Rubble of a House Fire Offers Tantalizing Clues

THE STORY SO FAR

Fire destroyed John Veysey’s house in Cary, Ill., leaving his wife and 3-year-old son struggling for life. Veysey himself survived, but a local detective doubted his story of jumping from a window to summon help. Then a caller told authorities about other suspicious fires in Veysey’s past.

*

CARY, Ill. -- The scent of charred wood hung in the frosty air as Det. Ron Delelio stepped around pools of standing water and holes where flames had eaten away the floorboards.

Burned furniture, clothing and toys were everywhere -- a family’s worldly possessions fried into an amorphous mess. Somewhere a generator was humming. A contractor was surveying the fire damage.

Near the foot of the basement stairs in what had been John Veysey’s home, Delelio spotted something that stopped him cold. A smoke detector hung open without a battery. Then nearby, mixed in a pile of clothing, he saw a 9-volt battery.

Delelio wasn’t taking written notes. But an experienced cop always makes mental notes, and the empty smoke detector got a page all to itself.

It came on top of tips from callers to the police station only hours after the fire the previous day.

Most were anonymous. People who knew John T. Veysey III didn’t like him and they told Delelio some intriguing things:

* His first wife died mysteriously.

* He didn’t seem to work, yet he lived comfortably.

* He collected big insurance payouts.

In 15 years as a cop, Delelio had developed a theory about police work: 98% is common sense. And common sense told him that Veysey, this seemingly respectable family man, was a fraud and a liar.

Maybe something even worse.

Proving it would be hard work. Delelio was used to that.

He’d grown up outside Chicago, one of 13 children in a family that struggled to get by. Their three-bedroom home in rural Wonder Lake was so crowded that some kids slept on the living room floor.

At 11, Delelio was washing dishes in a pizza parlor. He dropped out of high school but later got a college degree. His dream was to be a police officer, like his grandfather.

If you wanted something, he’d learned, there was one way to get it: hard work. What he wanted now was to find out what really happened in that fire.

*

When Deserie Veysey woke up in the hospital four days after the High Road inferno, she had no memory of it, no sense of how close she had come to dying.

As she looked around, she saw her mother, Irene Beetle; her husband, John; her 8-month-old daughter, Sabrina; her sister, Denise; her father-in-law, Tom Veysey.

And her stepson, Little John. He was there too. He was OK.

Both had suffered smoke inhalation and were treated in hyperbaric chambers, which increase oxygen levels and help the body eliminate smoke-borne toxins.

Deserie was accustomed to hospitals, having undergone repeated surgeries through childhood to correct a birth defect that left her nose misshapen.

She was hoarse now from tubes inserted in her throat, and she hurt from severe burns on her leg, hand and face. Her whole body felt taut and stretched. Bits of melted carpet still clung to her fingertips.

But she was breathing. She was alive.

How had she gotten here? What had happened?

John was the hero, her father-in-law kept saying. It was John, he said, who saved them all.

John told her that she had discovered the fire when she got up in the middle of the night, threw him a fire extinguisher -- which turned out not to work -- and struggled in vain to crank open a window.

Then, he said, he took a running jump and plunged through the double-glass window, landing in the snow nine feet below. He called it a “Ninja roll.”

He caught Sabrina when Deserie lowered her through the broken window, he said, but then couldn’t get back inside after running for help.

Deserie didn’t remember any of this. Not a single detail.

She remembered coming home about 9:30 p.m., changing into pajamas, spooning herself a bowl of Moose Tracks ice cream and getting ensconced on the couch near the Christmas tree to watch TV.

John had asked if she wanted a glass of water -- not the type of thing he normally did. The last thing she remembered was drinking it.

Deserie spent five days in the hospital before being released.

They all moved in with John’s parents. But instead of sharing a room with her husband, Deserie found herself upstairs with her stepson. Veysey explained that he didn’t want to risk hurting her if he thrashed around in bed.

Since the blaze, John had changed. He was cool and distant. He never asked how she felt, never kissed her. He never said he was happy she’d survived. One morning, Deserie went downstairs, lay next to John on the sofa bed and wrapped her arms around him. He remained rigid.

It was just one more sign that something was terribly wrong. She would never heal there, she thought. She wanted to be coddled, as her mother had done when she was sick as a little girl.

Within a few days, Deserie moved out -- it was the beginning of the end of their marriage.

She moved with Sabrina to her mother’s house outside Rockford, where, two days later, there was a knock at the door. It was Delelio, with fellow Cary Det. Denise Bradstreet.

In the family room, where Deserie sat with her bandaged leg propped up, Bradstreet asked about her burns. She asked about the children. Then she got to the point:

“We’re concerned about your safety; that’s why we drove out here. There are some things that lead us to believe this wasn’t an accident.”

As Bradstreet spoke, Deserie thought about how aloof John had become. Listening, she let an idea that would have once been unthinkable slowly take hold: John had set the fire.

Bradstreet had expected Deserie to protest, “No, not my husband, John.” Instead, her response took the detective by surprise.

“OK,” she said calmly. “What do you want me to do?”

The detectives needed information, they explained; then they carefully broached a possible motive: insurance.

Yes, Deserie said, after their wedding, she and John had taken out $500,000 life insurance policies on each other. There had been a $50,000 policy on Little John; it had lapsed a month earlier when a renewal notice was sent to the wrong address and never forwarded. There was no policy on Sabrina.

Over the next few weeks, Deserie made daily visits to the small investigations room on the second floor of the police department, and her life story unfolded.

She had met John in 1996 through a personals ad in the paper. She was on the rebound from a long relationship that had gone bad -- and now she was ready to start a family.

She remembered what he wore the day they met: tight white jeans, aqua shirt and gray suede shoes. At first, she’d been put off by that, but soon he won her over.

John would send her lush bouquets for no special reason. She felt comfortable around him. He was intelligent, dependable, someone she could count on.

As for work, he told her that he dabbled in commodity futures trading.

They were married in 1997, a month before Sabrina’s birth.

The detectives were amazed by Deserie’s command of details. Although she didn’t remember the fire, there were some unsettling things she could recall.

When they started dating in the summer of 1996, John was living in the Galena home that he’d shared with his first wife, who had died 15 months earlier. In December 1996, fire damaged that house. And something he said soon afterward struck Deserie as odd.

“They’re going to arrest me,” she remembered him telling her. “They’re going to think I did it.”

But that fire was ruled accidental. And he collected $266,382 in insurance.

Another strange thing happened later, Deserie told the detectives. It was January 1998, two days before the fire on High Road in Cary.

She came home from work and Veysey told her not to read her mail. He needed some fresh air. With the kids, they piled into her car and went for a ride, skidding on icy streets.

That night, Deserie opened her bank statement and discovered that two checks written by John -- for $2,500 and $500 -- had bounced. Just a bookkeeping error, he said.

Deserie gave the detectives copies of insurance policies. She went to the library and tracked down a copy of a personals ad that Veysey had placed with the headline: “Sleepless In Galena.”

Delelio started collecting everything in a three-ring binder and put together a timeline. But it was becoming clear that he needed help: This case, which had moved far beyond the boundaries of Cary, Ill., was getting too big for him.

He invited county, state and federal officials in and laid out what he had learned, what he suspected and what he felt was beyond his reach.

This would be a turning point. Federal involvement would mean the power to subpoena crucial bank and insurance records in different states.

It would bring in arson and financial specialists that a small-town police department couldn’t match.

Even with the promised help, Delelio kept a hand in the case. He returned to search the High Road house, again and again.

On one visit, he discovered the pieces of another melted smoke detector, this one in the second-floor hallway. It had no battery, just like one in the basement. That was strange, considering that Deserie had told him Veysey had tested it and found it working just a month before the fire.

In the master bedroom, he found a package with a charred wrapper. Inside was “The Anarchist’s Cookbook,” containing recipes for making bombs.

And in the exercise room, there were two volumes of “The Poor Man’s James Bond” with instructions for setting fires and using exotic poisons.

Another day, Delelio returned to the bedroom from which Veysey claimed he had jumped. Picking up shards of glass, he looked for dried blood or pieces of cloth. Nothing. He scanned the window frame, just 2 feet wide. Veysey was big -- 6-foot-5, 220 pounds.

Again, no torn cloth or blood.

Delelio went to work with a screwdriver. He removed the wooden frame and put it in his squad car.

Someday, he thought, this will be important evidence.

*

Next week: A master arson sleuth has his own suspicions.