Where There’s Smoke . . .

The land is scorched black and smoke is still drifting from the skeletal remains of the burned shrubs and small trees as Bill Hager starts sifting through the ashes.

Hager first touches the charred grasses and the blackened bushes along the road near a steep canyon, guiding his fingers across the stems looking for telltale signs of how the fire burned.

The sides of burned plants can indicate the direction a flame traveled, so Hager studies an area about 50 yards square, feeling the bushes and putting down markers that point to where the fire started.

After more than an hour of work he has a spot pinpointed, the spot where this 100-acre fire, which burned through the rugged canyon off South Mountain Road near Santa Paula in October, was started by someone as yet unknown.

Whether it is a house fire, a minor brush fire or a conflagration that burns thousands of acres down to the sea, the small team of Ventura County Fire Department arson investigators is there.

There are three investigators: Hager, a 24-year Fire Department veteran with 13 years as an investigator; Peter Cronk, with 25 years of experience, 18 as an investigator, and Dave Chovanic who has 13 years with the department and five years as an investigator.

The sometimes overworked team added Capt. Keith Mashburn to its roster Nov. 4. The 21-year Fire Department veteran heads up the arson unit, helping to coordinate investigations.

Last week, Hager and Cronk joined forces with Oxnard Fire Department investigator Steve Elkinton to look at a blaze that caused an estimated $2.5 million of damage to the Mike Wallace Ford dealership in Oxnard. The team has not released many details about the blaze except to confirm that it was arson and that signs of a flammable liquid were detected throughout the burned-out building.

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Although both the Oxnard and Ventura fire departments have investigators, only the Ventura County arson unit works full time.

The team is an integral part of the Ventura County Arson Task Force, which is made up of investigators from all the local fire departments as well as members of the FBI, the Sheriff’s Department, and the Oxnard and Ventura police departments. The team works together on large-scale arson investigations that cross jurisdictional lines.

Whether it’s a house fire or a wilderness fire, an arson investigator’s first task is to determine if the blaze was an accident or deliberately set.

Once a fire is determined to be the work of an arsonist, the county investigators act as gumshoes, gathering evidence and talking to witnesses. But it is never easy. Arson is one of the most difficult crimes to solve, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Simon.

“In a lot of these cases the evidence is burned up in the fire, and unless somebody sees them lighting the fire it is very difficult to solve,” said Simon, who has been prosecuting arson cases for the county since 1989.

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Simon recently won a case against Rhonda Erving, a 43-year-old dock worker and single mother, the so-called Silver Strand arsonist. Charged with setting up to seven fires, the Oxnard woman was convicted late last month on overwhelming circumstantial evidence.

“No one ever actually saw her lighting the fires,” Simon said. “Someone did see a woman that looked like her light a fire and then go through a gate that led to her house.”

Simon speculates that Erving was motivated by anger. “Some people are just angry at the world,” he said.

She apparently lit two fires after a neighbor asked her to turn down music she was playing during a party at her home.

Anger though does not always explain the motivation, and Erving, a black woman, does not fit the typical profile of an arsonist. Most are white males between 20 and 30 years old, investigators say. And they are motivated by everything from revenge to greed to a strange desire to create some excitement. Fires have been set for the insurance settlements and for retribution.

“Sometimes it’s real basic,” Cronk said. “You’ve got a woman [upset] with her husband so she piles all his clothes on his car and lights it on fire. Sometimes it’s not so easy.”

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In one series of small fires in the early 1980s around Ventura, investigators found beer bottles and semen stains near the fire scenes, Cronk said. Over time they worked up the profile of a man, whom they eventually caught, who received sexual gratification by watching the fires he lit burn.

“That’s a true pyromaniac,” he said.

But many arson cases remain unsolved, and long after the fire has gone cold the embers continue to burn bright in the minds of investigators.

Larry Titus, who retired from the county’s fire investigation unit in 1993 after serving for 17 years, said he still thinks about the 1985 Wheeler Gorge fire that burned more than 100,000 acres in Los Padres National Forest and cost an estimated $8.6 million to put out.

Titus said he chased down close to 1,000 leads in an unsuccessful attempt to solve the case.

“Yeah I still think about that one,” he said. “It was right in my backyard, so to speak, and I felt like we were close to solving it.”

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Investigators are still looking for the person who started the devastating 1993 Green Meadow blaze, which burned 43,844 acres, destroyed about 60 homes and cost more than $12 million to extinguish.

“Unless we catch someone, I’m sure I’ll be thinking about that one long after I retire,” said Cronk, as he sat in the investigation unit’s cramped office next to a Moorpark fire station.

Because of the nature of arson, Cronk said, experience is the most important part of the job.

“Unfortunately, we often need to have a series of fires to make the case,” he said.

The team uses two old computers that contain a database of all the fires set in Ventura County since 1971. The computers can spit out names or similar circumstances that can help the team track down suspects.

“We could check all the fires set on a full moon in the summer, for instance,” Cronk said.

Investigators continue searching for clues in the Oct. 25 fire near downtown Ventura that burned almost 500 acres.

And a spate of more than 14 fires started along Potrero Road from Thousand Oaks almost to Camarillo earlier this year is still unsolved.

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“What we look for are patterns,” Cronk said. “So the more fires someone sets the easier it is for us to catch him.”

Good luck also helps.

More than a year ago, a U.S. Forest Service employee spotted a car driven by Kenneth Allen Lee, an Ojai oil rig worker. It was someone the employee had seen before. Over the next 12 months Lee was spotted near the site of several different brush fires, authorities said.

Investigators contend that Lee, who is set to stand trial in December, lit at least five such fires around Ojai. Investigators say they linked him to the fires through witnesses who saw him near where those fires began, physical evidence and statements he made after he was arrested by sheriff’s deputies.

At the spot where investigators allege Lee lit a fire in June, they found a matchbook traced to the Breakers Motel in Morro Bay, where Lee and his family had once stayed.

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After he was picked up, Lee reportedly waived his Miranda rights and told deputies he set three fires because he was bored, court documents say. He later recanted that statement.

When searching for arson suspects, Cronk said, his team also makes sure to look within the firefighting ranks.

Former Glendale Fire Capt. John L. Orr, an arson expert and former instructor for state arson investigators, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of setting three store fires in Bakersfield in 1992.

He later confessed to setting a series of other fires in 1987 while he was attending an arson investigators conference.

In Ventura County, Cronk said, the team has found only one firefighter involved in setting fires, a fire crew member who was trying to get more overtime pay.

“It really takes all kinds,” Cronk said. “And usually if they light one fire, they’re going to light another, and the more fires they light, the more likely we’re going to catch them.”