The Blaze ‘Speaks,’ Investigator Listens

CARY, Ill. —  Every fire scene has something to say, and Jack Malooly does his best to hear it.

Two weeks after the house on High Road was swept by fire, he arrived at the blackened shell as part of a new federal team called in to help local investigators. A stocky, ruddy-faced ex-cop with a walrus mustache and a gold ring bearing the initials of an elite task force, the National Response Team, Malooly had prowled the scenes of hundreds of disasters, from Oklahoma to Pakistan.

Two decades with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had made him a master of an often fiendishly tricky science: ferreting out the origins of fires.

Once, after a blaze in a U.S. Army building in South Korea, he gathered the melted clocks to see when each had stopped. That created a trail to the source.

“You have to be patient and methodical and curious,” he said.

Now he was investigating John T. Veysey III -- and the fire that had almost killed Veysey’s wife, Deserie, and his son, Little John.

From the start, Cary police Det. Ron Delelio had suspected that the fire was no accident, and he had dug into Veysey’s past -- gathering records, conducting interviews, trying to piece together a puzzle. But he could only go so far. He was no fire expert.

Enter Jack Malooly.

Following his own special style, Malooly starts outside, circles the ruins, examining scorch marks where flames have escaped, then works his way inside, moving painstakingly from least damage to most, sizing up a fire in a language all his own. Anything combustible is a “fuel package.” A quick-hit arson is a “splash and dash.”

When he arrived in Cary, the preliminary fire marshal’s report pointed to the Christmas tree as the likely cause -- possibly the string of lights.

Right away, Malooly doubted that. Christmas trees don’t burn as easily or as long as people think.

There were other clues in the living room. The fire had reached flashover, the instant when hot gases turn a room into a raging furnace. If the fire had started in the tree, Malooly figured, that would not have happened because the tree was next to windows, which would have shattered quickly, allowing hot gases to escape.

Something else was to blame, he thought.

“What do we have here in this corner?” Malooly asked another agent.

An overstuffed chair had been there. All that remained were pieces of charred frame, stacked outside.

Could it be that?

Malooly bought three of the same chairs. He shipped them to the National Institute of Standards and Technology outside Washington, where lab workers touched them off under a steel hood fitted with equipment to measure the intensity of the fire. Each went up like a torch.

For Malooly, that clinched it. The fire had started in the chair -- he’d swear to it.

As he worked, other investigators were busy too, retracing Veysey’s footsteps, interviewing former co-workers and ex-girlfriends, plowing through yellowing financial records.

One afternoon, Delelio, still working the case, was thumbing through Veysey’s credit card receipts when he came upon one with a name that sounded like a chemical company in Florida.

He grabbed the phone. A Florida police officer soon confirmed that a garage at the address had been raided and someone was selling GHB -- the so-called date-rape drug -- over the Internet.

The hairs on Delelio’s neck stood up.

Bodybuilders sometimes take GHB, and Veysey lifted weights. But it also was a knockout drug that can cause amnesia. Delelio had interviewed women who had dated Veysey and said they had passed out or had dizzy spells after he gave them drinks.

It was too late to know, but he wondered: Had GHB been in the water Veysey handed Deserie -- her last memory before the fire?

*

Another unanswered question, at least as troubling, nagged the investigators: How had Veysey’s first wife really died, three years earlier?

Like Deserie, Patricia DeBruyne Kemp Veysey, divorced with two children, met her future husband through a newspaper personals ad.

They settled in Twin Lakes, Wis., where disaster struck in September 1993, three months after the wedding. A gas explosion blew their house to bits; no one was home at the time.

The blast came four days after Veysey increased his insurance. He collected $363,587. (Just two years earlier, Veysey had had a serious fire at the same house. He had collected $198,000 in insurance and rebuilt it.)

By the summer of 1994, when John IV, Little John, was born, most of that insurance money was gone, mainly spent on cars, furniture and a home in the scenic Mississippi River town of Galena, Ill.

The following spring, Veysey was unemployed, having just left a job as a real estate agent. He had five mouths to feed, including Patricia’s two children from her first marriage. His bank balance was down to $2,761.64.

On May 15, 1995, he drove the children home from school. There, they found Patricia dead on the dining room floor. She was only 34, but a pathologist ruled it cardiac arrhythmia due to a congenital heart problem. It seemed possible. At 5-foot-6, she weighed 260 pounds.

But as they reviewed Veysey’s past after the Cary fire, federal prosecutors Pat Layng and Lori Lightfoot were suspicious and reopened the case of Patricia’s death. They had noted a pattern: Veysey would be low on cash, there would be a disaster, then a large insurance payment and a spending spree.

After Patricia’s death, he had collected $200,000 from her life insurance.

There was something else bothering prosecutors: In autopsy photos, they noticed a large bruise over Patricia’s left eye. The pathologist said she got it when she collapsed. That didn’t make sense. She hadn’t fallen on her face. She’d been found lying on her back.

Adding to that, prosecutors had a startling piece of evidence from an ATF investigator’s interview with a real estate agent who had worked with Veysey.

“I know how to kill somebody and it’s totally untraceable ...,” Veysey had said about three months before Patricia’s death, according to Lavonne Deininger, the former co-worker. “I can just inject their vein with something and if there is an autopsy ... it appears as though they had a heart attack.”

A single vial of Patricia’s blood had sat for years in the refrigerator in the Jo Daviess County sheriff’s office, alongside deputies’ brown-bag lunches. Layng contacted a testing lab in Pennsylvania.

“I think a guy killed somebody and poisoned her,” he said.

“What kind of poison?” the toxicologist asked.

“That’s what I’m asking you,” Layng replied.

There was no single test to detect all poisons. So, Layng and Lightfoot studied Veysey’s books, got expert advice and suggested tests.

Cyanide came back negative. So did antifreeze. About 15 tests were done before the last drop of blood was exhausted. No poisons were found.

Prosecutors were sure they knew the motive -- insurance -- even if they didn’t know the means.

For more answers, they turned to Patricia’s daughter, Cassie. One July afternoon, Layng and Lightfoot sat at a table on a sunlit deck at Cassie’s grandmother’s house, talking with the high school sophomore.

Cassie told them that when she left home the morning her mother died, the windows were open and the door unlocked. That terrible afternoon, though, the shades were drawn, the door bolted.

And Patricia’s hands were almost clasped, peacefully -- a seemingly impossible position if she had collapsed. A glass of water was also standing near her feet.

Prosecutors took Cassie further back -- to the 1993 Twin Lakes, Wis., explosion at the family’s home.

She told them that before leaving for a getaway weekend, John and Patricia had loaded the car with prized possessions and pets, even the fish. Veysey’s explanation: They were flea-bombing the house.

Days before the blast, she recalled, Veysey had grumbled about something being wrong with the clothes dryer and called a repairman.

The day before the family left, Cassie went to the basement for some clothes. The washer and dryer were pulled out from the wall and Veysey, she said, was behind them.

He was working on some pipes -- one was fat and spongy, the other hose-like.

Suddenly he spotted her, and his command was sharp:

“Get out.”

*

The Twin Lakes explosion had been ruled an accident and nothing remained of the house, but half a year after the interview with Cassie, Jack Malooly was asked to take another look.

Prosecutors had turned up hundreds of photos taken by investigators hired by the insurance company.

Malooly focused on a flex line -- a stainless steel, hollow-ridged tube -- that linked the dryer to the gas supply line.

Photos he enlarged showed that the tube was cracked -- not just on one side, but both. A metallurgist that Malooly consulted blamed a high-stress, low-cycle fracture. Someone had bent the tube back and forth until it cracked.

Malooly bought several flex lines and took them to his basement workshop. He placed one in a vise and bent it back and forth until it cracked, exactly the way the one on Veysey’s dryer had. He tried other flex lines. Each cracked exactly the same way.

A cracked flex line would let gas leak until something -- maybe an appliance motor or a thermostat -- triggered an explosion.

The ATF agent also looked into Veysey’s house fire in Galena, Ill., in 1996 -- more than three years after Twin Lakes. A cord extending over the top of a furnace had seemed the likely cause to local investigators -- but Malooly concluded that the fire had started in a futon in the next room.

In each disaster, Malooly now believed, Veysey had left a false clue that investigators could grab onto as they searched for a cause. The cord in Galena. A problem dryer in Twin Lakes. A Christmas tree on High Road in Cary.

Each case had been ruled accidental. But to Malooly, each one was arson.

*

More than a year had passed since the High Road fire, and federal investigators were edging closer to proving Delelio’s suspicions. Veysey’s methods of operation were becoming clear.

And that’s why a new discovery alarmed investigators.

In the late spring of 1999, as they studied Veysey’s subpoenaed phone and bank records, a name leaped out: Kathleen “Callie” Hilkin.

Veysey was now divorced from Deserie, and Callie was the new woman in his life. She and Veysey, records showed, were getting a home equity loan, which required homeowner’s insurance.

An ATF agent, Tina Sherrow, called the insurance company listed on the loan application.

“Good lord,” she said after she got off the phone, “look what we’ve found.”

Veysey and Callie also had an appointment to take out life insurance policies.

Callie’s life was in danger, Layng said.

“We’ve got to stop him.”

*

Next week: Police make their move.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

THE STORY SO FAR

Deserie Veysey, overcome by smoke during a fire at the home she shared with her husband John and two children, finally emerged from unconsciousness; 3-year-old Little John also survived. Confronted by detectives’ suspicions of her husband, Deserie agreed to cooperate. As the probe widened, local investigators called in federal help.

*

How This Series Was Reported

The story of the investigation into John T. Veysey III is based on interviews with numerous officials, including Pat Layng and Lori Lightfoot of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago; members of the Cary, Ill., police, including Det. Ron Delelio, Deputy Chief Ed Fetzer and former Det. Denise Bradstreet; Cary firefighters Brad Dellatore, Andy Veath, Scott Mohr and Robert Deau; U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agents Jack Malooly, Tina Sherrow, Jane Balkema and Jim Allison; Deserie Beetle and her mother, Irene Beetle; Betty and Gerald DeBruyne; and Kathleen Hilkin. It also draws on thousands of pages of court testimony, as well as a transcript of an interview conducted by Sherrow and John Korth, a sheriff’s deputy in Jo Daviess County, Ill. Through his attorney, Veysey declined to be interviewed.