Someone—possibly a killer—came back to the scene of her death one week later and searched her house frantically. But for what?
Was Dorothy Jones killed by a jealous lover? A jealous woman? A drug dealer who “burned” her (literally) for “burning” him (figuratively)?
And $280 in cash was left behind, but her diamond rings were gone. Odd.
Was there another man that Dorothy planned to be with? She had talked to her girlfriends continually about Dante Blackwell, and even hinted that she had agreed to a divorce because of him, although he’d married another woman a few months after their affair began. Was all that talk only a smokescreen to hide a man she really cared about, perhaps a man of wealth and reputation whose name had to be kept silent? Had he been frightened at the thought that she was about to expose him, demanding more from him than he’d planned to give?
Such a man might well have had a duplicate key to her home, might have waited while she changed her clothes, started supper, even as she made a phone call to Dante Blackwell. Perhaps they made love for a final time—although Dorothy would not have known how final it was. And then this secret lover had killed her, deliberately setting a fire beneath her mattress.
Perhaps.
Maybe this unknown man believed he had gotten away without leaving a trace of himself, and then found, to his horror, that he’d dropped something—something that could inexorably be traced back to him. That would account for the “break-in” on December 27. Had he found what he sought?
After considering all the possible scenarios, there is one other that has to be addressed. It is possible that Dorothy Jones wasn’t murdered at all—that she succumbed to the strange phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion (SHC).
The theory that there are certain conditions inside a human body that will cause it to suddenly catch fire is as old as the Bible, although it is impossible to validate the incidents therein. In 1763, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont wrote a book called De incendiis corporis humani spontaneis, exploring several case studies of people who had literally burst into flames.
Dupont became interested in the subject after the husband of a woman named Nicole Millet was acquitted of her murder by a judge who was convinced by arguments that she had perished by spontaneous combustion.
A far more familiar author, Charles Dickens, used spontaneous human combustion to dispatch a drunkard in his 1852 novel, Bleak House. When critics mocked him, Dickens retorted that he had thoroughly researched the subject and found thirty cases where human beings had literally burned to death from some source inside their own bodies.
A century later, the charred remains of a St. Petersburg, Florida, woman named Mary Reeser, sixty-seven, were found in her apartment on July 2, 1951. Photographs show that all that was left of her body—beyond ashes—was her skull and her unburned left foot, still wearing a black satin slipper. Her neighbor, worried about her, had touched the doorknob to her apartment, found it hot, and called the police. A four-foot circle around Mary Reeser’s body was burned black.
The police investigators concluded that Mary, a heavy woman and a smoker, who had worn a highly inflammable rayon acetate nightgown, had accidentally set fire to herself. But the medical examiner wondered how heat believed to have reached 3,000 degrees hadn’t burned the whole place down. Although the ceiling and walls were covered with soot, the room was not burned at all.
Hapless Mary Reeser became the poster girl for spontaneous human combustion.
Six years later, Anna Martin, sixty-eight, of West Philadelphia, was discovered in her home, completely incinerated except for her shoes and a small portion of her torso. The medical examiner estimated that it would have taken temperatures above 1,700 degrees to accomplish this. And yet newspapers only two feet from the burned body weren’t even scorched.
There are dozens of similar, carefully documented cases of spontaneous human combustion, and even one victim who survived. A man named Peter Jones was saved by rescuers who smothered the flames. He later recalled feeling no pain, saying, “I didn’t feel hot at all—I only saw smoke.”
There are no absolutes in discussing the phenomenon, which has been attributed to everything from mass hysteria to old wives’ tales to electric short-circuiting within the body to punishment from God.
Experts in this bizarre subject have suggested that the elderly, particularly women, are more likely to spontaneously combust. Overweight people and alcoholics are thought to be prime candidates. But there are also thin people who are teetotalers who have reportedly caught fire with no outside flame starter.
I have been told a few times about a firefighter or an arson investigator who came upon a woman sitting in her living room in an easy chair with her entire torso, save for her genitals, burned away. Her legs and arms were intact, and so was the room. But when I tried to track this story to its source, I was never able to find the one person who saw this. It became more of a folktale than a credible first-person report.
One researcher offered a checklist to determine if SHC should be considered in a case of death by fire.
The body is normally more severely burned than one caught in a usual fire.
The burns are not distributed evenly over the body; the legs and arms are untouched while the torso is severely burned.
Small portions of the body remain unburned.
Only parts of body have burned. SHC victims have burned up in a bed without the sheets catching fire, clothing is barely singed, and inflammable materials only inches away remain untouched.
A greasy soot deposit covers the ceiling and walls, usually stopping four feet above the floor.
Although temperatures of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit are normally required to char a body so thoroughly, frequently little or nothing around the victim is damaged, except for the exact spot where the victim ignited.
The fact that Dorothy Jones was so severely burned in such a short time while the rest of her house and most of her bedroom were not makes one wonder if she could have been a victim of spontaneous human combustion. Although she was pleasantly buxom, she wasn’t overweight, and she didn’t drink to excess.
The shag carpet in her bedroom was not burned except for the spot right under her body. The mattress she lay on was burned beneath her body, the rest untouched, except for one spot at the foot of her bed.
SHC is only one theory among many, and probably not the cause of her death. But still, I wonder.
Marshal 5 investigators Jim Reed, Jack Hickam, and Bill Hoppe went over the incredible circumstances of Dorothy Jones’s death again and again, trying to find the one clue that had to be there. It was, ultimately, to be an exercise in frustration, and yet they still worked on the case whenever they could.
Time moved on and they all retired. Jack Hickam, who was “Mr. Arson” in Seattle, the ultimate expert in determining the cause of fires, passed away in September 1994 after a long illness. Jim Reed lost touch with his fellow investigators from Marshal 5. I still see Bill Hoppe often, and he remembers the case well. But he believes that no one ever unlocked the mystery of what happened to Dorothy Jones.
It is a challenge to try to figure out what might have taken place during that vital time period—only one hour—during the Christmas season 1976. Was there a man that no one knew about who stalked Dorothy? She was afraid of someone, but even her closest friends didn’t know who.
With the almost miraculous outreach of the Internet, perhaps one day I will hear from someone who knows the answers. If there was a human killer, he may be long dead now. Or he may have been dealing with a nagging conscience for thirty years and want to unburden himself. Or herself.
I think someone does know, and my e-mail address is listed on the back-inside cover of this book…
The
Convict’s Wife
The standard reaction to murders featured on the nightly news is, “They seemed like the nicest family. I can’t believe something like that could happen in our neighborhood!”
The case
that follows has extra pathos because the people involved had almost no neighbors or friends. No one really knew them at all. They wandered across America, looking for someplace they could live without paying rent. The men involved had a choice in the way they lived their lives, but the woman and the small children didn’t.
And how they must have longed to have some stability and to be able to count on where they would be the next year—or even the next month. The pieces of their world continually blew away in the winds of change like so many particles of milkweed or dandelion fluff. Nothing was permanent and they could never know what tomorrow might bring.
They journeyed toward the Pacific Ocean from their Midwestern roots. In an odd kind of way, the woman named Doris Mae was as defenseless as the pioneer wives who followed their men west in covered wagons 150 years earlier. Some will argue that she made immoral choices, and she did.
Others will understand that she probably had no one to turn to.
The brothers light grew up in Illinois and they lived by their wits; sometimes they lucked out, but as often as not, they ended up behind bars. Steadily building dubious reputations that made their names well known to lawmen all over the state, what they lacked in brains, they made up for in persistence. George Allen Light was six years older than Larry Max Light and he had a head start in crime, but Larry began young and soon caught up with George. Indeed, some said he surpassed him. Their crimes were the sort that take only modest ingenuity: car theft, strong-arm robbery, assault, burglary. Their faces became familiar behind the walls of the state pens at Joliet and Pontiac and Menard.
If they were unpopular with police agencies, they were sought out as gang members in the street subculture where aggressive behavior was a badge of honor. In 1959, when he was only nineteen, Larry Light was “rushed” by the gangs as assiduously as any prom queen at a sorority tea.
He chose one gang and, as a sort of initiation, was sent to “call on” the leaders of the gang he had turned down. The social call soon disintegrated into a brawl. Larry punched out the rival gang leader, but he spun around when someone leapt on his back spitting and scratching. He couldn’t see who it was, so he blindly swung his arm behind him. His fingers activated his switchblade knife, and he stabbed his attacker.
The grip on his back loosened and the soft moan of a female shocked the tangle of thugs who were still fighting. Larry Light had just fatally stabbed the gang leader’s “old lady.” While the gang members tried to stanch the dying girl’s bleeding, Larry slipped away and ran to the first hiding place he could think of.
As he hid out, he pondered his problem, which was twofold: He had already seen enough of the inside of reform school and prison walls to last him a lifetime, and he didn’t want to go back. More than that, he knew he was a dead man if the avenging mourners of his victim found him. He wasn’t even twenty yet, and this wasn’t exactly how he’d planned his future.
Larry’s chances for survival weren’t very good to begin with, and the odds dropped to zero when his brother, George, twenty-five, was questioned by detectives. George was pretty uptight whenever policemen approached him. He’d been into so much heavy stuff that he was afraid he was about to receive what convicts and cops called “the Big Bitch.” In most states, after conviction on three felony charges, repeat offenders could be sent to prison for life as habitual criminals.
George’s family loyalty was never all that trustworthy before Larry killed the raven-haired young woman, and now he sang like a bird when he was asked who stabbed the gang leader’s girlfriend. In return for his fingering Larry, George benefited from some plea bargaining that would keep him out of prison—at least for the moment.
George went free, while Larry drew a thirty-five-year sentence for murder and was bused off to Joliet Prison. He was furious over George’s betrayal, and he had plenty of time to think about it as he sat in his cell. His brother had snitched on him to save his own skin. During the endless dark nights at Joliet, Larry made certain promises to himself. It might take a long time, but he vowed that George was going to get what was coming to him for his transgressions. All prisoners detest snitches, and snitching on a man’s own brother broke almost every rule of prison ethics.
George Light’s face was as battered as any prizefighter’s, the results of his propensity to use his fists, especially when he’d been drinking. He was certainly not the answer to an average maiden’s prayer, but fourteen-year-old Doris Mae found herself drawn to him. Being with George seemed safer to her than where she was. He had a pretty good job as a truck driver, and that meant stability to her.
George Light was her ticket out of a home where her life was totally miserable. Doris was tiny and slender, and she had a face like a bruised pansy. She had no education, no skills, and clearly no talent at all about judging men. George was nicer to her when they were dating than any men she’d known so far, and she linked her fortune to his.
Despite her frail body, Doris Mae was soon constantly pregnant. She bore five children in rapid succession. When George was in jail—a frequent occurrence—she and the children lived on welfare payments; when he was out, she often served as his punching bag. If she had felt trapped before, Doris Mae was really trapped now.
Nobody knew exactly why, but in 1970 George packed up his family and headed west to the state of Oregon. Maybe things were getting too hot for him in Illinois. Their trip was reminiscent of desperate families escaping the Dust Bowl in the thirties. They had barely enough money for gas and baloney sandwiches along the way, and no money at all to rent a house when they reached their destination.
Salem, Oregon, in the fertile Willamette Valley, looked like paradise in the spring and summer, and George assured Doris Mae he would find them housing. His selection of a home was expedient and economical, if not luxurious. He spotted a deserted farmhouse near Salem on the Powers Creek Loop Road. It was a two-story structure, with a sagging porch, broken windows, and a yard overgrown with weeds. When he peeked in the windows, he deduced that it had obviously been empty for a long time.
George kept his ears open as he drank a beer at a local tavern, and with careful questions, he found out the farmhouse was owned by someone who lived out of state and never came around. He smiled when he heard that, and he soon moved Doris Mae and their five children into the abandoned house.
The old car that had barely gotten them to Oregon soon died. George parked it over an abandoned open well so the kids wouldn’t fall in. Doris Mae was discouraged when she surveyed the creaky old house, but her husband told her they would have to live there until he made a stake.
She had lived in a dozen or more places since their marriage and this leaking farmhouse was just another in a string of dumps. She put cardboard over the windows, stuffed newspapers in the cracks where the wind whistled through, set out pans where the roof leaked, and tried to make the best of it. It was kind of pretty outside by the grove of fir trees, and she noticed there were cherry trees that might blossom in the spring. Maybe she could even start a garden if they stayed that long. But they never stayed anywhere long, so she didn’t count on it.
George got a job in the lumber mill in the hamlet of Molalla. It was twenty-four miles away, but he got a ride to and from work from a generous neighbor. The money from his mill job wasn’t bad and he could have taken adequate care of his family—except that he spent money for liquor first and groceries second.
George Light was not a man who became cheerful and amenable when he drank. Not at all; he was a mean drunk. Doris had long since learned to dread the sound of his footsteps after he’d lingered at the tavern. She weighed 95 pounds, and George weighed 160, and if she said or did the wrong thing, she could expect a new crop of bruises or a black eye that no amount of makeup would cover. It was a way of life for her, and she did her best not to irritate him.
She enrolled their three older children in the closest grade school and spent her days with the two babies, one of whom was only a few months old. She lived a lonely and solita
ry life. About the only time she got out to talk to people was when she shopped at the Lone Pine store for groceries.
And then a Christmas Eve visitor changed the direction of Doris Mae’s life, not to mention George’s.
Larry Light, thirty now, had been recently paroled from prison after serving almost eleven years. His parole papers stipulated that he was not to travel outside the state of Illinois, but he ignored that edict, figuring that no one was going to chase him all across the country. He decided to surprise his brother and sister-in-law and join them in Oregon for Christmas 1970.
Laden with presents and several fifths of whiskey, Larry knocked on his brother’s door. If he still harbored resentment toward George for his betrayal, it wasn’t obvious. The brothers seemed to get along all right, and Larry soon moved in with George and Doris, stashing his sleeping roll in an attic alcove.
Larry had been a long time without female companionship and he was powerfully attracted to his fragile sister-in-law. Although Doris was twenty-nine years old, she still looked like a teenager. The years with George should have aged her a lot more than they had, but the damage had been done more to her spirit and soul than to her outward appearance. Her hair was still dark brown, untouched by gray, and hung almost to her waist. Her brown eyes were clear. There was only a faint hardness—or maybe it was tension—in her facial expression attesting to her years of disillusionment.
Larry studied her quietly as she moved about, doing the myriad chores required in a house with only the most rudimentary conveniences. She had to haul water from an outside pump, wash clothes by hand, carry in wood, and try to keep the dark rooms clean without the benefit of a vacuum sweeper. George didn’t help her. When he wasn’t working, he was either off at the tavern or sitting at the kitchen table nursing a bottle of whiskey. If he paid her any attention at all, it was to criticize her and bully her or demand his husbandly rights in bed.