New Witness Re-Enacts First Moments of Fire

With a potentially significant new witness in tow, authorities Saturday toured the area where last year’s Calabasas/Malibu fire started, asking him an array of detailed questions and re-enacting the fire’s opening minutes on videotape.

Robert Blakeley, who emerged from anonymity this week with new information about the fire, fielded 90 minutes of questions from two Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators, Jerome Beck and Mark Winters, and from Deputy Dist. Atty. Sally Thomas.

As they conducted their interview, investigators and Blakeley repeatedly walked up and down Old Topanga Canyon Road--and the now-barren hillside above it--where the Nov. 2 fire started. Authorities declined to comment about their investigation and tried to keep reporters at arm’s length.

The blaze eventually burned a path to the Pacific Ocean, overwhelming thousands of firefighters, killing three people and destroying more than 350 homes.

Blakeley is a potentially important witness because he was among the first people to arrive at the scene of the fire, and he joined the early efforts to battle the blaze. Investigators have been trying to locate him for months, but he only surfaced last week after The Times ran photographs of him and friends told him that authorities were eager to talk to him.

Blakeley told the investigators that the two suspects--Nicholas A. Durepo and Steven R. Shelp, both of whom were volunteer firefighters at the time--pulled up moments after he did, parked their blue pickup truck behind his vehicle and ran up a small road leading to two water tanks just above the spot where the blaze started. At some point, they fished a garden hose out of the back of Durepo’s pickup truck, Blakeley told investigators.

“I can remember those two guys dragging the garden hose,” up the hill, he told them. “They didn’t go up too far, if I remember.”

Beck, one of the lead investigators in the case, recorded Saturday’s re-enactment on videotape as Blakeley and investigators noted the locations of fire hydrants and other pieces of equipment that figure in the arson investigation. Accompanied by his wife and son, Blakeley arrived for the re-enactment in his white pickup, the same vehicle he said he was driving on the day of the blaze as he drove from Los Angeles International Airport to his home in Agoura Hills.

During the questioning, investigators repeatedly asked Blakeley how long Shelp and Durepo stayed on the hill before returning to Old Topanga, where the trucks were parked. He said the two were on the hill just a short while--less than a minute, Beck concluded after questioning Blakeley.

Detectives inquired at length about minutiae related to the case, seeking to determine whether Shelp and Durepo knew the locations of potential water sources in the area. If so, it might suggest that they had scouted the area, consistent with investigators’ theory that they deliberately picked a location where they believed they could start a fire and put it out, all in an effort to be praised for their heroism.

Under questioning by investigators, Blakeley said he told Shelp and Durepo that he had an adapter in his truck that would enable them to hook the garden hose to one of the hillside fire hydrants. Durepo and perhaps Shelp then headed up the hill with the hose and tried to battle the blaze, Blakeley said.

“Somehow the short guy (Durepo) ended up with the hose and went (back) up the hill,” Blakeley told the investigators. “He wasn’t up there very long--they were getting smoked out” by the flames.

By then, the windblown fire had gone down the hill and jumped Old Topanga, and was racing toward several homes. Within minutes, the fire had grown so large that it badly burned one victim, Ron Mass. Mass ran to the road, where Shelp and Durepo doused him with water from the hose.

“We just weren’t getting much water” out of the hydrant, Blakeley said.

Blakeley also told investigators that Durepo gave him the keys to his truck and asked that he move it down the hill and out of the path of the fire. Witnesses have said they saw a blue pickup matching the one driven by Durepo as he fled the scene of the fire.

Although Blakeley’s account could fill in many of the missing pieces in the investigation, it may not by itself resolve many of the questions about Durepo and Shelp.

Among other things, both of them failed polygraph tests, provided questionable accounts of their whereabouts on the day of the fire and offered other statements about the incident that investigators consider dubious, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

In addition, during a break in one of their many interviews by authorities, sources say Shelp was overheard to tell Durepo: “Don’t sweat this. I won’t give you up.”

Investigators have eagerly sought Blakeley because he was among the first people at the fire and because Shelp and Durepo contended that a passing plumber had provided the adapter that allowed them to connect the hose to the hydrant.

Until this week, investigators believed that Shelp and Durepo had made up that part of the story to explain how they happened to have the unusual piece of equipment. Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block said investigators had been unable to find the “plumber” for months.

But in recent days, The Times ran photographs of the man the two suspects told friends was the missing plumber. Blakeley’s friends recognized him, and when he returned from a trip to Oregon last week, he notified authorities that he was the man in the picture and that he would cooperate in the investigation.

Blakeley is an underground contractor instead of a plumber. He uses a variety of adapters in his work and happened to have several of them in his truck on the day of the fire, he told investigators Saturday.

In an interview with The Times last week, Blakeley said the two men were telling the truth and that he had indeed supplied them with the adapter. Also, Blakeley said the two men had pulled up behind him at the scene, arriving about three to five minutes after he did.

Although investigators questioned Blakeley about those and other issues Saturday, they would not comment afterward about whether their interview with Blakeley had changed their views of Shelp and Durepo.

Blakeley’s sudden appearance has thrust him into the center of the volatile case and made the soft-spoken contractor an instant celebrity. More than a dozen reporters and camera crews staked out his house last week, and his wife said the family has been besieged with requests for interviews.

On Friday evening, she said, they received 117 phone messages from reporters seeking comment. Beyond his interview with The Times, however, Blakeley has only spoken briefly about the incident in public and has declined to offer his opinion about whether the two set the fire. He has been told by authorities to keep quiet about his involvement in the case.