I mean, you want to know the bad thing? I wish I was back on drugs.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “That way, I’d have an excuse.”

  Godwin clucked and shook his head sympathetically as Barnes came in the room. Barnes slid into the third empty chair at the desk, positioning it so that the three men formed an equilateral triangle, so Charlie wouldn’t feel outnumbered. The room was small, with dingy carpet, a white board on one wall, and a small red cooler stashed in the corner that looked like it could contain either evidence or someone’s lunch. The drug task force office was actually a ranch house, in a neighborhood with other ranch houses. It had been office-ified a little, with regulation furniture and cameras installed in the interview rooms, but it still had a homey quality to it. The kitchen had remained mostly untouched. The stove and oven still worked. On the refrigerator were interdepartmental notices, but inside the refrigerator were drinks and meal fixings that the officers brought from home.

  “Is Glenn over here?” Charlie asked, thinking of the investigator Glenn Neal.

  “Rob’s here,” Godwin offered, nodding toward Barnes. “You know Rob, so it will make it a little easier.”

  Charlie nodded. “It would be more embarrassing with Glenn. I think a lot of Glenn.”

  “All right, Charlie,” Barnes said, as he took out a few official forms. He looked tired. He was tired. Godwin was still in his brown sheriff’s uniform; Barnes was in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. “You know who I am, I know who you are.” (They were, in fact, distant cousins in some way neither was quite sure of.) He ran through Charlie’s Miranda rights and then asked if Charlie wanted to talk or not.

  “Talk some,” Charlie agreed, and Godwin nodded as if the conversation was Charlie’s idea to begin with.

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p; “Okay,” Godwin said.

  “You know everything that has been going on with a lot of fires and stuff like that?” Barnes asked, mirroring Godwin’s position, ankle over knee, flipping through some papers. To an observer, the conversation would have looked and sounded like three friends talking about the fires while hanging out at Shuckers, which is just what Barnes wanted. Charlie hadn’t asked for a lawyer, and with his current demeanor it didn’t appear that he had any plans to do so.

  “Yes,” Charlie said.

  “And you made the comment to the sheriff earlier that you apologize and whatnot?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you did state that you didn’t set all of them.”

  “Right.”

  “All right,” Barnes said, pressing onward. “We’re at the point where we’re at eighty-six fires since the time this kicked off,” he said, including some that the police believed may have been accidents or set by copycats. “So we understand you were at the scene tonight. The one on Airport Drive. Who was driving in the vehicle?”

  “She was.”

  “And her name?”

  “Tonya Bundick.”

  These were easy questions, which the police already knew the answers to. Answering them didn’t cost Charlie anything. Barnes asked which direction the van had been driving, which direction they’d approached the fire from. “Did you ride by a couple of times or anything like that?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Charlie admitted, laughing again. “I knew we were busted before we did it.”

  “Why?” Godwin broke in.

  “Too many cars. It was a dead giveaway. I even told her that. I said, ‘This place is a setup.’ ”