Arson Suspect Acquires a New Fiancee; Law Closes In

THE STORY SO FAR

Investigators probing disasters in John Veysey’s life detect a pattern: When his bank balance drops too low, fires occur and he collects insurance on his homes and even on those close to him. Now there’s a new woman in his life, and he plans to take out a life insurance policy on her.

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CARY, Ill. -- She folded her arms in cold defiance and glowered as she listened to the painful words.

Two investigators were in Callie Hilkin’s office, telling her that the man she loved, John T. Veysey III, was dangerous.

“You are in jeopardy,” said John Korth, a Jo Daviess County deputy sheriff.

“I don’t believe he’d hurt me,” Callie insisted.

Tina Sherrow, a U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent, persisted, her voice kind but firm.

“We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think there was a real possibility of something happening to you and the children,” she said.

Did Callie know Veysey’s first wife, Patricia, had died, and that authorities were looking into it, the investigators asked.

And that Veysey had life insurance policies on his second wife, Deserie, and his son, Little John -- and they almost died in a fire?

“He got Little John out of the fire,” Callie blurted.

“He did not,” Sherrow quickly corrected her.

Callie sat disbelieving in the conference room of the Dubuque, Iowa, financial services company where she worked. Tears welled in her eyes.

“It’s a wonderful relationship,” she protested. “He takes very, very good care of me and my children.”

Veysey took her two sons hiking. He picked them up after school. She trusted him. Maybe he was a bit of a rogue sometimes, but he was good to her.

Her train of thought was interrupted by a question from Sherrow: Why were Callie and John visiting an insurance agent that very afternoon?

Car insurance, Callie replied.

Sherrow took the phone and called the insurance agent.

“Will you please tell her about the insurance she’s coming in for?”

“Life insurance,” the agent said -- $100,000 each.

The words hit Callie like a fist. John had lied: She already had life insurance, and he had said this appointment was for auto coverage. It didn’t make sense.

Only the day before, she’d signed a will leaving everything -- mostly life insurance, but also her 401K retirement plan -- to John. Her death would fatten Veysey’s wallet by $750,000.

Could John really be what they were saying, a time bomb?

It was all a shock. Not that she had never had questions about John. She had, many times. But he always had an explanation. John was so charming, so convincing.

But this was different. He had betrayed her. The call seemed to prove that. And there were other things that the investigators had said. John’s story of the High Road fire in Cary also was a lie -- he told her that he had almost died.

The more she heard, the more her doubts grew -- although there was one thing that she was immediately certain about. She had to deal with the will. She would tear it up.

As she crossed the Mississippi into Illinois on her way home that warm spring afternoon, she wondered: Should she stand by the man she loved? Or cooperate with the authorities?

At a service station, she abruptly pulled over and called the county sheriff’s office.

“We need to talk,” she said.

Agents had heard stories like Callie’s before as they followed Veysey’s path from woman to woman and fire to fire.

A single mom on the rebound from a nasty divorce, Hilkin had hooked up with Veysey through a personals ad in 1998. She had met him two years earlier in the same way and thought that he looked like “a Greek god,” tall and blond with rippling muscles.

Callie was naive, she admitted. She never questioned things that Veysey said, even his claim that he didn’t need to work because he had so much money. He dazzled her by flashing wads of $50s and $100s. Gradually, his bankrolls thinned and the bills were $5s and $10s.

Veysey was running short of cash.

One night in January 1999, she found him crying. He said he had a premonition that she would be killed in an automobile accident, that she wouldn’t see her boys grow up.

Callie, who had been in a serious head-on collision two years earlier, believed him.

It was time, he said, to get her affairs in order.

He urged her to get two life insurance policies, each paying $250,000. That way the boys could go to college and he could fight her ex-husband for custody. She obediently got the insurance.

But Veysey wasn’t satisfied.

Soon he was speaking feverishly of an elaborate insurance hoax. They would fake her death in a boating explosion.

The cops and insurance companies were dumb enough to buy it if she were willing to make a small sacrifice.

“A finger or two,” he said. They wouldn’t bother to look for the rest of her.

“You’re nuts,” she thought.

Veysey tried a new tack.

What she really needed, he said, was a will. It should specify that she wanted to be cremated. Somehow, he claimed, that would help him leave town with the boys before her ex-husband could get custody.

It sounded ghoulish. But again Callie went along.

One night, he came home with a draft of the will. They sat on the sofa in the family room and he put his arm around her as he explained the fine print.

By the time she finished reviewing all of this with investigators, Callie had made her decision: She wanted out.

The morning of May 20, 1999 -- 16 months after the Cary, Ill., fire that got the investigation rolling -- she gathered clothes in a basket and told Veysey, still in bed, that she was going to the cleaners.

“I just want you to know that I love you,” she said. “Goodbye.”

That afternoon, ATF agents escorted Callie and her sons to a hotel room. She planned to leave town in a few days -- and chose her new home by studying a map of the United States in a phone book. For now, it was just a matter of waiting a few hours.

Veysey was driving along Longhollow Road outside Galena that afternoon with Little John when police pulled him over.

“This is outrageous!” he thundered as the handcuffs were slapped on.

When Callie got home that night, agents had searched the house and found Patricia’s engagement ring, artwork and other possessions that Veysey had claimed as lost on insurance reports.

She spotted Veysey’s reading glasses on a nightstand.

“I’ve got to go see him,” she sobbed. “He needs his glasses.”

*

She did not see Veysey again until two years later -- in federal court in Chicago, when he went on trial for arson and fraud.

His insurance claims had netted nearly $1 million, prosecutors calculated.

They called nearly 100 witnesses, including medical and fire experts. They hauled out that narrow window frame the 6-foot-5 Veysey claimed that he’d leaped through during the High Road fire.

And they presented jurors with some telling numbers:

Some 74% of Veysey’s income, going back nine years, had come from insurance; just 4% came from paychecks.

And another number: An insurance actuary was asked what the odds were that four homes at random would have serious fires in nine years. On a pad projected for jurors to see, he began writing digits, 13 in all, running down the side of the pad -- 1.7 trillion to 1.

After a six-week trial, the jury deliberated just one day before returning the verdict: Guilty on 18 counts of insurance fraud and arson.

He was sentenced in November 2001 to 110 years -- the extraordinary length due, in large part, to the jury’s conclusion that Veysey was responsible for Patricia’s death as part of an insurance scam. (He was not charged with homicide.)

Veysey is appealing.

The ordeal finally over, Deserie Beetle, who had almost died in the fire on High Road, hugged Ron Delelio, the Cary detective whose suspicions had sparked the investigation.

Afterward, she took the courthouse elevator down with her mother and sister.

“He got what he deserved, only not enough,” she said as they descended. Then, under her breath, she muttered: “He’s still alive.”

As Delelio walked outside, he carried a commendation plaque that ATF agents had given him that day.

Heading home, he remembered the promise he had made years earlier to Patricia Veysey’s parents. “It may not be today or tomorrow or next month,” he had vowed, “but justice will prevail.”

Delelio smiled. That day had come.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

How This Series Was Reported

From Associated Press

The story of the investigation into John T. Veysey III is based on interviews with numerous officials, including Pat Layng and Lori Lightfoot of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago; members of the Cary, Ill., police, including Det. Ron Delelio, Deputy Chief Ed Fetzer and former Det. Denise Bradstreet; Cary firefighters Brad Dellatore, Andy Veath, Scott Mohr and Robert Deau; U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents Jack Malooly, Tina Sherrow, Jane Balkema and Jim Allison; Deserie Beetle and her mother, Irene Beetle; Betty and Gerald DeBruyne, and Kathleen Hilkin. It also draws on thousands of pages of court testimony from Veysey’s arson and fraud trial and sentencing, as well as a transcript of an interview conducted by Sherrow and John Korth, a sheriff’s deputy in Jo Daviess County, Ill. Through his attorney, Veysey declined to be interviewed.