Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

methods just were not indicated. There were none of the eye and lung hemorrhages that would have pointed toward strangulation. And she had not fought a killer; her long, well-manicured nails were unbroken.
    And why was Dorothy nude? She had had sexual intercourse on the afternoon she died, but with whom? In 1974, of course, it wasn’t possible to extract DNA from the ejaculate her partner left behind.
    Someone—possibly a killer—came back to the scene of her death one week later and searched her house frantically. But for what?
    Was Dorothy Jones killed by a jealous lover? A jealous woman? A drug dealer who “burned” her (literally) for “burning” him (figuratively)?
    And $280 in cash was left behind, but her diamond rings were gone. Odd.
    Was there another man that Dorothy planned to be with? She had talked to her girlfriends continually about Dante Blackwell, and even hinted that she had agreed to a divorce because of him, although he’d married another woman a few months after their affair began. Was all that talk only a smokescreen to hide a man she really cared about, perhaps a man of wealth and reputation whose name had to be kept silent? Had he been frightened at the thought that she was about to expose him, demanding more from him than he’d planned to give?
    Such a man might well have had a duplicate key to her home, might have waited while she changed her clothes, started supper, even as she made a phone call to Dante Blackwell. Perhaps they made love for a final time—although Dorothy would not have known how final it was. And then this secret lover had killed her, deliberately setting a fire beneath her mattress.
    Perhaps.
    Maybe this unknown man believed he had gotten away without leaving a trace of himself, and then found, to his horror, that he’d dropped something—something that could inexorably be traced back to him. That would account for the “break-in” on December 27. Had he found what he sought?

    After considering all the possible scenarios, there is one other that has to be addressed. It is possible that Dorothy Jones wasn’t murdered at all—that she succumbed to the strange phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion (SHC).
    The theory that there are certain conditions inside a human body that will cause it to suddenly catch fire is as old as the Bible, although it is impossible to validate the incidents therein. In 1763, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont wrote a book called De incendiis corporis humani spontaneis, exploring several case studies of people who had literally burst into flames.
    Dupont became interested in the subject after the husband of a woman named Nicole Millet was acquitted of her murder by a judge who was convinced by arguments that she had perished by spontaneous combustion.
    A far more familiar author, Charles Dickens, used spontaneous human combustion to dispatch a drunkard in his 1852 novel, Bleak House. When critics mocked him, Dickens retorted that he had thoroughly researched the subject and found thirty cases where human beings had literally burned to death from some source inside their own bodies.
    A century later, the charred remains of a St. Petersburg, Florida, woman named Mary Reeser, sixty-seven, were found in her apartment on July 2, 1951. Photographs show that all that was left of her body—beyond ashes—was her skull and her unburned left foot, still wearing a black satin slipper. Her neighbor, worried about her, had touched the doorknob to her apartment, found it hot, and called the police. A four-foot circle around Mary Reeser’s body was burned black.
    The police investigators concluded that Mary, a heavy woman and a smoker, who had worn a highly inflammable rayon acetate nightgown, had accidentally set fire to herself. But the medical examiner wondered how heat believed to have reached 3,000 degrees hadn’t burned the whole place down. Although the ceiling and walls were covered with soot, the room was not burned at all.
    Hapless Mary Reeser became the poster girl for spontaneous human combustion.
    Six years later, Anna Martin, sixty-eight, of West Philadelphia, was discovered in her home, completely incinerated except for her shoes and a small portion of her torso. The medical examiner estimated that it would have taken temperatures above 1,700 degrees to accomplish this. And yet newspapers only two feet from the burned body weren’t even scorched.
    There are dozens of similar, carefully documented cases of spontaneous human