Criminal - 527 Lime Street

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

Just before midnight on October 15, 1990, police arrived at 527 Lime Street in Jacksonville, Florida to find the small wood-frame house on fire. A man named Gerald Lewis was standing in the front yard. He said there were people inside the house. What happened next was so unusual that it changed the way we think about arson. We speak with attorney Frank Ashton and fire investigator John Lentini about the Lime Street case and why it was so important. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Just before midnight on October 15, 1990, police arrived at 527 Lime Street in Jacksonville, Florida, to find a small, two-story, wood-frame house on fire. An officer later described smoke and flames coming out of the windows and front

door, and a 35-year-old African-American man, Gerald Lewis, standing in the front yard, yelling. He was holding a toddler. He said there were still people inside the house. Gerald Lewis said he'd been asleep in a car in front of the house when the fire started. He indicated that he looked toward the house when he heard a sound, and he saw in the window of the living room flames coming up from a couch, which was right in front of the window. He indicated that he got out of the car. He ran to the front door.

He pounded on the door. He awoke the occupants of the house, at least his wife, who was sleeping downstairs. This is attorney Frank Ashton. Together, they attempted to extinguish the fire. He and she ran back and forth to the kitchen to get pots of water, to throw the pots of water on the couch. Those efforts were not successful.

Investigators later found melted pots on the floor of the living room. The faucet in the kitchen sink had been melted in the on position. Gerald Lewis later said that the fire started small, just a couch cushion. He said that when they couldn't put the fire out, his wife and her sister, who was also living in the house, went upstairs to get four children who were sleeping. Gerald Lewis says that he started to go upstairs too, and then realized that his three-year-old son was following him. He says he turned around, grabbed the child, and ran outside. He said that when he stepped outside of the house,

he heard a whoosh behind him, and that it seemed like the entire house was suddenly completely on fire. Flames were shooting out of the upstairs windows. The fire swept up the stairs and into the second story. Mr. Lewis said that he pounded on some neighbors' doors and that he stopped a car and asked that person to call 911. This was kind of in the days before cell phones. And then he returned to the house and was found by the police and fire officials when they arrived at the scene,

pacing in front of the house, holding his youngest son and appearing to be visibly upset. Firefighters entered through both the front and back doors. They later said that the fire on Lyme Street was extremely hard to extinguish and that flames they tried to put out would just bounce back again.

Six people died. Gerald Lewis's wife, her sister, who was seven months pregnant, and four children. A detective later told the Florida Times-Union, quote, I've never been to hell before, but that's what I'd associate it with. It was the worst thing I've seen in my entire police career.

The fire investigators who came to the scene said that it seemed to be a rapidly evolving fire. The circumstances as they evaluated the fire scene, it appeared in the hallway, the front hallway inside the front door, that there were different discolorations on the floor. The interpretation that they made at that time was that there had likely been some sort of accelerant poured on the floor in the hallway. Investigators found what are called pour patterns, burns that seemed to trace a path where an accelerant, like gasoline, might have been poured. They also found areas on the floor where the wood had charred and blistered so that it resembled alligator scales. Alligator patterns on the floorboards suggested that that was where the fire had burned the

hottest. And when you have alligator patterns on the floorboards, that suggests that an accelerant has been used because the fire typically burns hotter where an accelerant has been used. And they talked with Mr. Lewis, and they found a can of gasoline in the back of his car. He was the only one present at the scene. He was the only one that survived, along with his son. So the only child that survived the fire was the actual biological child of Gerald Lewis. Yes.

It looked like there was substantial evidence that Gerald Lewis had committed arson and killed these people. And they arrested him and charged him with murder. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. On the night of the fire, Gerald Lewis had been sleeping in a car parked in front of the house at 527 Lime Street.

His explanations about why he was sleeping in the car were contradictory. He told one officer that he'd been fighting with his wife about money. He told another that they hadn't been fighting. He told both officers that she didn't want him in the house after he'd been drinking. They were in the process of getting a divorce. The fire happened on October 15th. They had a divorce hearing scheduled for October 18th, three days later. Gerald Lewis told investigators that his wife would occasionally let him sleep in her car in front of the house. She'd recently taken out a restraining order against him after he physically abused her. He'd once threatened to burn down the house.

As for the gasoline investigators found in the car, it was in a plastic bleach container about a quarter full. When Gerald Lewis was asked about it, he said it was for the lawnmower. He'd recently mowed his wife's lawn, and he said he put the container in the car because he didn't want the kids to get into it. Police arrested Gerald Lewis that night. One investigator said that his description of how the fire spread from one couch cushion to the entire house so quickly, quote, didn't seem realistic. He was charged with one count of arson,

six counts of first-degree murder, and one count of manslaughter. His wife's sister was pregnant. He was also charged with violating a restraining order. When they arrested him, they confiscated his shoes and they also confiscated his pants. And they sent those shoes and pants to a forensic laboratory in Tallahassee to the state fire marshal. The state fire marshal determined, based upon his investigation and some gas chromatography testing, that there was evidence of gasoline on both Mr. Lewis's shoes and his pants,

which was further supportive of his having been involved in the fire and perhaps using an accelerant. Investigators speculated that Gerald Lewis had picked up his son and carried him out of the house pouring gasoline on his way out, and that once he was outside, he lit the fire. In the weeks after the fire, 12 different fire investigators visited Lime Street, and all 12 were certain that arson had occurred.

A report by the sheriff's office concluded, The fire was started as a result of a petroleum product A report by the sheriff's office concluded, Frank Ashton was an assistant state attorney at the time. He was assigned to prosecute the case. Arson cases are very unusual. I would say that in the entire time that I was with the state attorney's office, we maybe had maybe one or two arson cases, including the Gerald Lewis case. He remembers thinking that the case seemed straightforward. But then, he got a phone call from Gerald Lewis's public defender.

And he said to me, I know this case looks like it's a relatively clear case, but let me tell you that I think there are a lot of problems with the case, and I just want to be honest with you. I've had some previous dealings with the state fire marshal who said that there's gasoline on Mr. Lewis's pants and shoes. And I can tell you, I don't think that his testimony is reliable. He said, I can tell you further that we have had fire investigators go to the scene. We have cut sections of the flooring out of the front hall where your investigators have said that there was evidence of an accelerant. We've cut some of those areas out, had them forensically tested, and there's no indication that there was any accelerant used.

Frank Ashton listened to what Gerald Lewis's attorney was telling him and decided to hire an independent expert to evaluate the fire. That's when he got in touch with fire investigator John Lentini. John Lentini reviewed the findings from the chemist at the state fire marshal's laboratory. The chemist's name was Victor Higgs. John Lentini disagreed with Victor Higgs' assessment that gasoline was present on Gerald Lewis' clothing. He showed a colleague. She disagreed, too.

And then we copied the data and sent it around the country to ten different fire debris analysts, all of whom had stellar reputations. And they were unanimous. They said, this is not gasoline. I told that to the prosecutors, and they were dismayed

because that was an important part of their case. It just went away. But then, John Lentini looked at photographs from the scene and some pieces of the actual floor that had been cut out for analysis. And he thought then that there were signs of a flammable liquid fire. There's low burning, there's sharp lines of demarcation between the burned and unburned areas. Yeah, that could well be an arson fire. And I said, I've determined fires that look like

this to be arson in the past. Frank Ashton asked John Lentini to come to the house on Lime Street to examine it for himself. He inspected the scene, he inspected the house, looked at the burn patterns. And as we were doing all of that, we looked at the house next door, which happened to be virtually a duplicate of the house that had burned. 525 Lime Street looked exactly like the Lewis house. It seemed to have been built from the same plans, and it seemed to have the same layout and same measurements. It was condemned. It was unoccupied. And I asked him whether he thought we might be able to use that house for potentially some test burns to actually do a test fire ourselves,

where we could recreate the scene that night. They got to work, arranging access to the house next door and making plans to set it on fire. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Thank you. series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot,

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to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Was that a big step to take to try to burn down a wholly separate house to recreate some of these things, or is that done often? Well, it's a huge step. To my knowledge, it's never been done before in a criminal investigation anywhere in the United States. Obviously, it was very unusual to have a second house that happened to be right next door that was unoccupied and further was condemned by the city and was going to be destroyed. So we had an unusual circumstance as far as that goes.

Did anyone any higher up above you when you said, this is the plan, we're going to burn down this? Did anyone say, no, that's too much? Nobody higher than me indicated that. In fact, before we decided this is what we were going to do, I went with my co-counsel to the state attorney and his chief assistant and said, this is a very big case. There are a lot of people who died. If this defendant is convicted, he will almost certainly get the death penalty. And I think it's important for us to know

that we're right and that this prosecution is the correct prosecution. In order to do that, I think the best way to do it, and our experts agree, is to actually outfit the house next door in the same way this house that burned down was outfitted and do some test burns. We will instrument the house next door to monitor the heat and carbon monoxide levels because either of those, when they get high, can kill people. And we'll determine how long it took for this fire to go. We'll determine whether what the defendant said has any credibility whatsoever because at least the local fire investigators don't believe him. And we're going to bring in the top experts in the country to do this. A team got to work going to extraordinary lengths to replicate the Lewis house.

For example, there are bits of carpeting from the living room that we were able to get and test so that we could match the carpeting and put the same type of carpeting in the living room. We spoke with family members and they provided us photographs of the family in the house. So you could see the furnishings that they had. You could see where they had things placed. And one of the things we were able to determine was that they had rented some of the furniture from a local furniture rental store. We sent investigators to that store to get the exact couch

and some of the other furniture that these folks had rented. Now, the couch was no longer in stock and was no longer being made, but we found an individual who had purchased the same couch from the furniture rental store. We went to that person's house and literally purchased the couch from him so that we could use it in our test fire. They rebuilt walls. They repaired windows. They bought a coffee table and a television. There had been boxes of clothes in the hallway of the Lewis house.

They recreated that, too. So that what we had was essentially identical to the burned house. The house was wired with special sensors that could measure heat and carbon monoxide, but also withstand the fire. It took nearly five weeks to prepare the house, and the cost of the experiment was close to $20,000. John Lentini says they cut a hole at floor level in the hallway

and covered it with glass so they could see what was happening. They set up video cameras and prepared to test whether the fire could have spread that quickly all on its own. Here's John Lentini. First you have to prove that a crime was committed. And that's not the case with just about any kind of crime there is. You know, if a bank gets robbed or somebody gets shot and killed, there's never a question about whether a crime has occurred. But with a fire, you have to do a good bit of investigation in order to determine that you actually have a crime. He says that we used to think a lot of things about arson that just weren't true, and that

the field has struggled, at times, to outgrow its old way of interpreting evidence, a way which mainly relied on anecdotal observations passed down over the years by police and firefighters. And the problem with many fire investigators is they have no scientific training. And it's been pretty much recognized that the scientific method is the only way to investigate a fire if you want your results to have any validity. The plan for 525 Lime Street was to light two fires to test the two different versions of events. Gerald Lewis's version first, and then the prosecution's. Here's Frank Ashton. The defense theory was that the couch in the living room was on fire,

that Mr. Lewis had seen that couch on fire when he looked through the window from his car, which was parked in the driveway, and that the fire spread from there. So we simply set that couch on fire. Now, it's important to note that these couches won't catch on fire through a dropped cigarette or something of that sort. It takes an actual open flame. But the people in the house, at least two of them were smokers. And so there were lighters that were around in the house.

And we started a fire on the couch. And then we observed that fire. We observed the spread of that fire. We videotaped it, and we determined that, to our surprise, within four minutes after that couch was initially set on fire, the entire house was consumed in flames, and anybody inside that house would have been dead. It was an impressive fire. The couch just went up like it was coated with gasoline. If you have a sofa that's made with polyurethane foam, it's like having solid gasoline there. And then the back cushions were made with Dacron polyester fiber fill,

which also burns really fast. So this sofa took the room to flashover very quickly, way more quickly than we had anticipated. John Lentini has described Flashover as when you go from a fire in the room to a room on fire. And I was there watching and recording with a video camera, and I had an open mic, and a city fire marshal walked by, and he said, that may prove a defendant's story.

After about six minutes, the firefighters moved in and extinguished the fire. They determined the house hadn't been on fire long enough to cause structural damage. So they reset the house, replaced the carpet, repaired the windows. They had duplicates of almost everything, but they'd only been able to locate one couch exactly like the one in the Lewis house. In the second test, they used one made with similar materials. Frank Ashton and John Lentini say that using the exact couch was essential for the first test, where the fire originated on a couch cushion. For the second test, recreating the prosecution's theory of events,

the fire originated in the hallway. And we took the exact amount of gasoline that was missing from the gasoline container in Mr. Lewis's car, we took that exact amount of gasoline and poured it in various places in the hallway, attempting to match as much as we could the burn patterns, which our investigators had initially said were likely the result of an accelerant being used. And then that fire was ignited by a fireman who ignited the gasoline in the hallway. We watched the fire spread from the hallway into the living room.

The furniture catching fire in the living room and the carpeting catch on fire and the ceiling catching on fire, and then the smoke and flames billowing up the stairway to the second floor where everybody was, where everybody was found dead, and waited until the house was essentially fully consumed in flames once again, and then had the fire department come in and extinguish those flames. So what did you determine after seeing the second fire? The theory that we had been operating under is that the use of an accelerant would make the house go up much more quickly in flames than a fire started without the use of an accelerant. And what we found is that that theory was completely wrong. Not only were they wrong about how quickly the house could burn without an accelerant, they were also surprised by the presence of the same burn patterns.

Those very same alligator patterns existed even though we lit the first test fire without the use of any accelerant. The patterns on the floor in the hallway that our investigators had initially thought could only occur with the use of an accelerant were there. We were shocked in all candor when we saw the results of the tests. Did you think before the recreation

that it would show that this was arson? Were you surprised? Oh, you bet. I was scheduled to give a deposition the day after this test, and after seeing these results, I was just shocked. And I said to the prosecutors, I don't think I can say that this was in fact an arson fire anymore. Frank Ashton canceled the deposition. Instead, he met with the rest of the prosecution team to discuss what to do.

He later said, It was one of those cases where it starts out as a strong case, and then you find out pieces of evidence you thought existed aren't there. And we determined that this is not a case that we could take to trial because even our own experts couldn't testify that this was an arson beyond a reasonable doubt, which is our burden of proof. And we decided that it was not appropriate to take a man under these circumstances and put him on trial in a murder case, which, if he had been convicted, would certainly have resulted in him receiving the death penalty. And so we dismissed the case against him. John Lentini later said, This was my epiphany.

I almost sent a man to die based on theories that were a load of crap. Today, the Lime Street fire is seen as one of the most important experiments in the development of arson investigation. Here's Frank Ashton. It changed the books on fire science because that piece of evidence, that is the suggestion that it had to be an accelerant used if you had these particular burn patterns, that had probably been used in multiple other cases, was not right, and that multiple other people charged with arson may very well have ended up in jail or may have ended up receiving the death penalty in cases where the fire science that was put forth to the jury as true wasn't true. After the state dropped the charges against Gerald Lewis, the chemist at the state fire marshal's laboratory,

Victor Higgs, who'd incorrectly reported that there was accelerant on Gerald Lewis's clothes, was formally investigated on allegations of incompetence. One of his colleagues, a fellow chemist, told the Associated Press, my biggest fear is that someone is in jail because of his erroneous results. Victor Higgs had analyzed evidence in about 10,000 arson investigations

across the state of Florida. As for Gerald Lewis, he left Jacksonville and moved to Shreveport, Louisiana. Three-year-old Jeremiah Lewis was placed in the custody of his aunt. We reached out to both Jeremiah and Gerald Lewis, but never heard back. In 2010, Jeremiah Lewis told a local Jacksonville newspaper, Folio Weekly, that he didn't know much about the fire when he was growing up. He said his aunts and grandmother didn't want to talk about it. Once, he asked them about a newspaper clipping he'd found about the fire, but they just started crying. Jeremiah said, after a while, I didn't want to see people cry

so I just didn't ask about it Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Robertson is our assistant producer. Audio mix by Michael Rayfield. Special thanks to Michelle Harris. We'd also like to thank Radiotopia donors David Jean, Mike Newcomb, and Chip, just Chip.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Shows like Ear Hustle. Ear Hustle is returning with its fifth season on March 4th. Rat. Country. Pookie. Dumb Dave. Lowkey.

I am Rahsaan New York Thomas. I'm Nigel Poore. And I'm Erlon Woods. I did a total of 27 years in prison, but unlike most folks in there, I never really went by my nickname. Each of those names has a story behind it. This season on Ear Hustle, we're going to hear those stories and a whole lot more. So we pull up and it's like 80 cops out there. I get it. I mean, I get it. I get why everyone hates sex offenders. Steven did not want to get married at first. He knew he had life without and he didn't want this life for me. Ear Hustle Season 5 launches Wednesday, March 4th.

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