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Anyone and everyone is welcome to the library. That's part of their glory. That's part of why they are such special institutions. That means that you can have people with ill intent coming into a library.
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. Author Susan or Lean wrote a best selling book years ago that you've probably heard of, The Orchid Thief. It was made into a movie called Adaptation. Susan has now written another book, this one about an unexpected crime that might not have been a crime at all. A fire in the La Public Library destroyed more than
four hundred thousand books in nineteen eighty six. Did they find out what caused it or who? Susan tells me the story at the center of her book, The Library Book. So I think we should talk about the book that you had that was just an incredible success, Not that this one hasn't been.
But what book would people most know you for.
Probably The Orchid Thief, I'm guessing, even though that came out twenty five years ago, but it's had a very long after life in the best sense that people continue reading it. But also because it was made into a movie, was made into the film adaptation, which is a somewhat iconic film of its moment, and I think a lot of people.
Learned about the book because of the movie.
Were you a screenwriter on that movie? I can't remember.
No, No, I was not. I take no credit for it. I wish I could, but I didn't write on it, and I'm merely the happy recipient of brilliant screenwriting.
Now this book that we're getting ready to talk about that was optioned, right, is it being turned into a movie or a TV series?
A TV series, yeah.
And are you participating in that?
I am for the first time I decided that I wanted to have a hand in the process. So I'm working on developing that for television.
Boy, what a different muscle you have to flex for that, isn't it? Or do you feel like it's sort of the same process.
It's very different.
I mean, part of it is obviously rooted in the same skill set.
You know, it's about.
Creating characters, it's about conveying emotion storytelling, and that is consistent.
But television, film, you.
Know, all of those media are all about visual storytelling, and everything has to be conveyed with a visual component. So that's entirely different from writing for the page, where there is no visual component and all of the description, all of the sort of interior conversation, is all on the page.
So it's very very different.
Now, I've had a couple of my books optioned, and you know, we got to the development stage and I remember having a discussion with the producer about the main character in the way that he was going to look, and we had different opinions on that. And so at what point do you have to let go of those sorts of things and just say.
I need to stay in my own lane. And you know, once you.
Once you sign that paper, they can do and you know, a lot of cases what they want to do with it, what they think is best.
Well, I think the healthiest attitude is to let go right away option your work to people who you respect, and then step aside. I mean, if your ultimate goal is to maintain total control, you should probably not option your material to begin with. If what you want is to see the project develop, and you sign on with someone who you respect and who you think is smart, you have to go with the assumption that they're making decisions in the best interest of getting the project to
move forward. And I've found that surprisingly easy. I feel like, look, I've written my work. I'm in a sense, I'm done. Yeah, you want to borrow my work and do something with it.
I don't need to control that. That's your project.
It's like loaning someone a piece of clothing and they wear it differently than you would wear it. Yeah, but you don't want to be in their room going no, no, you have to wear it with black tights and blue shoes. And if that's what you want, you shouldn't loan it.
In the first place.
Yeah.
Absolutely, Well, let's start talking about your book, which I know was published about what eight years ago, seven and a half years ago, but continues to have an afterlife, which we all hope for as authors.
So that's good news for you.
Let's start with the way that you think it makes sense to tell this story. Is it to sort of dig into the mystery of it and what happens, you know, from the very beginning, or is it to talk about you and libraries a little bit?
What do you want to start?
I guess it really is a bit of a hydra with many heads. The book began with my curiosity.
About the day to day.
Life of a big city library. It just struck me as an interesting story to tell that, to my knowledge, had never been told, which is like, what is it like day.
To day in a library?
And that was a very documentary sort of curiosity.
I want to sort of.
See the unfolding of life in a library and tell all of those little stories that weave in and out. Then I found out about this catastrophic fire that had occurred at the LA Library, which was the library I was going to write about, and it was the largest library fire in American history.
It had occurred in nineteen eighty six.
It destroyed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. The library was closed for seven years after the fire, I mean the destruction and the extremely complicated process of rebuilding the collection of the library took a very long time. And the question, of course was who would set a library on fire? What would motivate you? You know, arson, Arson is a really interesting strange crime.
It's usually done for money, or it's done by someone who has a pathological kind of fascination with fire, or it's done for revenge. Those are the three categories. There is no money to be gotten from burning a library.
You know, those fires.
Tend to be business owners who set their own business on fire to get insurance money, or you know, some version of that, and so's it's a particularly kind of funky crime because it's really trying to leverage their insurance money out of a business. Revenge you can understand, you know, somebody gets insulted by someone who owns a restaurant or a bar, and for revenge they set it on fire.
That's also a sort of understandable kind of category. There are people who have the psychological fascination with fire, pyromaniacs who really are responsible for a lot of fires, frequently not in a place like the library, but you know, a lot of fires set in woods, fires set in smaller locations. And then of course it can escalate, and there have been many instances of people with psychological problems who have set a building on fire and people have
been killed. It was a really interesting instance here in La where I live, of a whole rash of fires that were cropping up in the Glendale area.
Nobody could figure it out.
Finally, one of these fires was lit in a sort of home depot kind of store. The roof collapsed, two firefighters were killed, and the fire department, you know, were really activated to figure out.
What is going on, We're having all of these arson fires. Well, who was it?
It was a member of the fire department, in fact, a chief in the fire department, who was a firebug and who was setting all of these fires. He had written a novel about a fire captain who was a pyromaniac, and he was trying to sell it to get option to make a movie.
I mean, this guy was hiding in plain sight.
Yeah, and I'm not going to say that firefighters are pyramaniacs, but it's not the only time in the history of the world that a person a firefighter turned out to be someone who also had this pathological fascination with fire and to the degree that they were starting them. So circling back here, the question was, right, there's no insurance money to be gotten by burning.
Down a library. Could it be revenge?
I'm sure somebody was in the library and a librarian spoke harshly to him, and he set the library and fire. No one could remember an instance of having an interaction was someone that where they felt like this person was angry and going to create a problem. So you've got the issue of all right, it's somebody with the psychological problem. How do you solve that kind of crime. The entire city was invested in figuring this out. People took the
burning of the library very personally. Yeah, I think it really stirred in people this sense that the library belonged to all of us and that someone damaging it was really damaging a communal property that people really cared about.
Take me back to that day in nineteen eighty six in La How did this unfold that actual day? You know where there are sprinkler systems, When did did people smell the fire? And how many people you know tell me that whole detail.
This day in April nineteen eighty six, it was a beautiful, clear day. The library at that point was not in good repair.
They had a lot of fire code violations, mostly sort of insignificant things that were technical violations.
They had a book cart sort of in the way of a fire exit and so forth. But also the wiring in the building was very old. The building was built in the nineteen twenties and it had been neglected. It was really overdue for a serious renovation, and a lot of the systems did not work well. For instance, if you plugged in a coffee maker, the lights would go out or you know it clearly, the wiring was faulty and way overloaded a building built in the twenties.
There was no air conditioning because they didn't have enough power coming into the building. Also the structure of the building, and this is no longer the way libraries are built. But you know, tons of books in a library are in sort of deep storage. They're not all on the shelves, They're in what is known as the stacks.
Back in the old days, the stacks were built like small rectangular.
Rooms within the library, and they would go the entire height of the library, resembling a chimney, no ventilation. And in the case of the La Library, and this was typical at the time, there were not floors between the levels. Now a floor or ceiling. In the case of a fire, the fire starts on the first floor and is going upward and hits a ceiling, it's not going to continue upward.
In the case of of the stacks in the library, it was seven stories and they were divided by wire grates, not solid floors, so it truly resembled a seven story chimney.
So the morning unfolded just as any ordinary morning.
It was about ten or eleven AM, and a fire alarm went off at that point in time. Because of all of these wiring problems, fire alarms went off all the time, and even though people.
Had to evacuate, they did it very.
Grudgingly because most of the time it was just some little, you know, coffeemaker threw as fuse and that was all it was. And you still had to evacuate the hundreds of employees, the hundreds of patrons, So everybody was a little slow to get out of the building. Everyone assumed
entirely that this was another false alarm. The library was working on the adding a wing at the time, and the architect of the new wing was in the building having a meeting, and they all took this fire alarm so unseeriously that he left all the plans in the building, He left his hotel key, a lot of the librarians left their purses. You know.
People were just like, oh god, this is such a headache.
We have to go out, and we'll left to stand there for ten minutes. Fire department will come, they'll reset the alarm.
That'll be it.
So everyone finally leaves the building. The fire department shows up. You know there they've been at the library a million times, so there again is like trudging through the building, check around. There's no sign of anything amiss. They go to reset the fire alarm and it wouldn't reset. And they try again and again it wouldn't reset, which any of us who have ever reset the breaker in our house knows that if it's no big deal, all you do is flip the switch.
So this would not reset.
They thought, all right, well, we'll do another walk around because obviously there's something is wrong, which they assumed was a failure of the fire alarm system. They walk through the library again and finally notice a little thin thread of smoke in the fiction department, and they come around the corner and they see a fire that has begun. They were absolutely astonished. What's more, when you think about where a fire would have fuel, a library is maybe
the most delicious place for a fire to begin. What's more, this fire had begun in the stacks, this tube that I was describing that instantly the fire shot up through the stacks, unstopped by floors because there were no floors, there were just those wire grates, and it climbed the seven stories of the stacks almost immediately. Because this was an old building, nobody had the drawings of the interior at the ready so that they could say, whoa, you know,
this is a seventh story chimney. We've really got to get in there and get it stopped immediately or it's going to really blow up. So while they're trying to find the drawings for the building, which are hidden somewhere in the archives from nineteen twenty six, the fire is raging. It took off really quickly. You know, this is the perfect environment for a fire. Not only the stacks, but that is what fueled the fire and.
Built it the intensity that it reached.
At one point it was estimated to have reached twenty five hundred degrees. There is a quality when a fire is so hot that the air itself is on fire, and you know.
That requires a fire having an enormous.
Amount of fuel, having essentially the perfect condition for fire, and it found it in the library, book after book, just being devoured, nothing really to stop it. The fire doors that are now very typical in every building. They had not installed fire doors. You know, this was an old building and it was not up to the code
that we would now expect a building to be. And because it was a municipal building and nobody was spending the money and nobody was really spending the time thinking about it, and you know, the city there were many discussions going on about maybe the building should get torn down. So there was a reluctance to invest in the building because there was a movement afoot to tear it down and replace it, sell the land, build up a library elsewhere.
So you had essentially the perfect scenario for a fire. It burned for seven and a half hours, which is as anyone can imagine an enormous amount of time for a fire to be burning, but every time they would dampen it down in one part of the library, it would simply shoot through the building to another area and start burning. Fire's a really interesting element. Fire has a will to live that we normally associate with animate beings, plants, humans, animals.
You know, this sort of I want to live kind of impulse. Fire has it too. Fire wants to keep burning, so if it's thwarted at one point, it will turn and look for other places to burn.
You know.
Writing about this fire was really kind of spooky. It was as if it was this wicked creature, kind of racing through this building, evading the firefighters and finding hidden passages in.
The building that they didn't even know existed.
Because nobody had current plans for the building.
I mean, in the animals of fire history.
It would go down as one of the more perfect fires from the point of view of destructiveness of an environment that was so conducive to fire.
I remember seeing what I think continues to be one of the most interesting movies to me, which was a huge commercial movie Backdraft, right, and it was the first time I had really seen it as sort of this rolling animal almost coming through. You know, I've written about smog, and you know, see it as that's sort of like an entity also. So let me ask you some basic questions. No sprinklers at all, I have to assume in the building.
No sprinklers. You know, sprinklers at that time, in nineteen eighty six were a pretty blunt instrument. If any little bit of smoke was detected, they would be set off, you know, and here you are in a library with water raining down on books.
Essentially you're ruining the books. So in fact, in the.
Tally of the books that were ruined, met all of the books that were damaged, or the majority of the books that were damaged were damaged by the water, not by I mean a lot of them were damaged also by smoke. And you know, and the four hundred thousand that were destroyed were largely the ones that were burned, but the water used to put out the fire. At some point they just thought, either we're going to save the building, or you know, that's our goal is to.
Save the building.
We cannot expect to save the books.
So libraries were very loath.
To have sprinkler systems, because just imagine someone lights a cigarette like absent mindedly and sets off this catastrophic you know, rain of fire. Sprinkler systems have gotten much better there might you know a lot of them use foam and not water. I mean, they've evolved. But remember that was a long time ago, nineteen eighty six. Yeah, sprinkler systems were probably new to the world at that point. I
mean I don't remember when they were developed. But they did one thing, which was they basically triggered these sprinklers literally. But no, the library didn't have any, nor did they have any you know, they probably had fire hydrants around. I mean that was the extent of it, but that would have worked on a little tiny you know, somebody dropped a match and they're squirting fire hydrant foam on it.
It was absolutely powerless. I mean, by the time they discovered this fire, it was way beyond that minor control. I mean, it not only required the fire department, but it nearly outmatched the fire department.
So when they first discovered the fire, you said in the fiction section, was it clear what the origin was of the fire? I mean, did they look at this and say this does not look electrical. It looks like this was intentional based on where it started.
Yes and no, yes they believe that. I mean the science of arson. And let me go on my little rant here about arsen Most of the learning about arson had been mainly sort of folk knowledge that was passed down from firefighter to firefighter, not based on science, not based on actual clinical studies. The area that's most burned is where the fire started. That was the thought.
Well, we have learned in more.
Recent time, with actual studies of fire, that that is not true. It may be where the fire started, but it is not necessarily where the fire started. So this is like the foundational belief of arson investigators, and that is wherever it's burned the most, that's where it started. There was a very famous case in Texas of a guy who was accused of setting his house on fire by lighting a fire under his children's beds, and the children died. He was sent to death row and he was.
Executed Todd Willingham.
Yeah, and then some years later, through the advocacy of people who truly believed he was innocent, they were able to prove pretty much without a doubt that the fire had started in a habachi on their front porch, and of course it was too late. They had already executed him. And it was the first really dramatic exposure of there's nothing malicious in this misperception.
It was believe you don't know what you don't know, right, And.
There's just logic.
Where it got burned the most is where it burned the longest, which means that's where it started.
It's just not true.
And you know, in the Library book, I talked to the guy who runs what is called the Arson Innocence Project, which is similar to the Innocence Project that looks at people on death Row and re examines their case. And in this case, you know, given that Arson increasingly has been reconsidered, the science behind it the way to prove cause, and it's very important to prove where it started.
That is kind of essential.
You know, if a fire started under a kid's bed where there's no electrical or no other cause, you can say, well, obviously, the only other person in the house must have lit a match under his kid's bed. But if you can say there was a hibachi that had live coals in the front porch, suddenly you have an absolutely obvious potential cause.
So this isn't just.
A matter of curiosity. It's actually extremely important to solving whether something is an arson at all or you know who did it and why, and you know what the whole story of the arsen is. In the case of the library, the area that was burned the most was this area in the fiction department. There were no wires, there were no there was no evident cause.
So you have to say that it had.
To be human, a human hand, which is the language that they use. It was a human hand because there were no wires, there were no fuses, there was you know, there was nothing where you could say, here's the potential cause, and that shows that it could have been truly an accident that nobody made happen. In this case, they said, the fire started here in the fiction section, and there was nothing near enough that could have triggered a fire.
Therefore it was arson.
Therefore we must look for the person who started it. Now, I will just sidetrack here to say that when I went to the Arson Innocence Project, I gave them all the material that I was able to gather from the fire department, the investigation, and while they didn't do a formal review, His take on it was I don't really see how this is arson.
You have dozens of I don't want to say the library it was a fire trap, but it kind of was.
It had known problems with wiring, which is very often the cause of an unexplained fire. You have tons of fuel. I mean, if the fire starts in the middle of a refrigerator, you know, you or some environment where there's nothing to burn, right, then you think, all right, that's crazy. How could the fire have started here? This wasn't a library.
It's filled with paper. I mean the fire load, which is the terminology for sort of burnable material in a library is higher than literally anywhere except maybe a sawmill. You know, it's just absolutely stacked with burnable material that's
very reachable by fire. But the fire investigators, and again I'm not trying to say that they were malicious or dumb or you know, they were going by the accepted standard of fire investigation, which said, look where it's burned the most, burn the most in the fiction sex nothing around that could have triggered it must have been arson. Now, look, a library is an open door. Anyone and everyone is welcome to the library. That's part of their glory. That's
part of why they are such special institutions. Anyone can come into a library.
That means that you.
Can have people with ill intent coming into a library, and it's very different from a private home a private business where there's a lot of control.
Over who comes in and out.
Libraries by definition, are the ultimate democratic institution in our cities. Anyone can come in. A person who is a pyromaniac can come in. The scenario that developed was very logical, which is someone with a mental problem or who was just going to get a thrill out of seeing this big dramatic fire.
Came in there, and maybe they.
Even had a grudge against someone at the library, we don't know and dropped a match. I mean, look, it'd be pretty easy to start a fire in a library. So all of the focus turned immediately to who started the fire. There was very little investigation into can we find a car because that explains the fire where it wasn't an arson. There really was very little investigation, or I would venture to say no investigation into whether there was some other probable cause.
Because once they.
Decided the fire had started there in the fiction Stax, that was it. They were off to the races it was someone lighting a fire. They never found a match, they never found accelerant, they never found material evidence beyond saying the fire started here, and there's no other explanation than the fact that a person started it.
You know, I remember interviewing David Grant about that piece that he wrote about Todd Willingham, and you know, I had read about it for a long time. My dad, who was a law professor in the head of the Innocence Project that UT, talked about that case. And what I remember David Grant talking about is the reason that they were proving that this was arson and that must have been Willingham was the pattern, like the spider like
pattern that was on the glass. And to the you know, so called expert, this meant you only see that with an arson. And then you have an expert come along after Willingham's been executed, or actually I think it was right before he was executed, because this was an appeal and say this happens with home fires that are just accidental. Look,
this is the pattern, and he can recreate it. And so learning about you know, what arson and what fires are capable of is so important because I would hate for it to be thought of as like a junk science. It shouldn't be thought of a junk science. But with that case with Willingham, it was alarming after that because then you know who are you supposed to trust. So
they are on a mission. It sounds like to find an arsonist who maybe didn't exist, But do they have any kind of suspects or how do how do we even move forward when this is open to thousands and year thousands of people.
And also I would like to point out, even though it's shocking to even imagine, there are no cameras filming people in nineteen eighty six. Now I don't know whether today there are security cameras. My guesses there are just not so much to film who is coming into the library, but for security purposes on the perimeter of the library. You do not log.
In when you come into a library. You walk in.
And that's part of the freedom that we all expect, which is you want to be able to go into a library and not be monitored and not have someone tracking what book you take out. I mean, that's very important to the principle of libraries, which is it's open to anyone and your privacy is protected. And this is a very important issue when you think about it. If the record of the books you checked out were open to public scrutiny, you lose a huge amount of privacy
in a very real way. And a lot of people come to the library to take books out about something that they are sensitive about, and they fully expect that they're except for the librarian who checks the book out, it's a private matter. So I know it's hard for us in this day and age of endless security cameras and everything is filmed and you don't enter a building without checking in at.
The front door.
None of that is true in libraries now, but in nineteen eighty six even less so there is no record of who was in the library that day. Now, you could say, well, that's too bad, because they could have narrowed it down. Yeah, but we're talking about it very important principle of privacy that I think is Luckily we're not talking about endless crime in libraries where we need monitoring. But this is a long way of saying that there was no record of who was in the library that day.
I mean, all the librarians were interviewed, no one had seen anything. None of the librarians had smelled fire. They left the building because the fire alarm went off, and so there was no eyewitness. A few of them said, well, there was a guy, kind of an odd guy, and this guy is a kind of an odd guy, but you know nothing beyond he's our regular patron and he's.
A bit of an odd guy.
So the investigation would have been extremely unproductive but for the fact that a young man named Harry Peek, who was a want to be actor, a boastful kind of performative guy, began saying to people, did you see that big library fire?
I started it?
And you know, he was telling friends, he was bragging, and eventually one of his friends, because there was a reward, told the police. My friend Harry Peek says he started the fire. So Harry, you know, you could say, we know for a fact that Harry was guilty of the crime of being an idiot. I would say, if he started the fire, maybe not such a good idea to go around saying your friends, hey, guess.
What, I started the fire.
But lucky for us, a lot of criminals are really not very bright and tend to brag about their crime. But the problem is with someone who is a notorious fabulous Did he really start the fire or is it that it was the big event of the day and he'd liked placing himself at the center of it.
There was no murder, right, There were no injuries.
I mean a few of the firefighters were hospitalized in you know, the course of putting out the fire, the heat exhaustion, the typical issues that arise in terms of you know, their exposure to smoke, their heat exhaustion. But no one, I mean luckily, because the fire alarm went off. Everyone was well out of the building for probably forty five minutes before they found the fire.
Well, these days, I would say, I don't know what they would have done in eighty six.
But you would have to think the same thing.
If you're convinced as an investigator that you've got someone you know who started a fire, and then you have somebody ragging about it, you bring that person in and you have them somehow confirm evidence right that you have not released. You know, So okay, you say you started the fire, how exactly did you do it?
And I wonder how much.
The arson investigators released to the LA Times or you know whoever. So that there was no holdback at all.
Right, Well, in Harry's case, I mean one of his problems, and you know, I wish, as a crime consultant, I could have said to him, bad move to say you did it, even a worse move to have multiple alibis, which is how this unfolded. First he said that he was at his parents' house. Then he said he was in the library, but he didn't do it. Then he said he was actually having lunch with two friends, you know, across town, and you know, it's never a good look to.
Have multiple excuses.
Ultimately, these two friends did vouch for him having lunch with them, but both of these friends were very questionable. I would say that their vouching for him was about as slender a kind of alibi as he could possibly have had. Also, you think, if you really would with your friends, why would you have first said you were
at your parents. And there was no record of him being at his parents for sure, because he claimed to have made phone calls while he was at his parents back in the day they were all landlines, it was very easy to see that there were no phone calls made from his parents house during that time. So boom, that alibi went out the door. He said he was in the library, but he didn't do it. That's not exactly an albi. That's like, yeah, I was there, but I didn't do it, even though I said I did.
It, yeah, and no one could I d him. I have to assume nobody would I d him there. No one said oh yeah, I remember that guy.
Oh right.
Well, there was one woman who you know, everybody was leaving the library during the fire alarm, and so people were sort of hurrying out, and Harry said that he had been rushing and had elbowed a woman, an older lady, and then apologized to her on his way out.
There was a woman.
When she was interviewed who said, yes, somebody had pushed in front of her in the line going out. She didn't remember what he looked like, but she remembered someone had sort of pushed. Yes, that has like a little kind of tang of truth, but she couldn't identify him.
There's a lot of people leaving too.
I mean, everybody's trying to get they're all pissed off, they're walking out the door. I mean, everybody's probably gonna get knocked in a little bit.
Right exactly, So just saying Oh, yes, somebody kind of pushed ahead of me. If you've ever been evacuated from a building, I assure you there's a lot of pushing. You know.
Harry was a.
Pretty noticeable guy. He was good looking, tall, blonde, you know, unlike a number of other good looking, young blonde guys in LA But he was somewhat distinctive. But nobody could absolutely say he was there. Now, the real question is did he do it? And if he did it.
Why now.
Most pyromaniacs begin demonstrating their pathology young.
I mean, it's a real pathology.
And these are the kids that, when they're nine and ten years old are starting fires. It's very, very unusual for an adult who has never demonstrated pyromania to suddenly have a you know, florid evolution of it at age twenty eight or what. I can't remember Harry's exact age, but he was in his twenties. It's just it's very rare. It's almost always something that kids begin demonstrating when they're kids.
So that didn't.
Hold with the usual understanding of pyromania.
So let's say he's not a pyromaniac. He was just goofing around.
That's a pretty big goof.
Like Harry was.
A fibber and a liar and a boaster. To me, starting a fire in a library is a different species of behavior than say, people, I'm up for a role in uh Hawaii five Ohm. Hm, you know that's a fib No one is harmed by it. He was not a destructive person, a person who had ever done it. He was a fuck up. Yeah, you know, he was a guy who boasted about his career in Hollywood. He was you know, he was one of those guys who's always got a story, he's always about to get a
big role in a show. But he had never done anything that seemed like a prelude to such a truly anti social act.
That would be an odd statement, I mean specifically at a library, which I mean maybe he was a smart guy, but it didn't seem maybe that unlike you. Maybe there's no personal I can't imagine there's a personal connection between Harry and libraries where you might make a statement about freedom of speech or or what you know, your ability to read whatever you want and privacy and all of that.
So yeah, that is that does not really fit in with what you're thinking would be something Harry would do, which would be bragging that.
He was in a film with Marlon Brando when he really.
Wasn't right exactly. I mean the kinds of psychopathy that he that you expect from him was these boastful, ragged docio. You know, I'm really good friends now with Clint Eastwood. I'm going to be in a new movie with so and so, and again, I think it's important to say that no one was ever harmed by his FIBs. They were sort of silly, braggy kinds of statements. He was not a malicious person, a harmful person. Everyone I interviewed who knew him said, you know, he was like big kid.
He was, you know, a Peter Pan, a guy who really pictured himself making it in Hollywood. Yeah, even though he had terrible stage fright, I mean there were there was something about him that seemed actually innocent.
Starting a fire is such a leap.
It's it's a pretty aggressive, pretty scary thing to do.
And it's risky too, because you know what I've learned when I've been writing about ar since to cover up murders, I interviewed a forensic chemist and she said, people don't understand you're not lighting gasoline, you're lighting the fumes.
That's what happens. It's the fumes that catch fire and spread everything.
And so she said, people are so dumb when they're trying to cover up murders because they don't understand how to do it. A lot of the times the body is still there, it doesn't destroy everything. But like you said, it's the water firefighters, you know, coming in and putting out the fire that destroys evidence.
But she said, it's not that easy.
It's not You have to kind of know what you're doing in certain circumstances. Right to me, Harry seems like the kind of guy who, if he is going to go down the road of being a criminal, it would be more like grifter, you know, using his charm to fund his next film. Right, tell me where we land with all of this. Do you think so Harry is petrified at this point? I would hope that that he's going to go down for something that he just stupidly admitted to when he didn't do it.
Right and the police did arrest him. The problem is they had no concrete evidence besides his boasting about it.
And we all know that that's a pretty.
Common phenomenon of people claiming to have done crimes, including really horrible crimes. Yeah, for reasons that have to do with their own desire for attention and so forth. And you know, the minute he got arrested, suddenly he was like, I didn't do it.
I don't know why I said I did. He never quite explained why he said he did. But I think we can.
Just assume that Harry liked to see himself at the center of every big event. The problem was the police truly had nothing to connect him, absolutely nothing. They had no eye witness sighting, no no fingerprint, nothing at all. I'm surprised that they were able to even arrest him given that they didn't have anything. They held him in jail until they couldn't and he was released because the fact is they didn't have anything on him. He then sued the city for defamation and ended up settling for
a very small amount of money. I think the city was pursuing the case and was going to defend itself against his claim of false arrest and so forth. When it came to be known that he was dying of AIDS, the city decided, look, let's just settle this is not going to be good for the look for the city to be, you know, wrangling in court with this guy
who's dying. And the amount of money they settled for, and I'm sorry I don't remember the exact amount, but it was a trifling you know, knowing the city sometimes settles for literally.
Millions of dollars. It was under one hundred thousand.
I think it was like thirty thousand dollars, which would be way less than it would have cost the city to continue fighting. And they really had lost their appetite for fighting, and Harry was happy to settle for this rather trifling amount. They never pursued another explanation for the arson, which I mean, look, they never pursued who killed Nicole Brown Simpson either. You know, when you have a case that supposedly you got wrong, often there's no follow up.
And in this case, you know, they never had another suspect, and they never they never investigated whether they could find
a physical explanation for the fire. And at that point the building was torn apart and being repaired, and there would have been no way to kind of trace another cause, to find an electric wire that had sparked, you know, so it was too late and at that point, you know, people were really focused on raising money to reopen the library, and I think the desire for accountability had kind of passed.
That this episode was so dissatisfying to everybody, the prosecutors, the arsenal investigators, you know, nobody, nobody felt that they got an answer. And to this day I have to say, we really do have to live with this question, which was we really don't know. I think a very strong case could be made that it was not caused by an arsenist, or that it was caused by an arsenist,
but we got the wrong guy. I've gotten a couple of letters from someone who claims that he knows who did it, that it's somebody who had a real beef with the library. And you know, I don't know how much credence to give this letter. It could be someone who's just mad at their brother in law or their poker partner, and yeah, he's saying, you know, he's but this was a guy who spoke angrily about the library. It will remain a municipal cold case. It's way past being possible to investigate it.
I want to make sure we don't skip over this. Although I mean it's certainly worth reading. You know your aspect of this. This was an important story for you that I think you felt for personal reasons, right.
It was very personal.
I was raised going to the library all the time with my mom. I had really strong connections to those memories of going to the library with my mother in a way that would surprised me. It was so intense hmm. As I began the book, my mom was in the very early stages of Alzheimer's, and it progressed almost in
tandem with my progress on the book. There's an expression in Senegal that when a person dies, you say their library has burned, and it was an expression that I found rather puzzling initially, so I thought, I don't see the parallel between a person dying in a library burning. Watching my mom loose her memory, though, made very plain to me the uncanny parallel between the human brain the sort of repository of our thoughts and memories and.
What you can share with other people you know too.
Exactly, and that in a sense it's organized very much like a library, or maybe the way to say it is that libraries are organized very much in a way that is brain like, where these connections. You know, we put books together by their connection to each other, and that when a.
Person dies, the entire content of.
Who they are and what they know and as you say, what they can share is gone. And when a library burns, a community experiences that same deficit, that this collected, shareable knowledge is gone, and all the stories that we have in common are gone.
That became the.
Sort of emotional centerpiece to me, and as a writer of books, I felt, you know, particularly connected to this, that books are the one durable evidence of what goes on in our heads.
That we can point to a book and.
There it is, and it's I just finished reading a memoir yesterday of someone who passed away a few years ago, and it was as if she were speaking to me and telling me her life story. And that endures. When she's gone, I'll never have a chance to talk to her, and yet she lives on. And in that sense, books have an immortality that is maybe unique in the human experience. And now, of course we have other media. We have
people can film themselves telling their life stories. But it's essentially the same idea that we can create a record that outlives us, and in this case it even mostly outlived the destruction of an Arson. Not all the books were replaced. There were lots and lots of books that couldn't be replaced.
But I Ray survived, and you know.
Most of the contents were replaced or new contents were brought in, and we have that lives on long past this incident that destroyed it.
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the audio versions of my books The Sinners, All About the Ghost Club, All that is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and don't forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already. This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis m Rosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More And if you know of a historical crime that could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked. Email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words