Persons of Interest

Firelighter

• Western Australia Police Force • Season 2 • Episode 9

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Finding answers amongst the ashes is the job of the Arson Squad. When most of the clues go up in smoke, it’s a race against time to find the fire lighter. 

This is a story about 49 days, 17 fires and the one clue that changed everything.



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Credits
Executive Producer: Joey Catanzaro
Producer and Host: Sandra Di Girolamo
Assistant Producer: Courtney Atkinson

...
SPEAKER_01:

They've all got different reasons for doing what they do, and I've never really understood what motivates them to light fires. I'm Detective Senior Constable Adrian Yates from the Police Arson Squad. My job is to find answers amongst the ashes. This is the story about 49 days, 17 fires, and one clue in this investigation that changed everything.

SPEAKER_00:

This

SPEAKER_03:

is

SPEAKER_00:

Persons of Interest, the WA Police Podcast.

SPEAKER_02:

The smell of an Australian bushfire is like nothing else. That thick smoke, the heat and the noise that comes from those flames. If you've ever been close to an out of control fire, you'll know what I mean. Even from a distance, the smell is unmistakable. Hello, I'm Sandra Di Girolamo and welcome back to Persons of Interest. Today we're talking fires. We're talking about people who deliberately light them and the people who catch them. Welcome to Adrian Yates from the Arsons Squad. Hi, thank you for being here. Hi,

SPEAKER_01:

Sandra. Thanks for having me this morning.

SPEAKER_02:

How would you describe people who light fires?

SPEAKER_01:

They're very unique. They come from all sorts of different backgrounds. Their ages vary. I can never really understand why certain people have certain motivations to cause them to light fires.

SPEAKER_02:

Because it's dangerous, isn't it? People can die. People have died in deliberately lit fires and homes have been lost.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, of course. You know, bushfires, particularly bigger bushfires, are a huge risk to the community. As you pointed out, people have died from fires. They cause a significant amount of property damage.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, imagine losing everything you own and finding out that it's because someone was playing with matches down the road.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, well, it's devastating. People quite often lose their houses and they have to start again from scratch.

SPEAKER_02:

And fires in some ways are like the perfect crime, aren't they? Because the evidence almost gets burned along with the crime.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. So traditionally we find that detecting and apprehending arson offenders is one of the most challenging parts of our job and quite often it can be the smallest clues in the investigation which will ultimately lead to identifying that person for a number of fires.

SPEAKER_02:

That leads us very nicely into the story that we'll talk about today. How does this story start for you? Music

SPEAKER_01:

It was just a normal office day for me at the ARSA squad. Part of my job would be just to review, you know, fires and incidents of fires, draw any sort of links between any fires and see if there's a pattern of anything that's going on in particular. And we'd sort of picked up there are a number of fires happening southern suburbs ways and we noticed that they were at particular times of the day. So we got our team together, we drove out to the particular locations, we examined the fire scenes.

SPEAKER_02:

Because the flames aren't still burning at this point right?

SPEAKER_01:

No so we will come in quite often the next day so the fire might be let's say for an example during the night we will attend the next day because we need the daylight to obviously investigate the scene thoroughly. There's a handful of fires what four or five? We identified about six so obviously we went out investigated all those fires individually. When you say

SPEAKER_02:

that sorry when you say you investigated them all individually what do you actually do? So I'm picturing you walking out there in your safety boots through a bushland literally looking on the floor for looking through the charred remains, I suppose, of this bush?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we would do like a grid search of the area to see if anything's been dropped, if there's some sort of incendiary device.

SPEAKER_02:

Sorry?

SPEAKER_01:

Incendiary device is essentially something that the offender might leave to start the fire and it gives them time to get away from the scene. So in other words, they can light something, place it into the place where it might light the bush, then leave the area, the fire will start and then they're no longer on the scene or able to be seen and long gone before the fire actually starts before somebody actually sees it.

SPEAKER_02:

So you're doing this grid search of these six fires. What do you find?

SPEAKER_01:

So early on, we don't really find much at all. We... we're closely looking at the ground because we have a very strong belief that whoever's responsible for this is only there within a couple of minutes, if probably, you know, if not less time.

SPEAKER_03:

How do you know that?

SPEAKER_01:

Just because the fires are quite small and the person's never really seen by anybody in particular and the fires are late at night, early hours in the morning. So you're

SPEAKER_02:

thinking there's one person who's just going out there for kicks, lighting some fires?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and they're all in a similar area too. We identified a number of houses in the particular streets that we were looking at for where these fires started. And we matched up a particular car as one that was common amongst all of these fires.

SPEAKER_02:

What, because people at those houses said they saw a car?

SPEAKER_01:

No, so we would go bang on their doors, get their CCTV, because we'd know at what time the fires would start. And then we would identify at a certain time and go, okay, can you show us your CCTV for that particular timeframe? We would review the CCTV. And then we identified over three or four fires, a particular vehicle very distinctive, would be seen on the CCTV. What kind of

SPEAKER_02:

car was it?

SPEAKER_01:

It was a silver-coloured BMW.

SPEAKER_02:

And could you see who was driving it?

SPEAKER_01:

No, we couldn't. All we could see was literally the car driving in the street and then the fire would start and then the car would drive out. And then we had a couple of instances later where the car would pull up on the side of the road. We could see somebody lighting some sort of material inside the car. Like what? We're not really sure. It could have been paper or anything that would just ignite quickly and And then they could get it out of the car because obviously they don't want to burn themselves or potentially set the car on fire. So we looked at that CCTV, showed them lighting something inside the car. They threw it out the window and then the bush would ignite and they would drive off straight away.

SPEAKER_02:

So you could see that. You could see someone in the car lighting something. You didn't know what he was lighting or she was lighting and throwing it into the bush and you see the bush go up in flames. What kind of bush area are we talking about?

SPEAKER_01:

So this particular one was just bush amongst residential housing. Close to houses. Yeah, literally across. the road. Fortunately, the wind was going the other way. But yeah, it was literally a case of the car pulling up on the bush. On the side of the road, opposite three or four brand new houses where people were living and asleep at night, the bush would immediately ignite. Because it's the middle of summer, the bush doesn't take much. As everyone knows, it's hot and dry in summer here. And the bush would immediately catch fire and then the person would drive away in the car.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow, so those people across the road would have been really keen to make sure you caught the person lighting these fires.

SPEAKER_01:

For them, it's almost like a bit of a close call. All it takes is the wind to be going in the opposite direction and all of a sudden they're asleep and their houses are suddenly getting embers hitting their house. Not to

SPEAKER_02:

mention all the smoke as well. I mean, that can affect people's health as well, as we know.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep. And then obviously if they've got kids and their kids get frightened and it's something that they always remember.

SPEAKER_02:

So you've got this guy or girl lighting something and throwing it. You know what car they're driving. Can you see the number plate of the car?

SPEAKER_01:

No. And that was one of the most probably frustrating parts of the investigation was we could identify the car clearly, but But because people have cameras facing towards the front of the house and obviously the street is running at opposite angles, at a 90-degree angle, we can never capture the registration.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, because it's driving past the house. It's driving past. So you can see the side of

SPEAKER_01:

the car. You can see the side of the car.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, how frustrating. So how many shots do you have of this car driving past that you...

SPEAKER_01:

So I think early on we probably had at least half a dozen images of this particular car. It had very distinctive rims on it. So we knew that we were looking at a car with very distinctive rims. And every single time we just knew straight away we saw the silver car and we saw the distinctive rims. We were becoming so frustrated with not having any luck that we started trawling the local CCTV at petrol stations, the 24-hour ones nearby, hoping that this car might have pulled into a petrol station at in a certain time frame, hoping we might pick it up there.

SPEAKER_02:

Any luck?

SPEAKER_01:

But no, we didn't have any luck.

SPEAKER_02:

Are you worried that these fires are getting more and more intense? Are you worried about what's going to happen next?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, of course. At that stage, it was very early on in the bushfire season. I knew that the worst of it was, you know, still to come. And this person's behaviour was continuing. It wasn't escalating, but it was constant. So what happens next? We went to a particular fire in that same area and it had the typical characteristics of what we'd been investigating all along.

SPEAKER_02:

So you thought it was the same

SPEAKER_01:

person, this person in the car that you... Yeah, we thought it was the same person because the area was the same, the characteristics of how the fire had started and the relationship between the bush and the street. They're all there. They're all common traits.

SPEAKER_02:

You say characteristics with how this fire was started. What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01:

Certain people will light fires in particular areas. So for example, if they go into the bush in the middle of nowhere, they might walk on a particular track and light a fire along a track. They might light two or three fires along the same track. Then you might get another fire in another bush area a few k's away and then you'll get another fire started by a track. So generally, we find that people that do a series of fires will have a common way of lighting fires or a particular method they like to go about it because they feel comfortable with that and they know that... And they got away with it. Yeah, they got away with it. So if they get away with it, they can repeat that behaviour and they feel comfortable and they think that they can continue that pattern of behaviour and not get caught and be comfortable in the sense that they haven't been caught for one, so they continue that behaviour thinking they'll never get caught.

SPEAKER_02:

And so you get out to this fire thinking, we know this is probably the same person. What happens?

SPEAKER_01:

I sort of thought, I'll have a look at... The verge in particular, a little bit more thoroughly this time because I knew this person was in a car and I thought maybe, you know, we might get lucky because they have to wind down the window or maybe open a card or something to throw something out the window. They might have pulled up there momentarily. MUSIC So I just happened to be walking along the verge between the road and the bush, which is probably about two or three metres wide. And just by chance, I just saw a loose piece of paper lying there. I sort of looked at it and went, it's not burnt or anything. I sort of looked at it a little bit more and then there was a bit of rubbish around us. There always is a lot of these fires, you know, bits of paper and maybe some... bottles or cans or whatever. So I just looked at this piece of paper. I sort of unravelled it. It was all

SPEAKER_02:

screwed up?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it was all screwed up. And I unravelled it and I realised, I could see it was a Bunnings receipt.

SPEAKER_02:

A Bunnings receipt?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

What was on the receipt?

SPEAKER_01:

I can't recall what it was specifically, what the transaction was for. Right. But I noticed the date and time was of interest to me because the date and time was a couple of hours before the fire. And I went, oh, that's interesting. So I thought, oh, okay, well.

SPEAKER_02:

And it could be nothing, right? Yeah, that's right. It could be that someone dropped that out their window or.

SPEAKER_01:

That's right. And that's what I was way out of mind. I was going, oh, this could be nothing. And I thought, well, we've got no CCTV in the street. So this might be something. It might not be. But if I grab it and it's nothing, well, then I've lost nothing. So I said to my colleague, we'll grab this and we'll go to Bunnings. I remember driving straight to the particular Bunnings, which was only 15, five, six, seven, eight Ks away. And I remember going in there, speaking to the manager and just saying, look, I've got a receipt here. Can you guys just bring up the transaction on your CCTV? I

SPEAKER_02:

assume people are pretty good about that. Like you walk into a Bunnings, the arson squad, then they're hardly going to say no, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, no, we never normally had any problems with the bigger shopping centres and the bigger retailers. They know that we're trying to do what we need to do and they're generally happy to help us out. If anything go above, try and help us out. So, yeah, we spoke to the manager and she took us upstairs into the office and she reprinted out the receipt and said, is this it? I said, yeah, this is it. And she brought up all the screens for the CCTV. Because you had a

SPEAKER_02:

time to marry it up. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And I know from experience that the CCTV for Bunnings is pretty close to the transaction. Everything sort of marries up, like their systems for the register match up to their systems on the CCTV.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, so they can say that this transaction matches that piece of vision. Yeah. They've got a system that does that. Oh, that makes life easier

SPEAKER_01:

for you. Yeah. So anyway, so she brought up all the CCTV, showed this particular person walking in, coming into the store, at the counter.

SPEAKER_02:

What did this person look like?

SPEAKER_01:

So this person was just a middle-aged male person, just dressed in a pair of jeans and a tank top, just looked like a normal average person. Okay. And they came in, they were at the desk and did the transaction and... and then left the store. And do you remember what they bought? I think it was a refund from memory. I don't think it was an actual purchase.

SPEAKER_02:

I was about to ask how they paid for it because if they paid for it by credit card, obviously that's great for you.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, no, I think... I think from memory, it was actually a refund of an item rather than an actual purchase because I know they went to the returns counter, not actually grabbing a particular item and going through a checkout like a normal person coming in to buy something would ordinarily do.

SPEAKER_02:

And obviously at this point, this still could just be a receipt. This guy's worst crime could have been that he threw a receipt out the window. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And there are all sorts of things that we have to consider because-

SPEAKER_02:

Imagine the arson squad knocking on your door for littering.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, yeah, that's right. Or having to explain yourself why your receipt's at a fire that you've had nothing to do with. And we've had to do that in the past. But yeah, so obviously we had the CCTV inside and I remember driving into the car park of this particular Bunnings and looking up at the entrance and there was this massive great camera out the front right over the entrance. And I thought, oh, this is good because if this person has driven in this particular car, then the camera would have picked them up. And I said, to the manager, can you just, you know, cut to the big camera out the front? And we watched this person walk out of the entrance and then head over to the car park. And literally as soon as the camera pointed into the direction of the car park, I could see the car straight away.

SPEAKER_02:

Bingo,

SPEAKER_01:

it's the car that you've been looking for. It was the car that we were looking for. I can remember sort of looking at my mate almost like we were, I was with my colleague and just, you know, like fist bumping each other going, how good's this?

SPEAKER_03:

Let's go, don't get off! You're

SPEAKER_00:

listening to Persons of Interest, the WA Police podcast. If you want to be part of the action, visit letsjoinforces.wa.gov.au to find out more.

SPEAKER_02:

You're listening to Persons of Interest and I'm here with Detective Senior Constable Adrian Yates from the Arsons Squad.

SPEAKER_01:

We were sort of praying that this person walked towards this particular car. And sure enough, they did. They went straight to the driver's side, jumped in the car and drove off.

SPEAKER_02:

You can see a number plate at this point.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, at that particular stage, we couldn't. So we were actually really happy that we'd found the car and found the person, but then we were still a little bit frustrated that we couldn't get the registration of the play off the cars within Bunnings.

SPEAKER_02:

But you didn't know who this guy was. You had vision of him. You don't have a name, do you?

SPEAKER_01:

No, that's right. So we didn't have a name or we knew it was a person. They had a particular tattoo on them. And fortunately for us, they were wearing a tank top in the Bunnings. So the tattoo

SPEAKER_02:

really... Was

SPEAKER_01:

on their shoulder and it was really prominent and really stood out. So we thought, oh, well, that's good at least. So this person goes back, gets into the car, drives out. And when you're looking at a multitude of cameras from outside of Bunnings, that was the car. The Bunnings was near some other shops and we then walked around to some other shops which sort of covered the roads in and out. Again, like you said, looking for a number plate. No joy again. We just had a person that had... driven to a Bunnings, conducted a transaction and left in that car. We didn't know whether or not that was the person that had been doing the fires. It was just a matter of, well, we've got someone driving that car on that particular day, two hours before that fire. That's enough. And I use the term, you know, so what? What does that prove for our case? It doesn't prove anything other than someone driving that car two hours before. We've got a very good intel analyst in our office and she, you know, I just said to her, look, this is the car we're looking at. Can you, you know, work your magic is the phrase I like to use. She's brilliant. So we, you know, we do stuff like... go through Department of Transport records. We have our own databases that we use. We might just do a generic search term on silver BMW. And I've got a couple of guys in my office who are very good with cars. I know the car. So if I say to them, what year is that BMW or whatever, they can go, oh, it's between this bracket. So we put all that information into our database under search terms. She'll do the same for the Department of Transport. We might get a list of, say, 10 cars in the greater sort of southern suburbs region. So for them, it's almost like a process of elimination. And there was sort of one or two that really stood out that were like, okay, these could be one, that could be one of these two. And then we just drove around to these particular houses that we knew these cars were registered to. I remember driving past and seeing this car in the driveway.

SPEAKER_02:

And you

SPEAKER_01:

knew it? I knew straight away that was the car we were looking at. The particular rims on it were distinctive. We were confident that's the car that we'd been looking for the entire

SPEAKER_02:

investigation. So you've got him, you run in and arrest him?

SPEAKER_01:

No, so all we had at that stage was, you know, a car parked at a house, you know, a male person with a tattoo and stuff driving that car to the Bunnings that day and this car connected to all these fires. So then we had to think about how we're going to put this person... in that car at these fires. So we have a whole range of technology that we can use. That technology is very good and that technology will tell us where that car was at a particular time and location and we could use that technology to prove that car's relationship to the fire at any given time. What happens next? Essentially, it's a bit of a waiting game because...

SPEAKER_02:

You're waiting for him to light another fire?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I know it sounds silly, but that's essentially what it is. It's a waiting game because...

SPEAKER_02:

Well, it sounds dangerous. You say it sounds silly. It sounds dangerous because he could light a fire that could be very dangerous. So you're waiting for him to do that?

SPEAKER_01:

It does sound dangerous, but the difficulty for us is we have to be sure that it's the person that's lighting these fires because if we strike too early or if we try and make an arrest too early and we don't have any evidence, then our case falls apart. He

SPEAKER_02:

walks free anyway,

SPEAKER_01:

I suppose. Yeah, and then essentially this person's still in the community and then the risk to the community is still there. It's still a risk because this person hasn't been dealt with before the courts. It's a catch-22 because you need... There's a balance between getting the evidence you need to make sure your case is going to be sound versus the risk of them potentially lighting a fire, which is a big fire and causes some damage. It's a

SPEAKER_02:

big call to make,

SPEAKER_01:

isn't it? Yeah, so we monitor what's going on very closely. There was a couple of other fires that happened that were just smaller fires by the side of the road and we're able to put the car at both of those fires.

SPEAKER_02:

Why wouldn't you just be following this guy so you could catch him lighting those fires?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. A lot of people just would probably naturally assume that we could do that. But the problem with arsonists is you can never actually tell when they're going to go and light a fire. We had nothing to say that it was going to be at four o'clock on this particular day on a week-to-week basis because these people with what they do is so sporadic. You can't actually predict what they're going to do. And this was no exception. For us to be able to Monitor this bloke 24-7 is hugely resource intensive and it's just not practical. But we sort of knew in the back of our minds that the more fires that continued and the more times that car was destroyed, At those particular fires, the stronger our case was getting. Late January, there was a fire down in the same area. But this was a much bigger fire compared to the other ones. It had happened on late afternoon, hot, dry day. The way the fire started was identical, but the bush area that it burnt out was a lot greater.

SPEAKER_02:

How big?

SPEAKER_01:

It was quite a few hectares.

SPEAKER_02:

Near some houses?

SPEAKER_01:

Getting close to some houses, yeah. We thought at that stage, you know, it's getting a bit risky. So we decided that we would essentially bring the investigation to a resolution. And then we sat off his house in a covert location. And we really wanted him to be, again, driving the car just to show the continuity of him using the car.

SPEAKER_02:

So he leaves his house, you're down the road, what happens?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so he leaves his house, we wait for him to drive down the road and then we conducted a roadside stop on him. You pulled him over? Yeah, we pulled him over. We knew he didn't have a licence, so... Oh,

SPEAKER_02:

he doesn't have a driver's

SPEAKER_01:

licence? No, he didn't have a driver's licence, so... Does

SPEAKER_02:

he know that you're the arson squad or does he think you're, you know,

SPEAKER_01:

the traffic cops? Well, at that stage I'm not actually sure because we were all kitted up but we had our arson squad t-shirts on underneath, spoke to him about his licence and then said, We want to speak to you about a series of fires. Placed him under arrest for a number of fires.

SPEAKER_02:

So you got him.

SPEAKER_01:

You didn't

SPEAKER_02:

actually catch him in the act, but you think you had enough at that point because it was escalating so much.

SPEAKER_01:

At that stage, yeah. And like we talked about earlier, there's always that risk of if he lit another fire, it was a bigger fire which potentially caused some damage. We'd be kicking ourselves going we should have done something earlier or whatever.

SPEAKER_02:

So he gets arrested. Yep. Does he go to jail?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so we arrested him, searched his car. We didn't find anything in his car. And then we immediately took him back to his house, as I said, wanted to obviously do an investigative search.

SPEAKER_02:

Looking for something that he might have lit the fires with?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so, I mean, sometimes they might have phones or something, which they might have their movements recorded on their phones, depending on where they're going. They might have text messages. In the past, I've done jobs where people have been bragging about fires they've lit. They've recorded them on their phones, done video recording of the fire they've lit.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, dumb

SPEAKER_01:

crims. So there's all sorts of things that you're sort of thinking in the back of your mind. So we go to his house, search his house, and then I recall walking into the room and we open up one of the drawers. Which

SPEAKER_02:

room?

SPEAKER_01:

The room that he's staying in, the room that he's sleeping in.

SPEAKER_02:

His bedroom?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, his bedroom, yeah. And open the drawer and there's a gun there.

SPEAKER_02:

A gun?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, just a sawn-off shotgun just lying in basically a sock drawer. I was like, okay, this is a bit serious, so... Unfortunately, we had him handcuffed at the time. There was no real risk to ask. What was he

SPEAKER_02:

going to do with the gun?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I don't really know. And when we found out, he didn't really say too much about it other than, yeah, what can you say? The gun's sitting in your bedroom drawer. It had a round in it, so it was loaded, ready to go. Wow. Sawed-off shotgun, you know.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow, so now this guy gets arrested obviously for the fires

SPEAKER_01:

and for the gun. Yeah, so obviously there's the gun, so he's looking at a serious firearms charge.

SPEAKER_02:

How old is this guy?

SPEAKER_01:

He was late 40s. Wow. So middle-aged. I expected

SPEAKER_02:

him to be a kid, and I don't know if that's just my perception. when we talk about arsonists, I expect them to be, when I say kids, I mean, you know, in their early 20s even, you know, late teens, early 20s. I don't mean kids. I'm surprised to hear that he's a grown-up.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So I found that you can never really predict who you're going to be dealing with in terms of arson offenders.

SPEAKER_02:

They come in all shapes and sizes.

SPEAKER_01:

They come from all walks of life. They all have different backgrounds. They all have different backgrounds. Family backgrounds, upbringings, genders.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, because I assume they're mostly male as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and if you look at the research base, the research base would tell you they're predominantly mid to late 20s, 30s, Caucasian male person, loner, doesn't have any friends or anything like that, unemployed. That would be your traditional sort of fallback position. But now I've found that there's no real particular thing you would focus on straight away. You've got to keep a very open mind and you've got to really think outside the box a little bit and not be focused on a particular personal thing.

SPEAKER_02:

Why do they light fires?

SPEAKER_01:

It's a million dollar question I get asked all the time and even by families of people that we deal with and I can never really explain it in a way that people can make sense of.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, why did this guy light the fires?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so from speaking to him, the best reason that we could get from him was that he had a drug habit and when his drug habit couldn't be maintained, he would light fires as a means to get his kicks or get high when he couldn't access any drugs. So it was essentially replacing the high he would get from the drugs by lighting a fire and then seeing the fire brigade come out and put the fire out.

SPEAKER_02:

Because they get their kicks out of that, like seeing the flames and seeing the fire brigade and knowing that I started that. Is that part of it?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, because I've dealt with volunteer firefighters in the past that I've charged for lighting bushfires. And one of the reasons that they do that is because they get that excitement, that adrenaline rush from lighting the fire and then either watching or being involved in personally the the emergency response. This person, obviously, he wasn't a volunteer firefighter or anything. He just got his kicks out of lighting the fire and seeing the fire brigade turn up as a replacement for his drug hire.

SPEAKER_02:

Why the arson squad for you?

SPEAKER_01:

You just never know what you're going to get when you come to work every day. Like, I've got over six years' experience as a specialist arson investigator. Every fire that you go to is different.

SPEAKER_02:

Because you've become a fire expert, haven't you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so I've done all the training. I've got all the qualifications. I had to, you know, do courses. I've had to do a postgraduate study at a university.

SPEAKER_02:

To learn how fire burns?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so there's the learning, because obviously fire is a sort of a chemical reaction process. How things burn is scientific based. So you need to learn a little bit and understand a little bit about the science behind it. So part of the postgraduate course that we do is about learning about fire science and then applying that to the situation that you're in and then coming up with a conclusion that you can support with evidence to make a determination on how the fire started.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, in this case, thank goodness for that Bunnings receipt.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you for coming in and thank you for listening. If you think you can work with the arson squad, maybe help them catch a fire lighter, please get in touch with WA Police and see if they'll have you. I'm Sandra DiGirolamo. You've been listening to Persons of Interest. We are featuring different stories completely unscripted, true stories from WA Police every week. You won't hear them talk so openly anywhere else. So subscribe if you want to hear the others thank you so much goodbye

SPEAKER_00:

thanks for listening to the wa police podcast you can keep listening to the action or you can be part of it visit let'sjoinforces.wa.gov.au to find out more

SPEAKER_02:

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