American Fire

by Monica Hesse

  Accomack County Sheriff Todd Godwin works a police checkpoint on U.S. Route 13 in Tasley, Virginia, on March 8, 2013. (Photo courtesy of Jay Diem)

  Charlie’s auto shop and Tonya’s clothing store shared a small, weather-beaten storefront in downtown Tasley. (Photo courtesy of Don Amadeo, Tasley Volunteer Fire Company)

  Charlie is interviewed by Todd Godwin and Rob Barnes on the night of his arrest, April 1, 2013.

  Charlie’s and Tonya’s mugshots, taken on the night of their arrest, April 1, 2013, at Accomack County Jail. (Accomack County Jail)

  Tonya consults with one of her attorneys, Christopher Zaleski, on the first day of her first trial in January 2014. (Vicki Cronis-Nohe / Virginia-Pilot via Associated Press)

  Charlie wipes away tears with cuffed hands as he testifies against Tonya on the stand during one of her trials. (Vicki Cronis-Nohe / Virginia-Pilot via Associated Press)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I talked about moving to Accomack for several months to research this book, people issued all kinds of warnings about small-town life: how closed-off it could be and how it would be difficult to find anyone who would talk. I have never found a warning to be further from the truth. People in Accomack invited me to barbecues, met me at the movie theater, sat with me at church potlucks, rescued me when I ran out of gas, and helped fix broken taillights on my car. Most importantly, they gave me their time, lots of it, helping me to understand as best I could what it was like to live in Accomack County during the deeply bizarre five and a half months of the arsons. They dug through old meeting notes, Facebook updates, and phone records to check their memories, which greatly aided me; the book would have been impossible without their help.

  I didn’t keep track of how many people I interviewed for this book. But the number well exceeds a hundred, including Accomack County government employees; Virginia State Police investigators and patrolmen; investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; members of the Accomack County sheriff’s department; town historians; property owners whose buildings were burned; defense attorneys; employees of the office of the Commonwealth’s attorney; employees of the courthouse; staff at the Eastern Shore 911 Center; friends and family of Charles Smith and Tonya Bundick; and many, many volunteers with the Accomack County volunteer fire departments. In particular, the firefighters in Tasley let me come to their meetings, play pool with them, eat pizza with them. They let me sleep in the firehouse and ride in the fire truck with the sirens blaring. At the end of my stay, they voted me in as a support member for the station, and I can honestly say there are few honors I have ever been more proud of.

  I also interviewed Charlie Smith, on multiple occasions, in person and on the phone, in conversations totaling more than a dozen hours. I am sure he had his own motivations for wanting to talk to a reporter. He obviously had his side of the story to tell, but among other reasons, by the time I contacted him he had been in jail for a year already, and he was lonely and bored.

  Prior to deciding to write this book, I had interviewed Tonya Bundick for a feature article about the fires. Tonya subsequently declined to participate in any further interviews, which I requested on multiple occasions in writing and via intermediaries. I do not blame her—she had trials under appeal, and maybe she thought that talking with me would impact her chances for those appeals, and maybe she was just done with it all. I do wish she had agreed, because I always think it’s better for people to be the narrators of their own stories, but I tried to tell hers with as much honesty and nuance as I could based on information gleaned from trial transcripts, court documents, and interviews with people who knew her or had known her. She has never wavered from protesting her own innocence.

  This book began as a six-thousand-word article in the Washington Post, which was carefully and lovingly edited by Rachel Dry and Ann Gerhart, who comprise one half of my work family. I am grateful for their attention, and grateful to Martin Baron, Tracy Grant and Liz Seymour for allowing me the leave time to turn the article into a book. And once it became one—or most of one—Hank Stuever and Dan Zak, the other half of my work family, were the clear-eyed readers I needed, to tell me what was and wasn’t working. I once had a dream that Hank whipped a pair of scissors out of his jacket and fixed my bad haircut; naturally, this was a metaphor for the story beautification he performs so skillfully. In less metaphorical hair news, Jade-Snow Joachim signed on to gather and secure permissions for all of the images used in this book; I would have ripped my own hair out without her help.

  Katie Adams at Liveright saw the article version of this story when it was printed and became convinced, long before I was, that the story could be a book. She is a brilliant editor, and she—along with my equally brilliant agent, Ginger Clark, put up with many e-mails’ worth of me sharing tidbits of life in Accomack, which they at least pretended to find as interesting as I did.

  The last person I need to thank is my husband, Robert Cox. He watched me head off to Accomack with the dog and the car, to go live in a county where my cell phone worked only sporadically. And when I returned several months later he was, as he often is, my most eagle-eyed reader, resulting in my most dogged editing sessions. He was almost always right, and his thoughts challenged me to become a more thorough and humane reporter. I would never want to be married to a writer, but I’m glad he doesn’t feel the same way.

  NOTES

  Below are a few research notes meant to supplement references in the body of the book, or to explain the sourcing of information if I feared it would not otherwise be clear. Unless otherwise stated, all information and memories attributed to individuals in the book came from personal interviews with those people. When two people recalled the same interaction differently, I tried to reflect that in the text. Memories can be faulty; by the time I interviewed some folks, the fires were a few years past, although many of them remarked it felt like yesterday.

  1: “CHARGE THAT LINE!”

  Jeff Fluornoy, the exceedingly smart director of the Eastern Shore Regional 911 Center, sat with me for the equivalent of several work days, helping me retrieve the 911 calls and dispatch recordings that formed the spine of this and many other chapters. All radioed communications, here and elsewhere in the book, are a direct transcription of the dialogue that occurred at the scenes of the fires. I’d previously interviewed Deborah Clark, the first 911 caller, for the Washington Post, and I referred to those interview notes for this book.

  Interviews with the firefighters who were called to that fire formed most of the rest of the chapter, along with reviews of the fire companies’ incident reports from the night, and visiting the fire location itself.

  2: “THE SOUTH STARTS HERE”

  The Eastern Shore Public Library’s greatest treasure isn’t a book but a man, Brooks Miles Barnes, the historian who runs the library’s local history room and weighted me down with books from the very old (Ye Kingdom of Accawmack: Or the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century) to newer tourist books. His scholarly article, “The Countryside Transformed,” about the impact of the railway on the Eastern Shore, is one of the loveliest and most elegiac academic works I’ve read and I referred to his research liberally. The Eastern Shore Railway Museum was similarly useful in giving me a sense of what the railway had meant to the county.

  Two additional historians also provided guidance: Kirk Mariner, who has written several guidebooks and histories of the shore (my favorite is Revival’s Children: A Religious History of Virginia’s Eastern Shore), and Don Amadeo, an amateur history buff whose day job is in the Accomack sheriff’s department. Don has an extensive collection of Accomack ephemera, including old county maps, photos, and fliers and menus from Whispering Pines.

  Information about the Eastern Shore’s chicken industry came from the Delmarva Poultry Industry, a local trade organization, and from meetings about chicken waste runoff, which I attended, and from Delmarva’s Chicken Industry: 75 Years of Progress, by William H. Williams, a
book that is more interesting than any book about chicken farming has the right to be. Data from the Virginia Employment Commission’s annual reports confirmed that Tyson and Perdue are Accomack County’s largest employers.

  3: “ORANGE IN THE SKY”

  Glenn Neal and Rob Barnes walked me through their fire investigation techniques, and for greater understanding I sat in on a day of classes taught by Bobby Bailey at the Virginia Fire Marshal Academy in Richmond, in which he discussed evidence collection and introduced students to the burn trailer. There were several law enforcement officials whose names didn’t make the book, but whose recollections helped reconstruct the early weeks of the fires. In the sheriff’s office, Todd Wessells, Billy Murphy, and David Mullins were particularly helpful.

  Here and throughout, I also took advantage of the local news coverage of the fires, both the Eastern Shore News and the Eastern Shore Post. Reporters from those papers were doggedly covering the fires long before the national news arrived.

  4: CHARLIE

  Charles Smith’s criminal past is well documented in files in the Accomack Courthouse, the criminal division of which is helmed by the relentlessly competent and kind deputy court clerk, Theresa Handy.

  Friends and acquaintances ranging from Charlie’s former parole officer to the woman who made the breakfast egg sandwiches at Charlie’s favorite diner to old classmates and colleagues provided additional information. The mother of Charlie’s daughter agreed to speak with me, but asked that her name not be used. The largest source of information in this chapter was Charlie himself, but there was very little he told me that I was not able to corroborate through additional sources.

  5: MONOMANIE INCENDIAIRE

  Dian Williams’s Understanding the Arsonist: From Assessment to Confession is intended for practitioners—Williams is a psychologist—but it was extremely helpful in laying out a general framework of an arsonist’s mind. Several scientific articles by Dr. Jeffrey Geller provided a historical context for the way arson has been studied: “Pathological Firesetting in Adults” and “Pyromania: What Does It Mean?” by Geller, McDermeit, and Brown were particularly helpful. For information about arson and women, I referred to “Female Arsonists: A Clinical Study” by Dominique Bourget and John M. W. Bradford, and for general statistics I referred to “Firesetting, Arson, Pyromania, and the Forensic Mental Health Expert” by Paul R. S. Burton, Dale E. McNiel, and Renée L. Binder. Descriptions of impulse control disorders came from The Oxford Handbook of Personality Disorders; descriptions of pyromania came from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

  6: TONYA

  Unlike Charlie, Tonya’s prior criminal record was virtually nonexistent. She did have two shoplifting charges from her late teens—she stole a box of Junior Mints from a grocery store—but otherwise had remained under the radar, with very few public records. Old yearbooks at Arcadia High School helped me trace her teenage life and connected me with people who had known her in earlier years. Two family members, a former work colleague, two former boyfriends, and multiple friends who knew her from Shuckers helped provide additional context for her life before she met Charlie.

  7: “LIKE A GHOST”

  In addition to the firefighters already mentioned elsewhere, I am indebted to the following for helping me understand the firefighting experience on the shore during the time of the arsons: Tom Schwartz; Jody Bagwell in Bloxom; Adam James in Onancock; Chris Davis in Onley; and Frank Ulrich, Cindy Ulrich, Myles Belote, and Bob Harvey in Tasley.

  This chapter is the only location in the book in which I interrupted the timeline of any of the events: reporter Chip Reid did not conduct his interview with Phil Kelley until March; for the sake of thematic cohesion I included it with events that happened earlier in the year. That interview is still available online, as is the video of the “Tasley Shake,” which I highly recommend.

  Statistics about the changing rural population come from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service—mostly from the Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America, but also from the “How Is Rural America Changing?” report. Numbers regarding the 502 Direct Loan program came from “Rural America’s Silent Housing Crisis,” a 2015 Atlantic magazine article, and a different Atlantic article titled “The Graying of Rural America” provided information about aging rural demographics. The calculation for Accomack’s farm subsidy payouts came from data collected by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

  Statistics about the decline in volunteer firefighters nationwide come from a 2014 New York Times article, “The Disappearing Volunteer Firefighter.” The U.S. Fire Administration study mentioned was “Retention and Recruitment for the Volunteer Emergency Services,” published in 2007.

  8: “TELL US WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT”

  Ron Tunkel, the profiler with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, is the only ATF staff member I ended up mentioning by name in the manuscript, but Darrell Logwood, Michael Scott, and Dan Wozlocsynowski were all members of the ATF’s Washington, D.C., field division who were dispatched to the shore, and they discussed the investigation with me as well.

  To better understand geographic profiling, Isaac Van Patten recommended I read the book Geographic Profiling by D. Kim Rossmo, the father of the field. It’s a bit academic, but deeply fascinating.

  9: CHARLIE AND TONYA

  By the time I began working on this book, Charlie and Tonya were both in jail and awaiting trial. Tonya had, according to multiple sources, deleted much of the couple’s Facebook page during the time she was out on bail. The portions that I quoted from were what remained on the page’s public view—both her personal page and the page she created for her store, A Tiny Taste of Toot. Online, she posted pictures of their Halloween costumes and recollections of their domestic life together.

  Jay Floyd and Danielle did not talk to me for this book, though I made requests multiple times, in person, via text, and over phone messages. Their dialogue in this chapter is as Charlie remembers it; other parties corroborate that the couples were close friends and that Jay and Danielle introduced Tonya and Charlie.

  10: “SCHRÖDINGER’S EVIDENCE”

  The technician who processed many of the arson materials submitted to the Virginia Department of Forensic Science is Brenda Christy. She could not discuss specific pieces of evidence from the fires, but she went into great detail about general scientific procedures and techniques, and assured me they would be the same for any piece of evidence.

  In this chapter, again, sheriff’s deputies David Mullins and Billy Murphy were helpful in reconstructing the investigation. Mullins was the man in the plane, who spent the arson months in the passenger seat of a Cessna scanning the ground below. Murphy was one of the deputies in charge of orienting the out-of-town officers, taking them to their assigned posts and then spending the night in his car nearby, ready to be called upon for a fire.

  11: THE EASTERN SHORE ARSONIST HUNTERS

  After Tonya’s arrest, it was discovered that she had earlier posted on several of the arson-related Facebook pages. Eastern Shore News reporter Carol Vaughn wrote a story about that. When Tonya was out on bail she deleted those posts; the ones I quoted came either from Carol’s article, or from screenshots that others had captured before the deletion. Incidentally, the food truck that Tonya speculated wasn’t burned by the real arsonist but by an owner for insurance reasons—Charlie never confessed to that one, and it might, in fact, have been an insurance-related plot.

  13: “LIKE HELL WAS COMING UP THROUGH THE GROUND”

  I owe several paragraphs of this chapter to the reporting of Carol Vaughn, who wrote about Whispering Pines history in her story about the resort’s burning.

  Information about the Whispering Pines damage costs, and similar information for other properties, all came from a “joint stipulation of facts” submitted by the Commonwealth’s attorney and Charlie’s defense attorney as part of his plea bargain. The documents included descriptions and p
hotographs of all of the fires, plus information on the structure’s history, insurance status, and damage costs, and they allowed me to track down property owners who otherwise would have been difficult to find.

  14: TONYA AND CHARLIE

  Both Charlie and Tonya discussed problems they’d been having with Tonya’s oldest son in their police interrogations and later in Tonya’s trial. As Tonya’s sons are minors, I did not include either of their names in this book, though they were used at the trial. Charlie and Tonya also separately addressed the fact that money and the death of Charlie’s mom were stressors in their lives.

  Charlie’s story of how they came to burn down the first house is what he told me; it’s also what he told police during his confession. Tonya continues to deny this interaction ever took place.

  15 AND 16: “THEY’RE NOT HUNTERS AT ALL” AND “I DIDN’T LIGHT THEM ALL”

  Troy Johnson’s and Willie Burke’s recollections of the night of the arrest were gleaned from the transcript of Tonya’s first trial, which I also attended. I separately interviewed Troy Johnson for additional backstory on the night and on the pair’s experiences in Accomack. Dialogue from Martin Kriz, Tonya’s arresting officer, came from his trial testimony. Details about the house and it location came from personal visits to it, and from the trial testimony of the home’s owner, Claude Henry.

  17: “SOMEDAY THEY’LL GO DOWN TOGETHER”

  I never envisioned acknowledging a website called Murderpedia.org—but the writers there are meticulous in their cataloging of humanity’s more depraved acts, and I thank and blame them for sending me down a rabbit hole of research-related crime-committing couples.