COLUMN ONE : New Clues in a Trial by Fire : What looked like arson in the past wasn’t necessarily so, scientists find. The discoveries may affect the convictions of two men in Arizona.

One cold November night in 1981, a fire swept through the cluttered hillside mobile home of Ray Girdler Jr., killing his wife and child.

Girdler escaped, running to his car in his undershorts for a fire extinguisher that he never used. He stood by, unburned and unblackened, while flames leaped into the starry desert sky.

“They’re gone,” Girdler said to a neighbor. “They’re gone.”

Firefighters would later call it an exceptionally hot blaze; witnesses saw it from Highway 69, the two-lane road that winds through brush-covered hills on its way into this picturesque former gold-mining town of 30,000 residents.

The extreme intensity of the fire was what led suspicion back to Ray Girdler. He was convicted of murdering his wife, Sherry, and daughter, Jennifer, for $6,000 in insurance money. State fire investigators testified to scientific “proof” of arson: heat-warped metal, burn patterns on the trailer floor in the shape of pools of liquid, multiple locations where the fire appeared to start.

It was clear, the state experts said, that Girdler had splashed at least a gallon of flammable liquid--probably gasoline--inside the trailer.

Now, however, after eight years in Arizona State Prison, eight years without his wife and child, eight years of insisting he was wronged, Girdler is back in the news: a man who may be innocent, after all. Advances in fire science have wrought a stunning turnabout, providing explanations for the fire that suddenly seem to justify Girdler’s version of events. In September the 44-year-old Girdler was granted a new trial, which is now pending.

The case vividly illustrates the difficulties of criminal prosecution in the face of evolving knowledge; how yesterday’s certainties sometimes dissolve into troubling ambiguities; how science and justice are uneasy partners.

Girdler is not alone. He is one of two men in Arizona whose convictions for arson murder are being reexamined by the courts. The cases involve the same zealous state arson investigator, the same defense lawyers, the same scientific videotapes and experts.

The sagas of Ray Girdler and John Henry Knapp, 45, a Mesa resident who was sent to Death Row after his two young daughters died in 1973, represent virtually the same legal battle. Each man bases his hopes for freedom on the relatively new scientific understanding of “flashover,” a phenomenon in which a fire, even an innocent one, can virtually explode in a small room to temperatures of 2,000 degrees.

In flashover, scientists now say, hot fire gases gather near the ceiling and radiate heat, causing combustible items on the floor, such as carpeting or clothing, to burst into flame. The phenomenon was filmed in the mid-1980s by researchers at Harvard University and the National Bureau of Standards’ Center for Fire Research. It has changed assumptions about fire investigation because flashover can mimic arson, producing the same intense burning with multiple points of ignition.

“We’re trying to come to grips with the fact that in the past, physical evidence which may just occur naturally . . . has been taken as evidence of arson,” said former firefighter Richard L. P. Custer, who is revamping fire investigation guidelines for the National Fire Protection Assn. in Quincy, Mass. “The erroneous theories of what indicates arson, such as holes burned into floors, multiple points of origin and dribble marks, have been written up in books and reinforced by word of mouth.

“The real solution to this thing is education.”

Of the two Arizona cases, Girdler’s is perhaps more striking in its turnabout and less complicated by unanswered questions. Journalist J. W. Casserly of the Phoenix New Times perceived Girdler as guilty based on the original trial testimony. “Now, after seeing all the (flashover) evidence come back, I don’t think there’s a jury in the United States that would put Ray Girdler in jail again,” he said.

Girdler’s in-laws, Carl and Jean Akers, have never believed that Girdler would kill. They say he loved his wife and child.

“Surely,” said Jean Akers, “if there had been any animosity or anything we would have felt it. We just never thought he should be in prison.”

College Sweethearts

Six years after they met in junior college, Ray and Sherry Girdler found a 50-foot single-wide trailer selling for $2,750. “A steal,” Ray told people in 1980. It contained a kitchen at one end adjacent to a den with sliding glass doors. A short hallway led to a small bedroom, a bathroom and a master bedroom. The rear door was near the master bedroom.

With a year-old baby, the Girdlers were looking to the future when they hauled the purchase to a scrubby ridge of homes three miles outside Prescott.

But from the day they moved in, the Girdlers struggled with bills. They were unemployed in the autumn of 1981 and the phone had been cut off. They were in jeopardy of losing gas and electrical service and were more than six months behind on their mobile home payments.

“Sherry . . . would really get frantic about (the finances),” Girdler said later. Meanwhile, he read Popular Science, tinkered with placing a windmill on the roof to save power costs and schemed of selling used novels in a mobile van.

Then came the fire. According to Girdler’s account, Sherry and the baby had gone to bed. A night owl, Girdler stayed up smoking on the den couch and watching TV. He drank several beers and went to bed about 2:15 a.m., only to be awakened soon afterward by a family cat.

“It sounded like (the cat) was in some kind of distress . . . upset or something,” Girdler said. “I stood up beside the bed and . . . I remember (Sherry) saying: ‘Oh, my God’ because we knew there was smoke.”

He assumed Sherry was going for the baby, Girdler would later tell jurors. “I was thinking it was a fire, and if I could get the fire extinguisher on it quick enough I could contain it.”

Stepping outside, Girdler hurried toward his car. Passing the sliding-glass doors of the den, he could look inside and see the fire on the couch--not yet large enough, he said, for alarm. But he struggled several minutes to free the extinguisher from a clasp on the car floor.

The next time he looked through the sliding-glass doors, Girdler said, the blaze engulfed the room, and suddenly his only thought was to find his wife.

“I can see shapes without my glasses. I can’t see very well, but I can see shapes,” Girdler said, “and I didn’t see (Sherry) anywhere. I was thinking: ‘Where is my honey?’--and she wasn’t out there.”

By now, intense heat and smoke blasted from the rear door, keeping him out, according to Girdler. He yelled for help and a neighbor, Tom Tucker, rushed to the scene and shut off the gas valve. Tucker also found the heat too intense to enter and stood with Girdler while the flames climbed.

Sirens became audible in the distance. “He just, you know, kept saying: ‘They’re gone, they’re gone,’ ” Tucker recalled.

Girdler’s behavior then became strangely disinterested. While Tucker hurried downhill to lead firefighters to the trailer, Girdler turned and walked away. A short while later he was at Tucker’s home, asking for a beer. He sat on the couch, apparently calm, while his wife and daughter burned.

Firefighters required 4,000 gallons of water to stop the fire. The trailer was a smoldering hulk by the time state fire investigator Robert Humphrey began his work the following morning.

Humphrey found signs that led to a further inspection by Arizona’s chief deputy fire marshal, David Dale, a thin, balding man who would become the key scientific witness against Girdler; he was “the top in his field,” prosecutor Robert Landis would later tell jurors. “(Dale) wrote the book on fire investigations.”

Dale’s investigation took only two hours. He concentrated on collapsed bedsprings and heat-warped aluminum--signs of tremendous heat. Dale also studied the floor. The degree of burning there was abnormal, a contrast to the principle that “heat goes up and out,” the investigators agreed.

Patterns were visible--areas of greater and lesser burn--and in some places the floor had charred completely through.

The bodies were in the baby’s bedroom. They contained about twice the levels of carbon monoxide poisoning necessary for coma. A table leg was found lying across Sherry Girdler’s torso. Her skull was broken.

Husband Arrested

Girdler was arrested four days after the fire and tried for murder the following April. Prosecutor Landis stressed Girdler’s financial problems and his apparent indifference to the tragedy.

Although the fire’s heat caused numerous fractures and amputations in both victims, Landis saw the table leg as significant.

“Maybe that was used to incapacitate her--we don’t know,” Landis told jurors. Girdler, meanwhile, walked away “unmarked, unblemished, unscathed . . . unconcerned with the fire.” Court-appointed defense attorney Kemp Wilhelmsen found one witness, the Rev. John Hollowell, who testified to the tragedy’s impact on Girdler. At his church office the day afterward, Girdler “broke down in intense grief, weeping and crying,” the pastor said.

The defense argued that the fire was accidental, caused by a smoldering cigarette left on the den couch or by an electrical short in the wall socket behind it; one cord there ran through the floor to an outdoor freezer.

Wilhelmsen debunked the table leg as a weapon: How then could it wind up on top of the ashes?

But the scientific evidence was strong. Humphrey and Dale spoke of arson as “a fact” of the case and testified that a “liquid accelerant” was splashed liberally throughout the trailer. No chemical traces of fuel were found, but in such a hot fire, the two experts noted, the accelerant often burns completely.

Dale further ruled out the possibility that the fire was set by an intruder. Fuel vapors would have created an instantaneous holocaust. A sleeping Girdler could not have escaped. “Whoever was lying in that bed at the time of ignition would most certainly burn and very seriously,” Dale said.

At mid-trial, prosecutors unveiled another blow to the defense: A two-time convict named Danny Ketner, who had shared a cell with Girdler, testified to hearing a confession from a disconsolate Girdler. He said Girdler had blurted: “I shouldn’t have killed my baby.”

“What did you say?” Ketner said he asked incredulously.

“Nothing,” Girdler purportedly said.

Although Girdler denied making the statement, the guilty verdict surprised no one. “Don’t you think, ladies and gentlemen, that if the defendant had anything at all going for him regarding how the fire occurred--anything that would contradict the experts--don’t you think that” would have come out? Landis thundered.

Girdler was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Dale was again a witness at the presentencing hearing, where he addressed the heinous nature of the crime in light of a possible death penalty.

Time and again, Dale compared the case to one of Arizona’s most notorious arson convictions, another in which Dale had been a key witness. That case, dating to a cold November night eight years prior, involved another debt-plagued man named John Henry Knapp.

Children Died

In 1973, John Knapp was 28, a burly Vietnam veteran who suffered intense migraines. Laid off from a job at a can factory, Knapp worked sporadically driving a cab. Unpaid bills had resulted in the intermittent loss of telephone, electrical and gas service at the squalid tract home in Mesa he shared with his wife Linda and two young daughters. The Knapps cooked on a Coleman stove.

Linda Knapp did not work and was plagued, her husband said later, by depression; she had previously attempted suicide.

The fire of Nov. 16, 1973--which killed Linda Marie Knapp, 3, and Iona Knapp, 2--began at 8 a.m. and rapidly engulfed the children’s tiny bedroom. John Knapp later claimed the children must have been playing with matches, perhaps trying to keep warm. (According to defense attorneys, matchbooks were found throughout the household debris.) Knapp told jurors he had been asleep on a sofa bed in the living room.

“I remember, very vague, I woke up and I saw my wife walking towards the hallway and I heard the kids crying,” Knapp testified. “The next thing I remember . . . I heard my wife scream.”

In Knapp’s version, he found his wife trying to reach the children in a room filled with fire. He pulled her back, ran outside, struggled with a garden hose and smashed a window to spray the blaze.

The case would become a soap opera, as surreal and twisted as a David Lynch film. While firefighters recovered the children’s charred bodies, Linda Knapp was hysterical, neighbors testified; John, however, was calm, even talkative--”like the host at a cocktail party,” one witness said.

Investigators, including David Dale, found evidence of intense floor-level burning in patterns suggesting a liquid accelerant. An empty Coleman fuel can was discovered buried in a closet.

Police halted the funeral just before the tiny coffins were lowered into the ground, announcing there would be an inquest. The same night, without telling her husband, Linda Knapp left with her father for Nebraska, answering police questions only when they traveled there to see her. John Knapp, meanwhile, was interrogated by authorities at the charred house and later at the police station.

Knapp discounted suspicions that his wife set the fire. But it was arson, police insisted. If his wife were innocent, he must have set the fire.

The interrogation lasted several hours. Knapp began to complain of severe headaches. He was seeing spots, he said. He became so tormented, according to transcripts, that he began pulling out his hair.

At that point, versions of the session diverge. According to police Sgt. Robert Malone, Knapp then confessed to the crime: “He said he loved his wife very much and that he didn’t want to lose her. He felt that perhaps the loss of their children would bring them together. . . . He was tired of seeing them eat dog food and cat food and drinking the cat’s milk. . . .”

The confession was never recorded or transcribed. Knapp later denied making the comments, saying his migraine was so bad he began answering “yes” to every police question.

At trial, a Tucson engineering consultant named Marshall Smyth presented time-lapse photographs and videotapes in Knapp’s defense, showing the startling speed at which children’s mattresses could erupt in roaring flame. The jury deadlocked and a second trial began. This time the judge excluded Smyth’s photographic evidence. The consultant asked to construct a full-scale model of the tiny bedroom to conduct a fire demonstration, but the court declined to allocate the necessary $2,000.

Knapp was ultimately convicted and sentenced to death.

By the time of the Girdler fire and subsequent confinement at Arizona State Prison, Knapp had been there for seven years--on Death Row. Knapp continued to fight, however. Numerous appeals and legal petitions were being filed, all in vain.

“And then,” said defense attorney Larry Hammond, “a series of odd things began to happen: Linda Knapp divorces him, moves to Utah, remarries, has a son. The boy’s name is Russell Sorensen.

“Russell, when he’s about 6 years old, has a fire in his little bed--almost dies.”

The incident was not immediately known to the Phoenix law firm of Meyer, Hendricks, Victor, Osborn & Maledon, which had agreed to take on Knapp’s case pro bono --without payment. But the firm hired a private investigator who found Linda Knapp’s second husband, Warren Sorensen, in a jail where Sorensen was doing time for forgery.

The couple had split and were involved in a custody battle. Sorensen talked of the fire in his son’s bed and claimed that Linda Knapp had privately confessed of killing her two children in Mesa.

American Lawyer magazine later investigated the case for an article it entitled, “An Innocent Man on Death Row,” and reported evidence of other fires at Linda Knapp’s home. Linda Knapp, however, denied setting or confessing to the one that killed her children.

The disclosures went nowhere in court. A judge ruled that the information might tend to incriminate Linda Knapp, but it fell short of clearing her husband.

Then, in 1985, a turning point came: Fire consultant Smyth learned of academic studies concerning flashover and obtained videotapes. Harvard had filmed a one-inch flame growing to engulf a room in less than seven minutes. Flashover could melt synthetics, creating petroleum-based liquid runs like those of flammable fuels.

New court petitions were drafted. Either Linda Knapp started the fire or it could be blamed on matches and flashover, defense attorneys figured. Either way, John Knapp’s culpability was now seriously in question.

In early 1987, Superior Court Judge Stephen A. Gerst agreed, granting Knapp a new trial. The prosecution stalled. “The next thing you know,” Hammond said, “John Henry Knapp walks out of the jail a free man.”

Thirteen years had gone by. Stepping into the streets, the smiling, gap-toothed Knapp was mobbed by reporters and TV cameras. It was one of the biggest judicial news stories in Arizona history, carried statewide by media making their fledgling attempts at explaining flashover. And one of the most interested readers of all was Popular Science aficionado Ray Girdler.

Letter to Law Firm

Girdler’s letter to the law firm of Meyer, Hendricks was handed around like prank mail. “How many more of these will we get?” attorneys joked. But, according to Hammond, the more they looked into the case, the more they were amazed.

“Girdler is a shocking case,” Hammond said. “I could understand how a jury could convict Knapp. I could understand how the passions and the prejudices of the case, coupled with the ‘confession,’ could lead a jury to do that. Girdler, the closer you get to that case, the more inexplicable it becomes.”

The law firm, just finished with one costly pro bono crusade, reluctantly took on another. Testimony at a new hearing began this year in June.

Girdler’s lawyers, again using a private detective, had taped an interview with Danny Ketner, the former convict who testified to Girdler’s purported confession. Now, Ketner conceded that Girdler’s comment, “I shouldn’t have killed my baby,” might have been merely an expression of remorse--Girdler feeling responsible.

David Dale was called. Under questioning by defense attorney Ed Hendricks, Dale appeared as a different man than the one touted in 1982 as the man who “wrote the book” on arson.

“I never wrote any books,” Dale testified; in fact, he acknowledged, the only article he ever circulated was one he had plagiarized from another firefighter. Dale had never graduated from high school. He passed an equivalency test in 1963--just before becoming a fireman--after holding jobs as a shoe salesman, a parking attendant and a tool-and-die-maker.

The damaging testimony seemed to set up Dale for Hendricks’ next line of questioning. Did Dale know about the phenomenon of flashover, and its consequences, at the time of Girdler’s trial? Despite the fact that discussion of the phenomenon was confined largely to a few academics at that time, Dale answered that he did.

“But you didn’t tell the judge or jury about (flashover), did you, sir?” Hendricks demanded.

“No, I did not.”

Hendricks now raised a scientific point that had gone all but overlooked during the trial--the high levels of carbon monoxide in the victims.

How could Sherry and Jennifer Girdler consume so much carbon monoxide in an instantaneous inferno? Hendricks wondered. They would have inhaled large volumes of superheated air. And yet, he pointed out to Dale, the autopsies showed no searing of the lungs, bronchial tubes or trachea.

“I didn’t know that,” Dale said.

“You didn’t know that because you didn’t bother to read the autopsy reports?”

“That’s correct,” Dale said.

Dale declined to be interviewed because of the pending new trial. However, in spite of his concessions, he still clings to his assertion that the fire was arson: “Absolutely,” he told a reporter. “Today I’m no less persuaded (of Girdler’s guilt) than after my initial findings.”

The order of a new trial came soon after another startling development: The rearrest of John Henry Knapp, three years after his release from prison. Knapp would be retried, after all, the Arizona attorney general’s office announced. A preliminary hearing began in late August and it appeared conceivable the two trials might proceed concurrently.

Hammond wonders how many innocent men might be in prison based on arson evidence that is now questionable--just as he wonders how to account for the impassive behavior of Ray Girdler and John Henry Knapp at moments of tragedy. Hammond theorizes that there is something inscrutable about death by fire.

“You can’t see the people die,” he said. “You can’t see who’s dead behind the flames. Your mind won’t let you grasp the horror of it.”

Times researcher Ann Rovin in Denver contributed to this article.