Evidence Hard to Come By in Laguna Blaze

While Anaheim fire officials got a major break Monday, investigators probing Orange County’s most destructive arson--the firestorm that consumed 366 Laguna Beach homes and caused an estimated $270 million in losses--still appear to have little more than a mystery.

With the investigation in its second week, arson experts will begin circulating a flyer today seeking help from any possible witnesses.

The biggest clue investigators say they have found where the fire started Oct. 27 was the absence of any physical evidence: No downed power lines. No half-burnt cigarette butts. No cause for the fire’s being there other than someone setting it. Which, in the arson investigator’s lexicon, is known as negative corpus.

“When you have absolutely nothing,” Orange County Fire Capt. Dan Young said, “that’s evidence. It stands up in court.”

With Monday’s arrest of a suspect in the Anaheim Hills fire after a fortuitous tip, the 14-member Laguna Beach arson task force can only hope for a similar break.

As they’ve sifted through more than 300 leads, hard evidence has been hard to come by.

Investigators have canvassed the point of origin, scrutinizing soot stains on trees, rocks and chaparral to pinpoint where the fire began.

They know traffic had slowed to a crawl on Laguna Canyon Road at the exact time and place the Laguna Beach fire began. And they think the arsonist or arsonists may have been sitting in one of those cars.

When it comes to how the fire was sparked, investigators say they have only hunches: It could have been a newspaper, road flare, lighter, Molotov cocktail or some other incendiary device. There were few physical clues--such as metal fragments or matches--at the scene, investigators say. And the fact is, arsonists employ everything from the crude cigarette-matchbook set-up used by William Holden in the movie “Stalag 17,” to sophisticated timing devices that can be detonated from miles away.

But investigators have ruled out possible accidental starts--like a tossed cigarette--because the fire started more than 80 feet off the roadway.

“Ever try to throw a cigarette butt 80 feet?” Young said. “There’s absolutely no way that fire started without someone deliberately starting it.”

Deluged with tips, investigators have sequestered themselves in their command post. One group sorts through the leads and rates them; another group follows up. With reinforcements from the California Department of Forestry and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, investigators have already quizzed scores of witnesses.

Investigators are trying to find motorists who were bottlenecked on Laguna Canyon Road near the flash point about the time that the fire broke out. A California Department of Transportation crew had closed off one lane of the highway, causing the slowdown. By piecing together fragments of license plate numbers and vehicle descriptions, they hope to find more witnesses, if not the arsonist himself.

“There were many cars in line that day,” Young said. “No one saw anyone on foot, so we think it’s possible the person responsible was in one of those cars.”

Although the overworked team of investigators is confident and determined to nab the culprit in the Laguna fire, it’s clear that doing so will take the right combination of dogged detective work and luck. Of the estimated 102,000 arsons reported nationwide last year, the FBI says there were 19,900 arrests, less than one in five, a number far lower than that for other crimes such as murder and rape.

“I can tell you right now, we can’t catch everyone that’s responsible for all the arsons,” said ATF arson task force supervisor Larry Cornelison, referring to the 26 fires that have swept through Southern California in recent days, 19 of which have been deemed suspicious or arsons. “Some of the best (arson) cases in the world go unsolved.”

Most tricky is motive. Arsonists have some characteristics in common, but they hail from all backgrounds, everything from construction workers to volunteer firefighters, from people seeking vengeance who act on the spur of the moment to maladjusted, serial fire-setters who plot their every step.

Arson specialist Gus Gary, an ATF agent, said arsonists fall into six categories: those who set fires for revenge, excitement, vandalism, crime concealment, profit and extremist motives. Roughly half of repeat arsonists fall into the revenge category, which would include those who set fires out of a generalized anger at society or institutions.

In recent years, the list of jailed arsonists in Southern California includes: an ex-nun who tried to burn down the home of her boss, a McDonald’s restaurant manager; two brothers who torched a family’s home so they could peddle drugs from it; a 19-year-old man who set fire to three hair salons out of anger about haircuts he had received, and a pair of teen-agers who tried to burn down their school in an attempt to destroy the records of one of the boys to prevent him from being sent to a continuation school.

“The viciousness, the spitefulness, the anger that these people carry with them is enormous,” said psychiatrist George Molnar, a State University of New York associate professor who analyzed 225 convicted arsonists in Buffalo in the mid-1980s--one of the few in-depth studies to delve into the minds of arsonists.

Despite the primitive nature of their crime and their frequent portrayal on television as wild-eyed fire-lovers, Molnar said you cannot assume arsonists lack intelligence.

“It used to be that arsonists were thought to be of subnormal intelligence,” Molnar said, “but not anymore.”

Some arsonists do get caught because they are brazen, if foolish, enough to make their intentions known beforehand or loiter at the scene of the crime to gaze at the chaos they’ve unleashed. However, it’s more often the case that an arsonist gets arrested by a stroke of luck--someone who has seen something suspicious and can provide investigators with that one key description.

Faced with crimes in which all but circumstantial evidence has been destroyed, investigators in the Laguna Beach blaze are banking on just such a break.

“When you have someone who goes out and lights a remote field on fire, you really need to have somebody who says, ‘We’ve seen this person’ or ‘We’ve seen this car,’ ” said Greg Smith, a supervising arson investigator with the state fire marshal’s office.

“Even if it seems like a trivial thing, it may be the one break you need. Until they get that person, it’s really hard to say what the (arsonist’s) motivation might be. You’re not looking at an arson-for-profit where you can go in and make a clear case.”

Among the motives investigators have considered early on in the Laguna Beach fire: whether someone wanted to show city officials they were wrong when they recently rejected the construction of a 3-million-gallon water tank (which proponents said would be critical in fighting fires); and whether someone picked Laguna because of its reputation as having Orange County’s largest gay population.

Both of which, admittedly, seem far-fetched and, if true, “would be quite diabolical,” Molnar said. More likely, he said, would be someone “who had a grudge against rich people, who resented the affluence he saw in those communities.” Or, someone who, on a lark, wanted to set a wildfire, but who didn’t intend to cause that amount of damage.

“The problem is,” said CDF’s Mike Barnes, “there’s a lot of weird people running around.”

The arson that ATF’s arson task force chief Cornelison most wants to solve is the Laguna fire. “I’d give anything to find the guy who did that,” he said.

“I’ve been out here 30 years and one of the most beautiful cities in this area was Laguna Beach.”

To do their part to restore the seaside community to its former splendor, Cornelison and the other local, state and federal arson investigators who have descended on Orange County and other parts of Southern California plan to meet again this week to share notes. In the meantime, they ask that anyone who has information call the Orange County Arson Line at (714) 744-0515.

Smith from the state fire marshal’s office said: “We’d rather sort through hundreds of tips that lead nowhere than miss out on the one tip that cracks the case.”