The Arsonist Next Door | 1: You Build We Burn
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What happened to Lee Benson’s dream home in Phoenix?
I just love the beauty of the desert. All the changing seasons, coyotes, javelina, bobcats, lots of rattlesnakes in the summertime. Phoenix, Arizona, the year 2000.
Lee Benson is a local businessman. He's building his dream house. It's enormous. A custom-designed mansion close to the Phoenix Mountains Preserve, an area of wilderness set aside for conservation. This bumpy brown patch of desert is being transformed.
The walls are up, the roof is on, all the wiring is in. Every day coming to the construction site and watching this thing go up, it was so much fun. Everything is going according to plan.
Who is Battalion Chief Brian Parks and how did he respond to the fire?
All of a sudden, the lights kicked on the station. Waking up from a sound sleep, and it's kind of an adrenaline rush. Your heart starts pounding. You're breathing fast.
It's 1138 on a Sunday night in April. Battalion Chief Brian Parks leaps out of his bunk at a Phoenix fire station. Get dressed quick.
Get out to the truck. Pulling out of the station and heading south, you could see a glow in the sky.
The glow is getting brighter and brighter, like a red dawn breaking over the mountains. But sunrise is still six hours away. What Brian's team is heading towards is something much more dangerous.
The flames were looking up probably 40, 50 feet in the air in the area of the mountain preserves. A huge plume of smoke billows from the base of Piestewa Peak. Undisturbed desert is where it was. You get something in there, you're going to have a brush fire.
The fire truck careens through a winding neighborhood onto a narrow dirt road before coming to a dead end. Beyond is nothing but desert, a rugged valley covered in cactus and creosote bush.
Very limited access. Very, very dark. But you can see the glow the whole time, and you're just trying to get back there to get to work. Lee Benson's mansion, on the verge of completion, is engulfed in flames.
The whole structure's ignited and burning at this point. Brian has to make a decision on whether to send his people inside the building. Rolling the window down, you could actually feel the heat. Because this is a construction site, Brian is hopeful there's no one inside to rescue. But even if there was, there's no way he can order his team into a fire like this.
The wall could collapse, and you don't want to be in the area where the wall falls on you or some of our equipment.
He tells his firefighters to stay back and try and contain the blaze from the outside. The air is filled with the smell of wood smoke.
Like a big lumberyard fire, basically. You're going to hear crackling, you're going to hear crashes and stuff like that. You can actually hear the wind moving too, because fire needs oxygen to burn. A strange howling sound pierces the air, as if the fire itself were alive. Out in an open environment, it's going to consume as much oxygen as it can, and it's going to grow fast.
As the flames leap into the sky, fiery embers rain down over neighboring houses, igniting small brush fires in the surrounding desert. If this fragile landscape burns, it will take decades to recover. At 5.30 a.m. the following morning, the owner, Lee Benson, is woken up by a phone call.
what, we've got all this time and money and effort to this point, like what the heck happened?
When he arrives at the scene, the road is lined with trucks, their lights flashing red and white.
It was so hot that the concrete was sort of chipped up and coming apart.
Neighbors crowd around, craning their necks for a view of the destruction. When the fire was over, everything was burned. There was nothing left that wasn't burned in that house.
The fire investigation team arrives to assess the damage. They're looking for clues to how it began, the point of origin.
There's nothing natural that could have started that fire other than somebody else doing it. In other words, arson.
But Lee Benson, he's not so sure. It's probably just some kids smoking cigarettes, dropped a match. I just assumed that it was an accident.
Sure, as someone who used to sneak into construction sites to smoke blunts with my friends when I was 16, I appreciate this theory.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What happened to Lee Benson’s dream home in Phoenix?
0:39–1:28
2
Who is Battalion Chief Brian Parks and how did he respond to the fire?
1:28–5:53
3
What clues suggest the fire was an act of arson?
5:53–6:40
4
Who is Lee Benson and what was his reaction to the fires?
6:40–8:33
5
What threatening messages were left after the fires and who is CSP?
8:33–9:39
6
What is the neighborhood of Heritage Heights like?
9:39–12:34
7
How did neighbors and locals perceive Lee Benson and his mansion project?
12:34–18:18
8
What role does Lieutenant Rob Handy play in the investigation?
18:18–40:38