American Fire by Monica Hesse

Author:Monica Hesse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2017-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

“THEY’RE NOT HUNTERS AT ALL”

APRIL 1.

The team of criminal profilers—Isaac van Patten, Jon Cromer, Ron Tunkel, Ken Morris—had been coordinating the psychological part of the investigation from afar for too long. Five and a half months into the fires and they still hadn’t all been to Accomack at the same time. Tunkel had come down once around Christmas, but that was a period when the fires came to a stop for a couple of weeks. At the time everyone had hoped they were done for good, so Tunkel had gone back home. Isaac Van Patten hadn’t been there at all.

On this day, April Fools’ Day, they’d managed to all get there. They hoped that having their shoes on the ground would give them new insights into the man or men they were trying to catch. There were things you couldn’t know until you were there in person.

Tunkel was asked to give a presentation to some of the fire investigators who were desperate for something, anything, that could help forward their psychological understanding of the arsonist. Jon Cromer remembered sitting in the audience and being impressed with his colleague’s work, and the way he vividly described how to best embolden witnesses to come forward. “He will make a mistake,” Tunkel said. Police should trigger citizens’ memories by encouraging them to trust their instincts and be on alert for anything out of the ordinary.

One person at the meeting, a police supervisor, had a question for further down the line: When they did catch the guy or guys, how should they question him? What should be the protocol?

Tunkel demurred—he was hesitant to offer a boilerplate protocol when every situation required nuance. The questioner pressed on: “Listen,” he said, “my boys might catch him tonight, and we won’t have time to get up with you.” They needed something general they could work with if push came to shove.

Tunkel tried to formulate something general that would be of use. He talked about power. “Arson is a means of power. Fire setting is a means of demonstrating power,” he said. “Serial arsonists tend to be unempowered people. These aren’t captains of industry or successful businessmen.”

On television, police interrogations often involved an officer browbeating a suspect, or two of them ganging up until the suspect finally cracked. That wouldn’t be the way to go in this case, he explained. The person or persons lighting the fires were already having a bad year, some of the people in the room remembered him saying. The way to get him to talk wouldn’t be to berate him, but to be gentle. Make it clear the investigators understood where the arsonist was coming from. Make it feel like some of the power was being returned to him.

“We know there’s some goodness in you,” Tunkel suggested saying to the arsonist. “We know that whatever was going on in your life, there was a lot of stress. We appreciate the fact that most of the buildings were unoccupied.” Tunkel suggested reminding the arsonist of the chickens at the Gomez house.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.