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StyleTHURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014

by Monica Hesse

L O V E A N D F I R EBONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

The rising sun is reflected in a window of a charred house on John Caine Road in Parksley, Va. The property was one of the last to be set ablaze in a series of arsons that took place over the course of five months.

In Virginia’s rural Accomack County,a troubled romance was behind

a string of 77 arsonsBY MONICA HESSE

JAY DIEM/EASTERN SHORE NEWS

Firefighters monitor one of the arsons, which destroyed ahouse on Church Road in Accomac, Va., onMarch 5, 2013.

6For more photos and a video related to this article,go to wapo.st/arson.

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 KLMNO PAGE 2

ACCOMACK COUNTY, Va. — The corn was har-vested, and the field was a dirty sort of brown. Deborah Clark would

think about that later, how at a dif-ferent time of year she wouldn’t have seen anything until it was too late.

A friend had come over to her house in Parksley, Va., once the kids from Clark’s living-room day care went home. He left about 10:30 that Monday evening, but a few minutes later knocked on her door again. “Hey,” he told her. “That house across the field is on fire.”

She knew which one he was talking about. It had been a nice house once: two stories, white paint. But now it was empty, and it had a peeled, beaten look to it. It had been a long time since anyone lived there, so she couldn’t think of how it could have caught fire — except that it was so dry that maybe the weather had something to do with it.

Clark followed her friend outside and saw that he was right. The old sad house was burning down and the flames were rolling in her direction over the brittle field.

She ran next door to warn her neigh-bor, who, like Clark, lives in a low-slung ranch house off a silent road. At 10:41 p.m. on Nov. 12, 2012, she called the East-ern Shore 911 center, flustered and out of breath. “I’m just calling — somebody done

set the house on fire on Dennis Drive.”In the coming weeks, she would

get used to the sirens. Everybody would. They would sound just after bedtime or just before, twice a night or once a week, from Parksley, Tasley, Melfa, Bloxom. The county vibrated with fire engines groaning over gravel driveways. The county vibrated with suspicion. The county went about its business. The county burned down. People assumed that the culprit must be someone who lived among them, and people would be right. It would be a love story.

Deborah Clark’s fire was the first fire in Accomack County.

In the span of five months, there would be 76 more.

“I didn’t know what was going on. I thought the world was coming to an end,” Clark says, remembering how on that cold, dry night, she stood in her yard and watched a once-fine house disappear into charred wood and ash.

In Virginia’s rural Accomack County,a troubled romance was behind

a string of 77 arsonsBY MONICA HESSE





Accomack is an old place, a rural one, established in 1608 or 1634 or 1670, depending on which definition of “established” is being used. It was a farming

community originally, making money off white potatoes and lumber.

Along its northern border, which begins midway down the narrow peninsula of the Eastern Shore, is a big sign shaped like a Confederate flag reading, “The South Starts Here.” South of the county, about 60 miles, is the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tun-

nel, which connects Accomack to the rest of the commonwealth. Route 13 makes up the spine of the area, with unmarked drives veining off into quiet dead ends. Every-thing there is connected to everything else — the people, too, many of whom share last names even if they don’t remember how they share bloodlines. There are lots of car repair shops, a few big-box stores, a few cute cafes, a railway museum.

When the sun goes down, the county is silent and the roads are black as hell.

Just after one in the morning on Nov.

PHOTOS BY BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

A deserted house sits in Accomack County, which has no shortage of such properties, tucked deep into country roads that aren’t well traveled. Many of the properties the arsonists targeted were uninhabited.


13 — three hours later and 13 miles away from where Clark called 911 — Helen Hasty went to let her dog out and saw flames sur-rounding some outbuildings on the farm she owned.

“They’re not insured, they’re vacant — they’re just old shacks that have been there for a hundred years,” she told the operator who answered. She hadn’t heard anything. She hadn’t seen anything. “Oh my God,” she said as the fire presumably grew big-ger. “There she goes.”

The next 911 call came just eight min-utes later: A brush fire had been set near a ditch bank and burned a 10th of an acre of woods.

Twenty-one hours after that, a sheriff ’s deputy on his way home called to report that an abandoned house was burning.

Another call followed at 10:45 p.m., and another at 11:43.

“Hey, buddy,” Miles Thornton, who made the 11:43 call, said to the operator. “There’s a structure fire over on Savan-nah Road.” Thornton had stepped outside for a cigarette when he heard a crackling sound, which was coming from an empty house seven miles north of the original fire in Parksley. “I looked over,” Thornton explained, “and all I saw was orange in the sky.”

It was a little more than 24 hours after the first fire had been set. Now there were six.

The Accomack County Sheriff ’s Office doesn’t have its own fire investigators, so the Virginia State Police sent special agents

to examine the properties. The agents determined that all of the fires had been intentionally set.

At the time of the 1910 Census, Accomack had the highest per capita income of any non-urban area in the United States. That was the peak of the county’s fortune. Over the next century, the population sank, from 53,000 at its height to 33,000 in 2010. People picked up and moved, north to Delaware or across the Chesapeake Bay to the mainland, leav-ing unsellable houses behind to crumble in an emptying county. Those who stayed ran stores, taught school, farmed crops, and got jobs with Tyson or Perdue, which have plants nearby and process millions of chickens a year.


Once the arsons started, outsiders would occasionally wonder why nobody had been caught, after all that time, after all those fires.

“I can comprehend why they lasted so long,” says Jim Eichelberger, the mayor of Parksley.

“First of all, there’s no traffic off of 13,” he says. “After 8 or 9 p.m., you won’t see but two cars.” People in Accomack don’t waste money making unnecessary car trips. They have no cause to drive down the deep coun-try roads where a lot of the fires were set, he reasons, so they had no chance to see

who could have been lighting them.The second reason the fires kept hap-

pening had to do with simple supply.“As for running out of abandoned

buildings?” Eichelberger says. “Naw. They could never run out of abandoned build-ings here.”

Lois Gomez’s Christmas lights were half up on Dec. 15, 2012. She hadn’t decided whether to bother with the rest of the decorations, which were meanwhile stored in

the family’s detached garage. In the mid-

Warren Phillips records gun sales at Jaxon’s Hardware in Parksley, Va., a store he owns— and that his father owned before him. Phillips saidthat during the arsons, he avoided going out at night.


dle of that night, she got up for a drink of water and heard a passerby banging on her door, yelling that the garage was on fire — approximately the 30th fire since the arsons had begun a month before. The family kept chickens in a pen attached to the garage, and as Gomez watched her property burn, she realized that whoever set the fire had taken the time to let out all the birds, which were now running around the lawn at 4 a.m.

It was a strange time to live in the neighborhood.

A few weeks later, just down the street, someone burned out an old pickup truck, and resi-dents watched firefighters put out the flames.

Charlie Smith and his fiance, Tonya Bundick, who lived next door to the Gomezes, were in the crowd. After the fire was extinguished, according to an investigation document, Tonya asked fellow onlooker Joanna Thornes who she thought was responsible. She told Thornes that the arsonist was too smart to be caught. The police had

“As for runningout ofabandonedbuildings? Naw.They couldnever run out ofabandonedbuildings here.”Jim Eichelberger,mayor of Parksley


For weeks before it burned onMarch 12, 2013, people in Tasley, Va., had been wondering whether the old,emptyWhispering Pines motel would be targeted.


canvassed the area and had visited Char-lie and Tonya’s house twice, Tonya remem-bers, to ask if they’d seen anything.

Months passed and fires accumulated. Houses, shacks, cabins. Billboards, piles of tires. Nothing that pointed to insur-ance fraud; many of these places weren’t insured. This was a county that didn’t have much, and what it didn’t have was burning down. A storage building burned down, and an airplane hangar burned down, and a Methodist church almost burned down but didn’t. A commercial garage caught fire, and so did the propane tank inside it,

and that fire was on Christmas Eve and the flames lit the horizon. For weeks, people had been wondering whether Whispering Pines — a ramshackle, shuttered motel that used to have a AAA-rated restaurant — would burn down, and it would, even-tually, but the next day there would be another building, and another, and there was always something else burning.

The police issued statements and reward offers, and then they quintupled the reward offers, up to $25,000. Resi-dents given to more paranoid explanations thought the federal government might be

BONNIE JO MOUNT/THE WASHINGTON POST

A long-vacant house on Dennis Drive in Parksley, Va., was the first to be set on fire, on Nov. 12, 2012. Nothing about the arsons pointed to insurance fraud, as many of the properties weren’t insured.


responsible, maybe via drones.An industrious group of

armchair detectives who called themselves the Eastern Shore Arsonist Hunters purchased motion-triggered cameras, posi-tioning them at a house they thought was a likely target. When they came back the next day, they discovered a police camera also there, trained on their own movements.

But even while the reward led nowhere and the armchair detectives surveilled nobody but each other, there were still sign-posts.

It was the 44th fire of the series, and it took place at the residence of J.D. Shreaves, a single father who works for a tree-pruning company.

In February, three months into the arsons, Shreaves left his house near Accomack’s northern border to drop off his two young daughters at his mother’s. The round-trip drive took no more than 25 minutes. Back at home, he thought he smelled something burning, but when he walked from room to room he found noth-ing and decided he’d imagined it.

Later that evening, though, when his daughters returned, they smelled some-thing, too. This time, Shreaves took a flash-light outside. On the back of his house, the siding had been pulled away, and a lit piece of cloth was stuffed into the boards.

His daughters sobbed as he called the police. “Girls, calm down,” he told them. “Your dad-dy’s here with you.” He was no expert, but the lit rag — it was obvious the fire was set inten-tionally.

If that were true, though, it meant an aberration from the pattern. Shreaves’s house wasn’t abandoned; it was occupied by a family. And then there was the sequencing — the fact that the fire was set in the 25 minutes he was gone. It meant someone had timed it perfectly. It meant someone had been watching him.

There was one other detail that didn’t seem to mean any-

thing.“That night of my house?” Shreaves

remembers. “It was Valentine’s Day.”

By that February, of 2013, Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick had been dating for about two years. Everybody knew Charlie. Some people knew him as Charlie

Applegate, the surname of the stepfather who had raised him, but everybody knew him in one way or another. He was of aver-age height, 5-foot-8, but seemed smaller because of a hunched, folded-in way of walking. He had red hair, cut close, a goa-tee and wide blue eyes.

He’d once been a volunteer firefighter

“It’s the mostunderprosecutedcrime. Arsonistsgenerally don’tconfess. Theydon’t feel guilty.They don’tshow up inpolice stationsand say, ‘Thishas beenkeeping me upat night.’ ”Dian Williams. thefounder of the Center forArson Research


at the Tasley station, in the south-central part of the county, although he hadn’t been active for several years. Now he ran an auto shop on Tasley Road, where he did body and paint work. He used to perform the same tasks out of his stepfather’s shop across the street, but they had a falling out and no longer spoke much. One time, Wayne Wessels, an acquaintance of the family, went to Charlie for a touch-up job; Charlie didn’t have the right materials but thought his stepfather might. Rather than call himself, he asked Wessels to go over and pick up the supplies so the father and son wouldn’t have to interact.

The rift had been at least partly over drugs, people speculated. Charlie, 38, had begun experimenting when he was 13, and by his late teens he nursed a crack addic-tion, according to court documents from the mid-1990s. In 1994, he was living with an uncle who looked the other way when his nephew stole a coin collection, a gun and a 10-speed bicycle, but who couldn’t when Charlie began writing checks in the uncle’s name. They were for relatively small amounts — $65, $110 — but there were a lot of them, and Charlie eventually was charged with 24 counts of forgery. A 1996 letter from a probation officer recounts how he was put into a drug treatment pro-gram, relapsed, referred to a mental health counselor, relapsed.

“He wasn’t a mean-spirited person at all,” Wessels says. People wouldn’t have used his business if he were. He was always friendly around the shop; he just seemed

like a doofus whose addiction kept causing him to screw up.

One night in mid-2011, he went to Shuckers Roadhouse, a rural Accomack bar. He was carrying two eight-balls of cocaine. Some friends had set him up on a date.

Tonya Bundick didn’t approve of drugs. She was a single mom raising two boys on a nursing assistant’s salary; she didn’t use illegal substances and didn’t like to associ-ate with people who did. When Tonya met Charlie, she told him that if he was going to be around her kids, he couldn’t be on drugs.

For her, he went clean, he would later say. For her, on the very night they met, he flushed his eight-balls down the toilet.

Like Charlie, Tonya, 41, had grown up in Accomack. Bundick is a good East-ern Shore name, appearing on law offices and small businesses around the county. Although Tonya remembers having a happy childhood, others recall her as a bit of an outsider: She wore cheap shoes and clothes that looked like hand-me-downs, one class-mate says. Other students harassed her on the school bus or in the cafeteria.

“She wasn’t one of those that got picked on that became meek,” the classmate says. When people got mean, she fought back. A boy tried to trip her, and “she jumped right up and sent fists flying.”

Her father was a hard man, but her mother, who had studied to be a nurse before having children, was loving. Tonya liked to read her mother’s old textbooks


as a young girl, and she took her certified nursing assistant courses while still in high school.

As Tonya got older, she grew into her looks. Her face was fine-boned, almost Nefertiti-like. She put highlights in her thick brown hair and wore meticulously applied eyeliner. She was 5-foot-6 with a figure that was long-limbed and large-busted. She would dance on tables when out weekly at Shuckers, which wasn’t unusual for the establishment, but sometimes she’d do it even when nobody else was.

On one of the nights that Kelly Rose, a Shuckers waitress, first met Tonya, she walked into the bar wearing nothing but a bra and underwear beneath her trench coat. “Wow, I got the same outfit at home, but I must do it wrong,” Rose joked to a co-worker, “because I wear clothes over the top.” People noticed Tonya.

Privately, Tonya always thought of herself as a homebody. She liked to read novels, she liked to be in with her boys. “She kept to herself,” an old boyfriend says. She was a showy introvert, a private exhi-bitionist.

But on the night of that first date with Charlie, a set-up by mutual friends, they both opened up, talking for hours in the parking lot. He told her about his troubled past. She told him about her kids. She loved how easygoing he seemed, and the way he laughed. “You could say anything to him and he would laugh,” Tonya says. “His smile would just light up his face.”

Charlie moved in with Tonya, to the

white bungalow she shared with her sons in Parksley. In the same building that Charlie opened his garage, Tonya opened a business of her own, selling clothing in the front office area. She named the store “A Tiny Taste of Toot,” after the pet name her father called her. Charlie, Tonya remem-bers, would hang out in her store more than in his portion of the building, until finally she would have to shoo him away, explaining that women didn’t like shop-ping for clothes around a man covered in dust and car paint.

They seemed very in love. “Lovey-dovey, I guess you’d call it,” says James Kline, who knew them and would see them in public. They shared a Facebook account, and sometimes Charlie logged on to leave her public messages. “It’s Char,” he com-mented on a close-up of Tonya. “Not only are you the best and I love you, your the most beautiful girl in the whole damn world.”

One afternoon in the spring or sum-mer of 2012, before the arsons, they went for lunch at the Sage Diner. Charlie was fidgety, leaving the restaurant to pace around outside. Tonya wondered if some-thing was wrong, but when he returned to the table, his words came out in a jumble. “I have something to ask you,” she remem-bers him saying. Will you marry me?

She dressed up as the Easter Bunny for a children’s celebration. They both dressed up for Halloween, as vampires. Their acquaintance Seth Matthews took a few photos of them in costume, and when


Tonya saw them, she asked if he would pho-tograph their wed-ding. He warned her that he was no profes-sional, but agreed to anyway for $250.

In March 2013, Tonya posted on her clothing store’s Face-book page that she would be closing for a

few months to focus on planning the wed-ding. She was hoping it could be in May, if they could get money together. Their col-ors would be blue and silver.

Later that month, Charlie told Wayne Wessels that he wished he knew who was responsible for the arsons. He said that he had half a mind to find a passed-out junkie, drive him to an abandoned build-ing and plant a lighter on him, just to col-lect the $25,000 in reward money. Wessels

thought the joke was out of character and in poor taste but chalked it up to the stress the whole county was feeling.

Charlie was under stress, because Charlie was the one setting the fires. He says Tonya was, too. He says they were Tonya’s idea.

Arson is a weird crime.

It has no obvious payoff; unlike burglary or drug dealing, it doesn’t make its perpetrators richer, unless it’s an insurance-

related plot. The forensic profile that psy-chiatrists have come up with is skewed by limited sample size: Only 17 percent of arsonists are ever caught.

“It’s the most underprosecuted crime,” says Dian Williams. “Arsonists generally don’t confess. They don’t feel guilty. They don’t show up in police stations and say, ‘This has been keeping me up at night.’ ”

Williams is an arson profiler, the

Charlie Smithseemed reluctant togive arsoninvestigatorsinformation abouthis fiancée, TonyaBundick. Buteventually hisversion of theirstory came out: herson, his sense ofinferiority, howmuch he loved herand howmuch hethought she neededthe fires.

PHOTOS BY VICKI CRONIS-NOHE/VIRGINIAN-PILOTVIA ASSOCIATED PRESS


founder of the Center for Arson Research. She has interviewed more than 1,000 arsonists, by her estimate, and she divides them into categories: revenge arsonists, thrill-seekers, disordered-coping fire start-ers. Most of them are white. Most of them are men. Some of them, such as John Orr, a famous thrill-seeking arsonist who lit an estimated 2,000 fires in Southern Califor-nia while maintaining his day job as a fire investigator, revel in the havoc they secretly create.

Some of them light fires because they have primitive coping skills, and the arsons

are symbolic ways of working through childhood trauma. Sometimes the rea-sons are more inscrutable, Williams says: “When you talk to thrill-seekers and ask them to describe in one word the reason that caused them to set fires, the reason, time after time, is ‘boredom.’”

Virginia state troopers Troy L. Johnson and Willie Burke had been waiting for about three hours. It was April Fools’ Day, 2013. They got into position a

little after 8 p.m. and set up their equip-


Before the Whispering Pines motel burned down, the police offered rewards for information leading to the arsonists, then quintupled the offers, up to $25,000.


ment: night-vision goggles, a portable radio and a hunter’s camouflage pup tent pitched out of view 50 yards behind the tree line.

Johnson and Burke’s task that night was to monitor a house at 19322 Airport Dr. in Melfa, near the southern border of the county. The home’s owner, Claude Henry, had purchased the house for $19,000 and planned to fix it up, but it was still dilapi-dated enough that police had added it to a watch list of empty properties.

Johnson, who has been with the police for four years, wore the goggles. At 11:25 p.m., he saw a gold minivan stop in the road. A passenger leaped out and ran at a dead sprint toward the back of the house. Johnson saw a series of sparks. To the trooper, it seemed like time slowed down as he waited, presumably, to be sure the figure was the arsonist they’d been trying to catch.

Finally, the fire took and the figure ran back toward the road. Johnson and Burke chased after, but just as they were clearing the forest, the minivan reappeared. The fig-ure, wearing dark, baggy clothes, jumped in through the passenger’s side and the van drove off.

Burke, a nine-year police veteran who carried the radio, used it to alert nearby units. The police vehicle carrying Accomack Sheriff ’s Sgt. Wayne Greer was the first to respond. He pulled over the minivan at a traffic light half a mile down

the road, where rural Airport Drive intersects with the more populated Route 13.

Charlie Smith emerged from the passenger side and put his hands up. Martin Kriz, a state trooper who had arrived shortly after Greer, approached

the driver, Tonya Bundick, who was wear-ing a white top and yoga pants. He asked if she was carrying anything he should know about, and she said she had a ChapStick tucked in her bra.

By the time Todd Godwin, the long-time sheriff of Accomack County, showed up at the scene, the intersection was swarming with police cars.

Godwin went over to Greer’s vehicle, where Charlie had been placed in the back seat.

Charlie looked up at the sheriff, whom he’d known for 20 years the way people in this county just know one another. “Todd,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t light them all.”

Charlie and Tonya were arrested, driven to separate police sta-tions and taken into interroga-tion rooms. State police officer Scott Wade, who had been home

enjoying a night off, was called in to ques-tion Tonya. She told him that she and Charlie had been driving around that night when he asked her to stop and let him out of the car. She did, she told Wade, and then a few minutes later she swung back to pick

“Is there anyway we can gether out of this?”Charlie Smith, referringto his fiancée, TonyaBundick, in a policeinterview after his arrest


him up. She didn’t know he’d gone to light the fire, she said. She didn’t know anything about the arsons.

Charlie’s interviewers were Godwin and Robert Barnes, a special agent with the Virginia State Police. The interroga-tion room was equipped with a table, three chairs and a red cooler someone had left sitting in the corner.

“You know Rob, don’t you?” asked Godwin, who has a reassuring high-tenor voice and a face that looks, perpetually, freshly shaved.

“Unfortunately, yeah.” Charlie, who

wore baggy jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt, burst into sudden, sheepish laughter. “I like him and all, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Barnes brought the subject around to the matter at hand. “Do you understand why we’re all here?” he asked. “Lots of fires been going on and stuff.”

Charlie was open about his participa-tion, but when Godwin and Barnes tried to ask him why he’d done it and how it started, he grew cagey. “Is she here?” he asked. He wanted to see Tonya. “Is there any way we can get her out of this?”


This abandoned house in Accomack County is much like the ones that were targeted—off the beaten path, tucked deep into country roads. At the time of the 1910 Census, Accomack had the highest per capita income of any non-urban area in the nation. Over the next century, people picked up and moved, leaving unsellable houses behind to crumble in an emptying county.


He didn’t want to give them information about her. Eventu-ally, though, his version of their story came out: her son, his sense of inferiority, how much he loved her and how much he thought she needed the fires.

“Was it, like, a relief for her?” Barnes asked.

“I think so,” Charlie said. They never stayed to watch any of them burn, he said. They just lit them and ran.

“Was there any that you liked better?”

Charlie shook his head. “I hated every night.”

There are things Charlie and Tonya agree on, about what led them to the house on Airport Road. There are aspects to the story Charlie and Tonya don’t

agree on at all, having to do with how a love story became a fire story.

They have both attested, either in interviews or court documents, that in 2012 and 2013, they were going through a rough patch.

Tonya found out her older son had a behavioral disorder when he was a young child, but the problems were increasing in severity as he entered adolescence. The issues ultimately led to several hospitaliza-tions, and to him being placed in a home-school program. Tonya was forced to quit her nursing job to care for him. The cloth-

ing store, A Tiny Taste of Toot, was a response to this chain of events: Tonya thought running her own business would allow her the flexibility to tend to her son.

Charlie’s life had been upended in its own way. His mother passed away in May 2012, and unbeknownst to Tonya, the death had caused him to start using again, he would later say. He had a daughter from a pre-vious relationship, and the girl’s mother cut off his contact with the

child when she learned about the relapse.What embarrassed him even more

than the drugs was something else hap-pening with Tonya. He loved her. He wasn’t looking for a relationship when they met but he ended up loving that woman more than he’d ever loved any woman.

“And the minute I fell in love,” he would later explain to detectives, “my dick stopped working.”

He and Tonya hadn’t had sex in more than a year.

“He would psych his own self out,” says Tonya, in a lengthy interview from the Eastern Shore Regional Jail, where she has been incarcerated since November.

Because of the couple’s bedroom prob-lems, she says, she encouraged Charlie to see a doctor, who told Charlie the prob-lem wasn’t physical. He’d always thought he didn’t deserve someone as smart and clean and good as Tonya. She repeatedly reassured him that she loved him, but he

“I’d dowhateverI couldto makeher happy.I didn’t wantto lose her.”Charlie Smith, theCommonwealth’s starwitness, answering aprosecutor who askedabout his relationshipwith Tonya Bundick


couldn’t imagine that could continue to be true.

In late 2012, around the time the arsons began, Tonya says, Charlie’s behav-ior changed. He started disappearing. While she stayed home with the children, he would tell her he had to go back to the garage. He would claim he was finishing up a paint job, or delivering an estimate to a customer — but he’d never worked nights like this before, and he didn’t seem to be bringing in more money despite the extra hours. Tonya worried that he was cheat-ing on her, although he denied it when she confronted him.

Charlie has a different version of these events. Charlie says Tonya knew exactly where he was in the evenings spanning late 2012 and early 2013.

Ask her about one of Charlie’s accounts in particular, and she shakes her head. That never happened, she says, a moment of incredulity in a private jail interview that has been mostly calm, in which she has openly answered most questions.

What Charlie says happened: On Nov. 12 — the night Deborah Clark placed the first call to 911 — Charlie and Tonya were driving around Parksley. It was an evening ritual. He would come home after work and take her to McDonald’s for coffee.

According to Charlie, on this particu-lar night, Tonya suddenly veered from the routine. They cruised past a peeling house on Dennis Drive, two miles from where they lived. It had been a rough week. Tonya, he says, had received more bad news about

her son. They drove past that house and, Charlie claims, Tonya suggested they burn it down.

Charlie says he figured it was a joke, but Tonya kept talking about it. Finally, he realized she was serious. She dropped him off near the abandoned house. He went inside. He sat for 10 minutes. He didn’t light anything. He then went back out to the car and lied to her. He told her he’d set the fire, and they drove away.

Over the next few hours, he says, it was like something in Tonya softened. She started to share with him intimate details of her life that she never had before, and he couldn’t help but think that her sudden forthcomingness was because of what she believed he’d done for her.

“I just couldn’t let her down,” he would tell the police in his confession. “I mean, her son had just torn her to pieces. . . . She don’t hit her kids, she don’t yell at them.” She didn’t do drugs. She didn’t have any outlets.

So he admitted that he’d lied; the house was still standing. And then they drove back to the house together, in the dark, empty county where both of them had grown up and both of them struggled. This time, Charlie would later say, Tonya lit the fire.

She lit the next dozen, too, he says, and it wasn’t until the 15th fire, on Nov. 21, that this changed: Tonya was nearly spotted by police posted near the site. Unable to bear the thought of her being caught, Charlie announced that he would take over.


Most of the time, the fires were ran-dom, spur of the moment. Only a few of them were personal. Like the fire at J.D. Shreaves’s house. Shreaves was Tonya’s ex-boyfriend. They dated for six months and had broken up a couple of years ear-lier. Shreaves had seen Tonya and Char-lie out and about since then and thought their conversations were cordial. But on Valentine’s Day night, when Shreaves was taking his daughters to their grandmoth-er’s, Charlie was peering in his windows to make sure nobody was home, pulling back the siding of the single-story house, stuff-ing an old shirt underneath, and using a cigarette lighter to ignite the blaze.

On or around March 30, Charlie would tell the police, he and Tonya had sex for the first time in 18 months.

Charlie Smith pleaded guilty to 67 counts of arson and one count of conspiracy to commit arson. “Mr. Smith is very remorseful,” said his attorney, Carl Bundick,

no relation to Tonya, in a brief interview in front of the courthouse on Oct. 30, the day of Charlie’s no-contest bench trial.

Tonya Bundick was initially charged with one count of conspiracy and one count of arson — the final fire on Airport Road where police had stopped the gold minivan. She was originally placed in Accomack County Jail, where Charlie was also being held.

Her access to news was limited, and she didn’t know that Charlie had impli-

cated her in his confession. He was still writing her love letters, she says. He would bury them by the flagpole in the Accomack exercise yard, folded between plastic prison cutlery, for her to retrieve during her own hour outside. He talked about wanting to marry her. She thought she still wanted to marry him.

She didn’t know the extent of his betrayal until she was let out on bond and saw the excerpts of his confession that had been leaked to the media. She didn’t believe her eyes at first. And then, as it began to sink in, she felt numb.

In December, a month after Charlie had pleaded guilty, Tonya was charged with an additional 62 counts of arson. This time she was sent to Eastern Shore Regional Jail, away from Charlie. Her younger son went to live with his father; her older son was placed in foster care. She wrote poetry from her cell, which a friend posted on Facebook, in which she worried that she would be forgotten “like the fading sea-sons.” She maintained her innocence.

She awaited trial.Between Dec. 1 — when the Virginia

State Police began collecting data on its arson investigation — and mid-April, police personnel dedicated 26,378 regular work hours and 14,924 overtime and comp hours to solving the arsons in Accomack County. The agency spent $112,833 on lodging, $67,404 on food, $86,671 on fuel and $37,837 on aviation expenses.

Five months after the arsons began, they ended.


The Jan. 14 trial of Tonya Bundick, which would decide her fate on the two initial charges, was becoming the largest spectacle the county had seen in recent

memory. It was moved from Accomack over the Bay Bridge-Tunnel to Virginia Beach, a trip that takes 90 minutes — the first time in decades an Accomack case had required a change of venue.

Tonya entered the courtroom with a walk that seemed unrushed and lan-guid. She sat between her two attorneys, a father-and-son team, wearing black slacks and a ruffled blue button-down blouse. Money had not been deposited into her Virginia Beach jail account in time for her to purchase makeup from the commissary, and Tonya felt unkempt, stripped of the

products she normally so carefully applied.The maximum sentence for the two

charges was 20 years.“How do you plead?” the judge asked

Tonya, whose response was quiet and lilt-ing.

“Not guilty.”Charlie, the commonwealth’s star wit-

ness, shuffled into the courtroom with his feet and hands shackled, avoiding eye con-tact with Tonya, whom he hadn’t seen since before her second arrest six weeks earlier. Tonya had steeled herself for this moment, and she kept her eyes averted from the man whose laugh she had once fallen in love with.

Charlie’s voice was wavering and quiet as he answered Commonwealth Prosecu-tor Gary Agar’s questions. Was it true that

Arnulfo and Lois Gomez of Hopeton, Va., rebuilt their garage after it was heavily damaged byarson on Dec. 15, 2012. Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick lived next door to the Gomezes.


he had been engaged to Tonya Bundick?“I still love her,” he said, and his throat

caught.Tonya’s attorneys argued that Charlie’s

testimony wasn’t built on a sudden desire to do the right thing, but rather on a pos-sessive fear that Tonya might meet some-one else while he was in prison.

“It would kill you if you found out she was dating someone else,” asked the younger attorney, Christopher Zaleski.

“Yes,” Charlie acknowledged.“You wanted her to always be your

princess.”

“Yeah.”Charlie insisted that he just wanted to

do what was right, and that he hadn’t been told of any special deal he would get for testifying against Tonya. “I’d do whatever I could to make her happy,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose her.”

Love is a weird act: a temporary insanity, an optimistic delusion.

Fire is a passionate ele-ment, and it captivates even as it destroys.

Accomack is a small county that

Two houses on Church Road in Accomac, Va., were ruined by the arsons, which also destroyed shacks, cabins, astorage building and an airplane hangar, as well as billboards and piles of tires.


looked half-gutted even before the fires started, where love and fire could combine to transform two ordinary people’s lives into an epic romance.

Late on the morning of Jan. 14, the defense called Tonya to the stand. Her hair was tangled and she wore the same clothes she had the day before.

What she talked about on the stand was not a story of romance so much as it was a story of life, in a rural county, in 2013.

She and Charlie had driven 20 miles to the Wal-Mart in Pocomoke on the night of the last fire, she said. Her boys had birthdays coming up and they wanted smartphones. They were home alone that night. She thought they could be on their own for a few hours — the older one was 13. Yes, her older son had a behavioral disorder. Yes, he’d been put out of school several times. Yes, she and Charlie would drive to McDonald’s some nights for coffee, because it was the only chance she had to get out of the house.

At Wal-Mart, she said, Charlie wanted to buy a package of Steak-umms. She told him no. They were trying to stay on a budget. He acted petulant. They left, and in the car, he asked if she wanted to stop at another Wal-Mart down in Onley. She said fine, thinking maybe he’d decided on something else to buy her sons. In the second Wal-Mart, she went to the under-wear section. He followed her there, just like he used to follow her into her clothing shop, or from room to room after they first started dating. Now, it bothered her. She

asked him, “Do you have to be up in my ass while I’m looking at underwear?”

They started to drive home. He asked her to let him out so he could urinate. He got back in the car and they drove a little more. They were both still mad. She told him, look, “if things are too hard to deal with, all you got to do is walk.”

He asked to be let out again. She was angry and didn’t ask why. She picked him up a few minutes later. They went through a light on Airport Road, and then all of a sudden, “there was the cops. Everywhere.”

It was the first time, she said, that she realized Charlie had anything to do with the arsons. At her trial, she insisted what she has always insisted, in testimony, police questioning and in her jailhouse interview: She thought they were just getting out of the house for a while. She thought they were just going for a ride.

Tonya and Charlie’s relationship had become one of two love stories.

Either, as Charlie says, he loved her so much that he had been willing to burn up a county because he thought it would make her happy. Or, as Tonya grew to believe, he loved her too much to let her be free while he went to prison alone.

At 12:39 p.m. on Jan. 14, Tonya’s lawyers re-entered the court-room and announced that their client would like to change her plea. During a recess, she says,

they told her that they’d tried to read the mood in the courtroom and it didn’t look


good. The jurors, who would have sen-tencing power if she were found guilty, seemed as though they believed Charlie’s testimony. Because of this, the attorneys advised Tonya to submit an Alford plea, in which the defendant does not admit guilt but acknowledges that the state has pre-sented enough evidence to result in a con-viction.

The charge, passed down from the grand jury, had read: “On or about April 1, 2013, in the County of Accomack, Tonya Susan Bundick did feloniously and mali-ciously burn or destroy by the use of explo-sive in whole or in part a building or struc-ture having a value of over $200 belonging to Claude Henry, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.”

In the courtroom, the charges were read again.

“To this, do you enter a plea of guilty or not guilty?” The judge asked.

Charlie had testified that he’d lit the fires to win her love.

That love was changed now.The county was changed now, dotted

with blackened heaps of rubble appearing along the fields.

“Guilty,” Tonya said, and whatever flames had been ignited in Accomack County weren’t burning anymore.

Tonya Bundick is awaiting sentencing on her initial charges. On Thursday, a sen-tencing hearing will take place in Accomack County to determine how she will be tried on the 62 remaining indictments. Charles Smith is awaiting sentencing on charges that carry up to 584 years in prison.

[email protected]

How we reported this storyThis article was reported from several dozensources. Tonya Bundick contributed writtencorrespondence and permitted a 90-minuteinterview at Eastern Shore Regional Jail. CharlesSmith’s attorney did not respond to multiplerequests for an interview. Smith’s version ofevents was pieced together from video of hisconfession, his testimony at Bundick’s trial anda document detailing to his participation in thearsons, presented to the court at the time of hisguilty plea. Other sources included in-personand telephone interviews, news articles andreleases, court documents, 911 recordings andpolice expenditures obtained through Freedomof Information Act requests, and the courtroomtestimonies of Virginia State Police officers andrepresentatives from the Accomack CountySheriff’s Office. Julie Tate and Justin Jouvenalcontributed to this report.

C

thursday, april 10, 2014 EZ SU

ABCDE

Style

L O V E A N D F I R EIn Virginia’s rural Accomack County,a troubled romance was behind

a string of 77 arsons


The rising sun is reflected in a window of a charred house on John Caine Road in Parksley, Va. The property was one of the last to be set ablaze in a series of arsons that took place over the course of five months.

BY MONICA HESSE

2012, she called the Eastern Shore 911 center,flustered and out of breath. “I’m just calling —somebody done set the house on fire onDennis Drive.”

In the coming weeks, she would get usedto the sirens. Everybody would. They wouldsound just after bedtime or just before,twice a night or once a week, from Parksley,Tasley, Melfa, Bloxom. The county vibratedwith fire engines groaning over gravel drive-ways. The county vibrated with suspicion.The county went about its business. Thecounty burned down. People assumed thatthe culprit must be someone who livedamong them, and people would be right. Itwould be a love story.

Deborah Clark’s fire was the first fire inAccomack County.

In the span of five months, there would be76 more.

“I didn’t know what was going on. I thoughtthe world was coming to an end,” Clark says,remembering how on that cold, dry night, shestood in her yard and watched a once-finehouse disappear into charred wood and ash.

arson continued on C5



BY PAUL FARHI

In dying unexpectedly on Tuesday, theprofessional wrestler known as the UltimateWarrior (né James Hellwig) had this incommon with many of his contemporaries:He expired long before his time.

Professional wrestlers of Warrior’s gener-ation (he was 54) have experienced a mortal-ity rate that would be considered a crisis anda scandal if it happened in some othercontext — say, to football players, racecardrivers or boxers.

The list of prematurely dead wrestlers ofthe last generation is so long, stretching tomore than five dozen names, that there is aWeb site dedicated to those who have diedbefore age 50. You would have to go back tothe early-TV generation, the era of GorgeousGeorge and Freddie Blassie, to find a cohort

that survived more or less intact into old age.The roll of the dead includes major stars,

such as Eddie Guerrero (died in 2005, age38), a World Wrestling Entertainmentchampion from a distinguished wrestlingfamily, and the lesser-known and anony-mous lugs who plied the VFW halls andgrimy, bare-bulb auditoriums depicted in“The Wrestler.” Among the most famousdead wrestlers of all is Chris Benoit (died in2007, age 40), who came to widespreadpublic attention after killing his wife, 7-year-

wrestling continued on C3

BY MICHAEL DIRDA

O n Aug. 24, A.D. 79, from his villa inMisenum, near Naples, the learnedPliny the Elder — whose “Natural His-

tory” is one of the great encyclopedic works ofantiquity — noticed a cloud of unusual sizeand appearance. It appeared to be issuingfrom Mount Vesuvius. As his nephew Plinythe Younger later wrote to the historian Taci-tus:

“The pine tree, rather than any other, bestdescribes its appearanceandshape, for it rosehigh up into the sky on what one can describeas a very long trunk, and it then spread outinto what looked like branches. . . . Its appear-ance varied between white on the one hand,and grimy and spotted on the other, accord-ing as it had thrust up earth or ashes. Myuncle, most learned man that he was, realizedthat this was important, and should be inves-

Pro wrestling’s grim tally growswith Ultimate Warrior’s death

BOOKWORLD

An intimate revisiting of a doomed city

FROM POMPEIIThe Afterlife of aRoman TownBy Ingrid D. RowlandBelknap/HarvardUniversity340 pp. $28.95

tigated at closer quarters.”In short order, the elder Pliny “ordered a

fast-sailing ship to be made ready” and set offfor closer observation at Stabiae, where hestopped to eat and even take a nap. By thistime, Vesuvius was pouring out flames, whilegrit and pumice soon began to fill the court-yards of fashionable villas in Stabiae and thenearby towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii.

The napping Pliny was then awakened, forby now, continues his nephew, “the buildingswere shaking with frequent large-scale trem-ors, as though dislodged from their founda-tions” and “seemed to shift now one way andnow another, and then back again.” The in-quisitive naturalist, finally aware of the dan-ger, persuaded everyone in his party to makea dash for the sea, despite the rain of pumiceand debris. “They used strips of cloth to

book world continued on C3


Ultimate Warrior dies at 54James Hellwig, one of pro wrestling’s biggeststars in the late 1980s and early ’90s,collapsed while on a walk with his wife. B5

Accomack county, va. — The cornwas harvested, and the field was adirty sort of brown. Deborah Clarkwould think about that later, how ata different time of year she wouldn’t

have seen anything until it was too late.A friend had come over to her house in

Parksley, Va., once the kids from Clark’s living-room day care went home. He left about 10:30that Monday evening, but a few minutes laterknocked on her door again. “Hey,” he told her.“That house across the field is on fire.”

She knew which one he was talking about.It had been a nice house once: two stories,white paint. But now it was empty, and it had apeeled, beaten look to it. It had been a longtime since anyone lived there, so she couldn’tthink of how it could have caught fire — exceptthat it was so dry that maybe the weather hadsomething to do with it.

Clark followed her friend outside and sawthat he was right. The old sad house wasburning down and the flames were rolling inher direction over the brittle field.

She ran next door to warn her neighbor,who, like Clark, lives in a low-slung ranchhouse off a silent road. At 10:41 p.m. on Nov. 12,

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 KLMNO EZ SU C5

approximately the 30th fire since the arsons hadbegun a month before. The family kept chickensin a pen attached to the garage, and as Gomezwatched her property burn, she realized thatwhoever set the fire had taken the time to let outall the birds, which were now running aroundthe lawn at 4 a.m.

It was a strange time to live in theneighborhood.

A few weeks later, just down the street,someone burned out an old pickup truck, andresidents watched firefighters put out theflames.

CharlieSmithandhis fiancée,TonyaBundick,who lived next door to the Gomezes, were in thecrowd. After the fire was extinguished, accord-ing to an investigation document, Tonya askedfellow onlooker Joanna Thornes who shethought was responsible. She told Thornes thatthe arsonist was too smart to be caught. Thepolice had canvassed the area and had visitedCharlie and Tonya’s house twice, Tonya remem-bers, to ask if they’d seen anything.

Months passed and fires accumulated. Hous-es, shacks, cabins. Billboards, piles of tires.Nothing that pointed to insurance fraud; manyof these places weren’t insured. This was a


and process millions of chickens a year.Once the arsons started, outsiders would

occasionally wonder why nobody had beencaught, after all that time, after all those fires.

“I can comprehend why they lasted so long,”says Jim Eichelberger, the mayor of Parksley.

“First of all, there’s no traffic off of 13,” hesays. “After 8 or 9 p.m., you won’t see but twocars.” People in Accomack don’t waste moneymaking unnecessary car trips. They have nocause to drive down the deep country roadswhere a lot of the fires were set, he reasons, sothey had no chance to see who could have beenlighting them.

The second reason the fires kept happeninghad to do with simple supply.

“As for running out of abandoned build-ings?” Eichelberger says. “Naw. They couldnever run out of abandoned buildings here.”

Lois Gomez’s Christmas lights were halfup on Dec. 15, 2012. She hadn’t decidedwhether to bother with the rest of thedecorations, which were meanwhilestored in the family’s detached garage.

In themiddleof thatnight, shegotup foradrinkof water and heard a passerby banging on herdoor, yelling that the garage was on fire —

Accomack is an old place, a rural one,established in 1608 or 1634 or 1670,depending on which definition of“established” is being used. It was afarming community originally,

making money off white potatoes and lumber.Along its northern border, which begins

midway down the narrow peninsula of theEastern Shore, is a big sign shaped like aConfederate flag reading, “The South StartsHere.” South of the county, about 60 miles, isthe Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, whichconnects Accomack to the rest of the common-wealth. Route 13 makes up the spine of thearea, with unmarked drives veining off intoquiet dead ends. Everything there is connect-ed to everything else — the people, too, manyof whom share last names even if they don’tremember how they share bloodlines. Thereare lots of car repair shops, a few big-boxstores, a few cute cafes, a railway museum.

When the sun goes down, the county issilent and the roads are black as hell.

Just after one in the morning on Nov. 13 —three hours later and 13 miles away fromwhere Clark called 911 — Helen Hasty went tolet her dog out and saw flames surroundingsome outbuildings on the farm she owned.

“They’re not insured, they’re vacant — they’rejust old shacks that have been there for ahundred years,” she told the operator whoanswered. She hadn’t heard anything. Shehadn’t seen anything. “Oh my God,” she said asthe fire presumably grew bigger. “There shegoes.”

The next 911 call came just eight minuteslater: A brush fire had been set near a ditchbank and burned a 10th of an acre of woods.

Twenty-one hours after that, a sheriff ’sdeputy on his way home called to report thatan abandoned house was burning.

Another call followed at 10:45 p.m., andanother at 11:43.

“Hey, buddy,” Miles Thornton, who madethe 11:43 call, said to the operator. “There’s astructure fire over on Savannah Road.” Thorn-ton had stepped outside for a cigarette whenhe heard a crackling sound, which was comingfrom an empty house seven miles north of theoriginal fire in Parksley. “I looked over,”Thornton explained, “and all I saw was orangein the sky.”

It was a little more than 24 hours after thefirst fire had been set. Now there were six.

The Accomack County Sheriff’s Office doesn’thave its own fire investigators, so the VirginiaState Police sent special agents to examine theproperties.Theagentsdetermined thatall of thefires had been intentionally set.

At the time of the 1910 Census, Accomackhad the highest per capita income of anynon-urban area in the United States. That wasthe peak of the county’s fortune. Over the nextcentury, the population sank, from 53,000 atits height to 33,000 in 2010. People picked upand moved, north to Delaware or across theChesapeake Bay to the mainland, leavingunsellable houses behind to crumble in anemptying county. Those who stayed ran stores,taught school, farmed crops, and got jobs withTyson or Perdue, which have plants nearby

arson from C1

‘ Oh my god . There she goes . ’


A deserted house sits in Accomack County, which has no shortage of such properties, tucked deep into country roads that aren’t well traveled. Many of the properties the arsonists targeted were uninhabited.

“As for runningout ofabandonedbuildings? Naw.They couldnever run out ofabandonedbuildings here.”Jim Eichelberger,mayor of Parksley

Warren Phillips records gun sales at Jaxon’s Hardware in Parksley, Va., a store he owns— and that his father owned before him. Phillips saidthat during the arsons, he avoided going out at night.

LOVE AND FIRE

C8 EZ SU KLMNO THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014

and didn’t ask why. She picked him up a fewminutes later. They went through a light onAirport Road, and then all of a sudden, “therewas the cops. Everywhere.”

Itwas the first time, she said, that she realizedCharlie had anything to do with the arsons. Ather trial, she insisted what she has alwaysinsisted, in testimony, police questioning and inher jailhouse interview: She thought they werejust getting out of the house for a while. Shethought theywere just going for a ride.

Tonya and Charlie’s relationship had be-come one of two love stories.

Either, as Charlie says, he loved her so muchthat he had been willing to burn up a countybecausehethought itwouldmakeherhappy.Or,as Tonya grew to believe, he loved her toomuchto let her be freewhile hewent to prison alone.

At 12:39 p.m. on Jan. 14, Tonya’slawyers re-entered the courtroomand announced that their clientwould like to change her plea. Dur-ing a recess, she says, they told her

that they’d tried to read the mood in thecourtroom and it didn’t look good. The jurors,who would have sentencing power if she werefound guilty, seemed as though they believedCharlie’s testimony. Because of this, the attor-neys advised Tonya to submit an Alford plea,in which the defendant does not admit guiltbut acknowledges that the state has presentedenough evidence to result in a conviction.

Thecharge,passeddownfromthegrand jury,had read: “On or about April 1, 2013, in theCounty of Accomack, Tonya Susan Bundick didfeloniously and maliciously burn or destroy bytheuseofexplosive inwholeor inpartabuildingor structure having a value of over $200 belong-ing to Claude Henry, against the peace anddignity of the Commonwealth.”

In thecourtroom, thechargeswerereadagain.“To this, do you enter a plea of guilty or not

guilty?” The judge asked.Charlie had testified that he’d lit the fires to

win her love.That love was changed now.The county was changed now, dotted with

blackened heaps of rubble appearing alongthe fields.

“Guilty,” Tonya said, and whatever flameshad been ignited in Accomack County weren’tburning anymore.

Tonya Bundick is awaiting sentencing on herinitial charges. On Thursday, a sentencinghearingwill take place in Accomack County todetermine how she will be tried on the 62remaining indictments. Charles Smith isawaiting sentencing on charges that carry upto 584 years in prison.

she had to get out of the house.AtWal-Mart, she said,Charliewanted tobuya

package of Steak-umms. She told him no. Theywere trying to stay on a budget. He actedpetulant. They left, and in the car, he asked if shewanted to stop at another Wal-Mart down inOnley.Shesaidfine, thinkingmaybehe’ddecidedon something else to buy her sons. In the secondWal-Mart, shewent to theunderwearsection.Hefollowedher there, just like heused to followherinto her clothing shop, or from room to roomafter they first started dating. Now, it botheredher. She asked him, “Do you have to be up inmyasswhile I’m looking at underwear?”

They started to drive home. He asked her tolet him out so he could urinate. He got back inthe car and they drove a little more. They wereboth still mad. She told him, look, “if things aretoo hard to dealwith, all you got to do iswalk.”

He asked to be let out again. She was angry

ed, where love and fire could combine totransform two ordinary people’s lives into anepic romance.

Late on the morning of Jan. 14, the defensecalledTonya to the stand.Herhairwas tangledand shewore the same clothes she had the daybefore.

What she talked about on the standwas nota story of romance somuch as it was a story oflife, in a rural county, in 2013.

She and Charlie had driven 20 miles to theWal-Mart in Pocomoke on the night of the lastfire, she said.Her boys hadbirthdays comingupand theywanted smartphones. Theywerehomealone that night. She thought they could be ontheirownfora fewhours—theolderonewas 13.Yes, her older sonhadabehavioral disorder. Yes,he’dbeenputoutofschoolseveral times.Yes, sheand Charlie would drive to McDonald’s somenights for coffee, because it was the only chance

pleaded guilty, Tonya was charged with anadditional 62 counts of arson. This time shewassent to Eastern Shore Regional Jail, away fromCharlie. Her younger son went to live with hisfather; her older son was placed in foster care.She wrote poetry from her cell, which a friendposted on Facebook, in which she worried thatshewouldbe forgotten “like the fading seasons.”Shemaintained her innocence.

She awaited trial.Between Dec. 1 — when the Virginia State

Police began collecting data on its arsoninvestigation — and mid-April, police person-nel dedicated 26,378 regular work hours and14,924overtimeand comphours to solving thearsons in Accomack County. The agency spent$112,833 on lodging, $67,404 on food, $86,671on fuel and $37,837 on aviation expenses.

Five months after the arsons began, theyended.

The Jan. 14 trial of Tonya Bundick,which would decide her fate on thetwo initial charges,wasbecomingthelargest spectacle the county had seenin recentmemory. Itwasmoved from

Accomack over the Bay Bridge-Tunnel to Vir-ginia Beach, a trip that takes 90minutes — thefirst time in decades an Accomack case hadrequired a change of venue.

Tonya entered the courtroom with a walkthat seemed unrushed and languid. She satbetween her two attorneys, a father-and-sonteam, wearing black slacks and a ruffled bluebutton-down blouse. Money had not beendeposited into her Virginia Beach jail accountin time for her to purchase makeup from thecommissary, andTonya felt unkempt, strippedof the products she normally so carefullyapplied.

Themaximum sentence for the two chargeswas 20 years.

“Howdo youplead?” the judge askedTonya,whose response was quiet and lilting.

“Not guilty.”Charlie, the commonwealth’s star witness,

shuffled into the courtroom with his feet andhands shackled, avoiding eye contact withTonya, whom he hadn’t seen since before hersecond arrest six weeks earlier. Tonya hadsteeled herself for this moment, and she kepther eyes averted from the man whose laughshe had once fallen in love with.

Charlie’s voicewaswavering andquiet as heanswered Commonwealth Prosecutor GaryAgar’s questions.Was it true that he had beenengaged to Tonya Bundick?

“I still loveher,”hesaid, andhis throat caught.Tonya’s attorneys argued that Charlie’s tes-

timony wasn’t built on a sudden desire to dothe right thing, but rather on a possessive fearthat Tonya might meet someone else while hewas in prison.

“It would kill you if you found out she wasdating someone else,” asked the younger attor-ney, Christopher Zaleski.

“Yes,” Charlie acknowledged.“Youwanted her to always be your princess.”“Yeah.”Charlie insisted that he just wanted to do

what was right, and that he hadn’t been told ofany special deal he would get for testifyingagainst Tonya. “I’d do whatever I could to makeher happy,” he said. “I didn’t want to lose her.”

Love is a weird act: a temporaryinsanity, an optimistic delusion.

Fire is a passionate element, and itcaptivates even as it destroys.

Accomack is a small county thatlooked half-gutted even before the fires start-

arson from C7

Two houses on Church Road in Accomac, Va., were ruined by the arsons, which also destroyed shacks, cabins, astorage building and an airplane hangar, as well as billboards and piles of tires.

Arnulfo and Lois Gomez of Hopeton, Va., rebuilt their garage after it was heavily damaged byarson on Dec. 15, 2012. Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick lived next door to the Gomezes.


This abandoned house in Accomack County is much like the ones that were targeted— off the beaten path, tucked deep into country roads. At the time of the 1910 Census, Accomack had the highest per capita incomeof any non-urban area in the nation. Over the next century, people picked up andmoved, leaving unsellable houses behind to crumble in an emptying county.

How we reported this storyThis article was reported from several dozensources. Tonya Bundick contributed writtencorrespondence and permitted a 90-minuteinterview at Eastern Shore Regional Jail. CharlesSmith’s attorney did not respond to multiplerequests for an interview. Smith’s version ofevents was pieced together from video of hisconfession, his testimony at Bundick’s trial anda document detailing to his participation in thearsons, presented to the court at the time of hisguilty plea. Other sources included in-personand telephone interviews, news articles andreleases, court documents, 911 recordings andpolice expenditures obtained through Freedomof Information Act requests, and the courtroomtestimonies of Virginia State Police officers andrepresentatives from the Accomack CountySheriff’s Office. Julie Tate and Justin Jouvenalcontributed to this report.

LOVE AND FIRE

“I’d dowhateverI couldto makeher happy.I didn’t wantto lose her.”Charlie Smith, theCommonwealth’s starwitness, answering aprosecutor who askedabout his relationshipwith Tonya Bundick

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014 KLMNO EZ SU C7

the reason, time after time, is ‘boredom.’”

Virginia state troopers Troy L. Johnsonand Willie Burke had been waiting forabout three hours. It was April Fools’Day, 2013. They got into position alittle after 8 p.m. and set up their

equipment: night-vision goggles, a portable ra-dio and a hunter’s camouflage pup tent pitchedout of view 50 yards behind the tree line.

Johnson and Burke’s task that night wasto monitor a house at 19322 Airport Dr. inMelfa, near the southern border of thecounty. The home’s owner, Claude Henry,had purchased the house for $19,000 andplanned to fix it up, but it was still dilapidat-ed enough that police had added it to awatch list of empty properties.

Johnson, who has been with the police forfouryears,worethegoggles.At11:25p.m.,hesawa gold minivan stop in the road. A passengerleaped out and ran at a dead sprint toward thebackof thehouse.Johnsonsawaseriesofsparks.To the trooper, it seemed like time slowed downas he waited, presumably, to be sure the figurewas the arsonist they’d been trying to catch.

Finally, the fire took and the figure ran backtoward the road. Johnson and Burke chasedafter, but just as they were clearing the forest,the minivan reappeared. The figure, wearingdark, baggy clothes, jumped in through thepassenger’s side and the van drove off.

Burke, a nine-year police veteran whocarried the radio, used it to alert nearbyunits. The police vehicle carrying AccomackSheriff ’s Sgt. Wayne Greer was the first torespond. He pulled over the minivan at atraffic light half a mile down the road, whererural Airport Drive intersects with the morepopulated Route 13.

Charlie Smith emerged from the passengerside and put his hands up. Martin Kriz, a statetrooper who had arrived shortly after Greer,approached the driver, Tonya Bundick, whowas wearing a white top and yoga pants. Heasked if she was carrying anything he shouldknow about, and she said she had a ChapSticktucked in her bra.

By the time Todd Godwin, the longtimesheriff of Accomack County, showed up at thescene, the intersection was swarming withpolice cars.

Godwin went over to Greer’s vehicle, whereCharlie had been placed in the back seat.

Charlie looked up at the sheriff, whom he’dknown for 20 years the way people in thiscounty just know one another. “Todd,” he said,“I’m sorry, but I didn’t light them all.”

Charlie and Tonya were arrested, driv-en to separate police stations andtaken into interrogation rooms.State police officer Scott Wade, whohad been home enjoying a night off,

was called in to question Tonya. She told himthat she and Charlie had been driving aroundthat night when he asked her to stop and lethim out of the car. She did, she told Wade, andthen a few minutes later she swung back topick him up. She didn’t know he’d gone to lightthe fire, she said. She didn’t know anythingabout the arsons.

Charlie’s interviewers were Godwin andRobert Barnes, a special agent with the Vir-ginia State Police. The interrogation room wasequipped with a table, three chairs and a redcooler someone had left sitting in the corner.

“You know Rob, don’t you?” asked Godwin,who has a reassuring high-tenor voice and aface that looks, perpetually, freshly shaved.

“Unfortunately, yeah.” Charlie, who worebaggy jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt,burst into sudden, sheepish laughter. “I likehim and all, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Barnes brought the subject around to thematter at hand. “Do you understand why we’reall here?” he asked. “Lots of fires been going onand stuff.”

Charlie was open about his participation,but when Godwin and Barnes tried to ask himwhy he’d done it and how it started, he grewcagey. “Is she here?” he asked. He wanted to seeTonya. “Is there any way we can get her out ofthis?”

He didn’t want to give them informationabout her. Eventually, though, his version oftheir story came out: her son, his sense ofinferiority, how much he loved her and howmuch he thought she needed the fires.

“Was it, like, a relief for her?” Barnes asked.“I think so,” Charlie said. They never stayed

to watch any of them burn, he said. They justlit them and ran.

“Was there any that you liked better?”Charlie shook his head. “I hated every night.”

arson from C6

There are things Charlie and Tonyaagree on, about what led them to thehouse on Airport Road. There areaspects to the story Charlie andTonya don’t agree on at all, having to

do with how a love story became a fire story.They have both attested, either in inter-

views or court documents, that in 2012 and2013, they were going through a rough patch.

Tonya foundoutheroldersonhadabehavior-al disorder when he was a young child, but theproblems were increasing in severity as heenteredadolescence.Theissuesultimately ledtoseveral hospitalizations, and to him beingplaced in a home-school program. Tonya wasforced to quit her nursing job to care for him.The clothing store, A Tiny Taste of Toot, was aresponse to this chain of events: Tonya thoughtrunning her own business would allow her theflexibility to tend to her son.

Charlie’s life had been upended in its ownway. His mother passed away in May 2012, andunbeknownst to Tonya, the death had causedhim to start using again, he would later say. Hehad a daughter from a previous relationship,and the girl’s mother cut off his contact withthe child when she learned about the relapse.

What embarrassed him even more than thedrugs was something else happening withTonya. He loved her. He wasn’t looking for arelationship when they met but he ended uploving that woman more than he’d ever lovedany woman.

“And the minute I fell in love,” he would laterexplaintodetectives, “mydickstoppedworking.”

He and Tonya hadn’t had sex in more thana year.

“He would psych his own self out,” saysTonya, in a lengthy interview from the EasternShore Regional Jail, where she has beenincarcerated since November.

Because of the couple’s bedroom problems,she says, she encouraged Charlie to see adoctor, who told Charlie the problem wasn’tphysical. He’d always thought he didn’t de-serve someone as smart and clean and good asTonya. She repeatedly reassured him that sheloved him, but he couldn’t imagine that couldcontinue to be true.

In late 2012, around the time the arsonsbegan, Tonya says, Charlie’s behavior changed.Hestarteddisappearing.While shestayedhomewith the children, he would tell her he had to goback to the garage. He would claim he was

finishing up a paint job, or delivering an esti-mate to a customer — but he’d never workednights like this before, and he didn’t seem to bebringing in more money despite the extra hours.Tonya worried that he was cheating on her,although he denied it when she confronted him.

Charliehasadifferentversionof theseevents.Charlie saysTonyaknewexactlywherehewas inthe evenings spanning late 2012 and early 2013.

Ask her about one of Charlie’s accounts inparticular, and she shakes her head. Thatnever happened, she says, a moment of incre-dulity in a private jail interview that has beenmostly calm, in which she has openly an-swered most questions.

What Charlie says happened: On Nov. 12 —the night Deborah Clark placed the first call to911 — Charlie and Tonya were driving aroundParksley. It was an evening ritual. He wouldcome home after work and take her to McDon-ald’s for coffee.

According to Charlie, on this particularnight, Tonya suddenly veered from the rou-tine. They cruised past a peeling house onDennis Drive, two miles from where theylived. It had been a rough week. Tonya, he says,had received more bad news about her son.They drove past that house and, Charlieclaims, Tonya suggested they burn it down.

Charlie says he figured it was a joke, butTonya kept talking about it. Finally, he realizedshe was serious. She dropped him off near theabandoned house. He went inside. He sat for 10minutes. He didn’t light anything. He thenwent back out to the car and lied to her. He toldher he’d set the fire, and they drove away.

Over the next few hours, he says, it was likesomething in Tonya softened. She started toshare with him intimate details of her life thatshe never had before, and he couldn’t help butthink that her sudden forthcomingness wasbecause of what she believed he’d done for her.

“I just couldn’t let her down,” he would tellthe police in his confession. “I mean, her sonhad just torn her to pieces. . . . She don’t hither kids, she don’t yell at them.” She didn’t dodrugs. She didn’t have any outlets.

So he admitted that he’d lied; the house wasstill standing. And then they drove back to thehouse together, in the dark, empty countywhere both of them had grown up and both ofthem struggled. This time, Charlie would latersay, Tonya lit the fire.

She lit the next dozen, too, he says, and itwasn’t until the 15th fire, on Nov. 21, that this

changed: Tonya was nearly spotted by policeposted near the site. Unable to bear thethought of her being caught, Charlie an-nounced that he would take over.

Most of the time, the fires were random,spur of the moment. Only a few of them werepersonal. Like the fire at J.D. Shreaves’s house.Shreaves was Tonya’s ex-boyfriend. Theydated for six months and had broken up acouple of years earlier. Shreaves had seenTonya and Charlie out and about since thenand thought their conversations were cordial.But on Valentine’s Day night, when Shreaveswas taking his daughters to their grandmoth-er’s, Charlie was peering in his windows tomake sure nobody was home, pulling back thesiding of the single-story house, stuffing an oldshirt underneath, and using a cigarette lighterto ignite the blaze.

On or around March 30, Charlie would tellthe police, he and Tonya had sex for the firsttime in 18 months.

Charlie Smith pleaded guilty to 67counts of arson and one count ofconspiracy to commit arson. “Mr.Smith is very remorseful,” said hisattorney, Carl Bundick, no relation to

Tonya, in a brief interview in front of thecourthouse on Oct. 30, the day of Charlie’sno-contest bench trial.

Tonya Bundick was initially charged withone count of conspiracy and one count ofarson — the final fire on Airport Road wherepolice had stopped the gold minivan. She wasoriginally placed in Accomack County Jail,where Charlie was also being held.

Her access to news was limited, and shedidn’t know that Charlie had implicated her inhis confession. He was still writing her loveletters, she says. He would bury them by theflagpole in the Accomack exercise yard, foldedbetween plastic prison cutlery, for her toretrieve during her own hour outside. Hetalked about wanting to marry her. Shethought she still wanted to marry him.

She didn’t know the extent of his betrayaluntil she was let out on bond and saw theexcerpts of his confession that had been leakedto the media. She didn’t believe her eyes at first.And then, as it began to sink in, she felt numb.

In December, a month after Charlie had


‘ I just couldn ’t let her down ’


Before theWhispering Pines motel burned down, the police offered rewards for information leading to the arsonists, then quintupled the offers, up to $25,000.

Charlie Smithseemed reluctant togive arsoninvestigatorsinformation abouthis fiancée, TonyaBundick. Buteventually hisversion of theirstory came out: herson, his sense ofinferiority, howmuch he loved herand howmuch hethought she neededthe fires.

PHOTOS BY VICKI CRONIS-NOHE/VIRGINIAN-PILOTVIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOVE AND FIRE

“Is there anyway we can gether out of this?”Charlie Smith, referringto his fiancée, TonyaBundick, in a policeinterview after his arrest

C6 EZ SU KLMNO THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2014

county that didn’t have much, and what it didn’thave was burning down. A storage buildingburned down, and an airplane hangar burneddown, and a Methodist church almost burneddown but didn’t. A commercial garage caughtfire, and so did the propane tank inside it, andthat fire was on Christmas Eve and the flames litthe horizon. For weeks, people had been won-dering whether Whispering Pines — a ram-shackle, shuttered motel that used to have aAAA-rated restaurant — would burn down, andit would, eventually, but the next day therewould be another building, and another, andthere was always something else burning.

The police issued statements and rewardoffers, and then they quintupled the rewardoffers, up to $25,000. Residents given to moreparanoid explanations thought the federalgovernment might be responsible, maybe viadrones.

An industrious group of armchair detectiveswho called themselves the Eastern Shore Arson-ist Hunters purchased motion-triggered camer-as,positioningthematahousetheythoughtwasa likely target. When they came back the nextday, they discovered a police camera also there,trained on their own movements.

But even while the reward led nowhere andthe armchair detectives surveilled nobody buteach other, there were still signposts.

It was the 44th fire of the series, and it tookplace at the residence of J.D. Shreaves, a singlefather who works for a tree-pruning company.

In February, three months into the arsons,Shreaves left his house near Accomack’s north-ern border to drop off his two young daughtersat his mother’s. The round-trip drive took nomore than 25 minutes. Back at home, hethought he smelled something burning, butwhen he walked from room to room he foundnothing and decided he’d imagined it.

Later that evening, though, when hisdaughters returned, they smelled something,too. This time, Shreaves took a flashlightoutside. On the back of his house, the sidinghad been pulled away, and a lit piece of clothwas stuffed into the boards.

His daughters sobbed as he called the police.“Girls, calm down,” he told them. “Your daddy’shere with you.” He was no expert, but the lit rag— it was obvious the fire was set intentionally.

If that were true, though, it meant an aberra-tion from the pattern. Shreaves’s house wasn’tabandoned; it was occupied by a family. Andthen there was the sequencing — the fact thatthe fire was set in the 25 minutes he was gone. Itmeant someone had timed it perfectly. It meantsomeone had been watching him.

There was one other detail that didn’t seemto mean anything.

“That night of my house?” Shreaves remem-bers. “It was Valentine’s Day.”

By that February, of 2013, CharlieSmith and Tonya Bundick had beendating for about two years. Every-body knew Charlie. Some peopleknew him as Charlie Applegate, the

surname of the stepfather who had raised him,but everybody knew him in one way oranother. He was of average height, 5-foot-8,but seemed smaller because of a hunched,folded-in way of walking. He had red hair, cutclose, a goatee and wide blue eyes.

He’d once been a volunteer firefighter at theTasley station, in the south-central part of thecounty, although he hadn’t been active forseveral years. Now he ran an auto shop onTasley Road, where he did body and paintwork. He used to perform the same tasks out ofhis stepfather’s shop across the street, but theyhad a falling out and no longer spoke much.

arson from C5

One time, Wayne Wessels, an acquaintance ofthe family, went to Charlie for a touch-up job;Charlie didn’t have the right materials butthought his stepfather might. Rather than callhimself, he asked Wessels to go over and pickup the supplies so the father and son wouldn’thave to interact.

The rift had been at least partly over drugs,people speculated. Charlie, 38, had begun exper-imenting when he was 13, and by his late teenshe nursed a crack addiction, according to courtdocuments from the mid-1990s. In 1994, he wasliving with an uncle who looked the other waywhen his nephew stole a coin collection, a gunand a 10-speed bicycle, but who couldn’t whenCharlie began writing checks in the uncle’sname. They were for relatively small amounts —$65, $110 — but there were a lot of them, andCharlie eventually was charged with 24 countsof forgery. A 1996 letter from a probation officerrecounts how he was put into a drug treatmentprogram, relapsed, referred to a mental healthcounselor, relapsed.

“He wasn’t a mean-spirited person at all,”Wessels says. People wouldn’t have used hisbusiness if he were. He was always friendlyaround the shop; he just seemed like a doofuswhose addiction kept causing him to screw up.

One night in mid-2011, he went to ShuckersRoadhouse, a rural Accomack bar. He wascarrying two eight-balls of cocaine. Somefriends had set him up on a date.

Tonya Bundick didn’t approve of drugs. Shewas a single mom raising two boys on anursing assistant’s salary; she didn’t use ille-gal substances and didn’t like to associate withpeople who did. When Tonya met Charlie, shetold him that if he was going to be around herkids, he couldn’t be on drugs.

For her, he went clean, he would later say.For her, on the very night they met, he flushedhis eight-balls down the toilet.

Like Charlie, Tonya, 41, had grown up inAccomack. Bundick is a good Eastern Shorename, appearing on law offices and smallbusinesses around the county. AlthoughTonya remembers having a happy childhood,others recall her as a bit of an outsider: Shewore cheap shoes and clothes that looked like

hand-me-downs, one classmate says. Otherstudents harassed her on the school bus or inthe cafeteria.

“She wasn’t one of those that got picked onthat became meek,” the classmate says. Whenpeople got mean, she fought back. A boy triedto trip her, and “she jumped right up and sentfists flying.”

Her father was a hard man, but her mother,who had studied to be a nurse before havingchildren, was loving. Tonya liked to read hermother’s old textbooks as a young girl, and shetook her certified nursing assistant courseswhile still in high school.

As Tonya got older, she grew into her looks.Her face was fine-boned, almost Nefertiti-like.She put highlights in her thick brown hair andwore meticulously applied eyeliner. She was5-foot-6 with a figure that was long-limbedand large-busted. She would dance on tableswhen out weekly at Shuckers, which wasn’tunusual for the establishment, but sometimesshe’d do it even when nobody else was.

On one of the nights that Kelly Rose, aShuckers waitress, first met Tonya, she walkedinto the bar wearing nothing but a bra andunderwear beneath her trench coat. “Wow, I gotthe same outfit at home, but I must do it wrong,”Rose joked to a co-worker, “because I wearclothes over the top.” People noticed Tonya.

Privately, Tonya always thought of herself asa homebody. She liked to read novels, she likedto be in with her boys. “She kept to herself,” anold boyfriend says. She was a showy introvert,a private exhibitionist.

Butonthenightof that firstdatewithCharlie,a set-up by mutual friends, they both opened up,talking for hours in the parking lot. He told herabout his troubled past. She told him about herkids. She loved how easygoing he seemed, andthe way he laughed. “You could say anything tohim and he would laugh,” Tonya says. “His smilewould just light up his face.”

Charlie moved in with Tonya, to the whitebungalow she shared with her sons in Parksley.In the same building that Charlie opened hisgarage, Tonya opened a business of her own,selling clothing in the front office area. Shenamed the store “A Tiny Taste of Toot,” after the

pet name her father called her. Charlie, Tonyaremembers, would hang out in her store morethan in his portion of the building, until finallyshe would have to shoo him away, explainingthat women didn’t like shopping for clothesaround a man covered in dust and car paint.

They seemed very in love. “Lovey-dovey, Iguess you’d call it,” says James Kline, whoknew them and would see them in public.They shared a Facebook account, and some-times Charlie logged on to leave her publicmessages. “It’s Char,” he commented on aclose-up of Tonya. “Not only are you the bestand I love you, your the most beautiful girl inthe whole damn world.”

One afternoon in the spring or summer of2012, before the arsons, they went for lunch atthe Sage Diner. Charlie was fidgety, leaving therestaurant to pace around outside. Tonyawondered if something was wrong, but whenhe returned to the table, his words came out ina jumble. “I have something to ask you,” sheremembers him saying. Will youmarry me?

She dressed up as the Easter Bunny for achildren’s celebration. They both dressed upfor Halloween, as vampires. Their acquain-tance Seth Matthews took a few photos ofthem in costume, and when Tonya saw them,she asked if he would photograph their wed-ding. He warned her that he was no profes-sional, but agreed to anyway for $250.

In March 2013, Tonya posted on her cloth-ing store’s Facebook page that she would beclosing for a few months to focus on planningthe wedding. She was hoping it could be inMay, if they could get money together. Theircolors would be blue and silver.

Later that month, Charlie told Wayne Wes-sels that he wished he knew who was responsi-ble for the arsons. He said that he had half amind to find a passed-out junkie, drive him toan abandoned building and plant a lighter onhim, just to collect the $25,000 in rewardmoney. Wessels thought the joke was out ofcharacter and in poor taste but chalked it up tothe stress the whole county was feeling.

Charlie was under stress, because Charliewas the one setting the fires. He says Tonyawas, too. He says they were Tonya’s idea.

Arson is a weird crime.

It has no obvious payoff; unlikeburglary or drug dealing, it doesn’tmake its perpetrators richer, unlessit’s an insurance-related plot. The

forensic profile that psychiatrists have comeup with is skewed by limited sample size: Only17 percent of arsonists are ever caught.

“It’s the most underprosecuted crime,” saysDian Williams. “Arsonists generally don’t con-fess. They don’t feel guilty. They don’t show upin police stations and say, ‘This has beenkeeping me up at night.’ ”

Williams is an arson profiler, the founder ofthe Center for Arson Research. She has inter-viewed more than 1,000 arsonists, by herestimate, and she divides them into catego-ries: revenge arsonists, thrill-seekers, disor-dered-coping fire starters. Most of them arewhite. Most of them are men. Some of them,such as John Orr, a famous thrill-seekingarsonist who lit an estimated 2,000 fires inSouthern California while maintaining hisday job as a fire investigator, revel in the havocthey secretly create.

Some of them light fires because they haveprimitive coping skills, and the arsons aresymbolic ways of working through childhoodtrauma. Sometimes the reasons are moreinscrutable, Williams says: “When you talk tothrill-seekers and ask them to describe in oneword the reason that caused them to set fires,


LOVE AND FIRE


A long-vacant house on Dennis Drive in Parksley, Va., was the first to be set on fire, on Nov. 12, 2012. Nothing about the arsons pointed to insurance fraud, as many of the properties weren’t insured.


For weeks before it burned onMarch 12, 2013, people in Tasley, Va., had been wondering whether the old,emptyWhispering Pines motel would be targeted.

“It’s the mostunderprosecutedcrime. Arsonistsgenerally don’tconfess. Theydon’t feel guilty.They don’tshow up inpolice stationsand say, ‘Thishas beenkeeping me upat night.’ ”Dian Williams. thefounder of the Center forArson Research

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