An arsonist has been setting fires in the Dandenong Ranges National Park in Victoria, Australia for the last four years. Maybe this arrest will be the end of it.

From the AAP:

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A Country Fire Authority volunteer charged with lighting scrub fires in Melbourne’s outer east since September last year has been remanded in custody. The 36-year-old man, who was not named, appeared in an out of session court hearing before a bail justice in the kitchen of the nearby Lilydale Police Station on Thursday night.

The man was arrested by Lilydale detectives on Wednesday after seven small scrub fires were reported burning on roadsides around Mount Evelyn about 2pm. The accused faces 23 counts each of deliberately lighting a bushfire and conduct endangering life, along with a drink-driving charge.

Lilydale Detective Senior Constable Brigette De Chirico told the hearing police would oppose bail because the accused was “an unacceptable risk to the community because he’s likely to commit further offences whilst on bail”.

She said the accused suffered depression, had an ongoing alcohol problem and allegedly committed the offences while “heavily intoxicated”.

“He has difficulty controlling his behaviour whilst he is intoxicated,” Detective De Chirico said.

The accused did not apply for bail. The bail justice, who was not named, remanded the man to appear in the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday.

Speaking after the hearing, Lilydale Senior Detective Sergeant Allan Price said the charges related to fires deliberately lit as far back as September last year.

He said a team of detectives and support staff had worked “around the clock” since the investigation was launched in mid-November. He praised the community’s assistance which he said led to the arrest.

“It’s a real weight off a lot of people’s shoulders, the police and the community and these things don’t happen without the assistance of the community and they have been fantastic,” he said.

The Mount Evelyn man was arrested by local detectives on Wednesday after seven small scrub fires were reported burning on roadsides around the Mount Evelyn area, in Melbourne’s outer east, at about 2pm (AEDT).

A CFA spokesman confirmed earlier on Thursday that the man in custody was a volunteer but would not say how long he had been part of the organisation.

CFA chief executive Mick Bourke said volunteer screening processes involved police checks.

“The screening is that national police check process, which we started many years ago,” Mr Bourke told ABC Radio.

Miller-McCune has released the fourth in their series of five articles about the latest advances in managing wildland fires.

Part I: THE POWER OF ‘LOOK-DOWN’ TECHNOLOGY
Part II: UNDERSTANDING WILDFIRE BEHAVIOR AND PREDICTING ITS SPREAD
Part III: WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING ON U.S. FIRELINES
Part IV: CATCHING WILDFIRE ARSONISTS RED-HANDED
Part V: SMART SOLUTIONS GOING FORWARD

These are really well-done articles and are worth reading. Here is how the latest one, Part IV, about wildfire arsonists, begins:

Sixty-year-old grandmother Charmian Glassman, aka Ma Sparker, started 11 separate fires at Northern California’s Mt. Shasta in 1995, setting each within 10 feet of where she stopped her new Buick at the side of a winding woodsy road.

Her motive? To give her forest firefighter son enough fires to fight to prove himself a hero.

Consultant Paul Steensland, a veteran fire investigator and retired U.S. Forest Service senior special agent, frequently mentions this case when lecturing fire investigators. It’s a cautionary tale about getting too deeply invested in “profiles” of arsonists derived from the analysis of past offenders.

Although every arson case is different, these profiles — the most notable generated by research conducted by the FBI and the South Carolina Forestry Service in the mid-1990s — are markedly similar: Caucasian males in their teens or 20s, unemployed or marginally employed, blue-collar background, living alone or with parents. The profiles’ acceptance is why, even as officers were desperately searching for their arsonist on Mt. Shasta, Charmian Glassman managed to set a couple of fires right under their noses.

“She literally lit two fires within less than 50 feet of where officers were in the brush,” Steensland recalled, “because they just saw her pull by and could see her in her car and said, ‘She’s a grandmother.’ They had been conditioned to look for young white males.”

Thanks Dick

Two teenage boys were arrested for starting a fire in Australia on Black Saturday last February 7 in which a disabled resident burned to death. The Maiden Gully fire near Bendigo killed Kevin “Mick Kane, 48, destroyed 60 homes, caused $29 million in damages, and burned 875 acres.

The two boys, aged 14 and 15, are said to have started the fire, then were seen by witnesses when they returned to watch it. Later they were stopped by a police roadblock.

Between January 29 and March 26 they made 55 calls on a mobile phone to an emergency number, threatening operators and harassing them with obscene comments. Police used listening devices to investigate the pair.

The boys were each charged with arson causing death, deliberately lighting a bushfire, lighting a fire on a total fire ban day, and lighting a fire in a country area during extreme weather conditions. They face a total of more than 150 charges.

Investigators have concluded that the 160,000-acre Station fire near Los Angeles was arson, but in spite of arresting someone for starting a small fire in the same area, they have not charged anyone starting the fire that was the largest in the recorded history of Los Angeles County.

Here is an excerpt from an article in the Los Angeles Times:

Nearly three months after the Station wildfire turned into the biggest blaze in L.A. County history, killing two firefighters, investigators say they don’t have the necessary evidence to arrest anyone for the arson.

Babatunsin Olukunle

Sheriff’s homicide detectives have questioned a man charged with setting a smaller blaze less than a week before in Angeles National Forest. But authorities say they have not been able to connect Babatunsin Olukunle, a 25-year-old Nigerian national, to the 160,577-acre Station fire that began Aug. 26 in a turnout near Mile Marker 29 above La Cañada Flintridge, authorities say.

“He has told us nothing of relevance in connection with the Station fire,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Liam Gallagher, who is leading the homicide probe. “We’ve talked to him and we’d like to talk to him again.”

Nationally, only about 10% of arson fires yield charges .The task is made all the more difficult in arson wildfires because unlike structural fires there is no confined space.

Arson wildfires are among the most difficult homicide cases to prove, especially when there is a lack of eyewitnesses in an area and point of origin has been repeatedly burned over during by the fire, Gallagher said.

Gallagher said Olukunle was charged last month with setting the Lady Bug Fire and was sent to Patton General Hospital, a state mental health facility, for an evaluation. Olukunle, a one-time UC Davis student who became a transient, was “articulate” during an interview but of little help, Gallagher said.

Olukunle has pleaded not guilty to setting the earlier fire in a forest. Detectives won’t even call him a person of interest anymore in the Station fire.

“We don’t label people,” Gallagher said.

Investigators know that a substance helped ignite the fire, according to sources familiar with the investigation. They have repeatedly combed the grid around the fire’s point of origin looking for markings or other clues to the human cause of the blaze.

“Basically we have nothing at this point. We have run down all our leads,” Gallagher said.

The fire became a double homicide Aug. 30 when County Fire Capt. Tedmund “Ted” Hall, 47, and firefighter specialist “Arnaldo “Arnie” Quinones, 35, died when their vehicle careened off a road south of Acton, plunging some 800 feet into a ravine.

Thanks Dick

As Wildfire Today reported on October 20, Ricky Lee Fowler has been indicted for setting the Old fire which burned 91,000 acres in 2003 in southern California. He was charged with five counts of murder, one count of arson of an inhabited structure, and one count of aggravated arson with special circumstances. Five heart attack deaths have been linked to the fire which burned in the areas of Lake Arrowhead, Running Springs, and Big Bear.

The charges were filed just four days before the statue of limitations was due to expire. It could be difficult to prove that stress from the fire led to the heart attacks.

Here is an excerpt from a story by the AP:

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Proving that case, however, could be a challenge: all the victims had a history of heart disease, and prosecutors might be hard-pressed to get a jury to see murder in the medical mix.

Under state law, any death that occurs during the commission of a felony, including arson, can be charged as first-degree murder — but a conviction will hinge on how much time elapsed between the crime and the death and if any other factors contributed.

“There’s nothing inherently wrong with attempting a felony murder conviction in this case,” said Robert Weisberg, director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford University. “But the judge could conceivably say I’m not even going to give this to the jury … because it’s too hard to say the fire actually caused the deaths.”

Prosecutors insist they have a strong case and are confident they can link the deaths to the arson.

Investigators pored over hundreds of tips, witness reports and other evidence over six years and were finally able to file charges Wednesday, just four days before the statute of limitations was to expire. Rickie Lee Fowler, a 28-year-old convict currently in prison for burglary, was indicted on five counts of murder, one count of aggravated arson and one count of arson of an inhabited structure.

He has not appeared in court and no attorney was listed in court records.

Following a phone tip, investigators interviewed Fowler several months after the fire, but didn’t have enough evidence to press charges. They went back to him in 2006 and 2008, when he finally provided additional information that helped detectives close the case, Supervising Deputy District Attorney Victor Stull said.

Stull would not say what he said, but defended the district attorney’s decision to charge Fowler in a potential death penalty case. He should have known that people could die — even from heart attacks — when he tossed a lighted roadside flare into the brush.

“You can anticipate someone having a heart attack every now and again, but (these were) three on the same day, within hours of each other and the others followed just days after,” Stull said. “The arsonist takes his victims as he finds them.”

Fowler’s case highlights a new determination to charge alleged arsonists with murder whenever possible in a region plagued by wildfires that repeatedly lead to firefighter and civilian deaths, said John Maclean, who has written four books on arson wildfire prosecutions.

Earlier this year, prosecutors in neighboring Riverside County won a death penalty conviction against Raymond Lee Oyler, an auto mechanic who set the 2006 Esperanza wildfire that killed five federal firefighters. Oyler is believed to be the first person in the U.S. to be convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in a wildland arson case.

Investigators are trying to determine who set the Station Fire, a wildfire north of Los Angeles that resulted in the deaths of two firefighters who drove off the road in thick smoke.

Maclean called the Oyler conviction a watershed moment for prosecutors seeking to stem arsons that ravage the region every fall.

“The lesson of the Esperanza Fire is that anyone who starts a fire deliberately is putting himself in jeopardy of the death penalty, even if there was no intent,” said Maclean, who is currently writing a book on Oyler’s case. “The cat’s out of the bag here. You don’t have to have an Oyler case anymore to go for first-degree murder or in fact to go for the death penalty.”

Like the other victims, McDermith had a history of heart disease, said his daughter-in-law, Lisa McDermith. He had a quadruple bypass in the early 1990s and was having trouble breathing in the thick smoke from the wildfire.

When he died, he was driving from his home in Highland to San Bernardino to retrieve his RV from a mobile home park so he could load it with clothing and camp out in a church parking lot during the evacuation. A crew checking electric wires nearby spotted him in distress and did CPR until an ambulance arrived, but McDermith was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital.

Another man, 93-year-old Charles Howard Cunningham, had a heart attack as he watched his home burn.

Lisa McDermith said because of the victims’ pre-existing conditions, she was surprised when a detective said Fowler would likely be charged with murder.

“Who knows how much longer these people would have lived? It was a very stressful situation with the fires, the smoke, they couldn’t breathe, they were starving for oxygen,” she said. “I think that exacerbated all of their health issues and I really believe that murder charges are justified.”

At the royal commission hearing that is reviewing information about the February 7 Black Saturday fires in Australia, a forensic behavioral scientist told the panel that some wildfire arsonists are indifferent towards causing death and may see starting a fire as a chance to empower themselves.

Here is an excerpt from an article in The Australian:

Professor Ogloff, who is head of Victoria’s state forensic psychiatric service and director of Monash University’s centre for forensic behavioural science, said bushfire arsonists could also become excited by total fire ban days and see them as opportunities to light fires with little chance of being caught.

He said he had dealt with arsonists or “fire setters” for whom days of high fire danger “enacts some of the thinking around setting fires”.

“What better time than when there are already fires all around and difficult to control then for them to go and set a fire which would have relatively little chance of them being caught,” Professor Ogloff said.

“At the time of these fires, and certainly in the days leading up to it, there is an increased interest, and in fact we have seen in some cases increased behaviour in the fire setting. So it is a problem.”

A number of Black Saturday bushfires under investigation by the royal commission are suspected of being deliberately lit, including the Murrindindi fire that killed 40 people and destroyed more than 500 homes.

Professor Ogloff said that at peak times, up to 80 per cent of fires in Australia were either deliberately lit or suspicious.

He said there was no single profile of bushfire arsonists, but they were more likely to be “social outcasts”, physically unattractive, lacking confidence and of low intelligence who may have a mental disorder and prior criminal convictions.

Bushfires were lit for a range of reasons, including arsonists attempting to increase their self-esteem or feel “in control of an otherwise dismal existence”. Lighting bushfires could be a “particularly empowering experience”, causing arsonists to become serial offenders to regain that feeling. Professor Ogloff said potential arsonists could be attracted to working as volunteer firefighters and go on to light fires, in some cases because they wanted to be seen as heroes. A study in NSW showed that 11 of 50 convicted arsonists were found to have been fire service volunteers.

He said criminal background checks and psychological screening would reduce the risk of arsonists becoming firefighters.

The hearing into the Black Saturday disaster, which killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2000 homes, resumes on Monday.