by Monica Hesse
Here was a county that had almost burned down. Here was that county moving on. All of these fires could have happened only in Accomack, a place with empty, abandoned buildings, prominently signaling a fall from prosperity. Where else was there so much emptiness, so many places for someone to sneak around undetected? Except that maybe it could have happened in Iowa, heart of the heartland, where rural citizenry has been decreasing for the past century. Maybe in southern Ohio, where emptying factories led to emptying towns. Maybe in eastern Oregon, where rural counties had aged themselves almost out of existence. Maybe it could have happened anywhere.
By the numbers, Accomack could look like a desolate place to live. The Opportunity Index, a nonprofit measurement of sixteen different indicators of success in every county in America, gives it a forty-three out of one hundred. But numbers can be misleading. To residents, statistics could not account for the deep feeling of belonging that came from being able to find your surname in three hundred-year-old county records. They couldn’t account for how clean the air felt and how orange the sun was setting over the Chesapeake Bay.
How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand stars in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.
I went to Accomack County and I found endless metaphors for a dying county in a changing landscape. There were endless metaphors that went the opposite way, too: rural life as a fairy tale, better than the rest of the country.
The reality is probably somewhere in between. The people who lived in Accomack were happy to live in Accomack. It wasn’t small, it was close-knit. It wasn’t backward, it was simple. There weren’t a hundred things to do every night, but if you went to the one available thing, you were pretty much guaranteed to run into someone you knew.
As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing. We gorge on it ourselves and we pass it down to generations. One afternoon in Accomack, I drove to the Barrier Islands Center, an old house (an “almshouse,” actually, a place where the poor and the mentally ill used to be sent to live and labor) that has been converted to a museum exploring life on the old Eastern Shore. I watched a short documentary about Hog Island, a community off the coast that once had its own culture and its own traditions, but then was forced to disband when the waters got too high. The documentary was full of people nostalgically talking about how it no longer exists. The island had been unpopulated for eighty years by the time of the documentary’s making, but the tone was still wistful, even though all of the living interviewees were people who had left the island as babies.
But maybe rural America isn’t dying so much as it’s Shucker-ing: adjusting, adapting, becoming something new, getting a new outdoor sign and adding jalapeno hush puppies to the menu. I’d like to think that.
In the end, the grandest sweeping statement I can make about Accomack is this: There were buildings that burned down. Some of the buildings that burned down had meant something to people, and their burning was a tragedy. Some of the buildings that burned down were ugly and old. Nobody knew who they even belonged to and why they were still there. Those buildings weren’t missed. A normal person wouldn’t have burned them down, but the fact that Charlie and Tonya did—well, that wasn’t the worst thing in the world, either. And the people who really made the county, the firefighters and teachers and librarians and police officers, they were all still there. That mattered.
TWO TRIALS WERE OVER and there were as many as sixty left to go. It seemed almost incredible to the residents of Accomack County that they could still be so far from completion. The houses that had burned down began to be reclaimed by the land, with grass and vines growing over the broken structures.
Tonya hadn’t broken. She hadn’t asked for a plea deal, despite the guilty verdict with the second case. What she did do was fire Allan Zaleski. “To Whom It May Concern,” she wrote in neat cursive on a page of notebook paper addressed to the courthouse. “I am writing to find out the proper procedure for having your public defender removed from your case. I don’t find the legal advice I am given to be in my best interest.” While Judge Tyler was considering her request, there was also the matter of her sentencing. Charlie still hadn’t been sentenced. Tonya had received a sentencing recommendation from jurors in her second trial, in which she had been found guilty, but the judge needed to affirm those recommendations. He also had to sentence her for the first trial, in which she had submitted a last-minute Alford plea.
On the morning of her sentencing, a brisk day in April 2014—over a year since her first arrest—Judge Tyler explained what he’d been thinking as he’d mulled over Tonya’s punishment. It was true, the judge said, that sometimes the court gave more leniency to felons who had pleaded guilty. That was because a guilty plea, submitted ahead of time, relieved the Commonwealth of the burden and expense of a trial. Criminals were rewarded for that. But this is not what had happened on this occasion, he said. Tonya had pleaded guilty only at the end of a costly and inconvenient trial.
Because of this, he planned on following the method he’d established for sentencing over a long career on the bench. If he had a repeat offender in his court, “I just simply look at what their jail time was last time and double it,” he explained. Therefore, because the previous jury had recommended a sentence of three-and-a-half years for the charge in which Tonya was found guilty, he would impose a sentence of seven years for the one in which she’d submitted an Alford plea. He wanted the sentences to run consecutively.
That meant the total time she would spend in prison, for just two out of her sixty-odd charges, would be more than a decade.
While Tonya stood impassively, not reacting at all to the judgment that had just been placed, Tyler said that there was one more piece of business to deal with. Tonya had written a letter requesting a new attorney. Did she still want that?
“Yes,” she said.
Okay, then, he said. He would have a new attorney appointed for her, and that new attorney could take her through the rest of her trials.
ELSEWHERE, as the court proceedings continued:
A proposal to build eighty-four new chicken houses was brought forth to the county, and Accomack began debating its past and its future. Were big, modern farms the pathway to rebuilding the shore’s financial success? Were they a temporary solution that would ruin the land? The county began planning town halls, to which hundreds of neighbors would come and listen to environmentalists and chicken executives, and argue, and watch slide show presentations debating the merits and downfalls of chicken poop.
The Tasley Volunteer Fire Department, which had long ago come to the conclusion that it was time to upgrade from their old, out-of-date space, began searching for a plot of land on which to build a new station. Ultimately, they chose a lot right across from the now burned-down Whispering Pines resort, big enough to hold a three-bay, modern station with modern equipment. Jeff Beall decided not to run for chief of the Tasley department the following year. He knew people didn’t blame him for the fires, but he was the guy whose roster Charlie had been on, and that knowledge weighed on him. There was some infighting in the station about which direction the department should go, and several members ended up leaving. One of those members was Bryan Applegate. It didn’t have anything to do with his brother, he told people. He was just looking for a change of scenery so he started running with the company in Onancock.
Of the Virginia State Police investigators who had worked the case, Scott Wade and Rob Barnes stayed in their same jobs with their same titles. Glenn Neal, who was deeply affected by the knowledge that the arsonist had been his friend, ended up leaving the investigative branch of the police. He went back to being a highway trooper. He was happier that way.
After the arsonists were caught, nobody had much need for an Eastern Shore Arsonist Hunters T-shirt anymore. The ones that
had already been purchased—sometimes people would still wear them while doing yard work or washing the car, but it wasn’t with the same sense of civic pride as during the arsons. It was more of a memento of a weird time in everyone’s lives, or a talisman from a shared experience. ESAH founder Matt Hart ended up donating the leftovers to a nonprofit and heard that those somehow ended up at a homeless shelter in north Philadelphia.
Jon Cromer, the police profiler who had questioned Tonya on the night of her arrest, would silently add her to the mental list of prisoners he hoped would one day talk to him about what they’d done and why they’d done it. He thought that he would learn a lot from her.
CHAPTER 28
“IT’S OVER”
IT ENDED. OF COURSE IT DID, it finally did, and like a lot of things, by the time it actually ended, people were starting to become a little less aware of the fact that it was still going on at all. As the third trial approached, there was a sense of exhaustion, of gearing up all over again for another trial where Tonya would say she didn’t remember anything and Charlie would say that in spite of the fact that he was testifying against this woman, he still loved her.
Tonya’s new attorney, a short-haired, no-nonsense woman from Virginia Beach named Janee’ Joslin, was not going down without a fight. At a motion hearing she argued that the venue of the third trial should be changed yet again. “It’s my opinion, Your Honor, that Virginia Beach is no longer an appropriate forum for any further trials of Miss Bundick in this matter,” she said. The saturation of the crimes had now traveled miles across the Bay Bridge-Tunnel; the arsons were just too famous.
The judge denied that request, and so everyone suited up again, and on a Monday morning in early April of 2015—now two years after Tonya’s arrest—everyone traveled to Virginia Beach again, at an expense rate that one local news outlet reported was costing the Commonwealth $3,000 a day just in motel and meal costs for all of the personnel required.
Gary Agar checked into his hotel room at the midpriced chain that all of the Commonwealth staff was staying in. Later when interviewed about this, he couldn’t remember exactly the order of what happened next. It was either late that Sunday or early the next morning, when he’d already put on a dark suit and a blue striped tie and was about to drive to the courthouse, that he got a phone call.
Tonya’s new attorney. She was willing to arrange a deal.
The trial was scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. For all of the previous trials and hearings, Judge Tyler had started exactly on time, with the courtroom open fifteen or twenty minutes early for spectators to get seats. That Monday, the doors remained shut. Spectators arrived and tugged on the door a few times, just to be sure. There were a diminished number of reporters compared with the previous trials, as news organizations decided they couldn’t afford to keep sending staff to cover trials in which the pattern had become predictable. There were other crimes to follow. Other weirdos. Accomack had its moment, but after a while, the whole thing went from exciting to just tiresome.
Maybe Tonya had an even newer new boyfriend than the minister, people joked. Maybe he was getting ready to testify. Maybe he and Charlie had somehow run into each other and gotten into a fight.
Finally, the doors were opened. Inside, the jury panel had not been seated. The air-conditioning was working overtime. Tonya wore an orange prison jumpsuit and by her side, instead of Allan Zaleski, was Joslin, a middle-aged woman in a navy pantsuit.
Judge Tyler explained what had just happened. Tonya had submitted another Alford plea, the same guilty plea she had submitted for the previous trial, the one in which she had said she wasn’t actually guilty at all. This time it was not for just one count, but for all of them, all sixty-one remaining counts of arsons.
“I think,” Judge Tyler said from the bench, once he had ascertained that the plea had been entered into willingly by both parties, “This concludes the matter.”
The trials were over.
In the end, nobody knew what made Tonya change her mind. Was she spooked by the previous verdict? Did she begin to see her situation as hopeless? Was she simply exhausted? Would she ever say?
The journalists who had expected to have at least two hours of jury selection before they needed to begin taking notes in earnest or file web updates for their stories now realized that something big had happened; there was the sound of pens clicking as they tried to keep up.
The plea deal arranged by Gary Agar and Tonya Bundick’s attorney called for seven additional years. Added to the sentencings from her previous two trials, the amount of time she would spend in prison would be seventeen and a half years. By the time she got out, she would have spent nearly a third of her own life in prison. Too old for short skirts and tube tops, too old to turn heads in the same way she had before this whole mess started. The bars she had gone to already didn’t exist anymore. The sentencing worked out to around three and a half months per fire.
Joslin left the courtroom without commenting, walking briskly to her car and waving off the reporters who followed her with microphones and notepads. Gary Agar emerged from the courtroom and, in his deep, slow, rumbling voice, gave interview after interview to the reporters who had lined up for comment.
“It’s a long time in prison for her,” he said to the first local news station, which put a microphone in his face and caught him in the hallway. “This was a horrendous crime that they committed over a long period of time, and now they need to spend a long period of time in the penitentiary because of what she did, and to prevent others from doing the same thing.”
The last part of his statement was, perhaps, superfluous. The chance of there being another person managing to do the same thing Tonya had just been convicted of, burning down a county, building by building over half a year’s time, was very, very small.
Two days after Tonya’s sentence, Charlie would be sentenced, too, to fifteen years—a shorter sentence than hers, presumably because of his original confession and his cooperation throughout Tonya’s trials. He’d already served two of the fifteen years in the Accomack jail. By the time the sentencing came along, he was mostly just relieved that he would now get to be moved to a bigger facility, someplace with a better exercise yard and maybe a woodworking class and a cafeteria with more variety. He’d spent a lot of time practicing drawing tattoo art with a pen and paper and he knew how to use a pen and a wire to ink prison tattoos. This, he knew, could be a lucrative business in prison, and he wondered if he might be able to get into it himself. Eventually, Charlie was moved from Accomack to a facility in Central Virginia.
The day after the trial that wasn’t, Carol Vaughn, the Eastern Shore News reporter who had been covering the trial, began her story with an opening paragraph that was only two words long: “It’s over.” Unlike the early articles and Facebook posts, which gathered dozens and dozens of comments and reactions in the early days after the arrests, these got one, or two, plus a handful of weary “Likes” from people who couldn’t be bothered with any more of a reaction. “Good,” wrote one commenter on an article published by the local public radio station. “Now lock the stupid c--- up and throw away the key; let’s not have to see her fugly face again.” The only other comment was a cheeky two-word response: “Bonfire Bundick.”
Immediately after the trial that wasn’t, the court clerk, along with Sheriff Todd Godwin and a handful of deputies, decided to go for an early lunch at a nearby hoagie chain. The mood was celebratory, the clerk bought everyone a cookie, the deputies talked and joked and speculated about how bad the traffic would be on the ride home. Bad in Virginia Beach, at least, which was why none of them lived in Virginia Beach. Once they crossed the Bay Bridge-Tunnel and were back safe on the Eastern Shore, all of the cars would fall away. It was the off-season. Only locals would be driving through.
The hoagie place was a little bit out of the way, but it was reasonably priced and everyone liked the sandwiches. Also, it wasn’t a chain that existed on the Eastern Shore, which made going there se
em even more like a special occasion. Appropriately, though nobody commented on it at the time, the name of the place was Firehouse Subs.
A little after noon, they got back in their cars. The lunchtime traffic was bad but not too bad, and they hit the Accomack border some ninety minutes later, and everything was quiet and whatever passions had caused the fires had ended, and nothing was burning anymore.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Tonya Bundick and Charlie Smith celebrate Halloween at Shuckers, the site of their meeting and courtship. (Photo courtesy of Seth Matthews)
Firefighters work to control one of the larger arsons, a fire at the former Mallards Restaurant near Onancock, Virginia, in March 2013. (Photo courtesy of Jay Diem)
Tasley fire chief Jeff Beall and captain Richie Bridges, a volunteer with the company, rest after fighting another fire. (Photo courtesy of Don Amadeo, Tasley Volunteer Fire Company)
A vintage postcard depicts Whispering Pines in its heyday as the Eastern Shore’s premier resort. (The Tichnor Brothers Postcard Collection, courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library)
Whispering Pines, already in disrepair, became a burned shell after fire destroyed it in March 2013. (© 2014, Bonnie Jo Mount / The Washington Post)
The Tasley firehouse, where Charlie had volunteered since his twelfth birthday. The Tasley Volunteer Fire Company was called out for more arson fires than any other Accomack fire department. (Photo by Lydia Outland)