Suspicious Inferno Illuminates a Murky Past

The fire on High Road was an angry monster.

It ripped through the roof of the wood-frame house, shattered windows and wrecked everything in its path, its hot breath searing walls black.

The fire sprang to life about 2 a.m. in the living room, near a Christmas tree. In minutes, flames filled the room, then roared along the hallways, blowtorch-hot, eating into beams and timbers.

Thick smoke billowed up the stairs, into the rooms, under the beds.

In a second-floor hallway, the plastic shell of a smoke detector attached to the ceiling began to melt, curling inward to the place where a 9-volt battery should have been.

Through the eaves, tongues of flame licked upward, lighting the sky for blocks around with a false dawn.

A neighbor who peered out his window from across the street saw a husky man silhouetted in the eerie glow, pacing quickly back and forth, staring at the burning house.

This figure, shoeless and wearing pajamas despite the snow and 10-degree cold, was John T. Veysey III.

“Help, get my wife and kid out!” Veysey shouted as he ran toward Sgt. Edward Fetzer, the first police officer to arrive.

The two men hurried to the side of the house. Fetzer got down on hands and knees and Veysey stood on his back, using the officer’s flashlight to break a window. Glass rained down on Fetzer. Then Veysey fell.

The officer found a ladder, climbed to the window and shined the flashlight in. All he could see was black smoke.

From somewhere inside came a groan.

“Let me go in!” Veysey said in a voice that seemed filled with panic.

No one was stopping him. But, Fetzer noticed, Veysey made no move.

“Where is the fire department?” Veysey wailed.

Fetzer looked at him. He was rumpled and he seemed half-crazed with worry, but the sergeant could see no serious injuries, no burns or bruises.

How had he managed to get out? Why were his wife and son still inside? Fetzer had no time to pursue those questions.

In the days ahead, many more questions would surface, and the answers would reveal that this was just the latest disaster in John Veysey’s life.

His aura of doom would soon pique the interest of a detective on the small police force in Cary, a village an hour outside Chicago, and his suspicions would grow the more he discovered. In time -- and the case would take years and reach far beyond this town -- others would dig deeper, including dogged prosecutors and a team of federal agents, one of them a sleuth who had traveled the world, unraveling the mysteries of fire.

But now, on this freezing morning in January 1998, the first priority was to stop the High Road fire from becoming a killer.

A few blocks away, the radio pager on the night table beside Brad Delatorre’s bed began beeping.

“Structure fire at 342 High Road. People trapped,” a dispatcher’s voice intoned. Delatorre, a volunteer firefighter in Cary, forced himself awake.

The four-block drive to the fire station took less than a minute.

Delatorre hustled into bunker pants and rubber boots and pulled a Nomex fireproof hood over his head. He jumped into a seat on Engine 243, shrugging into the harness of his 7-pound oxygen tank as the truck raced through the darkness.

A block from the house, Delatorre could see flames leaping from windows. Smoke was going to be everywhere.

A fire lieutenant met the engine and briefed Delatorre: A woman and a child were in a rear bedroom. No one knew what kind of shape they were in, but it couldn’t be good.

From the time he was a boy, Delatorre had always wanted to be a firefighter. It was a rush, a thrill. That had never changed, even after eight years.

He knew what had to be done. He had practiced the drill, pulling plastic dummies out of smoke-filled buildings with instructors watching.

This was the first time it was for real.

Adrenaline pumping, Delatorre adjusted his hood, put on his air mask, helmet and gloves, and forced open the front door.

A furnace-like blast hit him. Flames cascaded down the stairs, and a fireball flew over his head.

The smoke was so dense that at first Delatorre was almost blind. He could barely make out the first stair.

Getting down on hands and knees to avoid the worst of the heat, he put his left hand against the wall and crawled forward.

Like all firefighters, he dreaded becoming lost and wandering aimlessly in the deadly smoke. If he had to retreat, he could turn around and use his right hand against the wall to guide him out.

Flames were shooting along the ceiling.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” he yelled to firefighter Andy Veath, behind him on the dark stairs. “We’ve got people trapped.”

Veath, a firefighter for a decade, had once saved an 18-month-old girl from choking. He kept her photo on his desk.

Now he was moving so quickly that part of his air pack got tangled with his left glove, and he ran in with one hand bare. He touched something hot -- very hot -- and he winced as he moved up the stairs with Delatorre.

At the top, they turned left and crawled down the hall.

“Anyone here?” Delatorre called. “Anyone here?!”

He held his breath because exhaling in his mask made a spooky, Darth Vader-like noise that could drown out cries for help.

But there were no cries -- just each other’s voices and background chatter from their two-way radios.

He turned into the bedroom, felt a bed and reached under it. Nothing.

He crawled over it and felt a limp torso. A woman, face down.

“We’ve got somebody here,” he shouted. He was fairly sure that she was already dead.

Veath followed. “I have a child,” he called out.

Delatorre grabbed the woman in a bear hug from behind, but her loose clothing made her hard to hold. As she flopped like a noodle, her arms flailed at him, knocking his helmet off and dislodging his mask.

Veath thought that the child in his arms was probably dead too. But he wasn’t sure -- and if the kid were to have any chance, he had to get him out of this smoke.

He saw a firefighter at the window.

“Back off,” Veath bellowed. “I need to break some glass.”

He smashed the window of the back bedroom with his left arm while cradling the limp body with his right, then passed the child, a boy, out to the firefighter on a ladder.

Quickly, Veath rejoined Delatorre, who now had gritty smoke seeping into his mask. Joined by a third firefighter, Scott Mohr, they dragged the woman into the hall, down the stairs and out the front door.

Veysey hovered as his wife and son, both motionless, were carried to the ambulances.

Steam rose from Deserie Veysey’s body. Her face was streaked with soot. Rescuers weren’t sure if she was breathing.

Little John, just 3 1/2, was breathing, but at a labored pace, far too slowly, as if he were losing the fight for survival. Specks of glass glittered on his face in the harsh light of the ambulance.

Veath put a laryngoscope, an L-shaped flashlight, into the boy’s mouth, shining a light down his throat. He tried to insert a narrow tube to keep his air passage open, but he couldn’t see the vocal cords and was afraid to push deeper.

Veath withdrew the tube. It was caked with soot.

He cleaned the tube and tried again. Again it came up black.

Veath knew that the poisons carried on the smoke were already thick in the blood of the woman and the boy.

They needed to get to a hospital fast.

“Load and go!” he shouted.

The ambulances rushed off into the night, sirens wailing.

*

Hours later, Deserie Veysey lay unconscious, face ashen, hair matted, as her distraught mother leaned over her hospital bed.

Tubes inserted to help her breathe had taken on the inky color of the smoke. The sight had hit Irene Beetle so hard that as she approached her 29-year-old daughter, her knees had buckled.

Unable to reach over the tubes, she kissed her own hand and gently placed it on Deserie’s forehead.

“I love you,” she whispered.

There was little more she could do. She thought of her grandchild, Little John -- Deserie’s stepson -- who also had been trapped in the fire.

She rushed down the corridor to see him.

*

It was shortly afterward that Det. Ron Delelio arrived at the Cary police station, a Tudor-style building that looks like a cozy inn in the English countryside.

He got a verbal report from an officer who had photographed the fire scene. Right away, it struck Delelio as odd.

The husband, the officer said, told him that he had escaped the smoke and flames by hurling himself through a second-story bedroom window, then had run with his baby daughter, Sabrina, in his arms to call for help. He left her with neighbors.

But he had left his wife and son inside.

What kind of man would leave his family to fend for themselves in a fire -- even to call 911?

Delelio thought of his own wife and baby daughter. He tried to imagine himself doing that. Impossible. It would never happen.

Delelio drove to the firehouse. A preliminary report from the state fire marshal’s office was already in: The blaze appeared to be an accident. It had apparently started in the Christmas tree.

That was plausible. It was mid-January and by now the tree would have been tinder-dry. The spot near where the tree had been standing was the most charred part of the room.

Delelio seized a string of Christmas tree lights to be sent for testing. Maybe it was faulty wiring. But he doubted that was the cause. He couldn’t get that image of a man abandoning his family out of his mind.

As he headed back to the police station, Delelio got word: Come back to the firehouse. The fire chief had just received a call from someone who wasn’t buying the story either.

The caller, Betty DeBruyne, lived in nearby Hainesville. Her daughter, Patricia, had once been married to John Veysey. Patricia had died in 1995. The coroner had ruled it cardiac arrhythmia, due to a congenital heart problem.

Over the years, though, Betty DeBruyne and her husband, Gerald, had grown increasingly suspicious of their onetime son-in-law.

This wasn’t Veysey’s first fire, she said.

His home in Twin Lakes, Wis., had burned. After it was rebuilt, a gas explosion had blown the house to splinters.

A Veysey home in Galena, Ill., had gone up in flames as well.

“Don’t take this lightly,” she warned. “He’s had too many fires.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

How This Series Was Reported

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 Chief 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 “Callie” Hilkin.

It also draws on thousands of pages of court testimony, as well as a transcript of an interview with Veysey conducted by Sherrow and John Korth, a sheriff’s deputy in Jo Daviess County, Ill. Through his attorney, Veysey declined to be interviewed.

*

Next week: A small-town detective finds clues and follows his suspicions.