Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - The Arsonist Next Door | 6: Behind the Facade

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

The identity of the culprit raises more questions. Was this crusade to protect the desert real? Or just a smoke screen for something far more sinister? A shocking twist reveals how this local story ended up having global consequences. Binge all episodes of The Arsonist Next Door, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment and Novel production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone, I'm investigative journalist and park enthusiast Delia D'Ambra. And every week on my podcast Park Predators, I take you into the heart of our world's most stunning locations to uncover what sinister crimes have unfolded in these serene settings. From unsolved murders to chilling disappearances, each Tuesday we dive deep into the details of cases that will leave you knowing sometimes the most beautiful places hide the darkest secrets. Listen to Park Predators access wherever you listen. The Binge, feed your true crime obsession.

The Binge. Novel. novel. Are you ready for the whole truth? I had several dreams about that house behind me. They were troubling dreams. They were dreams about setting the fire. One night I did. At the bottom of the Grand Canyon, under the light of a full moon,

Mark Sands confessed that he was the one who set all those fires, terrorizing the neighborhood for more than a year. I refined the technique and it got to the point where it turned very low accelerant. Water bottle. With gasoline? Gasoline.

How did you come up with now shall not desecrate? Now is not the time. I hear footsteps. He never suspected that I was anything other than a close confidant of him and probably the only friend that he really had in the world at that time. Mark's best friend, Warren Jerams, turned against him to secretly record the confession. But strangely, it's Warren, not Mark, who is now overcome by guilt. It just hit me that I had really betrayed him. After the hike, Warren skips town for a while.

A little over a week after the Grand Canyon operation, the cops hurdle back into Mark's neighborhood, Heritage Heights. A dozen armed officers surround his house. Helicopters are hovering overhead. Vicki, Mark's friend from Bible study, gets a phone call. Mark's about to be arrested. I only had like a 10 minute warning.

She heads over to try and pick up Mark's daughter before the cops show up. I didn't make it fast enough. I got there right after they had literally broken down the door. We were a little fearful that he'd be like a trapped criminal at that point. We weren't sure what he would do when he knew we were coming for him. Guns drawn, they kick in the door and call for Mark to back out of the house

with his hands where they can see them. I remember him coming backwards to us. FBI Special Agent Terry Kearns steps forward. The arson investigation is Terry's first time leading a major case. Rob said, you cuff him. This moment belongs to her. The feeling when you have the person

put their hands behind their back, it was kind of adrenaline-filled because it felt like we were doing something that was going to really protect the community. Meanwhile, Vicki is inside with Mark's daughter, watching as the house is searched for the second time. They literally trashed the house. Officers are opening drawers, tearing things off shelves.

They even knock over a hamster cage that belongs to Mark's daughter. This portal of hamsters running around in this thing. It's absolute chaos. It looked like somebody had come in and vandalized it. You know, I mean, holes in the wall and just pure vandalism. Mark is hauled off to jail. His name is already known to the media

from when he was arrested for vandalizing the sign. But now, the press are ferocious, coming after Mark's whole family. They were really being hounded. Initially, Mark claims that he's innocent. He's going to fight the charges and take this to trial. But with the secretly recorded confession tape, plus the DNA evidence linking him to CSP's letters, the evidence against him is overwhelming.

In the fall of 2001, Mark Sands pleads guilty to an eight count indictment. He's sentenced to 18 years in federal prison. Do you feel like that was a fair sentence for what he did? I did. Yeah. Yeah, I felt it was fair. While Mark's crimes were serious, I was surprised when I saw the length of his sentence. 18 years, for crimes in which no one was injured or killed.

Murderers frequently get less time than that. There's one way of looking at this case where the punishment doesn't seem to fit the crime. But on the other hand, it was pure luck that no one died. The firefighters risked their lives again and again to put out these fires. And there were other costs too. Families were forced to watch as their dreams and sometimes life savings burned to the ground. Most of the folks whose houses burned down eventually rebuilt and moved on with their lives. But there's one thing that I think probably couldn't be rebuilt so easily, the trust between Mark Sands

and his friends and family. This is the part that I just can't get over, the betrayal of those closest to Mark. He put his friends and neighbors in danger over and over again and lied to their faces while doing it for more than a year. And now Mark's family were facing the prospect of nearly two decades alone. They had no idea what he'd been up to in the preserve.

The craziest part of all of this is that it was supposedly done in the name of protecting the mountain preserve, but Mark's fires didn't stop any houses from being built. If anything, they put the desert landscape more at risk of catching fire. And then there's the wider impact on Phoenix. The arsons were estimated to cost the city and its residents over $5 million.

But when I take a look at the indictment, I'm struck by how little it has to say about any of this. Mark pled guilty to one count of use of fire to commit a felony and seven counts of extortion affecting interstate commerce. How does setting houses on fire affect interstate commerce? Essentially, commodities were purchased, transported across state lines to build a home, and he disrupted that process. It sounds like kind of a stretch. It is getting creative with the statute for sure.

The decision about what charges make it into an indictment happens well above Lieutenant Rob Handy's pay grade. That's the purview of the Attorney General in Phoenix and the top bosses on both sides of the task force. Rob tells me it's because they were looking for the longest possible sentence to protect the community. And for this, they needed to charge Mark in federal court.

They considered Mark to be a dangerous criminal and wanted him put away for a long time. But I can't help but wonder whether there was a more political reason for the federal charges too. That the FBI needed to justify the money and resources they spent working on a local investigation that turned out to have very little to do

with domestic terrorism, the original reason they got involved. So if this would have turned out to be an eco-terrorist group, then the FBI has jurisdiction and there's a lot of federal statutes that apply to that. But if it's not an ecoterrorist, you gotta get creative with how the jurisdiction works. Correct.

After all that panic in the media about CSP and radical ecoterrorism, after all those terrifying Bible-infused warning notes, Mark Sands was never charged or sentenced as a terrorist. notes, Mark Sands was never charged or sentenced as a terrorist. Mark did create a wave of fear and anxiety in his community, but to be considered a terrorist, there has to be some kind of political or social objective driving the violence. In the end, investigators didn't believe that's what motivated Mark. I think that's a charade.

I think he's a manipulator. I think he was bored. I think that's a charade. I think he's a manipulator. I think he was bored. I think he is a narcissistic person. But not everyone agrees. He was an environmentalist who wasn't happy about building encroaching on the preserve. The question of why Mark did what he did continues to divide those who were pulled into his orbit.

I still think that the man's got evil in him. In the final chapter of my investigation, I'm setting out to find the truth behind what really drove Mark Sands into an epic crime spree, deceiving an entire city. And that's not all, because I've learned that there's yet another alleged crime that Mark Sands was never charged with. A crime that has nothing to do with arson. I just think of him as an ugly, despicable human being. From Sony Music Entertainment and Novel, I'm Sam Anderson. This is The Arsonist Next Door. Episode 6 Behind the Facade I'm searching for the real Mark Sands.

I need to know what actually drove him to set those fires all those years ago. What tipped this seemingly normal man over the edge into doing something so extreme? After he was convicted, Mark served a little over 15 years in federal prison. He seems to have behaved well, even becoming a chaplain, which tracks with the religious tone of those CSP letters. He got out in 2016. As a chaplain, my primary ministry is with the homeless,

mostly in North Phoenix. That's Mark in 2019. He's giving a sermon. Once he got out of prison, he kept a pretty low profile, except for one big interview series with the Arizona Republic in 2019 that included a video piece. Let's go. Americans are great at having facades.

And often it's a lie. In the video, he took a journalist along with him as he ministered to the homeless. Morning, guys. Anybody hungry? Chaplain Mark is back. In the video clip, you can see Mark in blue shorts and a Jesus baseball cap. He's walking with a slight limp as he approaches

a homeless encampment, handing out snacks, the picture of Christian charity. Here's something that you get for yourself later. How you doing otherwise? Good, good, good. What can we pray for? In the piece, he talks about what led him down the path of arson.

I think I was unhappy with some things going on in my life. You know, I was laid off from the position. There was some depression. And I developed a porn addiction. There was a report that speculated it was a case of eco-terrorism. And the rest is history, as they say. And the rest is history, as they say. And the rest is history.

When you put it that way, sounds pretty simple, huh? A depressed guy starts watching a little too much porn and does what anyone else would do, goes out and burns a bunch of houses down. This was an early theory of the task force when they found all that porn in Mark's house, that there might be a sexual component to the arson. But what about Mark's laser focus

on the houses bordering his beloved preserves, his manipulation of the media narrative, the religious notes, the careful construction of that CSP persona? After all that, Mark is blaming the fires on depression and a porn addiction that got out of hand. I still have so many questions.

So my producer, Leona and I decide to email him. Okay, if I'm like, hi, dear Mark, hi Mark, strong feelings on dear, dear oh hi. Maybe we should say something along the lines of like, hey, we're like doing a podcast about these events and we're really interested in the media narrative and how we proofread it back to each other like 20 times, hit send and then wait. For a while, we don't hear anything back from Mark or anyone else we've contacted searching for him until a reply from Mark's chaplaincy

organization. He says, Hi Leona, Mr Sands passed away last year. Wait, what? There's gotta be some type of announcement, like some type of memorial? You would think so, especially for a deeply Christian man. This came as a complete shock to me. Not only is there no record at all online or in any newspaper, but no one I'd spoken to knew that Mark had died.

But the pastor sends us the booklet from Mark's funeral. It's official. Mark Sands died in August, 2023. Journalistically speaking, the news is a huge disappointment, but then something happens. The world of Mark Sand's life after prison opens up. I get in touch with some folks who were close to Mark

in the final years of his life, and they're willing to talk. I want to ask them what they think really drove the man they knew. They said, if I wanted to understand Mark, I should visit the homeless shelter, where he volunteered as a chaplain. All right, well, welcome, everybody.

Good morning. God bless you. I'm not that good, but I love Jesus. We all sound perfect to him. So sing away brother. I'm inside a small chapel at Central Arizona Shelter Services. It's the biggest homeless shelter in Phoenix. Tell me, what kind of work would Mark do in a place like this? He would do one of the Bible studies.

It's kind of whatever is on the heart of the chaplain to talk about. I want to ask these people about Mark's crimes, but it turns out that a lot of the folks who remember Mark from this place don't know about his past at all. So why Mark Sands? Well, Mark Sands had a notorious history. Did he? Yeah.

I find myself explaining all about Mark's arson spree. Are you serious? Yeah, I'm serious. Wow. Wow. I keep trying to steer the conversations back to Mark's arson spree and why he might have set those fires. But the kind Christians I'm speaking to

prefer to focus on his redemption after his release from prison. Mark had a way where he would sit down with people, he would hear their story, he would connect with them, and then he would say, can I pray for you? This is Chaplain Bill Lukens. He spent a lot of time with Mark and told me that after he got out of prison, Mark spent all his waking hours helping the homeless. For some of these people, giving them a bottle of water is a difference between life and death in the middle of summertime. And Mark recognized that.

I'm trying to figure out why Mark started all those fires, but the picture Bill paints of Mark is totally at odds with the sinister arsonist I've been reporting on. Although he does mention some motivations that seem consistent from Mark the arsonist to Mark the saintly helper of the needy. There's religion, of course, from Bible quotes and the CSB letters to giving sermons at the shelter. And then there's housing. Many of the homeless are just people that are victims of unaffordable housing.

He's saying we're building these multi-million dollar mansions while people are going without. And I think that was a lot of his motivation. He wanted to bring attention to what was happening. If he was here, he would tell you that. Bill tells me that Mark was a real environmentalist from the start. That's what motivated him to burn those houses down. These people are encroaching upon this preserve. I think he would almost consider it holy ground. According to Bill, Mark's time behind bars taught him that even if his intentions were

good, his intentions were good, his tactics were morally wrong. Repentance would probably be the best word. He realized that there was a better way to do it than he did. And he regretted what he had done to those folks. And he started doing what was right when he came out. Wouldn't it be neat and tidy if I could wrap up the story here with this vision of repentance and redemption?

Unfortunately, reality is rarely that simple. I was wild and crazy and I've done a lot of wild and crazy shit. But I don't have the balls on me to go burn down houses, dude. This is Mark's son, Kevin Sands, from his first marriage. I think he felt bad about the consequences to the family. I think he had regrets about all that. Kevin has a different idea about what really drove his dad. Do I think he regrets burning that guy's house down twice? Absolutely not.

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Smart, the Heaven's Gate cult tragedy, and so much more. Follow Crime House True Crime Stories now, wherever you get your podcasts. And for ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. Mark's church buddies insisted he was driven by a combination of environmentalism and faith. He just took things way too far. He saw the error of his ways and spent the rest of his life helping people. But I suspect there's more to uncover in the mind of Mark Sands.

So I keep digging. That's how I find Kevin. My boss is like, hey, someone's up the front door, you need to go talk to him. Hurry up. In 2001, he's just a teenager living in Utah with his mom when the FBI arrives at his workplace.

The men in the expensive suits start questioning Kevin about his dad. He's been arrested in Phoenix for lighting fires. Did he ever talk to you about it? I'm like, no, no, no, dude. You guys are fucking tripping, dude. I don't know what you're talking about. But in my head, I thought something was up right then. Kevin explains to me his dad had always been kind of strange. So when he finds out about the arrest, it didn't come as a huge surprise. He ran the law.

He was in and out at a lot of hours. He was just like really weird, you know what I mean? On the surface, he could be charming. My dad was very approachable, very friendly with people. I think that's probably why he got away with it for so long. I've noticed this theme myself, the many sides of Mark Sands. But if anyone can take me behind the facade, it's Mark's own son.

So, why does Kevin think his dad set those fires? I wonder if he sees any truth in the eco-warrior theory. I would call it more good Samaritan type stuff, rather than environmentalism. Kevin says Mark cared about recycling, he rode his bike everywhere, he picked up trash if he saw it on the ground. But he wasn't marching in the streets.

The way Kevin describes it, it doesn't seem like the sort of driving passion that could send a man over the edge into extremism. The whole Bible collecting was kind of a shocker too. According to Kevin, Mark was actually not particularly religious before prison, despite all that thou shalt not desecrate God's creation stuff. They went to church, they would do some Bible study stuff, but he would drink a beer, he would run with his shirt off. They probably tend to be more liberal in a lot of ways.

That comes as a big surprise to me. The fire and brimstone language has been at the center of the CSP brand. So now I'm wondering, which Mark Sands is the real one? I lived with him at different times. We definitely had a roller coaster relationship for sure. I mean, he left my mom when I was five. I realize I might have to search a little further back,

which is how I find Carol. This is all supposition, you know. Carol Sands, Kevin's mom. They'd never done anything environmental before. And to be quite honest, that man couldn't even start a campfire. Carol was married to Mark. They were together for 14 years.

They divorced in the late 80s. so she wasn't really in the picture when Mark was lighting fires. But she dismisses the God-fearing eco-warrior. Instead, Carol has her own theory about why Mark did it, which starts with artificial hearts. You sound far too young for this, but Barney Clark was the first artificial heart recipient before they went to transplanting hearts.

OK, I was too young for this. Barney Clark was a 61-year-old dentist with congestive heart failure back in 1982. Barney traveled to Utah to receive the first artificial heart. And it was covered breathlessly by the news, local, national, and global. Before Barney Clark's historic operation,

he was dying of congestive heart failure. This procedure was a huge deal. Today, he made medical history. And the communications person working at the hospital where that groundbreaking procedure took place? None other than Mark Sands. We had national news correspondents and people from foreign countries.

Suddenly, Mark was at the center of all that attention. A guy at CBS and NBC and all that, I mean, big reporters came to our house. Mark invited them to come and just get away from all the craziness for a while. Carol explains that for Mark, who studied journalism in college, being the guy who facilitated access for these famous reporters to this huge news story

gave him a feeling of power and importance. He always said, I want to replace Walter Pratt and Tate. After Mark tasted the media spotlight, Carol says he changed. That was the beginning and the end of our relationship, to be quite honest, just because of the change he did in his personality. Carol says Mark's ego got bigger and bigger

and their marriage began to fall apart. I'm gonna show my political bias, but his personality really reflected Donald Trump. The world revolved around Mark. Carol thinks Mark's ego must have played a role in his arson spree. And this, more than any other explanation, feels the closest to the truth. Their son Kevin describes to me how he thinks Mark became a serial arsonist. The very first house cut right in his running trail. And I think that's what planted the seed,

the encroachment on his trail. His trail. Kevin confirms the first fire was personal. And then? I mean, I can tell you exactly why he burned that guy's house down a second time. If you remember Lee Benson's reaction to that first fire and the you build, we burn again warning note left behind, he was defiant. Here's what he said.

There's no way I'm going to let somebody like that win. No way. Kevin told me that Lee Benson was on the news talking about his plan to rebuild, which Mark for sure would have seen. Remember that security guard that Lee hired, the one who left early one morning? I remember my dad telling me that dumbass left at 6 on 1, that house got burned down at 6 on 3. It was almost like a personal challenge. The second fire was just petty. Mark refused to let Lee win. And then it was the media attention.

And that is what sucked my dad in. It wasn't until the media took the eco-terrorist angle and ran with it that Mark really began torching homes all over town. He saved everything like a fucking scrapbook. Every article, every single thing, he would cut it out of the newspaper and he saved it. He definitely got addicted to the attention. Kevin believes there was an element of truth in the eco-warrior character

that Mark adopted for the media. He said, look son, I was trying to bring awareness, but people were more upset about the fire than the loss of preserve. But the most important thing for Mark was that he was dominating the headlines. Mark dreamed of being the next Walter Cronkite, a legendary news anchor. But that dream was never realized. Maybe the next best thing is being on the news, day after day, week after week. Imagine how powerful it must have felt to control the

attention of a whole city. He was having a hard time finding a job. He was striking out a lot of interviews. That generation of people, the man's supposed to be the leader of the house, whatever, but my stepmom was the breadwinner. I think the fantasy that was CSP satisfied a deep need inside Mark to be somebody. Someone who mattered. When in his real life he was striking out. And in a totally twisted way, the fires achieved what he wanted. Mark became notorious. But the roots of the arson spree go even deeper.

Kevin works as a social worker now, and he sees Mark's behavior as one strand of a long family legacy of mental health issues and addiction. That's evident through three generations. Kevin told me the story of his grandfather Myron, Mark's dad. He was a fighter pilot in World War II and flew a P-38 Lightning. He was the bomber escort pre-Normady. He got shot down and he spent his time in a prisoner of war camp.

After the war, Kevin says Mark's dad became an alcoholic. Mark's mother, Mary, struggled too. She suffered from postpartum depression. Back then, if you had postpartum depression, they locked you up. Sometime in the 1950s, Mary was sent to a state psychiatric asylum that was more like a prison,

where she received electric shock therapy and wasn't allowed to leave. I can see how all of this intergenerational trauma might have shaped Mark, how it could have created a desperate need for validation and attention, a need that seemed to never quite be satisfied. Kevin suffered from addiction too. and attention, a need that seemed to never quite be satisfied. Kevin suffered from addiction too. He tells me it landed him in prison three different times, but he got clean a number of years ago. And these days he sees his dad in a different light.

Even when I was an active addiction, me and my dad talked all the time. A few years after Mark was released, he became sick with a heart condition. After a long, complicated, and often painful relationship, Kevin reconnected with his dad. Mark would call Kevin with updates from his hospital bed. Hey, kiddo.

Checking in. New day, new developments. And so I want to get Kevin's thoughts on the redemption narrative I've been told by Mark's church friends. About Mark spending the last part of his life doing mutual aid work, helping the homeless, living as the Bible instructed. And on this, Kevin agrees. When he got out of prison, all he cared about was helping the homeless. Anything that he got, he would just go donate. And that's what I want him to be remembered by.

Still in my hospital room, waiting for people to come and go. Love you so much. Bye bye. I was the only one by his side when he died. He was unconscious. I read him the Bible. I just talked to him about things I I was doing in school and my internship and my stepson's football games.

I told him about how we were up in the mountains fishing and took some video of it. I looked up, he opened his eyes. I show him the video. He took his last breath. And it was like a lifetime of resentment and disappointment. This pretty much ended right there. On August 18th, 2023, Mark passed away at a hospital in Phoenix. He died from a heart condition at the age of 72.

After talking to Kevin and Carol, I finally feel like I understand the riddle of Mark Sands. The eco-warrior schtick, the religious fire breathing, they're both red herrings. Really, this was a damaged, insecure man, probably scarred from childhood with a fragile ego and a desperate need for attention and control. And he satisfied this deep psychological need in the most twisted way possible by torching people's homes

and wreaking havoc on his community. Maybe deep down in the heart of Mark Sands was a little bit of yearning to be somebody, to be remembered. After all, it's been 25 years since these events went down. And here I am, still talking about it. Mark would probably love that. As for the redemption narrative, Mark's work with the homeless

is definitely something to be admired. But I do wonder if his saintly deeds were still motivated by ego on some level, a desire to be perceived as a hero. The truth, I expect, as always, is somewhere in the murky in between. But there's something else that keeps playing on my mind, something unresolved, that disturbing video mashup Mark made,

cutting together hardcore porn and a home video of someone close to his friend Warren. It points to something dark and messed up in Mark's personal relationship to his friends and neighbors. I wanted to find resolution to that part of the story. So I went back to Mark's neighborhood. What are we thinking here?

I guess it couldn't hurt to do a door knock. Looking for someone who could tell me more about a subject Mark wouldn't have talked about to his friends, to his family, or to the media. I watched the 2020 special on him and they didn't even mention any of this. And do you remember who the neighbors were? Yeah, but I don't know if they want me to say their names. Maybe not, but maybe we could pass on our information. It didn't take long before I found exactly what I was looking for.

I thought, you know, they're smarter than me. They're going to be investigating it. You regret not saying something? Yeah, I do. I do now. Want more True Crime? Subscribe to The Binge to get all episodes of The Arsonist Next Door ad-free today and get instant access to over 50 other jaw-dropping True Crime stories. Plus, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series on the first of every month. Search for The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts or head to GetTheBinge.com to subscribe today.

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She thinks a lot with a great sense of humor. Crystal's describing her younger daughter, who I'll call Katie. Katie is around 18 when they move into the neighborhood. She was graduating from high school that June. She's home alone when there's a knock at the door. He came to the door, talked to her a bit. A friendly welcome from a party of one.

Mark was the welcome basket person in the neighborhood. Mark Sands. He's at their door representing the Homeowners Association. He would deliver a plant, maybe a card, from the association when you moved into the neighborhood. He chats with Katie for a while, finds out she likes to play tennis, and then invites her to play a game with him. I think she did play with him once,

but she said, I didn't feel comfortable around him. She said, I got a really creepy feeling from him. And then he wanted her to go running with him. Katie refused to play any more tennis with Mark. And running? Forget about it. But this small interaction sticks with Katie's mom all the same. I just had an impression of him as a weird kind of guy, mainly because, you know,

what 40-something-year-old man pursues my daughter to play tennis? Crystal's bad feeling about Mark is reinforced when she starts hearing whispers, warnings from other women in the Heritage Heights neighborhood. I had been told that he had been caught in backyards. According to Crystal, Mark is always just around. If I went out in the early morning to put my trash bin out there was Mark or at night he was out odd times and so I just see him you know. More often than any other neighbors? Oh yeah yeah. After Lee Benson's house burned

twice the cops are out canvassing the neighborhood. Crystal gets a knock on the door. They ask if she's noticed anyone acting strange in the neighborhood lately. It was on the tip of my tongue because I just suspected Mark Sands. But she doesn't say anything. I thought, you know, they're smarter than me. They're going to be investigating it. You regret not saying something?

Yeah, I do. I do now. And I probably regret it more after I found out that he was photographing my daughter. More than a year after the cops knock on her door, it's one of Crystal's neighbors who first alerts her to the fact that FBI investigators might be looking for her. She came up to me one day and she said they're looking for a house that Mark Sands was videotaping. It's now June 2001, and Mark Sands has been arrested for the second time, just a few days after the hike in the Grand Canyon.

The FBI have been out walking the preserves, trying to match a grainy still from one of the videotapes they confiscated from Mark's house with the backyard of one of the houses in the neighborhood. They aren't telling anyone exactly what's on the tape, but they've taken a still of a girl's face, and they're going around around showing neighbors trying to identify who she is. And she said you look just like the girl in the picture because my daughter and I looked very much alike. Crystal is at work when the FBI finally tracks her down. He showed me the picture taken of my daughter in her bedroom. It's a picture of Katie standing at her dresser. He's outside in my yard taking pictures of my daughter undressing in her bedroom.

There was a second photo, too, of Katie and another girl in the backyard at night. Sitting in those chaise lounge chairs, kind of how you sit with your knees up or something. Obviously trying to zero in on the crotch as they're sitting in the chair. I just felt horrified, sick to my stomach. There's a variety of ways of being violated. It doesn't have to be physical. For her, that was a huge violation. I had to get blinds because she just was so unnerved about being in a house with lights.

It's an experience that Katie hasn't forgotten. When she speaks, it comes out in a flood. When I sit on the phone, they're doing a podcast, she goes, I want to talk to them. Ultimately, for personal reasons, Katie decided not to go on the record for this podcast. But she did give her mom permission to share this story. And even though she doesn't want the attention an interview like this might bring, she does want you to know that Mark Sands affected more lives than just those whose houses were set on fire.

It affected her more than the fires, the fact that somebody was photographing you outside your window, especially when you're 18. Video voyeurism is a criminal offense in Arizona. If Mark had been convicted, he could have faced a sentence of up to 30 months, as well as mandatory registration as a sex offender. Had he been charged in local court, he'd have been charged with that too. Video voyeurism was not a federal crime in 2001. So another consequence of bending Mark's crimes into the shape of a federal case is that these

allegations never made it to court. I was glad at the time we didn't want the publicity for that. But then when that Arizona Republic piece ran about Mark Sands in 2019, the one you heard earlier, Katie and her mom, Crystal, watched him explain away his arsons and spin his story of redemption. She was really upset because it just sounded like he did nothing.

He was going to live a lovely life hereafter, irrespective of what he had done to her. I just think of him as an ugly, despicable piece of human being. Crystal and I sit in silence for a moment. The pain of revisiting past memories hangs in the air. Have you spoken to Mark Sands? No, so Mark Sands actually passed away last summer. Oh, I didn't know that. Crystal wasn't the only one who I broke the news to

about Mark's death. Even the lead investigators hadn't heard before I told them. Were you aware that Mark Sands passed away last year? No kidding. I did not know that. Oh no, I didn't know that. Okay, well there's one less I have to worry about.

No, I had no idea. But one of those investigators felt more disappointed than anyone else by the news that Mark Sands had died. I was shocked when you told me he was dead. That's retired FBI Special Agent Ken Williams. I would just love to have asked him some of the questions that we're talking about. This case has weighed on Ken for over 20 years, and he has stronger feelings about Mark and his motivations

than any other investigator on the task force. I really despise Mark Sands. I think he's an evil person. For Ken, all of this is tied up with another case he was working on at the time, the one that his boss pulled him off to go work on the Arson case. I was working in international terrorism.

You might remember around the time the arson spree really took off, in fall 2000, Ken was working a confidential source. This informant told him about two students up in Prescott, Arizona. These students, according to Ken's source, were Islamic extremists, recruiting others to their cause. And I was ultimately taken off that case in 2000 to work the series of arsonists that were taking place in the Phoenix metro area.

The FBI saw this potential case of eco-terror in Phoenix as the bigger priority. And so they gave Ken's expertise to the arson task force. And to this day, Ken hates Mark Sands for that. Because he took the FBI's attention off of other guys that did something more horrible. By June 2001, Mark Sands is in custody, and Ken Williams goes straight back to his old case. I get back on it. I get the informant to re-engage, and we start watching these guys. And, you know, the rest is history. In July, Ken Williams writes an urgent note to the FBI higher-ups,

which would become known as the infamous Phoenix memo. He sends it to the FBI counterterrorism office in DC and the New York bureau too, and he asks that it be shared with the broader intelligence community and with our foreign allies. The memo was a request that more attention and resources be focused on a then largely unknown man named Osama Bin Laden, whose acolytes were learning about airline security near Phoenix, Arizona.

Did anybody respond to it? No. Did anybody respond to it? No. Two months later, on September 11, 2001, Ken heads into the Phoenix office as usual. The guy manning the front desk calls out to him. You better come and look at the TV. We just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center in New York City.

There is more and more fire and smoke enveloping the very top of the building. And as I'm sitting there watching it, I go, here comes another one. Oh my God. Oh my God. That looks like a second plane. It's Ken, possibly before anyone else in the country, who understands exactly what's going on. This is Al Qaeda doing this. And I kept thinking of my memo, and I'm going, oh my God, I gotta round up some agents and get them up to Prescott to go look for those students that I wrote about. All the way up there, I'm thinking, please don't let one of these guys be on these airplanes.

and please don't let one of these guys be on these airplanes. The guys Ken had been watching weren't on the planes, but they moved in the same Al-Qaeda circles. Two of the 9-11 hijackers had been based in Arizona in the months prior. If he hadn't been reassigned to the arson case, Ken believes he would have been able to identify them. When I was looking at Mark Sands, looking at the Phoenix Mountain Preserve arson case, nobody looked at him for a little over a year.

How did it make you feel personally? Sick to my stomach. Thousands of people have died. That one day. I mean, think about what 9-11 resulted in. The country goes to war in two fronts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thousands of innocent civilians killed, soldiers killed, wounded, maimed for life. I'm always going to have questions in my head about what could have happened had we stayed on the two al-Qaeda guys in Prescott. on the two al-Qaeda guys in Prescott. It's hard to process the implications of Ken's question. Could the FBI have averted 9-11

if the Phoenix office hadn't plowed so much of their resources into a lone arsonist? There was a lot of manpower and money spent on this case. I mean, a lot. So at what point does the FBI have to make a judgment call of like, hey, this is a this is probably a lone guy, maybe we should pull back some of our resources. I've asked that question myself. That's a great question. That probably should have been evaluated, but it wasn't. Those people that made those decisions have to live with it. I'd lose sleep on it. I really do.

I'll take that one to my grave. I just don't know what we might have been able to prevent. In the early 2000s, the FBI was so focused on stamping out environmental extremist groups, and in particular, a fictional eco-terror cell invented by one Mark Sands, that they overlooked a far more significant threat. A threat that would result in the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent civilians in just one day. Of course, hindsight is 20-20, and the FBI doesn't have a crystal ball. But law enforcement agencies do have a long history of prioritizing the protection of

private property over actual human life, and of repressing protest groups of all kinds. 25 years later, and the legacy of these choices is clear to see. America's environmental protections are crumbling as cities like Phoenix and my home Los Angeles contend with unprecedented heat waves and wildfires even as we sprawl further into the desert. As each house burned as law enforcement circled the preserve as the media wrote furious headline after furious headline I imagine Mark watching it all unfold a depressed man with a fragile ego, sneaking around the preserves with some gasoline

and a video camera, obsessed with the limelight, relishing this new feeling he finally had of power. That's both the curse and the allure of fire. It's ferocious, destructive, and totally unpredictable. But any coward can light one. Unlock all episodes of The Arsonist Next Door ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Not only will you immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get Binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts,

all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes all at once. Search for The Binge on Apple podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple? The Arsonist Next Door is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and Novel. This series was written and reported by me, Sam Anderson. It was produced and reported by Leona Hamid. Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr.

Research by Zayana Youssef. Additional production from Tom Wright and G. Styles. Our editor is Dave Anderson. Additional story editing from Max O'Brien. From Novel, our executive producers are Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan. From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander and Daniel Kempson.

Our original theme song was composed and performed by Nicholas Alexander. Production management from Cherie Houston, Joe Savage, Sarah Tobin and Charlotte Wolf. Fact checking by Dania Solayman. Story development by Nell Gray-Andrews. Novels Director of Development is Selena Metta, and Willard Foxton is Novels Creative Director

of Development. Special thanks to Jen Feifield, Libby Goff, Bob Kahn, Xander Adams, Anthony Wallace, Steve Ackerman, Carolyn Sher-Levin, and the team at Reviewed and Cleared, Mario Caciotolo, Carolyn Sher-Levin and the team at Reviewed and Cleared, Mario Caciotolo, Isaac Fisher, Kevin Lee-Karas, Jess Swinburne, Sunny Marr, Carly Frankel and the team at WME. You