3 Kids’ Deaths in House Fire Turn Into Murder Case Against Dad

Jolted awake, Bill Hood raced downstairs and came upon his neighbor lying in her nightgown on his living room floor, her long hair singed, burned skin hanging off her legs.

“She was screaming in pain and screaming about her babies being trapped,” he recalled.

Flames were shooting out the front window of the Mastin family’s converted carriage house 40 feet away. Hood smashed the rear window in an attempt to save the three children, ages 6, 5 and 3.

The intense heat drove him back. He rushed home to call 911, and there he found Lisa Mastin’s husband, Mark--fully dressed, standing still, staring impassively out the window, a flash burn on the left side of his face.

“He didn’t seem to be upset at all,” he said. “It struck me awful funny.”

This stoicism, authorities now say, reflected a murderer’s heart.

Less than two weeks after that cold, windy night, they say, Mastin confessed to starting the fire by tossing a cigarette into a pile of papers and encyclopedias under the stairs.

Since his arrest, neighbors who rushed to help the Mastins after the fire have raged at what they see as Mastin’s deception. Some have compared him with Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who drowned her sons and made up a story about a murderous interloper.

Others ponder the horrific end of a troubled, dysfunctional family that defeated the efforts of social workers.

“They were definitely the parents from hell,” said Sandy Zeoli, who once was the Mastins’ next-door neighbor.

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Mark Mastin is 26, a truck driver who lost his job weeks before the fire, a timid, slight man. His wife is 24, with a cherubic face; her shoulder-length hair was cut short after it was singed by the fire.

Lisa Mastin “had total control of Mark, she did as she damn well pleased and Mark had to put up with it,” Zeoli said. “She was always down at the bar. She partied a lot. The children would be home with Mark.”

In September, they moved to this hamlet in Finger Lakes farm country from nearby Geneva, where they had lived for two years.

There, former neighbors said, the Mastin children were frequently left wandering outside unattended, and were verbally and physically abused, prompting at least five calls to the state’s child abuse hotline.

Zeoli said she was so disturbed by the mistreatment that she built a six-foot stockade fence to try to block it out. Social workers visited regularly, but nothing seemed to change, she said.

On one occasion last spring, when Mark Mastin’s van caught fire outside, police found the house to be so filthy that the county social services department ordered the couple to undergo parenting instruction.

Only on Sundays, when a friend came by to drive them to church, did they seem like a normal family. “They weren’t screaming, they weren’t hollering, nobody was getting hit,” she said.

Louis, the eldest, a polite but inquisitive boy who wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll star, “got hit the most,” Zeoli said.

Her favorite was Cassandra, the middle child known as Cassi, a lively girl despite suffering brain damage when her father lost control of his car in 1992.

One rainy day, she saw Cassi fall flat in the mud and brought her home. Lisa Mastin wouldn’t wipe her face.

“She said, ‘Oh, leave her out there; she’s only going to get dirty again.’ It was turning in my stomach. It bothered me because, to me, little girls are supposed to have bows in their hair, little dresses and patent-leather shoes. She didn’t have any of that.”

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In the hours before Louis, Cassandra and Douglas were buried, their parents showed up unexpectedly at a fund-raiser organized on their behalf at a Hooters bar. The tragedy had struck a chord, and people were giving willingly; ultimately, charities collected $44,000 for the couple.

The Mastins drove from there to the funeral. Later, they attended a general equivalency degree class in Geneva.

“They’re at school like nothing happened!” said Patty Schultz, who had known Lisa Mastin for 18 months.

Fire investigators initially found nothing suspicious, but police were put on guard when Mark Mastin contradicted his wife’s account--and those of Hood, his girlfriend and their teenagers--of what happened.

Lisa Mastin said she got home at 4:30 a.m. that Saturday, Dec. 9, after a night out with friends. She said she even checked the fire alarm before going to sleep upstairs with Louis. No fire alarm was found.

She said she awoke to dense smoke and led Louis to the stairs. Blocked by fire, she smashed a window. When she turned back, she said her panic-stricken son had vanished. She jumped from the window to get help.

Her husband, who was sleeping downstairs, told how he had admonished his two younger children on Thanksgiving Day for playing with matches. When fire prevented him from getting into their bedroom, he said, he broke the rear window in a desperate effort to rescue them, then hurried next door.

The Hood family said he did neither. “He lied about a lot of things,” said Hood, 42.

Four days before Christmas, after a 10-hour interrogation, Mark Mastin confessed. Investigators said he was angry that his wife had left him, as she had on many other occasions, alone with the children while she was out late partying.

“I wanted to teach my wife a lesson,” he allegedly said.

Failing to find evidence that he intended to kill anyone, police charged Mark Mastin with second-degree murder. His wife was not charged.

Mastin hired an attorney with $15,000 in public donations. A judge froze the account, but Felix Lapine, a high-profile Rochester attorney, later took the case for $1.

He maintains that Mastin was railroaded into a confession. “This kid is a passive, little guy. I see no evil streak in him whatsoever,” he said.

“People start fires in their house accidentally any number of ways. You drop a cigarette, you put too many plugs into an outlet. But to go from that and say, ‘I did it to get even with my wife,’ it’s not even credible.”