Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

combustion, and even one victim who survived. A man named Peter Jones was saved by rescuers who smothered the flames. He later recalled feeling no pain, saying, “I didn’t feel hot at all—I only saw smoke.”
    There are no absolutes in discussing the phenomenon, which has been attributed to everything from mass hysteria to old wives’ tales to electric short-circuiting within the body to punishment from God.
    Experts in this bizarre subject have suggested that the elderly, particularly women, are more likely to spontaneously combust. Overweight people and alcoholics are thought to be prime candidates. But there are also thin people who are teetotalers who have reportedly caught fire with no outside flame starter.
    I have been told a few times about a firefighter or an arson investigator who came upon a woman sitting in her living room in an easy chair with her entire torso, save for her genitals, burned away. Her legs and arms were intact, and so was the room. But when I tried to track this story to its source, I was never able to find the one person who saw this. It became more of a folktale than a credible first-person report.
    One researcher offered a checklist to determine if SHC should be considered in a case of death by fire.
The body is normally more severely burned than one caught in a usual fire.
The burns are not distributed evenly over the body; the legs and arms are untouched while the torso is severely burned.
Small portions of the body remain unburned.
Only parts of body have burned. SHC victims have burned up in a bed without the sheets catching fire, clothing is barely singed, and inflammable materials only inches away remain untouched.
A greasy soot deposit covers the ceiling and walls, usually stopping four feet above the floor.
Although temperatures of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit are normally required to char a body so thoroughly, frequently little or nothing around the victim is damaged, except for the exact spot where the victim ignited.
    The fact that Dorothy Jones was so severely burned in such a short time while the rest of her house and most of her bedroom were not makes one wonder if she could have been a victim of spontaneous human combustion. Although she was pleasantly buxom, she wasn’t overweight, and she didn’t drink to excess.
    The shag carpet in her bedroom was not burned except for the spot right under her body. The mattress she lay on was burned beneath her body, the rest untouched, except for one spot at the foot of her bed.
    SHC is only one theory among many, and probably not the cause of her death. But still, I wonder.
    Marshal 5 investigators Jim Reed, Jack Hickam, and Bill Hoppe went over the incredible circumstances of Dorothy Jones’s death again and again, trying to find the one clue that had to be there. It was, ultimately, to be an exercise in frustration, and yet they still worked on the case whenever they could.
    Time moved on and they all retired. Jack Hickam, who was “Mr. Arson” in Seattle, the ultimate expert in determining the cause of fires, passed away in September 1994 after a long illness. Jim Reed lost touch with his fellow investigators from Marshal 5. I still see Bill Hoppe often, and he remembers the case well. But he believes that no one ever unlocked the mystery of what happened to Dorothy Jones.
    It is a challenge to try to figure out what might have taken place during that vital time period— only one hour —during the Christmas season 1976. Was there a man that no one knew about who stalked Dorothy? She was afraid of someone, but even her closest friends didn’t know who.
    With the almost miraculous outreach of the Internet, perhaps one day I will hear from someone who knows the answers. If there was a human killer, he may be long dead now. Or he may have been dealing with a nagging conscience for thirty years and want to unburden himself. Or herself.
    I think someone does know, and my e-mail address is listed on the back-inside cover of this book…

The
Convict’s Wife

The standard reaction to murders featured on the nightly news is, “They seemed like the nicest family. I can’t believe something like that could happen in our neighborhood!”
    The case that follows has extra pathos because the people involved had almost no neighbors or friends. No one really knew them at all. They wandered across America, looking for someplace they could live without paying rent. The men involved had a choice in the way they lived their lives,