American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  But it was all confusing. One day a deputy came to his cell and told him that the sheriff wanted to see him. Charlie was escorted from the rear part of the building, where the cells were, up to the front, where Godwin’s office was just off the lobby and overlooked a parking lot. Charlie sat down on the visitor side of Godwin’s big wooden desk, and Godwin got straight to the point.

  “If she really loved you, why is she out on bond seeing another guy?” Godwin asked him. He had it on good authority that Tonya had been spotted going on dates since being released from the jail.

  Charlie had no earthly idea what Godwin was talking about. He told himself it was a ploy, just them trying to get him to turn against Tonya. He told Godwin that the whole jail system and the whole county was probably corrupt.

  Tonya did love him. If she didn’t, why had she recently agreed to marry him, even now, while she was free and he was in jail? Marriage seemed the prudent thing to do—they both had heard of the rule that prevented married couples from having to testify against each other in court—but also, Charlie wanted to. So now they were trying to plan a wedding, even if it wasn’t quite the wedding they’d originally had in mind. Charlie’s job had been to ask his youngest sister to procure a wedding ring and get it to Tonya.

  “Make sure you get up with Sarah,” Tonya wrote him in a letter one day. “Hopefully she will do as promised.”

  “So have you gotten up with Sarah yet?” she asked in another letter. “Hope she does it before my court date. If not, it will be too late.”

  “I never got vows. When did you send them?” she wrote another day. Eventually, she mailed him the vows she’d written that she planned to use in a theoretical ceremony. She told him, as he remembered, that she was going to ask her lawyer whether it was possible to bring a preacher into the jail’s visitor space, to do their ceremony right there.

  Would she have done any of that if she wasn’t in love with him?

  The friends and family who still talked to Charlie told him he was being a fool. The whole business about marriage being for their mutual benefit didn’t make any sense. What did it matter if Tonya testified against Charlie? He’d already confessed to the crimes. The only person who would benefit from this arrangement was Tonya, who had continued to say she was innocent. That’s why she wanted the ring before her court date, people told Charlie. She didn’t want Charlie testifying against her.

  “Have you asked Sarah about the ring?” she wrote again. “Don’t say I know about it,” she instructed him. His sister, she would later explain, was not Tonya’s biggest fan. She wasn’t sure if Sarah would buy the ring for her if she thought Tonya was orchestrating it.

  Eventually, she would decide that the importance of getting married outweighed any fear of her future sister-in-law’s negative feelings. “Does he still want to?” she wrote in a letter directly to Charlie’s sister, trying to move the process along. “Can we get married here? What is the law on this? Because I want to, soon.”

  Through all of this, Charlie sat, and he thought, and he wrote, and he called Tonya, once or twice a week as she would allow. The Accomack jail was boring, even as jails went, but he had Tonya’s letters, and she was a faithful correspondent and they were going to be married. There was so little that was certain in this world and that was certain.

  One afternoon a guard came to him again and said someone wanted to talk to him. Charlie thought it might be his lawyer. But instead of leading him to the visitor’s room, the guard took him back to Todd Godwin’s office. Charlie sat again at the big desk with the front window across from the sheriff who, despite what Charlie had said in anger the last time, he actually believed to be a fair and trustworthy person. In front of him on the big desk were a pile of papers.

  “Charlie, we’ve known each other a really long time,” Charlie remembered Godwin saying. “I just can’t believe you’re going to spend the rest of your life here for a girl who didn’t really love you.”

  “You need to know what’s going on,” Godwin remembered telling Charlie. “She might be telling you something, but she’s got another boyfriend.”

  Charlie was ready to protest again, but this time there was evidence. There was a stack of papers on Godwin’s desk, and he now slid them over to Charlie. The papers were photocopies, and the photocopies were of letters, and the letters appeared to be from Tonya. Charlie recognized her handwriting. When he read the words, he recognized her in those, too. In these letters, she talked about her favorite sexual positions and other intimate things. “Suckin’ and fuckin’,” he would later describe the content. “One asked how big the guy’s dick was.” After a few paragraphs of a few letters, he couldn’t read any more. They were love letters that Tonya had written back while she had been a prisoner in Godwin’s jail, where all correspondence could be monitored. They weren’t to Charlie. They looked to be to another inmate at another jail, someone she’d met through a prisoner pen-pal service.

  “I need a cigarette,” Charlie said.

  The sheriff arranged for a pack to be brought in, opening the front window so Charlie could blow smoke outside. Neither of them talked much. Charlie felt dazed.

  A little while after that, Carl Bundick came to visit again, sat in front of his client and said in grave seriousness that testifying against Tonya was Charlie’s only shot. It was a possibility or even a probability that if Charlie did not cooperate, he would never be a free man again.

  “It’s time to wake up,” Carl said.

  For the first time, Charlie forced himself to think of what was at stake. If he didn’t cooperate with the prosecution, there was a good chance he wouldn’t see his daughter again. He wouldn’t have a chance to rebuild a new life. He wouldn’t have the chance to make amends for his old one. He would be sentenced and sent to a prison on the mainland. It would be too far and too expensive for anyone to come and visit him, and that was assuming anyone even wanted to. And while he was there, the whole time, as he turned forty, fifty, seventy, he wouldn’t have Tonya because Tonya didn’t really love him anymore. When he eventually got out, if he eventually got out, he would be alone.

  So this time, when his attorney laid out the situation in the same matter-of-fact way that he had done several times before, Charlie still didn’t say anything, because saying something made it feel a little too final. But he nodded.

  The love story, the one Charlie had thought was too good for him from the beginning, was now breaking into pieces. In the coming days, he would call her again, and they would talk again, and he would cry on the phone again, telling her how much he loved her again and wondering if he should tell her about the way that he’d just agreed to betray her, or that he knew about the way she’d betrayed him.

  But there wouldn’t be too many of those conversations. On December 2, 2013, Tonya Bundick was arrested again and indicted on sixty-one additional counts of arson. This time she would be taken to the Eastern Shore Regional Jail down in Northampton County where they couldn’t pass any more notes. “I know you love her,” Charlie remembered his attorney saying, on the afternoon that he finally agreed to testify. “But she don’t no more give a damn about you than she does the Man in the Moon.”

  CHAPTER 23

  BURNED

  OR MAYBE SHE DIDN’T DO IT.

  So far, Tonya Bundick hadn’t announced any alibis for any of the nights of any of the fires, but what did that mean, anyway? The fires had happened over the course of several months. Memories could get foggy; she couldn’t be expected to know what she was doing those nights. And maybe there wouldn’t have been alibis anyway. Wouldn’t most people be at home, alone, during those times?

  Maybe she was the provocatively dressed mom who bragged too much on Facebook, and Charlie was the aw-shucks good old boy who was friendly with the cops and the fire department. Maybe it was easier for people to like him than her, for the abstract ways it’s sometimes easier for people to wrap their heads around difficult men than complicated women. All of the conversations that
Charlie claimed they’d had, about burning houses and broken dreams—all of those were, she would continue to steadfastly maintain, a lie.

  A while after this was all over, a self-published book appeared on Amazon.com, printed by one of those companies that will print any book whose author is willing to pay for the copies. The title was Burned, and it was about a woman named “Sonya Booneswick” who lived in “Accolake County” and was framed for a bunch of arsons that her boyfriend “Harley” committed. The author went by the pseudonym Z. Jasmine BelFord, and claimed to “have the unique ability to see the story from inside the heart and mind of Sonya.” The story, which is told in the first person, opens with the couple’s arrest, and follows Sonya as she is pitted against a system that is out to get her: the sheriff, the police, the media, the Commonwealth’s attorney, her own attorneys. She begins an affair with her bail bondsman, she begins an affair with another man, and all throughout, she protests her innocence, sometimes in verse:

  Who set those fires in the county, everyone’s hoping to collect the bounty

  It wasn’t me, was it you? Does anyone have a clue?

  Some of the poems read like Sonya-isms.

  In the book version, the character Harley ultimately kills himself at the end, riddled with grief over ruining Sonya’s life. “May his soul rise to Heaven before the Devil finds out he’s dead,” the author wrote.

  Maybe the book reflected what happened in real life to Charlie and Tonya. Maybe Charlie was orchestrating a massive plot, while playing completely dumb. It was a possibility.

  Maybe nobody knew Tonya Bundick at all.

  CHAPTER 24

  “WE’D DONE IT BEFORE”

  THE TRIALS OF TONYA BUNDICK were turning into the biggest spectacle the Eastern Shore had ever seen. Media from outlets all over Virginia had sent in requests to place cameras in the courtroom. The local news was printing updates on every incremental court procedure related to the trial.

  As it turned out, the trial wouldn’t even be on the shore. The judge, Glen Tyler, had granted the defense team’s request for the trials to be moved to Virginia Beach, a ninety-minute trip down the peninsula, through Northampton County, and across the Bay Bridge-Tunnel to the mainland. The publicity was one thing—more pressing was the fact that it might be impossible to seat a jury where one or more members didn’t own something that had burned.

  Allan Zaleski, Tonya’s court-appointed defense attorney, had been relieved for the venue change but disappointed in the ultimate location. The Norfolk-Virginia Beach area was heavily populated by military personnel, who tended to be conservative and trusting of law enforcement, and perhaps, Zaleski feared, more inclined to believe the prosecutor’s account over Tonya’s. Zaleski tried but failed to have it moved again to a county even farther away.

  Zaleski was tall, white haired, and wore a pair of glasses that he used to gesture, with grandfatherly effect, in the courtroom. He had a lot of courtroom experience, and the arsons did not represent his strangest case. That honor went to a man he’d defended for rape and murder more than a decade ago. The victim was a sailor’s wife, discovered by her husband when he came home from sea. As a suspect, police latched on to her neighbor, also a sailor. The neighbor first proclaimed his innocence, but after an eleven-hour interrogation, he not only confessed but also implicated a second assailant, his roommate and fellow seaman. The roommate initially said he was innocent, but eventually also confessed, and additionally implicated a third suspect, who in turn implicated still another. Zaleski’s client was the third suspect, a man named Derek Tice, arrested in what was originally believed to be a shocking example of mass depravity and sadism within the U.S. Navy. Their confessions were disturbing: “Dan started to strangle her to keep her from talking,” Zaleski’s client told investigators after nine hours of interrogations, “so I made a statement that, ‘Just get a knife and stab her.’ Then Dan stabbed her, then I stabbed her, then Eric stabbed her, Joe stabbed her.”

  But there was one problem. Every time a new assailant was introduced—the group eventually became known as the Norfolk Four—the man’s DNA would be tested. And none of the DNA collected from any of the alleged perpetrators ever matched what had been found at the crime scene. Their confessions didn’t match up with the evidence either: one man said they had beaten the woman to death; in fact, she had not been beaten at all. All of them went to prison anyway. Some of them protested their innocence, saying they’d only confessed out of exhaustion and fear: the interrogating detective said unless they confessed they’d get the death penalty. One of them grew to believe he must have been involved, even though he’d had an alibi. It was the only way he could make sense of how he’d ended up in jail. And then, after all that, there was another stunning twist in the case: the real killer, a man none of the Norfolk Four had ever even met before, confessed unprompted in a letter to a friend, which the friend brought to law enforcement.

  It would still take several years, and multiple complicated legal machinations, for the wrongly convicted men to be released. What had been thought of as a gang rape instead became a case study in false confessions.

  Now Zaleski was seventy-two years old and made his own hours out of a Norfolk law firm that also employed his son, Christopher. Allan also kept a small office for his occasional work on the Eastern Shore. The court system was a tricky thing over there, because so many attorneys had conflicts of interest due to prior cases. For high-profile matters, a judge would occasionally recruit a defense attorney from the mainland. Over the years, Zaleski had become one of these attorneys. He’d defended, for example, the drunk driver who killed an off-duty state trooper and his young son as they drove together to a Harry Potter book release party. No lawyer on the shore wanted that case. Zaleski took it, and the driver went to jail for ten years and then got out and crashed another car in another DUI.

  Zaleski wasn’t a true believer, not the type to think all his clients were innocent. What mattered was what could be proved in a court of law. And that’s what he asked clients. Not “Did you do it?” but “Can they prove you did it?” He hadn’t been Tonya’s original assigned attorney, but the original lawyer had recused herself due to a conflict of interest. Judge Tyler called Zaleski to ask if he would take over.

  The duration between Tonya’s initial arrest and her first trial was eight months. Commonwealth’s attorney Gary Agar had used every day of it strategizing how to build his case. The fact that Charlie had agreed to testify was important; what Agar didn’t know is whether Charlie’s testimony would be sufficient. He was, after all, a convicted felon. The jury might hold that against him, just like they might hold against him the fact that he was Tonya’s spurned lover and not exactly an unbiased party. Agar needed corroboration. But he didn’t have any fingerprints or DNA evidence. He didn’t have any other witnesses. What he had besides Charlie was a lot of “riding around.”

  And, he had phone calls. State troopers Johnson and Burke, who caught Charlie, thought they had seen him communicating on the phone as he ran away from the fire. Charlie himself had said that Tonya would typically drop him off to light a fire, and that he would call her cell phone when he was ready to be picked up. If that was true, there should be records of those calls. Agar had never employed cell-phone tower evidence before, but he was familiar with the general concept: When a cell phone was used, it connected to the nearest available tower. Each tower’s coverage was divided into three sectors, facing in three different directions. Placing a cell phone within a certain sector gave the information even more specificity.

  Agar decided three things were necessary in order for the cell records to be useful. First, he needed to look for nights in which the cell phones had called each other around the same time that a fire had been reported. Second, during the times of the calls, the two phones both had to be located in the same sector of the same cell phone tower, near the fire, which would aid in supporting the idea that Tonya was idling in the car nearby, waiting for a pickup call. And third,
the calls couldn’t take place within the same sector as Tonya and Charlie’s house on Matthews Road—if it did, the defense could argue that Tonya had been talking to Charlie while she was at home and while he was, unbeknownst to her, out lighting a fire.

  Agar found several calls that fit those criteria, including on the night Charlie and Tonya were caught. To his list of potential witnesses, Agar added a Verizon Wireless expert.

  While Agar’s office combed through phone records looking for the best evidence against Tonya, the Zaleski team—Allan and son Christopher, who would be joining his father for Tonya’s defense—focused on negotiating how the charges against their client would be tried. If all sixty-two counts were packed into one trial, Allan worried the jury would get exhausted. They would stop paying attention to the evidence, or lack thereof, and just assume that anyone brought forth on that many charges must be guilty. So he wanted lots of trials. “Each case, fresh and new,” he explained to the Virginian Pilot newspaper in an interview. The prosecution wanted the opposite. Multiple trials would stretch county resources and further anger an already agitated community. Besides, the fires were part of a “common plan,” Agar had argued to Judge Tyler at a hearing on the subject, which meant they should be part of a common trial. “All were at night,” he said. “All buildings were unoccupied, no accelerant was used, all were on secondary roadways.” The judge had sided with the Zaleskis, ruling that the trials could be split up, one per count if necessary.

  Sixty-two trials. Even if they moved along at three per year, a quick clip, there was a good chance that by the time the legal proceedings were over, many of the main players would be dead.