by Monica Hesse
She nodded, Wade nodded. He’d left his description of what was going to happen open-ended. “Move on with the rest of your life” could be understood to mean that at the end of the evening, he expected Tonya to walk out a free woman.
“Are you living with Charlie?” he continued.
“He’s living with me.”
“We’ll get through it,” he said again. “We’ll get through it, and we will be done with it. Do you want to go see him when we’re done?”
“I guess,” she said. “I have kids at home.”
Wade asked if there was a friend or neighbor who could come over to be with them, and she gave him a name. He asked if she’d seen enough cop shows on TV to see people being read their Miranda rights. She said she had. He explained that that’s what he was going to do now—read her those rights, have her sign some forms, and ask her some more questions.
“Where do you want to start at?” he asked, when she was done with the papers.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said.
“How did this all get started?” he tried again.
“I really don’t know,” she said. “I mean, because tonight, you know, we went to go to Walmart. You know, my sons are having birthdays on Wednesday, and we were just driving around. I mean, you know, we went to Walmart. We still had that stuff in the back of the van, and I mean, Charlie asked me to drop him off, so I dropped him off, and then, you know, the rest is history. The next thing I knew, we’re being surrounded. I was shocked, you know, but I know he did set that fire tonight.”
The gears in Wade’s brain started turning. When he’d referred to “this” getting started, he’d introduced the chance for her to explain and take responsibility for five months’ worth of fires. She hadn’t. Instead, she’d talked about the Airport Road fire as if it were a singular event, one committed only by Charlie, and which she’d known nothing about. Wade noticed that Tonya wasn’t crying anymore. She was putting herself together with each passing moment. He thought it was like watching a lightbulb turn off in front of him.
“Where did you drop him off tonight?” he continued, going along with the idea that Charlie was the only arsonist.
“In Melfa.”
“And you said you were going to Walmart?”
“No,” she said. “We had gone to Walmart before this, and he wanted to ride around.”
“What did he say when he said he wanted you to drop him off?”
“He told me to drop him off and turn around and come back and get him.”
“How many times have you dropped him off?” Wade tried, again leaving the door open to discuss other fires.
“This is the only time I’ve ever dropped him off anywhere.”
That had been a crucial question. Tonya had no idea that nine miles away Charlie was breaking down and telling Godwin and Barnes that Tonya had been the actual fire starter in some of the arsons, and the driver in all the rest. To corroborate that, Wade needed Tonya to admit that she had been in the car on multiple occasions in which Charlie had asked to get out. That was the lever on which he would move the case.
For now, he backed off.
“Are your parents still alive?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you have anybody other than your kids?”
“No.”
“Do your kids have anybody other than you?”
“No.”
“You’ve never been in trouble before?”
“No.”
“You’re not on probation or anything like that?”
“No.”
“You’re already ahead,” he encouraged her. “Most of the people we deal with are on probation. You’ve got a good, clean past. You’ve never been in any kind of trouble. Even if it was, it was something minor. You’ve got your kids that you have to deal with. Your kids don’t have anyone else, and you’re sitting here, and you’re being cooperative. Everything you’ve got going for you is positive. Let’s keep it that way.”
“Uh-huh.”
But keeping it that way meant that she had to be 100 percent honest, he said. Did she understand? Right now, the two of them together had to have this conversation, and she needed to be 100 percent honest. “The same sheet of music, 100 percent. Is that a deal?”
Charlie had been under stress, she offered. “He’s been under some sort of stress the whole relationship. Either between work, you know, money to pay the bills—this, that, and the other. I’m not sure if you know anything about Charlie, but he’s not your typical person. I sit there all the time and pick on him because, I mean, you can tell him to do something and he’ll turn around twice and forget it . . . He always has these strange ways of acting that would make you think he’s on drugs, but he’s not.”
“I like Charlie,” Wade offered. “But we have to make sure we are all on the same sheet of music.”
“Right.”
“What is the first fire that you were aware of?”
“Tonight,” she said.
“Tonight?”
“Tonight,” she said. She went to Walmart to get two plastic containers to store stuff under the bed, and then another container to put shoes in, and then she got some Easter candy that was on sale. And after that, they went out driving—or actually, Charlie was driving. Then he got out and told her to take over the wheel, saying, “Go up the road and turn around and come back and get me.” So that’s what she did.
“You didn’t ask him why?”
“No,” she said.
“How many times have you gotten in the car and dropped him off—”
“That’s the first time that I’ve dropped him off anywhere,” she interrupted. Sometimes he worked late, she explained. Sometimes he worked late, and then came home for dinner, and then went back to work. Or she always assumed he was going back to work. She couldn’t say for sure what he was doing.
“What does he normally drive?” Wade asked.
“He usually drives his truck, but he’s been driving the van that his granddad gave him.”
“How many nights have you been out riding around with him?”
“Quite a few.”
“You never dropped him off anywhere?”
“No.”
What had they bought at Walmart? Just the storage containers for under the bed? And they left around 9 p.m.? And then they rode around? Okay. What about when he was driving? Did he ever stop in the middle of the road “and you stayed in the truck while he went out and did anything?”
It was just another way of asking whether she’d dropped him off.
“No,” she said. No times. No times had she ever dropped Charlie off anywhere.
He could feel her stiffening every time he circled back to the idea of dropping Charlie off. She was not merely closing herself off to questions, but actively deflecting them. This put him in treacherous territory. She’d agreed to proceed with the interview without having an attorney present, but as soon as she requested one, the conversation would be over. She was obviously getting wise to the fact that they weren’t questioning her merely because they wanted her to implicate Charlie.
Wade decided to back off from the conversation, hoping that another agent might have more luck. Beside him, Keenon Hook had been listening in on the entire interview. Wade leaned back to let Hook take over, effectively disappearing himself from the conversation.
“Tonya, I don’t think I’ve properly introduced myself,” Hook began. “I’m not from around here, so I might need you to help me a little more to understand some of the things he knows”—he gestured toward Wade—“that I don’t. Wade knows Charlie, and has told me a little bit. Obviously, I don’t know either one of you. Help me to understand.”
He asked her to tell him about her house, her neighborhood, her kids—the fight that put the older one out of school, and how the homeschooling was going—“Pretty good,” she said. “The teacher comes out once a week.” The conversation was pleasant, chatty, and he didn’t touch on anything r
elated to the fires.
“You must have been working before?” he asked. “What were you doing?”
“Taking care of mentally retarded people,” she said.
“Is it like a residential care place?” he asked. “So it’s residential, like the mentally retarded people live there?”
“Yes, fourteen people. I would work shifts there.”
They talked more about her work and whether she liked it. He was exceedingly polite and solicitous. When he wanted clarification on something, he preceded the question by saying, “Forgive me,” as if any holdups in the interview were the fault of his weak memory. If he caught a small discrepancy in any of her life stories, he would blame them on his own confusion: “I thought you stopped because of your son, though?” he inquired after Tonya told him she’d left her job in 2011—she’d previously said her son hadn’t left school until 2012.
“It sounds like you and Charlie have really created a stable environment for your children,” he told her. “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices in our lives to deal with their problems and issues that come up, and it sounds like you’ve done that, and that is, you know, commendable. I mean, I really admire and respect you for doing that.”
His solicitousness continued when, several minutes later, he finally pivoted to the fires. Forgive him—but did he understand that Charlie had been involved with the fire companies, but wasn’t any longer? Hadn’t he enjoyed it? Had he ever thought about going back? What about Tonya—had she ever thought about volunteering with a fire company?
“No.”
What size shoe did she wear?
“Eight and a half.”
“I only say one thing to you right now, and that is me and Scott Wade and everybody else in this county are truly thankful to you. Because you clearly exercised self-restraint, and you were careful. Not a single person got hurt, and I cannot tell you how happy I am to hear that. This really was a victimless situation, and these buildings were unattended, and they don’t matter much anymore, and you guys were just being very careful about what you chose and where you chose it.”
As Hook was describing them, the fires were a minor blip, something everyone would easily get over. He didn’t mention police overtime, late night meetings, tedious roadblocks, exhausted firemen, insurance claims, men in tents, burning landmarks, and a whole county white-knuckling it through five months and dozens of fires.
Tonya stopped responding to Hook’s statements, but he kept talking—offering explanations for what could have happened and what might have gone wrong. Hell, he said, she and Charlie probably hadn’t even set them all. There were probably copycats who set some of them. Maybe she and Charlie were, themselves, copycats. But if she didn’t talk about the ones they were responsible for, they might end up getting blamed for more than their fair share.
“Hey, I’m not the Eastern Shore Arsonist,” he offered, suggesting an “out”—a way Tonya could confess to some of the fires without necessarily taking blame for all of them. “I’m somebody out here just relieving stress. You don’t know what we have going on in our lives. I had to quit my job to take care of my son—and believe me, I know what it’s like to reorganize your life around a child—and maybe things aren’t going the way I wish they would, and I’m frustrated. That’s an explanation that people can understand.”
He waited.
“I can’t tell you something I don’t know,” she said.
Wade, who had been sitting silently for several minutes, now broke in again.
“You need to start looking out for Tonya,” he told her. “What would you say if I were to tell you that Charlie told us—just listen to me—what would you say if I told you that Charlie told us that you dropped him off for, like, twenty-five fires?”
“I don’t know why he would say that,” Tonya said.
Wade didn’t know either. Though he’d stopped by the task force where Charlie was being questioned earlier, at this point he didn’t know the extent of what Charlie had said; he’d spent the rest of the night sitting in a room with Tonya.
The two men had tried appealing to both her vanity and her humanity—providing her with “outs” that would present her in a flattering light. They had walked her up to the same questions again and again, hoping that her story might change or elaborate. They both had tried to present themselves as full of admiration and understanding. In response, she’d barely spoken more than a sentence at a time. Wade decided it was time to up the ante.
“I’m a very patient person, but I’ve got some other things to do,” he said, feigning irritation. In fact, he was accustomed to spending hours on end with suspects, letting stories unspool and then unravel. Sometimes confessions took time. He wasn’t being impatient now, he was being strategic. His presence seemed to be shutting her down, and they were running out of things to try. “If he”—meaning Hook—“wants to sit here and talk to you, he’s more than welcome.” As a final tactic, he would leave.
As Hook’s final tactic, he would invite in the profiler Jon Cromer, who was currently waiting outside the interview room door, and who, just a few hours earlier had been wondering, along with the other psychological profilers, whether they would ever catch the arsonist at all.
Like Scott Wade, Cromer had assumed that the arrest of the arsonists was an April Fools’ joke. He had been in his room at the Holiday Inn when he got the call from one of the investigators. “Nice try, I’m not buying it,” he’d said. It was only when he saw the blue lights of a marked vehicle pull up in the parking lot that he believed it wasn’t a prank and grabbed his wallet and keys. Nobody had planned on him interjecting into Tonya’s interview, but at this point it couldn’t hurt.
He entered the room and addressed Hook first. “The guys that are meeting with Charlie called, and I’m waiting on the situation,” he said, before turning to Tonya.
“I’m Jon Cromer. I’m with the state police,” he told her.
A few times during the interview, Wade and Hook had alluded to the fact that Charlie was being questioned at another station. Cromer was the first person who had been in steady contact with the police interrogating Charlie, and who could attest to what Charlie had said or not said. And he’d made that clear to Tonya, with his first statement to Hook upon entering the room.
Cromer knew it was a common technique for officers to tell suspects that their accomplices were tattling on them, whether or not that was true. He sensed Tonya would be smart enough to know this, too. He wanted her to understand that this conversation wasn’t just a ploy. He decided to put all of his cards on the table.
“I’ve been in with Charlie,” he told her. “He’s been going through them one by one. I want you to understand. You are going to stand in front of a judge regarding these fires, in one of two ways. Number one, you are going to deny it. Or you are going to say, ‘I made a mistake.’ Listen to me. Charlie told us at 2:34 a.m., he told us that you lit the church fire. He also said you lit twelve of the first fifteen. He said he never got out of the car, because you did it.
“Now I wouldn’t lie to you, but what has me worried is that you are going to be standing there in front of that judge, the only one in the mix who is denying that they were there. And I’m thinking, I would not want to stand there. We don’t need a confession from anybody to take them to court. We need evidence, and trust me, there’s plenty of evidence. Ma’am, I am going to tell you, when the evidence is brought through the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office to court, it is going to be overwhelming.”
He told her about the photograph from Church Road, the one in which there was a figure that everyone had suspected was a woman. He talked about her cell phone, and how technicians would be able to see whether it had really been at home all those nights she said Charlie was at work and she was at home.
He knew he must be using the right tone, because her eyes were locked on his, she was leaning in and fully engaged. Cromer felt like he was watching her balance on a precipice, and it wasn’t clear yet which w
ay she would fall. He’d been in plenty of interviews before where, as a strategy, he’d feigned a certain position or set of emotions in order to elicit a particular response. This time he found it wasn’t necessary. He genuinely believed it would be better for Tonya if she confessed. He could see her future stretching in front of her, two possible paths depending on what she said now. He found himself talking to Tonya like he talked to his own daughter, as calmly and matter-of-factly as he could, worried that she did not understand what her silence was costing her.
“Everywhere your phone has gone, whether it’s been in the on position, it has been pinging towers logging your location,” he told her. “That is the truth. You will not see your phone. You will not see the routes the phones were drawing on a map. You will not see that man until you testify, and he is honest, and he’s a good man. He’s the only one that is going to admit to the fires. He’s going to come clean with me. I do not want you to admit to something you did not do, but I want you to understand this clearly. I want you to tell the truth about what you did do, because if you don’t, you will stand in front of the judge. There will be Charlie. And he will say, ‘I’m sorry. I made a mistake. These things in life set these things into motion, and it went crazy. For two days of it, we had fun. Then it went crazy, but that’s the truth of it, judge.’ And when Charlie gives details that no one but the person who was there would possibly know, then the judge will know he’s telling the truth. And where will you be? I would not want to—”
“You give me a paper and I’ll sign it,” she broke in, “because I haven’t done anything. So write it up and let me put my signature on it, and you can take me to a cell and do what you need to do.”
“Help us—” he began again.
“I don’t know what to tell you all. Write it up and let me sign it and let me go. Put me in a cell.”
“Tell me—” he stared again.
“That’s all I know.”
“Here’s what I want to tell you. They said—”
“What don’t you get? I didn’t do it, and I don’t know. What don’t you all understand?” she asked.