California Fire And Life

56

Incendiary origin, opportunity and motive.

Also known as the Tripartite Proof.

Whatever it's called, you need these three elements to prove arson by an insured in court. And if you deny a claim based on arson, you'd better be able to prove it in court.

Same with the murder, Jack thinks. To deny the life insurance claim, I need to prove that it was a homicide, and that Nicky had motive and opportunity.

Incendiary origin is just a fancy way of saying that someone intentionally set the fire. What you need to satisfy this one are such things as traces of accelerants, the remnants of an incendiary device, maybe a timer. You also want the indicators of a hot, fast-moving fire: big V-pattern, alligator char, deep char on the floor, crazed glass, a pour pattern.

Most important of all these is traces of accelerants, and now he has them. Dr. Bambi will come into court and testify that he found heavy traces of kerosene in the flooring and the floor joists. He'll show the jury his charts and graphs and the jury will go back into the room believing that someone poured kerosene around that bedroom.

So Jack checks off incendiary origin and pushes it out of his mind. Opportunity – that is, did the insured have a chance to set the fire or cause to have it set? It goes a little deeper than that. The actual standard is "exclusive opportunity" – was the insured the only party to have access to the house during the critical time when the fire was set?

Opportunity is a tricky mother. It's why you look to see if doors and windows were locked. It's why you talk to neighbors to see what – and whom – they might have seen. It's why you take recorded statements to pin the insured down to where they were at the time of the fire.

It's elusive.

One reason being that arsonists – unless they're really stupid – tend to use timing devices. For one thing, there is a matter of getting out of the place without setting yourself on fire. You pour some gasoline around and strike a match, you stand a good chance of becoming a human torch. What a lot of amateurs don't know is that it's the fumes that ignite, not the liquid. So they pour the gas, step back, toss the match and then run out flaming into the night.

For another thing, a good timing device gives you the time to establish an alibi. You were somewhere else at the moment of ignition, so you didn't have the exclusive opportunity to set the fire.

A timing device can be very simple or very sophisticated. As simple as a series of twisted sheets tied together to form a giant wick, which gives you the chance to light it and get away by the time it hits the big pool of gas and goes PHWOOM. Or it can be a simple timer wired to strike a spark into a well of accelerant at a certain time, and that gives you even more space.

Jack's personal all-time favorite for a sophisticated timer, though, was on the file where the couple was definitely in Las Vegas the weekend their house burned down. They had receipts and eyewitnesses for a fifty-some-odd-hour period and there were no remnants of timers found in the house.

But the fire was sure as hell of "incendiary origin" because it had all the indicators and someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make the house fire-ready. Holes had been punched in the walls to improve circulation (fire eats oxygen), windows had been left open (same), and floor samples tested positive for accelerants.

The security system was intact and there were no signs that anyone had come into the house.

So how was the fire set?

Jack puzzled over it, hell, agonized over it, for weeks. He visited the site again and again. Finally, he found a hot spot on the floor in the upstairs family room. Right below the charred remnants of the VCR.

Jack's favorite all-time timing device: a videocassette timed to eject and tip over a burner into a pool of accelerant.

The couple got away with it, of course, but Jack was relieved to have figured it out.

Anyway, all this is to say that generally speaking, opportunity has to do with time, which often has to do with some kind of timing device.

This is true even if the insureds have hired the arson out. Jack's experience is that this is more often the case in commercial fires, because it really takes a pro to burn a warehouse down. But there have been cases where homeowners have hired an arsonist and then gone off on vacation to establish an alibi, but Jack doesn't think that Nicky hired this one out.

You burn up your wife in your bed, it's personal.

So Jack asks himself, Did Nicky have the opportunity to go into the house, kill his wife, and set the fire? Not if his mother's story is true, but Jack thinks that Mother's story is bullshit. Then Jack considers the question: Given opportunity, did Nicky have the exclusive opportunity to set the fire? Well, the doors were locked, the windows were cracked open. There were no signs of forced entry. So who besides the owner had access to the house?

But it's tricky, it's weak, and unless he can catch Nicky in a lie, proving the opportunity issue is going to be tough.

Which brings Jack to the subject of motive.